Ancient genomics support deep divergence between Eastern and Western Mediterranean Indo-European languages

Omino

Omino

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Y-DNA haplogroup
J2a
Abstract
"The Indo-European languages are among the most widely spoken in the world, yet their early diversification remains contentious (1-5). It is widely accepted that the spread of this language family across Europe from the 5th millennium BP correlates with the expansion and diversification of steppe-related genetic ancestry from the onset of the Bronze Age (6,7). However, multiple steppe-derived populations co-existed in Europe during this period, and it remains unclear how these populations diverged and which provided the demographic channels for the ancestral forms of the Italic, Celtic, Greek, and Armenian languages (8,9). To investigate the ancestral histories of Indo-European-speaking groups in Southern Europe, we sequenced genomes from 314 ancient individuals from the Mediterranean and surrounding regions, spanning from 5,200 BP to 2,100 BP, and co-analysed these with published genome data. We additionally conducted strontium isotope analyses on 224 of these individuals. We find a deep east-west divide of steppe ancestry in Southern Europe during the Bronze Age. Specifically, we show that the arrival of steppe ancestry in Spain, France, and Italy was mediated by Bell Beaker (BB) populations of Western Europe, likely contributing to the emergence of the Italic and Celtic languages. In contrast, Armenian and Greek populations acquired steppe ancestry directly from Yamnaya groups of Eastern Europe. These results are consistent with the linguistic Italo-Celtic (10, 11) and Graeco-Armenian (1, 12, 13) hypotheses accounting for the origins of most Mediterranean Indo-European languages of Classical Antiquity. Our findings thus align with specific linguistic divergence models for the Indo-European language family while contradicting others. This underlines the power of ancient DNA in uncovering prehistoric diversifications of human populations and language communities".

www.biorxiv.org

Ancient genomics support deep divergence between Eastern and Western Mediterranean Indo-European languages

The Indo-European languages are among the most widely spoken in the world, yet their early diversification remains contentious[1][1]–[5][2]. It is widely accepted that the spread of this language family across Europe from the 5th millennium BP correlates with the expansion and diversification of...
www.biorxiv.org www.biorxiv.org
 
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We’ve known it for a while but now it’s official Armenian and Greek are directly linked to the Yamnaya culture while Italic and Celtic are Bell Beaker derived.
 
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The later Eastern Steppe derives its ancestry from Corded Ware, not directly from Yamnaya (Western Steppe). This is surprising.
 
Anfänger said:
We’ve known it for a while but now it’s official Armenian and Greek are directly linked to the Yamnaya culture while Italic and Celtic are Bell Beaker derived.
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R1b-heavy versus R1a-heavy?
 
Vallicanus said:
R1b-heavy versus R1a-heavy?
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Both are R1b heavy but of different subclades Italo-Celtic R1b-L51 and Greco-Armenian R1b-Z2103. This study has the first R1b-Z2103 from Bronze Age Greece.

I am quite surprised that language switch to Indo-European in Bronze Age Greece came from these few R1bs.

By the way, I just noticed also a J2b-L283. This further proves this haplogroups link to Yamnaya.
 
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https://twitter.com/x/status/1863962917911359743

"Another non-local from Coppa Nevigata genetically can be distinguished from the other Italian individuals by carrying Yamnaya-related steppe ancestry and Mediterranean farmer proportion similar to the Aegean/Balkans."

That's Puglia, btw. :)
 
Another "bikini" article - What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.
Steppe ancestry is just a derived spin-off of the Southern movements to the North and the Indo-European original formation can only be investigated with new samples from the South (Eastern Anatolia, Caucasus, Armenia, Caspian Sea, Iran, Mesopotamia), before the creation of the admixed steppe ancestry, before 6000 BCE in the CIHG movements from the South to the North (and vice-versa after the CIHG-EHG-steppe admixtured populations also moving from the North to the South as already admixed groups).
 
An intriguing discovery has been made in the Bronze Age tombs at Vounous Bellapais, Cyprus, where archaeologists uncovered the remains of a Scandinavian man with haplogroup I1. Following the findings of Baltic samples in Himera, this adds to the evidence of potential mercenaries from the Far North. It appears that Bronze Age Greeks engaged not only with the Levant and Anatolia but also had interactions with Northern Europe.


During the subsequent Iron Age, data from both
373 Lapithos and Amathus suggest an increasingly uniform population across the island.
374 Moreover, Iron Age genomes show a formation similar to populations of the Aegean and
375 Western Anatolia Iron Age, carrying a small proportion of Yamnaya ancestry which reflects
376 Greece ancestry (Fig. 6). Additionally, there is genetic evidence of long-distance interaction
377 with Northern Europe, as seen in a Scandinavian genetic outlier (CGG_2_022535) from a
378 rock-cut tomb at Vounous Bellapais, excavated by the Swedish-Cyprus expedition and dated
379 to c. 4,000–3,800 BP. (Genetics and Strontium Supplementary Fig. S6.45, Archaeology
380 Supplementary 2.2.7). This outlier clusters with Scandinavian Bronze Age individuals and,
381 intriguingly, this origin is also supported by the Y-haplogroup I1 and by a non-local highly
382 radiogenic strontium isotope signature compatible with some parts of Scandinavia (Genetics
383 and Strontium Supplementary S10; Supplementary Table S8).
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Pdf p. 15
www.biorxiv.org

Ancient genomics support deep divergence between Eastern and Western Mediterranean Indo-European languages

The Indo-European languages are among the most widely spoken in the world, yet their early diversification remains contentious (1-5). It is widely accepted that the spread of this language family across Europe from the 5th millennium BP correlates with the expansion and diversification of...
www.biorxiv.org www.biorxiv.org
 
I looked up the supplementary material on page 51, and if I'm not mistaken, the authors attribute a second steppe invasion to Greece
to a Corded Ware source, following the initial Yamnaya one in 2200 BC. And two Bronze Age Greeks clustered with BA Scandinavians.
Cyprus

To model individuals from Cyprus, we used East_Set6 and Yamnaya (East_steppe_Set1; Supplementary Table S4) and CWC (East_steppe_Set3; Supplementary Table S4). The model with Iran and Caucasus populations revealed that the earliest individual from Cyprus dated to 4,300 BP showed farmer ancestry while the rest of the individuals showed multiple population structures. One group is similar to Anatolia and Levant Bronze Age populations (Tepecik+Caucasus/Iran), while the second group shows the same pattern with Western Anatolian Iron Age individuals (Tepecik+Caucasus+Barçın+Yamnaya), and a few individuals carry a higher proportion of Ukraine Meso/Neolithic, which indicates steppe-related ancestry potentially from Europe (Fig. S6.45). When we added two steppe sources, Yamnaya and CWC respectively, this variation became clearer, showing two steppe outliers (CGG_2_022534; CGG_2_022535) carrying CWC ancestry (Fig. S6.45; Supplementary Table S5). These individuals are also clustered with Scandinavian Bronze Age individuals. Another group shows the Aegean/Balkan signature by showing a mixed pattern of both steppe sources, and the other group resembles Eastern Anatolian/Levantine Bronze Age, showing increased Iran ancestry. Among two outliers with the highest steppe proportion, we cautiously report that one of them (CGG_2_022534) has no reliable context information, and might be from somewhere else. The other one has no direct carbon dating (Archaeology Supplementary 2.2). Interestingly, the Bronze Age individuals from Hala Sultan Tekke show three different admixture patterns; similar to Balkan/Greece, Anatolia Bronze Age, and Lebanon Bronze Age (Fig. S6.42). Further, we investigated Anatolian contribution to Cyprus and Levant Bronze/Iron Age by applying Anatolia Chalcolithic/Bronze sources populations (Fig. S6.46; S6.47). The model with Arslantepe individuals completely modelled Levant populations except the Iron Age and later period individuals who received steppe proportion (Fig. S6.47; Supplementary Table S5). The model with Central and Western Anatolian Chalcolithic/Bronze modelled Cyprus Bronze Age individuals better than Arslantepe and Çamlibel sources (Fig. S6.46; Supplementary Table S5). The individuals with steppe ancestry modelled both with Yamnaya and Bell Beaker. Whereas two Scandinavian outliers are modelled with Bell Beaker, the rest are modelled with Yamnaya, similarly Greece Bronze Age individuals (Fig. S6.46; Supplementary Table S5).
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real expert said:
I looked up the supplementary material on page 51, and if I'm not mistaken, the authors attribute a second steppe invasion to Greece
to a Corded Ware source, following the initial Yamnaya one in 2200 BC.
Click to expand...

Yes, this is from the supplementary material p.32:

Greece

... we observed a sharp change in the Bronze Age in which the introduction of steppe ancestry in individuals between 4200 BP and 3800 BP (Greek Middle Helladic and Middle Bronze Age) differs from the later period samples corresponding to the Mycenaean period (LBA: 3,700 BP–3,200 BP) that have a higher steppe proportion.

In addition to model EU_Set1, we built source sets to model Greece Bronze Age specifically. In Greece_Set1, we replaced the farmer source with Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age populations from the Peloponnese and kept only Yamnaya as steppe source and also added GAC (Fig. S6.18; Greece_Set1; Supplementary Tables S4 and S5). In this model, we observed an elevated CHG proportion after ~3,600 BP, then we added an eastern source which is Anatolian Chalcolithic (Çamlibel) who already possessed the CHG proportion. The Greece_Set2 revealed that the Anatolian Chalcolithic source completely replaced the CHG proportion in Greece Bronze Age individuals (Fig. S6.18). Then we added CWC individuals and observed the same pattern with Greece_Set2 except with a few individuals (Fig. S6.18). In the model with two steppe sources (Yamnaya, CWC in Greece_Set3; Fig. S6.18; Supplementary Tables S4 and S5), we also detected a small proportion of CWC in a few individuals with lower error bars. Potential explanatory scenarios for this could include another steppe source from an unsampled steppe population or interaction with populations from Central Eastern Europe. Another explanation is that we could not find the right farmer source for those individuals. However, when we added BB groups, a small BB proportion in one individual from Kirrha (CGG_2_022403, ~3,800 BP) indicates a contact with the populations from the Balkan Bronze Age that exhibit a mix of BB and Yamnaya proportions (Fig. S6.19; Supplementary Table S5). This individual is also shown in the PCA plot shifting towards the Balkan cline, and clustered with Hungarian Bronze Age individuals.
 
Late Bronze Age northern Italics and iron age populations like the Picenes will also be Yamnaya heavy, similar to the illyrians. Their proportion of neolithic Caucasian ancestry is much heavier than bell beaker descended types such as the latins/etruscans proper. It necessitates an origin from the balkans or carpathian basin.

The idea of there being fundamentally two different types of ancestry profiles concerning Steppe neolithic to Caucasian neolithic ratios is something I've mentioned more than a few times. Even excluding transaegean population exchanges in greece and southern Italy, Southern Europe was receiving a heavier dosage of Caucasian input through Yamnaya. If this weren't the case, northern Italy would look much more like France or maybe Spain instead of Iron age Illyria/Paeonia/Thrace. There was fundamentally at some point a mass replacement of the EBA bell beaker type profiles we see in Po Valley and the Italian Alps with Yamnaya derived introgression which seemingly did not cut deeply into the center of the peninsula until the end of late antiquity and the middle ages.
 
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Vitruvius said:
Late Bronze Age northern Italics and iron age populations like the Picenes will also be Yamnaya heavy, similar to the illyrians. Their proportion of neolithic Caucasian ancestry is much heavier than bell beaker descended types such as the latins/etruscans proper. It necessitates an origin from the balkans or carpathian basin.

The idea of there being fundamentally two different types of ancestry profiles concerning Steppe neolithic to Caucasian neolithic ratios is something I've mentioned more than a few times. Even excluding transaegean population exchanges in greece and southern Italy, Southern Europe was receiving a heavier dosage of Caucasian input through Yamnaya. If this weren't the case, northern Italy would look much more like France or maybe Spain instead of Iron age Illyria/Paeonia/Thrace. There was fundamentally at some point a mass replacement of the EBA bell beaker type profiles we see in Po Valley and the Italian Alps with Yamnaya derived introgression which seemingly did not cut deeply into the center of the peninsula until the end of late antiquity and the middle ages.
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Quite a few ancient calculators give me Illyrian.
 
Vallicanus said:
Quite a few ancient calculators give me Illyrian.
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Autosomally their admixture proportions are identical to Northern Italians. The two ethnic groups almost certainly originate from either a common or genetically related set of populations in the bronze age that ended up later dividing.
 
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