All Iberian men were wiped out by Yamna men 4,500 years ago

[Cpluskx]

They need to find R1b without steppe admixture in the South to speak this confidently.

 

[Olympus Mons]

You're probably more familiar than me with the archaelogical evidence, and it makes sense that there would have been an early migration from the south onto the steppe. The problem is for me is that an Indo-Hittite split that early just doesn't seem likely.

Maybe. If someone can explain me why 4900/4800BC split for Indo-Hittite is not Probable and then Feasible. I will have to take that into consideration. Do you have a good argument? Its not like language is carbon dating, right?

They need to find R1b without steppe admixture in the South to speak this confidently.

For example even in supplements of Wang at al, shows admix for so many transversal periods, isn’t it conspicuous that the only ones not having a “Neolithic Phases” is exactly where I have been saying for years now is the key for the enigma? – am I just that unlucky?

 

[halfalp]

I'm pretty sure that early neolithic south caucasus was already anatolian_neo and iran_neo.

 

[CrazyDonkey]

It seems Eurogenes and his fans are concerned that the Max Planck Institute people (and perhaps the Reich group at Harvard) continue to see the movement of people and language from the south Caucasus into the steppe through Maykop or steppe Maykop.

Although I'm no Eurogenes fan, I've lately been thinking that the genetic movement perhaps stems back to the late Mesolithic perhaps, which would be too early for the language movement, wouldn't it?

Is this all based on rumors or has something been published?

Hard to see PIE being pushed back to before the domestication of the horse (4,200-4,500 BC?).

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=994

 

[gidai]

All Iberian men were wiped out by Yamna men 4,500 years ago etrified:

Clearly not!

 

[Saetrus]

IE has to be from the Steppe at the very least after Anatolian split off.

No, not really. Indo-Europeans were a mountain people who generally preferred to stick to the mountains, this is the main component and Y-DNA profile associated with them:

It's the same component and Y-DNA profile you also see in Kura-Araxes and BMAC, here associated with Hittite, Palaic, Luwic, Luwian, Lycian, Milyan, Carian, Sidetic, Pisidian, Lydian, Sicel, Latino-Faliscan, Osco-Umbrian, Venetic, Liburnian, Armenian, Mycenaean Greek, Dacian, Illyrian, Liburnian, Messapic, Mysian, Paeonian, Phrygian, Thracian, etc.


Now this component is an offshoot of the above group related to the L51 founder effect:

It's associated with proto-Germanic and partially with proto-Celtic (We also have a Hallstatt sample that is G)

 

[Ygorcs]

But southern people got into Steppe in copper age. Specifically in the 5th millennium BC.... Just saying.
Maybe that conclusion is not there because they know more than what they are publishing.

IIRC the ~4200 BC Chalcolithic Ukraine sample analyzed in the recent (Caucasus? I don't remember well) pre-print already had a lot of the CHG admixture found in later Yamnaya, with the Yamnaya some 1,000 years later having only slighlty more CHG in relation to EHG, but no major change. So, I would say the southern influx into the steppes probably happened before that, more like Late Neolithic than Chalcolithic.

 

[ToBeOrNotToBe]

No, not really. Indo-Europeans were a mountain people who generally preferred to stick to the mountains

I've never heard such rubbish, if anything at least during their main expansion they were close to the opposite.

 

[Ygorcs]

Well in terms of archaeology there's a decent amount backing it up - of course, I've mentioned the swastikas and metallurgy spreading from the Balkans originally, but what about the overall pretty great similarities between Vinca and Ubaid symbols, figurines and metallurgy? The early 20th century archaeologists saw Vinca as a development of Mesopotamian cultures like that of Ubaid, but now we know if anything it was the other way round - metallurgy is oldest in Vinca, as are the symbols (which bear some similarities, but the extent of this is debatable) and the figurines (those lizardmen people think are aliens).

If Vinca had been the source of PIE in the steppes, bringing not just language but also a whole cultural package and dominant mode of economy, shouldn't we expect the EBA Steppe population to have much less CHG and much, much more EEF?

Also, why could it not potentially be the case that one branch travelled down Mesopotamia, and another continued in the highland region to the North (eventually moving up into the Steppe). That, though, seems like an added complication and so goes against Occam's razor I suppose. But, there is a neater solution - what about Leyla-Tepe - these guys are theorised to have been Ubaid-period migrants, who brought with them the first metallurgy to the Caucasus, and are theorised to have been founders of the Maykop culture. The fact that Maykop seems to be Y DNA G, J and L could be explained by burial differences or differences in location (the pastoralists might have been in a different region than sampled, as is the case with the Caucasus today lots of different groups can live in a relatively small area isolated by terrain). From looking at where the samples were taken, it appears the Y DNA G, J and L were not found in the Eastern Caucasus - whereas perhaps Z2103 migrated to the Steppe through th easier Azerbaijani-Dagestani route (near to where that Chalcolithic Z2103 was found). Maykop Steppe is just completely mind-boggling to me - how Siberian HG ancestry is there I have no idea. Whatever the case, I'm dead-set on Z2103 from West Asia, which leads the Z2103 of Yamnaya to be Southern in origin. Also, there's the presence of red hair and blue eyes carried by someone with Y DNA L in the Areni-1 cave, that surely is ultimately of R1b origin (so indicating close contact between the two). Caucasian red hair is still preserved in the North, among the Chechens, who actually have an awful lot of it.

You know, your hypothesis sounds very plausible and would explain well the Euphratic-PIE connection except for one major drawback: chronology. Leyla-Tepe, if it really came from Ubaid immigrants to the north, is dated to ~4350-4000 BC, but PIE itself is dated to before 4000 BC (because by 4000 BC Proto-Anatolian is supposed to have already started to diverge from it independently).

So this issue could be solved if PIE was actually spoken by Leyla-Tepe and was nonexistant in the Pontic-Caspian area until later (but Chalcolithic ~4200 BC samples were already pretty Yamnaya-like in terms of EHG-CHG mix, and not much extra CHG was admixed into the steppes later, indicating that the bulk of that south-to-north movement took place before 4000 BC, i.e. before the split of PIE; besides, the Chalcolithic Caucasus was already arguably pretty enriched by Anatolian_Neo, not found in significant proportion in the EBA Steppe people - not until much later -; and there's also the problem that PIE lexicon reflects a different natural environment, not a Caucasian one, and a more farming-intensive economy).

But the main problem then is: even if Leyla-Tepe spoke PIE (PIE not being the descendant of Leyla-Tepe in the steppe), it must've separated linguistically from their southern brothers by at least ~4200 BC, and therefore we'd expect the Euphratic language supposedly written down in the tablets used as a basis for Sumerians to write their own language around 3000 BC (that's the hypothesis of Whittaker, the oldest written seals would've been non-Sumerian, but IE Euphratic) to be already very distinct from the Leyla-Tepe PIE from which it would have diverged some ~1300 years earlier. Yet the "Euphratic" roots used by Whittaker to explain some Sumerian words, on the basis of similarities with PIE roots, are basically the reconstructed PIE, with very few and only occasional, even ad hoc changes here and there. How likely is such a deeply conservative phonology and morphology? Another major chronological problem related to it: Whittaker finds MANY Euphratic roots for Sumerian words in the feminine gender -eh2 (ancestor of Latin/Romance -a for instance), thus assuming that Euphratic had 3 noun genders... But the problem here is that Early PIE certainly DID NOT have this system at all, as Anatolian shows. The feminine in -eh2 would've been a feature of Late PIE, certainly split and spread in the steppes centuries later. Yet somehow Euphratic and the Steppe "Leyla-Tepe-derived" (speculating here) PIE would've developed exactly in the same way after more than a millennium of divergence. Also very unlikely.

 

[halfalp]

If one day Leyla-Tepe is tested with at least 5 samples and y-dna, i call for J1.

 

[Ygorcs]

Hard to see PIE being pushed back to before the domestication of the horse (4,200-4,500 BC?).

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=994

Nobody is saying PIE was spoken before the domestication of the horse, but that the language branch it belonged to should've been brought to the steppes earlier, in the Mesolithic or Neolithic (by the way, the Neolithic in the Pontic-Caspian era is not that ancient, it's basically 5000-4500 BC). All languages come from an earlier one. PIE means just "the last unified stage of the language that gave birth to all the known daughter languages". That language must've been spoken at the latest in 4000 BC if you include Proto-Anatolian, and as late as ~3500-3200 BC if you include the other branches (Tocharian being arguably the earliest to split). But that does not mean that its origins were at that time, that's actually the time that the language started to diverge into different languages, its latest moments, not its beginnings.

 

[Ygorcs]

No, not really. Indo-Europeans were a mountain people who generally preferred to stick to the mountains, this is the main component and Y-DNA profile associated with them:

This is utter, well, "original research". If there is one thing that can be deduced from the PIE lexicon as it was reconstructed, it is that its speakers were NOT a mountain people (though they knew mountains of course) and that they most definitely did not stick to the natural and geographical landscape typical of mountains. I wish you could point out what scientific sources (linguistic, archaeological, whatever) you have used to conclude that. And honestly associating J2a (generically like that, not even a specific clade, as R1b-M269 and R1a-M417 are clearly associated, in ancient and modern DNA samples, with the expansion of at least several of the IE branches) with Indo-Europeans sounds a bit like wishful thinking, especially for North Eurasia (Northern Europe, Inner Asian steppe/forest-steppe).

 

[markod]

This is utter, well, "original research". If there is one thing that can be deduced from the PIE lexicon as it was reconstructed, it is that its speakers were NOT a mountain people (though they knew mountains of course) and that they most definitely did not stick to the natural and geographical landscape typical of mountains. I wish you could point out what scientific sources (linguistic, archaeological, whatever) you have used to conclude that. And honestly associating J2a (generically like that, not even a specific clade, as R1b-M269 and R1a-M417 are clearly associated, in ancient and modern DNA samples, with the expansion of at least several of the IE branches) with Indo-Europeans sounds a bit like wishful thinking, especially for North Eurasia (Northern Europe, Inner Asian steppe/forest-steppe).

Anna Dybo 'Indo-European and Altaic Landscapes' :wink:

 

[Ygorcs]

Anna Dybo 'Indo-European and Altaic Landscapes' :wink:

Thanks. But does this author still really believe the widely discredited Altaic language family is a real thing? (edit: I just read she is one of those reconstructing Proto-Altaic, including even Koreanic as part of Altaic, so it is the broader Altaic hypothesis as I can see) Hmm, from the title alone I'm already a bit suspicious about what's written in it in terms of sound and updated linguistics... :-D

 

[markod]

Thanks. But does this author still really believe the widely discredited Altaic language family is a real thing? (edit: I just read she is one of those reconstructing Proto-Altaic, including even Koreanic as part of Altaic, so it is the broader Altaic hypothesis as I can see) Hmm, from the title alone I'm already a bit suspicious about what's written in it in terms of sound and updated linguistics... :-D

I think in Russia and Finland it's generally not considered to be discredited.

 

[Ygorcs]

I think in Russia and Finland it's generally not considered to be discredited.

I read her article. Honestly I did not find its conclusion convincing based on the data used for PIE (I skipped the Proto-Altaic parts, because it's not the point here and I honestly find the whole hypothesis itself unconvincing). The best reasons she has to say PIE was spoken in a mountainous region is that it supposedly has many words for "rock", but she does not elaborate on that or show the PIE roots to demonstrate that. Most of the PIE roots written down do not look the kind of words you'll only see in a mountainous area. Valleys, meadows, hills, slopes, hills, mountain, top of mountain... (btw how high were those "mountains" supposed to be to be considered as such by its speakers? Mountains were certainly not unknown to people in the Pontic-Caspian region, there are mountains in Crimea, Carpathians, Urals and North Caucasus at the very least neighboring their lands, no to speak of lower elevations/plateaus like in southeastern and western Ukraine and along the Volga Basin as in the vicinities of Saratov and Samara; I mean, here where I live the average relief is so low that people name 400m elevations as "mountains", hills are held to be much lower than that). Mind you, there are several different words for "meadow, open field" in reconstructed PIE. I find it somewhat hard to believe that they all meant a generic "meadow, field, open space" instead of terms with originally more specific semantics. There are also many words for water and water bodies. That's congruent with a homeland in a forest-steppe and steppe area near rivers, streams and lakes.

 

[markod]

I read her article. Honestly I did not find its conclusion convincing based on the data used for PIE (I skipped the Proto-Altaic parts, because it's not the point here and I honestly find the whole hypothesis itself unconvincing). The best reasons she has to say PIE was spoken in a mountainous region is that it supposedly has many words for "rock", but she does not elaborate on that or show the PIE roots to demonstrate that. Most of the PIE roots written down do not look the kind of words you'll only see in a mountainous area. Valleys, meadows, hills, slopes, hills, mountain, top of mountain... (btw how high were those "mountains" supposed to be to be considered as such by its speakers? Mountains were certainly not unknown to people in the Pontic-Caspian region, there are mountains in Crimea, Carpathians, Urals and North Caucasus at the very least neighboring their lands, no to speak of lower elevations like in southeastern Ukraine and especially along the Volga Basin as in the vicinities of Saratov and Samara; I mean, here where I live the average relief is so low that people name 400m elevations as "mountains", hills are held to be much lower than that). Mind you, there are several different words for "meadow, open field" in reconstructed PIE. I find it somewhat hard to believe that they all meant a generic "meadow, field, open space" instead of terms with originally more specific semantics. There are also many words for water and water bodies. That's congruent with a homeland in a forest-steppe and steppe area near rivers, streams and lakes.

Yeah, I don't find it convincing either. But I consider Anthony's attempt even more dubious, at least this is somewhat systematic.

 

[ToBeOrNotToBe]

If Vinca had been the source of PIE in the steppes, bringing not just language but also a whole cultural package and dominant mode of economy, shouldn't we expect the EBA Steppe population to have much less CHG and much, much more EEF?You know, your hypothesis sounds very plausible and would explain well the Euphratic-PIE connection except for one major drawback: chronology. Leyla-Tepe, if it really came from Ubaid immigrants to the north, is dated to ~4350-4000 BC, but PIE itself is dated to before 4000 BC (because by 4000 BC Proto-Anatolian is supposed to have already started to diverge from it independently).So this issue could be solved if PIE was actually spoken by Leyla-Tepe and was nonexistant in the Pontic-Caspian area until later (but Chalcolithic ~4200 BC samples were already pretty Yamnaya-like in terms of EHG-CHG mix, and not much extra CHG was admixed into the steppes later, indicating that the bulk of that south-to-north movement took place before 4000 BC, i.e. before the split of PIE; besides, the Chalcolithic Caucasus was already arguably pretty enriched by Anatolian_Neo, not found in significant proportion in the EBA Steppe people - not until much later -; and there's also the problem that PIE lexicon reflects a different natural environment, not a Caucasian one, and a more farming-intensive economy). But the main problem then is: even if Leyla-Tepe spoke PIE (PIE not being the descendant of Leyla-Tepe in the steppe), it must've separated linguistically from their southern brothers by at least ~4200 BC, and therefore we'd expect the Euphratic language supposedly written down in the tablets used as a basis for Sumerians to write their own language around 3000 BC (that's the hypothesis of Whittaker, the oldest written seals would've been non-Sumerian, but IE Euphratic) to be already very distinct from the Leyla-Tepe PIE from which it would have diverged some ~1300 years earlier. Yet the "Euphratic" roots used by Whittaker to explain some Sumerian words, on the basis of similarities with PIE roots, are basically the reconstructed PIE, with very few and only occasional, even ad hoc changes here and there. How likely is such a deeply conservative phonology and morphology? Another major chronological problem related to it: Whittaker finds MANY Euphratic roots for Sumerian words in the feminine gender -eh2 (ancestor of Latin/Romance -a for instance), thus assuming that Euphratic had 3 noun genders... But the problem here is that Early PIE certainly DID NOT have this system at all, as Anatolian shows. The feminine in -eh2 would've been a feature of Late PIE, certainly split and spread in the steppes centuries later. Yet somehow Euphratic and the Steppe "Leyla-Tepe-derived" (speculating here) PIE would've developed exactly in the same way after more than a millennium of divergence. Also very unlikely.

In terms of the lack of ANF in Yamnaya, I'd just go with my (Tomenable's) generic "metallurgical elite" point, because it is true that those who were adept in metallurgy were the elite and that they tended to keep to themselves and not share what they knew (as it was the source of their social status). It's not a great answer though, of course, as you'd expect some mixing no matter what, but doesn't the lack of Steppe ANF basically go against any Southern origin theory, so if that's the case why are the big wigs seemingly backing it? I'm not one to appeal to authority at all (clearly, as I don't believe L51 was Steppe in origin), but I would have thought they'd have thought of that given they prioritise auDNA so much (whereas I think looking at Y DNA phylogeny is often more useful). Whatever the case, related to the spread of pre-PIE or not, Vinca and Ubaid are clearly related - there are too many similarities. There is the Swastika point though - it appeared in Vinca, and then in Mesopotamia (Halaf, then Samarra, then Ubaid), and this spread mirrors the spread of copper metallurgy and of plenty of other things (such as pottery and figurines). It is, however, definitely possible that the Vincans (if that's what they can be called) simply picked up the symbol from very early contact with Ukraine and the Steppe proper and themselves had nothing to do with the hypothetical spread of R1b M269 and later L23 into the Middle East along with what would later become Euphratic, which is something I've overlooked. Also, besides in metallurgy, R1b-L23+ folk in general seem to have been culturally unsophisticated on the whole, which does stand in contrast to Ubaid - though as mentioned earlier in this thread Ubaid was probably multiethnic, so these cultural innovations could have come from a different group (the presumably far larger group of farmers rather than the potentially R1b pastoralists, but speaking the same Euphratic language as surely Ubaid wasn't multilingual). But yeah - Vinca to Ubaid is something that I'd have to see evidence against to not believe, rather than the other way round, given the large similarities (quick google search shows some of it, looks pretty clear to me). As for the linguistic analysis, why does it have to be the case that Anatolian represents features of the earliest IE - why could Anatolian not have made separate developments itself? Perhaps they "decided" to not have 3 noun genders, maybe similar to how English lost (all of its) noun genders. And for the point that Euphratic isn't divergent enough from PIE given the likely divergence in age - I have no idea, but I would have thought Whittaker would have thought of this (again, appealing to authority, but I have no other arguments), so maybe it's the case that early on in the language family's development, there weren't many changes for whatever reason? Perhaps the words are so basic that change would be minimal, or perhaps populations (both for Leyla-Tepe and Euphratic) were more concentrated before reaching the more open Steppe and so there was less linguistic development - I really don't know. Maybe there is also a bias here to Whittaker finding the words that happen to have not changed as much (as they would be easier to find), when in reality most words changed more to the point of being unintelligible with PIE. Point being - I have no idea lol

 

[ToBeOrNotToBe]

I have no idea why I can't use paragraphing so I'll just colour the text differently

 

[epoch]

If there's no steppe DNA in Anatolia, and no southern populations entered the steppe in the Bronze Age, that would pose a serious problem for the steppe hypothesis.

That's why it's weird that the authors of the Caucasus paper didn't address that their data seemingly falsifies the idea of genetic exchange between the Transcaucasus and the steppe.

You realize Hittites cremated their dead?