Tomenable
Elite member
- Messages
- 5,419
- Reaction score
- 1,337
- Points
- 113
- Location
- Poland
- Ethnic group
- Polish
- Y-DNA haplogroup
- R1b-L617
- mtDNA haplogroup
- W6a
First of all they found R1b and NOT R1a in Yamnaya.
Professor Reich (co-author of the study) said - during a lecture which took place after the publication of their study - that both R1a and R1b were surely present in Yamnaya.
Indo-Europeans were a combination of R1a1a and R1b1a, who were descendants of Eastern European Hunter-Gatherers who switched from hunting to pastoralism.
That took place in forest-steppe zone of Eastern Europe, which is located south of Karelia (but hunters who were direct ancestors of R1a1a M417 lived in Karelia):
The Proto-Indo-Europeans likely lived during the late Neolithic, or roughly the 4th millennium BC [4000 - 3000 BCE]. Mainstream scholarship places them in the forest-steppe zone immediately to the north of the western end of the Pontic-Caspian steppe in Eastern Europe. Some archaeologists would extend the time depth of PIE to the middle Neolithic (5500 to 4500 BCE) or even the early Neolithic (7500 to 5500 BCE), and suggest alternative location hypotheses.
North-Eastern European Hunters - haplogroup M17 (M417), so ancestors of M417 - lived between 5500 and 5000 BCE.
And M417 emerged (among descendants of those hunters) between 2800 and 4800 BCE. Everything fits pretty well.
Let's also check Y-DNA from steppe / nomadic Indo-European cultures, discovered to date:
Yamnaya - R1b1a (only 7 individuals checked so far)
=============
Corded Ware - R1a1a
Tocharians from Xiaohe - R1a1a (and interestingly, Tocharian R1a was not Z93 - read below)
Andronovo - R1a1a
Scythians - R1a1a
==============================
Hui Zhou from Jilin University, China, about Tocharian Y-DNA (which was found to be M417, but NOT Z93):
Hui Zhou (2014-07-18 16:14) Jilin University
Archaeological and anthropological investigations have helped to formulate two main theories to account for the origin of the populations in the Tarim Basin. The first, so-called “steppe hypothesis”, maintains that the earliest settlers may have been nomadic herders of the Afanasievo culture (ca. 3300-2000 B.C.), a primarily pastoralist culture distributed in the Eastern Kazakhstan, Altai, and Minusinsk regions of the steppe north of the Tarim Basin. The second model, known as the “Bactrian oasis hypothesis”, it maintains that the first settlers were farmers of the Oxus civilization (ca. 2200-1500 B.C.) west of Xinjiang in Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, and Turkmenistan. These contrasting models can be tested using DNA recovered from archaeological bones. Xiaohe cemetery contains the oldest and best-preserved mummies so far discovered in the Tarim Basin, possible those of the earliest people to settle the region. Genetic analysis of these mummies can provide data to elucidate the affinities of the earliest inhabitants.
Our results show that Xiaohe settlers carried Hg R1a1 in paternal lineages, and Hgs H, K, C4, M*in maternal lineages. Though Hg R1a1a is found at highest frequency in both Europe and South Asia, Xiaohe R1a1a more likely originate from Europe because of it not belonging to R1a1a-Z93 branch (our recently unpublished data) which is mainly found in Asians. mtDNA Hgs H, K, C4 primarily distributed in northern Eurasians. Though H, K, C4 also presence in modern south Asian, they immigrated into South Asian recently from nearby populations, such as Near East , East Asia and Central Asia, and the frequency is obviously lower than that of northern Eurasian. Furthermore, all of the shared sequences of the Xiaohe haplotypes H and C4 were distributed in northern Eurasians. Haplotype 223-304 in Xiaohe people was shared by Indian. However, these sequences were attributed to HgM25 in India, and in our study it was not HgM25 by scanning the mtDNA code region. Therefore, our DNA results didn't supported Clyde Winters’s opinion but supported the “steppe hypothesis”. Moreover, the culture of Xiaohe is similar with the Afanasievo culture. Afanasievo culture was mainly distributed in the Eastern Kazakhstan, Altai, and Minusinsk regions, and didn’t spread into India. This further maintains the “steppe hypothesis”.
In addition, our data was misunderstand by Clyde Winters. Firstly, the human remains of the Xiaohe site have no relation with the Loulan mummy. The Xiaohe site and Loulan site are two different archaeological sites with 175km distances. Xiaohe site, radiocarbon dated ranging from 4000 to 3500 years before present, was a Bronze Age site, and Loulan site, dated to about 2000 years before present. Secondly, Hgs H and K are the mtDNA haplogroups not the Y chromosome haplogroups in our study. Thirdly, the origin of Xiaohe people in here means tracing the most recently common ancestor, and Africans were remote ancestor of modern people.
This data is not yet officially published.
===================
We know TOCHARIAN LANGUAGE from surviving to this day materials. Tocharians spoke INDO-EUROPEAN.
Some links with info about Tocharian language and origins:
http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/eieol/tokol-0-X.html
http://www.oxuscom.com/eyawtkat.htm