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

A focus on language and culture can cloud the genetics. Both language and culture can be picked up; neither are passed on intact like y-DNA. Also, languages and cultures do not give birth to other languages and cultures. They evolve, often by incorporation of features from other languages and cultures. Indo-European languages, for instance, are unlikely to derive wholly from proto-Indo-European.

Considering extant R-M269 at any one point during the early to mid 5th millennium BC, it is important to take into account that we are not looking for a people, but a person. According to yfull's estimates, all known M269 descends from a single man who lived in 4,400 BC. Trying to pinpoint this man definitively is like looking for a needle in a barn full of haystacks, particularly as he could have moved around a lot for all we know. We can only get a general flavour of his origin by looking at the broad indications that current genetic data provides.

To summarise my own research in this area regarding the formation of SNPs associated with Indo-European:

R1b-M269
1. Estimates from y-DNA phylogeny and STR variance predict a most likely origin zone for M269 somewhere around Northern Romania/Moldova/North Western Ukraine.
2. Estimates from mt-DNA associated with M269 populations predict a most likely core origin zone in Poland/Northern Romania/Moldova/Western Ukraine.
3. Estimates from a-DNA associated with M269 populations predict a most likely core origin zone in Northern Ukraine/Belarus.

R1a-Z645
1. Estimates from y-DNA phylogeny and STR variance predict a most likely origin zone for Z645 somewhere around Poland/Eastern Slovakia/North Western Ukraine.
2. Estimates from mt-DNA associated with Z645 populations predict a most likely core origin zone in Eastern Poland/Eastern Slovakia/North Western Ukraine.
3. Estimates from a-DNA associated with Z645 populations predict a most likely core origin zone in Northern Ukraine/Belarus.

These readings look both fairly internally consistent and pretty similar to each other. Are there any reasons why they do not look possible? Given the similar geography, I would not be surprised if early bearers of these SNPs shared certain cultural or linguistic traits.

The early geographical development of these SNPs is a different question. Branches of M269, for instance, look most likely to have spread South and South East (Balkans, Anatolia, Caucasus) fairly early on, and South West (France, Spain) not too long afterwards. There is nothing to say that all of these branches would have retained the same core language group or culture, which would depend on how numerous and influential the bearers of each branch were within the developmental populations in which they found themselves and on the appropriateness of the culture to the new environments.
 
Maybe it's the case that the elite were cremated more often
Hittite crania seem to differ from other crania in the region however. Physical anthropologists used to have long-winded debates about this. There can be little doubt that a brachycephalic population invaded Anatolia in the Bronze Age.
 
How do you exactly knows what Anatolian skull is Hittite or not?
 
Hittite crania seem to differ from other crania in the region however. Physical anthropologists used to have long-winded debates about this. There can be little doubt that a brachycephalic population invaded Anatolia in the Bronze Age.

That's fair enough then
 
Can anyone give me a link of social media, or university profile about Wang Rong? I cannot found anything, but unrelated homonyms. I would like an answer to why ancient Yamnaya samples were basically EHG/CHG, while in the Maikop paper some start to shows Anatolian_Neolithic. Are they founding new samples, or are they making specific papers with specific samples? Nature and all those magazines are supposed to be vulgarisation for the mass, but nothing is really explained, they just talk about f-stats, d-stats, mbuti... wich doesn't explain a lot...

Edit: Never mind, i found Chaun-Chao Wang.
 
I'm sure you know better than Reich and colleagues.

I've seen several series of Hittite skulls myself.

Hittite era skulls? Or Hittite skulls?

EDIT: Mind you, the only Hittite era samples are from Damsgaard. The Lazaridis B.A. samples are from a jug burial site with dates ranging from 2800 BC to 2000 BC, in a place where Luwians appeared after 2000 BC. And the idea that this would be a problem for ancient DNA because the Hittites cremated their dead was dropped by Nick Patterson in the reactions at Davidski.
 
I cannot found anything for Hittite skulls and physical anthropolgy.
 
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.

I think that's true, but wouldn't it have to be even before that?

The people of the western steppe had no agriculture to speak of. How could Neolithic people of the trans-Caucasus have failed to bring it with them, even if the gene flow was female mediated? Unless, perhaps it was a case of abandoning what wasn't feasible given the climate and terrain and retaining only the herding of animals?

Even then, though, what of all those papers indicating the animals and the skills necessary came from "Old Europe", as well as the metals and the rudimentary metallurgical skills?
 
I think that's true, but wouldn't it have to be even before that?

The people of the western steppe had no agriculture to speak of. How could Neolithic people of the trans-Caucasus have failed to bring it with them, even if the gene flow was female mediated? Unless, perhaps it was a case of abandoning what wasn't feasible given the climate and terrain and retaining only the herding of animals?

Climate, I'd say that's possible. Terrain? We're talking the richest Löss soils in the world.

Even then, though, what of all those papers indicating the animals and the skills necessary came from "Old Europe", as well as the metals and the rudimentary metallurgical skills?

So did several Ertebolla like cultures.
 
Hittite crania seem to differ from other crania in the region however. Physical anthropologists used to have long-winded debates about this. There can be little doubt that a brachycephalic population invaded Anatolia in the Bronze Age.
Markod
Was it ALL brachy or was brachy amongst them?
because at that period Brachy was often found.
As an example, I remember late Neolithic Portugal Bruchner work found that something like 15% brachy and 5% ultra brachy whatever that means...
Most pop was actually meso rather than Doly.

Edit. Correct values.
About 8% were Hiper- dolichocephalic, 34% Dolichocephalic,
46% mesencephalic,
8% Brachycephalic and
4% ultra- Brachycephalic (*333).
So majority were Mesencephalic
 
Hittite crania seem to differ from other crania in the region however. Physical anthropologists used to have long-winded debates about this. There can be little doubt that a brachycephalic population invaded Anatolia in the Bronze Age.

This needs some links. I find it interesting, mind you.
 
Markod
Was it ALL brachy or was brachy amongst them?
because at that period Brachy was often found.
As an example, I remember late Neolithic Portugal Bruchner work found that something like 15% brachy and 5% ultra brachy whatever that means...
Most pop was actually meso rather than Doly.

Edit. Correct values.
About 8% were Hiper- dolichocephalic, 34% Dolichocephalic,
46% mesencephalic,
8% Brachycephalic and
4% ultra- Brachycephalic (*333).
So majority were Mesencephalic

IIRC no. It's just that a new brachycephalic element enters Anatolia at the time. Coon:

Let us first examine what Bronze Age skeletal material there is in Asia Minor. So far, all of it comes from two sites, Alishar Hüyük, which, in its later periods, was a Hittite city, and Hissarlik, the seventh level of Which was Homer’s Troy. Both were important centers in the Bronze Age. At Alishar, fifty-three skulls have been studied, from seven archaeological periods, ranging from the earliest Copper Age, dated from between 2600 and 2300 B.C., to the Osmanli invasion.2

Ten crania from the earliest period (two “Chalcolithic,” eight Copper Age) are uniformly Danubian in type, both metrically and morphologically. The small, high-vaulted, somewhat infantile dolicho- and mesocephalic form, with small face and mesorrhine to chamaerrhine noses, is no different from that found at roughly the same time at Anau, at Mariupol, in the Kiev Government, and in the Danube Valley, in association with Neolithic cultures. Two others, which are longer, may belong to a Megalithic or Corded variety.The unity of the early food-producing peoples on both sides of the Caucasus and Black Sea is therefore indicated, and from the racial standpoint, the Danubians could have come to central Europe from either South Russia or Anatolia, or both.

In the second and third periods at Alishar, dated between 2300 and 1500 B.C., and called the Early Bronze Age, brachycephalic skulls appeared, and these persisted through the period of the Hittite Empire, for several centuries after 1500 B.C. The crania are large, low vaulted, and only moderately brachycephalic, with lambdoid flattening, and moderate browridges. The faces are of medium length, and narrow, although somewhat broader than those of the earlier Danubian type. The stature of the one male observed was tall, 174 cm.3

Not all of the Hittite Empire crania are brachycephalic. A long-headed variety, which seems to have replaced or outnumbered the brachycephals by the time of the Phrygian invasions, is both longer and lower vaulted than the Danubian type of the Copper Age; it is characterized by a very prominent nasal skeleton of true Near Eastern form, with little nasion depression. Bas-relief sculptures of historic Hittites reproduce this hook-nosed, open-eyed type of countenance.

The sequence of racial types in Asia Minor during the metal ages probably runs somewhat as follows: the earliest food-producing people were the same as those in western Turkestan and southern Russia. The latter probably came in earlier times from the highland belt of which Anatolia forms a part. Shortly before 2000 B.C., a moderately brachycephalic type, with tall stature, entered Anatolia from regions yet to be determined, followed by a low-vaulted, hawk-nosed Mediterranean form, which we have named Cappadocian,” and which is well known in the present day Near East. True Arrnenoids or Dinarics were not, apparently, common in early times.

I think Haddon studied the Hittite skulls in more detail butI can't find the reference.
 
I think that's true, but wouldn't it have to be even before that?

The people of the western steppe had no agriculture to speak of. How could Neolithic people of the trans-Caucasus have failed to bring it with them, even if the gene flow was female mediated? Unless, perhaps it was a case of abandoning what wasn't feasible given the climate and terrain and retaining only the herding of animals?

Even then, though, what of all those papers indicating the animals and the skills necessary came from "Old Europe", as well as the metals and the rudimentary metallurgical skills?

Bug-Dniester was transitional between HG and Farming, just like Lepenski Vir in the Balkans. Archeology speeks more than Archeogenetic for material facts. Balkans HG's were full of R1b, all replaced by G2a2. But were all those R1b goes? and did they knew Farming already?
 
Hittite era skulls? Or Hittite skulls?

EDIT: Mind you, the only Hittite era samples are from Damsgaard. The Lazaridis B.A. samples are from a jug burial site with dates ranging from 2800 BC to 2000 BC, in a place where Luwians appeared after 2000 BC. And the idea that this would be a problem for ancient DNA because the Hittites cremated their dead was dropped by Nick Patterson in the reactions at Davidski.

I don't find the evidence published thus far very convincing either. I'm just assuming the rumors are true.
 
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.

But whatever language (or languages, to be more precise) it was, it was likely not PIE. Whatever language the R1b cattle-herders brought with them onto the steppes, it wasn't PIE.
 
I think that's true, but wouldn't it have to be even before that?

The people of the western steppe had no agriculture to speak of. How could Neolithic people of the trans-Caucasus have failed to bring it with them, even if the gene flow was female mediated? Unless, perhaps it was a case of abandoning what wasn't feasible given the climate and terrain and retaining only the herding of animals?

Even then, though, what of all those papers indicating the animals and the skills necessary came from "Old Europe", as well as the metals and the rudimentary metallurgical skills?

Metallurgical skills seem to always be associated with R1b-M269 people, at least at the earliest stages
 
Climate, I'd say that's possible. Terrain? We're talking the richest Löss soils in the world.



So did several Ertebolla like cultures.

If I remember my David Anthony correctly, there was some rudimentary farming only in the riverine valleys, of which there weren't many. That would likely be a combination of a constant water supply and particularly fertile soil. The tree less, dry, windswept steppe plains would not have been optimum for farming during certain weather conditions. These types of soils are very prone to wind erosion in dry periods, and the soil becomes brittle as well, so the plants can't develop the necessary root structure. That's why the American midwest and west became a "dust bowl".

So, I would say a combination of terrain and climate.

If there was a movement from the Caucasus all the way to the western steppe they would have had to traverse areas particularly inhospitable for farming, and indeed for their package of crops.

That might, I suppose, explain why they lost their agricultural vocabulary.

Does anyone know if Anatolian has words for agriculture?

Land+Features+Associated+With+Continental+Glaciers.jpg


To all:
For the thousandth time, metallurgy first appeared in the Near East. PLEASE use the search engine for the appropriate papers.
 
If I remember my David Anthony correctly, there was some rudimentary farming only in the riverine valleys, of which there weren't many. That would likely be a combination of a constant water supply and particularly fertile soil. The tree less, dry, windswept steppe plains would not have been optimum for farming during certain weather conditions. These types of soils are very prone to wind erosion in dry periods, and the soil becomes brittle as well, so the plants can't develop the necessary root structure. That's why the American midwest and west became a "dust bowl".

So, I would say a combination of terrain and climate.

If there was a movement from the Caucasus all the way to the western steppe they would have had to traverse areas particularly inhospitable for farming, and indeed for their package of crops.

That might, I suppose, explain why they lost their agricultural vocabulary.

Does anyone know if Anatolian has words for agriculture?

To all:
For the thousandth time, metallurgy first appeared in the Near East. PLEASE use the search engine for the appropriate papers.

Well you might use it yourself, because the earliest Metal Mines are from Serbia, way before anything like Kura-Araxe or Sumerians(???!!!)
 

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