Central and South Asian DNA Paper

I think that J2b2-L283 just happened to be more common in the Balkans today due to a founder effect in the Illyrian population. Otherwise J2b2-L283 is found pretty much all over Europe, even if at lower frequencies in the north.

I agree with this. I think the most likely scenario is that J2b2-L283 was a minor lineage among an IE population that expanded mostly into Balkans/Europe. With J-L283>>Z2507 (YFull TMRCA 4400 ybp) going through some founder effects after reaching the (western) Balkans. Currently all Balkan samples are below J-Z2507, including the Bronze Age Dalmatian which was proven Z2507+ Y15058+
https://j2-m172.info/2018/02/y-snp-...l283-bronze-age-croatia-mathieson-et-al-2018/
 
This is exactly why I am reluctant to define Proto-Indo-European solely as the group of R1b-M269 and J2b2a people who lived in the Central and South Caucasus between, say, 5800 and 5200 BCE.
Some people think that it's better than the Pontic-Caspian Steppe as a PIE homeland because it could be made to include the archaic Anatolian branch. But we don't know anything about the genetics of the Anatolian branch, and in any case the Hittites, Luwians and Lydians don't show up until about 1650 BCE, with horses, chariots and what is in fact more of a Middle Bronze Age Steppe cultural package. I think that the archaic traits of that branch can be explained either by some sort of isolation from other PIE groups within the Steppe (e.g. early migration to the Balkans from 4200 BCE or to Turan from 3500 to 4000 BCE) or by a hydrisation of their language with non-IE languages.

Linguistically, it is indeed difficult to explain how, by the time they appeared, the Hittites could still be speaking such an archaic form of PIE. This said, we must keep in mind that some phonological changes are one-way, no-return changes.

Hittite still has laryngeals, which are postulated only as "algebric" remnants in reconstructed steppe PIE - meaning that they had already begun to evolve into different, more "modern" sounds : eg, [H²] had become, or was in the process of becoming [a] (except when followed by s in some environments). No hybridization can ever restore extinct laryngeals. How they survived intact among Hittites while fading out elsewhere is hard to tell. It certainly implies a high degree of isolation. Now, could a tribe remain so extremely isolated in the open geography of the steppe ? Did they remain isolated in a valley of the Caucasus for 2000 years or more ? As to the "warrior package" (horse, chariot, etc.) I think it was extensively shared by all warlike groups in the middle-east by Hittite times, including the Egyptians and the early Assyrians. I feel tempted to stick to my idea that they were a small tribe who moved early from the south west Caspian into Anatolia (along with other small tribes), and then had a hard time surviving among hostile neighbors. Until they emerged and conquered - a bit like the Romans did in Italy.

The same applies to Satem IE. Satem is the result of palatalization. I've never heard "de-palatalization" mentioned. So Satem forms derive from original, "hard" Centum forms. It can't work the other way round. Palatalization, on the other hand, could be due to hybridization, or adoption of a language by people who had difficulties managing some of its sounds. A powerful R1a expatriate from south Yamna, plus a founder effect, plus a degree of isolation, would do the trick, to some extent. It doesn't leave much time, though, to multiply enough to muster the might to found the CWC.
 
Wow awesome paper. Finally some South and Central Asian.

Has anyone thrown the site coordinates into Google maps? I just started doing this and it's really cool. In many cases you can see features of the dig.

According to the authors we essentially have Indus River samples, which is sweet. They're just South Asian+Iran Neolithic. I guess that should have been expected.

The West Siberian is interesting and helps fill some gaps from the Scythians paper.

There's E1b in a 10000BC Northern Iranian sample. That seemed strange initially, but I guess it's not.

The R1b Z2103 in 5500BC Northern Iran is very interesting, but saying that this single sample proves that copper age Iranians were speaking PIE is crazy, even if this very guy is the direct ancestor to those Z2103 Yamnaya guys, which is unlikely. The consequence of this being true would make for a very strange mechanism of dispersal, which would probably generate more mysteries than it solves.

It would provide a nice explanation for the origin of Anatolian languages, but that's about it. Remember we're now about as certain as we'll ever be that Indo-Iranian and the European IE languages came from the steppe, so how is this reconciled with PIE/Anatolian in Iran all the way up to the bronze age, where Non-IE languages are attested? They would have had to quietly and quickly move to Anatolia and the steppe and been immediately replaced with other non-IE speakers. The whole time being absent from history.

Also this Iranian Z2103 guy is contemporaneous with the Khvalynsk guys, who are already showing an increase in CHG/Iranian Neolithic. So we would have to also say that these guys have nothing to do with IE or Yamnaya, and yet they're very clearly ancestors of steppe populations that would later expand and spread IE languages. Not only this, but these Iranian PIE speakers would also have immediately assimilated into a steppe culture exhibiting none of their Iranian Neolithic cultural characteristics.

So these are stealth ninja PIEs who infiltrated the steppe, and only then did they expand rapidly in every direction from the steppe.

I guess it's possible. We really need Maykop males and more ancient Caucasian genomes then because if the IE L23 lines are really exploding out of the Caucuses then we should find much more evidence than one dude in Copper age Iran.
 
It's a great paper, very extensive. Most of the results are what I expected.

- BMAC was a mixture of J2a (main haplogroup), G2a, L1a, Q1b and R2a, just as I had predicted.

- R1b went south from the Caspian Steppe across Central Asia and settled in Turan/BMAC. Nowadays R1b is far higher than Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and northern Afghanistan (Hazaras).

- R1a-Z93 went south from southern Siberia along the Tianshan to reach Pakistan and India. Once again that is expected as the R1a-Z93 concentration today are much higher along the Tianshan (Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, eastern Afghanistan). What I don't understand is why this paper insists on separating the admixture of those R1a-Z93 people and calling them 'West Siberian HG related' when they in fact originated in the northern forest-steppe of Europe (around Belarus and northern Ukraine).


Here are a few things no one could expect:

- E1b1a1a1c2b1 (aka Z6005) in Mesolithic Iran (12,000 to 8,000 BCE), a Sub-Saharan African clade now found mostly in the far western end of Africa (Gambia, Sierra Leone). Hunter-gatherers did travel a long way... Y-Full says that its parent clade CTS6649 formed 9600 ybp and has a TMRCA of only 6700 ybp, so that is a gross underestimation as it had time to travel over 7000 km and be in Iran about 12,000 years ago.

- E1b1a1a1c2c3c, another SSA lineage, and plenty of Y-DNA A, BT and CT in the BMAC during the Bronze Age. The A, BT and CT could be early Homo sapiens lineages that died out, but why again West African Y-DNA in Central Asia?

- Surprisingly lots of (Levantine?) E1b1b1b2 with also some A0, CT, DE and E in Early Iron Age northern Pakistan. Was there a massive Natufian migration to the region in the Early Neolithic? Or is that more Paleolithic or Mesolithic African hunter-gatherers?

- I2a2a2a in Neolithic Turkmenistan (5000-2000 BCE). Is that an offshoot of a Neolithic culture of Old Europe, a Mesolithic European tribe that ended up in Central Asia, or an early Steppe invader?

- As mentioned before, Mal'ta can't be R1b1a1a2 and it's extremely suspicious to find a Nordic Bronze Age clade of R1b-U106 (S21728, downstream of Z9) in Iron Age Pakistan. Either it's a typo or that sample was contaminated.

E1b1a ... amazing.
The fun thing is that no sub Saharan ancestry in Iran Neolithic has been detected. Using formal stats. The same with the Natufians who are E1b1b.
Maybe Basal Eurasian is somehow connected to Africa ?

These results caught me off guard too. Assuming it's not some kind of error I can think of two crack pot theories for why there is african/natufian haplogroups in central asia. Either it was mediated from Oman which had extensive cultural and economic connections with the IVC cultures into the "Turan" area or it turns out Elamites had a partially Natufian origin and didn't just transmit their script, numeral system and language as far as Sharh-i-Sokhta, but also some of their genes. Both of these groups had a presence in the area as early as the late 4th millennium bc.

As for the seeming lack of Natufian/Levantine autosomal ancestry, Matt from eurogenes pulled out a telling quote from the Supplementary section which reveals the Anatolian farmer ancestry is just a representative for a "western Near East Neolithic population"

p106 "An important caveat is that we do not consider here Levantine agriculturalists who were closely related to those of Anatolia with some uncertainty as the direction of gene flow between Anatolia and the Levant [Laz16].

Relatedly, the distribution of Anatolian/Levantine/Iranian-Neolithic related populations in the ancient Near East is only sparsely known[Cite Laz/Broushaki/Boncuklu paper], with an important lacuna in Mesopotamia. Our results do not imply that the shift related to populations sampled in northwestern Anatolia [Mathieson] implies admixture from that area, but we use this set because of its large sample size and high quality as representatives of Neolithic populations of the western Near East."


It's in response to a user who questions that there could be Natufian/Levantine ancestry this far north before the Akkadian era, but it's actually entirely possible given the immense amount of economic and cultural exchange occuring across the Arabian Sea hundreds of years before the Akkadians existed. The absence of mesopotamian and Elamite genes also leaves open the possibility that it was simply brought through the middle east as well. This of course is all conjecture, but I see these theories as the most probable possibilities if in fact the y-dna here isn't just an error.
 
Anyone still remembers this study?:

https://www.nature.com/articles/ng.3559/figures/4

"Each circle represents a phylogenetic node whose branching pattern suggests rapid expansion. The horizontal axis indicates the timings of the expansions, and circle radii reflect growth rates—the minimum number of sons per generation, as estimated by our two-phase growth model. Nodes are grouped by continental superpopulation (AFR, African; AMR, admixed American; EAS, East Asian; EUR, European; SAS, South Asian) and colored by haplogroup. Line segments connect phylogenetically nested lineages. This figure was generated with ggplot2 (ref. 32)."

ng.3559-F4.jpg


R1a-Z93 exploded in South Asia (SAS) during the Bronze Age, not later.

If they didn't find it one possible explanation is that Z93 were practicing cremation.
 
indeed, there is a lot of R1a in South Asia today, and according to the paper, it does not come from the Scyths, it got there earlier, that should be Steppe MLBA then

There is a substantial amount of R1a, particularly in the northwest, and yet in the 41 samples from 1200 to 800 BC there is 10-15% steppe ancestry, but not a single R1a. Even in the Iron Age, there is only one R1a, and that's from 400 BC.

Either this is an unusual area, and R1a arrived via another route(?), or R1a was just a founder effect for some reason, or a lot of it did come with various SAKA groups.

It's like there's a disconnect between the conclusions and the data.

Also, the steppe MLBA percentages are pretty darn low in these samples. I mean, they vary, but a lot are in that 10-15% range.

I have to read the Supplement again, I guess. :)
 
Wow awesome paper. Finally some South and Central Asian.

Has anyone thrown the site coordinates into Google maps? I just started doing this and it's really cool. In many cases you can see features of the dig.

According to the authors we essentially have Indus River samples, which is sweet. They're just South Asian+Iran Neolithic. I guess that should have been expected.

The West Siberian is interesting and helps fill some gaps from the Scythians paper.

There's E1b in a 10000BC Northern Iranian sample. That seemed strange initially, but I guess it's not.

The R1b Z2103 in 5500BC Northern Iran is very interesting, but saying that this single sample proves that copper age Iranians were speaking PIE is crazy, even if this very guy is the direct ancestor to those Z2103 Yamnaya guys, which is unlikely. The consequence of this being true would make for a very strange mechanism of dispersal, which would probably generate more mysteries than it solves.

It would provide a nice explanation for the origin of Anatolian languages, but that's about it. Remember we're now about as certain as we'll ever be that Indo-Iranian and the European IE languages came from the steppe, so how is this reconciled with PIE/Anatolian in Iran all the way up to the bronze age, where Non-IE languages are attested? They would have had to quietly and quickly move to Anatolia and the steppe and been immediately replaced with other non-IE speakers. The whole time being absent from history.

Also this Iranian Z2103 guy is contemporaneous with the Khvalynsk guys, who are already showing an increase in CHG/Iranian Neolithic. So we would have to also say that these guys have nothing to do with IE or Yamnaya, and yet they're very clearly ancestors of steppe populations that would later expand and spread IE languages. Not only this, but these Iranian PIE speakers would also have immediately assimilated into a steppe culture exhibiting none of their Iranian Neolithic cultural characteristics.

So these are stealth ninja PIEs who infiltrated the steppe, and only then did they expand rapidly in every direction from the steppe.

I guess it's possible. We really need Maykop males and more ancient Caucasian genomes then because if the IE L23 lines are really exploding out of the Caucuses then we should find much more evidence than one dude in Copper age Iran.


take it with grain of salt
there y and mtdna table is a big mess
 
For I think cranial shapes has always some indications to give to us when seriously studied - variations exist within pops but for the most these variations has an history - OK for BB's as an heterogenous pop in space and time, not only variated - the most of Yamna were rather meso-dolicho (but with rather low faces) and the most of CWC were rather dolicho high faced and high skulled, what does not exclude a common component among both at some degree - that said, Joren provided 'Pamir-Ferghana' type evocates curiously 'dinaric' (so a part of early BBs "linker" population, if not the true first BBs)- I noticed this upon current Tadjiks of the mountains - origin? convergence in microevolution?
I know the little confidence of people in craniometrics so this ought to be discussed in an anthropo thread, even if it could be linked from far to the present thread

The problems with craniometrics are that:

1) the variables are too limited (dolicho vs brachy, high vs low face) compared to DNA

2) the same skull shapes can be found in completely unrelated populations (e.g. dolichocephalic Nordics and Berbers)

3) cranial traits recombine when two different populations mix and can give rise to intermediate traits that are different from both source populations and closer to other unrelated populations. You can't extract percentages of admixtures from the original populations based on craniometics.

It's like mixing colours. If you mix one type of yellow with one type of blue, you get one type of green. With DNA you can see what the original colours were and what percentage of each is present in the mixture. With craniometrics all you know is that you have green, but don't know what the original colours were, nor how many were used and in what proportions. In the case of the colour green, you know that either you already had some green and could have altered it with adding another colour, or you could make it from scratch with blue and yellow. But if the colour is brown, it's much harder to know what was mixed originally.
 
Linguistically, it is indeed difficult to explain how, by the time they appeared, the Hittites could still be speaking such an archaic form of PIE. This said, we must keep in mind that some phonological changes are one-way, no-return changes.

Hittite still has laryngeals, which are postulated only as "algebric" remnants in reconstructed steppe PIE - meaning that they had already begun to evolve into different, more "modern" sounds : eg, [H²] had become, or was in the process of becoming [a] (except when followed by s in some environments). No hybridization can ever restore extinct laryngeals. How they survived intact among Hittites while fading out elsewhere is hard to tell. It certainly implies a high degree of isolation. Now, could a tribe remain so extremely isolated in the open geography of the steppe ? Did they remain isolated in a valley of the Caucasus for 2000 years or more ? As to the "warrior package" (horse, chariot, etc.) I think it was extensively shared by all warlike groups in the middle-east by Hittite times, including the Egyptians and the early Assyrians. I feel tempted to stick to my idea that they were a small tribe who moved early from the south west Caspian into Anatolia (along with other small tribes), and then had a hard time surviving among hostile neighbors. Until they emerged and conquered - a bit like the Romans did in Italy.

The same applies to Satem IE. Satem is the result of palatalization. I've never heard "de-palatalization" mentioned. So Satem forms derive from original, "hard" Centum forms. It can't work the other way round. Palatalization, on the other hand, could be due to hybridization, or adoption of a language by people who had difficulties managing some of its sounds. A powerful R1a expatriate from south Yamna, plus a founder effect, plus a degree of isolation, would do the trick, to some extent. It doesn't leave much time, though, to multiply enough to muster the might to found the CWC.

I agree with everything, except perhaps with the Hittites moving early from the south west Caspian into Anatolia. The Hittites were close relatives of the Luwians (from Troy), Carians, Lydians and Lycians, who were all living in western Anatolia. The Lycians are said to be originally from Crete. That's why I think that an early migration from the Steppe to the Balkans is more likely. Furthermore, the R1b-L51 branch (Centum or Proto-Italo-Celto-Germanic) only moved to central Europe between 3000 and 2500 BCE, but Steppe people started invading the Carpathians and Balkans ("Old Europe") from 4200 BCE. What happened to all those Steppe people who settled in SE Europe for over one thousand years? I believe that they were the Anatolian branch and that later Steppe invasions pushed them to western Anatolia (and probably also Greece and Albania).
 
Wow awesome paper. Finally some South and Central Asian.

Has anyone thrown the site coordinates into Google maps? I just started doing this and it's really cool. In many cases you can see features of the dig.

According to the authors we essentially have Indus River samples, which is sweet. They're just South Asian+Iran Neolithic. I guess that should have been expected.

The West Siberian is interesting and helps fill some gaps from the Scythians paper.

There's E1b in a 10000BC Northern Iranian sample. That seemed strange initially, but I guess it's not.

The R1b Z2103 in 5500BC Northern Iran is very interesting, but saying that this single sample proves that copper age Iranians were speaking PIE is crazy, even if this very guy is the direct ancestor to those Z2103 Yamnaya guys, which is unlikely. The consequence of this being true would make for a very strange mechanism of dispersal, which would probably generate more mysteries than it solves.

It would provide a nice explanation for the origin of Anatolian languages, but that's about it. Remember we're now about as certain as we'll ever be that Indo-Iranian and the European IE languages came from the steppe, so how is this reconciled with PIE/Anatolian in Iran all the way up to the bronze age, where Non-IE languages are attested? They would have had to quietly and quickly move to Anatolia and the steppe and been immediately replaced with other non-IE speakers. The whole time being absent from history.

Also this Iranian Z2103 guy is contemporaneous with the Khvalynsk guys, who are already showing an increase in CHG/Iranian Neolithic. So we would have to also say that these guys have nothing to do with IE or Yamnaya, and yet they're very clearly ancestors of steppe populations that would later expand and spread IE languages. Not only this, but these Iranian PIE speakers would also have immediately assimilated into a steppe culture exhibiting none of their Iranian Neolithic cultural characteristics.

So these are stealth ninja PIEs who infiltrated the steppe, and only then did they expand rapidly in every direction from the steppe.

I guess it's possible. We really need Maykop males and more ancient Caucasian genomes then because if the IE L23 lines are really exploding out of the Caucuses then we should find much more evidence than one dude in Copper age Iran.
Our brain always finds a way to spin things around does it not? And that is what you are doing .

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.

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

c. Hajji Fizuz is not a culture. Its a offshoot remote place where people used to settle and many places around are clearly seasonal for transhumance pastorals. At that period they were making wine, like the shulaveri shomu in georgia. Many books state the links with south caucasus pastorals and obsidian.

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....

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?

There is no better pattern for dispersal of PIE than them.
 
You don't get to t-roll Slavs or any other nationalities here. You already got an infraction. Keep this stuff up and you'll be out of here very soon.

@Johen,
You want to take issue with a genetics paper? Argue the genetics. Stop with this kind of nonsense.

Not to mention that Indo-Iranian "Scythian masters" of the Iron Age (that's when Scythians proper existed), who by the way were also heavy in R1a percentages, certainly couldn't have taught a Balto-Slavic language to R1a-majority anestors of Slavs and Balts. Not only a language doesn't "back-evolve" to its former stages to be then reshaped when it is adopted by another people (believe it or not, Balto-Slavic is clearly not a daughter of Indo-Iranian), but also Baltic and Slavic languages already had developed their very distinctive fundamental sound rules by the end of the Bronze Age, what's suggestive of a long internal and independent development. I ask myself why people don't seem to even think twice about the linguistic implications of these hypothesis before they think they are pausible enough to be even posted here for appreciation.
 
I agree with everything, except perhaps with the Hittites moving early from the south west Caspian into Anatolia. The Hittites were close relatives of the Luwians (from Troy), Carians, Lydians and Lycians, who were all living in western Anatolia. The Lycians are said to be originally from Crete. That's why I think that an early migration from the Steppe to the Balkans is more likely. Furthermore, the R1b-L51 branch (Centum or Proto-Italo-Celto-Germanic) only moved to central Europe between 3000 and 2500 BCE, but Steppe people started invading the Carpathians and Balkans ("Old Europe") from 4200 BCE. What happened to all those Steppe people who settled in SE Europe for over one thousand years? I believe that they were the Anatolian branch and that later Steppe invasions pushed them to western Anatolia (and probably also Greece and Albania).

Maybe is time to give a pause to this Steppe thing because clearly its no as crank up as some (and probably you) have been saying.

Every body was expecting to find a mythical place north caucasus full of R1bs and actualy the oldest (m269) is found in northwestern Iran. The only importance of Steppe is the fact that is the last component of europe admix and there is a clear possibilities it did so by providing extended exogamy to crazy Bell beakers males with CWC females in central europe (and other way around i suppose) something even nmdental traits have been saying for15 years.

People speaking Pie during 5th and 4th milenia clearly were in anatolia, armenia, even in Thrace or western shores of black sea or southeast balkans. There is no need for steppe anything.
At least that Kum6 girl in north anatolia spoke PIE (shulaveri fleeing 4700bc).
 
Linguistically, it is indeed difficult to explain how, by the time they appeared, the Hittites could still be speaking such an archaic form of PIE. This said, we must keep in mind that some phonological changes are one-way, no-return changes.

Hittite still has laryngeals, which are postulated only as "algebric" remnants in reconstructed steppe PIE - meaning that they had already begun to evolve into different, more "modern" sounds : eg, [H²] had become, or was in the process of becoming [a] (except when followed by s in some environments). No hybridization can ever restore extinct laryngeals. How they survived intact among Hittites while fading out elsewhere is hard to tell. It certainly implies a high degree of isolation. Now, could a tribe remain so extremely isolated in the open geography of the steppe ? Did they remain isolated in a valley of the Caucasus for 2000 years or more ? As to the "warrior package" (horse, chariot, etc.) I think it was extensively shared by all warlike groups in the middle-east by Hittite times, including the Egyptians and the early Assyrians. I feel tempted to stick to my idea that they were a small tribe who moved early from the south west Caspian into Anatolia (along with other small tribes), and then had a hard time surviving among hostile neighbors. Until they emerged and conquered - a bit like the Romans did in Italy.

The same applies to Satem IE. Satem is the result of palatalization. I've never heard "de-palatalization" mentioned. So Satem forms derive from original, "hard" Centum forms. It can't work the other way round. Palatalization, on the other hand, could be due to hybridization, or adoption of a language by people who had difficulties managing some of its sounds. A powerful R1a expatriate from south Yamna, plus a founder effect, plus a degree of isolation, would do the trick, to some extent. It doesn't leave much time, though, to multiply enough to muster the might to found the CWC.

Sorry if it's a silly question - I don't know linguistics - but could there have been many IE speaking peoples, even before the Hittites? We don't have written records from them but they could have existed. Then of course there were huge migrations of an IE Steppe population in the Bronze Age, but maybe they weren't the only IE speaking people at the time.
 
There is no better pattern for dispersal of PIE than them.

..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?
 
Sorry if it's a silly question - I don't know linguistics - but could there have been many IE speaking peoples, even before the Hittites? We don't have written records from them but they could have existed. Then of course there were huge migrations of an IE Steppe population in the Bronze Age, but maybe they weren't the only IE speaking people at the time.
Good question. Of course there were many.
Hittite is just a reference because left a written legagy. For milenia people spoke Pie before Hittite.
 
I wouldn't be too surprised from Sub-Saharan DNA in Neolithic west/central Asia, or any kind of DNA anywhere else honestly, except for Australia and the Americas, which were more isolated. We know about the major out of Africa migrations of 60-120kya, and we know that many haplogroups reached Eurasia in different waves. Humans were traveling far and wide as early as that. I would assume with time, traveling could have only gotten easier, except for the melted land bridges. There already was a paper showing booth Sub-Saharan and Near Eastern ancestry in Morocco around 12kya iirc, so long distance travel should not have been too uncommon.

Thinking about the differences in trait variance in different populations, which Reich mentioned, I wonder how much of that difference is due to actual differentiation through evolution, selection and archaic admixture, and how much it is just random differentiation that naturally occurs you split with bias any data base into two groups (bias because splits happened by lineages and not completely randomly).
 
Not to mention that Indo-Iranian "Scythian masters" of the Iron Age (that's when Scythians proper existed), who by the way were also heavy in R1a percentages, certainly couldn't have taught a Balto-Slavic language to R1a-majority anestors of Slavs and Balts. Not only a language doesn't "back-evolve" to its former stages to be then reshaped when it is adopted by another people (believe it or not, Balto-Slavic is clearly not a daughter of Indo-Iranian), but also Baltic and Slavic languages already had developed their very distinctive fundamental sound rules by the end of the Bronze Age, what's suggestive of a long internal and independent development. I ask myself why people don't seem to even think twice about the linguistic implications of these hypothesis before they think they are pausible enough to be even posted here for appreciation.

there are many here - including me - with a very limited knowledge of linguistics
on the other hand I sometimes get the impression that others - not you - who claim to know something about linguistics try to twist their arguments in favour of their own biassed opinions or believe they can explain everything with linguistics
 
Maybe is time to give a pause to this Steppe thing because clearly its no as crank up as some (and probably you) have been saying.
Every body was expecting to find a mythical place north caucasus full of R1bs and actualy the oldest (m269) is found in northwestern Iran. The only importance of Steppe is the fact that is the last component of europe admix and there is a clear possibilities it did so by providing extended exogamy to crazy Bell beakers males with CWC females in central europe (and other way around i suppose) something even nmdental traits have been saying for15 years.
People speaking Pie during 5th and 4th milenia clearly were in anatolia, armenia, even in Thrace or western shores of black sea or southeast balkans. There is no need for steppe anything.
At least that Kum6 girl in north anatolia spoke PIE (shulaveri fleeing 4700bc).
the authors are convinced that all extant branches of IE were spread by steppe EMBA or steppe MLBA

europeindianmap.jpg


but indeed the Anatolian branch may have another source

as for R1b, a strange pattern emerges
pré-Yamna steppe and Iron Gates seem to have been populated by the R1b-V88 branch
while R1b-P297 was observed in the Baltic area, and now also western Azerbaijan
 
Every body was expecting to find a mythical place north caucasus full of R1bs and actualy the oldest (m269) is found in northwestern Iran. The only importance of Steppe is the fact that is the last component of europe admix and there is a clear possibilities it did so by providing extended exogamy to crazy Bell beakers males with CWC females in central europe (and other way around i suppose) something even nmdental traits have been saying for15 years.

People speaking Pie during 5th and 4th milenia clearly were in anatolia, armenia, even in Thrace or western shores of black sea or southeast balkans. There is no need for steppe anything.

Actually there is. The only admixture that clearly starts to appear and incrase whenever and wherever IE languages started to appear, except for West Asia (until now), is the Bronze Age steppe one. I'm perfecty fine with the hypothesis, increasingly supported by evidences, that the earliest form or PIE (maybe even still pre-PIE) was in West Asia, south of the Caucasus and near the Caspian and/or Black Sea, but that is a really long way from claiming that the steppe peoples had nothing to do nor were "necessary" at all for the spread of IE languages much, much later, when the Late PIE that expanded the most was certainly very different from that Earliest PIE if we consider that even the Anatolian branch, which is itself an evolution of that, and not a fossil that preserved that Early PIE intact, is already so distinct from the non-Anatolian IE branches that some once found it even hard to believe it was really IE and not a closely related language family. To talk about the spread of IE languages in the Bronze Age trying to link that phenomenon exclusively with Shulaveri-Shomu south of the Caucasus around 5,000 BC would be more or less like trying to establish how Portuguese and Spanish spread to South America relying just on the expansion of Italic tribes in Iron Age Italy.

The steppe component was probably NOT the source of PIE, but to say it was not "necessary" and had nothing to do with the spread of the vast majority of IE branches is simply unsubstantiated if you look at the ample evidences and the conclusions of virtually every studies based on evidences. People mix, change their genetics, absorb others, and the subsequent generations, even if totally transformed genetically, may keep the language and culture alive.

Of course, admixtures and Y-DNA haplogroups don't transmit languages, people do, so you and no one can expect to find a completely seamless and always intensive association of steppe admixture with the arrival of IE-speaking peoples, but there is undoubtedly a very strong correlation with the sole exception, until now, of Bronze Age Anatolia (as for Iberia, we have no reason to believe IE languages were there very early, all the IE languages documented there were very clearly not that divergent from Central European IE tongues to have been spoken there since the early Bronze Age).
 
Good question. Of course there were many.
Hittite is just a reference because left a written legagy. For milenia people spoke Pie before Hittite.

I was trying to reconcile some genetic evidence pointing to migrations from Steppe to southeast Europe to Anatolia, with the Anatolian languages not being in the same branch as Balkan languages. So maybe some early IE languages already existed there, straight from Armenia/Iran, then when the Steppe migration arrived, their relatively new IE form mixed with the old one, which would explain the archaic elements in there, and the seemingly Steppe ancestry. Seems a little complicated though.
 

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