The spread of 'Steppe' DNA and autosomal best-fit analysis

It is not evident to me which languages people spoke in the third and fourth millennium BC. I have not seen such evidence, and in any case I am only looking at genetics.

Common-sense says that 1) a 80% to 100% ydna turnover c. 2,000 BC in western Europe and 2) subsequent near complete Indo-European language-uniformity, go hand-in-hand. If not the result of a mostly one-way migration, there would have been a patchwork, and not a uniformity, of ydna genes and language families.
 
Yeah very difficult to say what happened without early samples from Central Asia. I'd say evidence is mounting that Maykop/Kura/Shomu are irrelevant when it comes to Yamnaya.

If i understand him well, Alberto thinks about a potential " CHG_Colchis " for the CHG in Steppe. I'm not sure what it means and what about it. Central Asia must be investigated whatsoever because CHG in Eastern Europe seems for what we know until now, intimately linked with the Volga, so either beyond it ( east ) or south of it. Maykop and Botai somehow tells us that, whatever the road, it happened before.
 
Very interesting indeed, they are totally unrelated with Maikop. And if the CHG in Steppe is related with Iran_Neolithic, it's then from a very early phase. The CHG component in Steppe is older than Areni-1, it's giving us at least some time frame to juggle with. Apparently Sarazm_Eneolithic is in Tajikistan at the edge of the Eurasian Steppe and the Pamir Range, very interesting how much those individuals have this ancestry ( Kelteminar??? ). Or maybe, as FrankN tried to tell ( if i understand him well ), it's possible that CHG came from East Caspian through intense and ancestral relationship with the Urals and that a Second ANE phase with CHG coming from Central Asia / Urals relplaced on the Volga the early EHG individuals, but if so, how did R1b stayed the dominant lineage?


https://books.google.ca/books?id=c_...v=onepage&q=surtanda geometry pottery&f=false (P 146)

The contact between the southern Urals and the southern Caspian basin can clearly traced not only in the mesolithic, but also during the neolithic an eneolithic

Southern Urals seemed to be a crossroad of ancient technology routes such a long time. So it could absorb CHG and furthermore be connected to sintahsta, of which culture and technology had something to do with west asia.
Especially the surtanda culture over there is closely related with botai, and its geometry pottery with sintashta and andronovo. Even if the author tried to connect surtanda culture to yamna and afanasievo, I cannot accept his opinion, but there is a possibility of them to have EHG P297. we have now yamna M269 and botal EHG M73, hence, their EHG ancetor p297 also would be near.
 
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https://books.google.ca/books?id=c_...v=onepage&q=surtanda geometry pottery&f=false (P 146)



Southern Urals seemed to be a crossroad of ancient technology routes such a long time. So it could absorb CHG and furthermore be connected to sintahsta, of which culture and technology had something to do with west asia.
Especially the surtanda culture over there is closely related with botai, and its geometry pottery with sintashta and andronovo. Even if the author tried to connect surtanda culture to yamna and afanasievo, I cannot accept his opinion, but there is a possibility of them to have P297. we have now yamna M269 and botal M73, hence, their ancetor p297 also would be near.

As far as R1b, i think it was widespread from Italy to the Volga at a point and only the R1b near the Volga or the Don got the CHG ancestry. Wich subclade it was, sounds pretty difficult to assign, it might have been different ones and only became dominant as M269 at one point. But really it could have been L278, V88, V1636, M269 wich later was dominated only by L23 and Z2103. The point is, R1b was a paleolithic lineage who was from West to East assigned to ancestry WHG - transitional WHG/EHG - EHG - CHG. Only people from the Don-Caspian Steppe and the Don-Volga region got the CHG ancestry originally, wich for me, the fact that Sidelkino HG had already CHG, makes it likely that this ancestry came from the East or more likely the South-East and had hard time to reach the Dnieper until the Chalcolithic.
 
If i understand him well, Alberto thinks about a potential " CHG_Colchis " for the CHG in Steppe. I'm not sure what it means and what about it. Central Asia must be investigated whatsoever because CHG in Eastern Europe .seems for what we know until now, intimately linked with the Volga, so either beyond it ( east ) or south of it. Maykop and Botai somehow tells us that, whatever the road, it happened before.

Colchian HGs are what we already have, i. e. the CHGs. Alberto believes the source population might be situated at a geographically intermediate position, perhaps even east of the Caspian sea.

My own suspicion is that once we move east of the Zagros the labels might not really apply, and that there existed intermediate populations for some time. Probably from the time when Basal Eurasian trickled from Arabia to Central Asia via southern Iran to mix with ANE-like to form CHG-like. We'll see.

Good background reading on this topic: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/309394707_central_asia_as_a_core
 
Common-sense says that 1) a 80% to 100% ydna turnover c. 2,000 BC in western Europe and 2) subsequent near complete Indo-European language-uniformity, go hand-in-hand. If not the result of a mostly one-way migration, there would have been a patchwork, and not a uniformity, of ydna genes and language families.

I don't generally trust 'common sense', which is often wrong. Common sense previously suggested that R1b was of West European origin, which data now indicates in most likely incorrect.

I would identify it more as a 50-85% yDNA turnover in Western Europe. And it might be misleading to give it a discrete date like 2,000 BC, when the data suggests the turnover might have occurred over a substantial period of time, perhaps extending from 2,800 BC up to the first millennium BC.

The data does not suggest a 'one way' migration to me. R1b-DF27 went mostly South West into Iberia, R1b-U152 went South into Italy and back on itself into Eastern Europe, R1b-U106 went North East into Scandinavia, R1b-L584 went South into the Caucasus and the Middle East, R1a-M417 went both West into Germany and South into Arabia and India.

Language uniformity has developed today, with European languages like English, French and Spanish being spoken across large parts of the world, in some cases accompanied by yDNA turnover, in some cases not. The two often correlate, but don't necessarily go entirely hand in hand. Genetic evidence is the only certain way of identifying genetic inheritance.
 
Colchian HGs are what we already have, i. e. the CHGs. Alberto believes the source population might be situated at a geographically intermediate position, perhaps even east of the Caspian sea.

My own suspicion is that once we move east of the Zagros the labels might not really apply, and that there existed intermediate populations for some time. Probably from the time when Basal Eurasian trickled from Arabia to Central Asia via southern Iran to mix with ANE-like to form CHG-like. We'll see.

Good background reading on this topic: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/309394707_central_asia_as_a_core
CHG perhaps started creeping into EHG from different sources, as the Khvalynsk samples might suggest - some with R1b from the Western Caucasus and a higher proportion with Q1a from the Caspian.
 
The shulaverian Hypothesis is that they were the Urheimat of L23 and PIE. Above anything else. But I have always stated that they moved from Romania/Bulgaria in 6500BC to 6000BC (first settlements in Scaucasus) and the unusual diversity of species cultivated is because they picked up species and words from farmers they were engaged with, first in Thrace and then even learned mudbrick architecture with Barcin related near places such as Fikirtepe black sea south shores. So its unlikely they did not pick up some G Ydna.
By 5000bc, so a thousand years later, they picked up J2a from northern Iraq and J2b from northwest Iran. They met for a millennium in Azerbaijan steppes so… some could be J. – But remember. Bulk was M269 and L23. Overall they come across as very reserved kind of people that didnt really mixed much...



By 4600 BC they were Boian and Gulmenita and the ones longer representing this phase the Krivodol- Salcuta.
I also believe Delta nile merimde-beni-salama was also them. So I don’t know which was the route. North or south. Let’s assume is north. Then L51 was a set of people on the move from these Balkans culture into all over shores of north Mediterranean sea in small pockets of L23 turning L51. So, If Zambujal/VNSP turning Bell beakers were them, were just a L51 remnant of your next question that got very good at warfare or at least conflict.



Yes. Either choice they were related people. Those that stayed in Balkans, in chalcolithic, work their way into Hamangia, into Precucuteni….and therefore engage cousins that were later known as Yamanya. It’s a 1000 years nobody seems to want to compute…
That is the messy time that made all this Dna admix confusion of Steppe, CWC etc.
Suvorovo either were just the ones that resulted from Yamnaya related type of guys moving along north black sea costs, and mixing with lets call it Boian-Gulmenita-Cucuteni… or actually just the later, people that had always remained in Balkans, that change way of living like many others had forcibly to, as 5.9kiloyear event made them all scatter and change life style.

To relate to the previous question, while these ones were engaging in that "mess", the ones of previous question (which ones made it to Portugal) were just the ones that kept on moving west as early as 4000BC, small pockets that ended up gathered in bigger numbers in Western iberia.
I am a beliver that you need to follow kindship. The sucess of Bell beaker was due to the fact that while they moved around in 3rd milenia, they always found kindship in the other places.



I don’t know. But I think G-PF3345 has a story of their own. Sometimes I think people do an undervaluation of them....



Shulaveri started a diaspora by 4900 BC. The resurgent of CHG is because, if anything Shulaverian arriving South Caucasus and departing went from no CHG to several degrees of CHG. CHG were in western Georgia and yes, in parts of north slopes of Caucasus mountains already . There were Shulaverian with this “pure” CHG, as there were others with some CHG/Iran Kind picked up in the steppes of Karabahk in Azerbaijan where they all met (L23, J2a, J2b, G).
When they all moved way the ones moving west (4600BC) were the ones with CHG-Iran that reached again south Balkans.. Kum6, Otzi Pal in Greece… they all had that admix irrespective of Y-dna. But also remember that the movement of Ydna J, and CHG/iran kept on moving into west. Anatolia but later Greece. The movement of Kura-araxes was a strong wind of CHG from east.
that is why when one finds Hittite YDna It can be anything. By 3000bc the ones speaking IE language where a mix of several small tribes.

I have looked for extant yDNA that might have traced a movement of people across the Mediterranean from the Caucasus towards Iberia for the period in question, and all I can find as a likely candidate is R1b-M269>PF7562, which my estimate suggests most likely crossed from Anatolia to Southern Italy via the South Balkans circa 3,300 BC (a tentative estimate, due to a paucity of data). It is possible that R1b-L51 might have accompanied it.

Other yDNA candidates appear to have migrated Westwards too early or too late to have been connected with it, so any move looks to me to have been predominantly R1b-M269.
 
Componental correlation coefficients for Bell Beaker data show a strong positive correlation between its minority WHG and CHG components.
This indicates that a population with substantial levels of both WHG and CHG entered the pre-Bell Beaker autosomal mix, and the only population I can see that would have had such a mix would be people living on the Northern Pontic coastal fringe.

By the time of the Ezero culture in Bulgaria (3,300 BC), nearly all traces of the Bell-Beaker-like Suvorovo-admixed DNA appear to have disappeared from the Bulgarian autosomal mix, to have been replaced by a higher concentration of the Northern Pontic WHG-CHG mix. My suggestion is that the arrival of the Northern Pontic coastal people is what triggered the Suvorovo-admixed Bulgarians to move out West - there was a small amount of Northern Pontic admixture into the Suvorovo-descended population, which then migrated away from the area.

The WHG-CHG mix first arrived at the Danube delta by about 4,000 BC with Cernavoda, spreading into Bulgaria by 3,300 BC. I suspect this narrows the timeframe over which the pre-Bell Beaker R1b population moved out of the Eastern Balkans and headed westwards to some point between 4,000 and 3,300 BC. This also ties up with yfull's estimated branching date for L51's two French-coalescing subclades (3,700 BC) and with the earliest Iberian M269 (most likely L51) sample (ATP3, dated to 3,300 BC).
 
I've found an even better fit for German R1b Bell Beaker that also explains its core EHG/Anatolian mix and its more recent correlated WHG-CHG insertion. It is 74% Steppe/Suvorovo-admixed Bulgarian Chalcolithic + 13% Bulgarian Ezero + 13% Ukrainian Chalcolithic, which yields an autosomal mix identical to the Bell Beaker average without any West European admixture.

This suggests that R1b pre-Bell Beaker was a caste within remnant East Balkan Chalcolithic populations that was displaced by the arrival of Ukrainians (Cernavoda) during the early 4th millennium BC. It either evacuated up the Danube on Cernavoda's arrival (c. 3,800 BC) or went west of Bulgaria a few hundred years later.

The latter is perhaps more likely, as -
1. Whoever was in Bulgaria seems to have held out against the Cernavoda people until around 3,300 BC, and
2. Such a movement mirrors the geography and dating of the spread of the related R1b-PF7562 lineage, which estimates suggest most likely moved into the SW Balkans and Southern Italy at exactly the same time, perhaps within the same migration, and with the R1b-L51 subset simply venturing further West into Iberia and France before finding its niche.
 
Pip, I'm banned from anthrogenica, but what did Eterne mean by this?

ylvFIHo.png


What exactly is the difference between .SG Iberia_ChL and "main" Iberia_ChL? If this is legitimate, it's worth investigating, but I don't even know what it is or what .SG means
 
Pip, I'm banned from anthrogenica, but what did Eterne mean by this?

ylvFIHo.png


What exactly is the difference between .SG Iberia_ChL and "main" Iberia_ChL? If this is legitimate, it's worth investigating, but I don't even know what it is or what .SG means
Perhaps it's a typo, and should be HG?
 
David Reich on Bell Beaker genetics, October 2018.

The link may have been posted on the forum already. I don't know; I have not been very assiduous recently.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVPxAGc6WX4

NB: Though the title of the video is in French, the lecture is in English.
 
Didn't he mis-speak? He said the new British population was 90% steppe, when they were 90% Beaker. The Beakers of Central Europe who went to Britain were themselves only 40-50% steppe. They had already admixed.

He probably just meant 90% "new" ancestry.
 
Didn't he mis-speak? He said the new British population was 90% steppe, when they were 90% Beaker. The Beakers of Central Europe who went to Britain were themselves only 40-50% steppe. They had already admixed.
He probably just meant 90% "new" ancestry.
"Steppe DNA" is a mantra, drummed into us by the genetic establishment to help sell its more exciting (to some) simplistic version of reality
The full story, as we know, is less certain, more mixed and more complicated
 
R1b-L51 looks autosomally similar to Suvorovo-admixed Bulgarian Chalcolithic samples, but it is also possible that it arose from a minority insertion into that population (from Sredny Stog, Western Caucasus or Cucuteni) that ended up gaining paternal prominence.
Do we know what happened to Bulgaria and its people in the 700 years between when the Varna & Suvorovo cultures ended and when Ezero moved in? It's hard to believe it was entirely empty and that no surrounding people moved into it for that long. Also, what do we think happened subsequently to the people who had lived there during that period?
 
Didn't he mis-speak? He said the new British population was 90% steppe, when they were 90% Beaker. The Beakers of Central Europe who went to Britain were themselves only 40-50% steppe. They had already admixed.

He probably just meant 90% "new" ancestry.

Perhaps he meant 90% steppe-admixed. Assuming it was absent previously. Wasn't 90% the British y-dna replacement figure in Oliade?
 
Perhaps he meant 90% steppe-admixed. Assuming it was absent previously. Wasn't 90% the British y-dna replacement figure in Oliade?
My guess is that he's intelligent and discerning enough to say exactly what he meant to say.
Of course, he could alternatively have described the new populations as 90% Anatolian or 90% Caucasian, as 90% of them had some Anatolian or Caucasian admixture in them.
The fact is that the new populations were a mixture, which just isn't as striking as the implication that they stormed across intact from the Steppe, eliminating everyone in their path.
 
What do we know about the Ezero era people of Bulgaria? Genetically, they do not look indigenous to me. Their best fit looks entirely North coast Pontic - Cucuteni Tripolye with substantial admixture from the Western Caucasus and some admixture from Dereivka.

If so, what happened to the Bulgarian inhabitants they replaced?
 
Perhaps he meant 90% steppe-admixed. Assuming it was absent previously. Wasn't 90% the British y-dna replacement figure in Oliade?

It had to be some slip up like that. Everyone knows, certainly academics, that the Beakers were 50-60% Late Neolithic farmer like. Yes, the replacement figure in Britain was 90%, but that means 10% British Neolithic and 90% Beaker, or, as you say, steppe admixed.

It's loose, imprecise talk like this that gets the archaeologists' hackles up. The geneticists know what they mean, but they can confuse people who haven't read all the papers.
 

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