Ancient genomes from Caucasus inc. Maykop

[Ygorcs]

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.

 

[Ygorcs]

What is the source? Without that information we can conclude basically nothing. If this is extracted from Bouckaert et al. or Renfrew, honestly the vast majority of linguists found so many mistakes in their data (including using wrong words and wrong assignments of some languages to an IE branch, actually the mistakes of Bouckaert et al. were so many that they inspired an entire book about them by linguist Asya Pereltsvaig) that I wouldn't consider these graphs at all. There was massive criticism from real experts against the models of those two studies, and not just because of methodological disagreements, but simply because there were lots of wrong premises leading to wrong conclusions.

Some of those dates look extremely suspicious to me: Anatolian splitting in 6700 BC, when not even agriculture and pastoralism had been spread to the whole Caucasus region (so what was the expansion about?). Tocharian splitting in the steppes as early as 5900 BCE even before Khvalynsk existed, and even before any pastoralism had developed there. Northwestern/European branches splitting at 4500 BC, before any major CHG or EHG expansion into Europe and before Sredny Stog, Yamnaya, Maykop, Kura-Araxes and virtually any other major culture possibly associated with the dynamics of CHG or more specifically PIE expansion. The dates just don't fit the archaeological evidences, unless they want us to believe that, without any major migration an/or acculturation, EEF people in Europe spoke IE, CHG people in Caucasus spoke IE, EHG people in the steppes spoke IE, and so on.

 

[Cpluskx]

you can find more info here: http://dienekes.blogspot.com.tr/2011/04/indo-european-origins-neolithic.html

 

[hrvclv]

The ancient presence of CHG north of the Caucasus does indeed complicate the pattern. I wish that team of geneticists would conduct a similar scrutiny of ancient genomes from Northern Mesopotamia and the Lake Van area.
Their kind of rather impermeable genetic frontier between Maikop and Steppe runs counter to an R1b link between NW Iran and the Steppe. What of that R1b guy in Hajji Firuz ? A stray lone wanderer ?

 

[Ygorcs]

you can find more info here: http://dienekes.blogspot.com.tr/2011/04/indo-european-origins-neolithic.html

Oh this is from 2011, the times when Dienekes still staunchly supported the Anatolian Neolithic expansion hypothesis for PIE, and when biology-inspired glottochronological methods were still beginning to be more widely used and, honestly, being believed somewhat naively as if languages function exactly like biological entities. Also, we know so much more about the genetics part of this equation now, just imagine how little we knew in 2011 about ancient populations.

This Bayesian glottochronological results given by Gray & Atkinson were very criticized in later years by several linguists, and they really yield some strange results especially as you go for more ancient language connections, because of the higher likelihood of accumulated borrowings and less well known lexicon (but there are weird datings even some of the later branches, like estimating that Latin split into its distinct daughter languages as early as 300 AD). There are also heavily controversial classifications, like Celtic being much further from Italic than Germanic, Romani splitting off very soon from other Indo-Aryan languages, and Polish and Belarusian being more related between themselves than they are due to prolonged contact. The method seemed to be prone to several mistakes caused by borrowings, different rates of phonetic and morphological evolution, presence of significant non-IE substrate, and so on.

There are studies that suggest there is a serious over-estimation of the dates using that Bayesian method, as the aforementioned linguist Asya Pereltsvaig pointed out in her book (see below, I really recommend reading her professional criticism of these supposedly "revolutionary" and "conclusive" methods). So, all these extremely old dates should be, probably, pushed forward significantly to be more credible and fit the archaeological and linguistic evidence better. Very few serious linguists today even entertain the possibility that, if Anatolian IE supposedly split from the rest in 6700 BC, PIE was spoken in Mesolithic 7000-8000 BC and spread even before the Caucasian and Pontic-Caspian Neolithic.

https://books.google.com.br/books?id=iFe3BwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=pt-BR#v=onepage&q&f=false

https://imgur.com/a/KpwgW4p

 

[Ygorcs]

I have only very briefly browsed the paper, but from the admixtures posted above it is startling to see just how different Steppe Maykop (almost pure EHG) is from core Maykop (CHG + Anatolian Chalcolithic).

I wonder if the so-called "Caucasian influence" (substrate or superstrate? I don't know) assumed by some linguists to have impacted the early development of PIE came from such a situation of strong "Caucasianization" of acculturated Southern Steppe tribes even in the absence of major immigration/population replacement, maybe even starting before Maykop. As per this paper, there seems to have been a long and hard genetic boundary between the steppe and the North Caucasus, but what if some of the steppe populations themselves had adopted Caucasian culture and language and thus become an intermediary vehicle for Caucasian influence to the more northern parts of the steppe away from the slopes of the Caucasus?

 

[Ygorcs]

Maybe more advanced civilization with much more population in the south forced the steppe population to assimilate into them? Steppe population need to know the language to communicate, trade, work etc. with them.

Maybe, but I don't think a people in a huge pre-modern region, much of which located hundreds of kilometers away from the Caucasus societies, would shift their everyday language just to be able to trade with them. They were mostly subsistence hunter-gatherers and later pastoralists, not export-driven societies. According to the study, they seem to have had "occasional contacts" with each other and maintained a strongly differentiated genetic border for centuries. That doesn't look like the situation where an entire population would shift to the more prestigious language to communicate, work and exchange ideas and goods with the foreigners who live far away and seldom mix with them. AFAIK in the past there is virtually no attested evidence of a people that forsook their language and adopted a foreign one just because they had occasional trade with them (if someone among you remembrs one such a case, please tell me), but probably lived apart from each other most of the time (see the aforementioned centuries-long genetic border with few influences from each side), so apparently there was no need to have inter-ethnic communnication on a daily basis. Multilingualism in the distant past was also no rare stuff, but linguistic shift usually requires much more than being neighbored by a more advanced society.

 

[MOESAN]

This is getting muddy in terms of the genetics.

"An interesting observation is that steppe zone individuals directly north of the592 Caucasus (Eneolithic Samara and Eneolithic steppe) had initially not received any593 gene flow from Anatolian farmers. Instead, the ancestry profile in Eneolithic steppe594 individuals shows an even mixture of EHG and CHG ancestry, which argues for an595 effective cultural and genetic border between the contemporaneous Eneolithic populations in the North Caucasus, notably Steppe and Caucasus. Due to the temporal597 limitations of our dataset, we currently cannot determine whether this ancestry is598 stemming from an existing natural genetic gradient running from EHG far to the north599 to CHG/Iran in the south or whether this is the result of farmers with Iranian farmer/600 CHG-related ancestry reaching the steppe zone independent of and prior to a stream601 of Anatolian farmer-like ancestry, where they mixed with local hunter-gatherers that602 carried only EHG ancestry."

Well, if it wasn't there before, and then it was there, wouldn't you lean toward it moving in, especially as it's showing up in steppe Maykop?

Anyway, this is helpful to keeping it straight:

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I find strange some admixtures tries, above: GAC input without any WHG??? so their HG's would have been only EHG from Ukraine? in Eurogenes I think I red the Steppes Maykop had some 'siberian' or 'american' input, so something from far East?
aside of this, I don't know it these people did IBD approaches?
concerning Mycenia, they show in some admixtures (GENERETIKER, amateur it's true) slight but maybe significative differences with Minoans (BTW these last ones would show some far East auDNA too, spite very light); Mycenia appears with less 'westasian', more 'HG' but this 'HG' is not 'WHG' for the most, but 'EHG'; more 'EHG' with less 'westasian', this doesn't point to a South Caucasus/Anatolia route...
I found confusing the three last studies about Caucasus Steppes and SCAsia -
I 'm still about R1b-L23 born in Armenia or Azebaidjan and have not made my thought about steppe or no steppe in metals ages Armenia; I red in Wiki Kura-Araxes had been kind of regression compared to Leila Tepe, and maybe multicultural; some flood from North?
South-Caucasus seems attractive for PIE but spite my ancientopinions about Renfrew I begin to wonder if Tripolye could not have played an important role in IE genesis?
So for me, "game is not over"

 

[bicicleur 2]

I must see, after this study, PIE origin didn't become much clearer.
The solution seems more complicated now.

 

[Olympus Mons]

The ancient presence of CHG north of the Caucasus does indeed complicate the pattern. I wish that team of geneticists would conduct a similar scrutiny of ancient genomes from Northern Mesopotamia and the Lake Van area.
Their kind of rather impermeable genetic frontier between Maikop and Steppe runs counter to an R1b link between NW Iran and the Steppe. What of that R1b guy in Hajji Firuz ? A stray lone wanderer ?

Hi. You might find the answers here:
https://r1b2westerneurope.blogs.sapo.pt/from-the-ubaid-and-kura-araxes-8426

Remember... there is a reason Lab rats are avoiding publishing Shulaveri. Everyone surrounding Shulaveri , earlier and later, have already been published. Not them tough.

 

[Milan.M]

CHG route went probably from "Iran,Kurdistan or Armenia" from around Caspian sea into steppe rather than through Caucasus mountains into steppe.

 

[Angela]

I find strange some admixtures tries, above: GAC input without any WHG??? so their HG's would have been only EHG from Ukraine? in Eurogenes I think I red the Steppes Maykop had some 'siberian' or 'american' input, so something from far East?
aside of this, I don't know it these people did IBD approaches?
concerning Mycenia, they show in some admixtures (GENERETIKER, amateur it's true) slight but maybe significative differences with Minoans (BTW these last ones would show some far East auDNA too, spite very light); Mycenia appears with less 'westasian', more 'HG' but this 'HG' is not 'WHG' for the most, but 'EHG'; more 'EHG' with less 'westasian', this doesn't point to a South Caucasus/Anatolia route...
I found confusing the three last studies about Caucasus Steppes and SCAsia -
I 'm still about R1b-L23 born in Armenia or Azebaidjan and have not made my thought about steppe or no steppe in metals ages Armenia; I red in Wiki Kura-Araxes had been kind of regression compared to Leila Tepe, and maybe multicultural; some flood from North?
South-Caucasus seems attractive for PIE but spite my ancientopinions about Renfrew I begin to wonder if Tripolye could not have played an important role in IE genesis?
So for me, "game is not over"

After finally getting through all the supplementary material, I think this paper, like the one on South Asia, doesn't really provide the genetic data to completely support the conclusions, even if in this paper the conclusions are called "possibilities".

At this point, I have more questions than answers.

 

[Ygorcs]

If European farmers were speaking a language related to Etruscan there would have been an Etruscan-related substrate in all European IE languages.
I associate early Etruscans with Central European pile dwellers.'

If you think that for Etruscans to be descended from Anatolian farmers we'd have to see an Etruscan-like substrate in all European IE languages, then who do you think those pre-Etruscan CE pile dwellers were if not descendants of at least one branch of Anatolian-derived EEF? I honestly don't think we can presume that the Anatolian Neolithic colonization of Europe happened with just one language group involved in it. Why should we think that the entire European continent spoke just 1 language family (the same directly ancestral to Etruscan) when IEs arrived, especially given that the Anatolian immigration had happened more than 3000 years earlier?

 

[Ygorcs]

Hi. You might find the answers here:
https://r1b2westerneurope.blogs.sapo.pt/from-the-ubaid-and-kura-araxes-8426

Remember... there is a reason Lab rats are avoiding publishing Shulaveri. Everyone surrounding Shulaveri , earlier and later, have already been published. Not them tough.

Why would they conspire against the Shulaveri-Shomu if it would even help them advance the very hypothesis they seam to lean to and have been finding more worth investigating, which is the South Caucasus homeland? I think you're fantasizing too much on this specific point.

 

[Ygorcs]

After finally getting through all the supplementary material, I think this paper, like the one on South Asia, doesn't really provide the genetic data to completely support the conclusions, even if in this paper the conclusions are called "possibilities".

At this point, I have more questions than answers.

My thoughts. I think those who have read these results and are now claiming victory for one of their "homeland" models, which are now looking increasingly simplistic, must have not read very carefully or are too blinded by wishful thinking. This study, while fascinating, only made everything even more confusing and uncertain. LOL

 

[Angela]

I find strange some admixtures tries, above: GAC input without any WHG??? so their HG's would have been only EHG from Ukraine? in Eurogenes I think I red the Steppes Maykop had some 'siberian' or 'american' input, so something from far East?
aside of this, I don't know it these people did IBD approaches?
concerning Mycenia, they show in some admixtures (GENERETIKER, amateur it's true) slight but maybe significative differences with Minoans (BTW these last ones would show some far East auDNA too, spite very light); Mycenia appears with less 'westasian', more 'HG' but this 'HG' is not 'WHG' for the most, but 'EHG'; more 'EHG' with less 'westasian', this doesn't point to a South Caucasus/Anatolia route...
I found confusing the three last studies about Caucasus Steppes and SCAsia -
I 'm still about R1b-L23 born in Armenia or Azebaidjan and have not made my thought about steppe or no steppe in metals ages Armenia; I red in Wiki Kura-Araxes had been kind of regression compared to Leila Tepe, and maybe multicultural; some flood from North?
South-Caucasus seems attractive for PIE but spite my ancientopinions about Renfrew I begin to wonder if Tripolye could not have played an important role in IE genesis?
So for me, "game is not over"

You can see it upthread in the Admixture chart.

Maybe you'd find this helpful from the Razib Khan link I posted:

[FONT=&quot]"Another curious nugget in their results is that there was early detection of both Ancestral North Eurasian (ANE) ancestry and, some East Eurasian gene flow (related to Han Chinese). One of their individuals carries the East Eurasian variant of [/FONT]EDAR[FONT=&quot], which today is only found in Finns, though it was found in reasonable frequencies among the Motala hunter-gatherers of Scandinavia. Additionally, [/FONT]Fu et al. 2016[FONT=&quot] found that the ancestors of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers received some gene flow from Eastern Eurasians as well (also in the supplements of [/FONT]Lazaridis et al. 2016[FONT=&quot])."[/FONT]

 

[Ygorcs]

Lol their chart shows CHG in Motala, CWC more CHG than EHG please... here we going away of PIE, we are reconstructd the genetic prehistory of europe with CHG in is core.

Well, that wouldn't be completely surprising if the Yamnaya-like source of the vast majority of the autosomal ancestry of CWC was already heavily CHG (and it's been a long time since we first knew that the steppe population was ~50% CHG), and if some of the CHG-related influx into Southeastern Europe also reached Central Europe bringing even more CHG via EEF-majority populations. Even before the CWC horizon started, much (most?) of the CWC territory had already been "cleaned" from heavy WHG and EHG presence by EEF, anyway.

 

[A. Papadimitriou]

If you think that for Etruscans to be descended from Anatolian farmers we'd have to see an Etruscan-like substrate in all European IE languages, then who do you think those pre-Etruscan CE pile dwellers were if not descendants of at least one branch of Anatolian-derived EEF? I honestly don't think we can presume that the Anatolian Neolithic colonization of Europe happened with just one language group involved in it. Why should we think that the entire European continent spoke just 1 language family (the same directly ancestral to Etruscan) when IEs arrived, especially given that the Anatolian immigration had happened more than 3000 years earlier?

I don't know what their genetic profile would have been. They could have descended from 'native' (pre-Neolithic) 'hunter gatherers' who could have acquired admixture from LBK and then expanded in a region which was genetically Mycenaean-like (Tuscany), if I interpret the ancient sources correctly.

Concerning the substrate my comment was about those who believe that EEFs/ANFs were speaking Etruscan-related languages. I don't believe that is something that can be supported.

Those who expanded from the same source (wherever that was) in the Neolithic could have spoken languages that belonged to the same language family.

 

[Angela]

Razib Khan is also grappling with the timing questions:

[FONT=&quot]"The close relationship of Indo-Aryan and Iranian languages is obvious to any speaker of either of these languages (I can speak some Bengali). A divergence in the range of 4 to 5 thousand years before the present seems most likely to me. But the relationship of the other Indo-European languages is much less clear.[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]One of the arguments in Peter Bellwood’s First Farmers is that the Indo-European languages exhibit a “rake-like” topology with the exception of Indo-Iranian, which forms a clear clade. To him and others in his camp, this argues for deep divergences very early in time.[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]It is hard to deny that the steppe migrations between 4 and 5 thousand years ago had something to do with the distribution of modern Indo-European languages. But, it is harder to falsify the model that there were earlier Indo-European migrations, perhaps out of the Near East, that preceded these. Only a deeper understanding of linguistic evolution, and multidisciplinary analysis of regional substrates will generate the clarity we need."[/FONT]


On the relevance of steppe in Hittites:

"[FONT=&quot]More interesting are the results in West Asia, and the [/FONT]linguistic supplement[FONT=&quot]. In the authors note that tablets now indicate an Indo-Aryan presence in Syria ~1750 BC. Second, Assyrian merchants record Indo-European Hittite, or [/FONT]Nesili(the people of Nesa), as early as ~2500 BC.

"[FONT=&quot]The main aspect I’d bring up with this is that in other areas [/FONT]steppe ancestry has spread deeply and widely into the population, including non-Indo-European ones. It is certainly possible that the sample is not needed enough to pick up the genuinely Hittite elite, but I probably lean to the likelihood that the steppe signal won’t be found. It seems that the Anatolian languages were already diversified by ~2000 BC, and perhaps earlier. Linguists have long suggested that they are the outgroup to other Indo-European languages, though this could just be a function of their isolation among highly settled and socially complex populations."

 

[Ygorcs]

I don't know what their genetic profile would have been. They could have descended from 'native' (pre-Neolithic) 'hunter gatherers' who could have acquired admixture from LBK and then expanded in a region which was genetically Mycenaean-like (Tuscany), if I interpret the ancient sources correctly.

Concerning the substrate my comment was about those who believe that EEFs/ANFs were speaking Etruscan-related languages. I don't believe that is something that can be supported.

Those who expanded from the same source (wherever that was) in the Neolithic could have spoken languages that belonged to the same language family.

I see. Do you know if there is an (apparent) common pre-IE substrate in all European branches of IE? I think there were some hypothesis, including the "Vasconic" one, but most of them were discredited by most linguists, and AFAIK the mainstream position has been that there is no demonstrated common thread between the non-IE substrates in all of Europe... I remember reading that there were some very similar non-IE borrowings in Germanic and Greek, but they were also not particularly similar to Basque. These results are the main reason why I think it is perfectly plausible that the Anatolian Neolithic spread to Europe could have involved two or more linguistically differentiated populations (we already know, at least, that they took two totally different routes of expansion, maybe that indicated also a different tribal/cultural identity?), or maybe the linguistic evolution was very rapid and intense, creating highly diverged subfamilies, in the 3,000-3,500 years before the IEs absorbed the EEF.