Ygorcs
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Two questions : Do you mean, as I seem to understand, that the Proto-IE/Anatolian ancestor language was initially EHG ? What is your estimate of the time span between the departure of the Anatolians and the emergence of Yamna ?
No, I don't mean that, I don't think any of us should be too sure about it. I'm entertaining the possibilities of both scenarios: that it originally (actually not PIE per se, but the distant ancestors of it) came from a EHG-majority population or from a CHG-majority population, and on a separate note that it came from north of the Caucasus or from the Caucasus itself (South Caucasus mainly). See, it's even perfectly possible that, if a large % of CHG arrived in the steppes very early on (Early Neolithic), PIE could've been BOTH a CHG language AND also a steppe language. It would've been brought so long ago to the Pontic-Caspian region that its IE descendants couldn't realistically have split in the beginning of the Neolithic, so the language would've moved to the steppes before it started to diverge. There are several possibilities.
I myself believe that a Caucasian origin among originally CHG-majority tribes followed by a consolidation of the language (at least non-Anatolian PIE) in the steppes is very likely, however I can clearly see that there is no way I can pretend that the data already allow me to discard any other hypothesis, especially if one doesn't focus only on the genetics, but also - as we all should, we're talking about a language family here - on the linguistic perspective on this matter.
I think that the data, including these latest data from this Caucasus paper, are not conclusive at all, so both hypotheses sound plausible and worth investigating at least as of now. Those who claim that all the evidences are pointing to a "game over" either for the Steppe hypothesis or for the South Caucasus hypothesis are deluding themselves. There are still a lot of missing links and unclear stuff in this narrative, and there is certainly no "game over" (the authors themselves are extremely cautious, talking about "possibilities", "could have happened" and so on). Beginning, of course, from the fact that the CHG in the steppes looks like it's very old, and not some Late Neolithic/Chalcolithic influx that would fit perfectly well with a South Caucasian expansion in two directions, one to Anatolia (Anatolin) and the other to the Pontic-Caspian region (Residual Late PIE).
Well, as for the dating of the split of Anatolian PIE I personally estimate that it certainly happened before 3500 BC (so, before Yamnaya) and most probably around 4000 BC, so some 500-700 years before the start of the Yamnaya expansion. That's basically the conclusion given by comparisons of the technological vocabulary in the IE branches and also by glottochronological methods, and also a safe date to explain why Hittite already was so very divergent from Mycenaean Greek and the few attestations of Old Indic by 1600 BC.
Therefore, I think steppe IE and Anatolian derived from the language of a pre-Yamnaya culture either in the steppes or in the Caucasus (regardless of whether it was originally more EHG or more CHG), but we definitely still need to explain how on earth the steppes could have absorbed that Caucasian language without any major Caucasian-shifted Y-DNA makeup transformation, and when there are signs that even before 4300 BC (the Eneolithic Ukraine sample) the EHG+CHG was already there in the steppes. If that CHG mix with EHG is too old, that could mean that even if the pre-PIE language had come with CHG people it would've been established in the Pontic-Caspian steppes for so long that it's really hard to imagine that Anatolian PIE and Steppe/Late PIE would've split in the Caucasus, possibly before 5000 BC. That's just too early, as most linguists AFAIK would agree.