WeepingElf wrote:Salmoneus wrote:WeepingElf wrote:Hmm, interesting. But there is another major branch of IE dominated by R1a: Balto-Slavic. Of course, Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian share a number of isoglosses, most prominently the satem shift and the ruki rule. Perhaps this "NW IE vs. Greco-Aryan" thing is vastly overrated as the "satem vs. centum" thing used to be. Indeed, the genetics seem to be more in tune with the "satem vs. centum" theory.
I think this is quibbling over minutiae.
Obviously, there are complications in dialectology: Greek lacks satem, Balto-Slavic lacks augment. Which of these occured first - and hence which is the 'genuine' 'genetic' commonality and which is the later sprachbund effect doesn't seem a really important question to me.
Sure, we have intersecting isoglosses, which point at an early IE dialect continuum. Hence, there is no reason to interpret the NW IE/Greco-Aryan isogloss as a primary bifurcation the same way 19th-century IEists interpreted the Centum/Satem isogloss, and the identification of this isogloss with Corded Ware and Late Yamnaya may be wrong.
I don't see how this follows. The fact that there were areal effects between early IE languages doesn't mean that they all sprang equally from the head of jove. We can still talk about different languages being more and less closely related. In the case of PIE, we can I think relatively straightforwardly identify four groups: Anatolian; Tocharian; Northwestern (Italic, Celtic, Germanic - linked by shared developments (like -tt- > -st-) and a considerable amount of shared borrowing from a common substrate family); and "Southeastern" (Indo-Aryan, Armenian, Greek, Balto-Slavic).
So when you said last Thursday that "R1b was brought to western Europe only by the Bell Beaker people" you meant a specific subclade of R1b that dominates western Europe today, and not R1b as a whole? Good that you pointed out this difference, because otherwise the statement above would flatly contradict that from Thursday.
Yes, sorry.
Actually, I think I meant two things:
- the steppe invasions brought the specific clades of R1b that are now prominent
- the steppe invasions changed R1b from "something that pops up now and then" to "something that claims up to 98% of the population in some areas".
But Khvalynsk not ancestral to Yamnaya? I was under the impression that Yamnaya evolved from Sredny Stog, and the latter when Khvalynsk merged with - or rather took over - Dniepr-Donets? Was I wrong?
Short answer: nobody really knows.
Longer answer: AIUI, Yamnaya occupied the territory of earlier Khvalynsk and did indeed take some features from it, while also taking some from elsewhere (particularly Sredny Stog). But the genetics may be more complicated. I think it used to be thought to be straightforward, but now people aren't sure? Looking at it, it seems that the problem is that not only does Yamnaya have much more Caucasian ancestry than Khvalynsk, it doesn't look to be closely-related Caucasian ancestry? So they're both "europeans plus southerners", but the southerners in question may have been different. In which case, Yamnaya may be the result of someone else (most common theory: Sredny Stog) taking over Khvalynsk territory and fusing their cultures.
But given the relatively small number of samples and the probable complexity of the area (there seem to have been multiple migrations over the caucasus and maybe elsewhere), I'm not sure we can really say for sure.
What is your idea of where Yamnaya came from, and what language they spoke?
Well, that's a big question!
On the small scale: it's probably complicated.
On the big scale, Yamnaya ultimate has four major elements: mesolithic European hunter-gatherers and a much smaller group of newcomers from Siberia formed an 'Eastern Hunter Gatherer' population on the steppe. There was then a huge migration from the Caucasus (or, at least, somewhere in the vicinity of the Caucasus, and presumably via the Caucasus). There was also a smaller but substantial migration from central european farming populations.
Yamnaya spoke, IMO, let's call it, "Indo-Germanic" - i.e. non-Anatolian PIE.
Where did that language come from? The most obvious answer is that it's an EHG language (everyone on the steppe would have spoken something similar). You probably want it specifically to be from Siberia, because that would allow your "Mitian" to be real. This seems very unlikely, though - the Siberians would only have been something like 10% of the founding population, and given that we're talking hunter-gatherers (i.e. not with a complex society that could easily accept a ruling class of invaders) it seems unlikely that they would have given their language to the area as a whole. More likely it's European - so perhaps even a relative of the Mesolithic european languages).
However, there's a problem there: Anatolian. Two problems, in fact:
a) so far there's no evidence of any influx of steppe genes into Anatolia to explain a migration of the Anatolian languages into the area. Particularly odd as we'd be talking about a less populous area transmitting its language to a more populous (and technologically developed) area, without seemingly any big invasion. So...?
b) the aforementioned evidence of Anatolian names already in the near east - most likely Syria! - already embedded in the populace
contemporary to Yamnaya.
Neither of those is a deal-breaker. For the first, as I say, we may simply not have looked at the right Anatolians yet. We'll have to wait and see. For the second... well, it's not like guessing language from names has ever gone wrong before, is it? Particularly when there might have been any number of other, unattested, languages in the area. So it would be a big coincidence that there's a bunch of seemingly Anatolian names there, but not impossible, maybe? That said, while not dealbreakers, they should absolutely give us pause.
Then again, there's another problem on the other side. Because if Yamna didn't speak their ancestral EHG language... why not? In particular, their Y-DNA is almost all local, and their southern ancestry shows up through their maternal lines. More than that: their Y-DNA shows so little variation, for their population size, that they were clearly organised socially around competing patrilineal clans (ruled, their sites suggest, by a warrior elite). Their southern/western DNA must represent either mass migration of women (presumably either through trade or through raiding), or through big migrations of foreigners, in which the foreign women were integrated but their husbands and sons were either killed or sexually out-competed. So why would the big macho patrilineal warrior elites have adopted the language of either their foreign slavegirls or (in the other hypothesis) the bunch of wimpy foreigners who couldn't get dates? Again, this isn't a logical dealbreaker, but it's kind of weird!
However, that basically means we have a choice. Assuming that the anatolian evidence is broadly accurate, we can say either that:
a) the northern barbarians spread their language to the cities of the south, despite not spreading any technology or genes along the way (and they did it really early on!).
or
b) the southern farmers spread their language to the barbarians of the north, along with some female genes and probably some technology
Neither's a great bet, but I'll go with b). [if we suddenly discover that high-caste Anatolians are from the steppe, of course, then I'm reversing course in an instant...]
If we go with b), we're adopting an Indo-Hittite model, in which a family established in the south spread a branch north, and that branch happened to explode with the Yamnaya expansions.
Where would Proto-Indo-Hittite have been spoken? Well, that might depend on how a branch got to Ukraine. There are two options:
i) through the Balkans, and then through Sredny Stog
or
ii) through the Caucasus (and perhaps then through Khvalynsk?)
I'm guessing the latter. Why? Well, for one thing there are more Caucasian genes in Yamnaya than there are European Neolithic genes. For another, the route through Europe would mean going through some really high-population areas and leaving no trace. If I had to pick this option, I guess I might put pre-PIH in, say, the Vinca Culture, and have Anatolian as a back-migration into Anatolia. But: the general direction of migration in Anatolia seems to have been from east to west. And we know that there were big migrations of people from the caucasus and iran into and through the near east. And the earliest-attested Anatolian languages, Hittite and Luwian, were in southeast anatolia - and east of the Hatti - rather than the west. So an eastern, rather than western, origin seems to require the least handwaving, in terms of travel routes.
This would suggest that proto-indo-hittite was spoken somewhere in Transcaucasia - from whence migrations both to the steppe and into anatolia are attested.
Not sure, I have to admit. They may indeed have been R1b. But all this argumentation with Y-DNA haplogroups as indicators of prehistoric language families may be misguided and irrelevant, for reasons I have already laid out and won't repeat here.
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I would just say that this seems to me even stronger genetic evidence than usual: the fact that almost all males were directly descended from a small number of common tribal ancestors, probably within few enough generations that people could actually remember the names of each ancestor back to the founder makes it wholesale replacement of their language, even by a related dialect, much less likely in my opinion - though of course not impossible. We're looking at a relatively rapid set of migrations, with hardly any assimilation of local males and almost certainly no integration of locals into the ruling class - exactly when you'd most expect language to follow genes, IMO.