In 1939, Carleton Coon wrote the Races of Europe. In it, he used the "skulls and pots as migrations" paradigm of his times, to infer a number of Neolithic and post-Neolithic migrations into Europe. A map from the chapter on the Neolithic Invasions captures his conception of prehistory well:
This map was drawn before carbon dating had been invented. We now know much more about both the anthropology and archaeology of Europe. But, the main thrust of Coon's prehistorical narrative can be summarizes as arrows on a map, or, prehistory as a series of invasions. The closing paragraph from the Neolithic Invasions chapter sums up this view admirably:
Five invasions, then, converging on Europe from the south and east, brought a new population to Europe during the third millennium B.C., and furnished the racial material from which living European populations are to a large extent descended.
He did think that the Upper Paleolithic population had not disappeared completely, but the name he often used to describe them was survivors, which denoted quite clearly their limited contribution to the present-day population.
When Cavalli-Sforza and colleagues collected genetic data on modern Europeans, and subjected them to principal components' analysis made possible by modern computers, they discovered that the first principal component of genetic variation was oriented on a southeast-northwest axis.
The picture of continuity since the Paleolithic was further supported in the much briefer article by Semino et al. (pdf) on The genetic legacy of Paleolithic Homo sapiens sapiens in extant Europeans: a Y chromosome perspective. This study, based mostly on the observation of rough congruences of the European map with some Y-chromosome markers set the stage for most Y-chromosome work in Europe for the next decade.
In a different study Vanmontfort et al. studied the geographical distribution of farmers and hunter-gatherers during first contact in Central Europe. This contact did not involve either adoption of farming by hunter-gatherers (as in the acculturation hypothesis), or admixture with hunter-gatherers (as in the demic diffusion/wave of advance model). Rather, agriculturalists and hunter-gatherers tended to avoid each other for 1,000 years after first contact!
Acculturation & Demic Diffusion
After WWII, the arrows on a map paradigm was no longer in fashion. The transition from the old to the new prehistory did not happen overnight, but two new intellectual fashions gained ground: acculturation and demic diffusion.
The proponents of acculturation were motivated by a reaction to the pots and skulls paradigm. To the idea that the spread of a new pottery type, or a new type of skull morphology indicated the spread of a people across the map, they countered that (i) pottery could be exchanged, copied, and traded without the movement of people, and (ii) that conclusions based on typological old-style anthropology were unsupportable, and the limitless malleability of the human skull was affirmed.
In some respects, the acculturation hypothesis represented a valid response to the excesses of the pots and skulls tradition. But, they went a bit too far in presenting a picture of complete stasis, in which European people, seemingly fixed to the ground, participated only in "networks of exchange", only ideas and goods flowed, and all differences in physical type across long time spans were ascribed invariably to responses (genetic or plastic) to new technologies, but almost never to the introduction of a new population element.
Demic diffusion is not as extreme as the pure acculturation hypothesis, but it replaces the model of invasions and migrations represented by arrows with a purposeless random walk. Demic diffusion has been argued on both archaeological and genetic grounds.
When Cavalli-Sforza and colleagues collected genetic data on modern Europeans, and subjected them to principal components' analysis made possible by modern computers, they discovered that the first principal component of genetic variation was oriented on a southeast-northwest axis.
At roughly the same time, the widespread dating of Neolithic sites across Europe proved that there was a fairly regular advent of farming, with the earlier sites found in Greece, and the latest ones in the Atlantic fringe and northern Europe.
Demic diffusion was summoned to explain these phenomena. Neolithic farmers, the story goes, did not particularly want to colonize Europe. Europe was colonized as a side-effect of a random process in which farmers moved away from their parent's home, while their population numbers grew due to the increased productivity of the farming economy.
The process was not seen as one of population replacement, however. Rather, it was seen as a slow movement of a wave of advance, in which farmers mixed with hunter-gatherers, and some of them moved on to populate new lands beyond the farmer-hunter frontier. The model predicted that the technology would spread without large-scale population replacement, as the hunters' genes would make a substantial contribution to farmers' gene pools at the furthest end of their expansion.
The Paleolithic Europeans make a comeback
Bryan Sykes' The Seven Daughters of Eve was a popular treatment of a new wave of acculturation-minded scholarship whose more formal expression was the masterful Tracing European Founder Lineages in the Near Eastern mtDNA Pool by Martin Richards et al.
Whereas Cavalli-Sforza and his colleagues had looked at dozens of polymorphisms, their synthetic PC maps of Europe didn't come with dates or easy explanations. The observed clines in Europe may have been due to Paleolithic, Neolithic, or even recent historical events. While they were consistent with the Neolithic demic diffusion hypothesis, the possibility existed that they may have been formed either earlier, or later than the Neolithic.
The new approach by Sykes, Richards, and their colleagues, looked at just mtDNA, but due to its being inherited from mother to daughter without recombination, they could (i) estimate the age of the common ancestors of the "European mothers", (ii) study the patterns of geographical distribution of their descendants to infer when and where they may have lived. Hence, the various stories about Katrine, Ulrike, Helena, etc. in Sykes's book.
The conclusions of the new methodology were clear (at least to the authors' satisfaction):
This robustness to differing criteria for the exclusion of back-migration and recurrent mutation suggests that the Neolithic contribution to the extant mtDNA pool is probably on the order of 10%–20% overall. Our regional analyses support this, with values of 20% for southeastern, central, northwestern, and northeastern Europe. The principal clusters involved seem to have been most of J, T1, and U3, with a possible H component. This would suggest that the early-Neolithic LBK expansions through central Europe did indeed include a substantial demic component, as has been proposed both by archaeologists and by geneticists (Ammerman and Cavalli-Sforza 1984; Sokal et al. Sokal et al., 1991 RR Sokal, NL Ogden and C Wilson, Genetic evidence for the spread of agriculture in Europe by demic diffusion, Nature 351 (1991), pp. 143–144.1991). Incoming lineages, at least on the maternal side, were nevertheless in the minority, in comparison with indigenous Mesolithic lineages whose bearers adopted the new way of life.
The picture of continuity since the Paleolithic was further supported in the much briefer article by Semino et al. (pdf) on The genetic legacy of Paleolithic Homo sapiens sapiens in extant Europeans: a Y chromosome perspective. This study, based mostly on the observation of rough congruences of the European map with some Y-chromosome markers set the stage for most Y-chromosome work in Europe for the next decade.
In today's terminology, this paper suggested that, like mtDNA, most European Y-chromosomes were Paleolithic in origin, and belonged in haplogroups R1b, R1a, and I which repopulated Europe from refugia in Iberia, the Ukraine, and the Balkans, after the last glaciation. To this set were added Neolithic immigrants from the Middle East bearing haplogroups J, G, and E1b1b, and Northern Asian immigrants from the east bearing haplogroup N1c.
Unfortunately, we do not have Y-chromosome data of Paleolithic age to determine the veracity of this scenario. Given present-day distributions, we can be fairly certain of a European origin (but when?) of haplogroup I, of a non-European origin of haplogroup E1b1b (via North Africa or the Middle East), and of N1c. A non-European origin of the entire haplogroups J and G in West Asia also seems quite probable.
The house of cards collapses
The beauty of science is that new data can always falsify cozy and plausible scientific theories. In the case of European prehistory, this occurred due to a combination of craniometric, archaeological, and mtDNA data.
Pinhasi and von Cramon-Taubadel (2009) examined skulls from the early Central European Neolithic (Linearbandkeramik) and found them to be closer to Neolithic skulls from Balkans and West Asia, rather than the per-farming Mesolithic populations.
Our results demonstrate that the craniometric data fit a model of continuous dispersal of people (and their genes) from Southwest Asia to Europe significantly better than a null model of cultural diffusion.
The authors correctly identified their data as rejecting cultural diffusion, but their conclusion that they supported demic diffusion was not warranted as there was really no evidence that Neolithic groups were "transformed" by gradual slow admixture with hunter-gatherers in their march into Europe. Their data could just as easily be explained by plain migration.
Archaeologists also made a strong case for a rapid diffusion of the Neolithic in the Mediterranean. Neolithic settlements appeared suddenly, fully-formed, occupied regions abandoned by Mesolithic peoples, and spread not slowly, in a wave of advance, but rapidly, as a full-fledged colonization:
Thus it appears that none of the earlier models for Neolithic emergence in the Mediterranean accurately or adequately frame the transition. Clearly there was a movement of people westward out of the Near East all of the way to the Atlantic shores of the Iberian Peninsula. But this demic expansion did not follow the slow and steady, all encompassing pace of expansion predicted by the wave and advance model. Instead the rate of dispersal varied, with Neolithic colonists taking 2,000 years tomove from Cyprus to the Aegean, another 500 to reach Italy, and then only 500–600 years to travel the much greater distance from Italy to the Atlantic (52).
To conclude, the following model can be put forward. During the 6th Millennium cal BC, major parts of the loess region are exploited by a low density of hunter–gatherers. The LBK communities settle at arrival in locations fitting their preferred physical characteristics, but void of hunter–gatherer activity. Evidently, multiple processes and contact situations may have occurred simultaneously, but in general the arrival of the LBK did not attract hunter–gatherer hunting activity. Their presence rather restrained native activity to regions located farther away from the newly constructed settlements or triggered fundamental changes in the socio-economic organisation and activity of local hunter–gatherers. Evidence for the subsequent step in the transition dates to approximately one millennium later (Crombé and Vanmontfort, 2007; Vanmontfort, 2007).The "Paleolithic" case won a short-lived victory when Haak et al tested mtDNA from early Central European farmers, discovering that they had a high frequency of haplogroup N1a which is rare in modern Europeans. This finding was interpreted as evidence that the incoming Neolithic farmers were few in numbers and were absorbed with barely a trace by the surrounding Mesolithic populations who adopted agriculture. Acculturation seemed to have won the day! The case was, however, tentative, and hinged on the assumption that the Paleolithic Europeans -who had not been tested yet- would have a gene pool similar to that of modern Europeans.
When hunter-gatherer mtDNA was tested in both Scandinavia (by Malmström et al) and Central/Eastern Europe (by Bramanti et al.), it turned out that continuity from the Paleolithic was rejected. Hunter-gatherers were dominated by mtDNA haplogroup U, and subgroups U4/U5 in particular. None of the other lineages postulated by Sykes et al. as being "Paleolithic" in origin were found in them. Moreover, there was substantial temporal overlap between hunter-gatherer and farmer cultures, but farmers seemed to lack mtDNA typical of hunter-gatherers and vice versa. Confirming the archaeological picture of the two groups avoiding each other, it now seemed that there was little genetic contact between the two, at least in the early age. The Neolithic spread by newcomers; there was no acculturation of Mesolithic people; there was no slow process of admixture between farmer and hunter along a wave of advance.
The gap between contemporaneous farmer and hunter mtDNA gene pools was as large as that found between modern Europeans and native Australians! The whole controversy about the relative contributions of the Neolithic and Paleolithic in the modern European gene pool was found to be beside the point. The modern European gene pool did not seem to be particularly similar to either Paleolithic hunter or Neolithic farmer: it possessed any haplogroups completely absent in pre-Neolithic Europe. And, it did not have a high frequency of the N1a "signature" haplogroup of the Neolithic. Selection, migration, or a combination of both had reshaped the European gene pool from the Neolithic onwards.
Where things stand
We have come full circle. Once again, Paleolithic Europeans assume the status of survivors, as their typical lineages are observed in a small minority of modern Europeans. The evidence for widespread acculturation of European hunter-gatherers or their significant genetic contribution to incoming farmers along a wave of advance is just not there. Hunters and farmers possessed distinctive gene pools, and farmers expanded with barely a trace of absorption of hunter gene pools.
Clearly many details remain to be filled out. What does seem certain, however, is that dramatic events took place starting at the Neolithic, and that modern Europeans trace their ancestry principally to Neolithic and post-Neolithic migrants, and not to the post-glacial foragers who inhabited the continent.
A clear outline of the intellectual upheaval we are living through.
ReplyDeleteWhat does seem certain is that modern Europeans trace their ancestry principally to Neolithic and post-Neolithic migrants
ReplyDeleteNo, it doesn't seem certain at all. The evidence against this is equally solid. The way you're purposefully ignoring or downplaying the huge problems with this theory points to a personal bias. More so in you're statement that the other theory was a house of cards that has fallen down.
.................
But I came here to post this map. It shows the distribution of the West Eurasian-only lineages in Central Asia. We can see that they're composition is very similar to Europe, and that U4 and U5 are perfectly in line with Europe's composition, also, which points [points, not proves] to their entry into Central Asia being together with the rest of the West Eurasian haplogroups, and not that U4 and/or U5 used to form an Eurasian mtdna zone by themselves.
Central Asia & Europe mtdna comparison
The post begins very well but totally crashes in the second half, when a mix of wishful thinking, clear fallacies, oversimplifications and gross exaggerations of the implications of the new data are all thrown together, along with abusive ignorance of "inconvenient" aDNA data, make up what is little more than an ideological pamphlet.
ReplyDeleteCarefully picked analysis of LBK and Cardium Pottery (two mostly unrelated phenomenons, even if parallel) are mixed happily to make up a non-existent unified European Neolithic phenomenon, that anyhow still fails to cover the other half of the continent.
The reality of Pitted Ware culture being a Neolithic regressive and immigrant phenomenon, original from Eastern Europe and not Scandinavia, is ignored by both Malmstöm and you, Dienekes. The fact is that the Megalithic farmers were surely older in Scandinavia than Pitted Ware rather part-time "foragers" or at best can be considered (in the particular case of Sweden) contemporary phenomenons.
The only really relevant data is that of Bramanti and in I'd even say that of Bramanti on Swabian hunter-gatherers, as the rest all belong to marginal areas, which could have any sort of local founder effects, irrelevant for the rest of the world.
While Bramanti's Paleo/Epipaleolithic data is almost beyond critique, Malmström or Haak's data is not better typed than the other studies that you like to disdain so happily, just because they point to H, what is a no-no in your dogma. They all limit themselves to the Hyper-Variable Region I, which is often more confusing than clarifying.
Balcanic and Danubian (LBK) Neolithic surely implied a good deal of demic replacement (though I'm not so sure at the area of cultural change of the Middle Danube where Sesklo-Starcevo transforms itself into Linear Pottery, with meaningful cultural changes precisely where high densities of foragers should have existed).
But Caridum Pottery is a clear case of scattered and limited demic clonization with much larger areas of native aculturation, where the Epipaleolithic toolkits persist. This is very clear in SE France and also Iberia excepting the Valencian area. Even the only relevant aDNA research for the area (Chandler 2005) shows that only minor mtDNA changes happened between Epipaleolithic and Neolithic Portugal, with H and U being present at apportions similar to modern ones in both periods.
I could follow but reaching to the conclusions you do from just 5 Swabian U individuals (the only relevant data) is just an extreme case of wishful thinking and twisted logic.
I will probably write a longer critique in my blog tomorrow. Because it is a clear case where the comments section is not enough.
"The gap between contemporaneous farmer and hunter mtDNA gene pools was as large as that found between modern Europeans and native Australians!"
ReplyDeleteAnd probably for much the same reasons. The same situation holds for North America and probably holds for the movement of 'modern' humans into regions occupied by Neanderthals. There's no need to postulate that they were entirely different species, or that they were incapable of inter-breeding.
So if most Europeans are descended neither from the foragers nor from early farmers, perhaps they really are mostly descended from the Indo-European cowboys?
ReplyDeleteWhat a surprise.
Doesn't fit well either: Corded Ware samples are apparently dominated by K1 (3 K1, 1 H, 1 U5, 1 I and 1 X2 - Haak'08). The appearance of H in big figures (what largely defines modern mtDNA pools) in Northern Europe would seem related, if anything, with a Urnfield culture of c. 1300-800 BCE (Schliz'06, Schweitzer'08).
ReplyDeleteHowever high levels of H are known to exist in SW Europe (Portugal, Basques, Catalonia - plus Northern Morocco too) long before that date, so we would be talking of... what kind of process? IEs kidnap SW women and bring them to the North? Or Celts as only Indoeuropeanized westerners with a mostly pre-IE genetic pool? Or some other thing like actually being of Danubian extraction? (and here I mean Danubian from Austria, Moravia and the like, and ill-sampled area, not the Elbe). I'm amiss.
There are no samples other than Cheddar Man (U5 apparently) in Britain until the Roman period, when H and other haplogroups are already at modern levels more or less, so we can hardly define the islander situation. The same more or less applies to Eastern Europe, France, Italy, the Low Countries and the Danube basin. The Balcans show likely 50% H at Chalcolithic/Bronze, though the samples are small. The situation for Scandinavia is no better (Malmström only muddied the matter) with the first clear samples appearing at Iron Age Denmark (with high H too).
So the case seems reasonably clear for the LBK area (discontinuity but not yet with a modern gene pool that might have arrived with Urnfield culture, not early IEs) and Iberia (likely continuity with a pool that approaches modern one) but not for the rest of Europe, where the aDNA data is scarce at least until proto-historical times.
We definitely need more data, especially from the pre-neolithic Danubian, Alpine, and Balkan regions, and more everywhere across the neolithic.
ReplyDeleteGood luck getting much data from Urnfield...
I wouldn't be surprised if we eventually find that by the end of Corded Ware, much of the current distribution was already finalized. The German site Y-DNA data seem to indicted that both R1a and R1b were already present, and if you had a lot more population movement going on at later times, the current European, relatively sharp dichotomy would be hard to explain.
I think that during LBK, agricultural success and population density in much of central and northern Europe would have still been very sensitive to climatic fluctuations, while later cultures would have learned more flexibility, used more long-term grain storage, etc.
Such climatic fluctuations clearly have had an impact in Europe over the millenia, but later it just seems that areas weren't simply abandoned during bad times, but that rather only "surplus" people migrated away to find better resources elsewhere.
"What a surprise."
ReplyDeleteIt’s not a surprise to me. Why not do some good science next time you write about dystonia and include all of us who have torsion dystonia.
Seems to me like relying solely on mtDNA haplogroup frequencies in small populations is problematic. A more holistic approach is required.
ReplyDeleteI think Dienekes makes some strong points here, based on the data available. However, these don't gel well with what I've found looking at HGDP and 23andme data.
Seems to me like there's a difference between Norhern and Souhern Europeans which doesn't fit with a simple Neolithic settlement of North/Central Europe from the south.
It's true that both are closely related today, but the Northerners show a clear affinity to Central-South Asian populations that the Southerners mostly lack. On the other hand, the Southerners show a clear affinity to Middle Eastern groups that the Northerners lack.
For example, see here...
http://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2009/10/playing-around-structure.html
I'll have more of these soon.
Just what I have been saying all along! Semino is a good geneticist but at interpretation of results she was just boringly common. All her interpretations were based on frequency. Frequency proves little. Genetic diversity proves much more. It proves that R1b is of Siberian origin, that R1a most likely originated near India and that Europeans and Anatolian Turks of haplogroup J1 have older J1 than any Arabian, Jew or other Middle Easterner further east. Never accepted any of the essentially unsubstantiated interpretations found in many genetic studies. I don't accept the paradigm as most of you know from my previous comments in this blog. Maju believes the paradigm like fanatics do their beliefs. Polako wants to believe the slight differences that exist among Europeans proves that Northerners are Paleolithic, the true blues Euros, and Southerners are Neolithics, just Middle Easterners with Europeanised culture. Well, most genetic studies show that Europeans are closer to each other than any other geographic groups. Europeans are highly homogeneous. As for Middle Easterners, it is only their non European admixtures that separate them from Europeans.
ReplyDeleteThe Neolithic is a cultural phase covering different times in different parts of the world. The Neolithic in South Asia, East Asia, SE Asia and the Americas are not exactly contemporaneous and involved different peoples and were indigenous to those regions. In Europe it totally derives from the Near East, totally derivative.
Dienekes said that haplogroup I is probably European. I doubt it. It probably arose in ancient Anatolia among pre Neolithic peoples of "Middle Eastern" orign. It with haplogroup J, F and G are the only haplogroups native to the western Eurasia. Haplogroup R is wholly eastern Eurasian from outside the western Eurasian pale. Haplogroup N is similarly eastern Eurasian. Other than commonness, the R1 tribe is not of western Eurasian birth.
Pots are not people, LBK does not prove much as to who made them. Just as the cars you drive might say something about you but you did not make them.
Mitochrondrial haplogroup U is quite old. Its being found in human remains in Europe just prove it existed in Europe at the time those humans were alive. You cannot extrapolate further back in time. You need to prove it existed in Paleolithic humans, more than 20 kya, not just the time contemporaneous with Neolithic farming Europeans. Both groups could be immigrants or one just preceded the other by only decades in Europe.
What is lacking is proof as Dienekes said. Old pots and contemporaneous human remains prove very little. Finally, I think some of you believe that the Neolithic people who lived in Europe had no previous ancestors, that they originated in the Neolithic age out of the ground of the Middle East without neither father or mother, without ancestry going back to the Paleolithic. You should study Middle Eastern archeology and stop being so Eurocentrically obsessed.
Many thanks, Argiedude (you haven't forgiven your Italian ancestors like Ponto does), for your map from Richards and Gockumen. I think that numbers speak: there has been clearly a migration from West Europe to Central Asia, and we can suppose not only of mtDNA but also of YDNA, specifically hg. R.
ReplyDeleteAs I said many times in the past, as massive haplogroups are difficulty distinguishable (but these numbers I think are speaking definitively), certainly U5b3, arisen without doubt in Italy, is a certain trace of the migration from Italy to all around, even to Middle East and Mesopotamia, after the Younger Dryas.
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ReplyDelete>>Haplogroup R is wholly eastern Eurasian from outside the western Eurasian pale.
ReplyDeletePonto, so far R1a is Europe's oldest Y-DNA haplogroup. It dates back to 4,600 BP Corded Ware folk who were certainly West Eurasians, as their skeletons attest.
Later, West Eurasian migrants in South Siberia also carried this haplogroup during the late Bronze Age and Iron Age.
Everything else is pure speculation till someone digs up more skeletons that say otherwise.
Polak, when I speak of Western Europe of course I mean not only “Western Europe” of today, but the whole Europe west of previous CCCP and I prefer not to name it “West Eurasian”. Certainly R1a and R1b spoke Indo-European languages and were in contact: we don’t know when they differentiated, though having the same ancestral origin, but it is very strange they weren’t in contact if they speak today Indo-European in the centum/satem varieties. We must reconstruct their careful history, but I think we aren’t far for truth if we place them in the Western Europe I defined above.
ReplyDeleteSo if most Europeans are descended neither from the foragers nor from early farmers, perhaps they really are mostly descended from the Indo-European cowboys?
ReplyDeleteThat is not very likely, as the few known pre-Neolithic samples from Russia belong only to haplogroup U.
But I came here to post this map. It shows the distribution of the West Eurasian-only lineages in Central Asia. We can see that they're composition is very similar to Europe, and that U4 and U5 are perfectly in line with Europe's composition, also, which points [points, not proves] to their entry into Central Asia being together with the rest of the West Eurasian haplogroups, and not that U4 and/or U5 used to form an Eurasian mtdna zone by themselves.
ReplyDeleteThat is contradicted by the mtDNA evidence from Siberia which showed only U5a as a Caucasoid lineage in the earlier samples. U-lineages came first, and the full suite of Caucasoid haplogroups came later.
Ahh. so that is why you were pushing those junky skull papers. I could not understand why you were giving them space. Meaning less data churning near as I could tell.
ReplyDeleteThe papers (Bramanti etc) on the early neolithic could more easily be used to prove that paleolithic people DID convert to farming as didn't as I have said elsewhere.
If you look at modern mtDNA patterns in Europe there is a clear diagonal split travelling from the North West to the South East. Most of the U aDNA (presumed paleolithic) so far is from the Eastern sector (particularly the north). Most of the H today is found in the Western sector.
Both of the populations examined in Norway are thought to be migrant populations. The DNA was sourced from burials when the area is notorious for its cremations. This is likely to have distorted population data (what little there is).
Basically I am seeing some interesting stuff but nothing to draw strong conclusions from. In either direction.
I am however concerned about the link being drawn between the superior technology (farming) and a genetic group of people. This smells of the idea of racial superiority. Life is rarely that simple. Population change in Europe today is not happening because the immigrant populations have a superior technology.
It's true that both are closely related today, but the Northerners show a clear affinity to Central-South Asian populations that the Southerners mostly lack. On the other hand, the Southerners show a clear affinity to Middle Eastern groups that the Northerners lack.
ReplyDeleteFor example, see here...
http://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2009/10/playing-around-structure.html
The evidence so far is clear that:
- European genetic variation is mostly clinal with only the Finns and Finn-influenced populations falling clearly outside the continuum.
- Substantial Central/South Asian admixture is not evident in Europe.
- Europeans show no significant admixture with the Middle Eastern Arabs included in the HGDP panel, and they are also distinct from Ashkenazi Jews.
I am however concerned about the link being drawn between the superior technology (farming) and a genetic group of people. This smells of the idea of racial superiority.
ReplyDeleteI have news for you but superior technology is often linked with a genetic group of people. For example, gun-carrying R1b-carrying Spaniards spread their genes over arrow-throwing Q-carrying Amerindians.
Possessing a distinctive genetic profile and a more productive economy/superior technology does not, of course, imply that the more productive economy/superior technology is the result of this profile.
Dienekes, it all depends what markers you use and how you set up the tests. Orkney Islanders have shown Central-South Asian "admixture" in one study using the HGDP samples, while Italians have not. But in this particular paper, it was the other way around...
ReplyDeletehttp://dienekes.blogspot.com/2009/04/fine-scaled-human-genetic-structure.html
Of course, it also depends how you define admixture, and whether ancient ancestral components now common to both Europeans and Central-South Asians can be called "admixture". For the purposes of a Structure exercise they can, and I don't think anyone is dumb enough not to realise that we're not talking about recent South Asian migrants contributing 20% ancestry to modern Scandinavians.
Also, like I mentioned, I've looked at a lot of data thanks to clients from 23andme and deCODEme, and yeah, variation in Europe is clinal. But North Indians are genetically closer to Northern Europeans than they are to Southern Europeans in individual comparisons. At the same time, Southern Europeans are much closer to Middle Easterners than North Euros are.
The latter fact especially cannot be denied, because it shows in all comparisons, even the most blunt ones. However, this doesn't mean Northern and Southern Europeans aren't closely related, and don't form one cluster.
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ReplyDeleteI realize that Dienekes. But we are talking about pots and cows not military technology. And given a choice the North American Indians were eager to buy and use guns. And Southern Amerindians made up a very substantial part of the Spanish army. But that is another story.
ReplyDeletePeople are mostly very eager to embrance new technologies. Particularly if it puts more food on the table.
And the weak evidence I have seen reads more as populations quickly converting to farming than being ethnically cleansed or sticking rigidly to old ways.
The point I am trying to make is that technologies can spread without population changes and populations can change for reasons that are not directly associated with any new technologies. To insist on a link between a superior technology and genetic traits when the evidence is otherwise, or weak, is a worry. To imply one is superior is to imply the other is inferior.
Right now the modern genetic evidence shows very little input in Europe of the haplogroups associated with the eastern agricultural expansion(Greece being the exception). Your proposed marker of this eastern input is Haplogroup H. But that same modern data indicates massive expansion of H FROM Western Europe in preneolithic times. Although I will admit the dating is a bit dodgy.
The ancient DNA is interesting but really there is not very much of it and it is not yet clear.
And even if there was a neolithic expansion of H, it does not have to be linked to a superior technology. There are other reasons.
Dienekes, it all depends what markers you use and how you set up the tests.
ReplyDeleteI trust studied with a few hundred thousand SNPs rather than your (otherwise laudable) analysis with a few thousand SNPs.
But North Indians are genetically closer to Northern Europeans than they are to Southern Europeans in individual comparisons.
This is anecdotal and contradicted by the recent study on Indian DNA which saw no differential affinity of European populations vis a vis the Ancestral North Indian component (ANI). It remains to be seen whether such affinity will be revealed by sampling other Caucasoid populations not included in the aforementioned study.
At the same time, Southern Europeans are much closer to Middle Easterners than North Euros are.
This is not surprising as Southern Europeans are geographically central in the Caucasoid range. However, the studies I cited makes it clear that Southern Europeans are completely distinct from both the Arabs included in the HGDP panel, as well as Ashkenazi Jews.
But that same modern data indicates massive expansion of H FROM Western Europe in preneolithic times.
Haplogroup H did not originate in Western Europe, but in Asia. Whether it expanded into Europe in late pre-Neolithic or early Neolithic times is a matter that remains to be settled; however, its complete absence in Central/Eastern European late forager populations makes it really difficult to envision its long-term presence in Europe.
Good luck getting much data from Urnfield...
ReplyDeleteHehehe!
Not all Unrfield is burned, they also used tumuli and other burial practices in some cases. But you have a point, indeed.
However, if there is enough pre-Urnfield and post-Urnfield data, we can still make the comparison.
The German site Y-DNA data seem to indicted that both R1a and R1b were already present, and if you had a lot more population movement going on at later times, the current European, relatively sharp dichotomy would be hard to explain.
Good point.
I've been thinking that I might have been too nitty picky, or even irregular, one what to consider close to modern mtDNA, using H as main reference. Most LBK sites (excepting the very much sampled but maybe not that crucial East Germany) show 25-33% or more (Austria is 100%, but is just one sample) H already. From that to the current c. 50% is not such a big difference. But some demic flow should have been acting anyhow.
It's possible that we're being misled by the oversampling of Saxony-Anhalt.
Also the Y-DNA data for either Corded Ware or Urnfield in Northern Germany is not like modern Y-DNA. Haak's Corded Ware sample is all R1a (2/2) and Schilz' Urnfield sample is mostly I2b2, with some R1a and only one individual being R1b. IE Asian samples are also almost exclusively R1a. The first R1b-dominated sample we know of are Alzualde's Medieval Basques with 2/4 R1b, 1/4 R1* and 1/4 I and Vanek's Bavarian Merovingians (3/5 R1b and 2/5 G2a). However no Y-DNA samples exist, except those of Northern Germany, anywhere in Europe before that time.
From the limited data, it looks like Indoeuropeans were almost exclusively R1a and, at the Urnfield period, maybe mostly I2 (with some R1a but still little R1b). It does look anyhow that Urnfield people may had a distinct genetic pool than Corded Ware - always with due caution.
But that same modern data indicates massive expansion of H FROM Western Europe in preneolithic times.
ReplyDelete"Haplogroup H did not originate in Western Europe, "
I am talking about the geographic pattern of the big expansion in H , not the origin of H as you know. It is difficult to see how this expansion pattern could be achieved by expansion from the east, regardless of the date.
Frequency proves little. Genetic diversity proves much more.
ReplyDeleteGenetic diversity can also be misleading. I and others have more than once pointed to the fact that immigration increases genetic diversity, specially when it has diverse origins.
Ponto, so far R1a is Europe's oldest Y-DNA haplogroup.
The oldest found in actually sampled aDNA, that incidentally was from Corded Ware burials. This alone demonstrates nothing though it does seem to make clear, together with other IE Y-DNA from Central Asia, that R1a was overly dominant among early Kurgan IEs, as has been claimed since long ago based on modern distribution and archaeological deductions.
... the Northerners show a clear affinity to Central-South Asian populations that the Southerners mostly lack. On the other hand, the Southerners show a clear affinity to Middle Eastern groups that the Northerners lack.
That's pretty interesting, thanks Polak. However Basques seem not akin to either group, what is quite revealing, IMO.
If you look at modern mtDNA patterns in Europe there is a clear diagonal split travelling from the North West to the South East. Most of the U aDNA (presumed paleolithic) so far is from the Eastern sector (particularly the north). Most of the H today is found in the Western sector.
An excellent observation, Annie, thanks. Most people seem to forget that the H/U cline is largely a West/East one, even if both lineages are always mixed at varied apportions. This is contradictory in itself with a Neolithic origin for H as a whole in Europe and is instead coincident with the aDNA data, that shows very old and frequent H in at least pre-Neolithic Portugal and Morocco (and possibly Italy too).
Both of the populations examined in Norway are thought to be migrant populations.
The Malmström populations are from Sweden in fact, Pitted Ware from Götland island and the small Funnelbeaker sample from the West, near Scania and Norway.
Funnlebeaker however is native to the "Greater Denmark" area and a local evolution from the earliest farmers, who in turn are probably a local evolution from Epipaleolithic foragers. Megalithism arrived from outside but, as in most other places, it is just a religious/burial custom on the local culture, meaningful of Chalcolithic wider trade and socio-political relations, in this case with the Atlantic area.
This is not the case of the so-called "native foragers" of Pitted Ware, who appear in fact to be immigrants from Eastern Europe, sharing many elements with Eastern European Neolithic, like pottery and burial style. However both cultural branches lived side by side, even hybridating in some areas, like the also claimed "aboriginal forager" Funnerlbeaker sample of Mecklemburg, which is in fact more directly related culturally with Pitted Ware and the "Mesolithic" samples of Lithuania and NE Poland.
But Chalcolithic Scandinavia shows that duality: with a native farmer culture that had adopted Megalithism (core Funnelbeaker) and a likely immigrant "forager" culture that had a clearly Eastern cultural background, related to Dniepr-Don Neolithic.
So what I get from Mälmstrom is rather that natives were H-T-K and immigrants were U5-U4-V-T. Of course, it's most difficult to evaluate the full ancestry of each population - but I'm talking of archaeological cultural continuity here.
And given a choice the North American Indians were eager to buy and use guns.
ReplyDeleteActually they were even eager in most cases to be assimilated into the Creole European culture, more or less. That's very clear with the Cherokee, who converted en masse to Christianity and even had African slaves as was common in Southern USA at the time. Only racist political decisions and the most unusual circumstance of a continuously flowing immigration from Europe caused them (and other less famous tribes) to be displaced and not simply assimilated.
We need more humor in this board... ;)
ReplyDeleteWith the few Y-DNA data so far, I have not been swayed away from assuming that all three, R1b, I, and R1a, were present -- not only during sampled times, but also pre-LGM, in Europe.
I can't see any association with any particular culture, at this point: I think it is a combination of chance, and a general, very early preponderance of R1b in the west over R1a in the East, and (less of) I in the middle.
Again, as much as LBK was fast and wide, it was a success based on perhaps a few tens or so of extended families who worked out the details of wet/cold agriculture with locally available long-house construction techniques (lake fishermen, requiring this for drying/smoking?) and spread from there in no time with little other genetic contribution both regarding them or their animals. They lucked out, but were rather marginal at the agricultural front, and when the weather turned (as it always does, in Europe, and if, for many decades), had to retreat.
I strongly believe that what we sea later (and now) is a second wave that brought together people from the milder, more southern and western climates to recover and bring about a more resilient agriculture in central and northern Europe.
I also agree that the U Mt-DNA found so far may only be indicative of the northeast - rather than the paleolithic - and may have rather recent (just pre-neolithic origin from the northeast.
Ooops. Yes Sweden of course. The Scandinavians would slaughter me for that one. Sorry.
ReplyDelete"From the limited data, it looks like Indoeuropeans were almost exclusively R1a and, at the Urnfield period, maybe mostly I2 (with some R1a but still little R1b). It does look anyhow that Urnfield people may had a distinct genetic pool than Corded Ware - always with due caution."
ReplyDelete--There is absolutely nothing to support this. Using such simplistic terms, an IJ split in the Caucasus mountains might better represent the Indo-Europeans and both R1a/b represent an earlier layer of Proto-Turkic speakers during the upper Palaeolithic.
I don't necessarily believe my previous statement, but it's about as credible as yours.
I think Ponto is on the right track.
"together with other IE Y-DNA from Central Asia, that R1a was overly dominant among early Kurgan IEs, as has been claimed since long ago based on modern distribution and archaeological deductions."
ReplyDelete-- What exactly is "IE Y-DNA", and I am under the impression some, if not many Kurgan burials are associated with Turkic speakers.
I don't necessarily believe my previous statement...
ReplyDeleteGlad to red that. Proto-Turkic UP Europeans... wtf?!
I think Ponto is on the right track.
In this: Pots are not people, LBK does not prove much as to who made them?
Said like that, it looks like they imported their stuff from China or that had "forager" slaves who did the work for them or something. Pots are oviously not people but they are one of their most meaningful remains, since they began using them. They are culturally relevant.
Plus archaeological cultures are not understood only on pots anymore, at least where something else is available. Archaeology is a detective work: all evidence is potentially important.
Or in this: Both groups could be immigrants or one just preceded the other by only decades in Europe?
Cultural patterns lacking please.
Pots may be silly and "made in taiwan" maybe (who knows?) but they are much better than mere pseudo-academic speculations based on the MCH alone: they are real, not just ideas.
-- What exactly is "IE Y-DNA", and I am under the impression some, if not many Kurgan burials are associated with Turkic speakers.
ReplyDeleteTurkic speakers modernly have rather low R1a or any other Western Y-DNA overall, except where they are largely assimilated pre-Turks, like in Turkey, Azerbaijan and to some extent southern Central Asia. Turkic expansion is generally understood to have began only in the last centuries BCE, that before that time they were limited to some areas of NE Asia, along with their other Altaic linguistic (and partly genetic) cousins: Mongols and Tunguses.
But you know all that, right? And you have heard of Scythians, sight?, and you know probably that they were Indoeuropean-speakers closely related to other Iranians, not Turks? You have also read surely on Tocharians and you know probably that they were not (yet) Uyghur Turks but Indoeuropean speakers, right?
So what's all this speculation about?
What have languages got to do with haplogroups? I am serious. Turkic languages are spoken by lots of different ethnic groups whose ancestors did not speak Turkic languages. The largest group of English speakers in the world, a Low German language of Germanic of the IE family, are South Asian Indians.
ReplyDeleteIt would be good policy to stop the mixing of languages with genetics, the correlation of the two is there but it is more of a coincidence. Nothing to do with actual human dna, unless you have found the gene or SNP for I.E languages speakers as distinct from Semitic speakers.
There is a new study on J1e, at least in "Arabians", and they err in mixing language, Semitic languages in this case, with the spread of J1e out of its origin point in Eastern Turkey, they claim 10 kya, with the Semites. Unfortunately it is unlikely there were any Semites outside Africa 10 kya, and the languages are more properly loosely associated with subclades of the African haplogroup E. Anyway, I doubt the peoples living in eastern Turkey who were J1e or J1* or J2 or I, in those ancient times spoke any language remotely like Semitic languages.
I too think the use of languages in population studies is over done. When I first got interested in this area I read a lot of arguments based on languages and found them to be very unreliable in the light of actual genetic data. I dont think they should be discarded completely but languages change far to fast to be used for long term studies.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was a child there were many very strong dialects in Britain. To the extent that a person from one side of England could have difficulty understanding a person from the other side. And a Cockney and a Geordie might as well have been living in different countries. The difference was greater than between the current American/Australian and British accents. Now it is all much more homogenous. The language has changed noticeably just in one persons lifetime.
The extent of the the Latin languages in Europe says a lot about Roman dominance but very little about genetics.
What have languages got to do with haplogroups? -
ReplyDeleteSome times they have to do. Other times they don't. Most of the time they have to do to some extent because often laguage spread include some amount of demic migration, very specially before state formation. Even the hyper-pre-IE Irish have some minimal levels of that R1a signal!
Turkic languages are spoken by lots of different ethnic groups whose ancestors did not speak Turkic languages.
True (up to a point) but I was not the one who mentioned Turks first. My point is that it's weird and against the extant knowledge to claim that Bronze Age Central Asians were "Turks" when we know they were Indoeuropean-speakers until rather late into the Iron Age and that Turks only expanded at a later date from further East.
There is a new study on J1e, at least in "Arabians", and they err in mixing language, Semitic languages in this case, with the spread of J1e out of its origin point in Eastern Turkey, they claim 10 kya, with the Semites. Unfortunately it is unlikely there were any Semites outside Africa 10 kya, and the languages are more properly loosely associated with subclades of the African haplogroup E. Anyway, I doubt the peoples living in eastern Turkey who were J1e or J1* or J2 or I, in those ancient times spoke any language remotely like Semitic languages.
I read a reference at Spitoon. It seems they forgot again to study Daghestanis and other Caucasic peoples with high apportions of J1 (not sure if J1e or what). They also seem to have forgotten of North Africans. The study at best would have validity for West Asia south of the Caucasus region and may or not bear a direct relation with the spread of Semitic languages, that I agree is of older date (though proto-Semites surely existed first in Asia and within the Harifian culture of Negev-Sinai, not in Africa).
However, if the date estimate is correct (what is always quite uncertain) it would imply maybe a correlation with the spread of PPNB, which is in turn indirectly related to the spread of Semitic languages because it was under its shadow that the Circum-Arabian Pastoralist Complex appeared, which is with all likelihood the real origin of protohistorical and historical Semites.
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ReplyDeleteThere is a new study on J1e, at least in "Arabians", and they err in mixing language, Semitic languages in this case, with the spread of J1e out of its origin point in Eastern Turkey, they claim 10 kya, with the Semites. Unfortunately it is unlikely there were any Semites outside Africa 10 kya, and the languages are more properly loosely associated with subclades of the African haplogroup E. Anyway, I doubt the peoples living in eastern Turkey who were J1e or J1* or J2 or I, in those ancient times spoke any language remotely like Semitic languages.
ReplyDeleteAfrasian homeland is levant(due to words for snow,hurrian loanwords in afrasian african languages and afrasian loanwords to indo-european[star,wine,tauros,agros,pyrgos,buck,sparrow,crow,snake,goat etc etc...])
J1 carriying Afrasian peoples share many vocabulary and grammatical features with J2 pre proto indo-europeans
There is no E1b1b(which is a sinaitic and not african haplotype)in Assyrian&Tchadic speakers whereas all Afrasian speaking has J1(copts have 39%,Berbers have 20%)
Afrasian is 10 k years old,very akin to proto-Afrasian age.
I recommand you to read Igor Diakonov and Allan Bomhard works.
http://www.geocities.com/therapeuter2002/humandispersal.html
ReplyDelete“The presence of Afroasiatic speakers in North Africa is due to successive waves of expansion from the Near East, each representing a contemporary form of post-Afroasiatic. In the earliest phase, the language may have been close to contemporary Indo-European, having the same SOV syntactic order inherited from Nostratic, and presumably much the same morphology, but already exhibiting the characteristic Afroasiatic feminine in t, which seems to be peculiar to this family. This wave, with its early Nostratic language, must have represented the first flush of Mesolithic influence in Africa, preceding the advent of the agricultural Neolithic in that region. It extended as far as the Ethiopian highlands and the Chad Basin to the Northwest of them, but there bogged down after converting the local African peoples to Nostratic speech as represented by the Cushitic, Omotic, and Chadic speakers of today… It is probable that the Cushitic and Omotic languages still retain traces of early Nostratic morphology…
“Later Southward waves of Afroasiatic speakers occurred at times when the old SOV pattern had changed – or was in process of changing – to the historically observed VSO pattern, accounting for the Berber and Old Egyptian speakers, the Semites of Syria, Palestine, Arabia, and Ethiopia, and eventually the Arabic expansion of the present era. The Semitic expansions seem to have been relatively late since their languages are less diverse than in the other branches. This is in harmony with the suggestion… that the early Indo-Europeans and Semites were neighbors in or near the Caucasus at a fairy late period.
“Thus, the diversity of the Cushitic and Omotic languages is not due to their speakers’ occupying the original homeland of Afroasiatic expansion [the rejected somewhat ‘unconventional’ proposal], but simply to the fact that these languages represent remnants of early Afroasiatic extended to its Southernmost extreme and evolving in relative isolation from currents of change in the major part of the Afroasiatic speaking world. There is a parallel situation in Northeastern Siberia, where such highly differentiated languages as Gilyak and Chukchi have evolved in isolation from their relatives in the rest of Siberia…” (p. 158 - 59).
The evolution of the Afroasiatic family is then similar to that of the Sinic
The basic pattern of the expansion of the Homo sapiens sapiens on the Eurasian continent, of “the peopling of Eurasia,” is of the “ripple” type, with the Near East in the center pumping waves after waves of immigrants to the east (East Asia), west (Europe), and somewhat later, namely after the retreat of the last ice-age, north and south (back to North Africa). The model of Eurasia-peopling is, that is to say, “Out of the Near East Again and Again.” The first wave has just been described and the linguistic vestiges of it identified. Around 40,000 years or so BP, a second wave of immigration “radiated” outward from the Near East center (“homeland”) to both East Asia and Europe. It’s quite possible that many of the descendants of the “first wave”, already resident in the larger part of South Asia, were “assimilated” by the second wave, the linguistic field of which covered up large section of South Asia. That is, they adopted the customs and languages of the new-comers, having lost their own linguistic and cultural identities. This is a too-often repeated pattern in the story of humans-coming-to-be-in-where-they-are-today, as we shall see. On the other side, arriving in Europe, the immigrants of the “second wave,” the first Homo sapiens sapiens to there turn up, quickly swept across and populated all over the frozen continent (“lasting 5 to 10,000 years”; p. 66, Cavalli-Sforza et al. The History and Geography of Human Genes). They brought with them the more sophisticated Aurignacian lithic culture, in contrast with the local, Mousterian culture of the Homo sapiens neanderthalensis. They brought about, too, the extinction of the latter through their more accelerated population growth. This second wave is today identified as the Dene-(Sino-)Caucasian substratum, at this time constituting a vast dialect field extending over the entire Eurasia from the tip of Spain to probably as far as the coast of Northeast Asia. The time is approximately 30,000 years BP. The European sub-culture of this vast Dene-Caucasian substratum has today left its traces in our memory as the “Cro-Magnon Man.”1 & 2 But only few vestiges from this “second wave” remain today. In the European west the only (linguistic) remnant today is the Basque (in southern France and northern Spain). To the east, the rest of the Dene-Caucasian substratum still remaining includes the north Caucasian family, Burushaski (of Pakistan), Sino-Tibetan, Yeniseian (Siberia), and Na-Dene of North America. Now if we want to identify the bearers of the language ancestral to today’s Chinese languages at this time, i.e. around 30,000 years BP, we can surmise that they were probably at this time no longer in the Near East but were to be found near the Himalayan region, the actual homeland of the Sino-Tibetan family 20,000 years or so later.
ReplyDeletethe Indo-European words for goat, ghaid, and boat, nau, seemed clearly to have been derived from the Semitic cognates gady- and naw.”) “In addition,” Kern and Bomhard continues, “shared words for star and seven suggest a common veneration for that number and perhaps a shared ideology.” Shevoroshkin adds, “Indo-Europeans also appear to have learned about the axe, the millstone, ale and ritual sacrifice from the ancient Semites.” (Ibid.) Bomhard and Kern conclude that these suggest “an association that was social as well as geographical.
Proto-Afrasian [-9.97].
ReplyDeleteI. South Afrasian/Cushomotic [-7.87].
I.1. Proto-Omotic [-5.36].
I.1.1. North Omotic [-3.99]: a) Dizi /Adikas/; b) Mao /Diddesa/; c)
Gonga [-1.14] (Shinasha=Bworo, Kafa); d) Janjero=Yemsa; e) Chara; f)
Ometo [-1.30] (Wolayta, Male).
I.1.2. South Omotic [-4.63]: a) Ongota; b) Aroid [-0.98] (Dime, Hamar).
I.2. Proto-Cushitic [-6.51].
I.2.1. North-Central Cushitic [-4.73].
I.2.1.1. Bedauye.
I.2.1.2. Agaw/Central Cushitic [-1.33]: a) Aungi=Auwiya; b) North
Agaw [-0.04] (Bilin, Khamta).
I.2.2. South Cushitic [-4.65]: a) Dahalo; b) Maa=Mbugu; c) Iraqw,
Qwadza [-2.65].
I.2.3. East Cushitic [-5.57].
I.2.3.1. Yaaku /= Mogogodo/.
I.2.3.2. Dullay [-0.05]: a) Gawwata; b) Tsamay.
I.2.3.3. Highland East Cushitic [-1.39]: a) Burji; b) Hadiya, Sidamo
[-0.36].
I.2.3.4. Afar.
I.2.3.5. Lowland East Cushitic [-2.57]: a) Somaloid [-1.95] (Somali,
Bayso); b) Oromoid [-0.79] (Oromo (Welegga), Konso); c) Galaboid [-1.07]
(Dasenech=Geleba; Arbore, Elmolo [-0.04]).
II. North Afrasian [-8.96].
II.1. Proto-Semitic [-4.51].
II.1.1. South Semitic/Modern South Arabian [-0.68]: a) Soqotri; b) Continental
South Semitic [0.42] (Mehri, Jibbali).
II.1.2. North Semitic [-3.55].
II.1.2.1. Akkadian.
II.1.2.2. West Semitic [-2.85].
II.1.2.2.1. Ethiopian [-0.89]: a) South Ethiopian [-0.30] (Amharic,
Harari); b) North Ethiopian [-0.39] (Tigrai=Tigrinya, Geez).
II.1.2.2.2. Common Arabic [0.32]: Qur'anic, Syrian Arabic, etc.
II.1.2.2.3. Levantine [-2.01]: a) Ugaritic; b) South Levantine [-1.73]
(Aramaic [-0.09], Hebrew).
II.2. African North Afrasian [-7.71].
II.2.1. Egyptian: a) Egyptian (Old Kingdom) [-2.55]; b) Coptic Bohairic
[0.45].
II.2.2. Chado-Berber [-5.89].
II.2.2.1. Proto-Berber [-1.11].
II.2.2.1.1. North-West Berber [-0.88].
II.2.2.1.1.1. Zenaga.
II.2.2.1.1.2. North Berber [-0.42]: a) Atlas [0.07] (Semlal, Izdeg); b)
Zenata [-0.16] (Shawiya, Qabyle (Mangellat)).
II.2.2.1.2. South-East Berber [-1.01].
II.2.2.1.2.1. South Berber/Tuareg [0.46]: a) Ahaggar; b) Ayr.
II.2.2.1.2.2. East Berber [-0.81]: a) Ghadames; b) Siwa.
II.2.2.2. Proto-Chadic [-5.41].
II.2.2.2.1. Central Chadic [-4.35]: a) Musgu; b) Mandara-Gudur
[-1.73] (Mandara; Gisiga, Mofu-Gudur [-1.04]).
II.2.2.2.2. East Chadic [-3.64]: a) Tumak; b) Mokilko; c) Migama,
Jegu [-0.85].
II.2.2.2.3. West Chadic [-4.10]: a) Bolewa; b) Kiir, Hausa [-3.87].
Category Indoeuropean/Afroasiatic
ReplyDelete1st person singular -h2e (-a) a-
2nd person singular -th2e (-tha) ta-
3rd person singular -0e (-e) i-
example
ie:oid-a, ois-tha, oid-e
aa:a-prus, ta-prus, i-prus
explanation of example "to know", perfect singular (Greek) "to decide", preterite singular (male) (Akkadian)
Erratum
ReplyDeleteAfrasian is 10 k years old,very akin to J1 age.
ashraf, you miss the point.
ReplyDeleteAfro-Asiatic is a language family which contains the Semitic language group. The ages of the the original proto language of Afro-Asiatic family, and the later original proto Semitic language group are very iffy, unproven. Even the classification of the language family by Greenberg and others, is tenuous. What can be said is that the Semitic language group is much younger than the parent family language which Greenberg termed Afro-Asiatic.
The origin point for proto Semitic language group is not known with any accuracy. Saying it is the Levant cannot be proven. That is just based on where those languages were found in the historical period which is not very far back in time. Akkadian is only known from Sumerian texts no more than 5000 ybp. The oldest known Semitic language, to Europeans anyway, is located in the Near East, and extinct, and older than what is called Arabic. Arabic's foundations can be traced to the Nabataeans but by any account Arabic, is a polyglot language devised to facilitate communication with widely spread out tribal peoples in the Middle East and is of recent origin, as of Muhammad's day. Some old pre Quranic poetry exists but either way Arabic is a synthetic language. The roots of Semitic languages are very similar in all existing Semitic languages even the Maltese language. This means Semitic languages are not very old and they have absorbed foreign loan by contact whether IE or those peculiar to the Caucasus. All languages have and continue to do that. Admiral, algebra and alcohol are Arabic absorptions into English.
The study showed that J1e among Arabic speakers, that was the object of the study Maju, not among other language speakers like Portuguese or Italian or Avari, is 10 kya. Since J1 is more genetically diverse in Europeans, Anatolians, and Ethiopians than in Arabic speakers the age would likely be older than the Arabic speakers J1e. That haplogroup accounts for most of J1 not just in Arabic speakers. J1* covers the rest of J1, with J1a,b,c and d being very uncommon. It is unlikely that the original J1e men and their families spoke Semitic languages, J1 itself is much older than 10 kya, and that puts it much too aged for any language group belonging to the Afro-Asiatic family to have existed in the origin point of the J1 haplogroup.
ashraf: this isn't a forum. Keep comments related to the blog post. Any further long copy-paste jobs will be deleted.
ReplyDeleteCan anybody please help me? I think im totally a novice in this field, but its so intersting. What kind of y chormosome data is available online?
ReplyDeleteImportant reference: ISOGG.
All the rest is scattered in many research papers. For starters, I'd suggest Wikipedia (browse for haplogroup...) and then checking for the references and building up gradually knowledge and a documentary reference.
How do I download it from the published data?
Not sure what you mean.
Is there a repository for y chromosome data? NRY sequences? Microsatellite data? (is this in the form of repeats?).
I presume that you mean STR sequences, these are short tandem repeats and are mostly more dealt with by genetic companies, some of whom (FTDNA in special) have publicly vailable data. They are mostly used to estabilish genetic structure in lack of SNPs and to estimate ages with the Molecular Clock hypothesis (several methods).
Specialized forums and blogs like this one can also be of help in gradually reading papers and on papers but you won't become knowledgeable overnight, that's clear.
Take it easy.
True (up to a point) but I was not the one who mentioned Turks first. My point is that it's weird and against the extant knowledge to claim that Bronze Age Central Asians were "Turks" when we know they were Indoeuropean-speakers until rather late into the Iron Age and that Turks only expanded at a later date from further East.
ReplyDelete-- I see this conclusion often. On what evidence? Do we have anything written down?
"Turkic speakers modernly have rather low R1a or any other Western Y-DNA overall, except where they are largely assimilated pre-Turks, like in Turkey, Azerbaijan and to some extent southern Central Asia. Turkic expansion is generally understood to have began only in the last centuries BCE, that before that time they were limited to some areas of NE Asia, along with their other Altaic linguistic (and partly genetic) cousins: Mongols and Tunguses."
ReplyDelete-- This is a hypothesis based on written account which happens to occur very late in time. This does not rule out the language being passed through oral tradition years earlier, without Mongol influence. One Russian linguist has drawn phonological similarities between Basque and the Kazakh language (and other Turkic languages to lesser degree) for example. I don't necessarily support it, but can't rule anything out either.
"Anyway, I doubt the peoples living in eastern Turkey who were J1e or J1* or J2 or I, in those ancient times spoke any language remotely like Semitic languages."
ReplyDeleteInterestingly. The subclade we know of as I2a2-D is very strongly represented north of the Black Sea and even in regions in the north of Russia. Try searching haplotypes in YHRD for Russia and you will see for yourself. I2 is pretty much absent in Turkey except in the area adjacent to Bulgaria (NW). I don't know the timeline for these movements but I suspect they were SW, rather than NE. I do find it interesting how IJ seem to bisect R1 distribution in half.
Also interesting is that the Cinnogliu study put the age of R1 in Anatolia as being older, which might support a younger age of J in general. Would this mean R1 had already traversed west from West-Central Asia into Europe and Anatolia in UP times? And what evidence do we have for these individuals not speaking IE language? It's all speculation of course...
"We have come full circle. Once again, Paleolithic Europeans assume the status of survivors, as their typical lineages are observed in a small minority of modern Europeans. The evidence for widespread acculturation of European hunter-gatherers or their significant genetic contribution to incoming farmers along a wave of advance is just not there."
ReplyDelete-Not sure I agree here. At best, the conclusions draw that mtDNA from the neolithic gene pool was absorbed by the Europeans and is fairly represented, or dominant in modern day. The so-called "paleolithic gene pool" U is still abundant, but sharing space with the gargantuan H. The same cannot be said necessarily for the Y-DNA or male contribution.
according to wikipedia J1 is 10 ky old.
ReplyDeleteAccording to this another site it is nearly 15 k years'old which fit extraordinarly with pre-proto afrasian[please note that it's not proto afrasian but rather pre proto afrasian]or perhaps proto-nostratic with J2 being perhaps the result of creolisation betweennostratic assimilated upon them with their former languages)
ReplyDeletehttp://thegeneticatlas.com/J1_Y-DNA.htm
I've been holding back from openly expressing what I think, which I've believed since I first read the Haak study and it's bizarre results a couple years ago, but well, I think it's almost certain these ancient mtdna results are erroneus and eventually will be proven to be so. They fly in the face of all other evidence. Pretty much the only evidence in favor of the farmer expansion is these 2 studies, before them there was absolutely nothing to support it, and ironically, probably the single most important piece of evidence to support population continuity involves modern mtdna. I've been going over the haplotype results of the ancient mtdna study of Etruscans and I've found scores of very serious problems involving close to half of the samples. I'm going to post them in the next few days, and keep in mind that these results were obtained twice in independent samplings, sometimes from different bones of the skeleton, so they're not an issue involving a single sample, they are the twice verified results of the subject studied, and they have very serious issues that call into question their validity.
ReplyDeleteToday I'll post this from the Etruscan strudy:
The Etruscan sequences show substitutions at sites (069, 126, 223, 270, and 356) known to be prone to recurrent mutation or postmortem damage (Gilbert et al. 2003).
270 identifies U5, and 356 identifies U4. And yes, I know that there were also coding mutations involved in some of the hunter-gatherer U4/U5 results.
In ancient mtdna studies, U5 seems to appear everywhere and at very unusually high frequencies. Dienekes has posted a big list of ancient mtdna studies that had very high levels of U5, and these included a single sample from 1000 years ago of a man that originated from around Tadjikistan, where U5 today is just 1% of the mtdna, and 1 U5 sample out of 3 samples from Crete, where U5 is 5% today, amongst other notable results. Many of these studies are of samples from just 1000 or 2000 years ago, greatly reducing the possibility of huge population rearrangements or for evolution to affect their composition.
[continued in next post]
[continued from previous post]
ReplyDeleteMaju called my attention when he pointed out that one of the hunter-gatherer samples was U*-CRS. Only 5% of U is U*, and only 10% to 15% of U* is CRS (if we include mutation 16519 then CRS is further reduced to just 2%). There are only about a dozen U4/U5 samples in the 2 hunter-gatherer studies combined, because we have to eliminate samples with the same haplotype from the same site. It's not unrealistic that we would find a U*-CRS amongst this group, but it's unlikely. [And yeah, I know that back then the frequencies of haplogroups were completely different from today... though curiously, they've since managed to form a ratio of U*/U2/U4/U5 that is remarkably similar from Morocco to Russia to Egypt and Ireland, and the frequency of U*-CRS amongst U* samples also managed to remain notably similar in the Middle East, Caucasus, and Europe... so yeah, sure, everything was completely different back then...]
So we've found a U*-CRS, which is a very rare haplotype for a U sample, but very common for H. On the other hand, I've never heard of U2 being found in an ancient mtdna study. U2 is more common than U* (definitely much more common than U*-CRS), and less than U4. With all the U results we've been seeing, not just in the hunter-gatherers but in many other studies, we would expect some U2 to have shown up by now, but there's apparently nothing. And on top of that, U2 should be the easiest to spot, because they have, by quite a margin, the greatest amount of mutational deviations from the CRS of any U lineage. Actually, that's why I think we're not seeing them. I think these ancient mtdna results are a mish-mash of snippets of stable and degraded mtdna, sometimes forming into a more or less believable result, sometimes forming impossible chains of mutations that make absolutely no sense. Haplogroup U is the closest to H in its HVR haplotype.
I've noticed that ancient mtdna seems to have a significantly smaller amount of mutations per equal length of the HVR than modern mtdna. This was also noted by the authors of the Taforalt ancient mtdna study, I believe. This doesn't really make sense, they shouldn't have less mutations. Please note that I'm trying to find my way here, brainstorming, if you will. I can't accept, like Dienekes does, that this matter is settled, because I've done my homework and I could swear that it's impossible that West Eurasians are the result of a mass movement of people 10,000 years ago, with subsequent events rounding out the picture. It's hard for me to explain here how solidly the evidence points to population continuity, ironically with the mtdna itself being perhaps the single greatest piece of evidence for it. In the case of y-dna the proponents of population movements have a valid argument, regardless of wether it's true or not, but in the case of mtdna, there is no argument. It's virtually impossible that modern West Eurasian mtdna is the result of some mass movement of people 10,000 years ago. Something's going on, and I'm glad that there are some excellent minds here who don't but this story, either (Maju, Annie, did I miss anyone?). This wouldn't be the first time (or second or third or fourth) that geneticists have made sweeping statements that later turn out to be total baloney (Zhivotovsky effective evolutionary mutation rate, for example, though not really his fault but rather the geneticists that misused it).
Tomorrow I'll also upload some of the excel files I've been using to help me follow these ancient mtdna studies. One of them that I found very useful is a table showing the frequencies of the major HVR mutations in more than 100 haplogroups. When I'm studying an mtdna haplotype, I can just glance at that table and quickly determine what haplogroups it can reasonably belong to. It's also given me an appreciation of how similar the HVR region is amongst most haplogroups, and how easy it is for a sample to transmute into a completely different haplogroup thanks to a single mutation.
I see this conclusion often. On what evidence? Do we have anything written down? -
ReplyDeleteYes, we do. And you should make your own research before messing everything up and down. Begin with Wikipedia maybe? Then follow the thread: Herodotus, Strabo, Chinese references, archaeology, etc.
One Russian linguist has drawn phonological similarities between Basque and the Kazakh language...
So Basque is "Turkic" now, what else?
who don't but this story, either
ReplyDeletewho don't buy this story, either
It's virtually impossible that modern West Eurasian mtdna is the result of some mass movement of people 10,000 years ago.
ReplyDeleteI strongly agree with this. However it is perfectly possible that there was important demic changes in the LBK area with Neolithic or even later (it would not clash with archaeology). But hardly through the whole continent.
Something's going on, and I'm glad that there are some excellent minds here who don't but this story, either (Maju, Annie, did I miss anyone?).
Yourself certainly: who are doing the real detective work. It's not mere exchange of compliments: I've been from some time waiting to see if you decide to begin your own blog, which I believe should be a quite interesting read.
I've noticed that ancient mtdna seems to have a significantly smaller amount of mutations per equal length of the HVR than modern mtdna. This was also noted by the authors of the Taforalt ancient mtdna study, I believe. This doesn't really make sense, they shouldn't have less mutations.
ReplyDeleteIn comparison with the CRS? In principle not because the CRS haplotype is not at the root but at the end of some branches.
However, as such HVS-I haplotype is so common among West Eurasian R-derived haplogroups, including it seems: U*, H1, H2 and even HV (someone said also R0?), I could speculate it could also be the ancestral haplotype of mtDNA R or some variants of it, which has remained stable in some lineages and mutated in others. Just a wild hunch that probably makes little sense - just within your "brainstorming" idea.
It could make some better sense if at least U and R0 would closely related but that doesn't seem to be the case beyond their common R-derivation.
But if "less mutations" means less mutations in relation to the the root, then it could make some better sense, as mutations need time to get consolidated. For instance, if the CRS haplotype would be ancestral for HV or at least European HV (eventually leading to H and possibly also V), it could explain its unusual aDNA frequency in this haplogroup (but not in U*, what can only be seen as a coincidence).
@Blue Jay
ReplyDeleteFor an intro start with:
http://isogg.org/tree
Then David Reynolds site:
http://daver.info/ysub/
GenBank stores sequences.
You might be onto something here Argiedude.
ReplyDeleteFewer mutations means genetically closer to H2 (the rCRS) and Haplogroup H.
As you travel up the tree you would expect more core defining mutations as you travel back in time, and fewer minor mutations.
As you travel forward in time away from H you would expect more core defining mutations and more minor mutations.
However it is thought that many of the mutations that arise do not persist. So of the large number of mutations we see now, a lot will not be detectable by future generations (the number of mutations is disproportionately high at present).
The key to this will lie in the patterns of the mutations.
Thinking about it you would also expect the number of mutations in actual aDNA to be disproportionately high as they represent the the "present" of that time.
ReplyDeleteNo, because population was smaller and therefore only a limited amount of such mutations could exist at any time. Obviously there can't be nearly as many diversity in a European population one the several thousands or tens of thousands (Paleolithic) as there can be in a European population of many hundred millions (now).
ReplyDeleteIn order for a mutation to exist there must be a person carrying it. In 5,000 people there can be a theoretical maximum of 5,000 unique lineages. In practice the number must be much much lower, specially as most are quite closely related to each other.
That's why Neanderthals had such a low mitochondrial diversity... when compared with modern humans. Some 5 or 10,000 Neanderthals necessarily will have less diversity than today's six billion people. But probably they had about the same diversity as the H. sapiens that replaced them in Europe, who were surely in not much larger numbers.
"disproportionately" Maju. I mean more mutations than we can now see. Not in absolute numbers.
ReplyDelete"But probably they had about the same diversity as the H. sapiens that replaced them in Europe".
ReplyDeleteProbably not. They had been isolated, and consequently inbred, for several tens of thousands of years. They certainly seem to look much the same across their geographic distribution, which would argue in favour of inbreeding.
If they lived in isolated villages and inbred then you would expect retention of more mutations not less and each pack would have its own characteristic sequence.
ReplyDeleteGenetic consistency points to a small initial founding population and/or interaction between villages. They were in Europe for a very long time. I doubt a founding effect would persist that long. So interbreeding is more likely.
But, population size matters not just for direct apportions: if there are, say, 1000 people who have "inbred" for many many generations already, they will have just a handful of lineages (drift does that, not to mention the founder effect at the beginning of the local demographic history too).
ReplyDeleteNovel mutations can only happen statistically once in X newborns. But today, there's almost no drift: nearly all mutations survive, while in the Paleolithic, drift was extreme and almost no new mutations would make it (and when they did they may have tended to become dominant or at least important).
I think we can only compare wide lineages, as downstream mutations that are "private", that have not consolidated as haplogroups (in the sense of being common enough), will always be more now than in the past, proportionally too, because of the deactivation of drift at large population sizes.
Drift tends to homogenize the genetic pool (in a conservative way most of the time), lack of it (as nowadays) tends to generate high (derived) diversity. However, if suddenly drift would become again active, like in an apocalyptic mega-bottleneck scenario, only some of the currently existing lineages would make it. Which ones? Impossible to predict, though the most common, the better chances in principle.
If they lived in isolated villages and inbred then you would expect retention of more mutations not less and each pack would have its own characteristic sequence.
ReplyDeleteIMO not, because drift is actually conservative and tends to fixation in one or few lineages, which could remain nearly stable for many milennia: extant common sequences have clear advantage (numbers) against novel unique ones. The odds are always extremely high in favor of the novel mutation being erased by mere drift. However, very now and then a novel mutation wins the lotto (someone must eventually) and the lineages become dynamic for that but only that mutation, which is incorporated to the advantaged but not very diverse dominant genetic pool.
That's why the pedigree mutation rate must be severely corrected when drift is active, i.e. for historical purposes. When drift goes inactive (strong population growth or large stable population sizes) there is no fixation anymore, so hardly a lineage can become dominant then: the trend is for them to remain rather small: private or at best as minor sublineages.
"Yes, we do. And you should make your own research before messing everything up and down. Begin with Wikipedia maybe? Then follow the thread: Herodotus, Strabo, Chinese references, archaeology, etc."
ReplyDelete-- For the record, I do, but this is just a hobby so I take it loosely. In no way can language be tied to a haplogroup directly. Obviously there may or sometimes not be mild association, but populations change, and often we cannot predict who will survive and who will not. Who gets persecuted, and who was in the majority...etc There are a plethora of variables. In the argument you are using, I could just as easily say these are J2 individuals in India/Iran responsible for the spread of IE for instance. (again I don't subscribe to this belief) That is heavily oversimplifying things, but I could draw the same conclusions from the raw data that you are.
The Basque-Proto-Turkic relationship could hold if the separation were that long ago. His study was just based on the phonology, and I am not entirely certain if the Caucasian languages were included in the analysis, which might also be a missing link. Interestingly, the Mongol languages also placed high on the list, but this could all be coincidence I suppose.
argiedude, I know what you are saying, but the spread of U4/U5...et al may have been that extensive in ancient times. Even today U is highest in the northern half of Europe using data from the community.
ReplyDeletePerhaps the neolithic brought an overlay of new mates that tended to be selected over the previous ones. I think the larger challenge is determining the extent of yDNA. At this point, the European men seem to have adapted rather than be replaced by incoming farmers. Obviously the strongest genetic effect is in SE Europe near the source.
In no way can language be tied to a haplogroup directly.
ReplyDeleteOf course: you can learn a new language and pass it to your children along with a new ethnic identity, distinct from that of your ancestors. You can't change your haplogroups.
Re. languages: Basque has been compared with nearly every other language on Earth and the authors of such comparisons have often been adamant of such relationship. However nearly no such hypothesis have resisted scientific scrutiny. As of now, Basque is an isolate with a likely relation of some sort (sprachbund?) with Ancient Iberian maybe. I also think that there is some very weak signal of potential correlation with NE Caucasian and hence with Hurro-Urartean maybe - but this would fall into a very ancient grouping if anyhthing, belonging to Paleolithic times. I also think that there is some European substrate, found in toponymy and some non-IE words here and there that looks Vasconic. But it's just my opinion anyhow and I won't get into any heated argument for that: I know the limitations of linguistics.
Wow fascinating stuff!
ReplyDeleteI'm not an anthropologist or archaeologist but being from Malta I found this post very interesting.
Loved reading this.
Cheers,
Marica
Oh dear! It seems that this review of paradigm shift has one or two people very upset. That is understandable, but there is no way to stop paradigm change once it has started.
ReplyDeleteI've been watching for it. It was obvious to me 20 years ago that anti-migrationism was not sustainable. It requires such a huge blindness to evidence. (There was a mass of evidence of migration relating to the spread of the Neolithic Argiedude. It's just that a lot of archaeologists were willing it away and arguing it out of existence.) And more will come rolling in. Eventually any intellectual cage will start to creak, if evidence just won't fit into it. The sounds of creaking and bars snapping have been building up for a few years.
Barry Cunliffe's most recent book - Between the Oceans (2008) gave the academic seal of approval to paradigm change. Prehistoric migration is no longer heresy. Whether you like it or not.
I don't think there is any such clear clash of paradigms, Jean. It's all a matter of prudence and common sense. What I see a problem is with rigidly aligning oneself with this or that model. The very use of the term "paradigm" implies that some model is almost unanimously accepted, what I don't think is the case either.
ReplyDeleteWhat I see is that the circumstances of process A in region alpha are not necesarily the same as those of process B in region beta, etc. The case of LBK was always suggestive (on the very archaeological grounds) of demic replacement at least to some point, except probably in Belgium and Northern France, where hybrid cultures existed, and maybe at the cultural change area of the Middle Danube, where Starcevo "became" (or maybe just "inspired", or something in between) LBK through a rather intense transformation that we do not witness anywhere in the Balcans before.
However for Coon's followers, the Neolithic demic flow should have been more intense in the Mediterranean, just because southern Europeans tend to be brunette rather than blond (and that is central in Coon's racial systematics, even if it's just one trait) and also because he hyper-emphasizes the Cro-Magnon "racial" type, which had surely only a limited influence in SW Europe, where Gravettian (and hence CM type) was late and short-lived, ignoring Magdalenian types for example, which are much closer to modern Europeans. But this Nordocentric Coonism is inconsistent with archaeology, because Impressed-Cardium Pottery culture is most of the time found in otherwise Epipaleolithic derived contexts, easily identifiable for their toolkits.
So we do have a possible demic replacement (though with some odd steps) in Central Europe and now archaeogenetics seems to confirm it. But we do not have any clear demic replacement in the Mediterranean area and archaeogenetics would also seem to confirm that.
Additionally, there is the Eastern European province, probably not suffering any demic replacement either at the Neolithic (excepting the Indo-Uralic easternmost fringes - hard to evaluate), and the variegated Atlantic area with a series of local Neolithic cultures evolving only reluctantly in most cases but with quite distinct cultural features, after the arrival of either major Neolithic current to their neighbourhood.
So it's a truly complex mosaic of circumstances. And right away extrapolating the possible circumstances of LBK to anywhere else in Europe is, said bluntly, arrogant and ignorant.
Nicely done, Dienekes. It's a very nicely done meta-analysis: informed, rational, and not over-reaching.
ReplyDeleteVV
Here's a handy reference I use to analyse these HVR-I results:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.sendspace.com/file/9f17br
[I'm still working on the problems with the Etruscan mtdna results, maybe I'll post that stuff tomorrow, and some other excel files I use involving mtdna]
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteMaju - Talking about "Coon's followers" is anachronistic. Coon has no followers in today's academia, except in the very distant sense that we all follow in the footsteps of pioneers in various fields.
ReplyDeleteWhat Dienekes has outlined is the swing of the pendulum in the study of prehistory from the "arrows on the map" approach to immobilism or at most a gentle "wave of advance" and now back again to migration.
This does not mean a return to exactly the same rather simplistic approach to migration that was taken in the first half of the 20th century, let alone to the precise detail of the views of Coon. The body of knowledge is vastly greater now than in his day.
Maju - Talking about "Coon's followers" is anachronistic. Coon has no followers in today's academia...
ReplyDeleteMost people here are not academics. I know what I mean. And anyhow, is not the very post atop of this discussion trying to recycle Coon's ideas?
What Dienekes has outlined is the swing of the pendulum in the study of prehistory from the "arrows on the map" approach to immobilism or at most a gentle "wave of advance" and now back again to migration.
There's been a lot of people proposing migrationism in the last 20 years or more, mostly based on genetics... but with little or no idea of archaeology, it seems to me. Others, also based on genetics but with wiser, more interdisciplinary, approach have proposed continuity instead.
The very fact that we are even considering a single European Neolithic process is a total disregard for archaeological evidence, whose results I have already exposed above.
What I said to Vizachero the other day: ok with your hyper-accelerated molecular clock or whatever but, as there is no single unified European Neolithic culture nor process, you cannot argue that an almost monolithic clade, essentially spread along an Atlantic axis is Neolithic. Because you would need at least two distinct founder effects: one for the south and another for the north, and they should not display that western N-S axis in any case because no Neolithic culture can explain that.
And I'm not even considering the Atlantic or Eastern European rather unique differences here: just the very basics about European Neolithic: there were two very different parallel waves, which should have left noticeably different tracks. And also the source should not be so directly in Anatolia but rather in the Balcans.
PS- The only way to argue for a pan-European Neolithic demic replacement is disregarding lots of information: not just archaeological but also genetic. There is just no Cardium Pottery genetic cluster of any sort: neither in Y-DNA, nor in mtDNA nor much less in autosomal genetics. Though there are traces of this process that tend to decline quite sharply as one heads to the West.
ReplyDeleteSimilarly there is no Balcano-Danubian genetic cluster anywhere, what makes me think that even if there was a demic replacement in parts of Central Europe with the LBK (what is perfectly possible) the source of this population was a neighbouring one with at least partly European native genetics. Or that there were further demic replacements after the LBK, that anyhow, met its end with the Kurgan invasions.
It's not like LBK was some sort of cradle of European civilization nor that it affected all Europe (not at all), though of course it left some influences. It was just an important cultural (probably ethno-linguistic too) area of Central Europe for some 2.5-3 millennia (but was diversified very soon after its rather fast expansion too).
Maju - Certainly some people - even within archaeology - have ignored anti-migrationist fashion. Joao Zilhao is one of them. He has argued for discontinuity in Iberia at the onset of the Neolithic.
ReplyDeleteA few archaeologists have actually fought the tide, notably David Anthony, with his article "Migration in archaeology: the baby and the bathwater", American Anthropologist, vol. 92 (1990), no. 4, pp. 23-42.
But that article and others like it would scarcely have been necessary if western archaeology had not embraced anti-migrationism.
If the world of academic archaeology had been just as happy to talk migration as continuity over the last 20 years, I think Prof. Barry Cunliffe would have noticed. Instead he plainly stated that what began as a challenge to the "waves of invasion" orthodoxy has hardened into dogma. It became the new orthodoxy, with some prehistorians refusing to contemplate the possibility of migration in prehistory. Now that orthodoxy is itself being challenged.
Joao Zilhao is one of them. He has argued for discontinuity in Iberia at the onset of the Neolithic.
ReplyDeleteI know. And that's probably why, in spite of the obviousness of the evidence, Chandler 2005 (of which Zilhao is co-author) claims that there is no genetic continuity in Portugal. So what's this: they get a pre-Neolithic sample that is mostly H with some U and some other, they get a Neolithic sample that is also mostly H with some U and some other and just because this some minor other is different (normal between any two random samples), they claim total genetic discontinuity.
That's Zilhao's personal mark, no doubt.
The good thing is that while trying to prove discontinuity, the raw data speaks for itself and yells: mostly contunity!
Zilhao may be wrong in other things but I'm not sure enough so I'll shut up.
But that article and others like it would scarcely have been necessary if western archaeology had not embraced anti-migrationism.
The data is there for all to see, Zilhao included. It is not Western Archaeology which has embraced anti-migrationism but archaeology which is producing results that clearly say that migration existed but was scattered and much less deep and continuous than the whole cultural complex it happened within. In SE France there are only two true Cardium colonies near the Alps! The rest is all locals adopting farming and that pottery style. In Italy and Spain there are some more clear colonies but again most of the sites are not that but assimilated Epipaleolithic ones. I don't know of a single Cardium colony in Portugal, by the way.
The situation admittedly is very different for Central Europe, where there is no clear case of assimilated Epipaleolithics. In the Balcanic-Danubian agricultural complex the apparent pattern is that of great initial homogeneity with no direct evidence of any assimilation. However I have always found unusual the way that the red-white painted pottery of the Balcans vanishes to become the new Linear engraved style precisely where one would expect the migrant farmers to cross paths with the post-Magdalenian foragers: in Hungary. So I suspect that the LBK may be the product of some "mestizo" cultural group. Still just a guess.
But in any case both areas are very different. And then there are still other areas with their own unique complexities.
All I say is look at the archaeological data: you can't talk Prehistory just from some controversial Genetics.
Maju - If you are talking about Cardium colonies, then clearly you have accepted the key factor in the new thinking about the spread of the Neolithic. The rest is just detail.
ReplyDeleteThe concept of leap-frog colonisation both across the Mediterranean and across Central Europe has put migration back in to the picture.
This is a huge change from the insistence on cultural diffusion and nothing but cultural diffusion, in the face of archaeological evidence not only of a sharp discontinuity in culture and economy at many sites, but anthropological evidence of the arrival of people of a totally different body build, akin to those found in the Near East. Archaeology has been afflicted with a staggering degree of migration-blindness.
No-one so far is arguing for the total wipe-out of the Mesolithic population. Archaeologists and geneticists will no doubt be happily engaged for many years to come in working out the details.
If you are talking about Cardium colonies, then clearly you have accepted the key factor in the new thinking about the spread of the Neolithic.
ReplyDeleteI don't know who you read, but I've been reading about that for decades now. It's nothing new: it's plain and clear. However most of the Cardium sites do not appear to be colonies but "aculturized" native settlements.
The rest is just detail.
The Devil is in the detail.
The concept of leap-frog colonisation both across the Mediterranean and across Central Europe has put migration back in to the picture.
It has been all the time there. However the impact, density and origins of such colonization is where the discussion is.
And anyhow, I refuse to argue in terms of paradigm clash and in terms that make no distinctions between the various European regions. I insist: the devil is in the details, there is no paradigm clash.
However there is a clash between those who adhere exclusively (maybe out of ignorance or maybe out of some sort of bias) to certain versions of the MCH, with a purely pseudo-genetic argumentation (and it is worth reminding here that population genetics has in fact just a brief decade or so of true existence: it's still a young stumbling science) and ignoring right away all the hard work done in the archaeological field in the last century or more, just because some statistical equation, where most variables are arbitrary hunches, says so... and those who shake their head in disbelief when reading about such feeble hypothesis being sold as the definitive "scientific" answer for Prehistory.
This fashion borders pseudo-science dangerously and must be kept in check. And is this barely scientific fashion which is "challenging" all and nothing else. And this is because the people defending it have biases/agendas and/or don't know/don't care about archaeology.
This is a huge change from the insistence on cultural diffusion and nothing but cultural diffusion, in the face of archaeological evidence not only of a sharp discontinuity in culture and economy at many sites, but anthropological evidence of the arrival of people of a totally different body build, akin to those found in the Near East.
Anthropometry (not Anthropology!) is very tricky, so I perfectly understand treating it with outmost caution. But even anthropometric data stands for (mostly) demic continuity in most places, including the Basque Country, whose prehistory I know better than that of other places.
However I never stop listening mermaid songs about how Basques are 100% Neolithic arrival from those Migrationist fanatics with a made-up equation and a "genetic" pretext on hand (but almost no knowledge of archaeology, at best a very patchy one).
No-one so far is arguing for the total wipe-out of the Mesolithic population.
They are. If Basque or Irish DNA is virtually all Neolithic, as some claim, that means a total wipe-out even in the farthest Atlantic reaches, geographically and climatically (and archaeologically too) most distant from the origins of European Neolithic at Thessaly.
And that is what I make no sense of.
Maju - I understand the depth of your feelings, as a Basque, about the how the new perspectives may alter the view of the Basques. But emotion attachment to a vision of personal heritage makes for bad science.
ReplyDeleteOf course the spread of Cardium pottery has been known for a long time. What is changing is the interpretation of these sites.
If one of the most distinguished and well-known professors of archaeology in Europe says that a paradigm change is going on among archaeologists in their view of prehistory, and several other recent works say the same thing e.g. Peter Peregrine et al (eds), Ancient Human Migrations (2009), denying it is pretty pointless.
I would agree that there is a discontinuity between paleolithic and neolithic and I believe that it has more to do with a "catastrophe" than arguments over types of diffusion. 6000 to 5000 BC was rife with natural disasters and Doggerland was destroyed and the Black Sea was flooded which started the subsequent "neolithic" invasions. Small areas, like Iberia were not
ReplyDeletedisjointed as much. However, I believe there is a clear discontinuity and almost a start- over beginning 4000 BC or so. This is as consistent a proposition as some of the discussion on this thread?
Maju - I understand the depth of your feelings, as a Basque, about the how the new perspectives may alter the view of the Basques. But emotion attachment to a vision of personal heritage makes for bad science.
ReplyDeleteYou don't understand anything, sorry. It is true that I embarked many years ago into studying prehistory and later also genetics largely because I was just bored of reading extremely different (and mostly hollow) versions on which was the origins of the Basques and I wanted to know where the truth laid. I did not have then any particular preconceptions, for what I care the odd hypothesis that Basque was a Bantu dialect could be true but I wanted to know for sure.
I still do not know for sure many things but what is quite clear (and I review the available data every other day, trying to find a flaw in my reasoning) is that the genetically clear Atlantic fringe of Europe has no possible Neolithic origins. And in order to explain that I need not to be Basque or whatever, I could equally be Chinese or Zimbabwean.
The only thing that my ethnic identity has given me is the interest in this area of the world more than in others, though it has also carried my intellect to very remote places and peoples, as all borders are to some point arbitrary and you need to cross them in order to understand things properly.
So no: it is not more emotional than anybody else's position. Probably much less because I don't care if Basques are ancient like Cro-Magnon or recent like Che Guevara, I don't care if we have a connection with the Tungusians, the Chechens or the Zulus... but I want to know for real.
If one of the most distinguished and well-known professors of archaeology in Europe says that a paradigm change is going on among archaeologists in their view of prehistory, and several other recent works say the same thing e.g. Peter Peregrine et al (eds), Ancient Human Migrations (2009), denying it is pretty pointless.
I have not read that book but in this World all what people say or write are opinions. Authority backing long fell out of use, it's a feature of scientific thought.
I am wondering though if there is a difference between what people write in English and what people write in other languages, like Spanish, French or German. Maybe there is a paradigm clash in English language and not so much in other languages, where some the analysis that you claim novel and paradigm-shifting have been around for decades. I often find such differences, like the usage of the term "cromlech" (stone ring in my universe) or the emphasis in making a difference between Epipaleolithic and Mesolithic, that I see English authors love to disregard happily, or the definition of Chalcolithic not as mere use of copper but as an evolved Neolithic where social structures become complex and hierarchical (Stonhenege is Chalcolithic for me but in English you always read "Neolithic", just because no copper tools have been found). So I do wonder if this is cultural misunderstanding, really.
And anyhow, what really matters are the details. These discussions about "paradigm shift" are meaningless unless we are really dealing with something specific.
ReplyDeleteIt is not different from generalistic shallow approaches that equate LBK to "European Neolithic". There was never any LBK in Britain, in Scandinavia, in Eastern Europe, in Italy or in Iberia: its relevance is regionally limited.
Maju - I'm delighted to know that you are simply interested in getting at the truth. In that case you have nothing to fear from new perspectives.
ReplyDeleteI agree entirely that what counts in science is evidence, not the word of authority. However what this discussion is about is not some specific case, but the way in which evidence is evaluated. In other words the framework of thought within which a particular discipline operates.
A change in that framework generally takes years to work its way through the system from outrageous heresy to bold challenge to new wave to general acceptance. The shift back to prehistoric migration within archaeology is currently somewhere between bold challenge and new wave. That is the point at which top flight academics will feel the wind change, (if they didn't before) because they are in the midst of that academic world.
You might as well try to stop a volcano by firmly closing your eyes.
But Maju could say: sobre el volcan la flor.
ReplyDeleteIn that case you have nothing to fear from new perspectives.
ReplyDeleteWhat I contest is that there are no such new perspectives: it's just a hype on some controversial genetic speculations.
However what this discussion is about is not some specific case, but the way in which evidence is evaluated.
If the toolkit looks like local Epipaleolithic, then it's a duck, no matter that it also includes a few Cardium-like pots and some farming basics. And that's what you see in most sites.
Vague speculations about some unclear paradigmatic shift will bring us nowhere: what matters is the actual cases, the detail of the findings, the possible cultural affinities with other groups, including those that were at the same region before, the C14 dates and the calibration curve, etc. And these have mostly not changed at all.
So, what are you talking about? In specific examples, please.
mutations that define mtdna haplogroups.xls
ReplyDeleteMuch better and cleaner version. I reduced the haplogroups to about 80 by eliminating a lot of redundant stuff, such as H6a and H6a1.
Thanks, argiedude, I can't see the "no mutation" (i.e. CRS) sequence anywhere though.
ReplyDeleteMaju, yeah, I thought about including a column with CRS, but in the end I decided that since CRS is lack of any mutation I'll just leave it out.
ReplyDeleteYou can see how many average mutations there are per haplogroup by selecting all the cells in the row of a haplogroup and observing their sum in the bottom of the Excel screen. For example, H4 has "18", that is, 0.18 mutation on average per sample, which is the lowest of any haplogroup; H4 has more than 70% CRS, the highest of any H. H2a has 1.02, justifying its rate of CRS of around 30%, I believe. L1b has 10, L1c1 has 11, etc.
ReplyDeletesobre el volcan la flor. No - that is what I should say! :)
ReplyDeleteMaju - If you want to argue about the Basques, that's fine, but let's do it off this blog, because that's not what the blog post was about. You can see my speculations on the Basques online, and you have your own blog wherein to rip them to pieces.
http://www.buildinghistory.org/distantpast/basques.shtml
Argiedude: the CRS is a sequence anyhow (and defining it as "lack of mutations" is somewhat arbitrary - consensual but arbitrary anyhow), and it seems to be found in several different haplogroups: at least H1, H2 and U*. And has arisen in recent discussions (as it seems to be highly common among the ancients), so IMO it's as relevant as any other series of mutations.
ReplyDeleteJean: let's not discuss Basques then, let's discuss Irish, Scotts, Welsh, Iberians, English, French, Germans, Belgians, Swiss, Northern Italians, Austrians and Danes. It is exactly the same issue: a cluster that does not show an East to West decline nor two distinct patterns, as one would expect of any Neolithic flow but that instead shows a West to East decline and virtually no two distinct patters for the southern and northern branches of European Neolithic.
The matter of this debate is whether there is an East to West demic replacement and in what apportions and I'm saying that such replacement for the lineages that some argue would be "Neolithic" is simply impossible.
And btw, your article has some major factual inaccuracies: there were no IEs west of the Rhin until 1300 BCE for example (not for 5000 years!) and you treat CP as if it was a mere demic replacement wave, what is not (and I can mention anthropometrical as well as more standard archaeological data to prove that) and I challenge you to prove it (it's very much relevant here).
I am always pleased to be saved from error, but I have no idea what you are talking about Maju. No IEs west of the Rhine until 1300 BC? You think this assertion is a provable fact? How do you propose to prove it? We all have to make the best sense we can of the available evidence when it comes to prehistory. There is no such thing as a fact in archaeology, as Prof. Cunliffe is fond of saying.
ReplyDeleteAs for Cardium Ware, which I presume you mean by CP, I merely sketch in the arguments for seeing the Neolithic in general as spread initially by real, live human beings, in leap-frog colonisation, rather than a purely cultural diffusion. I mention a couple of studies which conclude this was combined with cultural spread. End of story. I don't attempt to specify exactly what happened around the Bay of Biscay. I don't know.
I have some sympathy with your irritation at attempts such as mine to gallop through the entire European Neolithic is a few paragraphs. What happened in Greece is very different from what happened in Sweden. But I am concerned with the big picture and how new discoveries are changing it.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteOh - hang on a minute. Which article are you talking about? You mean my page on the Basques? When you agreed not to discuss them here, I though you were talking about my main article: The Peopling of Europe.
ReplyDeleteThe page on the Basques is just a supplement to that, and rather assumes that the reader has got the bigger picture at least in outline. So - yes - my coverage of Cardium Ware is even sketchier on the Basques page. But how about posting a really lengthy and detailed critique on your own blog?
Hey ArgieDude
ReplyDeleteCan you please include the H6s. I have a particular interest in them.
@ Maju I have never observed you to be an overly rigid person so far, although I dont always agree with you (eg diversity in Neanderthals). I did not notice any Basque agenda. :)
@ Jean. Not sure where all this pardigm shift stuff is coming from. As I understand it the archaeological/population theory establishment has been arguing the serial replacement theory for Europe for many decades. A series of violent invasions, each new population devastating the previous indigenous population. The actual genetic evidence came as a very nasty shock to this group of people.
I am still uncertain of the details of what happened with the transition to the neolithic, but the following things are clear:
(1) Very little of the initial typical neolithic eastern farming population made it to Western Europe. J for example is still comparatively rare in Western Europe.
(2) Most of Western Eurupe has been populated by a South West to North West expansion, and unless the neolithic farming arrived from the east via North Africa, this cannot be explained as replacement by neolithic eastern farmers.
(3) Recent papers (Brabanti and the Sweden paper) have distorted their own actual observations to squeeze the data into a replacement rather than a conversion model for the arrival of farming. This reveals a bias towards the replacement model NOT the conversion model, within the archaeological establishment.
Personally I worry about the genetic dating of haplogroups and subclades (which excludes neolithic replacement), and find the ancient DNA studies fascinating (which promotes neolithic replacement). But the overwhelming evidence at this point in time is that the population of Western (and central Europe) was NOT replaced by a wave of migrating farmers from the east. And there is a lot of evidence (I cite Brabanti for example, and evidence of very rapid diet change in communities) that indicates that the the existing populations converted to farming. What happened after that is anyone's guess at this time.
I wait excitedly for new data.
@Annie Mouse
ReplyDeleteThe "waves of invasion" approach was standard in British archaeology until the 1950s. Then the "New Archaeology" of the 1960s and 70s fell in love with continuity. As those who were students then rose up the academic hierarchy, they passed on this thinking. "Pots are not people" became the mantra in both British and American universities. (And it's a useful caution. But caution hardened into dogma.) Archaeology in Continental Europe was less affected, but it seems to vary from place to place. I give references for all this in the Peopling of Europe.
The work by Bryan Sykes and Stephen Oppenheimer was strongly influenced by the anti-migrationist thinking which was orthodox in British archaeology by the end of the last century. They have both worked with archaeologists and drawn on archaeology in their own work.
Maju, here's how I see it: the file lists mutations, but the CRS is a haplotype (sequence of mutations), so it shouldn't really be included.
ReplyDeleteAnnie, I'm sure H6 was included, but anyhow, here's the latest and hopefully final version. I split K into K1a, K1b, K1c, and K2, amongst other things.
mutations that define mtdna haplogroups.xls
Perhaps they were influenced Jean. But the major names (eg Cavalli-Sforza ) were not anti migrationist.
ReplyDeleteAnd the key issue with the early genetic work was dating of the major Western European haplogroup expansions to well before the neolithic. Hard to see how archaeological advisors could have influenced the mathematics.
Personally I worry about this dating. Huge standard deviations and big generic assumptions. But it would have to be very dramatically wrong to allow for neolithic replacement.
@ArgieDude
ReplyDeleteRemind me what you are doing with this? I thought you were comparing ancient and modern mutations with the possibility that the ancient sequences may be incorrectly identified due to corruption at specific mutation points?
Jean: unless you drink from the quite objectionable Anatolian origin theory, there were no IE (Kurgan-derived) cultures west of the Rhin or the North Sea or south of the Alps until the Urnfield culture, c. 1300 BCE. In fact there were no IEs near the Basque borders of some 2000 years ago until at least three centuries later (Iron Age Urnfield). Most of the Celtic expansion happened only since c. 700 BCE (Hallastatt) and in many areas, including most of the British Islands, since c. 300 BCE (La Tène).
ReplyDeleteHowever if you happen to be a follower of the AOT, then everything is possible. Just that Iberians did not speak Indoeuropean by any means.
As for Cardium Ware, which I presume you mean by CP, (...) End of story. I don't attempt to specify exactly what happened around the Bay of Biscay. I don't know.
You're mixing apples and oranges. I'll tell you what happened within the modern Basque borders:
1. Nothing. Absolutely nothing until c. 6000 BP. Pure Epipaleolithic continuity.
2. Subneolithic. C. 6000 BP is when the first isolated (non-Cardium) pottery item is found at the West Pyrennees.
3. Neolithic. C. 5500 BP the first non-Cardium (just plain, not decorated) pottery with sheep herding appear. Some other scattered sites are known. AFAIK they look locally evolved but this is always arguable. About this time some Gracil Mediterranean types are found also in the southern border area at the Ebro, mixed with local "Pyrenean" types.
4. Chalcolithic with Megalithism. This began c. 5000 BP, arguably arrived from Portugal.
I could follow but would be boring. But it's clear that Neolithic was late, short-lived and largely a local evolution on neighbouring but still distant models. The Mediterranean type came then to stay as minority trend among Basques, specially near the Ebro basin. The Alpinid type would not arrive until the Bronze Age, some centuries before IE migrations but very strictly associated to mining sites.
I wrote a quite decent synthesis for Wikipedia some years ago. It seems it has stayed almost untouched for all these years, so either it is quite good or nobody has much idea as to correct me. However I only dealt with the modern concept of Basque Country, excluding Gascony and other historically relevant areas.
I have some sympathy with your irritation at attempts such as mine to gallop through the entire European Neolithic is a few paragraphs.
I'm glad that you understand that.
@ Annie Mouse
ReplyDeleteVery true that Cavalli-Sforza is not anti migrationist, and of course he has worked with the major exception in British archaeology - Colin Renfrew. I do respect Renfrew for going his own way against the tide within his field. And I agree with both of them that the Neolithic would have involved language replacement. Unfortunately I feel that they were wrong about the particular languages involved.
Hard to see how archaeological advisors could have influenced the mathematics.
I wouldn't care to say exactly how the geneticists ended up with the "evolutionary rate" which Dienekes is not alone in thinking gives dates three times too old. But dating is only half the story. A haplotype can be ancient, but that doesn't mean that it has been sitting in the same spot all that time.
Maju - We have got into a little mix-up. I thought that you had read my main article - the Peopling of Europe. If you haven't then we are talking at cross purposes. No I don't subscribe to the Anatolian thesis. Nor do I believe that the Celts stem from the Urnfield Culture.
ReplyDelete@ArgieDude
ReplyDeleteRemind me what you are doing with this? I thought you were comparing ancient and modern mutations with the possibility that the ancient sequences may be incorrectly identified due to corruption at specific mutation points?
This is just a useful file for comparing mutations between haplogroups. Hopefully, tomorrow I'll force myself to write a detailed explanation about what I saw in the Etruscan study.
Maju - We have got into a little mix-up. I thought that you had read my main article - the Peopling of Europe. If you haven't then we are talking at cross purposes. No I don't subscribe to the Anatolian thesis. Nor do I believe that the Celts stem from the Urnfield Culture.
ReplyDeleteNo I had not read it (nor have done yet) with much attention. Just browsed over it, as most if not all of the data is well known to me. It did not arise my interest particularly, as I saw it as a didactic unit.
But I see that you go as far as to claim that Bell Beaker phenomenon (not really a culture at least for the most part) means Celts. All what I have read re. Bell Beaker tells that:
1. It was not a culture as such but at most a subculture, maybe a trading guild or something like that. They almost always appear as minority group within a distinct native culture and in most cases the anthropometric types are also local, meaning that they were not immigrants but local "adepts". Generally it is treated as phenomenon that is interwined with the array of local cultures it permeates, who keep their own personality.
2. The second (intermediate) phase of Bell Beaker is centered not at Bohemia but at Vila Nova (Portugal), where Megalithism and all the local peculiarities persist (as happen everywhere else with, I believe, a single exception near Calais, guess that a trading center of some sort).
3. In the third (desintegrating) phase of Bell Beaker (with a clear Bohemian center again) I have read that there are signs of demic replacement in West Germany, precisely in the area where Celts (Urnfield, etc.) would arise later on. So maybe the original creators of BB were some sort of "proto-Celts" after all but the Bell Beaker was not their expansion westward. Not yet.
Bell Beaker, like Megalithism before and also contemporarily, appears almost always as cultural phenomenon within already established cultural groups. It does not alter any culture other than by the appearance of some minority burials of this group. Maybe you or someone can question all this and suddenly find evidence of mass migrations and demic replacements in these phenomenons but I really don't think anyone will be able to.
Otherwise, maybe Megalithism and/or Bell Beaker can explain the spread of some R1b1b2a minor subclades for example but they cannot explain the brutal homogeneity of this haplogroup as a whole in the West. Not unless clear evidence of migration and (post-Neolithic!) democides is presented. So far there is nothing of it.
And, sincerely, would I be hard pressed to choose between either of the two phenomenons, I'd choose Megalithism as much more markedly influential. Bell Beaker was just some sort of "confetti", largely within Megalithism.
Also, Jean, AFAIK, Bronze Age appears everywhere in West and Central Europe AFTER Bell Beaker. The phenomenon has several centers but most importantly El Argar (proto-Iberians) and Unetice (Indoeuropeans) both starting c. 1800 BCE, just when BB vanishes from the archaeological record. I have read here and there c. 2000 for Britain but for what I could contrast with British people interested in archaeology it seems mostly an exaggeration and a rounding up of dates.
ReplyDeleteJean
ReplyDeleteProfessor Colin Renfrew, University of Cambridge, (Lord Renfrew of Kaimsthorn) was hardly a lone scientific outsider struggling against the overwhelming might of anti-migrationist archaelogical community!
Member, Ancient Monuments Board for England, 1974-84
Member, Ancient Monuments and Advisory Committee (HMBC) 1983–2002
Member, Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England, 1983–86
Chairman, Science and Conservation Panel (HMBC) 1983–86
Royal Commission on Historic Monuments (England) 1976–1985
Chairman, Archaeological Committee (RCHM) 1979–83
Member, Science-Based Archaeological Committee, SERC, 1979–83
Trustee, British Museum, 1991–2001
And the point is that if the neolithic farmers had overrun Europe then this would be reflected in a massive expansion in all the relevant haplogroups at the relevant time (ish). This does not happen.
"So I suspect that the LBK may be the product of some 'mestizo' cultural group".
ReplyDeleteI actually suspect that many, if not most, cultural expansions are a product of mestizo, or hybrid, groups. Even that of very ancient human technologies such as hand-axes. You get a sort of technological or cultural hybrid vigour, as well as the more obvious genetic hybrid vigour.
@ Annie Mouse
ReplyDeleteOf course Colin Renfrew is not an outsider. He is a respected member of the establishment and has gained a certain following in Britain and abroad, for example the Australian Peter Bellwood.
Nevertheless the mainstream climate within British and American archaeology has been resolutely and very publicly anti-migrationist. Anyone familiar with the field would tell you the same. This is getting silly.
@Maju - feeling better now? :)
ReplyDeleteAlso, Jean, AFAIK, Bronze Age appears everywhere in West and Central Europe AFTER Bell Beaker.
Yes I say that in the article you don't want to read, you just want to pour scorn upon. :)
It was Prof. Richard Harrison who re-assessed the Bell Beaker Culture as not-really-a-migration, back when anti-migrationism was the in thing. His work was highly influential. He is now busy reassessing Bell Beaker once more, in an exciting way. I follow his new thinking closely and cite his impressive article with Volker Heyd. I expect a new book from him, once the current research project is complete. The latter promises to include aDNA.
Maju,
ReplyDeleteYou have made some assertions about the languages of people who lived thousands of years ago and who didn't write.
Just because many historians from the late 19th and early 20th centuries did the same doesn't make it correct or logical.
Historians wanted to find Indo-Europeans inthe distant past and work out when they arrived in various places and where they came from, so they tagged "Indo-European speaker" on to any material culture that archaeologists had unearthed which fitted their preconceptions and theories.
Saying that the people who made things in the Urnfield, Corded Ware or Beaker cultural styles spoke this or that language is just so much bunk.
Also the spread of Halstatt or La Tene culture was just that, the spread of a way of decorating objects or burying the dead etc. People who adopted these traits may have already spoken a variety of Celtic for generations. The ability to execute swirly patterns in metal or enamel is no firm indicator of language.
You have made some assertions about the languages of people who lived thousands of years ago and who didn't write.
ReplyDeleteIberians did write. Their language was anything but Indoeuropean.
You may not agree considering Unetice Indoeuropean but it's mainstream.
Also the spread of Halstatt or La Tene culture was just that, the spread of a way of decorating objects or burying the dead etc. People who adopted these traits may have already spoken a variety of Celtic for generations. The ability to execute swirly patterns in metal or enamel is no firm indicator of language.
Sure but most people, including most scholars, would agree that it means something more than just a fashion. It is a culture: what implies some well defined sort of social, probably ethnic, cohesion.
I would not dare say that all and every single clan of such cultures spoke this or that but that the main driver was, at least for the West, Celtic language and ethnic identity seems quite clear.
Well, Jean, you clearly claim in your article, following old, obsolete and essentially useless theories (no relevant notes in that part), that Bell Beaker was the "culture" by which Celts allegedly spread through West Europe. You attribute that to "archaeologists" without any reference (the only note is about Bell Beaker in Scandinavia, where there were never any Celts) and you then happily say here that you don't believe that Celts have anything to do with Urnfield or Hallstatt or La Tène, as most scholars do.
ReplyDeleteI think that's pretty much gratuitous, specially as you seem to be aware that Bell Beaker is no culture but rather a phenomenon, no migration but rather a locally co-copting outgroup, regardless of whatever your Prof. Harrison may unveil in his still unpublished book (surely a very interesting read when it is published).
VNSP existed before Bell Beaker and did not change significatively when BB arrived (if anything it became even more cosmopolitan). That's also the case for nearly every other culture through Western Europe.
So copper-workers may have arrived in Iberia with a small company of migrants, to be gradually reinforced by others from the Danube basin, or along the route from it, seeking pastures new.
This is a nonsense, AFAIK. Specially when attributed to Bell Beaker. Corded Beaker (early phase) first arrived to Iberia by the NE, not from the Danube directly but rather the Rhin and Rhône, following the same route that Celts would use a thousand years later. No particular "pastoralist" lifestyle is ever attributed to its carriers, nor there is indication of any demic replacement.
Soon after we find the Maritime or International beaker, which, as you seem to know, spreads with a center in Portugal (a region barely touched by the Corded beaker but the only one affected in that part of the peninsula anyhow). Considering what we know of Celts in Iberia (Urnfield/Halstatt derived) and of the languages proto-historically spoken in the SW (Tartessian), making Maritime beaker to have any correlation with proto-Celts or Indoeuropeans is dreaming awake.
There is no evidence whatsoever of "gradual reinforcements". It's a total fantasy.
Of course there is a theory and interpretation for each person but I can hardly see how could anyone with some real knowledge want to oversimplify that way.
Re. Bronze Age: I found your text confusing (lots of strange theories pile up in very few paragraphs) but on second read, you seem to be correct and my reaction out of place.
The king buried in his ship at Sutton Hoo took a number of items decorated in La Tene style into the afterlife. It is generally assumed that he was a speaker of Old English rather than a Celtic dialect.
ReplyDeleteThe La Tene physical culture didn't really penetrate greatly into the west of Iberia, but there were tribes, such as the Celtici, who lived there who would appear to have been Celtic speakers.
In the 7th to 9th centuries there was a art style called Hiberno-Saxon which embraced Gaelic speaking Ireland, Pictish Alban, and all the English kingdoms. If this art had been from a pre-literate period it could be assumed that all these areas spoke a common language.
From these simple observations it is evident that pinning language to physical culture is a dangerous excercise, in the absence of other directly supporting evidence.
Maju - It might be better to read carefully and digest what I have written before commenting further.
ReplyDeleteSo far you have made a number of attacks, based on the conviction that I don't know things that I have in fact included in the article (such as the fact that Bell Beaker appears to flow from VNSP), or that the interpretations of archaeology by authors in the 1970s are unassailable "facts", or that I am not including references, when it is plain to anyone who even glances at the thing that the article is heavy with them. mindri
Urselius: there was absolutely no La Tène in Iberia at all. The Celtic expansion there therefore can only be attributed to Halstatt, on an Unrnfield earlier layer.
ReplyDeleteMost people seem to have very little idea on Iberian Celts. I keep reading around nonsense about connections through the ocean at La Tène dates, which is totally wrong. Celts in fact disrupted the Atlantic interactions between Iberia (which they invaded first) and Britain (that became Celtic only with La Tène, at least for the most part). The Atlantic cultural area is quite clearly pre-Celtic and vanished when Celts arrived to West Iberia c. 700 BCE.
In Iberia, the earliest Urnfield (IE) area in the NE was absorbed by the Iberian cultural area (while still keeping some Urnfield traits) in the 6th century, 100 or 150 years after the Celts had already occupied the center and west of the peninsula, movement that had an early Halstatt component (but was complex anyhow). This absorption happened soon after the foundation of Marseilles and roughly about the same time as its Iberian outposts were founded, so I imagine that Greeks had some influence in this outcome. Later Roman accounts tell of memories of a time when Celts and Iberians were bitterly confronted and whose overcoming was allegedly at the origin of the nation known as Celtiberians.
I don't know what has to do Sutton Hoo findings from the Middle Ages here. Of course, Celts were upon a time very influential but I'm quite sure that your Anglosaxon "king" burial could not be described as Latenean.
I don't say one has not to be cautious. You are somewhat right on that. But from this principle of prudence to the extremes that you suggest there is a wide gap that I'm not ready to cross because leads only to falling into a chasm, a void of meaning where nothing can be stated anymore and where everything is absolutely relative and "impossible to know".
Jean: now you want me to read your article, protesting that I could not know what you though before reading it, and now you protest as a personal attack that I disagree with some of what you claim and that said section doesn't seem too coherent or well researched.
ReplyDeleteMake up your mind, please.
And I don't think most of what I say is solely based on authors of the 70s. Maybe some of the late 80s at most but also from the 90s.
Maju - I don't mind if you read it or not. And you are naturally free to criticise it, if you do actually read it. What cannot do you any credit is attacking what I haven't said or done.
ReplyDeleteI can easily believe that you have read authors published in the 80s and 90s. Anti-migrationism was still in full force then, though data was building up gradually, partly through new scientific techniques, creating a tension that we are seeing the fruits of in this decade.
Clearly some will find that deeply upsetting. Cherished beliefs are being overturned.
I'm not "anti-migrationist" or anything of the like. Don't try to tag me in this false "paradigm clash": I'm just judging each case by its own merits.
ReplyDeleteThere are some cases that look like demic replacement migrations (LBK), others that look like minor migrations mostly absorbing the locals (CIP) and other cases that look like locals gradually adopting Neolithic (most Atlantic cultures). This is not anti nor pro: it is what each scenario looks like on light of the available data.
And, if I'm missing some of the available data, please put it forward clearly. Because I am really interested in it, rather than in vague discussions on some abstruse "paradigm change".
I'm just judging each case by its own merits.
ReplyDeleteQuite right too. I'm happy to hear it.
I can see that "thinking about thinking" is not your cup of tea. But like it or not, that is what Dienekes posted about.
No, Dienekes is making his case for his own favorite ideas. He, for whichever reasons of his own, prefers certain interpretations to others: he is a clear Migrationism, with or without clear evidence.
ReplyDeleteAnyhow, I just stumbled today upon this book (1996, various authors, ed. by David R. Harris) and it seems clear that the opinions of the 60s were still very much migrationist and it was only in the 80s and 90s when this trend was reversed, as it became more and more obvious that there were no archaeological traces of migration in places like NW Europe.
Neither Britain, nor Denmark nor the Basque area experimented any clear demic migration with Neolithic but all the evidence points to local "Mesolithics" adopting only very slowly the hard labor, as the farmer profession is still called in Basque (nekazari).
Interestingly this book also includes a chronology of the Baltic basin stating clearly that Pitted Ware were regressive farmers. Also one of the authors suggests that as much as these milennia represent the "neolithization" of NW Europe, they also may be a case of "Mesolithization" of Central Europe. With this he means the cultures that suceeded Rössen (Western LBK), which are generally percieved as oddly archaizing (epi-Rössen leading to Megalithic Horgen and related nordalpine cultures and, on the other hand, the very unusual late LBK of Michelsberg that may imply a Northern influence into the late Danubian Neolithic).
Things are not as clear cut as some would like us to see them. The late Prehistory of Europe is a most complex and fascinating subject that cannot be simplified in mere "migrationism" vs. "cultural diffusionism" "clash of paradigms".
So it is surely wrong to treat this issue as a mere conflict of fashions: it is a truly complex scenario that requires the best of detailed analysis in each case and when making any synthesis.
The Celts make me very uncomfortable these days. I think the whole discussion on Celts is due for a very thorough data reassessment. I am not convinced that the La Tene celts are connected to the Irish Celts alt all, except possibly prior to the arrival of both groups in Western Europe. And some of the data is starting to look like movements from the West to the East. Personally I think we need to start referring to these groups by different names to avoid confusion.It is looking like our whole understanding of who the Celts are may have been distorted by Roman misconceptions.
ReplyDelete"The king buried in his ship at Sutton Hoo took a number of items decorated in La Tene style into the afterlife. It is generally assumed that he was a speaker of Old English rather than a Celtic dialect".
ReplyDeleteI'm reasonably sure that the difference between Celt and German has been exaggerated and they originally spoke basically the same language, part of a dialect chain stretching across much of Europe. The division actually became more pronounced with the Roman occupation of the region south of the Rhine.
"I think the whole discussion on Celts is due for a very thorough data reassessment. I am not convinced that the La Tene celts are connected to the Irish Celts alt all, except possibly prior to the arrival of both groups in Western Europe".
Certainly. For a start if there had been any 'Celtic' genetic expansion one would expect some trace of it in at least the Y-hap distribution. Doesn't seem to be any.
"It is looking like our whole understanding of who the Celts are may have been distorted by Roman misconceptions".
And Greek.
I'm reasonably sure that the difference between Celt and German has been exaggerated...
ReplyDeleteDon't forget that we are in any case talking of a context that has a Celtic substrate: it's Britain after all, not Sweden. But Celts and Germanics were somewhat different anyhow and Germanic expansion destroyed Celtic culture almost everywhere, as they found easy to disrupt the late Celtic political-economic network, that was based not anymore on tribes only but on true commercial polis (oppidae), a characteristic of late La Tène almost everywhere.
Certainly. For a start if there had been any 'Celtic' genetic expansion one would expect some trace of it in at least the Y-hap distribution. Doesn't seem to be any.
R1a and even I can partly account for that, as well as some R1b sublineages. But anyhow:
1. It'd be extremely difficult in many cases, for instance Britain, to make a clear-cut difference between the Epipaleolithic settlers and the Iron Age Celtic minority elites, who came probably from the same area in (roughly) NW France and Belgium. It's the same as being almost impossible to make a difference between Doggerland-original settlers and specially Anglosaxon and Viking ones on mere genetic basis (no matter the occasional mediatic hype).
2. Cultural and political expansion does not necesarily (nor probably often) mean demic expansion at strong levels. The Normans conquered and ruled England but were just a few in comparison not just with the previous Anglosaxon elites but very specially with the masses of peasants, who surely were there mostly since before the Romans and the Celts. Peasants in those aristocratic times were some 90% of the people and they seldom migrated, no matter what.
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ReplyDeleteThe Normans are, by the way, a very interesting example for language studies.
ReplyDeleteIf you look at English now it is essentially a trade language. A language people use rather than having to learn lots of different languages. And English now dominates in many nations that have very little English blood (India, West Indies etc).
Latin was very similar and it is now dominates Spain and France, nations with only a little latin blood.
The Norman language however was the language of the political elite. If you look at documents in Britain, then the pre-Norman language vanishes for a couple of hundred years and then has a miraculous instantaneous resurrection when the Normans elite finish integrating. It turns out that the bulk of the population had been speaking the preNorman language all along despite what the records showed.
So political dominance (even for multiple generations) is not enough to spread a language, and bulk population movement is not necessary to spread a language. But trade can spread languages easily without population movements.
To get to the nub of it. I dont think the Irish are Celts.
ReplyDeleteSo political dominance (even for multiple generations) is not enough to spread a language, and bulk population movement is not necessary to spread a language. But trade can spread languages easily without population movements.
ReplyDeleteI'd say that political dominance may or not succeed in spreading a language and that is at least partly at convenience of both sectors and many hard to evaluate circumstances. The Anglosaxon language for example spread itself strongly with the equivalent Anglosaxon elite and, importantly, these were not particularly strong at trading.
Trade also was pretty weak in those times and I find hard to find examples where trade alone, without political domination, spread any language. Only Swahili comes to my mind but it's still anyhow mostly a lingua franca and not the motherly tongue of most speakers.
Greeks and Phoenicians dominated trade in the ancient Mediterranean but both languages spread more by political and military means than by just trade. In some cases their commercial hegemony may have favored the spread and consolidation of certain local languages instead, as it is argued to be the case with Iberian. While Iberian written with Greek letters is known in some cases, there is no single case of Greek text in any Iberian site.
Personally I still lean to elite domination as the most common reason for linguistic change. Normans were after all only partly French (they even revived some Danish laws) and still they managed to alter English radically making of it the most "Romance" of all Germanic languages by far, with almost 50% of vocabulary of French origin. Just slightly different circumstances may well have ended with modern English speaking a French dialect after all.
"But Celts and Germanics were somewhat different anyhow and Germanic expansion destroyed Celtic culture almost everywhere".
ReplyDeleteI was actually thinking of a time long before that, after any 'original' IE expansion and before the La Tene, or even Halstatt, expansion. Any connection would be ancient but languages spoken around the Rhine before the Romans arrived there were probably some sort of halfway house.
"I dont think the Irish are Celts".
Not in a genetic sense, but the language is related to languages spoken in France that we would have to call Celtic if the word has any meaning at all.
"But trade can spread languages easily without population movements".
And I suspect that's what we have here. No mass migration of Celtic-speaking people.
I was actually thinking of a time long before that, after any 'original' IE expansion and before the La Tene, or even Halstatt, expansion. Any connection would be ancient but languages spoken around the Rhine before the Romans arrived there were probably some sort of halfway house.
ReplyDeleteFair enough but we just don't know enough of the exact origins. Germanic was after all at its origns (and this is pretty well attested) a quite strict North European language, with two apparent dialectal variants: the Scandianvian and the Low German ones.
Archaeologically it is very difficult to think of any other migration or invasion of Scandinavia after the Corded Ware/Single Burials one, which is very clear, so in principle Germanic should have diverged from other West Indoeuropean languages at that point.
Germanic also has two major phonetic shifts that are unattested in other Indoeuropean languages, what suggest that it had a quite unique evolution before the Iron Age expansion.
On the other hand, Celtic is clearly a continental subfamily with a very wide proto-historical extension (from the Atlantic to Central Europe, if we ignore Galatia). One difficulty no doubt arises from the fact that most modern and even historical Germanic speakers' ancestors were once Celtic speakers, what may have caused some major substrate effect. For that reason maybe it's better to compare Scandinavian Germanic rather than continental/insular one, as it was more isolated.
Also the modern limited sample of Celtic languages (Gaelic and Brythonic essentially) surely does not capture the diversity that the Celtic language subfamily had at its apogee.
... the language is related to languages spoken in France that we would have to call Celtic if the word has any meaning at all.
Breton is a Medieval arrival from Cornwall, if you mean that. If you mean historical languages not just of France, but so many other places (Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, Czech Republic, Portugal, Spain, Italy... even Slovakia and Serbia) then ok. However it is misleading to equate Celtic or Gaulish (essentially synonyms) with just France, as many parts of modern France did never really speak Celtic (Aquitanians and Ligures specially) and instead Celtic was spoken in vast regions outside France, even most of modern Germany at some point.
There are huge heffalump traps for anyone investigating Celticity.
ReplyDeleteThe Irish were and remain, at least those in the Gaeltacht (Irish speaking areas), as Celtic as the Princess of Vix or Vercingetorix or Brennus the sacker of Rome. This is because they speak a Celtic language. Language is the only valid parameter to define the Celt. Celticness is not genetic or fixed to a physical culture. As we have seen Celtic speakers from the Iberian Peninsula were not within the La Tene cultural zone, and it is reasonably certain that some Rhineland Germanic speakers were absorbed within the La Tene cultural zone.
Again physical culture and language are seldom entirely linked, and both have no fixed connection to genetic identity.
The British Isles including Ireland were the last bastions of La Tene art. The English Lindisfarne Gospels and Irish Book of Kells show the last flowering of La Tene art, combined with Germanic-derived interlace and gripping beasts. So the Irish were both Celtic speakers and amongst the last exponents of the art form most associated with Celtic archaeology.
My basic argument is that if a more recent physical culture can be demonstrated to not be exclusively linked to a language then attaching language markers to earlier physical cultures is equally suspect.
BTW around 8o% of the vocabulary of Anglo-Saxon has been lost and leaves no trace in Modern English. The majority of the Modern English vocabulary is Latin derived. All this with an almost invisible genetic impact on the English people.
"Archaeologically it is very difficult to think of any other migration or invasion of Scandinavia after the Corded Ware/Single Burials one, which is very clear, so in principle Germanic should have diverged from other West Indoeuropean languages at that point".
ReplyDeleteI've become reasonably sure that the IE language is associated with the Corded Ware expansion so that would mean that proto-Celtic and Proto-Germanic would have separated at that time. The Scandianvian and the Low German branches would have separated more recently.
"If you mean historical languages not just of France, but so many other places (Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, Czech Republic, Portugal, Spain, Italy... even Slovakia and Serbia) then ok".
I was actually thinking of that whole region, although I'd guess that the languages spoken in Britain and Ireland would have been closer to those spoken in France than to those spoken further afield.
The Greeks and Romans considered the Celts to be the people who lived in Gaul (France/Belgium/Switzerland) and both the Romans and the Greeks knew there were people living in Britain and Ireland.
ReplyDeleteThe language the Irish speak is called Celtic because they were believed to be Celts. So the fact they speak Celtic is rather a circular argument. I am not keen on language-based arguments but if I had to I would note that Q -Celtic is not particularly close to Gaulish and in the P/Q model is much more closely aligned with CeltiIberian. Which fits with the Iberian genetic influence.
The definition of "Celtic" could just as easily have be extended to to the Germanic or even Romance and Baltic languages. Or even the entire European arm of Indo European languages. Or constricted to the Gaulish arm of the tree (more reasonable IMO).
The point is, There there seems to be no genetic relationship between the Gaulish Celts and the Irish beyond the basal population common to the entire region.
@Maju
English is 50% French? Where did you get that? Not as far as I can see. English is a mongrel of a language, there is some French, Indian, Cherokee you name it it is there. But as I understand it the influence of the Anglo-Normans on the language was significant but not substantial.
You might have a point about the requirement for a power imbalance AS WELL to favour one language over another. And by trade language I mean useful for interaction, that could also be within a community. Plus it has long been argued that Anglo Saxon was absorbed easily into Britain because it was not so different from the languages people already spoke. It has been argued that the Germanic languages are a hybrid of "Celtic" IndoEuropean and a pre IndoEuropean language.
Annie Mouse writes: "English is 50%French? Where did you get that? Not as far as I can see".
ReplyDeleteI have always known that English has 55% of its vocabulary from French or Latin and being a teacher of Latin I see every day that English is also often influenced by Latin on Grammar and Syntax. Do you know that when you write "Re: something", "re" is the ablative of Latin "res" like Latin "de + ablative"? And do you know that when you write "I want you to learn..." you are using an infinitive (accusative + infinite) from Latin?
Terry: glad that we agree on something. Just don't forget the Belgae, who seem to have starred a second invasion of the islands and are recorded by Roman historians. Also don't forget that some "French" Gauls like the Arverni were very old, probably rooting in the Urnfield and Halstatt waves, rather than being just a La Tène arrival.
ReplyDeleteAnnie: English is 50% French? Where did you get that?.
I read about it somewhere. Only almost but clearly above 40%. However most Romance words have some sort of "cult" vibe, while the Germanic words are more "popular" (basic) - very generally speaking.
Example: in your sentence:
But as I understand it the influence of the Anglo-Normans on the language was significant but not substantial.
All bold type words are Romance. "Anglo-Normans" is as well but being a proper name I didn't want to make a fuzz of it. They make a good deal of nouns and adjectives and even verbs, though are rare in shorter particles such as articles or prepositions.
Nobody said anyhow that English "is French", just that it has many more words from that origin than from any other language family by far, excepting the Germanic root (but by little). However the grammar is a simplified (creole) Germanic one. Grammar is much less likely to be changed by influences than vocabulary - normally grammar is this or that, while vocabulary can be heavily mixed.
The influence of Cherokee or even Latin and Greek in English is totally ridiculous when compared with French one.
You might have a point about the requirement for a power imbalance AS WELL to favour one language over another.
All I can say is that language replacement is a dialectic dynamics, not something that has a predetermined result. But the ability to be somehow "official" is crucial. If you have to make not just your purchases and sales but also all your legal procedures in said language, and, very specially, if vertical mobility is quite strictly associated to knowing that language, then many people will find eventually convenient to switch to the dominant language. However if there is some sort of "resistence" associated to the older language, this may delay the transition. Basque would not have survived to this day probably if there would not have been a de facto Basque independent area for a good deal of the Middle Ages most probably, however it still receded a lot to other more dominant languages (Romances) and is still suffering that situation. Much of the same can be said for instance of Irish in relation to English, etc.
Language prestige also seems to matter: Latin managed to de-activate the elite dominance mechanisms of Germanic rulers, Sumerian did the same with Semitic for some time. It may also matter some practical matters, such as if the linguistic landscape is very fragmented, the elite languages have it easier than if it is rather homogeneous, etc.
The equation has many variables and even a random factor. Nothing is written on stone.
I thought I could show that the 2 biggest subsets of results in the Etruscan study were linked, but now I don't think so. In the graph I included you can see 2 sets of results with 4 and 6 samples, both sharing in common mutation 193. The group with 193-219 is H6, the group with 126-193 is J2. 193 is extremely rare in H/HV, but it's a defining mutation in J2, so this made me think the 193-219 results were actually J2. Also, the fact that one of them had mutation 126, which is virtually inexistent in H/HV but universally present in J2 (and all other J's).
ReplyDeleteBut the study said 126 was very prone to degradation. And I realized that the other H6 mutation, 219, is just as rare in H/HV as 193, but they're always present together. And of course, the coding mutation indicated H/HV in 3 of 4 of the H6 samples, and it indicated NOT H/HV in 6 of 6 of the J2 samples. The 193 mutation was a very notable coincidence, occuring in 2 of the biggest groups of results, but it seems to actually be a coincidence, after all. This was the single most important thing I was looking at.
Etruscan samples.gif
There are though some strange anomalies in these results. H6 is almost always accompanied by mutation 362, which was tested for and found in at least 1 other sample. But the 4 H6 samples (193-219) don't have 362. In mitosearch, all 40 of the H6 samples with 193-219 also had 362.
Another anomaly is that all 6 of the J2 samples lack 069, which was tested for and found in other samples. 069 is nearly universally found in J2 (or any other J). This mutation was described in the study as one of the 5 positions most prone to degradation, but for all 6 of them to revert does seem odd. On the other hand, about half of J2 samples carry 278, and effectively, 3 of 6 of the Etruscan J2 have 278.
The point about a link between those 2 sets of results was really the big deal, because it would demonstrate that some results were being fabricated.
There are still some really strange things about the results, but it's no longer all that I was hoping for.
For starters, you can see in the graph that one of the H6 samples has 256-270-291, a crystal clear combination of mutations that indicates U5a1a. In mitosearch, there are 174 samples with that combination (with or without other mutations) and every single one was U5, and probably almost all of them are U5a1a. Likewise, in Richards' study of West Eurasia, 15 samples had this combination (together with other mutations) and all were either U5a1* or U5a1a. About a quarter of U5a1a samples have these 3 mutations (with/without others). All 3 mutations are very rare in H/HV, particularly so in H6. Only H2b has a big presence of 291. Even attempting to search for 256-270 or 256-291 or 270-291 didn't yield a single H/HV sample, out of more than 8000 (mitosearch). Or in Richards, who had another 1700 H/HV samples from all over West Eurasia.
So on the one hand we have a sample that seems clearly H6 due to its unique 193-219 mutation, only found in H6, without exception, plus the fact there are 3 other samples with that set of mutations and 3 of 4 of them are indicated as H/HV according to their coding region mutation, including the sample in question. But on the other hand, the sample has the mutations 256-270-291, which are virtually indisputable evidence of the presence of haplogroup U5a1a.
Later (today?) I'll note some of the other stuff, such as the samples with mutation 223 or the presence of many mutations that are almost inexistent amongst the 30,000 samples from mitosearch and Richards.
Well as a native English speaker I cannot understand modern French at all. Except the words that are used in English anyway.
ReplyDeleteWhen I listen to German however I unconsciously listen very hard because I am half convinced that I understand it (I don't). It sounds a lot like English with a harsh accent spoken in another room, not quite audible. But the written language is alien.
In contrast I do understand a lot of Latin, Spanish and Italian and I am relatively comfortable with these languages.
Argie Dude
ReplyDeleteI have not had a good look at your stuff yet. But be very careful with 362. 16362 is a defining mutation for H6 and it is often quoted in old papers as 362.
All the mutations I noted are HVS-I: 362 is 16362.
ReplyDeleteArgiedude can you put the links in again, and also to the Etruscan paper you quote? I am having trouble finding them.
ReplyDeleteAlso if a sequence does not have 16362 it is almost certaainly not H6.
Annie Mouse : "Well as a native English speaker I cannot understand modern French at all. Except the words that are used in English anyway. "
ReplyDeleteWhich are quite numerous (*).
Even some that you wouldn't suspect :
"War" and "warrior"
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=war
"very" is from "verai" (that gives vrai in French)
"(to) flirt" from "(conter) fleurette"
"match" from "meiche" (mèche in modern French)
"neat" from "net" (meaning "clean")
etc ... the list is long.
Even several firstnames (amy = aimée ; sydney = sidonie ; spencer (dispenseur) ; Frances (from "Françoise" which means "Frenchwoman") and others ; and all the michelle, nicole, stephanie, etc ...)
Estimations of the percentage of French words in English :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language#Word_origins
(*) And I don't even talk about this :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_French_words_and_phrases_used_by_English_speakers
Maju : ^^ That's Frankish (Germanic), not French.
ReplyDeleteThere were no such thing as "French" at this time in the middle age.
Anything coming from dialects from France in the middle-age can be labelled as "French", I guess, whatever the region of origin.
As for the Germanic element in French, it's part of the French language (Latin is "only" 80-85 % of the roots in French).
Annie, here's the Etruscan study:
ReplyDeleteEtruscan ancient mtdna (pdf)
What other stuff were you referring to?
...........................
There's something crucial about the Etruscan study. Each sample was extracted twice from the same skeleton, and the results were identical, so the very weird results can't be attributed to degradation.
The sample I mentioned yesterday, which had an indisputable U5a1a motif but simultaneously seemed to belong to H6 (193-219 and coding region mutation placed it in H/HV), was obtained twice from different samples. It's not a fluke. Yet it seems to be 2 haplogroups merged into one.
I've made a graph of the Etruscan results for quick reference. It also shows, colored in red, 8 mutations that are almost completely inexistent amongst the 30,000 results from mitosearch and Richards. These are mutations that are found in barely 5 or less samples amongst those 30,000 results. Yet 8 of them are found in the 28 Etruscan samples, a statistical impossibility. And once again, these results aren't degradation, because they were obtained twice in separate samples taken from the same skeleton.
Etruscan mtdna compared to mitosearch & Richards.gif
It appears from your links that ALL Norman words are considered French when in fact the Normans were a largely Viking (Germanic language) people. And any germanic derived words in french are not included in the Germanic total for some reason.
ReplyDeleteArgieDude
ReplyDeleteHave you checked out Sorensen? It has a bigger database and is very easy to search.
There were no such thing as "French" at this time in the middle age.
ReplyDeleteAnything coming from dialects from France in the middle-age can be labelled as "French".
No way! French is a Romance language and Frankish a Germanic language and most directly related with German and Dutch, specifically Middle German is another name for today's "evolved Frankish".
French instead only takes the name from the Franks, via its use to describe the country as Francia, but it is a Romance (Latin-derived) language. However we do have evidence of proto-French or Old French from Carolingian times at the Oaths of Strasbourg (842). And is also true that that the Romance was intensely influenced by Old Frankish.
Confusing Frankish (German) language with Old French or Gallo-Roman is understandable but an error in any case.
It appears from your links that ALL Norman words are considered French when in fact the Normans were a largely Viking (Germanic language) people.
ReplyDeleteThey were already French-speakers (and probably very mixed) by the time they invaded England, though they did keep memory of their origins.
And any germanic derived words in french are not included in the Germanic total for some reason.
Not sure but they should not be so many anyhow. War would probably be considered Germanic: it should be in fact. But there are still a zillion words that are so extremely romance that they are great help for any Romance-speaker learning English.
From a random post above:
The evidence against this is equally solid. The way you're purposefully ignoring or downplaying the huge problems with this theory points to a personal bias.
As you see in this sentence most nouns, adjectives and verbs are French-derived (bolded) - words that I can easily identify because they are nearly identical to those in Spanish. However the grammar is Germanic (and hence with some IE-generic exceptions like the verb "is", only known through learning. I am not sure about the word bias, so I'll presume it is Germanic.
Waggg: Maybe I misunderstood you and you mean that war is derived from French guerre. I am pretty sure that it's not the case. Even if it's derived from Frankish it must have an older origin than Normans. However you are correct that Romance guerre and guerra derive from Germanic (Frankish?) word similar to war (werra).
ReplyDeleteHi Maju
ReplyDeleteFrom what I have read (and I am not a linguist) the English grammer is not Germanic. That is one of the key distinctions between English and other germanic languages. I have read that the grammatical structure was derived from the previous British language. Most probably a form of Brythonic "Celtic" according to the author.
Interestingly is a database of the "Celtic" personal names of Roman Britain. They are clearly Romanicized, and some are still recognizable (eg Lucile) but they also bear almost no resemblance to modern "Celtic" personal names.
http://www.asnc.cam.ac.uk/personalnames/
Maybe Lucile should not be in there as it seems very Latin.
ReplyDeleteAnnie: interesting. I always thought it was a simplified (creole) Germanic grammar but maybe I'm wrong.
ReplyDeleteHowever, if your theory is right, why not to compare directly with modern and historical Brythonic (Welsh, Cornish, Breton)? Is there any chance that pre-Celtic British could have survived after only three or four centuries of Celtic domination and was the actual basis for such changes?
Hi Maju
ReplyDeleteThe author beleived that the source of the grammatical structure in England was indeed Brythonic.
Actually the evidence for a celtic language in Britain is very weak. A few vague traces of Cumbric in Northern England, and of course Cornish. The rest of the non- Roman Non-Anglo stuff is just assumed to be celtic. We were not particularly literate prior to the arrival of the Romans. :)
And to contradict myself. Lugh (pronouced Lu) is a traditional celtic name and could well be the source of Lucile, or could have facilitate its adoption by the local people.
Bad choice of example.
And what about Welsh? Cornish/Breton too, ok. But Welsh stands as a clear fossil of Celtic Britain too.
ReplyDeleteThey won't be "magic translators" maybe but you should be able to make modern Brythonic (Welsh/Cornish/Breton)/ancient Brythonic linguistic comparisons. It's not like ancient Brythonic is extinct: it's still spoken in Wales and Brittany.
Yes the Welsh. But there is very little to compare. Modern place names are used the most, and a lot of that is a very dodgy.
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brythonic_languages
"Terry: glad that we agree on something".
ReplyDeleteI'm sure we agree on a great deal. It's just that differences of opinion are more interesting than agreements, and more productive in extending our own ideas.
Annie Mouse :
ReplyDelete"It appears from your links that ALL Norman words are considered French when in fact the Normans were a largely Viking (Germanic language) people. "
Your "vikings" were speaking French (the dialect was a branch of langue d'oïl). Yes, French words with a germanic root for some of them - rather few that is - (going back several centuries by the time of the anglo-norman were in England).
These words came in English through French languages/dialects, IOW, they are French. What else could they be ?
You do realize that these words integrated the English language from c. 1060 to c. 1300 ?
And anyway viking and Franks were not part of the same linguistical branch within Germanic family than the Vikings. The Scandinavian words in English are from the Danelaw time.
French was the language of the English court for centuries. Richard Lionheart spoke French and barely spoke a few words of English - if at all (and besides he spent most of his life living in his lands in southwestern France), so don't be so surprised that the French language left an important imprint in English. Noone was speaking a word of any Scandinavian language (granted Richard was a Plantagenet, not a Norman, but that was the same in the time of William the conqueror, they spoke a French dialect not a Scandinavian one).
"And any germanic derived words in french are not included in the Germanic total for some reason."
The reason is that they came through the French language (they were part of it and evoluted in it). With your logic, the words of French origin should be 0% since the rest is mostly of Latin origin and should be counted as Latin... Let's be logical.
@ Maju : don't focus on this "war" word that is rather an exception anyway. All the other words I gave were from French word with a latin origin, which is the most frequent.
Anyway, etymonline says O. N. French = O.N.Fr. Old North French, the dialect of northern France before the 1500s, especially that of coastal Normandy and Picardy.
How wouldn't it be a French dialect by 1060-1300 (the time these words entered English language) ?
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=warden
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=warrior
(see ? 1300 AD)
These words are "late", there was no such thing as "old Frankish language" at this time. It was gone.
The language of the Franks left a mark in the French language even if a much smaller one that Latin (Few words with a Gaulish root still exist too).
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francique_(langue_morte)#Emprunts_du_fran.C3.A7ais_au_francique
(in French, non-exhaustive)
By your logic everything is French Waggg. And what Royalty spoke rarely had much impact on the bulk of the people. A large number of England's rulers did not speak the peoples language.
ReplyDeleteAnyhow of the 3 latin-based languages it is odd that French is the least understandable. In contrast the Spanish and Italians have little difficulty understanding each other. And the split between the Spanish and Italians pre-dates the Normans.
@ Annie Mouse : "By your logic everything is French Waggg"
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure what you're trying to tell.
English words that came via French languages/dialects are of French origin.
How is that a revolutionary concept ?
These words with a Germanic root were part of the French language for centuries.
And what Royalty spoke rarely had much impact on the bulk of the people
Well, whatever the reason, a non-negligible part of the English vocabulary is of French origin.
I add that after some times the English court quit using the Norman French dialect and started using the French language spoken by the French king that later became the modern French language, that's the reason for differences in words with a common etymology, but different forms.
For instance :
To carry / chariot (c / ch )
Anyhow of the 3 latin-based languages
There are more than 3.
I'm not sure Romanian is specially intelligible to Spanish locutors either.
it is odd that French is the least understandable
Maybe the difference is in the Germanic influence (the French 'u' sound is very common in Germanic languages and inexistant in other latin-based languages, for instance), I don't know.
Maybe the Celtic substrate influenced much the Latin spoken by population in antiquity (it is said that a Gaulish dialect was still spoken in central France around 500 AD, so maybe it was kinda influential in the evolution of the latin spoken in France)
Wagg says: "I'm not sure Romanian is specially intelligible to Spanish locutors either".
ReplyDeleteRomanian derives from Latin at 90%, then more than French, which is at 85%.
To realize, to comprehend a language is due to habit, practise and I'd be able to write English by using at least 80% of Latin terms.
Annie: ok, took note on "war". Not so important anyhow, as you say well.
ReplyDeleteAnd what Royalty spoke rarely had much impact on the bulk of the people.
That could be the case if it was only royalty maybe. But it was also the nobility and virtually all official instances. French was then in the elite dominance position, and only lost it by luck.
Anyhow of the 3 latin-based languages it is odd that French is the least understandable. In contrast the Spanish and Italians have little difficulty understanding each other. And the split between the Spanish and Italians pre-dates the Normans.
There are many more than just three Romances. But of course, French was strongly influenced by Germanic and maybe by Gaulish before that, and that makes it to stand relatively apart. Romanian or even some Italian dialects like Sicilian are even more "impossible to understand", as is surely Andalusian Spanish.
Anyhow, please notice that in Renaissance there was a Mediterranean Romance commercial standard that caused a sprachbund between all these languages, a process to which French (buffered by Occitanian/Provenzal) was surely alien to.
Romanian derives from Latin at 90%, then more than French, which is at 85%.
Maybe that is precisely the reason: Western Romances derive from a Vulgar Latin that was surely not too heard of that far East. Not to mention the relevance of religious Latin (Romania is historically Orthodox, not Catholic), the western Germanic influences and the SW sprachbund area around either Italian dialects, Provenzal, Portuguese, Catalan, French, etc., again absent in Romania.
We're getting very off topic anyhow.
It appears I was not clear. The three modern romance languages we were talking about. Distinguished from German.
ReplyDelete"But of course, French was strongly influenced by Germanic and maybe by Gaulish before that, and that makes it to stand relatively apart. "
ReplyDeleteBy this argument French should be even more understandable to the English, as English is a germanic language with brythonic influence. But it isnt. Spanish and Italian are easier.
Plus that Wikipedia page claims there are more French words than Germanic words in English. A bit of a surprize in a germanic language.
The theme of the above debate on western Eurolinguistics is somewhat afflicted with chaos theory. I can't resist joining in.
ReplyDeleteAfter all, the languages named are all of Indo European origin; so it is no surprise that they all contain much of each other, after allowing for the havoc wrought by peronunciation elision, and the confusion of regional orthographic or spelling development.(After all the Latin "cumulus" or cloud, in Welsh is very correctly "cwmwl". )
But one example given, the IE root "car", attached to processes or items connected with motion and translocation, goes straight back unchanged to Mesopotamia 8000 ybp. Pausing in Buddism and Yoga , as "kar-ma" meaning "mandate of behavioral momentum".
More recent "War" turns up in Cant-wara" 450AD Saxon for the army of Kent, the Urdu-Sanscrit word for word, "Talwar". The French "guerre" is most probably from Germanic "gewar".
I particularly like the word "dame" which is used for woman in (BCE 2400) Ebla cuneiform script. There too was "tog" for textile, later found in the Roman "toga", and now in English; slang for clothing, and scientific standard of fabric insulating value.
Welsh "cwmwl" is clear from Latin "cumulus". I can say this without consulting a Dictionary: Latin "ul" is from "ol" from "el": then this word is from Latin and not from Celtic.
ReplyDeleteAnnie: that you don't find French easy, doesn't mean that others dont'. Anyhow it's more obviously akin to German: vowel ü (regular u in French), sound of letter R as G, etc., while still being a Romance.
ReplyDeletePlus that Wikipedia page claims there are more French words than Germanic words in English.
That's probably only on paper: picking the words from a dictionary instead than from a conversation. But even in any normal conversation or text you can find their commonness.
The French "guerre" is most probably from Germanic "gewar".
ReplyDeleteNot because in French guerre is pronounced almost as werre (w > gu in Romances) and the same is Italian guerra (almost sounding werra) (though not in Spanish but that's surely a local evolution).
Maju, we say /gwerra/ not /werra/. Gw- is the voiced laviovelar.
ReplyDeleteMaju : "in French guerre is pronounced almost as werre"
ReplyDeleteIt's really a 'g' sound not a 'w'.
-> gay-r
'Guerre' comes from old Frankish *werra.
The germanic 'w' became 'g' in French :
Willahelm -> Guillaume (william)
Gioello: just a technicality: both pronunciations are very similar and tend to be confused. Romance speakers tend to say "guiski" even if written "whiskey" and Spaniards tend to say "guebo" even if huevo (egg) should be pronounced exactly like if beginning with English "w". The sounds are just almost identical and the way they are pronounced and written probably has to do with the general lack of a "w" semiconsonant in all Romances, which tend to use "gu" instead, and nothing else.
ReplyDeleteWhat a pity that you, Basque of Spanish language, and my Brazilian friends aren't able to write my name: "Gioiello", not "Gioello". Like Americans, this semiconsonant "y" is out of your pronuntiation.
ReplyDeleteThe Latin phoneme "w" became "v" in Italian (but Englishmen says always "wine" for "uino(m)") and didn't become *gwino. In Italian "gw" is rather an allophone than a phoneme, and not a simple sound. We have also the voiceless labiolvelar "kw", but they aren't in opposition and aren't then phonemes and in the people's pronuniation often interchange: "delinquente" is pronounced "delinguente".
Sorry about the spelling thing but really had not noticed.
ReplyDeleteAnyhow, you can't do that comparison because v>w (Lat > Ger) is just totally different and independent from w > gu (Ger > Rom). They have nothing to do with each other.
More ancient mtdna problems.
ReplyDeleteYou can follow what I'm saying in this post with the following graph, which I've posted already:
Etruscan mtdna compared to mitosearch & Richards.gif
In the ancient mtdna of Etruscans there are 2 samples with mutation 223. Mutation 223 is found at near 100% in all R- haplogroups, such as L1-3, M, and N*. But it's extremely rare in R+ haplogroups, such as H/HV, J/T, or U/K.
These 2 samples tested as 14766-, placing them in H/HV, which contradicts their 223 result. Only 1 in 200 H/HV samples have 223.
And both samples have 069. This mutation is one of the clearest cut mutations in the HVR region. It's only found in J. Barely 1 in 2000 H/HV samples have mutation 069, and the odds are even worse for haplogroups which typically carry mutation 223.
So we have a 3-way contradiction, and it occured twice! Both samples should belong to J as per their 069 mutation. Both samples should belong to H/HV as per their coding region result 14766-, and both samples shouldn't belong to either of these 2 haplogroups as per their 223 mutation.
The only caveat is that 069 was mentioned in the study as one of the top 5 positions prone to degradation. But each sample was reproduced independently from separate extractions of the same skeleton. 069 was only found in these 2 samples, and presumably in both extractions in either case, but wasn't found at all in any of the other 26 samples. This hints strongly that it's presence isn't from random degradation.
Finally, I tried to find a match for one of the 223 samples, because it had 6 mutations, the most of all 28 Etruscan samples, allowing a lot of permutations. Using all 6 mutations, there were of course no matches, as the study indicated, but also using all permutations possible with 5 mutations there wasn't a single hit. Worst of all, using all permutations possible with just 4 mutations, there wasn't even 1 single result amongst the 30,000 samples of mitosearch and Richards! Finally, using 3 mutations there were some hits, especially with the final combination I tried, 223-319-362, which apparently is modal for mtdna A, and produced hundreds of matches from that haplogroup.
Between the 3-way contradiction in the result and the near impossible task to find a single match even after reducing the selected mutations to 4 of the original 6, this sample's results look... artificial.
Keep in mind the other example I noted in this thread, about the sample that, on the one hand seemed to belong to H1b, inclduing the coding region mutation, but on the other had a chain of 3 mutations that was indisputably a marker of U5a1a and nothing else.
edit:
ReplyDeleteon the one hand seemed to belong to H1b, inclduing the coding region mutation
seemed to belong to H6
Argiedude, I was studying your posts, and I too thought that there was among Etruscan a mtDNA A, but very different from the modern ones. But Italy has even today some mtDNAA: see P33VV, probably A4a1.
ReplyDeleteThe fact that Etruscans had mtDNA A and also R0a survived only in Tuscany I think it is very meaningful.
The answer is in H mtdna
ReplyDeleteWho brought these brads to Europe?
I-M170 or R1-M173
Lets see the stats, mtDNA frequency are much more important in identifying the natives more than Y-chromosomes because females can't just start a rape carnival like Male hordes do, even if tehy did a female can barely rape one male every 11 months which is very slow comapred to what one male can do in 11 months of roaming around a defeated region. We still see majority % of native mtDNA in Latin America so we should not be surprised to see something similar in Europe assuming R1 did replace I-M170 in some parts of Europe...Victorious Males kill the males & rape the females...so mtDNA survive
OK now going to the numbers:
H mtDNA in Dalmatia ~ 60%
I-M170 in Dalmatia ~ 60%
H mtDNA in Ireland ~ 40%
R1 in Ireland ~ 90%
HV mtDNA highest frequencies in Anatolia-Levantines-Central Arabia
R0 mtDNA highest frequencies are in J-M304 regions (Socotra-Yemen)
When you go back in NOP populations (ancestors of R1), their mtDNA takes you in another direction.
Paleolithic Europeans are as old as HV mtDNA, H mtDNA which means they arrived in Europe as IJ Y-DNA
Mesolithic & Neolithic Europeans did replace the majority of the males lineages in Europe, but as in all raped nations, the native mtDNA survived
Gioiello wrote: "But Italy has even today some mtDNA A: see P33VV, probably A4a1".
ReplyDeleteedit: P33VU
I: if it's some sort of Paleolithic drift (as I believe), there's no need of such an unlikely mass rape once and again for many many generations until all babies or so are "rape bastards".
ReplyDeleteIn fact phenomenons like founder effect and drift could cause a lineage or group of them to get highly unusual success rates without any need of rape or even polygamy. Remember that UP Europeans were some 5-10,000 people only, what means an EP of maybe 1000-2000 people of each gender. This changed after the LGM, when population grew fast but until that moment at least Genetic Drift ruled unopposed.
But this I do not mean that rape did not exist in prehistory, just that is a bad explanation for the reproductive gender imbalance, which does not strictly need of it.
Well Maju why Rape is out of question?
ReplyDeleteWe know what males in general do, especially that R1-M173 are the same people who did the Y-DNA thing in South America in the Christian age, let alone in the Mesolithic age of terror
Please explain why that its only in Dalmatia, Sweden & the Basque region where H mtDNA is at high %
All these regions have very strong I-M170 links, in Dalmatia I2a2 still the majority & Sweden still strong frequencies & in Basque region we have I2a survivors
Why do R1b people refuse to admit the fact that they are the descendants of a violent rapist male common ancestor & he only gets more violent because thats the fittests amongst R1b (P312 & U106)
Why not apologize to I-M170 admit the Mesolithic genocide...I respect you Maju & enjoy your justifications about the NOP genocide of the DE people back in the Far East, but you just have to admit that NOP people in general are very violent Rapists thats why they the majority of the world today is NOP although they come from a relatively young common ancestor, R1-M173 are the most violent from NOP
Peace
"This changed after the LGM, when population grew fast but until that moment at least Genetic Drift ruled unopposed".
ReplyDeleteThe trait of depigmentation is supposed to have been selected for in higher latitudes. If the paleolithic population was replaced by immigrants from far south they would have to have transformed into the north Euro pigmentation type very quickly. It would have required a mass die off of the dark skinned followed by a geometric expansion of the surviving (depigmented) population.
Then what is said, that a population can change the colour from black to white within 20,000 years, isn't true?
ReplyDeleteI : "Why not apologize to I-M170 admit the Mesolithic genocide..."
ReplyDeleteROFL. Isn't it a bit early for any apologies? Noone know what really happened and we can suppose that violent behaviors were largely spread in these times on the planet.
What the ....
Is that a joke?
I'm not even pondering the why of rape. And as for "men do", I'd say it's unfair: some men do, the rest just get the reputation. Remember that empathy, compassion and love are at least as much part of the psychological package of being human (woman or man) as is that pseudo-instinctive egoism.
ReplyDelete... let alone in the Mesolithic age of terror...
That's clearly just a prejudice you have. What we know of actual foragers everywhere has nothing to do with terror. For some it is actually something closer to utopy, at least something more natural for us... the way we have lived for nearly all our evolutionary process.
Please explain why that its only in Dalmatia, Sweden & the Basque region where H mtDNA is at high %
Because you're reading the figures wrong and probably only looking at one unique map that does not express our overall knowledge but just part of it.
The trait of depigmentation is supposed to have been selected for in higher latitudes. If the paleolithic population was replaced by immigrants from far south they would have to have transformed into the north Euro pigmentation type very quickly.
ReplyDeleteHowever a particular pigmentation gene is said to have expanded at Epipaleolithic. That would correlate with the settling of the Far North.
But I agree the most of it should be pre-existent. After all people had been living north of 40 and even 50 degrees for many many generations by then.
Please explain why that its only in Dalmatia, Sweden & the Basque region where H mtDNA is at high %
ReplyDeleteMaju feel free to dig out all studies on Dalmatia (Pericic et al has more than 700 samples showing clearly I2a2 frequencies correlates with H mtDNA), H mtDNA is always over 50% reaching 70% in the islands were I-M170 is also 60%+, H mtDNA highest frequency in Sweden is also I1-M253 highest frequency zone...Please explain did R1b people just come over and hand over their women to the Paleolithic natives! If so why is H mtDNA % lower amongst R1b people?!
IN Argentina you know the native mtDNA is still up around 60s%, while the native Y-DNA is barely in the 10s%. Why do we ignore the fact that males can upset the genetic makeup within a few months of nonconsensual mating. (Did the native South Americans enjoy the compassion & love you mentioned?)
This recent history of the same people who entered Europe back in the Mesolithic, same DNA , same idea...Same surviving mtDNA
I am not aware of that Swedish high mtDNA H. I though they were rather high on U instead.
ReplyDeleteWhatever the case, nearly all European populations display 40-50% of H, so the slightly higher figures for Dalmatia and the Basque Country are in any case an apparent product of isolation, nothing else. The situation is the same everywhere.
Basques are not particularly high in Y-DNA I, nor the I2 of Dalmatia and the I1 of Sweden are too closely related.
And there is no logical reason to propose a "mass rape scenario" as you seem to believe. At continental scale!
Whatever the reasons for the present day distribution of haplogroups they are more likely the product of ancient founder effects and local fixations by drift. These rather simple socio-biological mechanisms are infinitely more effective that your wild "Paleolithic terror" fantasies could ever be.
Said that, I do not mean either that absolutely every instance of Paleolithic was peace'n flowers. Surely not.
IN Argentina you know the native mtDNA is still up around 60s%, while the native Y-DNA is barely in the 10s%.
I am not aware of that. Maybe you mean in some specific places or maybe some other country?
Whatever the case, the European genetic flow to America was not a matter of a single invasion but of sustained migration for many centuries. But you have other places like the USA (and largely Argentina itself) where neither Y nor mt DNA can almost be found of the first settlers. But all these are processes caused by continued massive population flow in a context of extreme technological disparity.
Places that experience a single invasion event or were not as culturally isolated, such as Africa or southern Asia, have not received almost any DNA in such processes. The Portuguese were for five centuries in Angola and their genetic impact, that does surely exist, is not too apparent in any case.
But they did create a Portuguese-speaking state and this language is more and more replacing the native languages, even after the colonial masters who left little genetic legacy are now gone.
I understand that you are all very much impressed by the genocidal effectivity of Europeans in America and other places. But you just have to take a look at places like Angola or even South Africa, to realize that there are many other cases, each one with its peculiarities.
And you have also to realize that the World was never modern before Modern Age. The USA would have never been colonized from coast to coast in about a century without the power of modern machines like steam trains or ships for instance.
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ReplyDelete"If the paleolithic population was replaced by immigrants from far south they would have to have transformed into the north Euro pigmentation type very quickly. It would have required a mass die off of the dark skinned followed by a geometric expansion of the surviving (depigmented) population".
ReplyDeleteLike Maju I believe 'most of it should be pre-existent. After all people had been living north of 40 and even 50 degrees for many many generations by then'. Where I'd disagree with him is that I'd go further and claim it's presence there goes further back than just the Epipaleolithic.
"I understand that you are all very much impressed by the genocidal effectivity of Europeans in America and other places. But you just have to take a look at places like Angola or even South Africa, to realize that there are many other cases, each one with its peculiarities".
The end result of such migration is presumably a refelction of the relative numbers. If the immigrant population is moving into a relatively sparsely settled region then replacement can be almost complete. This is probably the reason for population replacement during the European Neolithic.
I2a1 is scarce outside fo Sardinia...
ReplyDeleteI2 is what I wrote and I2a is common in several parts of Europe, mostly in the southern half, with highest concentrations in the former Yugoslavia, very specially the Adriatic areas.
Basque I is only half I2, the rest is uncategorized AFAIK.
Either way H mtDNA abnormal hogh % in Europe is evidence of either Sexual selection or Sexual Aggression.
I find that the distribution of H (specially H1) and Y-DNA R1b2a1 tend to overlap. Where it does not, I imagine male immigration or at least odd founder effect - maybe because these areas (North Africa, the Baltic, etc.) are towards the edges of H spread and have received "recent" migration.
But whatever... you can conceive any number of many theories and all will surely have pros and cons.
Wow, The all men are rapist theory. Despite the genetics I dont think that even happened in South America. Plenty of Amerindian men survived the conquest, many were part of it.
ReplyDeleteWhereas there is no doubt that rape occurred, the power imbalance and the racism would see to that, it seems to me the shift to European Ys did not happen immediately. Women like powerful men. If the native male population had no power and the Western male population had a lot of power then native women would have found them more attractive. And rape is not the basis for a sustainable family structure. Pregnancy is too difficult for that to work long term. Rape might provide a first child but not most of the 10 subsequent ones. It is hard to nurture a child who reminds you of a rape. Children of rape dont do well during childhood.
Plus in the Spanish/Amerindian split you could/can clearly see races. In the European context the differences would dissipate rapidly.
R1 dominates Europe in my opinion because it dominated the Pyrenean glacial refuge. The Ice killed the Is, not rapists.
Annina Topo writes: “R1 dominates Europe in my opinion because it dominated the Pyrenean glacial refuge. The Ice killed the Is, not rapists”.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you, but I think having demonstrated in the past that there was R1b1*, that migrated to Italy during the Younger Dryas, where were generated the subclades R1b1b2-M269, R-L23+/L150-, R-L23+/L150+, and from a migration to the Balkans and to Black Sea was after generated the LBK and all the subclades. Spain had again R1b1b2-S116+ from Central Europe.
This is my thinking.
A little OT, but coming back to the Celtic discussion, I agree with Annie. I have stated some of this before.
ReplyDeleteFirstly, there is little proof that the people of Celtic culture in central and southern Germany ever spoke a Celtic language.
Secondly, whatever written documents of "Celtic" in alpine regions is left, has little resemblance to island Celtic. In fact, to me it is much closer to old German and to Latin - which actually makes sense. Insular Celtic parted from even Gaulish a long, long time ago.
Finally, proto-Germanic of course resembled proto-Celtic (especially the soft continental one), and as such, most attempts to "prove" Celtic language use in southern Germany from place names are futile and ridiculous. Of the known examples I have seen, I can give derived Germanic and/or Greek words that are sufficiently close to argue for a proto-Germanic origin instead of a "Celtic" one (the ubiquitously cited Hallstad is one of them: "Salz/Salt in Germanic, but the Greeks gave use the "halides").
I see the origin of IE before Corded Ware - in fact going back to the cultures that formed when LBK broke up, and the proto-Germanic vs. proto-Celtic split around the Bell Beaker time.
As to German(ic) dialects, there used to me many: in addition to the Scandinavian, Frisian, and low German, to the East the archaic Gothic, and in the South Alemann and Bavarian/Austrian.
Annie Mouse said:
ReplyDeleteI am not convinced that the La Tene celts are connected to the Irish Celts alt all, except possibly prior to the arrival of both groups in Western Europe.
If you follow DNA studies at all, especially Y-DNA, you will notice that R-L21 seems to come up the Danube from Southern Germany, then spread into the area of Belgium, Holland, North Eastern Germany and Northern France, before crossing into the Isles.
R1b in the Isles is almost 100% R-L21.
Whereas to date, AFAIK, there have only been 2 samples of R-L21 found in Iberia, both linked to British influence.
So Annie, I think you need to evaluate your priors, as they say.
It would seem to me that a bunch of R-L21 guys arrived in Ireland with iron weapons, and quickly took over - much like the Iberians in South America.
Of course La Tene craftsmanship reached its highest expression in Ireland, so virtually no one doubts its connection with Ireland.
What seems more likely is that the Celtic language emerged in Southern Germany, and armed with iron weapons and horses, various groups expanded rapidly over vast areas, wiping out the men folk, and creating new hybrid population. The Celts in Ireland would have conquered the previous Neolithic inhabitants who may have spoken a language akin to Semitic, while in Northern Germany the native population that that got conquered almost certainly spoke Baltic.
So there you have it, a Celtic super-stratum over Semitic in Ireland and over Baltic in Northern Germany, thus creating creoles, which yielding different end languages rapidly.
R1b in the Isles is almost 100% R-L21.
ReplyDeleteI'd like to see a source of that. In any case this does not mean it is specifically Celtic, as the islands were colonized essentially from that very region before, in the Epipaleolithic.
So there you have it, a Celtic super-stratum over Semitic in Ireland and over Baltic in Northern Germany...
There is absolutely no evidence of any "Semitic" substratum. Just a speculation on a grammatical trait that is absent from other European languages but found in several West Asian ones, not just Semitic. Apart of this curiosity there is nothing of weight, specially when more likely (if anything) Berber languages have not even been considered.
The hypothesis is just hanging there like a zillion of other hypothesis are. It is also most unlikely that whichever Neolithic influence in Britain could be derived from a linguistic subfamily (Semitic) that was coalescing in West Asia more or less at the same time (6000 years ago).
Maju,
ReplyDeleteWhat language the original Neolithic Irish spoke is irrelevant, just that it was non-IE and carried a good few structural and sound shifts into Gaelic, that's all.
Yes, it could have been related to any of the Afroastiatic languages:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afroasiatic_languages
take your pick, though was probably not Basque-like, as I consider Basque to be related to languages of the Caucasus. I'm not sure about Iberian languages or whatever the Cardium Ware people or Megalithic people spoke, but it would have to be some language that had a significant gutteral sound, not found in most Indo-European languages, but common in Afroastiatic languages.
Hey. I did not say a word about Basque!
ReplyDeleteAnd it matters because you are assuming a priori that a wild hypothesis is the truth.
...as I consider Basque to be related to languages of the Caucasus.
While I can agree (with all due precautions) with this as a possibility (specifically in regard to NE Caucasian, not the other two families), I must again question the fact that you take the preliminary proposal as if it was the result of hardly questionable major evidence, which is not there.
And anyhow it would be still irrelevant.
I'm not sure about Iberian languages or whatever the Cardium Ware people or Megalithic people spoke, but it would have to be some language that had a significant gutteral sound, not found in most Indo-European languages, but common in Afroastiatic languages.
Why? Iberian Romances are anything but guttural (even the Indoeuropean tendency to supress vowels and agglutinate consonants seems moderated by the highly vocalic Iberian substrate). Ancient Iberian and Tartessian languages show no indication of being Afroasiatic either.
I don't have clear answers either but I'm not presuming that every other random hypothesis is the much desired answer.
Also, I do think that Basque and ancient Iberian could be related (they sound similar and also share a number of words, though this may be sprachbund too), an option that is well ahead of Caucasic languages in my list of likely relatives of Basque. Though I entertain the idea that this could be a pre-Neolithic relation (impossible to say for sure).
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ReplyDelete