rolloff analysis of Lezgins as Sardinian+Burusho

I have carried out rolloff analysis of Lezgins, a Northeast Caucasian population that is of particular interest due to it being modal for the "Dagestan" component whose long-distance relationships with Western Europe and South Asia have triggered a great deal of followup investigation on my part.

The Lezgins are also interesting for other reasons: they may be one of the populations related to the Kura-Araxes culture; they possess a high frequency of Y-haplogroup R1b, so they may be related to the migration that brought this haplogroup into Europe from West Asia.

In my previous analysis of the French using the same reference populations, I speculated that their signal of admixture may involve admixture between a Sardinian-like and a West Asian population in Asia itself circa 7,000 years ago, followed by a later expansion into Europe. And, in my analysis of Lithuanians and Ukrainians, I discovered a somewhat less "old" signal of admixture involving South Asian+North European references with a mean value of 5.5-6.3ky for the various population pairs.

The exponential fit for the Lezgins can be seen below:

The admixture time estimate is 198.773 +/- 70.649 generations or 5,760 +/- 2,050 years. This is not very precise, but seems consistent with the two phenomena described above. It also seems to contrast with the much younger signal for Armenians.

rolloff analysis of French as a mixture of Sardinian+Burusho

I obtain f3(French; Sardinian, Burusho) = -0.002652 (Z=-13.541) on the basis of 446,917 SNPs. This is the strongest signal of admixture in the French that involves a population that is high on the "West_Asian" component whose influence I have been investigating.

I thus carried out rolloff analysis using the French as a target population and the Sardinians and Burusho as reference populations. The exponential fit can be seen below:

The jackknife gives 239.556 +/- 50.553 generations for this admixture, which corresponds (assuming a generation length of 29 years) to 6,950 +/- 1,470 years.

Analysis of autosomal DNA from the Tyrolean Iceman and a Neolithic TRB farmer from Sweden have revealed an absence of the West Asian ancestral component and a Sardinian-like Neolithic population c. 5ka in Europe. This population may have extended to at least to the Balkans in space and down to the Iron Age in time.

In my opinion, the simplest explanaton for the evidence is that the admixture picked up by rolloff took place in West Asia itself c. 7ka, and then this population begun its movement into Europe at some post-5ka time period.

Importantly, the K=12 Caucasus component appears as a mixture of the K=7 West_Asian and Southern components. The former (West_Asian) is the most important one in the Burusho, and the latter (Southern) is the most important one in Sardinians.

European Neolithic farmers, of presumably West Asian origin only possessed Y-haplogroup G2a out of the wide variety of haplogroups found in West Asia today. They also lacked the West_Asian component which is modal in West Asia today. There is also physical anthropological evidence from Greece and Anatolia, for an introduction of new population elements during the Bronze Age.

These facts combine to make me believe that there were population movements across West Asia which preceded the Indo-European invasion of Europe during late pre-history. That event is then best seen as an extension of a broader Eurasian phenomenon that affected substantially both the western parts of Asia and Europe.

Taking all the evidence into account, I hypothesize that:

• a "Southern"/"Atlantic_Med"/Sardinian-like population substratum existed in West Asia, and this spawned the early European Neolithic.
• a new "West_Asian"/Burusho-like population arrived from the east, perhaps associated with the Halaf/Hassuna cultures, or from some other unknown center of dispersal in the Transcaucasus or Iran. Mobility may have been encouraged post-8.2 kiloyear event.
• these two elements began mixing ~7 thousand years ago in West Asia
• the admixed population expanded at some post-5ka period into Western Europe.

This scenario is also compatible with the lack of "Southern"/"Atlantic_Med" influences in the Indian subcontinent and Central Asia: if the West_Asian component originated to the east of the Sardinian-like population then it would not have the opportunity to incorporate "Southern" elements in its eastern expansion.

(Obviously, more rolloff analyses are needed to study these ideas; the current one took about ~3 days, which was a little faster than I expected.)

Related (?): Is Burushaski Indo-European?

Image credit: Don Perrault (source)

Is Burushaski Indo-European?

I try to shy away from linguistic controversies, and I doubt that the idea of the Indo-European origin of Burushaski will go down without a fight. The JIES is a little behind the times when it comes to online access, so I can't quite comment on the substantive part of Prof. Casule's theory.

We'll have to wait to see how much of this is press release hype and how much is new evidence. This idea has been in circulation for a while, but if there is indeed an issue of JIES dedicated to it, it probably deserves our attention.

Here is a paper critical of the thesis. Here is a seminar abstract by Prof. Casule with some more citations.

Cracking the code on the origins of a new European language

There is strong evidence to support the discovery of a new European language.

Macquarie University historical linguistics researcher, Associate Professor Ilija Casule, discovered that the language, known as Burushaski, which is spoken by about 90,000 people who reside in a remote area of North West Pakistan, is Indo-European in origin, not Indo-Iranian.

Professor Casule’s discovery, which has now been verified by a number of the world’s top linguists, has excited linguistics experts around the world. An entire issue of the eminent international linguistics journal The Journal of Indo-European Studies is devoted to a discussion of his findings later this month.

More than 50 eminent linguists have tried over many years to determine the genetic relationship of Burushaski. But it was Casule’s painstaking research, based on a comprehensive grammatical, phonological, lexical and semantic analysis, which established that the Burushaski language is in fact an Indo-European language most likely descended from one of the ancient Balkan languages. Professor Casule believes that language is most probably ancient Phrygian.

The Phrygians migrated from Macedonia to Anatolia (today part of Turkey) and were famous for their legendary kings who figure prominently in Greek mythology such as King Midas who turned whatever he touched into gold. They later migrated further east, reaching India. Indeed, according to ancient legends of the Burushashki people, they are descendants of Alexander the Great.

Tracing the historical path of a language is no easy task. Professor Casule said he became interested in the origins of Burushaski more than 20 years ago.

“People knew of its existence but its Indo-European affiliation was overlooked and it was not analysed correctly. It is considered a language isolate – not related to any other language in the world in much the same way that the Basque language is classified as a language isolate,” he said.

The remoteness of the area that was independent until the early 1970s when it became part of Pakistan, ensured Burushaski retained certain grammatical and lexical features that led Professor Casule to conclude it is a North-Western Indo-European language, specifically of the Paleobalkanic language group and that it corresponds most closely with Phrygian.

Dr Casule’s work is groundbreaking, not only because it has implications for all the Indo-European language groups, but also provides a new model for figuring out the origins of isolate languages – where they reside in the linguistic family tree and how they developed and blended with other languages to form a new language.

Image: Map of Burushashki speaking areas