Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past

It seems like David Reich leaks some information about South Asian genetic history that he probably has seen in his lab but is still not ready for publication. Hopefully we'll know more about that soon enough because I can't stand the over the top noise by South Asian deluded ethno-nationalists any more who are newly emboldened by the quotes published in Indian newspapers and given by (unsurprisingly) Indian geneticists who are working and marketing their conclusions on their own, with the vaguest and, honestly, most irresponsible rhetoric.

Since just a few days ago, I had to put up with three South Asian men telling me that the IVC was not only Indo-European and actually already Sanskrit-speaking (apparently Sanskrit was a kind of fossil for milennia), but also that the Indo-Europeans from IVC settled all of the steppes of the Middle East and were the ancestors of the Hittites, IE Europeans, ancient Arabians (what?!), Tuaregs (once again, what?!) and even the Chadic tribes (yes, just because they have high percentages of R1b, don't mind that it is R1b-V88, not M269, but how would they know these things are actually thousands of years apart?!). Oh, and yes they guarantee that the Indo-Europeans were the ANI - again, don't mind that ANI admixture is not found in many other Indo-European-speaking areas.

They're thrilled and kind of out of control with their wild speculations, because an Indian geneticist guarantees that they analyzed the ancient DNA and can state that the autosomal DNA of the IVC was totally indigenous harking back to the Palaeolithic (how likely is that in Asia, really?). They also said that there's no sign of migration either into or out of India at the time of the IVC (now that's a problem, people came to speak closely related Indo-European languages from Western Europe to China, but apparently there was no large-scale migration).

I'm really interested to see those results, because until now they sound like at best a desperate distortion of the scientific results. I would really like to understand why so many South Asians and - as I also was "lucky" enough to find out in the last few months - Subsaharan Africans are sooooo aggressively defensive against any result that suggests that they are not 100% indigenous to their territories since at least the Palaeolithic era. We're not even talking about modern ethnic/national disputes. There is a huge aversion even to suggestions that there was mixing with outsiders 5,000 or even 10,000 years ago. That's really weird for me.
 
mwauthy said:
I feel like ethnicity is a generational thing that is in continuous evolution. As a result, it doesn’t make much sense to me to personally identify my modern life with any historical ethnicity. My love for history is more a curiosity about the human condition during different eras.

We like to say these genes could be “Celtic” or “Roman” because of knowledge of the recent past. However, if there are 1000 generations and 1000 possible ethnicities between “Red Lady of Paviland” and the present is it logical to assign any particular snp to any one of those 1000 ethnicities?

This hobby is fascinating to me because it helps answer some of histories mysteries and because new insights are constantly unfolding.
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I agree with you, especially if we're talking about closely related ethnicities that are ultimately just variations of one common mosaic of cultures and genetic admixtures (like most modern European ethnicities). Besides what you said, one of the problems is that very few people nowadays, mostly those whose family have lived for a long time in very isolated communities, can calmly identify with ONE ancient ethnicity without any sort of cognitive dissonance or willful blindess to not see the whole picture. If we go back 2,000 years ago, some 100 generations, how likely is that the vast majority of what they are really comes from just one old ethnic group? We're not even talking about genetic origins here, but about ethnicity, a thing that comes and goes, changes even when the labels do not change (does anyone honestly believe that modern Norwegians identify with exactly the same ethnic culture and way of life as the Norsemen of the Viking age?) and sometimes may be completely replaced even without much or any genetic turnover (especially when the shift was from one to another related ethnicity, e.g. from north Celtic to Germanic).

I think it's perfectly fine to identify with one's modern ethnicity or nationality, as long as they are totally aware that even that ethnicity or nationality is not some kind of fundamental and permanent "essence" that exists apart from the others and has "inherent" qualities that prevail over time and space, especially in comparison with neighboring peoples.
 
Ygorcs said:
I think it's perfectly fine to identify with one's modern ethnicity or nationality, as long as they are totally aware that even that ethnicity or nationality is not some kind of fundamental and permanent "essence" that exists apart from the others and has "inherent" qualities that prevail over time and space, especially in comparison with neighboring peoples.
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Judging from how people define themselves below their avatars on this forum, I'd say we should clearly distinguish between ethnicity and the consciousness of ethnicity. By the way, does ethnicity exist outside that consciousness of one's ethnicity ? In other words, ethnicity may be a social construct, but it is primarily a psychological, personal, intimate construct.

As a social construct, transient as you seem to consider it, it did not emerge out of the blue. Just like your autosomal makeup at a given time in a given place is the result of previous encounters and changes, ethnicity is the outcome of military events, social uprisings, cultural choices, etc... It doesn't exist apart from the others, in fact it does exist thanks to the others, who prioritized their options (slightly or significantly) differently. It is defined and conditioned by history, the history of men and the history of ideas. Our present is child to our past. As such, it is indeed not a "permanent essence", but it can be a reliable element of reference to build a behavior on.

Alongside that cultural/historical dimension of ethnicity, there is the idea each individual forms of his ethnicity - his own intimate feeling of who he is. That too may be subject to alteration and change over time. The question is: Can we violate that ? Can we judge ? Everyone is entitled to develop his own self-image, as long as it does not drive him to harm his fellow human brothers. Ethnicity is eminently subjective, and as such, disconnected from how much DNA (real or assumed) one got from a given group. It has to do with Myth, not with time and space. It is beyond control, that's why it sometimes turns dangerous, when self-criticism and self-restraint fail.
 
hrvclv said:
Judging from how people define themselves below their avatars on this forum, I'd say we should clearly distinguish between ethnicity and the consciousness of ethnicity. By the way, does ethnicity exist outside that consciousness of one's ethnicity ? In other words, ethnicity may be a social construct, but it is primarily a psychological, personal, intimate construct.

As a social construct, transient as you seem to consider it, it did not emerge out of the blue. Just like your autosomal makeup at a given time in a given place is the result of previous encounters and changes, ethnicity is the outcome of military events, social uprisings, cultural choices, etc... It doesn't exist apart from the others, in fact it does exist thanks to the others, who prioritized their options (slightly or significantly) differently. It is defined and conditioned by history, the history of men and the history of ideas. Our present is child to our past. As such, it is indeed not a "permanent essence", but it can be a reliable element of reference to build a behavior on.

Alongside that cultural/historical dimension of ethnicity, there is the idea each individual forms of his ethnicity - his own intimate feeling of who he is. That too may be subject to alteration and change over time. The question is: Can we violate that ? Can we judge ? Everyone is entitled to develop his own self-image, as long as it does not drive him to harm his fellow human brothers. Ethnicity is eminently subjective, and as such, disconnected from how much DNA (real or assumed) one got from a given group. It has to do with Myth, not with time and space. It is beyond control, that's why it sometimes turns dangerous, when self-criticism and self-restraint fail.
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I absolurely agree with you. It is just that I always try to have it clearly stuck in my mind that, yes, ethnicities do exist "thanks to the others", as you say, but those others were often also the (partial) ancestors of other modern ethnicities, or people from other ethnicities that somehow contributed to what my ethnicity is like now (not just genetically, as you say etnicity is not about percentages in one's DNA, but a sort of collectively construed myth that allows us to organize better in a complex society). Identifying with one's ethnicity is ultimately a bit subjective, but as you say it's not "out of the blue", it's part of a historic and social process, but that process, we should never forget, was unvariably impermanent and often messy, so that our present ethnicity can't be seamlessly linked to any ancient ethnicity in a sort of unbroken line. It's always an ongoing and still imperfect process, and one which is spongy, not shielded from similary ongoing processes of ethnogenesis and organic change in other ethnicities nearby.
 
Well, it's out. I was going to get the Kindle version, but for textbooks I like print, so I don't know when it will arrive.
 
The Intro doesn't have a lot of content in it, but it does have this map from 2015 which I had forgotten about...explains a lot all by itself. It's labeled "farmers". I have to take a look at the paper to see how precisely it's defined.

ZIWumSI.png
[/IMG]

Even the chapter headings are causing some heartburn in all the expected cases: lots of "Iranian farmer" admixture. :)
 
Angela said:
The Intro doesn't have a lot of content in it, but it does have this map from 2015 which I had forgotten about...explains a lot all by itself. It's labeled "farmers". I have to take a look at the paper to see how precisely it's defined.

ZIWumSI.png
[/IMG]

Even the chapter headings are causing some heartburn in all the expected cases: lots of "Iranian farmer" admixture. :)
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I'm looking forward to delving into the book later this evening.
 
Jovialis said:
I'm looking forward to delving into the book later this evening.
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Well, this has got the usual suspects in an uproar, predictably:

"Ancient DNA available from this time in Anatolia shows no evidence of steppe ancestry similar to that in the Yamnaya (although the evidence here is circumstantial as no ancient DNA from the Hittites themselves has yet be published). This suggests to me that the most likely location of the population that first spoke an Indo-European language was south of the Caucasus Mountains, perhaps in present-day Iran or Armenia, because ancient DNA from people who lived there matches what we would expect for a source population both for the Yamnaya and for ancient Anatolians. If this scenario is right the population sent one branch up into the steppe-mixing with steppe hunter-gatherers in a one-to-one ratio to become the Yamnaya as descriebed earlier- and another to Anatolia to found the ancestors of people there who spoke languages such as Hittite."


I think it's noteworthy that he says no ancient DNA from the Hittites has yet been "published". He doesn't say it hasn't been found, or analyzed, he just says it hasn't been published. Is that his usual, lawyerly precision with words because perhaps someone out there has analyzed them but not yet published, or is it because his lab has analyzed them but just not published yet. There's those 2000 samples he says that are analyzed but not yet written about.

So, I guess we still don't know, except we know how he, and presumably his Lab mates, are leaning.
 
Angela said:
Well, this has got the usual suspects in an uproar, predictably: "Ancient DNA available from this time in Anatolia shows no evidence of steppe ancestry similar to that in the Yamnaya (although the evidence here is circumstantial as no ancient DNA from the Hittites themselves has yet be published). This suggests to me that the most likely location of the population that first spoke an Indo-European language was south of the Caucasus Mountains, perhaps in present-day Iran or Armenia, because ancient DNA from people who lived there matches what we would expect for a source population both for the Yamnaya and for ancient Anatolians. If this scenario is right the population sent one branch up into the steppe-mixing with steppe hunter-gatherers in a one-to-one ratio to become the Yamnaya as descriebed earlier- and another to Anatolia to found the ancestors of people there who spoke languages such as Hittite." I think it's noteworthy that he says no ancient DNA from the Hittites has yet been "published". He doesn't say it hasn't been found, or analyzed, he just says it hasn't been published. Is that his usual, lawyerly precision with words because perhaps someone out there has analyzed them but not yet published, or is it because his lab has analyzed them but just not published yet. There's those 2000 samples he says that are analyzed but not yet written about. So, I guess we still don't know, except we know how he, and presumably his Lab mates, are leaning.
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i doubt his lab analyzed it or else he probably wouldn't make speculations in his book. isn't the indo-iranian language branch supposed to be one of the if not the youngest of the indo european tree. so if it originated in what is now iran it would not have affected southern iran for thousands of years while spreading north and west before it spread south?
 
Ailchu said:
i doubt his lab analyzed it or else he wouldn't make speculations in his book. what's interessting for me is that the indo-iranian language branch is speculated to be one of the if not the youngest of the indo european tree. so if it originated in iran it would not have affected southern iran for hundreds of years while spreading north and west before it spread south?
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He's not suggesting that Indo-Iranian arose in the south Caucasus. It would be the most ancient form of IE, the one that gave rise to the Anatolian branch.
 
Angela said:
Well, this has got the usual suspects in an uproar, predictably:

"Ancient DNA available from this time in Anatolia shows no evidence of steppe ancestry similar to that in the Yamnaya (although the evidence here is circumstantial as no ancient DNA from the Hittites themselves has yet be published). This suggests to me that the most likely location of the population that first spoke an Indo-European language was south of the Caucasus Mountains, perhaps in present-day Iran or Armenia, because ancient DNA from people who lived there matches what we would expect for a source population both for the Yamnaya and for ancient Anatolians. If this scenario is right the population sent one branch up into the steppe-mixing with steppe hunter-gatherers in a one-to-one ratio to become the Yamnaya as descriebed earlier- and another to Anatolia to found the ancestors of people there who spoke languages such as Hittite."


I think it's noteworthy that he says no ancient DNA from the Hittites has yet been "published". He doesn't say it hasn't been found, or analyzed, he just says it hasn't been published. Is that his usual, lawyerly precision with words because perhaps someone out there has analyzed them but not yet published, or is it because his lab has analyzed them but just not published yet. There's those 2000 samples he says that are analyzed but not yet written about.

So, I guess we still don't know, except we know how he, and presumably his Lab mates, are leaning.
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That's really at least potentially game-changing. There'll be a lot of noise and resistance in many places, I bet. But just to make things clearer as I try to establish a chronology of facts and cultures in my mind (nothing too scientific, just my personal speculations that I wait to be confirmed, refined or totally destroyed by the next publications)... Do we know for certain what was the main autosomal admixtures of the Sredny Stog and where its earliest cultural influences came from? Is it possible that ancestor/sister clades of R1b-M269 were already quite common and diverse (well, in maps of diversity of R1b clades the area around the Black Sea coast always comes up in highlighted colors) in Transcaucasia or - as some speculated even years ago - in the Maykop area specifically? What would've been, if any, the relevance of Sredny Stog (there were some R1b found in it, or am I mistaken?) to the PIE cultural and linguistic formation, or should we now presume that there was a wholesale transformation and "Yamnization" of the entire steppe caused by the mixing of the EHG locals with that dominant Caucasian influx? I'm a bit confused as you can see...
 
Angela said:
Well, this has got the usual suspects in an uproar, predictably:

"Ancient DNA available from this time in Anatolia shows no evidence of steppe ancestry similar to that in the Yamnaya (although the evidence here is circumstantial as no ancient DNA from the Hittites themselves has yet be published). This suggests to me that the most likely location of the population that first spoke an Indo-European language was south of the Caucasus Mountains, perhaps in present-day Iran or Armenia, because ancient DNA from people who lived there matches what we would expect for a source population both for the Yamnaya and for ancient Anatolians. If this scenario is right the population sent one branch up into the steppe-mixing with steppe hunter-gatherers in a one-to-one ratio to become the Yamnaya as descriebed earlier- and another to Anatolia to found the ancestors of people there who spoke languages such as Hittite."


I think it's noteworthy that he says no ancient DNA from the Hittites has yet been "published". He doesn't say it hasn't been found, or analyzed, he just says it hasn't been published. Is that his usual, lawyerly precision with words because perhaps someone out there has analyzed them but not yet published, or is it because his lab has analyzed them but just not published yet. There's those 2000 samples he says that are analyzed but not yet written about.

So, I guess we still don't know, except we know how he, and presumably his Lab mates, are leaning.
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Moderators should prepare for firestorms if this is true.

Anyone that is on anthrogenica should go see what is just beginning to unfold...

Get your popcorn ready
 
If the oldest forms of PIE were located south of the Caucasus, they were probably spoken by predominantly R1b people. How come the R1a people in the forested steppe of the north ended up speaking IE without notable influx of R1b ? You can borrow technological innovations from neighbors. It is harder to conceive why a people would give up their language. I think there still remains a lot for us to discover about PIE.
 
hrvclv said:
If the oldest forms of PIE were located south of the Caucasus, they were probably spoken by predominantly R1b people. How come the R1a people in the forested steppe of the north ended up speaking IE without notable influx of R1b ? You can borrow technological innovations from neighbors. It is harder to conceive why a people would give up their language. I think there still remains a lot for us to discover about PIE.
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If the R1b men came also with many women and they were all full of CHG and some EHG admixture (which I think is most probable), then I don't think it is a big problem. The R1a men would've been coopted into the more advanced and prestigious culture originally brought by a majority of R1b men and their wives and daughters, possibly first as a useful lingua franca and "high status" 2nd language, then as the language of the elite (remember how many Ottoman Turks spoke Persian at the courts, or English elite, even those native to Britain, learned to speak French at the courts), and finally the common language of all the people, especially if there was a sizeable proportion of mothers, grandmothers and aunts of southern Early PIE origin, native speakers, among them through exogamy. I have imagined a similar scenario, but with an inverse influence, that is, the imposition of an originally EHG R1a/I2 language over a significant substrate of R1b language with more links to Old Europe or the Caucasus (this language could've even have influenced the later language of R1a men decisively, as a conquered but still prestigious and widely known language, much like it happened with Armenian vis a vis Hurro-Urartian much later)... So I think the opposite scenario (imposition of R1b language onto R1a people) is also at least possible.
 
Maciamo speculated years ago that R1b moved onto the steppe from the south if I remember correctly. He's been right about a lot of things.

We'll see what the ancient genomes show.

I'll tell you one thing: it doesn't seem as if Reich, and his Lab, I presume, are entertaining any horse riding cowboys raiding into the Caucasus for brides. :)

It's early days yet, though. It could be another yDna that just daughtered out or became a minority as the language and culture spread, if this is even the way it actually happened. Speculation is one thing, a paper that presents ancient dna and creates a well reasoned and persuasive argument is another, and we don't have the latter.

@Johane,
I'll never understand the passion over this issue. Speaking personally, what does it matter where a language first started?

@hrvclv,
Well, I speculated a couple of years ago that it was possible that the R1a "forest steppe" people were Indo-Europeanized, not Indo-European in the sense of language, culture, etc. but I stopped talking about it because the blowback was about the level of a Category 5 Hurricane. :)

Ed. Now the argument is going to be that the Hittites weren't "REAL" Indo-Europeans. They just never stop.
 
Sadly, I'm sure Dave Reich made a lot of enemies due to his discussion about race not being a social construct and his new book. I wouldn't go by the overall average review score on amazon or other big commerce site when making a decision to buy the book, since I expect it to be dragged down quite a bit due to people blaming the messenger so to speak...

Edit:
Angela:"Ed. Now the argument is going to be that the Hittites weren't "REAL" Indo-Europeans. They just never stop."

Don't know what to say about that :useless:





 
ok

I will try to find the book,
yet till it reach my country will take at least a month.



But still I have my 2 precautions


1. question
history told us
that he was powerfull against human cities,

300px-Apodemus_sylvaticus_bosmuis.jpg


could he be responsible for a genetic holocaust?
remember the plague of Athenean democracy Λοιμος

2. question
still wonndering for the 2 bellow,
again I use Eupedia maps
A dilemma as i understood it following Macciamo logic and posts

Caucasian-admixture.gif


Gedrosian-admixture.gif



Vasquez/ Gasgones
have Gedrosian, but not Caucasian admixture.

Slavs have Caucasian but no Gedrosian admixture

ANY POSIBLE CLUE?



and to make a joke,
I do not know your taste of humor,
but mine sometimes is bad,
IF Africans gain some immunity to embola,
could Europe be a 'black' continent?
and how much?
 
This is what I meant above about the modeling using "Iran Farmer":


Steppe:
Steppe pastorialist = Iran farmers + Steppe hunter gatheres (note distinction between Iran farmers with EEF and Anatolian below)

India:
ASI = Iran Farmers + Indian hunters
ANI = Steppe pastorialist + Iran farmers
Present India = ANI + ASI

Europe:
European farmers (EEF) = Anatolian farmer + European hunter gatherers
Northern European (Bronze age) =Eastern european farmer + Steppe pastorialist
South European Aegeans (Bronze age) =Iran farmers + European farmers
Present day Europeans = North + South european bronze age populations


I don't see anything there about steppe into Aegean Bronze Age. Is he going with the Greek from Anatolia scenario?

For ANI by Iranian farmers do they mean BMAC farmers?
 
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