Genetic study The Genetic Origin of the Indo-Europeans

[blevins13]

Right now the Phrygian/Brygian branch is supposedly through Yamnaya>Southwest Balkans>Anatolia. What if it actually went the other way, Yamnaya>South Caucasus>Anatolia>Southwest Balkans with the main body settling in central Anatolia and a smaller one migrating to Between the Macedonians and the Illyrians.

If they was any migration of Phrygian from Balkans to Anatolia, DNA samples will tell us. So far we have not seen any thing like that. This scenario is similar to the one that Armenians moved from Balkans to current Armenia.

 

[blevins13]

Come on. Serious? Indo-Iranian and Greek form the South Caucasus? Against all available data and common sense.

What available data, what common sense?

 

[bigsnake49]

What available data, what common sense?

From the illustrativeDNA discussion group,

https://www.reddit.com/r/illustrativeDNA/comments/1bwm549

2.179 Cypriot Greek

2.605 Dodecanese Greek

2.716 Anatolian Greek (Konya)

2.890 Anatolian Greek (Kayseri)

3.291 Anatolian Greek (Niğde)

3.475 Cypriot Turk

3.785 Romaniote Jew

3.958 Cretan Greek

4.181 Sephardic Jew

4.223 Cretan Turk

Hybrids between aegean islanders and anatolians.

I have no idea if those calculations are correct and do not have a subscription to IllustrativeDNA to confirm them.

Now I am not aware of any samples from the Balkan Phrygians/Bryges.

 

[Anfänger]

Yes and the Mespopotamia-Caucasus cline must be necessarily complemented by the Iranian Caspian continuum, the Iranian Southeastern Caspian also can be related to the same source to the Lower Volga-Northeastern Caspian population.

Davidski didn’t like it but yes, apparently there is Aknashen-related in Yamnaya via the CLV but there is also Central Asian/Tutkaul-related, which is essentially ANE+Iran_N, also via the CLV, probably mediated by BP group. That does prove that there is recent South Caucasus ancestry in Yamnaya and earlier steppe peoples.

 

[johen]

^
I quoted several times that Ural south east had contacted Caspian south east from meso to enolithic according to archaeology.
40% of EHG have Hg Q. EHG r1a with Mt DNA C was buried with neolithic baikal typed pottery, introducing supine position (like neolithic baikal) at Europe for the first time. Iran Hotu J had also neolithic baikal typed pottery. EHG has J also. I always say that PIE appeared in the triangle zone.

Thus EHG admixture at Hotu seems to be by WSHG:

also according to anthro ( it seems to be not mongoloid, but intermediate)

"Ernest Mackay, who published the mask from Harappa
and the “priest” figure from Mohenjo-daro, pointed out
that they in no way correspond to the local small plastic art
traditions and held them as imports. Of the Harappan
terracottas proper, a minutely developed canon is
characteristic: these are female statuettes with luxuriant
locks and round eyes rendered with appliqués or pits.
Against such a background, the maskoids and “priests” are
noteworthy precisely because of their peculiarity.
According to Mackay, these statuettes are of a distinctly
Mongoloid appearance and differ sharply in their facial
type from the ordinary examples. They were retrieved from
one of the lowest strata of the city and suggest that its
population may have had an admixture of Mongoloid blood
introduced, possibly, by newcomers from the North-West,
or perhaps from the Iranian Plateau where, during
excavations in Tepe Hissar, several very ancient Mongoloid
skulls were found (Mackay 1951:133)."

 

[johen]

looks like Population geneticists are following PIE linguists' steps. Everyone knows that there is no one evidence of R1a, R1b or J people to speak PIE at bronze age:

["Originally Posted by Tutut:

Linguists believe that the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE), from which all Indo-European languages descended, was spoken around 4000-2500 BC, but it is NOT directly attested in any written sources. Therefore, the exact nature and characteristics of PIE remain a subject of ongoing research and scholarly debate.
And more from Colin Renfrew: "One important question is the extent to which it is legitimate to reconstruct a Proto-Indo-European language, drawing upon the cognate forms of the words in the various Indo-European languages that are known. Certainly it is questionable whether the nouns (for linguistic palaeontologists make little use of verbs or adjectives) can legitimately be used in the way advocated by Pictet and by Schrader to create an inventory, as it were, of the Urheimat, the original homeland of these Proto-Indo-Europeans."
That is, the words presented for PIE are a huge speculation. The only proven source is Sanskrit for an old IE language base."]

 

[Moja]

One of the oldest Hittite monuments: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hittite_Priest-King_or_Deity.jpg

"A large basalt sculpture depicting a Hittite god or priest-king wearing a horned conical crown, false beard, and long robe. He holds a bowl in his right hand and once held something in his left, perhaps a staff or sword."

This is the same Kusa in Iranian mythology.

 

[norbert]

Doesn't the "Southern Arc" paper argue that there is Levant_N admixture among the Yamnaya? How would that be possible? Now that Sredny Stog seems to be the PIE homeland, that claim can be flushed down the toilet. They are punching out papers like madmen, revising their (often wild) claims every year, only to return to what has been known roughly all along.

 

[Archetype0ne]

Doesn't the "Southern Arc" paper argue that there is Levant_N admixture among the Yamnaya? How would that be possible? Now that Sredny Stog seems to be the PIE homeland, that claim can be flushed down the toilet. They are punching out papers like madmen, revising their (often wild) claims every year, only to return to what has been known roughly all along.

Did you read the supplement? You might find your answer there.
IIRC the Aknashen admixture had a bunch of CHG_N, and some Anatolia_N and Levant_N . Might wanna double check, I was not paying attention to this component when reading it.

 

[norbert]

Did you read the supplement? You might find your answer there.
IIRC the Aknashen admixture had a bunch of CHG_N, and some Anatolia_N and Levant_N . Might wanna double check, I was not paying attention to this component when reading it.

Aknashen isn't mentioned in the "Southern Arc" paper except in a footnote and only as a settlement, not a genetic category. I guess that some of what I'm about to quote has been discussed already but here it is again because it's relevant to my question:

"By sequencing 727 ancient individuals from the Southern Arc (Anatolia and neighbors in Southeastern Europe and West Asia) over 10,000 years, we contextualize its Chalcolithic and Bronze Ages (~5000-1000BCE), when extensive gene flow entangled it with the Eurasian steppe. Two streams of migration transmitted Caucasus and Anatolian/Levantine ancestry northward, and the Yamnaya pastoralists, formed on the steppe, then spread southwards: into the Balkans, and across the Caucasus into Armenia, where they left numerous patrilineal descendants. Anatolia was transformed by intra-West Asian gene flow, with negligible impact of the later Yamnaya migrations. This contrasts with all other regions where Indo-European languages were spoken, suggesting that the homeland of the Indo-Anatolian language family was in West Asia, with only secondary dispersals of non-Anatolian Indo-Europeans from the steppe."
These claims were already controversial upon their release and seem already outdated. I guess it's going to take Lazaridis some time to accept that. People are drawing wild conclusions from such nonsensical theories, such as Albanian or Greek having originated in Iran like this Moja character.

Here's another quote from the "Southern Arc" paper:

"Anatolia is remarkable for its lack of steppe (Yamnaya or earlier) ancestry down to the Bronze Age. The ancestors of the Yamnaya were, however, substantially drawn from West Asia, mainly from the Caucasus, a process that had started by ~7,000 years ago, but also from the more southern Anatolian-Levantine continuum. The Bronze Age expansion of the Yamnaya into the Caucasus can thus be seen as a return to the homeland of about half their ancestors."
Well, we now know that there's no lack of steppe ancestry in Anatolia. The claim that the Caucasus-related admixture goes back as far as 7000 years ago is also outlandish, to say the least. That's too early. And what Anatolian-Levantine continuum? That far in the north? As Maciamo already posted, not one single E1b1b sample was found.

This is from the current paper:

"It was discovered that the Yamnaya had not only CHG-related, but also Anatolian Neolithic ancestry, absent in the early known steppe inhabitants, and derived from European farmer neighbors west of the steppe. This ancestry was later shown to be of rather Anatolian-Levantine-Mesopotamian origin, and to be mediated not from Europe but from the Caucasus neighbors south of the steppe. Such ancestry must have been added following the expansion of Neolithic farmers into the Caucasus, introduced thence into the steppe as a later exogenous element, distinct from the earlier CHG-related one."

It has been known for a while that the Yamnaya derived about 15% (some claims go as high as 20%) of their ancestry from the EEF. It seems that Lazaridis is trying to hold on to two contradicting claims about the source of the EEF/ANF ancestry. The dubious "Anatolian-Levantine-Mesopotamian" origin is repeated.

As a side note, I find it laughable that Sredny Stog has become Serednii Stih.

 

[Anfänger]

Doesn't the "Southern Arc" paper argue that there is Levant_N admixture among the Yamnaya? How would that be possible? Now that Sredny Stog seems to be the PIE homeland, that claim can be flushed down the toilet. They are punching out papers like madmen, revising their (often wild) claims every year, only to return to what has been known roughly all along.

If I understand the paper correctly they argue that the CLV was the PIE homeland and Sredny Stog an offshoot with 4/5 of its ancestry from it and the rest from Ukraine HGs. Sredny Stog being an ancestor to Yamnaya though and therefore the homeland to "Late Proto-Indo-European".

Also, the supposedly Levantine ancestry from the southern arc paper has become Aknashen_N. I am pretty sure it would now become Nalchik-related ancestry but the authors of the new paper hadn’t its genome when they were preparing the paper. Nalchik was only published 3-4 weeks ago.

 

[Archetype0ne]

If I understand the paper correctly they argue that the CLV was the PIE homeland and Sredny Stog an offshoot with 4/5 of its ancestry from it and the rest from Ukraine HGs. Sredny Stog being an ancestor to Yamnaya though and therefore the homeland to "Late Proto-Indo-European".

Also, the supposedly Levantine ancestry from the southern arc paper has become Aknashen_N. I am pretty sure it would now become Nalchik-related ancestry but the authors of the new paper hadn’t its genome when they were preparing the paper. Nalchik was only published 3-4 weeks ago.

Can you link the Nalchik paper?

 

[norbert]

If I understand the paper correctly they argue that the CLV was the PIE homeland and Sredny Stog an offshoot with 4/5 of its ancestry from it and the rest from Ukraine HGs. Sredny Stog being an ancestor to Yamnaya though and therefore the homeland to "Late Proto-Indo-European".

Also, the supposedly Levantine ancestry from the southern arc paper has become Aknashen_N. I am pretty sure it would now become Nalchik-related ancestry but the authors of the new paper hadn’t its genome when they were preparing the paper. Nalchik was only published 3-4 weeks ago.

They interpret Aknashen_N as Anatolian Neolithic-Levant_N-CHG. Apart from the fact that they're trying to salvage whatever they can from the "Southern Arc" theory, it also didn't occur to them that, what they describe as Aknashen_N, could have already been present in Anatolia which was picked up by the incoming steppe people afterwards. Stay tuned for more "groundbreaking" discoveries. There was a time when people did a couple of years of hard work before they published their final conclusions. Now they're acting like journalists. But hey you either publish or perish. Gotta get that funding money. Lazaridis is doing PR work on X/Twitter and debating with amateurs and crackpots. Serious scientists don't do that. It's not Mr. Lazaridis' fault though. I feel sorry for modern scientists who are forced to beg for funds or publish as many papers as possible, so that their department can receive some funding. Needless to say that the quality of those papers suffers immensely just as their entire work.

Aknashen_N, CLV... they're certainly an imaginative bunch. Gotta be to survive, I guess.

 

[Anfänger]

Can you link the Nalchik paper?

Apparently, it’s in Russian? You can find everything related to that sample here though:

https://genarchivist.com/showthread.php?tid=525

They interpret Aknashen_N as Anatolian Neolithic-Levant_N-CHG. Apart from the fact that they're trying to salvage whatever they can from the "Southern Arc" theory, it also didn't occur to them that, what they describe as Aknashen_N, could have already been present in Anatolia which was picked up by the incoming steppe people afterwards. Stay tuned for more "groundbreaking" discoveries. There was a time when people did a couple of years of hard work before they published their final conclusions. Now they're acting like journalists. But hey you either publish or perish. Gotta get that funding money. Lazaridis is doing PR work on X/Twitter and debating with amateurs and crackpots. Serious scientists don't do that. It's not Mr. Lazaridis' fault though. I feel sorry for modern scientists who are forced to beg for funds or publish as many papers as possible, so that their department can receive some funding. Needless to say that the quality of those papers suffers immensely just as their entire work.

Aknashen_N, CLV... they're certainly an imaginative bunch. Gotta be to survive, I guess.

Sure, it’s unprofessional to argue with crackpots on twitter/x like Lazaridis does from time to time. He probably needs to clarify some things which people might not understand just by reading the paper.

Aknashen_N is possibly just early Shulaveri-Shomu culture. They were just as genetically heterogeneous as Sredny Stog . Earlier samples from Shulaveri-Shomu have higher CHG/Iran ancestry while later tend to be more Mesopotamian. Sometimes the genetic groupings overlap a culture and sometimes they don’t. The geneticists have to group them together by case by case approach.

 

[Archetype0ne]

Aknashen isn't mentioned in the "Southern Arc" paper except in a footnote and only as a settlement, not a genetic category. I guess that some of what I'm about to quote has been discussed already but here it is again because it's relevant to my question:

"By sequencing 727 ancient individuals from the Southern Arc (Anatolia and neighbors in Southeastern Europe and West Asia) over 10,000 years, we contextualize its Chalcolithic and Bronze Ages (~5000-1000BCE), when extensive gene flow entangled it with the Eurasian steppe. Two streams of migration transmitted Caucasus and Anatolian/Levantine ancestry northward, and the Yamnaya pastoralists, formed on the steppe, then spread southwards: into the Balkans, and across the Caucasus into Armenia, where they left numerous patrilineal descendants. Anatolia was transformed by intra-West Asian gene flow, with negligible impact of the later Yamnaya migrations. This contrasts with all other regions where Indo-European languages were spoken, suggesting that the homeland of the Indo-Anatolian language family was in West Asia, with only secondary dispersals of non-Anatolian Indo-Europeans from the steppe."
These claims were already controversial upon their release and seem already outdated. I guess it's going to take Lazaridis some time to accept that. People are drawing wild conclusions from such nonsensical theories, such as Albanian or Greek having originated in Iran like this Moja character.

Here's another quote from the "Southern Arc" paper:

"Anatolia is remarkable for its lack of steppe (Yamnaya or earlier) ancestry down to the Bronze Age. The ancestors of the Yamnaya were, however, substantially drawn from West Asia, mainly from the Caucasus, a process that had started by ~7,000 years ago, but also from the more southern Anatolian-Levantine continuum. The Bronze Age expansion of the Yamnaya into the Caucasus can thus be seen as a return to the homeland of about half their ancestors."
Well, we now know that there's no lack of steppe ancestry in Anatolia. The claim that the Caucasus-related admixture goes back as far as 7000 years ago is also outlandish, to say the least. That's too early. And what Anatolian-Levantine continuum? That far in the north? As Maciamo already posted, not one single E1b1b sample was found.

This is from the current paper:

"It was discovered that the Yamnaya had not only CHG-related, but also Anatolian Neolithic ancestry, absent in the early known steppe inhabitants, and derived from European farmer neighbors west of the steppe. This ancestry was later shown to be of rather Anatolian-Levantine-Mesopotamian origin, and to be mediated not from Europe but from the Caucasus neighbors south of the steppe. Such ancestry must have been added following the expansion of Neolithic farmers into the Caucasus, introduced thence into the steppe as a later exogenous element, distinct from the earlier CHG-related one."

It has been known for a while that the Yamnaya derived about 15% (some claims go as high as 20%) of their ancestry from the EEF. It seems that Lazaridis is trying to hold on to two contradicting claims about the source of the EEF/ANF ancestry. The dubious "Anatolian-Levantine-Mesopotamian" origin is repeated.

As a side note, I find it laughable that Sredny Stog has become Serednii Stih.

I thought your point was that Lazaridis somehow backtracked on the Anatolia/Levant Neolithic present in Yamnaya or something similar between the two papers. I just meant to clarify that that was not even Lazaridis main point, but either way that component is still part of the core package that gives Yamnaya with his current hypothesis, its just packaged* in a Remotnoye (BP + Aknashen*) mix.

But also historically we have to keep in mind that Neolithization (animal husbandry, farming etc) reached the Caucasus from these regions, and then reached the adjecent steppe from the Caucasus.

You had pre-Yamnaya like profile, very close to Yamnaya (but not exactly) on a cline, for a thousand or more years... Yet we did not see the massive technological change and IBD sharing and mobility before it got the additional Remotnoye-like ( BP+ Aknashen) admixture.

Edit: Since I think that might be hard to make sense of:

What gets you from pre-Yamnaya populations on the Sredni Stih cline to the Core Yamnaya, is an additional admixture of Remotnoye (BP + Aknashen).
BP being Klohpkov Bugor + CHG(older Kind)/PVgroup
Aknashen being Neolithic CHG +NeoAnatolia + NeoLevant

As the paper states BP can model pre-Yamnaya, but not enough to model Core Yamnaya. And notice the explosion in both mobility as well as ancestry sharing following this admixture with Remotnoye.

Edit2: Refer to post 35 on this thread.

 

[Tautalus]

This study it's a nail in the coffin of Heggarty's hybrid model for the origin of IE languages.
All Indo-European languages are considered to be steppe-mediated and not to have originated in the South Caucasus..

A population from the CLV gradient migrated south and then west to Anatolia around 4400 BC.

“CLV cline people migrated southwards ca. 4400BCE, or about a millennium before the appearance of the Yamnaya, (admixing with different substratum populations along the way) and then westwards before finally reaching Central Anatolia.”

This first migration of a population from the steppe region located between the North Caucasus and the lower Volga valley, towards Anatolia would correspond to the divergence of the Anatolian branch with the other Indo-European languages. The genetic data therefore favors the entry of speakers of the Anatolian branch into Anatolia from the east rather than the west.

“A recent study proposed a much deeper origin of IA/IE languages64 to ~6000 BCE or about two millennia older than our reconstruction and the consensus of other linguistic studies. The technical reasons for these older dates will doubtlessly be debated by linguists. From the point of view of archaeogenetics, we point out that the post-3000 BCE genetic transformation of Europe by Corded Ware and Beaker cultures on the heels of the Yamnaya expansion is hard to reconcile with linguistic split times of European languages consistently >4000 BCE as no major pan-European archaeological or migratory phenomena that are tied to the postulated South Caucasus IA homeland ~6000 BCE can be discerned.”

“First, the Yamnaya were formed by admixture ~4000 BCE and began their expansion during the middle of the 4th millennium BCE, corresponding to this linguistic split date between IE and Anatolian. Second, the Yamnaya were the source of the Afanasievo migration to the east a leading candidate for the split of the ancestral form of Tocharian, widely recognized as the second split after that of Anatolian. Third, the Yamnaya can be linked to the languages of Armenia via both autosomal and Y-chromosome ancestry after ~2500 BCE, and to the languages of the Balkans such as Greek. Fourth, the Yamnaya can be linked indirectly to other IE speakers via the demographically and culturally transformative Corded Ware and Beaker archaeological cultures of the 3rd millennium BCE that postdate it by centuries.”

“The Yamnaya culture stands as the unifying factor of all attested Indo-European languages. Yet, the homogeneity of the Yamnaya patrilineal community was formed out of the admixture of diverse ancestors, via proximal ancestors from the Dnipro and CLV clines (Fig. 2e). Yamnaya and Anatolians share ancestry from the CLV Cline (Fig. 2e,f), and thus, if the earliest IA language speakers shared any genetic ancestry at all—the possibility of an early transfer of language without admixture must not be discounted—then the CLV Cline is where this ancestry must have come from.”

 

[Moja]

This study it's a nail in the coffin of Heggarty's hybrid model for the origin of IE languages.
All Indo-European languages are considered to be steppe-mediated and not to have originated in the South Caucasus..

A population from the CLV gradient migrated south and then west to Anatolia around 4400 BC.

“CLV cline people migrated southwards ca. 4400BCE, or about a millennium before the appearance of the Yamnaya, (admixing with different substratum populations along the way) and then westwards before finally reaching Central Anatolia.”

It says the majority of CLV ancestry is from West Asian sources from the Mesopotamia-Caucasus (or Çayönü-Masis Blur-Aknashen) cline. In fact there is almost no difference between Heggarty et. al and this study, both of them say that the earliest Indo-European people were those who lived in the South Caucasus but this study says these people first migrated to the north of Caucasus and then came back.

 

[MOESAN]

It says the majority of CLV ancestry is from West Asian sources from the Mesopotamia-Caucasus (or Çayönü-Masis Blur-Aknashen) cline. In fact there is almost no difference between Heggarty et. al and this study, both of them say that the earliest Indo-European people were those who lived in the South Caucasus but this study says these people first migrated to the north of Caucasus and then came back.

A cline is just a cline. Which s important is knowing how it formed, how quickly or slowly, and with what kind of sexe balances: it may have some weight concerning languages transmission. Here Y haplo's have some weight too. ATW this cline formed on the Steppes, not south the Caucasus. We cannot say: they went North and then the very same ones returned South. When they returned they were no more the same ones, and according to the way their admixture was born, it can change a lot of interpretations. I haven't yet made my thoughts about all that.

 

[Moja]

A cline is just a cline. Which s important is knowing how it formed, how quickly or slowly, and with what kind of sexe balances: it may have some weight concerning languages transmission. Here Y haplo's have some weight too. ATW this cline formed on the Steppes, not south the Caucasus. We cannot say: they went North and then the very same ones returned South. When they returned they were no more the same ones, and according to the way their admixture was born, it can change a lot of interpretations. I haven't yet made my thoughts about all that.

I think the main issue is the contacts between Indo-European and Uralic language which could happen in the north of Caucasus, this clip talks about it:

In Persian ab from proto-Indo-European *h₂ep- means "water" which is the same as the Sumerian word for water, but in Hittite there is watar which could be related to Proto-Uralic *wete "water".

 

[torzio]

was not the Persians still in Uzbekistan until migrating to Iran in 1100BC ?