
Originally Posted by
Angela
As I said, population geneticists, in general, don't pay any attention to archaeology. The internet community is worse. That, and their own prejudices are why for so long, in the face of overwhelming archaeological data, it was argued that the Etruscans were recent migrants from the Near East. How did that turn out?
The same is true for the whole Indo European question. Corded Ware was NEVER a good fit archaeologically or culturally for the original Indo-Europeans. That was consistently ignored, no matter all the covering of you know what that is currently going on.
As someone else mentioned, the Ydna was also very different.
In terms of the genetics, Haak was six years ago, and there were subsequent genetics papers which gave hints as to the reality of the situation. Plus, Haak, based on the samples they had, proposed that, as you said, Corded Ware was 75% Yamnaya "like". It was people like Kristiansen and the internet community who turned that into "they're virtually identical". That's a very different thing.
I also don't see and never saw why people being genetically 75% similar necessarily meant that one "formed" the other. The most parsimonious explanation, it seemed to me, absent evidence of migration in the archaeology, was that they were formed from originally similar stock but were then influenced themselves by different migrations or admixtures, i.e. in the case of Yamnaya, with people who were CHG/Iranian farmer "like". As I also pointed out ad nauseam over the years, to the usual hysterical response, that's where the burial practices came from, and a lot of their cultural indices. Again, you had to pay attention to the damn archaeology. For goodness sakes, how could a horse riding or, more likely, horse taming and herding culture have formed in the midst of a forest? Horses were ideal for the flat steppe lands with their sparse vegetation. No wonder you can barely find horse remains in the early Corded Ware burial sites.
Yamnaya people were 40-60% CHG/Iranian farmer. Yet Corded Ware was not like that. Clearly, they couldn't be "identical", even if Kristiansen wanted to see it that way, and certainly the archaeological artifacts were not identical.
I mean, just the graphics provided in the paper are extremely telling, are they not? These were two separate groups with a different ecology, different lifestyles, and a different culture. As I repeated ad nauseam, they "present" very differently archaeologically.
Yes, they shared dna, because they were adjacent groups on the steppe, but I have never leaned toward the idea that the founders and formers of the "Indo-European" package came from forest "steppe" people. As I've been saying for ten years, imo they were "Indo-Europeanized".
In addition, it always seemed ridiculous to me to think that the steppe could have supported a horde of people who migrated into Central Europe. Far more likely that a lot of them came from the forested areas north of the actual steppe.
If you can quote me something from the paper that negates that, please do so. As I said, I haven't yet gone over the paper and supplement with a fine tooth comb.
As for R1a, I'm quite aware that it was old in Russia, but it seems likely to me that it had nothing to do with the genesis of the Indo-European culture, as I would have thought was more than hinted at given the difference in the yDna.
The modern "Slavic" R1a is, if I'm reading the paper correctly, a "very" late arrival to Indo-Europeanization.
This raises an interesting question about the ancient Greeks. If the samples of the first Bronze Age arrivals turn out to be R1b-Z2103, then the migration was indeed from the steppe, not the forested areas north of the steppe, and had nothing to do with Corded Ware.
When Eurogenes came on this site to argue with me, well, really to insult me and call my opinions stupid nonsense, I told him that you could fill the phone book of a small city with all his wrong predictions and opinions, as could also be said of the people at anthrogenica, and that I would turn out to be right far more often than he (they) would. I stand by that. Anyone trying to come to valid conclusions from data has to start out by being as objective as possible in following that data, not operating from confirmation bias.