New conference on Bronze Age mobility in Europe

[ToBeOrNotToBe]

I did not know that thing about the WHG to EHG ratio in BB samples. Really a very intriguing finding, and one which at the very least suggests the true genetic formation of that population was more complex, multilayered. Just so you do not forget it I will add: your hypothesis to explain how that outcome would have happened has verosimilitude. Lol

Lol, great word. This is probably also related to why the Basques have such high WHG.

 

[ToBeOrNotToBe]

I checked on MDLP K11 by the way, the only four populations that came up with any significance were WHG, EHG, Iran-Mesolithic and Neolithic (which makes sense - I'm assuming Neolithic is something like ANF, but it doesn't really matter).

Here's the two Bell Beaker samples I have on GEDmatch from Germany, both well East of the Rhine (so, if anything, their Eastern ancestry would be enhanced from mixing with Corded Ware):

 

[Ygorcs]

Clearly, you shouldn't be so sure of yourself:

"We may imagine the domestication of the horse was the final ingredient in a package of innovations that enabled the creation of something the world had never seen before: highly mobile, mounted warriors on horseback, shielded in bronze armor and wielding terrifying new weapons of bronze, with logistical support provided by wheeled wagons."

Whose is this excerpt? I mean, horse-riding warfare only has strong evidences from the mid-late Bronze Age onwards and was probably a decisive factor for the Indo-Iranian expansion, but as far as I know there is no reliable evidence that people of the late Chalcolithic and early BA like the Yamnaya were mounted warriors. They had domesticated the horse, but all that can be said with certainty is that they used them as an animal of traction complementing wheeled wagons (and possibly later war chariots), besides other uses like milk and meat. The early Bronze Age was the time of wagons and chariots, not exactly the archetypical Scythian and later Turkic or Mongol cavalry warfare.

 

[berun]

By the way if Casteluccio in Sicily and El Argar in Spain pop up suddenly around 2200 BC and show Aegean motives... such date is near to what I have in mind about proto-Greeks entering Greece... and moreover by 2300-2200 BB were pushing peoples in Central Europe also.

And not too late from that we see new WHG+EEF in the steppe delivering there Sintashta and Andronovo with their Indo-Iranic languages.

 

[Ygorcs]

I don't know what that's referring to, but if it was actually found to be probably pre-L51 everyone would have gone nuts by now. When do these samples date to? If Yamnaya, I very much doubt that it is legit. Danubian Yamnaya was clearly Z2103, the only hope for L51 from the Steppe is a pre-Yamnaya migration.

I still think that, apart from the lower Danube area, the last phases of Cucuteni-Tripolye should also be considered, as it was clearly, in archaeological terms, a culture under heavy steppe influence, reasonable continuity, but also marked changes in a direction suggesting more gradual homogeneization with the steppe neighbors (and all of that righ after a seemingly steppe culture expansion. The L51 may have been an earlier less succesful branch of L23 in Europe that was present in the Carpathians and its slopes, not in the steppes, and it was IEized before exploding in frequency.

 

[Ygorcs]

By the way if Casteluccio in Sicily and El Argar in Spain pop up suddenly around 2200 BC and show Aegean motives... such date is near to what I have in mind about proto-Greeks entering Greece... and moreover by 2300-2200 BB were pushing peoples in Central Europe also.

And not too late from that we see new WHG+EEF in the steppe delivering there Sintashta and Andronovo with their Indo-Iranic languages.

All of that, which would clearly have been a maritime-based military and trade enterprise (therefore probably strongly male biased), would have spread no uniform successful haplogroup or haplogroups even if they had been part of one and the same expansion wave? R1b-Z2103 and J2a in Greece, but mainly L51 in BB, but mainly R1a-Z93 (downstream of typical M417 of CWC)? Would those men have simply absorbed males and given them good opportunities to have success and spread their lineage?

 

[Johane Derite]

Didn't the Caucasus paper fail to find any EHG in Maykop, which is North Caucasus? If Maykop lacked it then I doubt the region of Armenia in South Caucasus would have non-negligible EHG. Unless, I think, if the steppe people had really roamed through and settled in the Caucasus after the Bronze Age, possibly even the Proto-Graeco-Armenians themselves. I know CHG had a small amount of EHG-related ancestry, but I assume the authors would be able to notice that a CHG source fits their genetic makeup better than a pure EHG one.

Yeah this is a good point which Angela also said. Is the scenario that Markod mentioned a feasible way for such a population to pick up EHG?:

"My guess is that even if they came from Anatolia, they would have come via the steppe regions of Bulgaria to mainland Greece and the Peloponnese. Drews in his new book sees Greco-Armenian develop in the Trialeti culture, and that's the general route he outlines."

 

[bicicleur 2]

". However, all the Bronze Age populations also have ancestry related to the Caucasusor Iran, consistent with their shift in PCA (Fig. 1b). This shift began in Anatolia no later than theChalcolithic (3943-3708 calBCE)16 and was not evident in Greece by the time of the Final Neolithic(4,230–3,995 calBCE) individual from Kleitos14 that resembled (like all other Greek Neolithicindividuals) Anatolian farmers (Fig. 1b). The newly reported Neolithic individual from Diros Cave inthe Peloponnese (where most of the Mycenaean samples are from) did not have this ancestry as late as5479-5338 calBCE (Extended Data Table 1). (Future studies may show when the transformationoccurred in Greece, but by the time of the Minoan and Mycenaean samples, both populations tracedsome ancestry to this eastern source, as did the southwestern Anatolians from Harmanören Göndürle.

I was not aware that the Diros Cave didn't have Iran ancestry.
The expansion of EEF from Central Anatolia to the Bosporus and Europe started only ca 8.5 ka, while first farmers arrived in Crete and Greece already ca 9 ka.
These farmers were semi-nomadic herders and the first to have ceramics (which Central Anatolia had only 8.5 ka) and probably made dairy products.
They came from SE Anatolia and the northern Zagros. They settled in western Anatolia and crossed the Aegean.
I would suspect their DNA was a mixture of Levantine and Iranian, but they must have been whiped out by incoming EEF from Bulgaria and the Carpathian Basin.

 

[halfalp]

I mean... we have samples from Bronze Age Southeast Europe and Anatolia, wich none of them are R1b. So if the El Argar R1b was a maritime migration ( ultimately from Black Sea? ) why wouldn't Anatolians IE came by the Sea to Anatolia too?

 

[berun]

that's not the picture in mind, BB would push CWC towards south (Greek) and east (Indo-iranian), pushing at the same time Pelasgians westwards as east and south were occupied already by advanced civilizations.

 

[ToBeOrNotToBe]

Whose is this excerpt? I mean, horse-riding warfare only has strong evidences from the mid-late Bronze Age onwards and was probably a decisive factor for the Indo-Iranian expansion, but as far as I know there is no reliable evidence that people of the late Chalcolithic and early BA like the Yamnaya were mounted warriors. They had domesticated the horse, but all that can be said with certainty is that they used them as an animal of traction complementing wheeled wagons (and possibly later war chariots), besides other uses like milk and meat. The early Bronze Age was the time of wagons and chariots, not exactly the archetypical Scythian and later Turkic or Mongol cavalry warfare.

I linked the source in a following post - it seems like it's wrong, but it was written by an affiliate professor so I just assumed it was correct. Yamnaya definitely had bronze weaponry though, which is the main point.

 

[ToBeOrNotToBe]

I still think that, apart from the lower Danube area, the last phases of Cucuteni-Tripolye should also be considered, as it was clearly, in archaeological terms, a culture under heavy steppe influence, reasonable continuity, but also marked changes in a direction suggesting more gradual homogeneization with the steppe neighbors (and all of that righ after a seemingly steppe culture expansion. The L51 may have been an earlier less succesful branch of L23 in Europe that was present in the Carpathians and its slopes, not in the steppes, and it was IEized before exploding in frequency.

Could be I suppose, but we'll have to see. Given the phylogeny of L51 (and I know some disagree with this), it would have mutated somewhere in the West Mediterranean around 4000 BC, which would necessarily mean a somewhat early migration from Cucuteni to the West. Also, it doesn't account for the signs of R1b-L23 in the Chalcolithic Middle East (swastikas, phylogeny, red hair and European HG ancestry in Armenia ChL etc.), as this hypothesis would presumably put the L23 mutation in roughly modern Ukraine, with L51 going West and Z2103 to the Steppe. Also, it can't really explain why there is so much Z2103 in Eastern West Asia and why the phylogeny of Z2103 points to a Caucasian origin, amongst other things - but this all does seem much simpler than the idea I've been promoting, which is obviously a good thing.

It's definitely a better hypothesis than Yamnaya whatever the case.

 

[Angela]

That is exactly the reason why many models using many reasonably proximate and plausible populations as hypothetical sources of ancestry must be tested, not trying to use the ones that the author previously wants to find. The closest fits will be the model nearer to the actual truth, though probably in a kind of simplified way, but the essence will be there. I think a good analysis could make sure that a model with separate EHG and Iran-Neo do not get conflated with Yamnaya/Steppe. Can we just assume EHG in BA steppe was still exactly identical to EHG in mesolithic Karelia or Romania?

There was certainly substructure within these broad labels like EHG and Iran-Neo, so using several proxy populations, especially contemporary genetic structures (honestly I do not think a 7000 BC EHG has a lot to say to us about demographic events in Europe in 3000 BC), instead of just a few samples, because that paucity may cause the algorithms to assign ancestry to the closest but still different source. I actually think that is what must be happening with their suspiciously too high Yamnaya-like admixture in modern Northeast Europeans like the Saami and even in ancient samples if the region, with the extra EHG that existed before totally disappearing. As Angela implied if I understood her correctly, I think that somehow the model ended up "splitting" EHG and attributing part of it to WHG, another part to Nganasan and another to Iran-Neo within Yamnaya.

From what I can see many of the amateurs use "only" the populations they hope to find, and usually because it would further their agenda. They're also adept at pretending they never said what they clearly did say. Their minions will echo that and the ignorant won't be any the wiser. Goodness, they're even adopting the snowflake mentality of the far left "progressive" loonies. Well, Sikeliot was always comfortable in that mode, but now even Davidski complains he's been bullied on line. Boo hoo. I haven't seen it but if he has, perhaps it's a little pay back for years of attacking Jews and Southern Italians on multiple racist websites. Things have come to a pretty pass if racists now claim victimization for their beliefs.

Ah, well. On to more important matters. Yes, that is what I rather inartfully said. To make it a little clearer:

These academics see the ancient European hunter-gatherers as essentially the same, except for accretions of a few minor components. The majority of their bars is "blue". WHG and SHG are essentially the same except for a smidgen of LBK. I'd have to go back and check the sample they used, because WHG was in Europe long before the EEF arrived, unless the algorithm is dumping something that resembles an element that it shares with the EEF into the closest reference sample, which is LBK. EHG has a bit more "additional" ancestry: something ANE heavy, and something Caucasus like. Fwiw, that makes some sense to me.

In other runs, that yellow, green, purple and orange gets dumped into more proximate references, leaving a blue they name "WHG".

Confusing, I agree.

I really do think the Reich Lab handles the statistics and therefore the analysis in a much clearer way.

 

[Olympus Mons]

Could be I suppose, but we'll have to see. Given the phylogeny of L51 (and I know some disagree with this), it would have mutated somewhere in the West Mediterranean around 4000 BC, which would necessarily mean a somewhat early migration from Cucuteni to the West. Also, it doesn't account for the signs of R1b-L23 in the Chalcolithic Middle East (swastikas, phylogeny, red hair and European HG ancestry in Armenia ChL etc.), as this hypothesis would presumably put the L23 mutation in roughly modern Ukraine, with L51 going West and Z2103 to the Steppe. Also, it can't really explain why there is so much Z2103 in Eastern West Asia and why the phylogeny of Z2103 points to a Caucasian origin, amongst other things - but this all does seem much simpler than the idea I've been promoting, which is obviously a good thing.

It's definitely a better hypothesis than Yamnaya whatever the case.

What are you saying?
a. Would you be ok with L23 being born in South Caucasus by 5500BC (or if makes you feel better in Mugan plains or ararat plains or even Northern Iran near Urmia Lake). -- Yes or no?
b. Would it be ok if L51 could very well be born in bulgaria Boian culture (4500BC) or Romania gulmenita 4200BC) or in Northern Romania/Moldova pre-Cucuteni by the same dates. -- Yes or no?

 

[Angela]

By the way if Casteluccio in Sicily and El Argar in Spain pop up suddenly around 2200 BC and show Aegean motives... such date is near to what I have in mind about proto-Greeks entering Greece... and moreover by 2300-2200 BB were pushing peoples in Central Europe also.

And not too late from that we see new WHG+EEF in the steppe delivering there Sintashta and Andronovo with their Indo-Iranic languages.

Those are good points. What the abstract says is that it was in Greece BY 1500 BC. They may have older samples in the "store", but they'll be in a later paper. Since it would appear it delivered a lot of J2a to Greece, I would imagine that was the dominant lineage going west, perhaps accompanied by E-V13?

 

[ToBeOrNotToBe]

What are you saying?
a. Would you be ok with L23 being born in South Caucasus by 5500BC (or if makes you feel better in Mugan plains or ararat plains or even Northern Iran near Urmia Lake). -- Yes or no?
b. Would it be ok if L51 could very well be born in bulgaria Boian culture (4500BC) or Romania gulmenita 4200BC) or in Northern Romania/Moldova pre-Cucuteni by the same dates. -- Yes or no?

I was just going over his theory, that's all. You know I believe in a West Asian origin of L23 and a West European origin of L51.

 

[Olympus Mons]

I was just going over his theory, that's all. You know I believe in a West Asian origin of L23 and a West European origin of L51.

What dates would you see L51 being born?
Just to be clear. I see Z2103 being born at the land of L23 (south caucasus) but L51 as younger brother being born after the diaspora, in South Balkans ( If I am completely wrong about the northern africa route.... which is a strong possibility).


From Shulaveri Shomu to Bell Beakers
(https://shulaveri2bellbeaker.blogs.sapo.pt/)

 

[ToBeOrNotToBe]

What dates would you see L51 being born?
Just to be clear. I see Z2103 being born at the land of L23 (south caucasus) but L51 as younger brother being born after the diaspora, in South Balkans ( If I am completely wrong about the northern africa route.... which is a strong possibility).


From Shulaveri Shomu to Bell Beakers
(https://shulaveri2bellbeaker.blogs.sapo.pt/)

I've posted before: L23 in West Asia, L51 in West Europe and Z2103 in West Asia. I just use their dates on YFull.

L51 and Z2103 can only be assumed to be the same age, by the way.

 

[Angela]

Yeah this is a good point which Angela also said. Is the scenario that Markod mentioned a feasible way for such a population to pick up EHG?:

"My guess is that even if they came from Anatolia, they would have come via the steppe regions of Bulgaria to mainland Greece and the Peloponnese. Drews in his new book sees Greco-Armenian develop in the Trialeti culture, and that's the general route he outlines."

I think we have to keep in mind that the academics seem to be seeing two migration waves hitting south east and south central Europe in the same general era, i.e. perhaps late Neolithic to Chalcolithic to early Bronze Age. One is "Iran dna" heavy without EHG, and one is steppe, which would include EHG. The first one deposited at least J2a from what we know from the Mycenaeans. We would expect some form of R1b or R1a from the steppe one, most probably R1b in my opinion, no matter what Davidski might think, but the ancient dna will tell us.

We know the direction of flow of the "Iran" like dna. The remaining question is the route of the steppe ancestry. If it came down from the steppe via the Balkans, it fits. It also explains the steppe levels in the Bronze Age Balkans. To support that it came from Anatolia we would have to find EHG at that time in Anatolia, whether or not the route was directly from Anatolia or it followed the Drews scenaritherwise, if the EHG was picked up only in the Balkans, what we would be seeing in Greece would only be a sort of "pseudo" steppe.

 

[Angela]

I was not aware that the Diros Cave didn't have Iran ancestry.
The expansion of EEF from Central Anatolia to the Bosporus and Europe started only ca 8.5 ka, while first farmers arrived in Crete and Greece already ca 9 ka.
These farmers were semi-nomadic herders and the first to have ceramics (which Central Anatolia had only 8.5 ka) and probably made dairy products.
They came from SE Anatolia and the northern Zagros. They settled in western Anatolia and crossed the Aegean.
I would suspect their DNA was a mixture of Levantine and Iranian, but they must have been whiped out by incoming EEF from Bulgaria and the Carpathian Basin.

Perhaps, and perhaps not. Time will tell.