The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

[Terra]

Yeah, that's what I meant to say. The Old Europeans were assimilated into the Indo-Europeans, so why couldn't that be the source of R1a?

Isn't R1a in (Northern) India? We'd have to find some evidence that the old Europeans either originated from, or migrated to Northern India.

[Salmoneus]

Except that the map of R1a basically screams in your face, 'hello, I'm a Proto-Indo-European Invasion!'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup ... bution.png

[KathTheDragon]

Might it be possible, then, that Uralic didn't come with N1c?

[Herr Dunkel]

A side question - in which languages and families are the cases best preserved in terms of their number?

Probably Balto-Slavic, with seven cases in most modern languages, and Armenian with six to seven agglutinated cases. Sanskrit had eight, older Latin had seven, Avestan had eight. Nobody has more than eight outside of Tocharian and Lithuanian (which acquired more through divergent evolution and borrowing, respectively)

[Salmoneus]

Might it be possible, then, that Uralic didn't come with N1c?

Realistically speaking, there were in Asia a bunch of people from haplotypes N and R. Due to bottlenecking and founder effects, certain subtypes became dominant in certain areas. I don't think we can say anything about linguistic connections.

We might want to bear in mind that in the historical period political and linguistic groups in central asia were often multi-ethnic. If we imagine a PIU group of people, some of whom went west and some of whom went east, it's far from impossible that the two child groups may have ended up with different dominant haplotypes - subgroups within the initial linguistic group may have been genetically different, and any genetic differences may have since been exaggerated by founder effects.

[Pogostick Man]

I'm inclined to wonder if the Germanic substrate hypothesis, if true, is due to Old European loans into Germanic.

[TaylorS]

We know that the Indo-Europeans supplanted the Old Europeans, but do we know that the Indo-Europeans didn't somhow pick up R1a from the Old Europeans?

IE supplanted whatever the Old Europeans spoke, but there doesn't have to have been much physical displacement - the OE speakers probably just switched to IE languages.

Yeah, that's what I meant to say. The Old Europeans were assimilated into the Indo-Europeans, so why couldn't that be the source of R1a?

Skeletons tested from the nearby Cucuteni-Tripolye Culture of Romania and western Ukraine all had Anatolian-Levantine markers like J1 and Eb1, same with many skeletons from the Danubian societies according to Manco.

[TaylorS]

Might it be possible, then, that Uralic didn't come with N1c?

Well, here's the modern distrobution of all N, for what it's worth:



That gap in the middle seems to be where Turkic people expanded into, and there is also a gap where the Russians expanded north.

[R.Rusanov]

Fingols :---DDDDDDDDDDDDD

that's ebin'st

[WeepingElf]

The haplogroup N map looks somewhat like Fortescue's Uralo-Siberian, but as a whole, I am rather skeptical about such correlations between genetic markers and language families.

[jal]

I am rather skeptical about such correlations between genetic markers and language families.

Well, it depends on whether the genetic markers diffused through standing populations without language spread, or whether they represent dispersal of an entire population that took their language with them. A third option is language spread without genetic markers spreading. It's indeed difficult to be certain what happened in specific cases, so all we can look for is correlations.


JAL

[gach]

The right way to go about the research is to study migrations and language spreading separately and only after that combine the results to see if you can learn anything about the nature of the spreading patterns. Of course, you might get valuable hints from the results of one field for how to proceed in another one, but if you trust these too much you'll be fooled sooner rather than later to force yourself on false conclusions or to overlook some less obvious results.

[jal]

The right way to go about the research is to study migrations and language spreading separately

Indeed. This is complicated by the fact that some migrations tended to be female-dominated, while others were male-dominated (known by spreading of mitochondrial DNA vs. Y-chromosome DNA), and not knowing whether in these societies it was the mother or the father passing the language.


JAL

[WeepingElf]

Also, languages are known to spread much faster than genes. "Language shift", i.e. communities adopting a new language, is actually quite common.

[Tropylium]

Well, here's the modern distrobution of all N, for what it's worth:
That gap in the middle seems to be where Turkic people expanded into

The clearest white hole is the Yeniseian peoples. Siberian Turkic peoples are the concentrated area east of them.

[gach]

To be honest, the East Siberian concentration matches with the repeated migration path down the Lena to the Arctic Sea which Fortescue talks about. If it's been a repeated corridor for spreading language and culture, neither of those will likely be representative of the ancestry of the base population.

[TaylorS]

The haplogroup N map looks somewhat like Fortescue's Uralo-Siberian, but as a whole, I am rather skeptical about such correlations between genetic markers and language families.

Fortescue's proposal is exactly what I thought of when I saw this chart in Manco's book

[TaylorS]

Well, here's the modern distrobution of all N, for what it's worth:
That gap in the middle seems to be where Turkic people expanded into

The clearest white hole is the Yeniseian peoples. Siberian Turkic peoples are the concentrated area east of them.

Oh, WHOOPS!!!

[TaylorS]

Also, languages are known to spread much faster than genes. "Language shift", i.e. communities adopting a new language, is actually quite common.

Hence my original question above.

[WeepingElf]

What do you think of this? Apparently, there is genetic evidence for a sort of a "kurgan" scenario. The IE family tree given in the paper looks nice, too, though I'd rather group Armenian with Greek than with Tocharian. (I have no opinion on the placement of Albanian, though.)

[sirdanilot]

The right way to go about the research is to study migrations and language spreading separately and only after that combine the results to see if you can learn anything about the nature of the spreading patterns. Of course, you might get valuable hints from the results of one field for how to proceed in another one, but if you trust these too much you'll be fooled sooner rather than later to force yourself on false conclusions or to overlook some less obvious results.

Also, languages are known to spread much faster than genes. "Language shift", i.e. communities adopting a new language, is actually quite common.

Thank you, thank you, there are at least some sensible people in this thread !

[masako]

Also, languages are known to spread much faster than genes. "Language shift", i.e. communities adopting a new language, is actually quite common.

Thank you, thank you, there are at least some sensible people in this thread !

Actually, as sensible as it might be, it doesn't really mean anything. What metrics are used to evaluate how "fast" a language spread? If it's decades or centuries I'd say that's fairly close to how "fast" genes spread. If a diachronic approach is used, then, again, major genetic features also change at a fairly analogous rate.

[Dewrad]

Also, languages are known to spread much faster than genes. "Language shift", i.e. communities adopting a new language, is actually quite common.

Thank you, thank you, there are at least some sensible people in this thread !

Actually, as sensible as it might be, it doesn't really mean anything. What metrics are used to evaluate how "fast" a language spread? If it's decades or centuries I'd say that's fairly close to how "fast" genes spread. If a diachronic approach is used, then, again, major genetic features also change at a fairly analogous rate.

Actually, we do have some historical case studies: as far as we can tell the genetic make-up of the population of the outlying areas of British Isles has remained pretty stable since the late neolithic. So, for the sake of argument, let's say since the arrival of agriculture in the British Isles, which we can very conservatively say was five millenia ago, there's been only minimal genetic change and admixture from other populations in e.g. North Wales during that period. During the same period, we can posit at least two language shifts (the second ongoing and abundantly documented), with the bulk of the population changing their language over the past century or so. While genetic drift can be relatively swift, complete population replacement is actually pretty slow in comparison to language spread.

[Salmoneus]

That's true, but what it overlooks is that most of these 'genetic evidence' arguments aren't about population replacement but about gene prevalence. Total replacement of a population is likely to be very rare - language shift is much more likely. But peoples are not monolithic blocks shunting about a game board. They're liquids - they pervade, and intermix.

If the question is: how easy is it for a language to spread without complete population replacement? - the answer is very easy indeed.
But if we instead ask how easy it is for a language to spread without genes spreading - well that's much harder. The two cases where we can expect language shift - a big influx of powerful people into a society, and the nearby presence of another powerful society - are both cases where genes are also likely to spread. Even in Wales, for instance, only 92% of people are R1b - 8% aren't.

Incidentally, how old R1b is in western europe is still debateable. Most neolithic europeans tested are actually G2 (now only common in the Caucasus).

[masako]

While genetic drift can be relatively swift, complete population replacement is actually pretty slow in comparison to language spread.

I get what you're saying, but I never approached the idea of complete population replacement. I also think a case could be made that the stability of the genetic make-up in the British Isles is a bit wonky.