How did I2a-Din get to the Balkans?

[Ike]

It only confirms I2a-Din is also found in substantial amounts in non-slavophone communities, but we knew that already from Romania and Moldova.

How do we know that? How are you sure that I2a-Din of that area didn't speak Slavic language, before they were Romanized?

The fact that R1a is found much less in Vlachs than in the Balkans in General and that I2a-Din is found in the same frequency is all the evidence you need that I2a Din was NOT brought to the Balkans by the Slavs.

Exactly, but only if it is the same. My only question is about that I-M170. Do we have more data on that? It could be all different clade...

 

[sparkey]

There is a study done on Vlach Y Dna and mtDNA you can find here

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1469-1809.2005.00251.x/full

They did sampling for 5 different Vlach populations in the Balkans, I calculated the averages for these 5 populations, here is the "Vlach Average" for the sampled populations. I won't post the whole table you can find it in the study.

[TABLE="width: 128"]
[TR]
[TD="class: xl63, width: 64"]
[TABLE="width: 340"]
[TR]
[TD]Y-chromosome (N)
[/TD]
[TD]Vlach Average
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]I-M170
[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]23.36%
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]J2-M172
[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]23.28%
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]R1b-PN25
[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]22.84%
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]E3b1-M78
[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]15.58%
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]R1a1-M17
[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]7.62%
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]G-M201
[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]3.46%
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]K(xP)-M9
[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]1.90%
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]C-RPS4Y711
[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]0.96%
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]J(x2)-12f2
[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]0.52%
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]E3b2-M81
[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]0.46%
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]E1-M33
[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]0.00%
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]E3b3-M123
[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]0.00%
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]H-M69
[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]0.00%
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]R1*-M173×(R1a,R1b)
[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]0.00%

[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
[/TD]
[TD="width: 64"][/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: xl63, width: 64"][/TD]
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[/TR]
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[/TR]
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[TD="align: right"][/TD]
[/TR]
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[TD="align: right"][/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
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[TD="align: right"][/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: xl63, width: 64"][/TD]
[TD="align: right"][/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: xl63, width: 64"][/TD]
[TD="align: right"][/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: xl63, width: 64"][/TD]
[TD="align: right"][/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="class: xl63, width: 64"][/TD]
[TD="align: right"][/TD]
[/TR]
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[TD="align: right"][/TD]
[/TR]
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[TD="class: xl63, width: 64"][/TD]
[TD="align: right"][/TD]
[/TR]
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[TD="class: xl63, width: 64"][/TD]
[TD="align: right"][/TD]
[/TR]
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[TD="align: right"][/TD]
[/TR]
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[TD="align: right"][/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]

Thanks for this, although I'm concerned that the "AAA" (Aromuns from Andon Poci in Albania) population is showing too much of an internal founder effect to be helpful when added to an average. Not just their Haplogroup I, but their R1b as well, are atypically high at the expense of other haplogroups. Take a look at the median joining network graph in the same paper. See how the AAA colors make big circles? That's because almost all Haplogroup I and R1b in the AAA population are very closely related. It's like almost the whole tribe descends from two fairly recent guys, one who carried Haplogroup I and one who carried R1b.

"AMK" also is a bit troubling if you want to make points about I2a-Din, as many of their Haplogroup I samples cluster away from the presumably I2a-Din group, and they seem to have minor founder effects on their R1b and J2. "AAD" isn't so bad with respect to I2a-Din, but they have a clear founder effect on J2.

It's tough to remove all these variables, but taking away the worst offender, AAA, gives an 18.7% average Haplogroup I and 9.5% average R1a.

 

[FrankN]

The fact that R1a is found much less in Vlachs than in the Balkans in General and that I2a Din is found in the same frequency is all the evidence you need that I2a Din was NOT brought to the Balkans by the Slavs.

Since I1 also appears to be hardly present in the Vlachs, the same line of thought would eliminate Goths and Heruli.

My only question is about that I-M170. Do we have more data on that? It could be all different clade...

That study has an extensive annex with all the individual markers that have been determined (load the pdf!). Anybody with more knowledge on how to analyse sub-clades than I have is invited to check that data. Would be nice to throw out any I2c, and also have a better idea of how much I1 can be found among the Vlachs.

How are you sure that I2a-Din of that area didn't speak Slavic language, before they were Romanized?

I am not any more sure about the language I2a-Din spoke in Romania and Moldova before Romanisation, than about their language in the Dinaric Alps before Slavisation. I just wanted to say that today's linguistic patterns alone are not really helpful to decide the question at hand.

 

[motzart]

Since I1 also appears to be hardly present in the Vlachs, the same line of thought would eliminate Goths and Heruli.

Yes you are correct that leaves us with I2a1b as the Goths.

 

[FrankN]

Yes you are correct that leaves us with I2a1b as the Goths.

Who, then, brought I1 in frequencies around 5% to the Balkans, if not the Goths? Schliemann and few other 19th century German archaeologists?:innocent:

 

[motzart]

Who, then, brought I1 in frequencies around 5% to the Balkans, if not the Goths? Schliemann and few other 19th century German archaeologists?:innocent:

I think you are on to something, since you seem to be on a roll with the explanations, tell me how the slavs brought I2a1b to Mesolithic Sweden in 6000 B.C.

Maybe time travel?

 

[Ike]

That study has an extensive annex with all the individual markers that have been determined (load the pdf!). Anybody with more knowledge on how to analyse sub-clades than I have is invited to check that data. Would be nice to throw out any I2c, and also have a better idea of how much I1 can be found among the Vlachs.

I'm not an expert, but went through the whole study and it seems to not go that deep into I clade.
I see no data telling which subclade of I was found to be 23% in Vlachs.

 

[FrankN]

I think you are on to something, since you seem to be on a roll with the explanations, tell me how the slavs brought I2a1b to Mesolithic Sweden in 6000 B.C.

Maybe time travel?

Oh, that's easy! Some guys chartered a boat, stopped over at their cousin's place in Sardinia, and then set sails to Canada. Unfortunately, they lost their way in a storm and stranded
on a cliff in Ireland. Fortunately, they found other people there who understood Slavic, and learnt they just had to walk across Doggerland to make it to Sweden. On their way, they erected a few megaliths here and there, and many more followed...

 

[motzart]

This is a good thread and for the most part I enjoy the discussion, but I feel that we have reached the limit of what can be said about I2a1b without developing theories as to the origin/timeline/spread of earlier/diverging I subclades and origin of the I branch itself. This will be my final post in here and hopefully we can have a new I2 thread as successful as this one.

 

[Greying Wanderer]

I'm surprised that Paleolithic continuity is getting such a strong hearing so far. I have a strong feeling that an ancestor clade of I2a-Din passed through the Balkans or at least the Carpathian Basin, quite possibly I* or early I2* or I2a* or even IJ. But I2a-Din is waaay down the SNP tree, with none of its cousin clades having their centers of diversity in the Balkans. Looking at Nordtvedt's tree makes it clear how young the clade is. And the "S" cluster, which is more common in the Balkans than the "N" cluster, is even younger than the clade as a whole.

So Paleolithic continuity requires either: (1) The STR dating is unreliable to the point of being junk, and the date is wrong nearly tenfold. Or (2) a massive bottleneck down to clusters N and S by ca. 2500 years ago, followed by an expansion of only N outside of the Balkans, followed by another bottleneck of S, which then expanded in the Classical Age or later (maybe with the Illyrians)? (1) seems very unlikely to me and (2) doesn't seem to fit what we know about the history of the region or the other haplogroups in the region.

What migration pattern does fit the cluster dating? Well, an expansion out of a small subset of an expanding population from the North during the 1st millennium CE would fit it. Sounds like the Slavs, or at least a Southerly subset of them that mixed with I2a-Din people who could have been there well before the R1a carriers.

"Or (2) a massive bottleneck"


*If* it is paleolithic continuity then there would need to be a reason why y dna I survived where it did and not elsewhere. The first most obvious factor is mountains, terrain unsuitable for neolithic farming, thus providing a refuge. However even if they had a refuge the population density of the surviving HGs would be much lower than the adjacent farmers which makes me wonder how the percentage of I in the total population could be so high even in the refuge areas of Scandinavia and the Dinaric Alps.


So it seems to me some kind of bottleneck would be expected where some of the surviving HGs adapt to agriculture in some way that allowed their population to expand. Otherwise as farmers gradually improved their crops and techniques over the centuries they would eventually have expanded into the terrain they previously ignored swamping the surviving HGs.


It seems to me ultimately there has to be a HG to farmer transition in refuge terrain **before** the outside farmers adapt to that terrain and spread into it.


In which case the importance of the refuge isn't so much the refuge in itself but the **time** it gave to allow the local HG population to adapt - the difference between adapt within 100 years or die and adapt within 1000 years or die.


So the Din bottleneck may be the descendants of a family of HGs who adapted to farming in some way - either something physical like lactose tolerance or cultural like taking up herding thus allowing HG-Farmer population expansion.


For example, some HG taken as a child and made into a slave shepherd / cowherd and later escaped back to his own people with some stolen sheep/cows.

 

[Dalmat]

Yes you are correct that leaves us with I2a1b as the Goths.

You know that places with high I2 frequencies have people looking Scandinavian.

I am being sarcastic, just in case

 

[Dalmat]

I think you are on to something, since you seem to be on a roll with the explanations, tell me how the slavs brought I2a1b to Mesolithic Sweden in 6000 B.C.

Maybe time travel?

And you are implying that 6000 years ago there were germanic tribes, germanic as designation that romans gave anybody north of their lands, literally meaning something like neighbors.

Maybe time travel?

 

[Ike]

*If* it is paleolithic continuity then there would need to be a reason why y dna I survived where it did and not elsewhere. The first most obvious factor is mountains, terrain unsuitable for neolithic farming, thus providing a refuge. However even if they had a refuge the population density of the surviving HGs would be much lower than the adjacent farmers which makes me wonder how the percentage of I in the total population could be so high even in the refuge areas of Scandinavia and the Dinaric Alps.

So it seems to me some kind of bottleneck would be expected where some of the surviving HGs adapt to agriculture in some way that allowed their population to expand. Otherwise as farmers gradually improved their crops and techniques over the centuries they would eventually have expanded into the terrain they previously ignored swamping the surviving HGs.

If we assume Paleolithic continuity we get very good fit of I2a-Din covering the whole SE Europe. Current distribution could be related to I2 being pushed towards mountainous areas, by the invaders from the South and from the Danube.

 

[gyms]

If we assume Paleolithic continuity we get very good fit of I2a-Din covering the whole SE Europe. Current distribution could be related to I2 being pushed towards mountainous areas, by the invaders from the South and from the Danube.

No.I2a-Din is only 2500 years old.

 

[Ike]

That's why I said "if we assume". Anyways, we don't know for sure what's it's age. Those are only calculations. As I'm concerned, I'll go with 2500, but that 2500 can easily turn up to be 1500 or 3500 if they readjust the formulas.

 

[Greying Wanderer]

If we assume Paleolithic continuity we get very good fit of I2a-Din covering the whole SE Europe. Current distribution could be related to I2 being pushed towards mountainous areas, by the invaders from the South and from the Danube.

Or the link **prior** to I2a-Din was the paleolithic continuity that covered SE Europe and some individual guy from that group with the I2a-Din mutation was the one who sparked a forager to farmer transformation that led to a population expansion large enough to allow I2 forager dna to survive.

 

[FrankN]

Or the link **prior** to I2a-Din was the paleolithic continuity that covered SE Europe and some individual guy from that group with the I2a-Din mutation was the one who sparked a forager to farmer transformation that led to a population expansion large enough to allow I2 forager dna to survive.

The area with the highest I2a-Din frequency (Herzegovina & South-Central Bosnia) isn't a farming region, it's a mining region since at least the Bronze Age. A key population group during the Medieval were transhumating cattle herders who also traded salt from the local mines to the Dalmatian coast.
There is archeological evidence of pre-historical large-scale gold-washing. It doesn't require a I2a-Din guy to become farmer, he just has to notice these shining metal pieces in the river and show them to people in the next town, and he will also have sufficient means for his extended family to grow in numbers. And when Goths, Avars & Slavs start incursing the area, he has the means to make them turn around and leave his family unharmed..

 

[Greying Wanderer]

The area with the highest I2a-Din frequency (Herzegovina & South-Central Bosnia) isn't a farming region, it's a mining region since at least the Bronze Age. A key population group during the Medieval were transhumating cattle herders who also traded salt from the local mines to the Dalmatian coast.
There is archeological evidence of pre-historical large-scale gold-washing. It doesn't require a I2a-Din guy to become farmer, he just has to notice these shining metal pieces in the river and show them to people in the next town, and he will also have sufficient means for his extended family to grow in numbers. And when Goths, Avars & Slavs start incursing the area, he has the means to make them turn around and leave his family unharmed..

yes, doesn't matter what it is - just takes some event that leads to a HG lineage expanding enough in numbers to resist encroaching farmers

(although i also wonder if there was a recurring pattern in prehistory where miners from an outside farming culture settled in a mountainous area and actively recruited and trained local HGs to herd animals to feed the miners and so it was often miners that triggered forager -> herder transformations)


edit: just to add when i said forager -> farmer transformation in the first post I meant forager -> herder transformation

 

[Kurgan]

To me, it rather looks like a traditional co-existence of I2a-Din (more north-westwards) and E-M78 (more south-eastwards) that has been overformed by successive incursions of R1b (Celts), I1 (Goths, Heruli etc.) and Slavs (R1a), with the Goths and Heruli mostly sparing out Central Bosnia, while Celts hardly and Slavs only to a limited extent made it to Herzegovina and the adjacent Dalmatian coast.

That would point to Palaeolithic continuity, if there weren't the TMRCA and diversity issues ported out by Sparkey. I don't feel qualified to comment on the former. As concerns I2a-Din diversity, however, both Rootsi and Periric report it to be high in Bosnia and Herzegovina, respectively. In fact, both suggest diversity to be highest there, within a wide area of high diversity that comprises most of central-eastern Europe from the Czech Republic towards Western Ukraine (Rootsi even has the high diversity area stretching as far to the North-East as Estonia, but his analysis includes other I2 clades aside from I2a-Din).

In short, after reviewing available research, I think that I2a-Din has already been present in the Dinaric Alps before the Slavic expansion, probably already before Roman times. The question is just whether it originated there, or expanded from further north, maybe the Carpathians around the sources of Dniester and Tisza, sometimes in the Neolithic, the bronze or the iron age. Judged by the diversity maps, an arrival by sea looks quite unlikely.

Thanks for a great post FrankN, I really enjoy the thought you put in to it and read it thoroughly. As to your quote about an origin point, I would like to refer to the Battaglia study's section on Variance. Greater variance in an area pointing to a clade being older there of course. I-M423 being older in Western Ukraine than Croatia/Bosnia where we find it in greater frequencies today. This matches my Goth theory.

This is also consistent with my limited understanding and research. The Dinaric Alps certainly pose quite the geographic refuge from invading R1a and/or R1b peoples.

To quote Bernie Cullen in an e-mail to me: "I think the big question is where did the Dinaric group come from--from the North (Russia/Ukraine/Poland) or from the south (Dinaric Alps of Bosnia, etc) (Of course there are other places it could have come from).

My guess based on slightly higher haplotpye diversity in the northern region is that Dinaric probably came from there. And we have the one "Dinaric cousin" result named Wojtowicz, he is from southern Poland and he is the closest relative to the the Dinaric group but not a Dinaric himself."

I would also like to make the point that being I-M423 (with family in both Slovakia and Ukraine), I was quite surprized to see so many North Caucasus people in my little group (I2a Project, FTDNA). Could it be possible that I2a originated there? What research has been done on North Caucasus peoples?

Category: 'I2a2 'Dinaric' Z16971+ (I-Z16971) CTS5966+ CTS10228+ also S17250+ Z16971+'
I2a Project page:

[TABLE="class: cms_table, width: 769"]
[TR]
[TD]Kit[/TD]
[TD]Family Name[/TD]
[TD]Origins[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]2275[/TD]
[TD]Baca[/TD]
[TD]Josef Baca, b. 1859 Bordovice, Czech Republic[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]280194[/TD]
[TD]Shidakov[/TD]
[TD]Shidak, Karachay, North Caucasus[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]296649[/TD]
[TD]Volek[/TD]
[TD]Michal Volek (Gajary, Slovakia)[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]291803[/TD]
[TD]Kulchaev[/TD]
[TD]Kulchaev, Karachay [North Caucasus][/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]267765[/TD]
[TD]Batchaev[/TD]
[TD]Batcha, ataul Jandar, Karachay [North Caucasus][/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]333648[/TD]
[TD]Urusov[/TD]
[TD]Urus, ataul Islam, Karachay, North Caucasus[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]211939[/TD]
[TD]Urusov[/TD]
[TD]Urus, Karachay [North Caucasus][/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]N38227[/TD]
[TD]Feketekuty[/TD]
[TD]Mano b 1200, Halych (Galicia), now Galic, Ukraine[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]256403[/TD]
[TD]Turkevich[/TD]
[TD]Kiril Turkevich, b. c1725 d 1780 [Ukraine][/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]280968[/TD]
[TD]Jaskuła[/TD]
[TD]Grzegorz Jaskuła, ca 1720, Żywocin? Poland[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]N113632[/TD]
[TD]Kowallis[/TD]
[TD]Jacob Kowallis b. 1735 [Poland][/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]

 

[Kurgan]

The area with the highest I2a-Din frequency (Herzegovina & South-Central Bosnia) isn't a farming region, it's a mining region since at least the Bronze Age. A key population group during the Medieval were transhumating cattle herders who also traded salt from the local mines to the Dalmatian coast.
There is archeological evidence of pre-historical large-scale gold-washing. It doesn't require a I2a-Din guy to become farmer, he just has to notice these shining metal pieces in the river and show them to people in the next town, and he will also have sufficient means for his extended family to grow in numbers. And when Goths, Avars & Slavs start incursing the area, he has the means to make them turn around and leave his family unharmed..

An interesting perspective! Again, the Dinaric Alps themselves pose a pretty formidible barrier to Goths, Avars, Slavs, et. al, as well.