Central and South Asian DNA Paper

[IronSide]

afaik the Mittani didn't speak IE, but there is a text about horse training for charriot warfare translated from Mittani into Hittite in which some technical terms are not translated, and these technical terms are Indo Aryan
this means that charriots and horses were introduced to the Mittani by a few Indo-Aryan people, probably an offshoot of those MLBA steppe people in the BMAC area, who instead of going further south got in contact with the Mittani court
these few people need not have left a detectable genetic mark in the Levant
there is no convincing evidence that the Hittites or the Egyptians had charriots before the Mittani got them

Indo Aryans may have been fewer in number than the Hurrians, but not reduced historically to just mercinaries from the east. they had a larger impact on Middle Bronze Age history and on Hurrian culture.

The rulers of many small polities in the Levant had Sanskrit and Hurrian names.

Amarna letters–localities and their rulers

An enjoyable reading on the subject: Hurrians and Their Gods in Canaan

 

[holderlin]

..and Holderlin
Do you want a bet that Maykop is going to be essently either: farmers from Balkans or southern caucasus later leylatepe with connections to Uruk and nothing to do with PIe or R1b?

You're saying that Maykop will have nothing to do with PIE, yet you're also saying that PIE originated in the Southern Caucuses and expanded onto the steppe. These two things are likely incompatible.

 

[Angela]

no, I don't know any other route, but this is what the paper says :

Second, samples from three sites from the southern and eastern end of the Steppe dated to 1600-
353 1500 BCE (Dashti-kozy, Taldysay and Kyzlbulak) show evidence of significant admixture from
354 Iranian agriculturalist-related populations, demonstrating northward gene flow from Turan into
355 the Steppe at the same time as there was southward movement of Steppe_MLBA ancestry
356 through Turan and into South Asia. These findings are consistent with evidence of a high degree
357 of human mobility both to the north and south along the Inner Asian Mountain Corridor (32, 33).
358
359 Third, we observe samples from multiple sites dated to 1700-1500 BCE (Maitan, Kairan,
360 Oy_Dzhaylau and Zevakinsikiy) that derive up to ~25% of their ancestry from a source related to
361 present-day East Asians and the remainder from Steppe_MLBA. A similar ancestry profile
362 became widespread in the region by the Late Bronze Age, as documented by our time transect
363 from Zevakinsikiy and samples from many sites dating to 1500-1000 BCE, and was ubiquitous
364 by the Scytho-Sarmatian period in the Iron Age (34). This observation decreases the probability
that populations in the 1st millennium BCE and 1 365 st millennium CE—including Scythians,
peer-reviewed) is the author/funder. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
bioRxiv preprint first posted online Mar. 31, 2018; doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/292581. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not
12
366 Kushans, and Huns, sometimes suggested as sources for the Steppe ancestry influences in South
367 Asia today (17)—contributed to the majority of South Asians, which have negligible East Asian
368 ancestry in our analysis. It is possible that there were unsampled groups in Central Asia with
369 negligible East Asian admixture that could have migrated later to South Asia. However, at least
370 some (possibly all) of the Steppe pastoralist ancestry in South Asia owes its origins to southward
pulses in the 2 371 nd millennium BCE, as indeed we prove directly through our observation of this
372 ancestry in the Swat Iron Age individuals dating to ~1000 BCE (discussed further below).

so, either there are unsampled R1a steppe MLBA en route toward south Asia
or there are unsampled R1a Scyths without East Asian admixture that made their way to South Asia

Honestly, I never thought I'd say this, but I can see why the Indian scientists might have balked at the conclusions drawn in the text. It's really murky, and I can definitely see how you could argue that it's up in the air precisely how and with whom and how much actual Bronze Age "Steppe MLBA" ancestry there is in India, even northwestern India.

With almost no R1a even in the Iron Age, and the fact that we have an EHG/ANE population which was there previously, along with lots and lots of Iran Neo, I can see how someone could make the argument that most of the R1a does not come from Bronze Age migrants from somewhere in the Andronovo horizon, and that most of the "Steppe MLBA" type ancestry either arrived earlier or later with Scythians.

I wonder if there was total agreement among all the authors about this. Sometimes, when you want to not rock the boat too much in your own world, don't want to lose certain collaborators, you have to break with others, even though they might have very valid points. It's a shame if that happened.

Yes, I saw that about the movement from Turan north. That explains the J2a on the steppe. Anyone know if there is a trail for that particular branch later on in Europe?
Also, do you remember our discussions here about the development of metallurgy on the steppe, and I thought it didn't make sense that there was such sophisticated metallurgy in Sintashta, but never any trail for that from the western steppe, and indeed the fact that the metallurgy on the western steppe didn't reach that kind of sophistication until later than Sintashta? I think this is the reason. It may have come from the indeed sophisticated BMAC north along the Inner Asian Corridor. This also correlates with the work Frachetti has been doing. I was glad to see he was one of the collaborators.

 

[Olympus Mons]

You're saying that Maykop will have nothing to do with PIE, yet you're also saying that PIE originated in the Southern Caucuses and expanded onto the steppe. These two things are likely incompatible.

That is the problem. People seem to be playing a PlayStation game.
Maykop is over 1200 years after Shulaveri were gone!
Whatever pushed Shulaveri away and out was not PiE. Or at least we can assume so.
So if they later became leylatepe and maykop they probably were not PIE. Hence so many languagesnin caucasus.
If Maykop arrived from Balkans, as some defend...then not Pie also... Probably.

 

[Olympus Mons]

....Yes, I saw that about the movement from Turan north. That explains the J2a on the steppe. Anyone know if there is a trail for that particular branch later on in Europe?
Also, do you remember our discussions here about the development of metallurgy on the steppe, and I thought it didn't make sense that there was such sophisticated metallurgy in Sintashta, but never any trail for that from the western steppe, and indeed the fact that the metallurgy on the western steppe didn't reach that kind of sophistication until later than Sintashta? I think this is the reason. It may have come from the indeed sophisticated BMAC north along the Inner Asian Corridor. This also correlates with the work Frachetti has been doing. I was glad to see he was one of the collaborators.

Angela, one day someone will review what nmdental traits were saying for decades and compare with Adna theories over time.
I remember a PCA from i think Zubova on nmdental traits that made me look on maps where the hell was east of Aral sea, because it cluster with armenian or anatolian something neolithic population...
Will try to find it again.

 

[holderlin]

Our brain always finds a way to spin things around does it not? And that is what you are doing .

You're taking a single sample and fitting it to a fantastical sweeping theory that is based almost entirely on your conjecture. How am I spinning anything? I'm methodically running through the consequences of this guy and this region in general being PIE speakers. I've said it was possible, but unlikely given all the other data we have.

a. Khvalynsk is not contemporaneous with this R1b Z2103 5500bc. Its a 1000 years later and with reservoir effect balanced it now is pushing Khvalynsk dating to something like 4200Bc or even later.

5200-4000BC vs 5900-5500 BC and neither are radio carbon dated. The ranges are 300 years from touching, but I can use Samara Hunter gatherer to support the same point being that we see clear cultural continuity on the steppe from Samara through the Bronze Age. There isn't any huge change signaling the imposition of some external influence, which is something we'd like to see in IE expansions from the Caucuses.

b. This guy Z2103 is the father of those eneolithic and yamnaya.

No, not if he's Z2103. We could then only assign a likelyhood that he's father to the Z2103 Yamnaya Samara samples specifically.

d. shulaveri were many. The Kura river basin was packed with settlements. They were highly developed pastorals with big cattle, they were masters of domestication of plants and animals, we even find many horse bones in some settlements....

That's great, but this sample wasn't on the Kura river. It was considerably south, so I don't know why you continue obsessing over this culture as if it definitely has something to do with the samples in question. And show me these horse findings. I'd love to see them.

e. Do you think is a coincidence that when they suddenly and completely vanished, by 5000bc (some settlement even have a layer of ashes), at the exact time agriculture arrives in the north caucasus?

And what does this have to do with Indo-europeans or the Iranian samples?

There is no better pattern for dispersal of PIE than them.

I don't know exactly what you mean by this but it would be the least parsimonious method of expansion out of the region you tout. I've already given a basic explanation as to why, but of course I couldn't possibly cover all of the problems that need solving.

 

[Angela]

Honestly, I never thought I'd say this, but I can see why the Indian scientists might have balked at the conclusions drawn in the text. It's really murky, and I can definitely see how you could argue that it's up in the air precisely how and with whom and how much actual Bronze Age "Steppe MLBA" ancestry there is in India, even northwestern India.

With almost no R1a even in the Iron Age, and the fact that we have an EHG/ANE population which was there previously, along with lots and lots of Iran Neo, I can see how someone could make the argument that most of the R1a does not come from Bronze Age migrants from somewhere in the Andronovo horizon, and that most of the "Steppe MLBA" type ancestry either arrived earlier or later with Scythians.

I wonder if there was total agreement among all the authors about this. Sometimes, when you want to not rock the boat too much in your own world, don't want to lose certain collaborators, you have to break with others, even though they might have very valid points. It's a shame if that happened.

Yes, I saw that about the movement from Turan north. That explains the J2a on the steppe. Anyone know if there is a trail for that particular branch later on in Europe?
Also, do you remember our discussions here about the development of metallurgy on the steppe, and I thought it didn't make sense that there was such sophisticated metallurgy in Sintashta, but never any trail for that from the western steppe, and indeed the fact that the metallurgy on the western steppe didn't reach that kind of sophistication until later than Sintashta? I think this is the reason. It may have come from the indeed sophisticated BMAC north along the Inner Asian Corridor. This also correlates with the work Frachetti has been doing. I was glad to see he was one of the collaborators.

Let me be clear, though. I absolutely don't believe there was any OIT.

Nor do I think the modern Indians, alone among mankind, have no admixture and are exactly the same as they were in the Neolithic or even the Paleolithic. It's clear there was a huge gene flow from Iranian farmers into India. It's also clear, imo, there was a substantial impact from the north, even if not as large as the former. It's the nature, timing and amount of the latter which I think is much more complicated than the version which has been peddled.

 

[berun]

My apologies Maciamo, I think that I confussed you with another member discussing R1b in Kura-Araxes, and by the fact to remember your map about R1b or someone's else delivering R1b from Iran in unspecified dates, supposedly in Paleolithic.

View attachment 9959

 

[markozd]

That is the problem. People seem to be playing a PlayStation game.
Maykop is over 1200 years after Shulaveri were gone!
Whatever pushed Shulaveri away and out was not PiE. Or at least we can assume so.
So if they later became leylatepe and maykop they probably were not PIE. Hence so many languagesnin caucasus.
If Maykop arrived from Balkans, as some defend...then not Pie also... Probably.

Some of the newer work on Leyla Tepe is interesting. Najaf Museyibli (2016):

The ceramic traditionof the Leilatepe culture society was a developedand independent handicraft. The culture, both as awhole, and with particular regard to its ceramic production,is linked to Eastern Anatolian- NorthernMesopotamian Late Chalcolithic traditions originating from post-Ubaid developments. Meanwhile, the Maikop culture of the Northern Caucasus emerged from the Leilatepe culture. The spread of these culturesstage covers occurred during the first half of the fourth millennium B.C. in Western Asia and theCaucasus. Pottery is the main diagnostic material ofthe Neolithic, Chalcolithic, and Bronze Ages. In this sense, the Leilatepe culture is not an exception. Theunique ceramic wares of this culture indicate an influentialrole in the development of the potter‟swheel, and they differs radically from the pottery ofpreceding archaeological cultures in the South Caucasus and of the Leilatepe culture‟s contemporary neighbors, with whom they did not have genetic ties.

The Ubaid culture quite peculiar too. I've read Alberto Green's "The Storm God in the Ancient Near East" just recently, not expecting it to be so heavy on archaeological research. Describing the female-centred rites of the hunter gatherers and early peasants he asks this question:

How then can we account for the conceptual emergence of a dominant masculine “storm-god” and his endemic role as a fertility deity in historic times?

He sees the beginning of this shift (that would take place across language barriers) in Ubaid:

Although fishing may have been the dominant industry when southern Mesopotamia emerged during the Eridu culture and into the Ubaid civilization, greater reliance on agriculture and changing climatic conditions forced the inhabitants to engage in drainage operations and work on irrigation. Because this development necessitated the cooperation of men in larger units than the typical Neolithic village, this could have had widespread consequences that led to the emergence of the characteristic city-state of the third millennium b.c.e. . The Ubaid culture, through a highly efficient peasanteconomy based on irrigation, still made fish offerings to a prehistoric male Water-god of the region. This is the earliest prehistoric evidence of the prominence of a male deity.

Perhaps the emergence of single-grave kurgans in Leila Tepe as a supposedly male-centred symbol is a symptom of these changes in religious rite.

 

[holderlin]

What of the Indo Aryan speaking groups in the Kingdom of Mittani in the Levant ? what migration path did they take ?

Late Bronze Age Canaanites from Megiddo should be a mixture of Levant EBA + Armenia MLBA (source), the Armenian admixing population should be the Hurrians.

The Hurrians had connections to Indo-Aryan speakers, Armenia MLBA is different from the preceding Early Bronze Age in having a larger portion of ancestry from the EHG, so my theory is Steppe populations moved to south Caucasus and admixed genetically and culturally with the Hurrian population there, and then migrated to the Levant.

I had always figured they came from the East around the Caspian because this is what Indo-Iranian seems to have done.

The Mittani thing is interesting. The Aryan seems only to be a horse training lexicon. Conclude what you will from that. Some say an Aryan horse riding elite who dominated Hurrian speakers forming the Mittani, but others don't like this for obvious reasons, so I say "horse training vocabulary" to keep people from getting excited.

 

[markozd]

I had always figured they came from the East around the Caspian because this is what Indo-Iranian seems to have done.

The Mittani thing is interesting. The Aryan seems only to be a horse training lexicon. Conclude what you will from that. Some say an Aryan horse riding elite who dominated Hurrian speakers forming the Mittani, but others don't like this for obvious reasons, so I say "horse training vocabulary" to keep people from getting excited.

IIRC the consensus is that the Kikkuli text is something like a translation of a translation, since the original Hurrian text retained the Indo-Iranian words when the vocabulary was either very specialized or difficult to translate. So the Mitanni were definitely Indo-Iranian.

 

[Ygorcs]

There is no need for steppe to explain Pie in Anatolia, armenia ....that is what i meant.
But being at that, Pie (if shulaveri) went as far as balkans... What.would have been the impact of thiose?
What if bell beaker came from there and not steppe and spoke pie?
What if Myceanian was a Pie nothing to do with steppe?

Extremely unlikely scenarions from the point of view of linguistics. I think you're overestimating the possible survival time of a Common PIE without any significant divergence. If the Bell Beaker-derived languages (I presume Celtic, Lusitanian and Italic, at least, ultimately descend from one of those) hadn't even crossed to Transcaucasia by 5,500 BC, it would certainly have diverged into an extremely divergent language in relation the "steppe-derived" branches like Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic (probably derived from a Yamna language more than 2,500 years later), and instead what we clearly see is that they all, without exception, look like closely related from a common source not many thousands of years prior to their first attestations, especially because they share a whole lot of innovations that for example Anatolian IE lacks.

They could have developed or mutually exchanged 1 or 2 of those features, but it's extremely improbable that they would somehow converge to the same point in several different features ranging from phonetics to morphology and syntax.

That's especially true of Mycenaean Greek compared to Indo-Iranian (which most clearly expanded together with Eastern European/North Asian steppe ancestry), since these two branches share so many commonalities that some linguists even proposed that they should be grouped together as an intermediary Graeco-Indo-Iranian language between Late PIE and themselves. Greek has clearly split from Indo-Iranian quite late in historic terms, not as early as before 5,000 BC, and take into consideration that it's most certain that the PIE speakers in the steppe mixed extensively with entirely different peoples and languages, so their language must've evolved significantly in such a scenario of intense migration, cultural shifts and displacement (like medieval English, for example).

The Shulaveri-Shomu that lived in the Balkans most certainly did not speak PIE at all, but an ancestor language of the PIE that eventually developed as one homogeneous and expansive language in the South Caucasus. If Bell Beakers and Mycenaeans came from a branch of Shulaveri-Shomu that had simply stayed in the Balkans while another offshoot came to West Asia, spent centuries there, migrated to the North Caucasus and from there expanded to the open steppes, well, I'm pretty sure that we'd have in fact 2 starkly different but related language families in Europe (e.g. Semitic vs. Berber), and not one common and still reconstructible Proto-Indo-European language. The divergence would've been much more significant, and the typological similarities between these "southern" branches and the "northern" (steppe) branches would be much fewer.

Languages inevitably change, it seems to me quite misleading to talk uniformly of a "PIE" from Shulaveri-Shomu still in the Balkans in e.g. 5,700 BC until the final divergence of PIE after 3,000 BC. No language survives more than 2,500 years without severe divergence (look at Romance languages, they ceased to be just variants of Latin for a mere 1,300-1,400 years).

I don't think (quite the contrary) it's unlikely that Para-Indo-European languages existed elsewhere in Asia and Europe, but THE Proto-Indo-European that really survived into many daughter languages was not much older than the Late Neolithic/Copper Age, so it corresponds much more plausibly with the period when the migration from Transcaucasia to the Steppes happened, not before that. The others, sister languages of PIE, simply died out.

 

[Ygorcs]

Perhaps twenty percent from only one group might have drifted out of the population.

The only other possibility I can see is that the West Siberian hunter-gatherers carried R1a as well.

Another question for investigation is which other route it might have taken.

There is this issue that also confuses me: are we even sure that Scythians or, more broadly, all Steppe Iranic peoples were significantly admixed with East Asians as early as the Bronze Age? Weren't those Scythian samples with relevant East Asian admixture mostly from the Iron Age onwards? I know craniometrical measures are flawed and limited and so on, but I remind reading a paper from a Kazakh archaeologist which claimed that, analyzing the skulls of ancient steppe inhabitants of Kazakhstan, they estimated that there was 0% East Asian genetic impact in the Bronze Age, 25% in the later Iron Age, 50% in the early Middle Ages and up to 75% in the end of the Middle Ages.

Anyway, we haven't seen that many sweeps of East Asian ancestry in European samples until the Middle Ages, so somehow, knowing the extreme mobility and the semi-nomad lifestyle promoted by the steppes, I somehow doubt that there was relevant East Asian introgression into Eastern European/Western Siberian steppe peoples as early as the Bronze Age (I mean, before 1,200-1,300 BC).

 

[Ygorcs]

This story that Hittites arrived 1650 BC makes no sense, it's like saying Italics only arrived in Italy when Rome became an empire, you can see autosomally that Anatolia becomes Indoeuropean in the Chalcolithic.

It seems like you're assigning a very restrictive label "Indo-European" to any shift towards Neolithic_Iranian and CHG into Anatolia, which wouldn't be right. Right next to the possible earliest PIE speakers (possibly even a mother language to PIE, not Common PIE proper) there were certainly several other non-IE-speaking tribes heavy in Neo_Iran and CHG, and in the Bronze Age we can clearly see in the contemporary documentation that there was an active non-IE expansion from eastern Anatolian peoples (neighboring Armenia and Western Iran, probable cradles of Early PIE), particularly Urartians and Hurrians. The present linguistic diversity of the Caucasus also point to the likelihood of even other language families in that very region.

In my opinion (many would disagree of course) even the pre-Proto-Semitic speakers came from roughly northeastern Mesopotamia/southeastern Anatolia, for I think adopted they just adopted the Afro-Asiatic language of their conquered Levantine people like IE males probably did in the ethnogenesis of the Basque people.

 

[Angela]

There is this issue that also confuses me: are we even sure that Scythians or, more broadly, all Steppe Iranic peoples were significantly admixed with East Asians as early as the Bronze Age? Weren't those Scythian samples with relevant East Asian admixture mostly from the Iron Age onwards? I know craniometrical measures are flawed and limited and so on, but I remind reading a paper from a Kazakh archaeologist which claimed that, analyzing the skulls of ancient steppe inhabitants of Kazakhstan, they estimated that there was 0% East Asian genetic impact in the Bronze Age, 25% in the later Iron Age, 50% in the early Middle Ages and up to 75% in the end of the Middle Ages.

Anyway, we haven't seen that many sweeps of East Asian ancestry in European samples until the Middle Ages, so somehow, knowing the extreme mobility and the semi-nomad lifestyle promoted by the steppes, I somehow doubt that there was relevant East Asian introgression into Eastern European/Western Siberian steppe peoples as early as the Bronze Age (I mean, before 1,200-1,300 BC).

The short answer is that I don't know. However, even if that's the case, we have a lot of Bronze Age samples in the spot through which it was assumed, I thought, that the steppe groups would have migrated into India during the Bronze Age, and there's not a single R1a, and there's a very small "steppe like" component.

So, either that's not the right spot, or it came later in the Iron Age, perhaps with groups which didn't have a lot of East Asian.

 

[Angela]

It seems like you're assigning a very restrictive label "Indo-European" to any shift towards Neolithic_Iranian and CHG into Anatolia, which wouldn't be right. Right next to the possible earliest PIE speakers (possibly even a mother language to PIE, not Common PIE proper) there were certainly several other non-IE-speaking tribes heavy in Neo_Iran and CHG, and in the Bronze Age we can clearly see in the contemporary documentation that there was an active non-IE expansion from eastern Anatolian peoples (neighboring Armenia and Western Iran, probable cradles of Early PIE), particularly Urartians and Hurrians. The present linguistic diversity of the Caucasus also point to the likelihood of even other language families in that very region.

In my opinion (many would disagree of course) even the pre-Proto-Semitic speakers came from roughly northeastern Mesopotamia/southeastern Anatolia, for I think adopted they just adopted the Afro-Asiatic language of their conquered Levantine people like IE males probably did in the ethnogenesis of the Basque people.

Completely agree.

 

[Alan]

I had always figured they came from the East around the Caspian because this is what Indo-Iranian seems to have done.

The Mittani thing is interesting. The Aryan seems only to be a horse training lexicon. Conclude what you will from that. Some say an Aryan horse riding elite who dominated Hurrian speakers forming the Mittani, but others don't like this for obvious reasons, so I say "horse training vocabulary" to keep people from getting excited.

Kurdish scientists are arguing for decades that the Mitanni came to be born from Gutians that merged with the Hurrians. They argue that at least this Indo_Iranian substrata in Mitanni are the Gutians. They also argue that the Medes came to be born after the Assyrians conquered Mitanni, and this Gutian substrata retreated back into the Zagros Mountains where they formed the Medes. Think of that what you want. As Cyrus used to call all Medes West of the Iranian Plateau, "Gutians". Gutians-Medes became a synonym for each other.

Various tribes and places to the east and northeast were often referred to as Gutians or Gutium.^[4] For example, Assyrian royal annals use the term Gutians in relation to populations known to have been Medes or Mannaeans. As late as the reign of Cyrus the Great of Persia, the famous general Gubaru (Gobryas) was described as the "governor of Gutium".

There are many things we still have no idea of and I am pleased that with new samples things I have been arguing for quite a while show up.

Mark my words Gutian samples if we find any, will be identical to Medes and Mitanni. There is a reason Greek historians often used to use Mede and Mitanni interchangable too.

And as I mentioned previously I am still not convinced about the "Indo Aryan-ness" of the Mitanni. And it seems scientists do not agree on that toi. As I argued the reason why it appears more "Indo_Aryan" than Iranian can basically be explained by the fact that this Indo_Iranian substrata in Mitanni was very archaic. And as Indo_Aryan is more archaic than Iranian it will naturally fall closer to the Indo_Aryan languages. I argue that this was still an undivided Indo_Iranian substrata or a very archaic Iranic tongue that later formed into what we call West Iranic.

 

[hrvclv]

What of the Indo Aryan speaking groups in the Kingdom of Mittani in the Levant ? what migration path did they take ?
Late Bronze Age Canaanites from Megiddo should be a mixture of Levant EBA + Armenia MLBA (source), the Armenian admixing population should be the Hurrians.
The Hurrians had connections to Indo-Aryan speakers, Armenia MLBA is different from the preceding Early Bronze Age in having a larger portion of ancestry from the EHG, so my theory is Steppe populations moved to south Caucasus and admixed genetically and culturally with the Hurrian population there, and then migrated to the Levant.

Mitanni is interesting indeed. Apparently they were a Hurrian people with an Indo-Iranian-speaking elite ruling over them, at least in the early phase. Hurrian itself seems to have been an agglutinative Caucasian language from Armenia. It's hard to tell where the Indo-Iranian people came from. Perhaps from the east.

What is interesting is the fact that on one side of the border in Mitanni, you have Indo-Iranian, a daughter language of PIE, "moving with the times", sort of, and following the normal chronological evolution of the language; and on the other side, the Hittites, speaking their "relic language", with traits that pre-date the earliest forms of the PIE reconstructed as the ancestor of European and Indo-Iranian languages. Regardless of DNA, Hittite is the riddle.

While I am at it... I can't see what the problem is with PIE arriving in the steppe from NW Iran. What does the history of haplogroup R+ tell us, from historic times as far back as we can see ? They were mobile, apparently quite aggressive, they arrived, conquered, and moved on. This is what may have happened around Lake Urmia and/or the Kura valley. They came, partly subdued the locals, intermarried with them, assimilated some of the J2b men, and moved on. They needn't have stayed very long - perhaps two or three generations. There were no written records to remember them - not even Sumer had yet emerged, so no wonder they went unremembered. No matter how we look at it, there has to be some explanation to the CHG genes in Yamna. This scenario works, with or without the R1b in the south west Caspian.

This does not rule out the possibility that some specific, very mobile, adventurous, R tribes reached Latvia, the Iron Gates, or other places in mesolithic or early neolithic times. They could have spoken some ancestral version of PIE. Or not. Still, Yamna seems to be the place where the IE package gets together : language, burial rites, weaponry, EHG+CHG. I have nothing against going into the slightest details of a picture, but sometimes, looking from too close, you just lose sight of the whole picture.

To lift suspicions, if any (you never know), let me make it clear that as far as I am concerned, should PIE come from the moon, I wouldn't care a fig!

 

[Alan]

In my opinion (many would disagree of course) even the pre-Proto-Semitic speakers came from roughly northeastern Mesopotamia/southeastern Anatolia, for I think adopted they just adopted the Afro-Asiatic language of their conquered Levantine people like IE males probably did in the ethnogenesis of the Basque people.

Pre Proto Semites and Proto Semites most definitely came from South_Levant that should be clear by now. As they seem to share Levant_Neolithic ancestry with their Berber and Egyptian cousins + E1b and J1 being the most typical Haplogroups for these groups. And Levant_Neolithic being the time and place that did combined these elements.

 

[Alan]

Mitanni is interesting indeed. Apparently they were a Hurrian people with an Indo-Iranian-speaking elite ruling over them, at least in the early phase. Hurrian itself seems to have been an agglutinative Caucasian language from Armenia. It's hard to tell where the Indo-Iranian people came from. Perhaps from the east.

Hurrian has not been grouped with any modern language family so far and is usually considered a "isolated language". That usually means they simply couldn't get them into any modern language family. However some Russian scientists argue about similarities to modern Northeast Caucasian languages. It is very much possible that the Northeast Caucasian languages are new arrivals to the region and indeed expanded from a region close to Central Anatolia.

But Hurrian being an isolate is the most accepted theory.