-3000 years old Anatolian personal names in Ebla ?

Bronze Age Anatolians don't have EHG ancestry, both they and the Steppe people have CHG/Iran_N ancestry, that's where they intersect. if it was some other language group we would follow this line of reason, why are Indo-European languages an exception ?

Because of Anatolian IE's particularly divergent and seemingly archaic (or on the contrary too innovative) status in comparison with simply all the other IE branches, and because apart from BA Anatolia it is clear that a partially EHG population had everything to do with the expansion of PIE in every other region of Eurasia. The fact that there are also several (at least 4 or 5) other language families potential candidates to the position of "CHG-derived families", but very unlike Indo-European (which actually, at least apparently, shares much more with the Uralic of North Eurasia), is also an issue.

Also, because CHG/Iran_N ancestry was already present in very high proportions in the Eneolithic, actually not very different from the CHG contribution in later cultures like Yamnaya, but PIE shared vocabulary (its latest undivided stage) can't be older than the Copper Age or even Early Bronze Age, so if it did come from the South Caucasus it happened very early on, before PIE is even supposed to have existed. If EHG is not found in any future sample in BA Anatolia, I'd place my bets on the once discarded but now revived Indo-Hittite hypothesis, that is, Anatolian being derived from a Para-IE sister language, not from the same language as "residual" PIE. The "problem" there would be that we have to find the specific time when CHG became so prevalent in the Pontic-Caspian steppe before the Eneolithic (~4200-4300 BC). If it was too early, then we'll have to explain how on earth the Anatolian IE and the Steppe IE remained so "close" (relatively speaking) that their connections were still recognizable in our modern era.

It's simply contrary to the evidences to try to derive the bulk of the IE expansion from Transcaucasia instead of the Pontic-Caspian steppe. It would be even more misguided (due to chronology) than trying to find the source of the Romance-speaking expansion in the Americas in Lazio, not in the Iberian Peninsula.
 
@Ygorcs, good argument

But isn't the Eneolithic Steppe samples of the last Maykop paper really just north of the Caucasus mountains ? not on the actual northern Steppe ? like in Samara or Khalynsk.

The way I'm seeing it is for levels of CHG to reach "Yamnaya levels" in these locations is an additional southern migration, that is either Ciscaucasus Eneolithic samples totally replace them, or admixture from a population with a high CHG ancestry.

It's really difficult that cultural flow from Maykop (e.g. Kurgans) and genetic increase in CHG ancestry coupled with lack of EHG ancestry in BA Anatolia and the existence of these Ebla records translates to Anatolians deriving from a Steppe migration.

I've read some of Anthony's "the horse the wheel and language" I don't remember too much of it though, aren't connections with Uralic on the level of borrowing words from IE speaking Steppe culture, right ? they're not descended from a common language.
 
@Ygorcs, good argument

But isn't the Eneolithic Steppe samples of the last Maykop paper really just north of the Caucasus mountains ? not on the actual northern Steppe ? like in Samara or Khalynsk.

I'm not completely sure, but some days ago I read about a purported Samara Eneolithic sample, who already harbored lots of CHG, too. Also, that Caucasus paper argued that the genetic makeup of the steppe had a clear genetic boundary in relation to the North Caucasus slopes (a lot more EHG in the steppe coupled with virtually no ANF, for instance), and the Y-DNA makeup particularly was completely different.

The Caucasian influx into the steppes, if it did happen, couldn't have happened in the Copper Age or Bronze Age, because by then the samples already showed a lot of ANF, which is negligible in the steppe until the Bronze Age and when it appears comes together with WHG in an admixture that fits an EEF origin much better than a direct ANF one. If Caucasus cultures like Maykop or even others a bit earlier had brought PIE into the steppes, it would've brought a significant amount of ANF together... but apparently they didn't. The CHG influx was probably earlier.

So it doesn't seem likely, according to the scientists' own results, that the steppes close to the North Caucasus were very shifted toward North Caucasian populations, and in any case the relation between both regions certainly dated to before the Late Chalcolithic/Early Bronze Age, otherwise we'd probably see a lot more CA/BA Caucasian influence in the southern part of the steppe. I think that two possibilities are at stake: either PIE is much older than linguists and archaeologists thought (a bit unlikely, given their shared vocabulary for CA technology), or PIE may even have been brought from the Caucasus, but it developed mostly in or near the steppes, maybe with some outliers also adopting the language...

AFAIK the supposedly distant connections between PIE and Uralic aren't only on the level of vocabulary (borrowings), but also of a few grammatical similarities, including some pronouns and verb conjugations. The typological and lexical similarities of PIE with other language families are assumed to include Kartvelian, Northwest Caucasian, Uralic and even Semitic, but by far the evidences point to a longer and more intense relationship with Uralic. Being located in the Pontic-Caspian area, between the North Eurasian forest/forest-steppe and the Caucasus/North Iran, would make sense considering those ancient borrowings and shared features.
 
The date "3000 years old" in the original post doesn't really make sense to me. Eblaite, an East Semitic language closest related with Akkadian of Mesopotamia, is attested from roughly the later part of the 3rd millennium BC (circa 2600-2200BC), until the destruction of the city. It was written with the cuneiform script, which was originally invented by the (non-Semitic) Sumerians of (southern) Mesopotamia.

Now, Anatolian names from 1000 BC (3000 BC) would be hardly controversial, given how Hittite and Hieroglyphic Luwian are older than that (actually 1000 BC would be after the Bronze Age collapse, meaning Hittite would be already extinct at that point).
On the other hand, 3000 BC would be weird (as in: it wouldn't make any sense) because the Sumerians themselves, the inventors of the cuneiform script, were barely literate at that point.

Regardless, I would like to point out that it's still unclear where the Proto-Anatolian homeland was located.
 
This case of "Ol' Hittite" is quite absurd, the paper says 30 names have typical Hittite endings (which in fact are two endings forgetting moreover to which PIE suffixes are related)... so that the roots of such names must be no IE, even forgetting to link such names to any known language of the area. I think that my WC paper has more reliable info about Hittites than that "paper".
 
The date "3000 years old" in the original post doesn't really make sense to me. Eblaite, an East Semitic language closest related with Akkadian of Mesopotamia, is attested from roughly the later part of the 3rd millennium BC (circa 2600-2200BC), until the destruction of the city. It was written with the cuneiform script, which was originally invented by the (non-Semitic) Sumerians of (southern) Mesopotamia.

Now, Anatolian names from 1000 BC (3000 BC) would be hardly controversial, given how Hittite and Hieroglyphic Luwian are older than that (actually 1000 BC would be after the Bronze Age collapse, meaning Hittite would be already extinct at that point).
On the other hand, 3000 BC would be weird (as in: it wouldn't make any sense) because the Sumerians themselves, the inventors of the cuneiform script, were barely literate at that point.

Regardless, I would like to point out that it's still unclear where the Proto-Anatolian homeland was located.

I said -3000 not 3000 years ago wich would be -1000 and yes it would'nt make any sense.
 
@Ygorcs

CHG levels did increase overall, in all locations, with Yamnaya, and with additional cultural influences from Maykop, it looks like geneflow to me, and it isn't impossible, there were more than one Steppe Maykop outliers that had ancestry from both Steppe_Maykop and Caucasus_Maykop. As to Y-DNA, I also think that it's from EHG and not from the Caucasus, male lineages can expand unpredictably and outcompete others in the same population, there must have
been some meaningful reason for the success of an EHG lineage.

A thought experiment involving Basque and R1b https://anthrogenica.com/showthread.php?4729-Were-Myceneans-lineages-R1b-or-R1a&p=429784#post429784

Maykop is crucial to the formation of Yamnaya, they passed their carts as well as their Kurgans to Yamnaya, that's religion my friend.

check the Caucasus paper again Ygorcs: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2018/05/16/322347.full.pdf

see where Progress 2 and Vonjuchka 1 are ? (labelled Steppe_Eneolithic) the distance between these locations and the actual Steppe in Samara, Khalynsk, and Ukraine is roughly equal to the distance between Armenia and Israel, no one should claim that Caucasus ancestry is native to the Levant because it once existed in Armenia. this caused great confusion when I tried to argue with the people in Anthrogeneica.

Yamnaya Samara should be modeled with respect to Eneolithic Samara, and Yamnaya Ukraine with respect Eneolithic and Mesolithic Ukraine, not with the Progress and Vonjuchka samples, these were the natural end of the EHG-CHG cline.

Once we do that, the issue of the ratio of WHG to Anatola_N should resolve, Yamnaya Samara lies in-between Eneolithic Samara and Maykop_Steppe outliers on PCA, who were a result of Caucasus_Maykop geneflow into the Steppe_Maykop.

I like to make one thing clear, all this reasoning should and must be coupled with reasoning about Anatolians, we have more than the samples from Anatolia to claim they didn't arrive from the Steppe because they didn't arrive to the Balkans until the Middle to Late Bronze Age:
No steppe migration to Anatolia via southeast Europe
One version of the steppe hypothesis of Indo-European language origins
suggests that Proto-Indo-European languages developed north
of the Black and Caspian seas, and that the earliest-known diverging
branch, the Anatolian branch, was spread into Asia Minor by the
movements of steppe peoples through the Balkan Peninsula during
the Copper Age at around 4000 bc47. If this were correct, then one
way to detect evidence of the spread of Indo-European languages
would be the appearance of large amounts of steppe-related ancestry
first in the Balkan Peninsula, and later in Anatolia. However, our
data provide no evidence for this scenario. Although we find sporadic
steppe-related ancestry in Balkan Copper and Bronze Age individuals,
this ancestry is rare until the late Bronze Age. Furthermore, although
Bronze Age Anatolian individuals have CHG-related ancestry26, they do not have the EHG-related ancestry characteristic of all steppe
populations sampled to date19 or the WHG-related ancestry that is
ubiquitous in Neolithic southeastern Europe (Extended Data Figs 2,
3, Supplementary Table 2). We caution, however, that at present we
only have data from a small number of Bronze Age Anatolian individuals,
none of whom are associated with known Indo-European speaking
populations. An alternative hypothesis is that the homeland
of Proto-Indo-European languages was in the Caucasus or in Iran.
In this scenario, westward population movement contributed to the
dispersal of Anatolian languages, and northward movement and mixture
with EHG was responsible for the formation of a ‘Late Proto-Indo
European’-speaking population associated with the Yamnaya complex13.
Although this scenario gains plausibility from our results, it
remains possible that Indo-European languages were spread through
southeastern Europe into Anatolia without large-scale population
movement or admixture.

Unless of course, they were invisible elites in the Balkans as well as in Anatolia, I don't know how different that claim is from Afrocentric claims about Ancient Egypt.

Uralic is not related to Indo-European, there wasn't a proto-language uniting them, the pronoun is a borrowing like the words they borrowed, no regular sound change and their numerals are totally different.
 
The date "3000 years old" in the original post doesn't really make sense to me. Eblaite, an East Semitic language closest related with Akkadian of Mesopotamia, is attested from roughly the later part of the 3rd millennium BC (circa 2600-2200BC), until the destruction of the city. It was written with the cuneiform script, which was originally invented by the (non-Semitic) Sumerians of (southern) Mesopotamia.

Now, Anatolian names from 1000 BC (3000 BC) would be hardly controversial, given how Hittite and Hieroglyphic Luwian are older than that (actually 1000 BC would be after the Bronze Age collapse, meaning Hittite would be already extinct at that point).
On the other hand, 3000 BC would be weird (as in: it wouldn't make any sense) because the Sumerians themselves, the inventors of the cuneiform script, were barely literate at that point.

Regardless, I would like to point out that it's still unclear where the Proto-Anatolian homeland was located.

The Anatolian names in Ebla records date to 25th century BC.
 
CHG levels did increase overall, in all locations, with Yamnaya, and with additional cultural influences from Maykop, it looks like geneflow to me, and it isn't impossible, there were more than one Steppe Maykop outliers that had ancestry from both Steppe_Maykop and Caucasus_Maykop. As to Y-DNA, I also think that it's from EHG and not from the Caucasus, male lineages can expand unpredictably and outcompete others in the same population, there must have
been some meaningful reason for the success of an EHG lineage.
There was some extra CHG in Yamnaya, but a comparatively really minor increase, and most importantly not accompanied by any comparable increase in ANF, which the Caucasus paper demonstrated was already present in very high proportion in the Chalcolithic Caucasus, including Maykop. The Steppe Mt-DNA makeup was also already similar to that of the North Caucasus in the Chalcolithic, besides harboring a lot of CHG-related admixture, too. Considering those data, I can concede there was an important cultural contribution and a tiny genetic one from the Caucasus, but it was probably not as important as internal expansions of a few population structures within the very large Pontic-Caspian region, possibly associated with the spread of Repin/Yamnaya culture over the former Sredny Stog expansion. The BA Caucasus was not simply CHG any longer, it was heavily ANF-shifted, so I'd need to see more evidences to be convinced there was a relevant contribution of Caucasians into Steppe_Maykop and thereby into the rest of the steppe, less directly subject to Caucasian influx. Even EEF introgression were more visible between the Chalcolithic and Bronze Age.


Uralic is not related to Indo-European, there wasn't a proto-language uniting them, the pronoun is a borrowing like the words they borrowed, no regular sound change and their numerals are totally different.

I'm not sure, are you? I really doubt that languages regularly borrow things like particles of verbal conjugation, endings of noun declensions and personal pronouns as basic as "I" and "you". It may happen, but it's really improbable. These are "core" words and syntactic structures, the ones least likely to be borrowed, though of course it's not impossible - but another relevant point is that for such an unlikely borrowing of extremely basic words to happen we'll have to at least assume a very close, intense and long contact between the two proto-languages, which fits the "indigenous Pontic-Caspian" hypothesis better than the "new arrival from the South Caucasus" one. Anyway, virtually nobody today seriously claims that Indo-European and Uralic came from the same proto-language as two sister branches. What is claimed is that there are more typological similarities betweeen the two and that may indicate a very distant and indirect genealogical relationship, probably going back many thousands of years (Late Paleolithic).
 
There was some extra CHG in Yamnaya, but a comparatively really minor increase, and most importantly not accompanied by any comparable increase in ANF, which the Caucasus paper demonstrated was already present in very high proportion in the Chalcolithic Caucasus, including Maykop. The Steppe Mt-DNA makeup was also already similar to that of the North Caucasus in the Chalcolithic, besides harboring a lot of CHG-related admixture, too. Considering those data, I can concede there was an important cultural contribution and a tiny genetic one from the Caucasus, but it was probably not as important as internal expansions of a few population structures within the very large Pontic-Caspian region, possibly associated with the spread of Repin/Yamnaya culture over the former Sredny Stog expansion. The BA Caucasus was not simply CHG any longer, it was heavily ANF-shifted, so I'd need to see more evidences to be convinced there was a relevant contribution of Caucasians into Steppe_Maykop and thereby into the rest of the steppe, less directly subject to Caucasian influx. Even EEF introgression were more visible between the Chalcolithic and Bronze Age.

Yamnaya do have more ANF ancestry compared to the Eneolithic, more CHG ancestry compared to the Eneolithic, this increase was admixing into a population that already had CHG but not ANF ancestry, that's why it seems unbalanced.

A model where only Eneolithic groups from the actual Steppe and EEF from Europe will not result in Yamnaya, you need an increase in both.

Again the larger context of lack of Steppe ancestry in Anatolia and the Balkans need to be explained. It's because of that I don't believe they came from the Steppe.

sdd.jpg
 
A model where only Eneolithic groups from the actual Steppe and EEF from Europe will not result in Yamnaya, you need an increase in both.

You have some good points. I'll think more about these results. But why do you say so? Could you explain your reasoning a bit longer (why an EEF contribution - and we know there was substructure among EEF populations, some with much more WHG than others - together with actual Steppe admixture wouldn't result in Yamnaya)? By the way, do you know which of the Yamnaya or Yamnaya-derived (e.g. Afanasievo) samples in this graph comes from the Eneolithic or is the earliest of them all? Apart from Lola (not steppe BA) and Steppe_Maykop, which isn't actually part of the Yamnaya "expansion center", the rest of Yamnaya show varying but roughly similar patterns of EHG vs. CHG.
 
You have some good points. I'll think more about these results.

hahaha sorry Ygorcs, I feel you got tired of the stubborn knucklehead that is me, this is my final post and its over, I don't have anything to say after it.

The main reason I don't believe proto-Anatolians migrated from the Pontic Caspian Steppe is lack of Steppe ancestry, not just in Anatolia, but also the Balkans, it doesn't appear there untill the Late Bronze Age according to the Southeast European paper, we have enough samples from both, more will not change the outcome, Anatolia at this time is bounded in a cline like fashion by the Chal Iran/Caucsus from the East, and the Balkans in the West.

I don't believe that they were invisible elites, that's biased and can be applied anywhere (I can claim that the Shang dynasty of China were Steppe people, if you don't find Steppe in their remains I'd say you didn't find the elites ???), not very different from afrocentrist and nordicist claims, every Steppe migration spread its ancestry deep and wide into the population, from the lowest castes to the highest, even to non-Indo European groups.

In the Maykop paper, qpAdm modeling of Steppe groups used both distal and proximal sources, the distal are fine, it's the choice of proximal sources that is weird.
NQNnRpr.png



When I saw Eneolithic Steppe for the first time I said whaaat? then you don't need Maykop or Caucasus or whatever to explain Yamnaya, they had it all along, but:

The two distinct clusters are already visible in the oldest individuals of our temporal transect, dated to the Eneolithic period (~6300-6100 yBP/4300-4100 calBCE). Three individuals from the sites of Progress 2 and Vonjuchka 1 in the North Caucasus piedmont steppe (‘Eneolithic steppe’)

Progress and Vonjuchka:

qyyMALQ.png


At the beginning of time, God made the EHG, and then in the Neolithic, Iran farmers and CHG mingled with them, these new (Eneolithic Steppe) are the natural end of the EHG to CHG cline, the further north you go, it decreases, that's visible on PCA and ADMIXTURE.

Sure you can choose to model BA Steppe with them, but isn't it more reasonable to choose Khalynsk, Samara, and Ukraine Eneolithic? once you do that then you'd need an additional source of ancestry that has both CHG and Anatolian Neolithic.

What I'm saying is very much reproducible and testable, you just need the Software, ADMIXTOOLS is a software package that includes useful functions to compute f-statistics, admixture graphs, and qpAdm modeling and others, you'd need this last one to infer mixture proportions.

https://reich.hms.harvard.edu/software

and of course you'd need the samples, they're also available, I can't do it because I don't have the technical requirements.

It's very easy to see that Steppe_Maykop outliers are the most reasonable candidate on PCA with respect to the actual Eneolithic Steppe to be the source of admixture:

4u7kYAf.png
 
hahaha sorry Ygorcs, I feel you got tired of the stubborn knucklehead that is me, this is my final post and its over, I don't have anything to say after it.

The main reason I don't believe proto-Anatolians migrated from the Pontic Caspian Steppe is lack of Steppe ancestry, not just in Anatolia, but also the Balkans, it doesn't appear there untill the Late Bronze Age according to the Southeast European paper, we have enough samples from both, more will not change the outcome, Anatolia at this time is bounded in a cline like fashion by the Chal Iran/Caucsus from the East, and the Balkans in the West.

I don't believe that they were invisible elites, that's biased and can be applied anywhere (I can claim that the Shang dynasty of China were Steppe people, if you don't find Steppe in their remains I'd say you didn't find the elites ???), not very different from afrocentrist and nordicist claims, every Steppe migration spread its ancestry deep and wide into the population, from the lowest castes to the highest, even to non-Indo European groups.

In the Maykop paper, qpAdm modeling of Steppe groups used both distal and proximal sources, the distal are fine, it's the choice of proximal sources that is weird.
NQNnRpr.png



When I saw Eneolithic Steppe for the first time I said whaaat? then you don't need Maykop or Caucasus or whatever to explain Yamnaya, they had it all along, but:



Progress and Vonjuchka:

qyyMALQ.png


At the beginning of time, God made the EHG, and then in the Neolithic, Iran farmers and CHG mingled with them, these new (Eneolithic Steppe) are the natural end of the EHG to CHG cline, the further north you go, it decreases, that's visible on PCA and ADMIXTURE.

Sure you can choose to model BA Steppe with them, but isn't it more reasonable to choose Khalynsk, Samara, and Ukraine Eneolithic? once you do that then you'd need an additional source of ancestry that has both CHG and Anatolian Neolithic.

What I'm saying is very much reproducible and testable, you just need the Software, ADMIXTOOLS is a software package that includes useful functions to compute f-statistics, admixture graphs, and qpAdm modeling and others, you'd need this last one to infer mixture proportions.

https://reich.hms.harvard.edu/software

and of course you'd need the samples, they're also available, I can't do it because I don't have the technical requirements.

It's very easy to see that Steppe_Maykop outliers are the most reasonable candidate on PCA with respect to the actual Eneolithic Steppe to be the source of admixture:

Very interesting and plausible points, thanks for this explanation. It really made me understand that there is at least a reasonable likelihood that there was some real change between the Eneolithic and the BA Yamnaya. But I still have to say I can't help but wonder: if the whole issue that triggered all this reasoning about a Caucasian influx into the steppes in the Chalcolithic and Early BA was the lack of EHG in Anatolian and Balkan samples, but Steppe_Maykop outlier still had much EHG too, then what's the change in that big picture? Would they have been totally acculturated by a completely CHG+ANF Maykop, with no EHG, and therefore did they act as intermediaries, carrying PIE language/culture into the steppes, but not into Anatolia? Would non-Anatolian PIE be the language of a thoroughly "Maykopized" but still mostly steppe-like population? Just wondering...

Also, if the extra CHG and ANF came mainly from Steppe_Maykop outliers, what explains the WHG in most of the later Yamnaya samples if not, most likely, an influx of EEF given the archaeologically undisputed western influences (Cucuteni-Tripolye et al.) in the steppe? I think your points are convincing and even somewhat probable, but I'm still full of doubts.

Maybe it would be better if we could really run these samples using other Eneolithic steppe samples (and also some Eneolithic EEF-rich source preferably) and see if the results would be more reliable with or without Steppe_Maykop outlier, and how much they would've in fact contributed. I still find it hard to believe that in the socio-economic system of the steppe such a huge cultural and linguistic change, effectively creating new ethnicities, could've happened without a considerable change in the distribution of paternal lineages... But let's see. I hope future papers make these things clearer to me.
 

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