Ancient genomes from Caucasus inc. Maykop

"Troy culture" should be a synonym of Yortan culture..they buried their deads into pithoi.

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Maybe a Kurgan influence can be seen in the spread of the Megara in 3000-2700 BC ??

"What should be emphasized at this point is that, from this period on, the megaron plan became characteristic throughout the region"...p.67

apparently the Megaron originated in Neolithic Russia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaron

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Mallory....


The earliest Indo-European-speaking peoples to enter the historical record were the Anatolians who are first attested by about the nineteenth century BC. By this time Assyrian merchants had penetrated into south central Anatolia and established their karum or 'trading office' at Kanes, the modern Kultepe. Excavations at this site, and at several other Assyrian trading posts, have uncovered clay tablets in Assyrian cuneiform that record the daily business of the Assyrian tradesmen. In addition, they also mention personal names and places which are recognizably Indo-European. By far the best attested of these is Hittites. With their capital at Hattusa (modern Bogazkoy), the Hittites have left us over 25, 000 clay tablets spanning the period from about 1650 to 1200 BC. In addition, their archives contain tablets in two other Indo-European languages, Luwian and Palaic. They present us with a picture of Anatolia where the Hittites are master of the central region, the Palaic speakers subservient to their north, and the Luwians occupying the role of the traditional rival in much of the western and southern Anatolia. After the collapse of the Hittites about 1200 BC, Luwian seems to have prevailed widely over southern Anatolia and Luwian-related languages such as Lycian continued down into the last centuries of BC, only to be finally engulfed by the expansion of Greek colonists.


It is most important for our purposes to inquire how autonomous were the Anatolian languages in their respective regions. The general opinion of both linguists and archaeologists would almost universally deny them a role as natives to Anatolia but cast them rather in the part of Bronze Age intruders who assimilated the indigenous non-Indo-European populations. The Assyrian merchants of the nineteenth century BC not only record the names of Indo-European peoples in their texts but make it quite clear that there was also a great body of non-Indo-European-speaking peoples in the region. The existence of these non-Indo-European peoples is undoubted since the Hittite archives themselves contain texts, translations of texts, and frequent borrowings from a language called Hattic. These Hatti are regarded as the predominant substratum, the aborigines if you will, of central Anatolia over whom the Hittites and Palaic speakers superimposed themselves. From the Hatti the Hittites borrowed not only many words, but also much of their culture, certainly much of their religion, and even the name Hittite derives from Hatti (the Hittites called themselves nes and their language nesili). Linguistically, Hattic is a non-Indo-European language with no certain close relationships, although there are some grounds (absence of grammatical gender, use of prefixes) to link it with the northwest Caucasian group of languages (Abkhaz) or perhaps Kartvelian, the major south Caucasian linguistic group.


Further to the east, on the fringes of Anatolia and north of Syria, lay another major non-Indo-European people, the Hurrians. Hurrian texts maintained in the Hittite archives, coupled with Hurrian loan words in Luwian and the Hurrians' own inscriptions and texts in north Mesopotamia which date as early as the twenty-third century BC, all speak for an additional non-Indo-European presence on the eastern borders of the Indo-Europeans of Anatolia. To their south were the lands of Semites and (formerly) Sumerians, again non-Indo-European speakers. The natural conclusion to be drawn from all of this is that the Indo-European-speaking Anatolians were intrusive into central Anatolia and were unlikely to have emigrated from directly east of southeast of this region were major non-Indo-European populations are historically attested. It is also clear from the abundance of mixed texts, foreign loanwords in Hittite and Luwian, and the entire cultural picture that emerges from the content of the texts, that the Indo-European Anatolians had already undergone considerable assimilation to the culture of the non-Indo-European Anatolians before they appear in history. Now what do linguistics and archaeology tell us about their origins?


For the linguists, the existence of three Indo-European languages in Anatolia by the seventeenth century BC generates two issues of considerable historical importance. The firs is their relationship with the other Indo-European languages. Here there is fairly universal agreement among historical linguists that the Anatolian branch offers us some of the most extreme examples of archaism among all the Indo-European languages. By this is meant that they retain grammatical forms and constructions that disappeared very early on in other languages. Some would go further and argue that the Anatolian branch appears to lack some grammatical forms that developed in all the other Indo-European languages. This, they maintain, indicates that the Anatolian branch diverged from the rest of the Indo-European continuum before it had even evolved into the form of Proto-Indo-European that gave rise to all the other Indo-European languages. This view is not universally accepted, especially since most linguists admit that the Anatolian languages had already undergone vast changes under the influence of non-Indo-European languages native populations before they emerged into history. Although there is much finely argued controversy about the details of these linguistic issues, there would be few to argue against the conclusion that the Anatolian languages represent a very early separation or divergence from the common Proto-Indo-European continuum of dialects.


The second major issue is the internal relationship among the Anatolian languages. With our evidence for the both Luwian and Palaic so meagre compared with Hittite, it is difficult to ascertain fully how divergent the three languages were. That differences did exist can easily be seen in comparing some of their vocabulary.


But despite these differences, and some are more thoroughgoing than these, the three languages are vastly more similar to one another than they are to any of the other Indo-European languages, even those other languages which are also attested as early as the Bronze Age. They give all the appearance of being the result of linguistic differentiation across a broad band of common Anatolian dialects. Their divergence from one another must obviously have occurred before their earliest historical attestation, but not too long before or we would expect yet greater differences. Linguists normally provide a broad estimate that the ancestors of the different Anatolian languages penetrated into their respective territories some time during the third millennium BC, or possibly as early as the later fourth millennium. Where does all this leave the archaeologists?


First, the Indo-European-speaking Anatolians are difficult to distinguish from their non-Indo-European neighbours or predecessors. They appear to have embraced thoroughly the local Anatolian Bronze Age cultures and they display no obvious cultural traits that mark them off as distinctly Indo-European. This is hardly surprising, as the basic social picture of Bronze Age Anatolia is of a series of city-states comprised of linguistically diverse populations sharing the same material culture. It has even been suggested that Hittite itself was not the language of the dominant group but rather a lingua franca, developed out of the close association of the earlier Hittites of Kanes with the Assyrian merchants, who were the first literate population in Anatolia and who used Kanes as a trading base.


We must also remember that our knowledge of Anatolian archaeology is still quite inferior to many other areas of Eurasia and so any argument for ethnic intrusions are generally build on admittedly meagre evidence. This is more than compounded by the length of rope with which the linguist has provided the optimistic archaeology, because with a 1,500-year time span to seek intrusions, few archaeologists who believe that such phenomena are traceable in the archaeology record can resits discovering several possible invaders - both the west and the east.


Probably the most widely accepted case for intrusion falls at the end of Early Bronze Age II, about 2700-2600 BC, when the evidence for population movement is coupled with destruction and abandonment. Beginning in western Anatolia we see destruction phases on every major site and abandonment of smaller sites. The Konya Plain is offered as the most convincing example since field surveys here have indicated a collapse from 100 Early Bronze Age II sites to a mere four in the following period. Some suggest that an infiltration by nomads who profoundly altered the sedentary economy of the region may be credited with this change. In addition, new ceramic elements which take their origin from northwestern Anatolia (Troy V) spread rapidly eastward as also does the classic form of status or ritual architecture - the megaron which was common at Troy and Beycesultan - which now begins to appear in central Anatolia at such sites as Kanes-Kultepe.


The arguments for a west to east movement of intruders in the mid-third millennium BC accords well with some linguistic theories concerning the dispersion of the Anatolian languages. Essentially, the new horizon embraces the subsequent historical lands of the Luwians who maintained a west to east pressure throughout their existence. This crisis at the end of Early Bronze Age II may have been either the manifestation of the earliest Luwians or even the earliest Anatolian speakers, including the ancestors of the Hittites, who underwent subsequent linguistic differentiation. The abandonment and destructions may nevertheless have simply been the result of climatic or internal calamities while the spread of yet another ceramic style or architectural form may not have required a new people with a new language.


The original nucleus of these proposed expansions is northwest Anatolia, which naturally includes Troy itself. Links between this region and Southeast Europe, especially in ceramics - including figurines - and architecture, have long been known, and until the past few decades generally attributed to an expansion of Near Eastern high culture to European barbarians. More recently there has been a recognition by some archaeologists that the direction of influence may require reversing, at least during the transition from the Chalcolithic to early Bronze Age. This can be seen, for example, in the ceramics, metallurgy and architecture exhibited at Bulgarian sites such as Ezero which only appear later at Troy. These similarities are seen by some to be little more than a general cultural horizon embracing both sides of the Sea of Marmara while other argue for actual folk movements, possibly refugees, who abandoned the Balkans for northwestern Anatolia about 3500-3000 BC under either the pressure of leadership of the Indo-Europeans. The remains of horses - whether wild or domestic is not certain - at Anatolian sites such as Demirci Huyuk is also cited as evidence for intrusions from Southeast Europe where the domestic horse antedates the Anatolian evidence and is a known possession of the earliest Indo-Europeans. We are not yet prepared to follow such a trail so early in our enquiry since this concerns too closely the problem of the Indo-European homeland itself. Rather, we must briefly turn our attention to those who prefer to seek the origins of Indo-European-speaking Anatolians to the northeast.


Most arguments for an Indo-European invasion from northeast concern the appearance of a new burial rite at the end of the fourth and through the third millennium BC. At this time, both north of the Black Sea and Caucasus, burials on the Russian-Ukrainian steppe were typically placed in an under-ground shaft and covered with a mound (kurgan in Russian). Before 3000 BC there begin to appear in the territory of the indigenous Transcaucasian (Kuro-Araxes) culture somewhat similar burials such as the royal tomb at Uch-Tepe on the Miliska steppe. As tumulus burials are previously unknown in this region, some would explain their appearance by an intrusion of steppe pastoralists who migrated through the Caucasus and subjugated the local Early Bronze Age culture. More importantly, a status burial inserted into a mound at the site of Korucu Tepe in eastern Anatolia has been compared with somewhat similar burials both in the Caucasus and Russian steppe. The discovery of horse bones on several sites of east Anatolia such as Norsun Tepe and Tepecik are seen to confirm a steppe intrusion since, as mentioned earlier, the horse, long known in the Ukraine and south Russia, is not attested in Anatolia prior to the Bronze Age. Continuing contacts or migrations are employed to explain subsequent similarities between the royal tombs of north - central Anatolia, such as their thirteen graves of Alaca Huyuk, with tombs formally similar to possessing related grave goods known north of the Caucasus.


At present, a northeastern intrusion does not make quite so good a linguistic 'fit' as does the northwestern hypothesis. The evidence for intrusion is either confined to eastern Anatolia - lands historically attributed to Hurrian or Caucasian languages - or north-central Anatolia where we might expect Hattic or Kaskian, another apparently non-Indo-European linguistic group. The evidence of kurgan-related burials is generally absent from those territories were we find the major Indo-European peoples of our search, especially the Luwian of southern and western Anatolia. And even if our kurgan-entombed overlords are proximate to the Hittite's traditional territory, linguists adamantly oppose an eastern entry for the Hittities and a separate western entry for the Luwians. The languages seem to closely related, too similar to have experienced the degree of separation implied by each having taken an opposing course around the Black Sea. Furthermore, what similarity exists between royal burials both north and south of the Caucasus may have far more to do with the need to develop more impressive forms of entombment for the hierarchies that developed in the both regions during the Early Bronze Age, and which participated in mutual exchange networks of prestigious goods. At present, the scales are tipped in favour of a western entry.
 
Thanks Leka, however it seems to me that their traces are not as evident as in the Balkans and in the Danube plain, where hundreds of kurgans appeared suddently.

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Leka said:
especially since most linguists admit that the Anatolian languages had already undergone vast changes under the influence of non-Indo-European languages native populations before they emerged into history.
Click to expand...

That is interesting, I would like to read about what those changes were, and if they can be linked to a known language or not. Also, thanks for the citation.
 
Cato said:
Maybe a Kurgan influence can be seen in the spread of the Megara in 3000-2700 BC ??

"What should be emphasized at this point is that, from this period on, the megaron plan became characteristic throughout the region"...p.67

apparently the Megaron originated in Neolithic Russia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaron

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Click to expand...

https://www.britannica.com/technology/megaron

''It seemingly originated in the Middle East, attaining a peculiarly Aegean aspect because of its open porch...''
 
Not unlikely, however it seems that it spread in Anatolia in a West to East movement..... (from the Balkans ??)

From the post of Leka:
"In addition, new ceramic elements which take their origin from northwestern Anatolia (Troy V) spread rapidly eastward as also does the classic form of status or ritual architecture - the megaron which was common at Troy and Beycesultan - which now begins to appear in central Anatolia at such sites as Kanes-Kultepe. "

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It's not really related with the paper, but with a previous Kura-Araxes sample from " The genetic structure of the world's first farmers " of Lazaridis. They found an R1b labeled R1b-M415 (xM269) what is that sample ? I never heard of that M415 denomination. By barely searching on google i read that. Note, though, that R1b-M415, a branch ancestral to R1b-M269, was found as early as 14,000 ya in Italy and 7,000 ya in Spain.


 
Btw, i read an interesting idea from, i guess it was Agamemnon of Anthrogenica. He postulated the idea that in paleolithic. People with related CHG ancestry or Basal Eurasian might have been north of the caucasus up to the Manych-Kerch Spillway wich was a water flow going from the Caspian Sea to the Black Lake / Sea and formed a natural barrier with the eurasian steppe and the caucasus. Maybe people with haplogroup J1 found with 2 individuals of eastern europe 100% EHG were originally from that population.
 
Saetrus said:
EBA is not when the Anatolian branch entered Anatolia, the chalcolithic sample from western Anatolia 3800BC clusters autosomally with the Hittite samples, it's already Indoeuropean.
Click to expand...

Yes, and they're all Anatolian farmer and Iranian farmer autosomally.
 
Saetrus said:
EBA is not when the Anatolian branch entered Anatolia, the chalcolithic sample from western Anatolia 3800BC clusters autosomally with the Hittite samples, it's already Indoeuropean.
Click to expand...

Angela said:
Yes, and they're all Anatolian farmer and Iranian farmer autosomally.
Click to expand...

But we know that the Hittite empire was multi-cultural because its origin is described in cuneiform tablets, many of its deities are from other cultures and part of the liturgy was done in Hattic. And we can be absolutely undeniably sure that it's entirely possible that communities existed in Hittite rule that did not receive any gene flow because we have a more or less similar situation in Ptolemaic Egypt. The language of government was Greek, Alexandria was in majority Greek, there were Greek settlers. Yet in Abusir the genomes from mummies show no exotic gene flow from the New Kingdom until the Roman times.

https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15694

So it is quite clear that such conclusions can't be made.
 
epoch said:
But we know that the Hittite empire was multi-cultural because its origin is described in cuneiform tablets, many of its deities are from other cultures and part of the liturgy was done in Hattic. And we can be absolutely undeniably sure that it's entirely possible that communities existed in Hittite rule that did not receive any gene flow because we have a more or less similar situation in Ptolemaic Egypt. The language of government was Greek, Alexandria was in majority Greek, there were Greek settlers. Yet in Abusir the genomes from mummies show no exotic gene flow from the New Kingdom until the Roman times.
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15694
So it is quite clear that such conclusions can't be made.
Click to expand...
Special pleading.
Using that logic almost all conclusions from adna can be ignored.
Actually by some fluke of universe all the samples that do not support my claims are in fact born out of far away kidnapped girls by adventurous guys the brought those girls to be slaves. ...are you saying there is no slaves in history? ..:) see the fallacy?
In fact not ro recognize the locality (broader area) of Hittites is something that eludes me completly. They were as local as they come. Highly developed and complex minded as the others that in circle them in the region from the east.
 
epoch said:
But we know that the Hittite empire was multi-cultural because its origin is described in cuneiform tablets, many of its deities are from other cultures and part of the liturgy was done in Hattic. And we can be absolutely undeniably sure that it's entirely possible that communities existed in Hittite rule that did not receive any gene flow because we have a more or less similar situation in Ptolemaic Egypt. The language of government was Greek, Alexandria was in majority Greek, there were Greek settlers. Yet in Abusir the genomes from mummies show no exotic gene flow from the New Kingdom until the Roman times.

https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15694

So it is quite clear that such conclusions can't be made.
Click to expand...

What type of exotic admixture do you expect if the Greeks were mostly ANF + CHG?
 
By the way, we don't have autosomal DNA from Early Dynastic Egypt or the Old Kingdom, unless I have missed something.

Every study Haak is involved has titles that are not supported by the data of the studies.
 
epoch said:
But we know that the Hittite empire was multi-cultural because its origin is described in cuneiform tablets, many of its deities are from other cultures and part of the liturgy was done in Hattic. And we can be absolutely undeniably sure that it's entirely possible that communities existed in Hittite rule that did not receive any gene flow because we have a more or less similar situation in Ptolemaic Egypt. The language of government was Greek, Alexandria was in majority Greek, there were Greek settlers. Yet in Abusir the genomes from mummies show no exotic gene flow from the New Kingdom until the Roman times.

https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15694

So it is quite clear that such conclusions can't be made.
Click to expand...

I'm sorry, I agree with Olympic Mons to the extent that this is special pleading. I've personally come to no actual conclusion yet. What I meant is that the samples we have so far are Anatolian and Iranian farmer genetically. If we get quite a few more samples, including ones from the royal Hittite tombs and that is still true, then there's an issue here. Plus, the Hittite area is not the only one where Anatolian languages were spoken, and so far there is nothing.
 
Leka said:
Mallory....
The earliest Indo-European-speaking peoples to enter the historical record were the Anatolians who are first attested by about the nineteenth century BC. By this time Assyrian merchants had penetrated into south central Anatolia and established their karum or 'trading office' at Kanes, the modern Kultepe. Excavations at this site, and at several other Assyrian trading posts, have uncovered clay tablets in Assyrian cuneiform that record the daily business of the Assyrian tradesmen. In addition, they also mention personal names and places which are recognizably Indo-European. By far the best attested of these is Hittites. With their capital at Hattusa (modern Bogazkoy), the Hittites have left us over 25, 000 clay tablets spanning the period from about 1650 to 1200 BC. In addition, their archives contain tablets in two other Indo-European languages, Luwian and Palaic. They present us with a picture of Anatolia where the Hittites are master of the central region, the Palaic speakers subservient to their north, and the Luwians occupying the role of the traditional rival in much of the western and southern Anatolia. After the collapse of the Hittites about 1200 BC, Luwian seems to have prevailed widely over southern Anatolia and Luwian-related languages such as Lycian continued down into the last centuries of BC, only to be finally engulfed by the expansion of Greek colonists.


It is most important for our purposes to inquire how autonomous were the Anatolian languages in their respective regions. The general opinion of both linguists and archaeologists would almost universally deny them a role as natives to Anatolia but cast them rather in the part of Bronze Age intruders who assimilated the indigenous non-Indo-European populations. The Assyrian merchants of the nineteenth century BC not only record the names of Indo-European peoples in their texts but make it quite clear that there was also a great body of non-Indo-European-speaking peoples in the region. The existence of these non-Indo-European peoples is undoubted since the Hittite archives themselves contain texts, translations of texts, and frequent borrowings from a language called Hattic. These Hatti are regarded as the predominant substratum, the aborigines if you will, of central Anatolia over whom the Hittites and Palaic speakers superimposed themselves. From the Hatti the Hittites borrowed not only many words, but also much of their culture, certainly much of their religion, and even the name Hittite derives from Hatti (the Hittites called themselves nes and their language nesili). Linguistically, Hattic is a non-Indo-European language with no certain close relationships, although there are some grounds (absence of grammatical gender, use of prefixes) to link it with the northwest Caucasian group of languages (Abkhaz) or perhaps Kartvelian, the major south Caucasian linguistic group.


Further to the east, on the fringes of Anatolia and north of Syria, lay another major non-Indo-European people, the Hurrians. Hurrian texts maintained in the Hittite archives, coupled with Hurrian loan words in Luwian and the Hurrians' own inscriptions and texts in north Mesopotamia which date as early as the twenty-third century BC, all speak for an additional non-Indo-European presence on the eastern borders of the Indo-Europeans of Anatolia. To their south were the lands of Semites and (formerly) Sumerians, again non-Indo-European speakers. The natural conclusion to be drawn from all of this is that the Indo-European-speaking Anatolians were intrusive into central Anatolia and were unlikely to have emigrated from directly east of southeast of this region were major non-Indo-European populations are historically attested. It is also clear from the abundance of mixed texts, foreign loanwords in Hittite and Luwian, and the entire cultural picture that emerges from the content of the texts, that the Indo-European Anatolians had already undergone considerable assimilation to the culture of the non-Indo-European Anatolians before they appear in history. Now what do linguistics and archaeology tell us about their origins?


For the linguists, the existence of three Indo-European languages in Anatolia by the seventeenth century BC generates two issues of considerable historical importance. The firs is their relationship with the other Indo-European languages. Here there is fairly universal agreement among historical linguists that the Anatolian branch offers us some of the most extreme examples of archaism among all the Indo-European languages. By this is meant that they retain grammatical forms and constructions that disappeared very early on in other languages. Some would go further and argue that the Anatolian branch appears to lack some grammatical forms that developed in all the other Indo-European languages. This, they maintain, indicates that the Anatolian branch diverged from the rest of the Indo-European continuum before it had even evolved into the form of Proto-Indo-European that gave rise to all the other Indo-European languages. This view is not universally accepted, especially since most linguists admit that the Anatolian languages had already undergone vast changes under the influence of non-Indo-European languages native populations before they emerged into history. Although there is much finely argued controversy about the details of these linguistic issues, there would be few to argue against the conclusion that the Anatolian languages represent a very early separation or divergence from the common Proto-Indo-European continuum of dialects.


The second major issue is the internal relationship among the Anatolian languages. With our evidence for the both Luwian and Palaic so meagre compared with Hittite, it is difficult to ascertain fully how divergent the three languages were. That differences did exist can easily be seen in comparing some of their vocabulary.


But despite these differences, and some are more thoroughgoing than these, the three languages are vastly more similar to one another than they are to any of the other Indo-European languages, even those other languages which are also attested as early as the Bronze Age. They give all the appearance of being the result of linguistic differentiation across a broad band of common Anatolian dialects. Their divergence from one another must obviously have occurred before their earliest historical attestation, but not too long before or we would expect yet greater differences. Linguists normally provide a broad estimate that the ancestors of the different Anatolian languages penetrated into their respective territories some time during the third millennium BC, or possibly as early as the later fourth millennium. Where does all this leave the archaeologists?


First, the Indo-European-speaking Anatolians are difficult to distinguish from their non-Indo-European neighbours or predecessors. They appear to have embraced thoroughly the local Anatolian Bronze Age cultures and they display no obvious cultural traits that mark them off as distinctly Indo-European. This is hardly surprising, as the basic social picture of Bronze Age Anatolia is of a series of city-states comprised of linguistically diverse populations sharing the same material culture. It has even been suggested that Hittite itself was not the language of the dominant group but rather a lingua franca, developed out of the close association of the earlier Hittites of Kanes with the Assyrian merchants, who were the first literate population in Anatolia and who used Kanes as a trading base.


We must also remember that our knowledge of Anatolian archaeology is still quite inferior to many other areas of Eurasia and so any argument for ethnic intrusions are generally build on admittedly meagre evidence. This is more than compounded by the length of rope with which the linguist has provided the optimistic archaeology, because with a 1,500-year time span to seek intrusions, few archaeologists who believe that such phenomena are traceable in the archaeology record can resits discovering several possible invaders - both the west and the east.


Probably the most widely accepted case for intrusion falls at the end of Early Bronze Age II, about 2700-2600 BC, when the evidence for population movement is coupled with destruction and abandonment. Beginning in western Anatolia we see destruction phases on every major site and abandonment of smaller sites. The Konya Plain is offered as the most convincing example since field surveys here have indicated a collapse from 100 Early Bronze Age II sites to a mere four in the following period. Some suggest that an infiltration by nomads who profoundly altered the sedentary economy of the region may be credited with this change. In addition, new ceramic elements which take their origin from northwestern Anatolia (Troy V) spread rapidly eastward as also does the classic form of status or ritual architecture - the megaron which was common at Troy and Beycesultan - which now begins to appear in central Anatolia at such sites as Kanes-Kultepe.


The arguments for a west to east movement of intruders in the mid-third millennium BC accords well with some linguistic theories concerning the dispersion of the Anatolian languages. Essentially, the new horizon embraces the subsequent historical lands of the Luwians who maintained a west to east pressure throughout their existence. This crisis at the end of Early Bronze Age II may have been either the manifestation of the earliest Luwians or even the earliest Anatolian speakers, including the ancestors of the Hittites, who underwent subsequent linguistic differentiation. The abandonment and destructions may nevertheless have simply been the result of climatic or internal calamities while the spread of yet another ceramic style or architectural form may not have required a new people with a new language.


The original nucleus of these proposed expansions is northwest Anatolia, which naturally includes Troy itself. Links between this region and Southeast Europe, especially in ceramics - including figurines - and architecture, have long been known, and until the past few decades generally attributed to an expansion of Near Eastern high culture to European barbarians. More recently there has been a recognition by some archaeologists that the direction of influence may require reversing, at least during the transition from the Chalcolithic to early Bronze Age. This can be seen, for example, in the ceramics, metallurgy and architecture exhibited at Bulgarian sites such as Ezero which only appear later at Troy. These similarities are seen by some to be little more than a general cultural horizon embracing both sides of the Sea of Marmara while other argue for actual folk movements, possibly refugees, who abandoned the Balkans for northwestern Anatolia about 3500-3000 BC under either the pressure of leadership of the Indo-Europeans. The remains of horses - whether wild or domestic is not certain - at Anatolian sites such as Demirci Huyuk is also cited as evidence for intrusions from Southeast Europe where the domestic horse antedates the Anatolian evidence and is a known possession of the earliest Indo-Europeans. We are not yet prepared to follow such a trail so early in our enquiry since this concerns too closely the problem of the Indo-European homeland itself. Rather, we must briefly turn our attention to those who prefer to seek the origins of Indo-European-speaking Anatolians to the northeast.


Most arguments for an Indo-European invasion from northeast concern the appearance of a new burial rite at the end of the fourth and through the third millennium BC. At this time, both north of the Black Sea and Caucasus, burials on the Russian-Ukrainian steppe were typically placed in an under-ground shaft and covered with a mound (kurgan in Russian). Before 3000 BC there begin to appear in the territory of the indigenous Transcaucasian (Kuro-Araxes) culture somewhat similar burials such as the royal tomb at Uch-Tepe on the Miliska steppe. As tumulus burials are previously unknown in this region, some would explain their appearance by an intrusion of steppe pastoralists who migrated through the Caucasus and subjugated the local Early Bronze Age culture. More importantly, a status burial inserted into a mound at the site of Korucu Tepe in eastern Anatolia has been compared with somewhat similar burials both in the Caucasus and Russian steppe. The discovery of horse bones on several sites of east Anatolia such as Norsun Tepe and Tepecik are seen to confirm a steppe intrusion since, as mentioned earlier, the horse, long known in the Ukraine and south Russia, is not attested in Anatolia prior to the Bronze Age. Continuing contacts or migrations are employed to explain subsequent similarities between the royal tombs of north - central Anatolia, such as their thirteen graves of Alaca Huyuk, with tombs formally similar to possessing related grave goods known north of the Caucasus.


At present, a northeastern intrusion does not make quite so good a linguistic 'fit' as does the northwestern hypothesis. The evidence for intrusion is either confined to eastern Anatolia - lands historically attributed to Hurrian or Caucasian languages - or north-central Anatolia where we might expect Hattic or Kaskian, another apparently non-Indo-European linguistic group. The evidence of kurgan-related burials is generally absent from those territories were we find the major Indo-European peoples of our search, especially the Luwian of southern and western Anatolia. And even if our kurgan-entombed overlords are proximate to the Hittite's traditional territory, linguists adamantly oppose an eastern entry for the Hittities and a separate western entry for the Luwians. The languages seem to closely related, too similar to have experienced the degree of separation implied by each having taken an opposing course around the Black Sea. Furthermore, what similarity exists between royal burials both north and south of the Caucasus may have far more to do with the need to develop more impressive forms of entombment for the hierarchies that developed in the both regions during the Early Bronze Age, and which participated in mutual exchange networks of prestigious goods. At present, the scales are tipped in favour of a western entry.
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https://www.quora.com/How-credible-...est-Caucasian-languages-are-related-to-Hattic
The kaska people came from the north-caucasus .........they settled north of the hatti/hittite and could never be conquered.......in the end , their many, many raids into the hittite empire led to one reason for its downfall.
The link is the most logical in regards to the linguistic side of the debate......that is , hatti and kaska are similar, hittite and luwian are similar....hittite imposed their language onto hatti area
 
Angela said:
I'm sorry, I agree with Olympic Mons to the extent that this is special pleading. I've personally come to no actual conclusion yet. What I meant is that the samples we have so far are Anatolian and Iranian farmer genetically. If we get quite a few more samples, including ones from the royal Hittite tombs and that is still true, then there's an issue here. Plus, the Hittite area is not the only one where Anatolian languages were spoken, and so far there is nothing.
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Off course it isn't special pleading as we know from historic sources that the Hittite empire wasn't mono-cultural. In such a scenario firm Hattic continuity is expected, even required. Hell, I'd even go farther: If we would have found *all* Anatolian samples heavily loaded with steppe we'd have had a problem as we then needed to explain a *massive* immigration into Anatolia, which is in conflict with historic sources.
 
We don't know where the Hittites were before about 1,650 BC. Heck, I'd like to see some Luwian samples (Troy I, c.3,000 BC)...
 
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