Germanic ethnogenesis: latest insights

[Fire Haired14]

Also Bronze Age Trzciniec culture DNA from Eastern Poland (and probably also from neighbouring countries) will be published soon, but it will be part of another paper. AFAIK, there is a lot of R1a (typically Balto-Slavic subclades) from Trzciniec culture, as well as one sample of R1b-U152. I think that the R1b-U152 singleton was there due to mixing between Trzciniec and Unetice.

Interesting stuff. So this means either the Germans of Eastern Europe made a small Y DNA impact or were Trziniec descendants(R1a) speaking a Scandinavian-derived(I1, R1b-U106, R1a-Z284) language. Also it would make sense there was sometype of migration from the South up(proto Balto Slavic) into the Northern Baltic Coast and Finland. This is because modern Balts and Finns definitly aren't a Corded Ware, WHG mixture. They have extra MN which could have only come from down south.

[Tomenable]

They have extra MN which could have only come from down south.

Couldn't it also come from the west? As for subclades of R1b in Poland, I started a thread about it:

http://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads...ades-in-Poland

It seems that the most common subclades of R1b-U106 are U106>L48>L47 and U106>L48>Z9.

Can't wait. There has been a dry period in publishing ancient DNA for long months now.

This is also interesting (they will test 10,000 Poles for free), similar projects are in the USA, UK and South Korea:

Google translation:

http://translate.google.com/translat...n%3Dproduction

Original:

http://biotechnologia.pl/biotechnolo...ign=production

[Northener]

Sncerely I have hard work to imagine Y-R1b-U106 did not play a central role in the Germanics formation.

Dear Moesan as I elsewhere stated there is archeological evidence that Unetice is related to German territory.

Maciamo made on the Eupedia site a very interesting remark about the Unetice culture in relationship with the spread of R1b S21:
"The principal Proto-Germanic branch of the Indo-European family tree is R1b-S21 (a.k.a. U106). This haplogroup is found at high concentrations in the Netherlands and north-west Germany. It is likely that R1b-S21 lineages expanded in this region through a founder effect during the Unetice period, then penetrated into Scandinavia around 1700 BCE, thus creating a new culture, that of the Nordic Bronze Age (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_Bronze_Age)."

http://www.wdgolden.com/genes/wp-con...-in-Europe.png


The Unetice culture in Northwestern Germany and Northern Netherlands is called the Sögel Kreis.

Prof Harry Fokkens (1998):
''The northern Netherlands is part of the northern group (NW Germany and Denmark) especially of the Sögeler Kreis characterized by a number of distinctive men's graves. The Drouwen grave is the best known Dutch example.It's remarkable that the Elp culture has never been presented as the immigration of a new group of people. Because clearly this period was a time when a number of new elements made their entry while others disappeared. The disappearance of beakers, the appearance of the Sögel men's graves with the first 'swords', among other things, the fully extended burial posture, under barrows; all the factors have been reason enough in the past to conclude that the Elp culture an immigration of Sögel warriors."

See also this link from 2012.


So DNA research and archeological findings may come together. The spread of the Bronze Age culture was obvious not a matter of acculteralization but of immigration and 'take over'.

And finally as Tomenable beautiful plotted my aDNA is typically Nordic Bronze Age.....

[bicicleur]

tell me who was fighting the Tollense battle 1200 BC :

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/...nze-age-battle

wasn't this where the Urnfield warriors were stopped in their northbound expansion
maybe by an alliance of Nordic Bronze and Unetice people

I think most Unetice traders in Central Europe were simply replaced by Urnfield warriors

[Northener]

tell me who was fighting the Tollense battle 1200 BC :

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/...nze-age-battle

wasn't this where the Urnfield warriors were stopped in their northbound expansion
maybe by an alliance of Nordic Bronze and Unetice people

I think most Unetice traders in Central Europe were simply replaced by Urnfield warriors

Interesting! The question is how far north went the Urnfield warrior?

My impression they want as far as the Rhine delta.

The Urnfield-Hallstatt-LaTene is proto Celtic, so more south of the Rhine!? The Kempen/Brabant area looks like a stronghold in the low countries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallstatt_culture#/media/File:Hallstatt_LaTene.png

May be Tomenable has an idea. On his plot I was German he was Celtic, I guess that if the Urnfield-Hallstatt-LaTene culture had an very large impact on the North I would have had a more Celtic aDNA than a Nordic Bronze Age/Germanic one....

But no more than some sort of educated guesses...can be totally wrong, so make me wiser!

[Northener]

In addition Prof. Fokkens about the Urnfield culture, indicates also that although influenced by, above the Rhine and especially Northern Netherlands is more Nordic Bronze Age. Nowadays Southern Netherlands/Belgium more Urnfield-Hallstatt-LaTene....

Crucial quote:
"The finds shows that in the Northern Netherlands a number of individuals particpated in the prestige networks of Northern Europe, as was also true in previous periods. The impression exitst however that the power base of Northern Europe was somewhat different from that in the South."

[Taranis]

It does not make sense.

I have posted the papers several times where you can find out that the earliest contact of proto-Germanic was to Baltic Finns and Saami speakers.
Celtic, Baltic and Slavic contacts happen only later.

Problem is that you dont read these papers and neither do those writing their own papers, all of you have a mental block that you are unable to get around.

Contact with the Celtic languages was extensive (especially common terminology for metallurgy, horsebackriding and warfare), and relatively old (mostly predating Grimm's Law). Wolfram Euler's point about the "Pre-Proto-Germanic language" or "Germanic Parent Language" (i.e. Proto-Germanic before Grimm's Law came into effect) is of significance with regard for that. One point I disagree on is his conclusion (at least as put forward in his book "Origin and ancestry of the Germanic peoples") that the sound shift happened only in the 1st century BC. In my opinion, that sound shift was earlier (in part, see the Negau helmet), in particular because there's no example of Latin borrowings being shifted by Grimm's Law (meaning the sound change was complete by the time that the Romans expanded to the Rhine).

The contact with Finnish/Uralic (which is very real, and was indeed extensive, in that point I agree with you!), I'm pretty sure, happened only after Grimm's Law had come into effect.

[MOESAN]

We don't. RISE98 dated to 2275-2032 BC from Lilla Beddinge in Southern Sweden (Scania) was R1b-U106.

There is also an unpublished Wielbark culture R1b-U106 from Drozdowo (ca. 80 km north-west of Warsaw):


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drozdowo,_Płońsk_County

There are of course a lot more of upcoming Wielbark culture Y-DNA samples. They should be published soon. AFAIK, autosomal profile of that Goth from Drozdowo is similar in terms of % of WHG admixture to Lithuanians and Swedes. But AFAIK Wielbark samples exhibit also some level of autosomal similarity to the Hungarian Bronze Age sample BR2 (Kyjatice culture).

Thanks Tomenable. I was aware of the S-Sweden RISE you refer to, not of the second U106. But a tree doesn't make a forest. I would have been happier yet if some more ancient U106's would have been found here and there to make my mind more seriously. BTW, the Wielbark C. is too late to tell us much about the Germanics genesis.

[arvistro]

The contact with Finnish/Uralic (which is very real, and was indeed extensive, in that point I agree with you!), I'm pretty sure, happened only after Grimm's Law had come into effect.

The Prehistoric Germanic Loanword Strata in Finnic (P.Kallio)
http://www.sgr.fi/sust/sust266/sust266_kallio.pdf




p.s. Tomenable,
thanks for updates on info on Polish and Trzciniec leaks. Waiting makes me sad.

[Northener]

The Prehistoric Germanic Loanword Strata in Finnic (P.Kallio)
http://www.sgr.fi/sust/sust266/sust266_kallio.pdf




p.s. Tomenable,
thanks for updates on info on Polish and Trzciniec leaks. Waiting makes me sad.

Thanks! Insightful. But I thought regarding the ethnogenesis of the Germans this is more peripheral than core....or?


Sent from my iPad using Eupedia Forum

[arvistro]

Thanks! Insightful. But I thought regarding the ethnogenesis of the Germans this is more peripheral than core....or?

That is right. Just commented that contacts between (pre)Germanic and Finnic started before Grimm's Law.

[Taranis]

The Prehistoric Germanic Loanword Strata in Finnic (P.Kallio)
http://www.sgr.fi/sust/sust266/sust266_kallio.pdf

I would like to thank you for the link to this paper, arvistro, I enjoyed reading that. Having said that, I would like to note that there's nothing diagnostically Germanic about the supposed "paleo-Germanic" loans:

Palaeo-Germanic *kāpa- (> Old Norse hófr, Old English hōf, Old High German huof) ‘hoof’ → Pre-Finnic *kapa, suffixed with *-ja(w) > Finnish kavio ‘hoof’ (LägLoS 1996: 69–70).

Palaeo-Germanic *sāgja- (> Gothic sōkjan, Old Norse sœkja, Old English sēcan, Old High German suohhen) ‘seek’ → Pre-Finnic *šakï- > Finnish hakea ‘seek’ (LägLoS 1991: 68–69).

Notably, one sound change missing from the *ā > *ō. I find it compelling that these words seem to be (Centumized?) Indo-European loans, yeah.

As Kallio puts it:

"Indeed, the Palaeo-Germanic loanwords in Finnic support the idea that Pre-Germanic *ā and *ō first merged as Palaeo- Germanic *ā which only later shifted to Proto-Germanic *ō."

However, without the *ā > *ō merger, and without Grimm's Law, there's literally nothing diagnostically Germanic about the words in question. It is not necessary, however, that they have to come from a Germanic source. There's another point that Kallio made which hints to exactly that:

Still, the fact that Germanic is the only centum branch spoken anywhere close to Finnic makes any other centum source less likely, even though the theory of a centum substrate in Balto-Slavic still has its proponents (e.g. Andersen 2003, 2009).

This is significant because, play devil's advocate, I'd like to note that for the first word, you have similar words in the Slavic languages, e.g. Russian "kopyto" (копыто), which fits into exactly the cathegory as he describes (Centum substrate words in Balto-Slavic).

[arvistro]

Can't find better study at the moment on this exact pre-Grimm's or post-Grimm's Law loanwords. All I can find is that layers from Germanic-ish to Finn-ish start from very early Paleo-Germanic-ish language and go through ages and phases of what looks like Germanic development.

There are some more articles that touch Finnic - Germanic contacts, courtesy of user Ukko:
http://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads...l=1#post478370

There seems to be some main archeological/linguistic theory (for me at least) that in big lines "what became proto-Finnics" arrived to the East of Baltics somewhere 1000 BCE - 500 BCE. There they met Scandinavian (in geographical sense, although also linguistically believed to be pre-proto-Germanics or so) colonists on coasts of West Latvia, Estonia, and mixed with them to create what became Baltic Finns (prior on their way they also mixed with Balts, but that is not a subject of this topic).

Before that they could meet Paleo Germanic words (or NW IE words) as well.

[Northener]

What are those names and what are the primary source?

Without having thought much about I believed the original homeland was Danemark / S. Sweden and proto-germanic could have been called 'dansk'. That's a more appropriate name because the original Germani were probably Celts. (in Greek sources 'Germani' was thought to have been an exonym applied by Romans which meant genuine/pure Celts).

Besides most Elder Futhark inscriptions are found in that region. (Although that obviously doesn't mean anything about the original homeland because 'proto-Germanic' was spoken much earlier but it can indicate something.)

Excuse for the late answer A. Papadimitriou!
The source is Wolfram Euler und Konrad Dadenheuer, Sprache und Herkunft der Germanen (Hamburg, Londen 2009)
He has based his thesis partly on the research of Jürgen Rudolph his life time research is about the name giving of places and rivers and so fort.
His conclusion (sorry in German) about the Skandinavian ethnogenesis of the germans:" Was aber deutlich anders is als auf den germanischen Festland; es fehlt den allmähliche Übergang von indogermanischen-alteuropäischen Gewässer und Ortsnamen d.h. es besteht keine Kontinuität in der Entwicklung.'
So in fact he says of course there is a German name calling in Skandinavia, but less than in the "old Saxon" territory. For the "Saxon territory" he can show there is more a kind of gradual metamorphose form Indoeuropean to german and it shows more continuity.
The linkages between language- archeology-genetics makes it according to me a plausible and strong hypothesis. So the dawn of the Germans doesn't lay in Scandinavia but in the southeastern part of Northern Germany.....

[MOESAN]

@Northerner
It could make sense.
But a succession of IE tribes slightly differenciated and coming to settle in the same region could give the same impression of gradual metamorphose? I have not red the paper. It's true the Saale-Sax-Anhalt region seems having attracted a lot of tribes of diverse origins since a long time, since Chalco at least. But for the same reason I believe the kernel of future Germanics tribes could have been there or just around, maybe a bit more North and East but in contact. The vaste lands of Scandinavia were maybe not the better place to produce a "centripete" move unifying so scattered and diverse people.
We can suppose the Continent had more arguments to federate tribes around a culture. Nevertheless when the autors you cite speak of toponymy they think in Sweden and Norway? Is Denmark included? Because I don' discard Denmark as an ideal place for this kind of "new" culture, half terrestrial half maritime. Denmark is in tight contact with the Continent, at the same time a link between North Sea and Baltic, a ford and a frontier for Scandinavia. SO a cradle Denmark-North Germany seems sensible. ANd more than a South-North move has been registred into Scandinavia, before more recent times. Only bets.

[Northener]

@Northerner
It could make sense.
But a succession of IE tribes slightly differenciated and coming to settle in the same region could give the same impression of gradual metamorphose? I have not red the paper. It's true the Saale-Sax-Anhalt region seems having attracted a lot of tribes of diverse origins since a long time, since Chalco at least. But for the same reason I believe the kernel of future Germanics tribes could have been there or just around, maybe a bit more North and East but in contact. The vaste lands of Scandinavia were maybe not the better place to produce a "centripete" move unifying so scattered and diverse people.
We can suppose the Continent had more arguments to federate tribes around a culture. Nevertheless when the autors you cite speak of toponymy they think in Sweden and Norway? Is Denmark included? Because I don' discard Denmark as an ideal place for this kind of "new" culture, half terrestrial half maritime. Denmark is in tight contact with the Continent, at the same time a link between North Sea and Baltic, a ford and a frontier for Scandinavia. SO a cradle Denmark-North Germany seems sensible. ANd more than a South-North move has been registred into Scandinavia, before more recent times. Only bets.

I guess you are right in that sense that the ethnogenesis of the Germans is no lineair and unified development, it's most probably a mosaic in time and place.
The cradle is during the Bronze Age in which the Unetice culture, epicenter is the southeast part of Northern Germany, gave a push to the Nordic Bronze Age.
A step further is the Jastorf culture, epicenter again southeast part of Northern Germany, may be slightly more northern.
These all are related within a (a more or less coherent) area which is nowadays Northern Netherlands, Southern Scandinavia, Northeast Germany/border Poland....And sometimes you can expect for example that Southern Scandinavia has relations with the Northern Netherlands by sea without interfering Northern Germany etc etc. Needs a dissertation in stead of a short notice on Eupedia at lunchtime ;)
But I think you can make the point that the epicenter of Germanic development is more the Southeastern part of Northern Germany, than Southern Scandinavia (Denmark,Southwest Norway, Southern Sweden). The major trends (genetics, archeological, language) form the Bronze and (early) Iron Age came form the inland to the outland (coast). Doesn't rule out other relations and developments (criss-cross) but " Im grossen und ganzen" I guess this is the case (educated guess).

[Northener]

@Northerner
It could make sense.
But a succession of IE tribes slightly differenciated and coming to settle in the same region could give the same impression of gradual metamorphose? I have not red the paper. It's true the Saale-Sax-Anhalt region seems having attracted a lot of tribes of diverse origins since a long time, since Chalco at least. But for the same reason I believe the kernel of future Germanics tribes could have been there or just around, maybe a bit more North and East but in contact. The vaste lands of Scandinavia were maybe not the better place to produce a "centripete" move unifying so scattered and diverse people.
We can suppose the Continent had more arguments to federate tribes around a culture. Nevertheless when the autors you cite speak of toponymy they think in Sweden and Norway? Is Denmark included? Because I don' discard Denmark as an ideal place for this kind of "new" culture, half terrestrial half maritime. Denmark is in tight contact with the Continent, at the same time a link between North Sea and Baltic, a ford and a frontier for Scandinavia. SO a cradle Denmark-North Germany seems sensible. ANd more than a South-North move has been registred into Scandinavia, before more recent times. Only bets.

The following case made me doubtful about the direct Unetice effect. And may be is a representation of the Germanic mosaic.
Yes there was a in Northern Netherlands, NW Germany and Denmark a Bronze Age culture called Sögel-Wohlde Kreis. See this passage in the Oxford Handbook:
'The Sögel Wohlde culture leads to a distinctive cultural development that spread from the eastern lowlands across Westfalia to Jutland. It is characterized particularly inhumations in burial mounds and at this stage-unlike the contemporaneous Tumulus culture of central Europe-is only known from male graves. They are identified by their grave goods:short swords or d or daggers, flanges axes, heart shaped flint arrow heads, pins and occasionally small rings of spirally wound gold wire.'
David from Eurogenes analyses my aDNA his result:
' Based on the Global 10 datasheet, which has more Nordic LN samples than the K7 sheet, this is how you come out.

Nordic_LN(-BA) 64.2
Bell_Beaker_Germany 35.8
Corded_Ware_Germany 0.0
Unetice_EBA 0.0'

So no connection with Unetice!? But between Southern Scandinavia (Jutland) and the Northern Netherlands? The Proto-Ingaevones? Or as J.J. Butler has called it the Northern Netherlands as the end of the Nordic rainbow? Quote:"And we have surely emphasized sufficiently the fact that all the leading characters have some connection with the South Scandinavian culture area and/or the ‘Mittelelbe’ province, although such connections are otherwise rare in this region."


Is the Nordic Bronze age a sort of basic layer in the North Sea or West German development?