Aberdeen;443000] ANE may tell us less than we'd hoped about the IE dispersal in Eastern Europe, simply because ANE was already present in Eastern Europe before the Bronze Age. Whereas it presumably wasn't present in Western Europe until the spread of R1b. So I'm not sure it's helpful to compare ANE levels in Basques and Lithuanians in order to try to figure out anything about the Indo-European dispersal.
I agree that it's not going to be as informative a "marker" as we'd hoped, especially as Reich and company are having problems figuring out how much was present in the Ancient Karelians, and I don't know if they'd be able to figure out if any ANE remained from the SHGs.
As for the idea that the replacement of earlier languages by IE languages in Europe happened in many cases during the Iron Age, history already tells us that. But, IMO, that calls into question the idea that IE folk raced across Europe on horseback to create the massive amounts of R1b in Atlantic Europe. IMO, either that happened during the Iron Age or Atlantic R1b arrived during the late Neolithic and wasn't IE.
Hopefully, the Samarra paper should be able to tell us if the yDna in Yamnaya included R1a and R1b or not. For all we know, other people are testing Yamnaya remains as well.
Wherever R1a and R1b were, I don't think they could have been too separated spatially. Also from Razib Khan's blog:
" One showed a
Bayesian skyline plot which illustrated that many of the Y chromosomal lineages you know and love went through very rapid population expansion on the order of 5 to 10 thousand years ago. A second poster had a phylogeny of Y chromosomes derived from high coverage whole genome sequencing. They had four individuals from the R1 lineages, two of them from R1a1a. One individual was Indian and the other was Russian. The coalescence was ~5,000 years ago. The individual who did this analysis was not aware of the Bayesian skyline plot poster, so she immediately ran off to look at it when I told her. The coalescence with R1b for the R1a individuals was ~10,000 years ago."
I could see both of them on the steppe, perhaps with R1a slightly north of R1b. However, there are other possibilities. Perhaps R1b was more toward the Caucasus and also a bit south of the Caucasus (We certainly have R1b V88 south of the Caucasus, although that split off earlier.) and R1a initially just north of the Caucasus. Whether R1b headed west earlier, I don't know.
Aberdeen: I think that if someone wants to plot modern population groups based on older groups, it should be based on WHG, EEF, EHG and West Asian, while recognizing that the latter two both included ANE.
My proposal was WHG, EHG, and an early Near Eastern farmer (when we get a good sample), plus ANE. You may be right, and ANE won't prove as helpful as a category, and shouldn't be part of the model, although we'd have to keep in mind that EHG contained "lots" of ANE. Now that you bring it up, I do think that EEF is important as a category as well, as that gives us a way to track the movement of groups like LBK all through Europe. I think we agree that the model will change. The Lazardis paper said that it would change as they got more ancient samples. The important one will be getting a good quality sample for one of the first Near Eastern farmers, hopefully before they set sail for Europe. At the same time, different models are helpful for tracking different population movements. What we have to get our heads around is that there's been admixture upon admixture in western Eurasia, jumbling up the genes so that disentangling it is very difficult.
I guess my problem with referring to EHG as Karelians is that modern Karelians are a linguistic group who speak a language that didn't yet exist when Proto-IE was being developed.
Maybe the entire area from near Finland to the Black Sea and east from there was populated by ancient Karelian type people. Uralic languages and Indo-European languages developed near each other, Uralic to the north and Indo-European in the rest of the area.
Aberdeen...the dominance of IE in Europe seems to have been created by the Celtic expansion, the Greek colonization of Italy, the Roman Empire, the creation of the German language and subsequent German expansion and the Slavic expansion. The first two are a mixture of Bronze Age and Iron Age and the last three are Iron Age events.
Again, we agree here. I even think we've already discussed it on this site. It has always seemed to me that a lot of this changed very late, especially in terms of language. When the Romans conquered Iberia, a huge chunk of it was still not speaking Indo-European languages. Even genetically, that central European signal into Iberia is dated to around 2,000 BC. The genetics of southern Italy was heavily impacted, perhaps, by Greek colonization starting around, what, 800 BC? What about the impact of the various Gothic tribes and Lombard tribes on Central Europe and perhaps eastern Europe? (By the time they got to Italy and Spain, it seems that they were too few in number and too admixed to have made much of an autosomal impact.)Then we have changes genetically going on in certain parts of Europe into the early Medieval period, i.e. Anglo-Saxons and then Vikings into Britain. Then look at the huge impact the Slavic migrations had on the Balkans and east into places like Germany perhaps. The paper that included the "Thracian" individuals showed that we still had groups of very "Otzi" like people living among very IR1 steppe nomad like people
very late in European history.
I know you didn't raise this issue, but as to this "catchphrase" about the revenge of the hunter-gatherers, I'm afraid it misses the point. Had the H/G's of Europe not adopted agriculture, whether through incorporation into EEF communities or admixture with EEF communities, or because they were later "Indo-Europeanized" and therefore learned farming and herding (which after all is an outgrowth of farming) along with getting an infusion of some new genes, they would have wound up as few in number and as isolated as the SAAMI. Once they did adopt it, their numbers were able to increase. Now, how many of the HG's in far northeastern and far northwestern refugia came south over thousands of years in a sort of steady drip, how many were incorporated in far eastern Europe and came west with the Indo-Europeans, and how many came into Central and northwestern Europe via the Goths etc. (and how admixed they were by that time) in the early medieval period, I don't know.
