Inferring the linguistic affinity of long dead and non-literate peoples: a multidisciplinary approach

Ancient DNA has treated us to many surprises in recent years. But it has also uncannily corroborated some well established hypotheses that were formulated decades ago from historical linguistics and archeological data. One such hypothesis is that the population associated with the Late Neolithic Corded Ware culture (CWC), and its myriad offshoots, spoke early Indo-European languages and spread

Some myths die hard

Ancient DNA tells us that the Bronze Age wasn't kind to the indigenous populations of Central Asia. It seems to have wiped them out totally. Indeed, Central Asia might well be the only major world region in which native hunter-gatherers failed to make a perceptible impact on the genetics of any extant populations.

Before the Neolithic transition, much of Central Asia was home to hunter-gatherers

R1b-M269 in the Bronze Age Levant

The new Harvard genotype datasets that I blogged about recently include a couple of potentially very useful samples from the Levant dated to 1400-1100 BCE. Search for IDs I2062 and I1934 in the anno files here. They're both from an archeological paper about a Late Bronze Age (LBA) burial site in what is now Israel that was published back in 2017 (see here).

Surprisingly, individual I2062 is

Early chariot riders of Transcaucasia came from...

I'm finding it increasingly difficult nowadays to fully appreciate all of the ancient DNA samples that are accumulating in my dataset. But it's not entirely my fault.

Among the hundreds of ancient samples published last year there was a couple of Middle Bronze Age (MBA) individuals from what is now Armenia labeled "Lchashen Metsamor" (see here). I wasn't planning to do much with these samples

Armenians vs Georgians

Armenians and Georgians are ethnic groups that live side by side in the south Caucasus, or Transcaucasia. By all accounts, they've both been there since prehistoric times and they're very similar in terms of overall genetic structure.

However, they speak languages from totally unrelated families: Indo-European and Kartvelian, respectively. How did this happen and might the answer lie in the

On the association between Uralic expansions and Y-haplogroup N

Almost all present-day populations speaking Uralic languages show moderate to high frequencies of Y-chromosome haplogroup N. I reckon there are two likely explanations for this:

- the speakers of Proto-Uralic were rich in N because they lived in an area, probably somewhere around the Ural Mountains, where it was common, and they spread it with them as they expanded from their homeland

- Uralic

Downloadable genotypes of present-day and ancient DNA data

They're freely available via the Harvard Medical School at this LINK. The linked web page includes this message:

We would be grateful if users of this dataset could alert us to any errors they detect and help us to fill in missing data. This could include: (1) errors or missing information for location, latitude, longitude, archaeological context, date, and group label, (2) concerns about Y

Map of pre-Corded Ware culture (>2900 BCE) instances of Y-haplogroup R1a

Below is a map showing the global distribution of Y-chromosome haplogroup R1a prior to the expansions of the R1a-rich Corded Ware culture (CWC) people and their descendants across Europe and Asia from around 2900 BCE. I'll be updating this map regularly and using it to help me narrow down the options for the place of origin of R1a, and also to counter the misinformation about this topic that has

Celtic probably not from the west

The term "Celtic from the west" is the catchphrase for a working theory, offered in a couple of recent books, positing that the earliest speakers of Celtic languages lived in Atlantic Europe during the Bronze Age or even earlier. It'll be interesting to see how this theory holds up against increasing numbers of ancient samples from attested early Celtic-speaking populations.

More popular and

How did Y-haplogroup J2b get to Europe?

Y-haplogroup J2b, defined by the L282 mutation, is found throughout Europe and reaches relatively high frequencies in the southeastern part of the continent. But the question of how and when it got to Europe is still wide open.

It's certainly native to the Near East, where all of the main subclades of Y-haplogroup J2 show more structure than anywhere else. Indeed, it's first attested in the

Ancient island hopping in the western Mediterranean (Fernandes et al. 2019 preprint)

Over at bioRxiv at this LINK. Here's the abstract, emphasis is mine:

A series of studies have documented how Steppe pastoralist-related ancestry reached central Europe by at least 2500 BCE, while Iranian farmer-related ancestry was present in Aegean Europe by at least 1900 BCE. However, the spread of these ancestries into the western Mediterranean where they have contributed to many populations

Open thread: What are the linguistic implications of Olalde et al. 2019?

I was going to write a huge post on the linguistic implications of the latest batch of ancient DNA from Iberia courtesy of Olalde et al. 2019, and then I thought better of it. Admittedly, I don't know enough about the languages of prehistoric Iberia to say anything really useful on the topic. So instead here's an open thread to bounce around a few ideas in the comments.

Just briefly, this is

Let's try a formal heuristic approach

I created a massive outgroup f3-statistics matrix, featuring almost 300 ancient and present-day populations and individuals, for the purpose of running unsupervised, or at least semi-supervised, fine scale mixture tests with nMonte. Most of the stats were computed with 400-900K SNPs, which is a lot and should provide plenty of power. The matrix is available in a zip file here.

The results I'm

Two new papers on ancient Iberia

Olalde et al. 2019 (Science) at this LINK...

Abstract: We assembled genome-wide data from 271 ancient Iberians, of whom 176 are from the largely unsampled period after 2000 BCE, thereby providing a high-resolution time transect of the Iberian Peninsula. We document high genetic substructure between northwestern and southeastern hunter-gatherers before the spread of farming. We reveal sporadic

A challenge

The datasheets below contain outgroup f3-statistics for a wide range of ancient and present-day populations. Five of the ancient groups and individuals are labeled "Unknown". In fact, I do know what they are, but I'd like you to try and work out whether they were the speakers of Indo-European or non-Indo-European languages by analyzing the datasheets with, say, PAST or nMonte.

An exceptional burial indeed, but not that of an Indo-European

Not too many people have been buried sitting on wagons. The most famous case is that of an Early Bronze Age man who, considering his injuries, may have died in a high-speed crash - high-speed for its time anyway - on the Pontic-Caspian steppe in Eastern Europe.

It's likely that this guy was one of the very first wagon-drivers in human history, because his four-wheeled wooden model is dated

Maykop: a multi-ethnic layer cake?

Let's speculate about the linguistic affinities of the currently available ancient populations from the Caucasus and surrounds. I put together a series of outgroup f3-stats to help things along. They're available for download here.

Maykop
Georgian 0.258224
Abkhasian 0.257899
Latvian 0.257376
Swedish 0.257301
Turkish_Trabzon 0.256996
Basque_Spanish 0.256589
Chechen 0.256514
Icelandic 0.256418

The Steppe Maykop enigma

Who were the Steppe Maykop people exactly? Their ancestry must surely rank as one of the biggest surprises served up by ancient DNA to date.

I always thought that they'd turn out roughly like a mixture between populations associated with the Kura-Araxes and Yamnaya cultures (mostly because their territory was located sort of in between them). Nope, that wasn't even close. This is where they

All quiet on the eastern front

I put together this quick and dirty qpGraph tree just to double check what the Eneolithic trio from the Piedmont steppe (Piedmont_Eneolithic) were roughly made of, and how they related to some of the other populations from the eastern half of ancient West Eurasia. The relevant graph file is available here.



Yep, the tree basically lines up with scientific literature. In other words,

Catacomb > Armenia_MLBA

It's now clear, thanks to ancient DNA, that Transcaucasia and surrounds were affected by multiple, and at times significant, population movements from Eastern Europe during the Chalcolithic and Bronze Age periods. Based on the ancient samples from what is now Armenia, I'd say that this process peaked during the Middle Bronze Age. But who exactly were the people who perhaps swarmed south of the

On Maykop ancestry in Yamnaya

What Maykop ancestry in Yamnaya? There is none, or at least not enough worth discussing, except in one highly unusual female outlier from a burial in what is now eastern Ukraine. But apparently this is still up for debate? Well it shouldn't be.



To anyone with even a passing interest in the Yamnaya culture, it should be rather obvious that it formed during the tail end of the Eneolithic on the

Ancient Caucasus open analysis and discussion

The following samples from the recent Wang et al. paper on the genetic prehistory of the Caucasus are now in the Global25 datasheets:

Catacomb MK3003
Catacomb RK4001
Catacomb RK4002
Catacomb SA6003
Darkveti-Meshoko I1722
Darkveti-Meshoko I2055
Darkveti-Meshoko I2056
Kubano-Tersk BU2001
Kubano-Tersk GW1001
Kubano-Tersk LYG001
Kubano-Tersk MK5009
Kubano-Tersk PG2002
Kubano-Tersk RK1003

Blast from the past: Matters of basic geography

I'm re-posting this article from 2017 for the benefit of some Science News journalists, who are apparently having major problems dealing with basic geography. That's because they think that the Yamnaya culture was located in Asia rather than Eastern Europe. Take my advice and don't read Science News whatever you do. It might rot your brain.

...

The steppe north of the Black Sea in Ukraine has

A Bell Beaker superhighway

Below is a density heat map of Bell Beaker pottery finds from a recent paper titled Der Glockenbecher in Europa - eine Karteirung (The mapping of the Bell Beaker in Europe). It's freely available as part of a series of new archeological papers on the Bell Beaker phenomenon at the Journal of Neolithic Archeology (see here).



Particularly eye catching, at least for me, is the trail of high

The tracer dye

Remember that Wang et al. preprint at bioRxiv on the genetic prehistory of the Greater Caucasus? Well, it's just been published at Nature Communications under a new title: Ancient human genome-wide data from a 3000-year interval in the Caucasus corresponds with eco-geographic regions.

The authors also re-worked a few other parts of the manuscript, including the abstract and figures, but most of

The Boscombe Bowmen

I'm thinking that the Boscombe Bowmen site in Wiltshire, southern England, might be a valuable case study of how the Bell Beaker population, and thus also the present-day western European gene pool, came to be.

Dated to 2500–2140 BCE, this isn't an especially early Bell Beaker grave, but its inventory is intriguing. It includes seven All-Over-Cord (AOC) beakers and one Cord-Zoned-Maritime (CZM)

Hungarian Yamnaya predictions

About ten thousand ancient burial mounds still stand in the Carpathian Basin and surrounds. Many of these kurgans or tumuli show direct archeological links with the highly mobile Yamnaya culture of the Pontic-Caspian steppe to the east, and may have been built by Yamnaya migrants.

The testing of ancient DNA from the remains in these burials is important, because the results are likely to be

Dutch Beakers: like no other Beakers

In my last two blog posts I tried to explain why the so called Bell Beakers of prehistoric Europe cannot be confidently derived in any significant way from the Yamnaya population of the Carpathian Basin, and are more likely to have been an offshoot, in varying degrees, of the Single Grave or Corded Ware people of the Lower Rhine region (see here and here).

To help drive my message home, below is

Single Grave > Bell Beakers

I've been studying in detail the genetic substructures within the Bell Beaker population with formal statistics and Principal Component Analyses (PCA). As far as I can see, among the two most homogeneous, and thus least likely to be recently admixed, Beaker groups are the Dutch Beakers and also the Dutch and British Beaker males belonging to Y-haplogroup R1b-P312. This, of course, makes good

Hungarian Yamnaya > Bell Beakers?

Ever since the publication of the Olalde et al. Beaker paper (see here), there's been a lot of talk online about Hungarian Yamnaya as the most likely source of the Yamnaya-related, R1b-P312-rich northern Bell Beakers who went on to dominate much of Central and Western Europe during the Late Neolithic and Bronze Age.

Certainly, this is still possible, and we might find out soon if it's true

PIE Urheimat poll: two or three options left

If we let ancient DNA dictate the terms in the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) homeland debate ahead of historical linguistics and archeology, then, as far as I can see, there are two or three realistic options for the location of the said homeland. Here they are, in order of my own preference:

1) The Don-Caspian steppe around 4,300 BCE (see here). The ancestors of the Hittites and other Anatolian

The PIE homeland controversy: January 2019 status report

Last year, the preprint that claimed to have presented archaeogenetic data that opened up the possibility of the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) homeland being located south of the Caucasus was, ironically, also the preprint that considerably strengthened my confidence that the said homeland was actually located north of the Caucasus.

Of course, I'm talking about the Wang et al. manuscript at bioRxiv,