Neolithic, Chalcolithic Northern Mesopotamia and Levant

Archaeologically, Sumerians and earlier Ubaid and Halaf cultures have a lot of similarities with BMAC/Turan cultures in Central Asia / Eastern Iran and Neolithic/Chalcolithic cultures in Iran.

In fact it is most probably that Sumerians migrated from Central Asia / Eastern Iran into Mesopotamia. But the ancestors of the BMAC/Turan people are also originated from Mesopotamia / Iran / Southern Caucasus.
So, since the Neolithic, there seems to be a repeating migration route from Mesopotamia to Central Asia(in between also Southern Caucasus and Northern Caucasus)(adding South Asia to the migration route) and vice versa.

The language of the Sumerians is the same as the language of the earlier Ubaid and Halaf cultures. It is not related to Semitic, Indo European and Caucasian languages. Instead the Sumerian language is a proto Turkish language. Semitic languages were introduced into the region with the Bronze Age.

Like mentioned above, I agree that the Sumerians could be consisted of Y-DNA like J and T(actually G, J, L, T could also be possible), but what do you guys think of the original place of the haplogroups G, J, L, T before the 9th millennium BCE?

The oldest ancient J sample seems to be from Georgia(CHG), dated to 11430 BCE(Jones 2015), following with Western Iran(8205 BCE).
Oldest G samples are from Central Turkey(8300 BCE) and Western Iran(7455 BCE).

As a conclusion, the ancestral region of G and J could be Southern Caucasus and Western Iran. From here, after the 9th millennium BCE they made migrations into the direction of Western Turkey.
We dont have ancient samples of L and T from earlier than 8000 BCE. Could it be that the ancestral region of L and T is Northern Mesopotamia? From here, after 8000 BCE they made migrations into the regions of the Fertile Crescent.
The ancestral region of E seems to be North Africa, since the oldest ancient E sample was found in Morocco at 13200 BCE. From here, in the following millennia they settled into the Southern Levant.

And after the introducing of agriculture, people of E, G, J, L, T formed some kind of an union, mixing with each other, and making migrations into several directions in Western Eurasia.

I'm pretty sure Sumerian has absolutely nothing to do with Turkic. By the time Sumerian was dead, there was probably not already something like pre-proto-turkic in Mongolia and not Central Asia.
 
I think it's unlikely Sumerian came from the South, instead it probably was part of a huge macro-family of ergative languages like Hurrian, Caucasian and Elamite languages. And that it came from the Taurus-Zagros region ( broadly South Caucasus ) with broadly y-dna J and T. My bet about Arabia and early neolithic Mesopotamia would be something related with ANA and East Africa ( Basal Eurasian? ), but still in the broad AA family linguistically speaking because this macro-family of language is way too old. Semitic is very divergent from the rest of AA languages for what i've read, so it might be a kind of Afro-Asiatic Isolate wich came to birth with the mix of an pre-semitic AA language and a language maybe related with Sumerian. There was a huge change in the finale Chalcolithic and early BA in the entire Middle-East. Just like, big systems of relationship between different Neolithic group got conquered ( for whatever climatic or social reasons ) by South Caucasus groups maybe linked with Kura-Araxes and y-dna J while themselves got moved away by eurasian steppe people migrating. This might imply that there was a huge change in climate between 3'500 and 2'500 BCE.

The problem to me is that there are just too completely different (and as far as we can really expect to know, unrelated between themselves) language families that are candidates for CHG/Iranian languages: Northwest Caucasian, Northeast Caucasian, Hurro-Urartian, Elamite, Dravidian, even some speculate Indo-European, Etruscan, etc. I mean, I know the genetic structure in that region was probably old, and before the Bronze Age it's quite probable that the linguistic diversity was much higher everywhere in the world, but I have a hard time believing that all of those unrelated (or, if related, with very faint connections) language families came from the same area and from quite similar population structures.

Afro-Asiatic is probably some 15,000-18,000 years old. It can't be much older than that, otherwise the connections between its subfamilies could never be safely asserted as they are, it would be too old (and therefore with too much profound linguistic divergence) to be traceable. But in my opinion AA should be found first in North/Northeast Africa, associated with E1b1b (mainly E-M78, I think) Y-DNA clades, and then, in that hypothesis, AA entered Southwest Asia right before the Natufians, with a male-biased mainly E1b1b migration (because the Mt-DNA makeup was decidedly West Eurasian), but not an equivalent autosomal impact (didn't a recent paper suggest that Natufians had some North African admixture?). But that also means that people of the Levantine-like genetic structure already spoke a language family of their own before the spread of E1b1b clades. Therefore, in my opinion a pre-AA Southwest Asian population should've existed. If they were the Sumerians, with their own Dilmun stories and stuff, I don't know, but I find it unlikely that all of the Levant and Arabia already spoke AA in the Mesolithic era. I'd associate AA spread in it with the Natufians and their later offshoots, spreading Levant_Neolithic ancestry. I don't know, but maybe Sumerians spoke a language family that had once been more widespread in Southwest Asia.

By the way, what Y-DNA haplogroups do you guys think were most common in the Levant/Southwest Asia area before the expansion of E1b1b clades? H2, T, F*? What else?

Another really intriguing thing is why on earth would Sumerians call themselves black-headed. I know Afrocentrists will say that's because they were black, butI find it unlikely they would've described themselves as those with black or dark head/top/face if they were black-skinned as a whole. What could it mean? I have read some speculate that dark-headed could indicate that they were bald, i.e. shaved their heads, so that the top of it darkened under the sun. Sounds plausible, because there are indeed many Sumerian artistic depictions of head-shaved men.
 
Turkic isn't the only agglutinative language in West Eurasia - in fact many of the isolates are. Those might somehow be related to CHG/ANE in some way, but even that's a big stretch.

People sometimes give too much relevance on languages' beng agglutinative. Languages, all languages, can only be described as more or less agglutinative, fusional, analytic or polysynthetic. And agglutinative languages are in fact particularly common worldwide. Two languages being agglutinative say nothing about their really working in similar ways, far less if they are related, even if only very distantly (in fact, we know for a fact that languages that are indeed related can come to belong to different categories, for instance Egyptian itself went from agglutinative to fusional and then mostly analytic).
 
The problem to me is that there are just too completely different (and as far as we can really expect to know, unrelated between themselves) language families that are candidates for CHG/Iranian languages: Northwest Caucasian, Northeast Caucasian, Hurro-Urartian, Elamite, Dravidian, even some speculate Indo-European, Etruscan, etc. I mean, I know the genetic structure in that region was probably old, and before the Bronze Age it's quite probable that the linguistic diversity was much higher everywhere in the world, but I have a hard time believing that all of those unrelated (or, if related, with very faint connections) language families came from the same area and from quite similar population structures.

Afro-Asiatic is probably some 15,000-18,000 years old. It can't be much older than that, otherwise the connections between its subfamilies could never be safely asserted as they are, it would be too old (and therefore with too much profound linguistic divergence) to be traceable. But in my opinion AA should be found first in North/Northeast Africa, associated with E1b1b (mainly E-M78, I think) Y-DNA clades, and then, in that hypothesis, AA entered Southwest Asia right before the Natufians, with a male-biased mainly E1b1b migration (because the Mt-DNA makeup was decidedly West Eurasian), but not an equivalent autosomal impact (didn't a recent paper suggest that Natufians had some North African admixture?). But that also means that people of the Levantine-like genetic structure already spoke a language family of their own before the spread of E1b1b clades. Therefore, in my opinion a pre-AA Southwest Asian population should've existed. If they were the Sumerians, with their own Dilmun stories and stuff, I don't know, but I find it unlikely that all of the Levant and Arabia already spoke AA in the Mesolithic era. I'd associate AA spread in it with the Natufians and their later offshoots, spreading Levant_Neolithic ancestry. I don't know, but maybe Sumerians spoke a language family that had once been more widespread in Southwest Asia.

By the way, what Y-DNA haplogroups do you guys think were most common in the Levant/Southwest Asia area before the expansion of E1b1b clades? H2, T, F*? What else?

Another really intriguing thing is why on earth would Sumerians call themselves black-headed. I know Afrocentrists will say that's because they were black, butI find it unlikely they would've described themselves as those with black or dark head/top/face if they were black-skinned as a whole. What could it mean? I have read some speculate that dark-headed could indicate that they were bald, i.e. shaved their heads, so that the top of it darkened under the sun. Sounds plausible, because there are indeed many Sumerian artistic depictions of head-shaved men.

The thing about all those languages, they could be just be a huge Macrofamily. Kartvelian, Northwest Caucasian and Northeast Caucasian are actually Polyphyletic languages, meaning even if they are related to some extent, most linguists dont consider those 3 families to been genetically identical. Wich can go back to a potential very huge macrofamily ( Dené-Caucasian? ) that pre-existed most Afro-Asiatic languages in the Middle-East. I think the best match for Afro Asiatic is the Iberomaurusian origin in Natufians, something coming with y-dna E from North Africa, maybe East Africa too.

As for Sumerian being Dark Skinned, if we can " apparently " found Dark Skinned Europeans in the Middle-Age central Europe, i think they could have likely being Dark Skinned. But you are right, saying you are Dark Skinned, implies that their is Fair Skinned people alongside, to make the prior distinctions. As for Dilmun origin in Barhein, it's like asking an Iron Age Celt if he came from the Pontic Steppe. At this point, ethnic Summerian and local peoples myths could have blended. So who knows what is related to who.

About lineages, my bet goes for something G or H. But it could also be C1a2. Sadly we dont have any y-dna from the Dzudzuana " Cluster " but let's wait few years. We also have to remind that, a lot of y-dna calls lacks a shitloads of snp's, just like those middle-eastern CT, i'm pretty sure they were not CT.
 
Quotations of preprint "The Genomic Formation of South and Central Asia":

Turan (Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan)

We document a southward spread of genetic ancestry from the Eurasian Steppe, correlating with the archaeologically known expansion of pastoralist sites from the Steppe to Turan in the Middle Bronze Age (2300-1500 BCE). These Steppe communities mixed genetically with peoples of the Bactria Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC) whom they encountered in Turan(primarily descendants of earlier agriculturalists of Iran)

In the Shahnameh, the term "Turan" refers to the mainland of medieval Turks. One of Turan's main cities was named "Kang".
The name of the Sumerian population was called Kenger(Keng/Kang). The Agglutination within the Sumerian language is not the only link that ties the language to the medieval Turkish language. In fact most of the recorded Sumerian words are identical with words in the Turkish language.
The term "Kengeres" is mentioned in the Orkhon inscriptions pointing to the Kangju who lived in the area between the BMAC region and the Tien Shan(Tengri) mountains.
The Chinese sources write that the Kangju language was the same with the Xiongnu/Hun language. So, the Kangju, who spoke an early Turkish language, were actually the BMAC people who mixed(in the 2nd millennium) with the Steppe people. The same mixing happened between the 6th and 4th millennia, when the native Fertile Crescent(+Southern Caucasus +Western Iran) people(Maykop) migrated to Northern Caucasus where they met the native Steppe people and mixed(culturally and genetically).
And by the way, there is no trace of a Turkish language within Mongolia or Siberia, before the medieval period.
The religious system of Northern Mesopotamia in the Chalcolithic/Neolithic period was based on the Inanna Star, which represented the main God. In the Sumerian language this eight pointed star was mentioned as the word "Dingir", which means Tengri. So, in fact the Chalcolithic/Neolithic people in the Fertile Crescent believed in the Tengri religion. These were the people that named the Tien Shan(Tengri) mountains.

So, the question we need to ask is, if the native people of the Steppe regions spoke a proto Indo-European language(who came into the South Central Asian region late in the 2nd millennium BCE), what language did the BMAC people(natives of the region between Eastern Turkey and Western Iran) in the Turan region speak?
 
Afro-Asiatic is probably some 15,000-18,000 years old. It can't be much older than that, otherwise the connections between its subfamilies could never be safely asserted as they are, it would be too old (and therefore with too much profound linguistic divergence) to be traceable. But in my opinion AA should be found first in North/Northeast Africa, associated with E1b1b (mainly E-M78, I think) Y-DNA clades, and then, in that hypothesis, AA entered Southwest Asia right before the Natufians, with a male-biased mainly E1b1b migration (because the Mt-DNA makeup was decidedly West Eurasian), but not an equivalent autosomal impact (didn't a recent paper suggest that Natufians had some North African admixture?). But that also means that people of the Levantine-like genetic structure already spoke a language family of their own before the spread of E1b1b clades. Therefore, in my opinion a pre-AA Southwest Asian population should've existed. If they were the Sumerians, with their own Dilmun stories and stuff, I don't know, but I find it unlikely that all of the Levant and Arabia already spoke AA in the Mesolithic era. I'd associate AA spread in it with the Natufians and their later offshoots, spreading Levant_Neolithic ancestry. I don't know, but maybe Sumerians spoke a language family that had once been more widespread in Southwest Asia.

Yes, I agree with the proto Sumerian language being native to the region of the Fertile Crescent. It is most probable that the Natufians came from North Africa and brought Afro-Asiatic languages with them.

By the way, what Y-DNA haplogroups do you guys think were most common in the Levant/Southwest Asia area before the expansion of E1b1b clades? H2, T, F*? What else?

I think L and T, but I dont know where the native region of H2 is. Could H2 be the South Asian hunter gatherer population which is lately being mentioned?

Another really intriguing thing is why on earth would Sumerians call themselves black-headed. I know Afrocentrists will say that's because they were black, butI find it unlikely they would've described themselves as those with black or dark head/top/face if they were black-skinned as a whole. What could it mean? I have read some speculate that dark-headed could indicate that they were bald, i.e. shaved their heads, so that the top of it darkened under the sun. Sounds plausible, because there are indeed many Sumerian artistic depictions of head-shaved men.

In Turkey and the core of Azerbaijan, people call themselves Red-Headed(Kizil-Bash), this doesnt have to exactly indicate the color of their skin, it can also indicate the color of their hat.
In the medieval period there were Turkish tribes like "Kara-Koyunlu"(people with Black-Sheeps) and "Ak-Koyunlu"(people with White-Sheeps).
Another example is the Karakhanid(Kara-Khan) dynasty, which means people with "Black-Kings". This obviously doesnt necessarily have to be related to the color of their skin, and even if it is, it could just mean they are people with a dark skin. Didnt we see the combination of "Dark skin and Blue eyes" within the European hunter gatherers? Physical appearances of such old times should not be compared to modern day populations. By the way the Karakhanids just like the Karluks seem to be also descendants of the BMAC people like the Kangju.
 
Sumerian isn’t Turkic lol. I’d guess Elamo-Dravidian if anything.

Elamite, Dravidian and Sumerian are all too well attested - and completely unrelated as far as linguists can see (which is not much, any linguistic connection older than ~15000 years will be untraceable scientifically, the difference between actual relation and sheer, random coincidence becomes too blurred). Sumerian, though, agglutinative, was extremely different from the other known Near Eastern languages. It was mostly monosyllabic, possibly tonal (because there are too many homophones and monosyllabic words), its grammar pretty unlike that of any of its neighbors. That's why I guess it was either a remnant of a language family once spoken in a larger area and supersided by the Neolithic expansion of other language family (like Afro-Asiatic or Hurro-Urartian) - maybe it only survived in "fringe" areas like the marshy South Mesopotamia and the Gulf coast -, or it came from a region outside the Fertile Crescent.
 
In fact most of the recorded Sumerian words are identical with words in the Turkish language.

It's highly unlikely that languages that are ~3,000-4,000 years apart from each other could be compared in such a way that most of the former's words would still be identical . That doesn't sound plausible, because then, if the ~3,000-2000 B.C. Sumerian is identical to the modern Turkish language, that probably means that the two languages were extremely different back then, otherwise we'd have to assume the nearly impossible scenario where Turkish barely changed at all in more than 3,000 years. Try comparing Modern English to Proto-Germanic, spoken just ~2000-2500 years ago: most of the words won't be even very similar, let alone identical. That kind of linguistic evidence is in fact very weak. If the words were very different in Turkish and Sumerian, but could be demonstrated to follow some regular sound correspondences, it'd be a much stronger evidence.

The same mixing happened between the 6th and 4th millennia, when the native Fertile Crescent(+Southern Caucasus +Western Iran) people(Maykop) migrated to Northern Caucasus where they met the native Steppe people and mixed(culturally and genetically).

That may have happened earlier, but not during the Maykop culture, because the Greater Caucasus paper last year has already demonstrated substantially that the Maykop barely contributed to anything in the later Pontic-Caspian steppe cultures (Steppe_Maykop was basically a dead-end), particularly not in terms of patrilineal ancestry, but not even autosomally.

And by the way, there is no trace of a Turkish language within Mongolia or Siberia, before the medieval period.

But how could it be any trace of a Turkish language before the late Antiquity/medieval period? There was no written language in Mongolia or Siberia before that. Don't Chinese sources talk of Xiongnu and Tiele, who were probably references to early Turks still in the Late Antiquity? That said, I think the origins of Proto-Turkic language (I won't venture speculating about a pre-pre-Proto-Turkic millennia earlier), which is dated to some 2000-2500 years ago, should be close to the Han Chinese civilization, because Proto-Turkic was full of Old Chinese loanwords, and Old Chinese also had several Proto-Turkic borrowings. So they must've lived close enough to each other.

The religious system of Northern Mesopotamia in the Chalcolithic/Neolithic period was based on the Inanna Star, which represented the main God. In the Sumerian language this eight pointed star was mentioned as the word "Dingir", which means Tengri. So, in fact the Chalcolithic/Neolithic people in the Fertile Crescent believed in the Tengri religion. These were the people that named the Tien Shan(Tengri) mountains.

So, the question we need to ask is, if the native people of the Steppe regions spoke a proto Indo-European language(who came into the South Central Asian region late in the 2nd millennium BCE), what language did the BMAC people(natives of the region between Eastern Turkey and Western Iran) in the Turan region speak?[/QUOTE]
 
It's highly unlikely that languages that are ~3,000-4,000 years apart from each other could be compared in such a way that most of the former's words would still be identical . That doesn't sound plausible, because then, if the ~3,000-2000 B.C. Sumerian is identical to the modern Turkish language, that probably means that the two languages were extremely different back then, otherwise we'd have to assume the nearly impossible scenario where Turkish barely changed at all in more than 3,000 years. Try comparing Modern English to Proto-Germanic, spoken just ~2000-2500 years ago: most of the words won't be even very similar, let alone identical. That kind of linguistic evidence is in fact very weak. If the words were very different in Turkish and Sumerian, but could be demonstrated to follow some regular sound correspondences, it'd be a much stronger evidence.

Identical means like "Dingir" being the same as the recent word "Tengri", transforming from 'dingir' into 'tengir' into 'tengri'. Or the Sumerian word 'Ada' transforming into 'Ata'(father). 'Ama' transforming into 'Ana'(mother). So, yes, it is quite spectacular to see that so many Sumerian words are matches with medieval Turkish words.

That may have happened earlier, but not during the Maykop culture, because the Greater Caucasus paper last year has already demonstrated substantially that the Maykop barely contributed to anything in the later Pontic-Caspian steppe cultures (Steppe_Maykop was basically a dead-end), particularly not in terms of patrilineal ancestry, but not even autosomally.

Yes, Maykop is in the 4th millennium, but the culture can be traced back to earlier cultures all directing it to the root of Mesopotamia. David Reich writes in its book that Southern people made migrations into the Steppe regions starting with the 6th millennium.
Y-DNA L was found within the Maykop samples(Northern Caucasus). If you go back to 4000 BCE to the Areni-1 Cave in Southern Caucasus(Armenia) you find the archaeological traits of the oldest Kura Araxes culture. Contemporary with Maykop, going further south into the Southern Caucasus(Azerbaijan) you find the Leyla-Tepe culture. And the Leyla-Tepe culture was formed by Ubaid/Halaf migrations from Mesopotamia who invented the Kurgan culture. Y-DNA T was also found in the Steppe Maykop outlier sample, showing also migrations from Mesopotamia.
Meaning that Mesopotamian Southern movements into Northern Caucasus started quite certainly a lot earlier than the Maykop culture.

But how could it be any trace of a Turkish language before the late Antiquity/medieval period? There was no written language in Mongolia or Siberia before that.

Exactly, why do we find written Turkish sources as early as in the Neolithic / Chalcolithic / Bronze Age Mesopotamia and we dont find Turkish sources earlier than the medieval within Mongolia or Siberia?
 
Yes makes sense to speak about Maykop and Mesopotamia and Ubaid/Uruk when we dont even have ancient dna from mesopotamia. That's exactly the same story as Maykop-Yamnaya, we fooled ourselves to believe any kind of cultural link, should be a demic linked too. It was not.
 
Elamite, Dravidian and Sumerian are all too well attested - and completely unrelated as far as linguists can see (which is not much, any linguistic connection older than ~15000 years will be untraceable scientifically, the difference between actual relation and sheer, random coincidence becomes too blurred). Sumerian, though, agglutinative, was extremely different from the other known Near Eastern languages. It was mostly monosyllabic, possibly tonal (because there are too many homophones and monosyllabic words), its grammar pretty unlike that of any of its neighbors. That's why I guess it was either a remnant of a language family once spoken in a larger area and supersided by the Neolithic expansion of other language family (like Afro-Asiatic or Hurro-Urartian) - maybe it only survived in "fringe" areas like the marshy South Mesopotamia and the Gulf coast -, or it came from a region outside the Fertile Crescent.

That's a really interesting hypothesis. It does make sense that such a remnant language would show up in a place were it was exceedingly difficult to grow crops and herd animals.

Sadly, I think we won't get Mesolithic Arabian DNA anytime soon. It would be so interesting.
 
Yes makes sense to speak about Maykop and Mesopotamia and Ubaid/Uruk when we dont even have ancient dna from mesopotamia. That's exactly the same story as Maykop-Yamnaya, we fooled ourselves to believe any kind of cultural link, should be a demic linked too. It was not.

The Maykop(and their ancestors since the 6th millennium BCE) in fact did influence the Steppe people, they thaught the Steppe people the Kurgan culture.
And we have to seperate culture(archaeology and linguistics) and genetics. The Steppe people and the Mesopotamian people can have different genetic structures, but that doesnt mean that the penetrating Southerns didnt give a cultural package to the Steppe people. Influencing culturally doesnt always mean that the influenced group will change their language.

The Neolithic Steppe people spoke the Proto Indo-European language, and the Neolithic Southern people spoke the Sumerian Turkish(=Altaic) language, and it could be that after the fall of the Maykop culture, the Yamnaya formation included a minor assimilated group with a secondary language, while the main language stayed Indo-European. This is a similar system with the later Scythians, whom also was a multilingual confederation.

What could have happened is that contemporary(around 3000 - 2000 BCE) to the Yamnayans(whom migrated to East and West in the Northern regions of Western Eurasia), the Southern people(Sumerians, Kura-Araxes, BMAC) migrated to East and West in the Southern regions of Western Eurasia.
After the fall of the Sumerian period, maybe the Sumerians merged with the BMAC people(or maybe some of them stayed in the same region under new formations like the Subartu and Turukkaeans), with whom they have a common origin, and maybe they were the builders of the medieval tribes like the Kangju, Wusun, Karluk, Karakhanids, Oghuz in Central Asia.
And maybe after the fall of the Kura-Araxes period, their descendants formed the populations like the Etruscans and Phoenicians in Southern Europe.
 
Identical means like "Dingir" being the same as the recent word "Tengri", transforming from 'dingir' into 'tengir' into 'tengri'. Or the Sumerian word 'Ada' transforming into 'Ata'(father). 'Ama' transforming into 'Ana'(mother). So, yes, it is quite spectacular to see that so many Sumerian words are matches with medieval Turkish words.

Are those regular sound correspondences found in several words and then deduced as a relatively regular sound rule, or just "phonetic adaptations" to make the Sumerian word fit into the Turkish word? Can you derive the same phonetic changes in other words, or is it ad hoc? I wouldn't consider words like ada/ata and ama/ana because these and similar forms (using d/t for father and nasal consonants like m/n for mother) for father/mother are, for some uncanny reason, extremely common across many different language families. Proto-Indo-European, for example, had *amma and *atta as endearing, informal terms for "father" and "mother". Also, most importantly, does the grammar work in similar ways and using reasonably similar patterns of affixes, too? Being agglutinative is not enough. There are thousands of agglutinative languages in the world, in many distinct language families.

I have honestly searched any credible sources (written by actual linguists for professional purposes) investigating links between Sumerian and Turkish, but all I could find were texts and discussion threads very obviously made by Turkic people personally invested in proving that point, so I can't give them much credibility, especially because the claims are always based on vague things like "both are agglutinative" or in mass comparison of words without any scientific method of historical linguistics, which allows us to distinguish random sound-alikes from actual cognates, and to establish a connection that is more than "I have compared words and collected these dozens of words that look similar" (particularly considering the huge gap between them, sounding too much similar should be a warning that there's something wrong in the assumption, not the opposite). Everything I could find is pretty pseudo-scientific. Do you know anything written by actual reputable linguists?

Also, what movement of civilized Sumerians (or a people related to them), who presumably carried a lot of Levant_BA and Iranian_Chalcolithic ancestry, could explain Turkish being spoken by such a people with such a completely dissimilar lifestyle, i.e. uncivilized nomadic herders from the Volga steppe to East Siberia in the Middle Ages, and its expansion clearly seeming to come from the Altai/Mongolia area (Huns, Xiongnu, Avars etc.)? Turkic must certainly have been spoken alongside Mongolic and Tungusic speakers for quite a lot of time, because they formed a really tight Sprachbund to the point that some linguists until recently believed they were directly related (Altaic hypothesis), something that has now been debunked and instead it looks much more plausible that they came from different sources and just shared very strong areal features - which implies a long time of coexistence. Or do you think Turks only got their language when they migrated southward and occupied Central Asia (but in that case there are more than enough scientific evidences that South-Central Asia spoke Iranic languages in the Early Middle Ages), or what else?
 
The Maykop(and their ancestors since the 6th millennium BCE) in fact did influence the Steppe people, they thaught the Steppe people the Kurgan culture.
And we have to seperate culture(archaeology and linguistics) and genetics. The Steppe people and the Mesopotamian people can have different genetic structures, but that doesnt mean that the penetrating Southerns didnt give a cultural package to the Steppe people. Influencing culturally doesnt always mean that the influenced group will change their language.

The Neolithic Steppe people spoke the Proto Indo-European language, and the Neolithic Southern people spoke the Sumerian Turkish(=Altaic) language, and it could be that after the fall of the Maykop culture, the Yamnaya formation included a minor assimilated group with a secondary language, while the main language stayed Indo-European. This is a similar system with the later Scythians, whom also was a multilingual confederation.

What could have happened is that contemporary(around 3000 - 2000 BCE) to the Yamnayans(whom migrated to East and West in the Northern regions of Western Eurasia), the Southern people(Sumerians, Kura-Araxes, BMAC) migrated to East and West in the Southern regions of Western Eurasia.
After the fall of the Sumerian period, maybe the Sumerians merged with the BMAC people(or maybe some of them stayed in the same region under new formations like the Subartu and Turukkaeans), with whom they have a common origin, and maybe they were the builders of the medieval tribes like the Kangju, Wusun, Karluk, Karakhanids, Oghuz in Central Asia.
And maybe after the fall of the Kura-Araxes period, their descendants formed the populations like the Etruscans and Phoenicians in Southern Europe.

I was talking about Metallurgy. Maykop metallurgy is pen and paper the same that we found in some Yamnaya site. Wich makes me think that either Steppe people got their hand with trading on Maykop metallurgy and tried to reproduce it, or either some Maykop smith brought this tradition into Steppe.

Leyla-Teppe Kurgans dont make sense whatsoever. You have a very Middle-Eastern-like culture with a lot of Middle-Eastern components like Mudbrick Houses, Jar Burials, Metallurgy... And then you have Kurgans. They dont make sense in the middle-eastern cultural horizon and we dont found them anywhere else but Maykop and the Eurasian Steppe. Why developping Mounds, when you already have Jar-Burials. Because Jar Burials are way older, it's then make it likely that Leyla-Tepe got their Kurgans from somewhere else.

I'm not sure about the ultimate origin of Kurgans, but my gut tells me that this is not the whole story.
 
I was talking about Metallurgy. Maykop metallurgy is pen and paper the same that we found in some Yamnaya site. Wich makes me think that either Steppe people got their hand with trading on Maykop metallurgy and tried to reproduce it, or either some Maykop smith brought this tradition into Steppe.

Leyla-Teppe Kurgans dont make sense whatsoever. You have a very Middle-Eastern-like culture with a lot of Middle-Eastern components like Mudbrick Houses, Jar Burials, Metallurgy... And then you have Kurgans. They dont make sense in the middle-eastern cultural horizon and we dont found them anywhere else but Maykop and the Eurasian Steppe. Why developping Mounds, when you already have Jar-Burials. Because Jar Burials are way older, it's then make it likely that Leyla-Tepe got their Kurgans from somewhere else.

I'm not sure about the ultimate origin of Kurgans, but my gut tells me that this is not the whole story.


Looks like ( as many other things btw) kurgans came out from more western areas of the steppe the ones occupied by the farmers of CT. Relative paper:


https://www.academia.edu/1870168/Ra...n_de_l_Orient_et_la_Méditerranée_Lyon_293-306
 
I was talking about Metallurgy. Maykop metallurgy is pen and paper the same that we found in some Yamnaya site. Wich makes me think that either Steppe people got their hand with trading on Maykop metallurgy and tried to reproduce it, or either some Maykop smith brought this tradition into Steppe.

Leyla-Teppe Kurgans dont make sense whatsoever. You have a very Middle-Eastern-like culture with a lot of Middle-Eastern components like Mudbrick Houses, Jar Burials, Metallurgy... And then you have Kurgans. They dont make sense in the middle-eastern cultural horizon and we dont found them anywhere else but Maykop and the Eurasian Steppe. Why developping Mounds, when you already have Jar-Burials. Because Jar Burials are way older, it's then make it likely that Leyla-Tepe got their Kurgans from somewhere else.

I'm not sure about the ultimate origin of Kurgans, but my gut tells me that this is not the whole story.

Burial-Mounds(=Kurgans) were already present in the Fertile Crescent since the Pottery Neolithic. An example of burial ground in the Tell Sabi Abyad site:

TELL SABI ABYAD, SYRIA: DATING OF NEOLITHIC CEMETERIES
H Plug1 • J van der Plicht1,2 • P M M G Akkermans1
ABSTRACT. Late Neolithic graves excavated at Tell Sabi Abyad, Syria, have been dated by radiocarbon. This series of 46 human bone dates represents a sequence of cemeteries that is analyzed by Bayesian methodology. The dates show continuous use of the northeastern slope of the mound as a burial ground throughout the Initial Pottery Neolithic to the Halaf period.

The existence of the Fertile Crescent cultural attributes within the Kurgans of Maykop and Leyla-Tepe only shows that the origin of Kurgans are within the Fertile Crescent. So again, we should seperate genetics and culture. The Fertile Crescent people brought their culture to the Steppe regions, and the Steppe people took parts of this culture and later formed the Yamnaya which assimilated all other earlier Neolithic cultural attributes in the Steppe.
 
Well Afanasievo, likely Repin-derived, had no kurgans afaik so a Maykop introduction to the Steppe is likely.
 
Elamite, Dravidian and Sumerian are all too well attested - and completely unrelated as far as linguists can see (which is not much, any linguistic connection older than ~15000 years will be untraceable scientifically, the difference between actual relation and sheer, random coincidence becomes too blurred). Sumerian, though, agglutinative, was extremely different from the other known Near Eastern languages. It was mostly monosyllabic, possibly tonal (because there are too many homophones and monosyllabic words), its grammar pretty unlike that of any of its neighbors. That's why I guess it was either a remnant of a language family once spoken in a larger area and supersided by the Neolithic expansion of other language family (like Afro-Asiatic or Hurro-Urartian) - maybe it only survived in "fringe" areas like the marshy South Mesopotamia and the Gulf coast -, or it came from a region outside the Fertile Crescent.

Well it appears even based on their own descriptions that the Sumerians "took over" from, i.e. invaded, the Ubaidians, who very likely spoke a different language. I think they spoke Indo-European as I now think proto-Indo-European was originally a farmer language largely unrelated to Y DNA R1 which entered Europe from West Asia after the original Danubian waves and was later picked up by Sredny Stog through Cucuteni-Trypillia, but then again I don't even think Yamnaya spoke Indo-European anymore (but rather non-basal Dene-Caucasian) so I'm probably wrong lol

So where could they have come from? If Iran seems out of the question, perhaps they did in fact come from the Southern Persian Gulf region (e.g. Bahrain etc.)?
 

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