Genetic relation between Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic

Johane Derite

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I was reading this paper by Vaclar Blazek and it claims that the Indo-European laryngeals have a genetic relation to Afro-Asiatic. Example:

EVbKH4yWAAcFo4E



Full link: https://www.academia.edu/38388357/AAIElaryngeals_JLR2011.pdf
 
Improbable, but if Blazek is correct, then E1b-L618 is a good possible candidate for some pre-Proto-Indo-European branch of the Afro-Asiatic group.

These cardium agriculturalists could have linguistically assimilated r1b's and r1a's in central europe / eastern eruope as they would have been economically less powerful (neolithic E-L618 has been found in Hungary).

1) E-L618 from Zemunica cave, Dalmatia, Croatia 7,600-7,470ybp

2) E-L618 from Hungary 6,780-6,700ybp
 
gyJRbvI.png
 
Who knows, it seems E-V13's began spreading as EDIT: Yamnaya speakers. Considering Dalmatian Cardials where V13 was picked up by basal Z2103's were pretty isolated for thousands of years except some later Vinča influence they could have been speaking some AA tongue prior to IE'sation.
 
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Balkanic E-V13 is via from Anatolia or Iberia?
 
Mallory, a previous steppe proponent wrote this paper showing that the most stable cognates shared throughout all IE languages seem to refer to arable agriculture. Meaning IE progenitors should have been agriculturalists.

Maybe Yamnaya could be a later expansion of one IE dialect of people that have been linguistically assimilated earlier by farmers.

EEG33-UWsAACsTD
 
It might be some influences via some contacts. Afro-Asiatic is a very old language family. The first lingua franca was Akkadian, a member of Semitic language family. I was reading some other day words like Asia come from Akkadian, as well as the word of the continent itself Europe might be Akkadian in origin, (erubu) => west/sunset, but Greek word origin is the most widely accepted (wide faced in Greek). Personally the Akkadian version looks more catchy to me.
 
It might be some influences via some contacts. Afro-Asiatic is a very old language family. The first lingua franca was Akkadian, a member of Semitic language family. I was reading some other day words like Asia come from Akkadian, as well as the word of the continent itself Europe might be Akkadian in origin, (erubu) => west/sunset, but Greek word origin is the most widely accepted (wide faced in Greek). Personally the Akkadian version looks more catchy to me.


The type of relation Blazek is suggesting is genetic, not from contact. (set of 80 words, with IE laryngeals matching Afro-Asiatic ones).

Akkadian is a branch of Semitic. Proto-Semitic is reconstructed around 6,000 years before present. E-L618 would have left levant/israel 2000 years before even proto-semitic existed (whether it was closer to proto-semitic or proto-egyptian).

Epirus and Corfu having early cardium presence is interesting as Epirus is traditionally associated through the Dodona oracle with the Pelasgians, who supposedly the greeks learnt those religious notions from.
 
The type of relation Blazek is suggesting is genetic, not from contact. (set of 80 words, with IE laryngeals matching Afro-Asiatic ones).

Akkadian is a branch of Semitic. Proto-Semitic is reconstructed around 6,000 years before present. E-L618 would have left levant/israel 2000 years before even proto-semitic existed (whether it was closer to proto-semitic or proto-egyptian).

Epirus and Corfu having early cardium presence is interesting as Epirus is traditionally associated through the Dodona oracle with the Pelasgians, who supposedly the greeks learnt those religious notions from.

My point with Akkadian wasn't so related to the topic, sorry. I have a feeling that E-M78 subclades are Afro-Asiatic, and the Natufian variants were not instead.

I don't have any opinion on this mysterious ancient populations. We really need a good paper covering all ages in the Balkans just to settle down this saga. :p
 
a detail: I suppose body and family vocabulary (and some basic verbs and adjectives) are more relevant than technical/economical vocabulary; if agriculture had been adopted by PIE's from an Anatolian or SouthCaucasus pop, what is not so amazing, this precise (stable ot not) lexicon could vey possibly show affinities between both groups of languages. Just a superficial remark. I have to read the paper.
 
"Improbable" is the right word (#2). The paper focuses too narrowly on laryngeals. For a more probable origin of PIE, perhaps look further east to Lake Baikal. Paleogenetics, archaeology and historical linguistics can be combined to paint a plausible picture of Central East Asian origins.

Archaeologists have identified the Mal'ta-Buret' culture, with it's distinctive "Venus figurines", located near Lake Baikal with a time horizon of 24-15 kya. The subsequent (and related) Afontova Gora culture has a time horizon of 21-12 kya.

Paleogenetics has identified the ANE genetic signature of these cultures, and shown that ANE expanded across Eurasia and the Americas over the following thousands of years.

Twenty years ago, before ANE had been identified, the linguist Greenberg suggested that "the Eurasiatic-Amerind family represents a relatively recent expansion (circa 15 kya) into territory opened up by the melting of the Arctic ice cap." Greenberg's proposed Eurasiatic macro family included Indo-European, Uralic, Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Eskimo-Aleut and Chukchi-Kamchatkan. His proposed expansion of Eurasiatic-Amerind parallels the expansion of ANE ancestry.

Mal'ta Boy, whose Y haplogroup was R*, maybe spoke proto-Eurasiatic-Amerind. He died at estimated age of 12, so is unlikely to be the ancestor of anybody, but his father or uncles may have been the Y ancestors of R1a and R1b, and probably spoke a language ancestral to PIE.
 
It would be very hard to establish a chain of languages from PIE(which is not very old) all the way back to Mal'ta
 
It would be very hard to establish a chain of languages from PIE(which is not very old) all the way back to Mal'ta

I agree, it would be hard, so it's only an hypothesis that some would call speculative. It's partly based on the father tongue hypothesis: language tends to correlate with Y haplogroups because males tended towards endogamy whilst females tended towards exogamy. So, since Mal'ta Boy was R*, ancestral to R1a and R1b, then his language was probably ancestral to PIE.

Greenberg reconstructed proto-languages and then grouped them into macro families based on similarities in vocabularies. He played a large role in grouping the 1,500 African languages into just four macro families that are widely accepted today. His Eurasiatic and Amerind proposals were not so widely accepted by many linguists because his comparative methods were criticized as unorthodox and imprecise. However, paleogenetics has since lent some support to his proposals, with the discovery of ANE and its prevalence in EHG and the indigenous peoples of the Americas.
 
I agree, it would be hard, so it's only an hypothesis that some would call speculative. It's partly based on the father tongue hypothesis: language tends to correlate with Y haplogroups because males tended towards endogamy whilst females tended towards exogamy. So, since Mal'ta Boy was R*, ancestral to R1a and R1b, then his language was probably ancestral to PIE.

Greenberg reconstructed proto-languages and then grouped them into macro families based on similarities in vocabularies. He played a large role in grouping the 1,500 African languages into just four macro families that are widely accepted today. His Eurasiatic and Amerind proposals were not so widely accepted by many linguists because his comparative methods were criticized as unorthodox and imprecise. However, paleogenetics has since lent some support to his proposals, with the discovery of ANE and its prevalence in EHG and the indigenous peoples of the Americas.

If the SE Asian origin of K2b is true shouldn't we also say ANE spoke a language derived from something similar to Austronesian or Austroasiatic languages?
 
If the SE Asian origin of K2b is true shouldn't we also say ANE spoke a language derived from something similar to Austronesian or Austroasiatic languages?

Austronesian and Austroasiatic are considered to be more recent language families than the Mal'ta era, and are probably associated with the expansion of rice horticulture from South China after 7,000 BCE.

Personally I favour an Indo-Iranian origin for K2b about 50,000 years ago. I think it's possible that one branch reached Siberia by the northern route of the Eurasian steppes.

Language family origins become even more speculative when you go back that far, but some linguists group Eurasiatic-Amerind within the wider macro family of Nostratic that includes Dravidian, Kartvelian and (returning to the topic of this thread) Afro-Asiatic. If the Mal'ta people spoke proto-Eurasiatic-Amerind, then proto-Nostratic was even older according to that hypothesis, maybe spoken in Iran over 30,000 years ago.
 
Austronesian and Austroasiatic are considered to be more recent language families than the Mal'ta era, and are probably associated with the expansion of rice horticulture from South China after 7,000 BCE.

Personally I favour an Indo-Iranian origin for K2b about 50,000 years ago. I think it's possible that one branch reached Siberia by the northern route of the Eurasian steppes.

Language family origins become even more speculative when you go back that far, but some linguists group Eurasiatic-Amerind within the wider macro family of Nostratic that includes Dravidian, Kartvelian and (returning to the topic of this thread) Afro-Asiatic. If the Mal'ta people spoke proto-Eurasiatic-Amerind, then proto-Nostratic was even older according to that hypothesis, maybe spoken in Iran over 30,000 years ago.

What do you mean by Indo-Iranian origin of K2b? You mean an origin between modern Iran and India? What's you reasoning? So would the first K2b have been some sort of Crown Eurasian that then contributed to West Eurasians (becoming P) and East Eurasians (becoming M).
 
What do you mean by Indo-Iranian origin of K2b? You mean an origin between modern Iran and India? What's you reasoning? So would the first K2b have been some sort of Crown Eurasian that then contributed to West Eurasians (becoming P) and East Eurasians (becoming M).

What's this Crown Eurasian concept you're using?
 
What's this Crown Eurasian concept you're using?

If I'm not mistaken it refers to the undifferentiated Eurasians (to the exclusion of basal eurasians) ancestral to both West and East Eurasians. I've also seen Use-Ishim and Oase referred to as Crown Eurasian.
 
What do you mean by Indo-Iranian origin of K2b? You mean an origin between modern Iran and India? What's you reasoning? So would the first K2b have been some sort of Crown Eurasian that then contributed to West Eurasians (becoming P) and East Eurasians (becoming M).

I think the SE Asian origin of K2b is far from certain, it's mainly based on the haplogroups of modern populations. My hypothesis is that the origin was further west in India or Iran. There's no direct evidence for this, but my reasoning is that haplogroup F must have diversified fairly quickly between about 55 and 50 kya, leading to GHIJK, then HIJK, then IJK, then IJ and K. Before 47 kya K had diversified further to L, K2a, K2b and subclades of K2b (such as K2b1 in Sahul).

What's interesting about haplogroup K2 is that by 40 kya it had become very widespread from Europe to Sahul. The other haplogroups that descended from F, such as G, H, IJ and L seem to be less widespread at that stage. The only other Y haplogroup that was similarly widespread from Europe to Sahul at that time was C, particularly C1.

My admittedly speculative theory is that C1 and K2 (including K2a and K2b) co-migrated widely in HG bands that were not pure but mixed in their Y haplogroups. An example of this would be the initial settlement of Australia (Sahul) sometime before 47 kya. Since it involved an ocean crossing, the founding population must have been small, but it apparently had mixed haplogroups, including K2*, K2b1 and C1b2.

K2a was present early on in western Siberia (Ust'-Ishim 45 kya) and Europe (Oase 40 kya), suggesting an origin in Iran or western India, then a migration north to the Kirghiz Steppe. It's possible K2b diverged from basal K2* at a similar time and place as K2a, and that some subclades of K2b co-migrated north with K2a. Even the K2b in North China (Tianyuan) may have arrived via the steppe route rather than via SE Asia. Obviously at least one subclade of K2b did migrate to Sahul via SE Asia though.
 

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