Tamakore
Regular Member
- Messages
- 181
- Reaction score
- 62
- Points
- 28
- Location
- Wellington
- Ethnic group
- Maori Irish French Scottish English
- Y-DNA haplogroup
- R1b-L21 DF5>BY154246
- mtDNA haplogroup
- J1c3b2
Origins
When considering the origins of R1b, R1a and PIE, it seems to me that paleogenetics, archaeology and historical linguistics can be combined to paint a plausible picture of East Asian (or 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.
What I would like to know is, why were the early ANE (Mal'ta-Buret') people apparently so successful? In the unpromising environment of Central Siberia in the depths of the last Ice Age they thrived and expanded whilst some other populations were huddling in refugia. Siberian winters are cold enough now, imagine how cold they were 20,000 years ago during the LGM. Did they devise techniques for hunting mammoths and reindeer that were just better than anybody else's, allowing their population to grow and migrate? The degree of ANE ancestry in many populations today suggests that they did grow faster than most other hunter-gatherer populations of their day.
When considering the origins of R1b, R1a and PIE, it seems to me that paleogenetics, archaeology and historical linguistics can be combined to paint a plausible picture of East Asian (or 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.
What I would like to know is, why were the early ANE (Mal'ta-Buret') people apparently so successful? In the unpromising environment of Central Siberia in the depths of the last Ice Age they thrived and expanded whilst some other populations were huddling in refugia. Siberian winters are cold enough now, imagine how cold they were 20,000 years ago during the LGM. Did they devise techniques for hunting mammoths and reindeer that were just better than anybody else's, allowing their population to grow and migrate? The degree of ANE ancestry in many populations today suggests that they did grow faster than most other hunter-gatherer populations of their day.