Origins of the Indo-Europeans: the Uruk expansion and Cucuteni-Trypillian culture
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Patterson said that linguistic evidence has tracked the ancestral language, called “late proto-Indo-European” to about 3,500 years ago in the Caucasus, among a people who had wheeled vehicles at a time when they were just being put into use.
Genetic evidence ruled out one likely related group in the region, the Yamnaya, because their DNA showed the group had hunter-gatherer ancestry, which is inconsistent with the fact that two Indo-European groups, Armenians and Indians, don’t share it, Patterson said. That made Patterson look south, to the Maikop civilization, which likely had significant contact with the Yamnaya, as a plausible culture where Indo-European languages originated. Samples have been obtained from Maikop burial sites, but the DNA work to test that proposal is pending, Patterson said.http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2014/12/the-surprising-origins-of-europeans/
Genetic evidence ruled out one likely related group in the region, the Yamnaya, because their DNA showed the group had hunter-gatherer ancestry, which is inconsistent with the fact that two Indo-European groups, Armenians and Indians, don’t share it, Patterson said. That made Patterson look south, to the Maikop civilization, which likely had significant contact with the Yamnaya, as a plausible culture where Indo-European languages originated. Samples have been obtained from Maikop burial sites, but the DNA work to test that proposal is pending, Patterson said.http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2014/12/the-surprising-origins-of-europeans/
Angela
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Yes, interesting isn't it? I'm assuming, if the work on the Dna from Maikop itself is still ongoing, that the people at the Reich Lab are leaning in that direction because of their analysis of the data from Yamnaya (not yet published), and their modeling indicates this is probably the region from which "late proto-Indo-European" spread. Or, they may have preliminary results which confirm their original suspicions.
That would mean, I think, that "Indo-Europeans" or "Indo-European culture", by their definition, originated from an area between the Black and the Caspian Seas, and radiated out from there, with the Indo-Iranians, for example, having their origin very near there. Wouldn't this also place it temporally at 1500 BC?
I wonder how this sits with David Anthony, who is supposedly a co-author or consultant on their Yamnaya paper?
Certainly, there are specific quotes in Anthony's work where he places the culture and language of the Indo-Europeans on the Pontic Caspian Steppe from 4000 t0 3000 BC. Granted, I had, and have, a problem with that, because that probably excludes horse riding, and certainly excludes chariots, which are much younger and further east. (2000 BC), and also because of the well known problems with "Armenian" and with the fact that there's no sign of agriculture east of the Volga until you get to Siberia. (There are also problems with the other theories, as we know.)
However, isn't that a very late date for even "late proto-Indo-European"? Patterson says linguists support that date. Does anyone know the linguists to whom he's referring?
If this should turn out to be true, would this mean that western Europeans, for example, adopted Indo-European languages at a very late date indeed? That would certainly take care of the Basque language/genetics problem.
That would mean, I think, that "Indo-Europeans" or "Indo-European culture", by their definition, originated from an area between the Black and the Caspian Seas, and radiated out from there, with the Indo-Iranians, for example, having their origin very near there. Wouldn't this also place it temporally at 1500 BC?
I wonder how this sits with David Anthony, who is supposedly a co-author or consultant on their Yamnaya paper?
Certainly, there are specific quotes in Anthony's work where he places the culture and language of the Indo-Europeans on the Pontic Caspian Steppe from 4000 t0 3000 BC. Granted, I had, and have, a problem with that, because that probably excludes horse riding, and certainly excludes chariots, which are much younger and further east. (2000 BC), and also because of the well known problems with "Armenian" and with the fact that there's no sign of agriculture east of the Volga until you get to Siberia. (There are also problems with the other theories, as we know.)
However, isn't that a very late date for even "late proto-Indo-European"? Patterson says linguists support that date. Does anyone know the linguists to whom he's referring?
If this should turn out to be true, would this mean that western Europeans, for example, adopted Indo-European languages at a very late date indeed? That would certainly take care of the Basque language/genetics problem.
Aberdeen
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I can only assume the reporter badly mangled the story, because I can't imagine David Reich and friends getting it that wrong. There are written examples of Hittite, Mycenaean Greek and Vedic Sanskrit that are about 3500 years old, so it's very unlikely that Proto-IE still existed anywhere at that point. Wheeled vehicles have been around for about 6000 years and perhaps longer and chariots have been around for about 4000 years. And while I can't find any autosomal details about India, there's definitely a lot of R1a in the higher castes of Northern India. The Vedas are all about IE bros having fun invading from the west, so we know IE folk were already in India 3500 years ago.
bicicleur 2
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Could there be a typo : shouldn't it say 3500 BC instead of 3500 years ago?
By that time, the wheel was invented.
By that time, the wheel was invented.
Aberdeen
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The article says "3500 years ago in the Caucasus" but 3500 years ago would make more sense. And we still don't know where IE originated - it could have started with the "Armenian" portion of the Yamnaya population, i.e., Maykop, instead of with the "Karelian" portion of Yamnaya or a mixture of the two. So if they're only talking about the language and not the cultural package, and the researchers actually said 3500 B.C. instead of 3500 BP, that might almost make sense.
bicicleur 2
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David Anthony wrote a nice story in 2007.
It seems he's convinced now and will have a new story to tell..
I hope horse riding will be told as well, although the timing will probably be dalyed.
As for 3500 years BP, I don't think it's correct.
Charriots appeared 4100 years BP near the southern Urals.
Italic tribes arrived on the Po plain 3300 years BP
Halstatt iron age culture was 2800 years BP, by then continental Celts were allready seperated from Atlantic Celts.
Nordic bronze age started 3700 years BP.
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Even apart from the date, nothing in that article makes sense to me. The information that's leaked out so far about the upcoming paper had to do with people in the Yamnaya culture being seen as IE and being a mix of "Armenian" and "Karelian". And I don't think anyone can deny the link between R1a and IE, or between IE and the European Bronze Age, even though many parts of Europe didn't become IE speaking until the Iron Age.
bicicleur 2
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it doesn't make sense to me either
we should ignore it untill they come out with the full story
we should ignore it untill they come out with the full story
Angela
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Sorry,. I just got back to this:.
I don’t know precisely what Patterson means by these snippets. I don’t even know if he was talking about 3500BC or 3500 KYA, a very different time.
In so far as the genetics angle is concerned, I think we know, if early leaks are correct, that they see genetic admixture in the general area between an “Armenian like” group, which would perhaps be mostly EEF/ANE, to use those terms, and an eastern type hunter gatherer group in which the representative sample seems to have given them some difficulty in terms of getting a precise fix on how much ANE he carried, but which I have been assuming definitely had some WHG.The map to which I pointed some time ago shows a definite arrow from south of the Caucasus onto the steppe, despite the emphatic protestations of some in the internet community that the Caucasus was an absolute barrier to migration. So. that's likely the source of the "Armenian like" genes. Then there’s the snippet from Lazaridis at the genetics conference supposedly saying Yamnaya=Indo-European. Perhaps what is meant by that statement will turn out to be much more nuanced when we actually read the Yamnaya/Corded Ware paper.
Now, the members of the Reich Lab seem to be saying that the “Indo-Europeans” who went on to India, and other places, i.e. the Indo-Iranians, did not have any WHG,, which would mean that they were a strictly EEF/ANE group. Was that the case with the Samara samples? One would think not, as they carried unremarkable eastern European/northern Eurasian Mesolithic mtDna. Was that the case on the western steppe? I don’t know. Could Cucuteni have absorbed quite a bit of WHG before it mixed with a mixed Yanmaya group? I don't know that either. . I guess we’ll find out soon enough.
As to the cultural aspects of the Yamnaya "package", the scholarship that has been coming out in the last few years indicates to me that it is more than possible that much of what is considered to be an integral part of the Yamnaya package also came from further south, i.e. kurgans themselves, social stratification, most of the developments in metallurgy, perhaps even the wheel.
Then there’s the question of language, of course. All of the work on the Indo-Europeans has seen the language and the genetics, or ethnicity, as joined. It seems a little too convenient to now wish to uncouple them because the genetics don't work out. The most “popular” theory has it arising on the Pontic Caspian steppe. Perhaps it did develop only there, from these admixed people. Does the Reich group thinks that it actually arose either close to or in or slightly south of the Caucasus, near the Caspian somewhere and, was first spoken by people who were “Armenian” like, and Yamnaya was “Indo-Europeanized” later both genetically and linguistically? I don’t know. Might this all have something to do with the Kura Axes culture and R1b is tied to that, while R1a Is more tied to Yamnaya? I don’t know that either. Ialso don’t know if David Anthony is still a consultant on one or more of these papers (or walked off in a huff!), and whether he is or he isn’t, what he would have to say about any of this, if anything.
I think we're just going to have to wait for the papers.
Maybe he and Ivanov and Mallory and Grigoriev had a virtual meeting, sat around a virtual campfire, sang Kumbaya, and decided on a two-step development of Indo-European, with the steppe being the secondary urheimat. That would be nice…thank God almighty, consensus at last!
Ed. Sorry, I don't know why some of this is coming out in bold.
Aberdeen
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A lot of your post is coming out bold because you're taking a bold stance on the subject, Angela, and I can agree with it all except for the India part. One of the mysteries about IE is why it's a fairly structured and formal language, according to the linguists, when one would expect a nomadic culture that's probably racially mixed to speak a simplified language. Another mystery is where a group of pastoralists got some of the technology, such as bronze smelting. That's probably why some of the older threads that I've looked at here mention the probability of Yamnaya having been influenced by Maykop, with the specifical cultural traits that made the IE expansion possible being the combination of bronze working with a nomadic warrior culture. In other words, the Maycop contributed the bronze smelters and the Yamnaya contributed the aggressiveness and love of expansion. However, I do think that haplotypes did relate more to specific cultural groups back then than at present, and the association of R1a with Vedic invaders in India suggests to me that they were Yamnaya and not just "Armenian". Plus, if we still want to see Corded Ware as an early IE horizon in Europe, I can't see them as Maykop.
Angela
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You're giving me way too much credit for both computer skills and subtlety.
I'm also not quite sure why you think I have bold opinions on this subject. I didn't count, but I think I put an awful lot of question marks in the post, and statements that there's a lot I don't know. All I was attempting to do was put together a reasonable theory about what the Reich Lab people might be seeing as the pattern based on very fragmentary leaks and quotes in articles, and papers which I have read.
I won't know whether that's what they will ultimately say, and I don't know whether I will find their analysis persuasive at that point or not, in terms of the linguistics and culture side at least. As far as the genetics are concerned, they haven't always been right, as they showed with Moorjani at all, but they seem to be not only very well versed in statistics and "computational biology", but rather circumspect in most of their conclusions, and open to, and in fact looking forward to refining their genetic models as new samples become available. They also do extraordinarily exhaustive modeling. So, if they do indeed say that Maykop was genetically Armenian like, and that turns out to mean EEF/ANE, and they have sampled, or have modeled populations like the Armenians, or Indo-Iranians, and they don't have WHG, I would be inclined to accept their conclusions about that. The make up of the people in the western steppe or the eastern steppe might very well be different, and different at different times as well.
Now, as to culture and technical innovations, I know there is disagreement about the sources, and plenty of opposing papers, but it looks to me, and perhaps to them, that a lot of it came from the Caucasus or south of it. If for no other reason, let's just say that the idea of wandering pastoralists with their rough carts, one step away from living in a cave or a yurt, suddenly becoming master metal workers and dragging around huge furnaces strikes me as a little implausible, shall we say.
So, again, if the upcoming papers show a match between the genetics and the source of most of the culture, what then about language? Are people so wedded to the Pontic Caspian theory suddenly going to make a 360 degree turn and say that the language was independent of the genetics and the culture? It's fine by me, but it's quite a switch. As I predicted in a prior post somewhere, if the genetics results prove unpalatable for internet types, I predict we'll see so many twists and turns of logic that pretzel shapes will seem simple!
As to the linguistic arguments about Indo-European, I find that the internet types are far more emphatic than the scholars themselves. There's an awful lot that isn't clear, as there is a lot that isn't clear about the whole topic. J.P. Mallory certainly sees issues with all the theories (I think he calls the Pontic Caspian one the "least bad" theory.) You wouldn't know that from internet posters, however.
I'm not competent to judge some of the finer points of the linguistics debate. (One linguistics course at university absolutely doesn't count!) I think, however, that the very fact that proto-Indo-European is so structured, as you say, might be additional evidence that it indeed arose in a more settled culture like that of Maykop, which was at the same time adjacent to the steppe. In terms of India, the movement, to my understanding, was, even according to the proponents of the Pontic-Caspian theory, through Bactria, so, whatever the subsistence strategy of these people when they arrived, I'm sure it was quite different when they left and got to India. The fact that Sanskrit is such a formal, archaic language might also, perhaps, have a great deal to do with the fact that it is a ritual language. How much has Latin changed in two thousand years?
I'm rather bemused, also, by this insistence that Maykop could not, under any circumstances, be the center of Indo-Euroean, because of the Uralic influences on Indo-European. Maybe I'm missing something, but is it settled where and when precisely Uralic was spoken at the time in question? What if it was spoken around the Volga? Would that be close enough for some borrowing to have occurred?
(I apologize to the linguists among us if I've made a hash of this part.)
As to the haplogroups involved, we don't know yet what y lines any of these people carried. (I do wish they'd publish these darn papers so that we do, as the closer we get to Christmas, the less time I'll have for any of this!) What if the ancient hunter gatherer group way to the east in Samara was N? Or C? How do we know yet that they were R? Even if they were, how does that change anything? I think we just have to wait and see the precise subclades of the lineages carried by all of these people. At any rate, I would be surprised if all the people involved in even the initial spread of IE were all of the same yDna. I think of them sort of like the Vikings. Look at Rollo and his band, and the "Normans" who supposedly descended from them, and brought French to England (not that it took, given that in that case there weren't enough of them). How mixed were they by that point? My understanding is that they included men within their ranks from the "native" people of "Normandy" within a few generations, and then added men from Brittany, men from the Low Countries, eventually Anjou etc. Why couldn't the same thing have happened with the Indo-Europeans? Very large amounts of admixture are common in many "steppic groups". How many different cultures were absorbed by the Huns? How many strands of yDna were there in that "group"? All of this is separate and apart from the yDna of whatever region it is finally concluded (in our lifetimes?
Anyway, none of this can be known or even seriously conjectured about until we have the ancient samples analyzed, and the more the better. I think it will be very interesting to discover the y Dna lines not only of Maykop, and Samara, and the western steppe, but of the Kura Axes people, and to find out if the Afanisievo people really did carry R1b, and the nature of their autosomal make up.
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it is in and around this topic, but not linked to tightly to the last posts -
I reserve my thoughts for later if they have some value
it 's just a very controversial book written by Jean-Paul DEMOULE in frenc: "Les Indo-Européens? Le mythe d'origine de l'Occident"
"pure legend", he said, to deny the jewish origins of the european culture - glup! gargle! a glass of water, please
I reserve my thoughts for later if they have some value
it 's just a very controversial book written by Jean-Paul DEMOULE in frenc: "Les Indo-Européens? Le mythe d'origine de l'Occident"
"pure legend", he said, to deny the jewish origins of the european culture - glup! gargle! a glass of water, please
MOESAN
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I fid your post logical enough, Aberdeen - the PIE language doesn't seem either a franca lingua or a largely spred and mobile language or any kind of stuff like that - so I'm tempted to attach it to a firstly steady enough population, culturally already well developped - the theory of mountains and big lake is maybe true, i've not studied the question of intitial lexicon in I-E! I only know today meanings of works can very well abuse us - if I should decide to receive this theory, I could say nevertheless other regions than Caucasus-South Caspian can be convenient; not too far, but not exactly there -
I’ve studying haplogroup for some time and it seems like in the Paleo Meso era R1b was mostly located in Eastern Europe and Siberia Stretched West until the Alpine region and East to the Altai Mountains or Lake Baikal and North of the Danube and Caucascus Mountains then when the Neolitic era began most men carrying R1b traveled with there cattle they domesticated South into Central Asia and Northern Middle East and some of those into Africa and from the Northern middle East around Anatolia into Europe and lots settled around modern Germany then R1a came in from Central Asia the Indo Europeans into Eastern Europe assimlating R1bs who moved West and the the ones in and around Germany also moved West making R1b today most common in Western Europe. Please respond with commonents or anything you disagree with
hrvat22
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https://cache.eupedia.com/images/content/R1b-migration-map.jpg
https://cache.eupedia.com/images/content/R1a_migration_map.jpg
According to these maps R1a and R1b tribes or peoples come from Yamnaya, it would mean that both of these peoples already speaking Indo-European language in Yamnaya and as Indo-Europeans come to Europe.
I also noticed the time coincidences of the arising of civilization in Mesopotamia, and the technologically advanced societies in the North Caucasus.
Both appeared at 4000BC, with evidence of trade from the Caucasus to the steppes, and advances in both peoples in agriculture/herding, as well as the Info European wagon and sword technology.
Both appeared at 4000BC, with evidence of trade from the Caucasus to the steppes, and advances in both peoples in agriculture/herding, as well as the Info European wagon and sword technology.