Ygorcs
Active member
- Messages
- 2,259
- Reaction score
- 812
- Points
- 0
- Ethnic group
- Multiracial Brazilian
This seems to be basically what Reich suggests, but he places the original PIE homeland just south of the Caucasus rather than just north of the Caucasus.
What I find implausible about Reich's South Caucasus hypothesis is that PIE clearly spread and diverged at least as late as the Copper Age, but the South Caucasus and even, in fact, the North Caucasus were already packed with ANF and some Iran_Neolithic ancestry by that time, but very little EHG admixture, whereas the PIE expansion seems to be related with a much more Progress or Vonyuchka-like genetic profile, that is, a mix of a "pure" CHG-related people with a lot of EHG-related people (in fact, the steppe admixture in most Europeans have more EHG than the average Yamnaya and Progress/Vonyuchka, suggesting some dilution from mixing with Sredny Stog II and Late Khvalynsk-like groups before spreading to other parts of Europe). Therefore, I still think a steppe origin just north of the Caucasus is more likely.
And the presence of some small percentage of Progress/Vonyuchka-like admixture virtually everywhere in West Asia from Chalcolithic Anatolia to Chalcolithic Turkmenistan is really intriguing for me, though it could be explained by something else, like a higher than average ANE influence in those lands from older times (but it could also mean ancestry from a people with very similar genetic history to those presumably early PIE speakers in the Caucasus piedmont).