Ancient Indo-European Folktales?

I don’t think their basic assumption is valid, because folktales cross linguistic barriers easily.

There can’t be any Indo-European folk tales, but only Eurasian ones.

Some classical folktales have even greater distribution, including all of Eurasia and large parts of Africa.

Cinderella (ATU510A in Aarne Thompson Uther (ATU) Index) is case in point.

This tale well is known folklore of peoples living in Western and Eastern Europe, Middle East, Iran, Central Asia, Tibet, Siberia, Japan, China, South Asia, Indo-China, Western Africa, Eastern Africa.

4000 years? Indo-European tale?

No way. Cinderella is so widespread that it’s ought to be dated to Upper Paleolithic, at least.

@SFReader: So they do attempt to control for this. They’re using two variables — geographic location and common linguistic descent — and trying to figure out which of them explains more of the variations in the fairy tale plots.

I’m still skeptical, but at least this basic objection is covered.

One pretty obvious question is what level of generality do you use to decide if two tales from different cultures/languages are variants of the same ur-tale. (At a sufficiently high level of generality you can usually take a random ’70’s sitcom rerun and find a foreshadowing of the plot in some comedy by Plautus.) They seem to be using this ATU collection, which no doubt has a methodology (with no doubt both defenders and detractors in some relevant specialist literature). So on the one hand it’s good (and also convenient) that they’re using an existing dataset, with whatever pluses and minuses it has, rather than coming up with their own dataset that might be biased toward supporting their own hypothesis. But on the other hand, if the methodology used for the ATU dataset was done in a different context for a different purpose, how do we know if it’s the right sort of data for this exercise? It strikes me that in other folklore-corpus contexts, like the Child ballads in English, you clearly have both situations where text A and text B are plausibly historically related as actual texts even though there may be substantial differences in wording and then you have other situations where text C and text D appear, as texts, to be entirely independent compositions but nonetheless have some similarity of theme, setting, and plot. Using genetic metaphors may work pretty well for the first sort of relationship; for the second sort of relationship it’s, shall we say, a looser metaphor.

@Dmitry,

One of my great-grandpas was a village blacksmith. His fame and local stories about his real or imaginary deeds circulated long after his death in the whole parish, especially because he was also a cheery sort of chap and a prankster. Some occupations just attract people’s attention in this way.

Some occupations just attract people’s attention in this way

Yes, if it feels like magic and raw power, then … But the blacksmiths also liked to cultivate the rumors of their special relations with the dark forces on purpose. Like I remember the story of Shaka Zulu’s assegai forged in the dead of the night using things which weren’t to be named.

(The only time I knew I was in Hell was when we visited an aluminum factory as interns … imagine a cavernous pitch dark hall with the lights dimmed by hydrogen fluoride patina of corrosion of windowpanes and fat, thick graphite dust, where the black crust of the ovens glows red through the cracks, and flickers of blue flame dance over it, with the disquieting low buzz of electricity drowning all sounds … so a cherry-glowing giant scoop swings overhead, unheard, and fades into the darkness … and soon the devil himself appears, a diminutive foul-mouthed man completely covered in soot, wielding a jackhammer to break the crust and to prevent boiling-over of the liquid metal)

There was a Norwegian experimental archaeologist a few years ago who added charred bones to the smelt to make carbon steel. He interpreted the tales of smiths’ black magic as trade guild metaphysics, interpreting the increased strenght of the metal as the spirit of the animal or the fallen enemy forged into the blade itself.

It made me wonder if copycat children book writers, inspired by the Grimm brothers of Germany but introducing variations here and there, may have contributed to the present-day variability.

Absolutely. “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” has a known point of origin, or at least a known point of dispersion: Robert Southey’s 1837 story (in which Goldilocks is not only an old woman, but the villain of the piece). All the folklore and literary versions since then descend from it.

One pretty obvious question is what level of generality do you use to decide if two tales from different cultures/languages are variants of the same ur-tale.

Tolkien complained in “On Fairy-Stories” about what he considered to be abuses of this very point:

[T]here are many elements in fairy-stories (such as this detachable heart [which appears in the Egyptian “Tale of Two Brothers” and over and over in both folklore and literature since then], or swan-robes, magic rings, arbitrary prohibitions, wicked stepmothers, and even fairies themselves) that can be studied […]. Such studies are, however, scientific (at least in intent); they are the pursuit of folklorists or anthropologists: that is of people using the stories not as they were meant to be used, but as a quarry from which to dig evidence, or information, about matters in which they are interested. A perfectly legitimate procedure in itself—but ignorance or forgetfulness of the nature of a story (as a thing told in its entirety) has often led such inquirers into strange judgments.

To investigators of this sort recurring similarities (such as this matter of the heart) seem specially important. So much so that students of folk-lore are apt to get off their own proper track, or to express themselves in a misleading “shorthand”: misleading in particular, if it gets out of their monographs into books about literature. They are inclined to say that any two stories that are built round the same folk-lore motive, or are made up of a generally similar combination of such motives, are “the same stories.” We read that Beowulf “is only a version of Dat Erdmänneken”; that “The Black Bull of Norroway is Beauty and the Beast,” or “is the same story as Eros and Psyche”; that the Norse Mastermaid (or the Gaelic Battle of the Birds and its many congeners and variants) is “the same story as the Greek tale of Jason and Medea.”

Statements of that kind may express (in undue abbreviation) some element of truth; but they are not true in a fairy-story sense, they are not true in art or literature. It is precisely the colouring, the atmosphere, the unclassifiable individual details of a story, and above all the general purport that informs with life the undissected bones of the plot, that really count. Shakespeare’s King Lear is not the same as Layamon’s story in his Brut. Or to take the extreme case of Red Riding Hood: it is of merely secondary interest that the retold versions of this story, in which the little girl is saved by wood-cutters, is directly derived from Perrault’s story in which she was eaten by the wolf. The really important thing is that the later version has a happy ending (more or less, and if we do not mourn the grandmother overmuch), and that Perrault’s version had not. And that is a very profound difference […].

From Jeffrey Heath’s grammar of the Songhay of Timbuktu:

“Among the other castes of greatest sociocultural interest, both feared and despised by mainstream Songhays, are the griots and the blacksmiths …
… the blacksmiths …. are thought to have black-magical powers; most local blacksmiths are ethnic Tuaregs.”

I don’t know enough about Indo-European linguistics to comment on the direct influence of the trees. I do, however, know a lot about statistics, and the results did not seem especially strong in that area. (I was particularly puzzled by what they were doing with the Markov chain Monte Carlo, but I suspect that is mostly a weakness of their explanation.)

Re: Geser/Caesar

One of the most common Mongolian mantras is “om Ochirvaani umpad” (Sanskrit oṃ vajrapāṇi hūṃ phaṭ)

This is actually a prayer to Heracles…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajrapani#Appearances_and_identifications

The headline I saw was “Phylogenetic analyses suggests fairy tales are much older than thought” which initially made me think “Finally Julian Jaynes has been vindicated!” Less ambiguity in headlines, please.

I am dubious about The Smith and the Devil going back to the Bronze Age, since the magical status of the smith in folklore depends on the use of iron.

I don’t think it’s controversial that people enjoy a good story, and that stories can cross linguistic and cultural boundaries. Some Chinese folktales are related to European ones. However, as far as I know, no Native American stories are related to Eurasian ones. That would demonstrate a limit on how far back relationships can be traced.

There’s a claim that Child Ballad No. 4 (The Outlandish Knight), which is related to an old Hungarian folktale, is illustrated on a gold Scythian scabbard dated to the 3rd century BC. (See discussion at http://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=22848, http://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=143147). If nothing else, it shows that people have been considering these matters for some time.

The language of the Ulam tribe constructed by Anthony Burgess for Quest for Fire looks (at least lexically) like an Indo-European-based pidgin. Atra ‘fire’ is even distinctly Iranian (or maybe Proto-Albanian), tir ‘game’ is High German, and bratt ‘brother’ is Slavic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Br%27er_Rabbit

Cherokee, rather than Muskogean according to the ‘pedia; I’d forgotten about the Algonquian trickster-rabbit, too.

Whatever else, it all demonstrates just how contagious good stories are.

“Some Chinese folktales are related to European ones. However, as far as I know, no Native American stories are related to Eurasian ones. ”

I know of another non-exception exception to this. There used to be an anthropologist who was active in the Southwest collecting among other things folk stories. One time when he went out, he was astonished to hear a story that resembled the Bremen Town Musicians. Then it dawned on him what had happened. Collecting these stories is not just a matter of saying “Okay, the tape recorder is going; start telling your story.” You had to offer a story to get one back, and he had told the story of the Bremen Town Musicians. What threw him off at first was the substitutions. Instead of three animals there were four and the European animals had been replaced with ones that made more sense locally. I remember that one of them was a coyote.

But a number of European-like tales in Canada are attributable to the shared lives of French and Indian paddlers and other lowly employees of the fur trade in past centuries.

I suppose Bugs Bunny has a fair claim on the inheritance. He’s better at it than Brer Rabbit, though. Must be those extra centuries of practice.

What could be said about the famous Aesop’s Fables then? Could they echo older, widespread tales shared by various people in SE Mediterranean, or were they inspired by his immediate environment? (He himself was supposed to have come from Asia Minor originally.) Were they the product of just one man’s imagination? Were they later received so well in other languages only because they were translated into them, or because their standard characters (smart animals, lazy people, etc.) were already part of the local folklore? One way or another, their perseverance is remarkable.

Ariadne: Some of Aesop’s fables are also found in India.

With ancient literature as well as folk tales, the role of the known “author”‘s was not to invent the stories but to tell them in a particularly memorable manner. Aesop, Ovid, Homer, or in France Perrault (tales) or La Fontaine (fables) (and similarly other authors in different countries) largely transmitted much older traditions, in their own distinctive manner and style.

@Brett:

In that case we have to postulate an origin of the tale many millions of years ago. Unless, of course, there were human beings prior to Adams who spoke Lapine.

Sounds like a rip-off of Edward Casaubon’s magnum opus, sadly unfinished at his death.

Have a look at Figure 4 (the phylogenetic tree) and the occurence of different tales in different branches.

Where did they get that tree? Why is Indo-Iranian branching off first when it is clearly related to Balto-Slavic? It all looks bizarre.

@SFReader:

“One of the most common Mongolian mantras is “om Ochirvaani umpad” (Sanskrit oṃ vajrapāṇi hūṃ phaṭ)”

Belated but heartfelt thanks. Mongols praying to Heracles (which seems oddly right, somehow) has now officially taken over as my poster child of cultural diffusion from Tibet’s national epic starring C Julius Caesar, beating St Bodhisattva into third place.

Truly, all This is That …

The Japanese wind god Fūjin is said to be derived from the Greek Boreas.

Apropos of nothing much except that it’s cool cultural diffusion and involves Greek, the Nubian kingdom of Makuria in the first millennium

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Makuria

used Greek as its primary written language (also Coptic and Old Nubian) and Greek may even have been the language of the court.

Prince Georgios of Makuria is said to have travelled to Baghdad to intercede (successfully) for remission of tribute under the “Baqt” i.e “pact”, the treaty between Makuria and Muslim Egypt.

Governmental records! How fascinating! 🙂

I don’t know about the stuff in Greek or Coptic, but the total amount in Old Nubian is agonisingly small. According to Gerald Browne’s Old Nubian Grammar it would amount to about a hundred pages of continuously printed text. This is actually a lot more than once was the case; the archaeological rescue work engendered by the Aswan Dam project quadrupled the amount of material.

Of what there is, about half is translation from Greek, New Testament and other Christian writings, and the remainder “public contracts, private letters and similarly ephemeral material.”

The translation stuff is of course invaluable for the language, but tells you nothing about Nubia except what they valued in reading material; the limitations of the corpus make interpretation of the “ephemera” hard, by the sound of it.

There’s a lot of interest (I gather) in involving Africanists in the Old Nubian work, which has traditionally been carried out by people more from the “philological” Classicist side. There are various modern forms of Nubian which descend from the old language. I was mightily irritated by the blurb on the back, though, which says: “it is the only indigenous African language whose development we can follow for over a millennium.” Get a map of Africa, guys …

Makuria, not Makodia. I’ve carried out an Anschluß by Makuria of its upstream neighbour Alodia. Apologies to both parties involved.

David: King Arthur, protector of Wales… and of Brittany perhaps, rather than France. There are medieval French texts adapted from the King Arthur legend, which were known as la matière de Bretagne ‘the matter of Brittany’.

Re: ” However, as far as I know, no Native American stories are related to Eurasian ones.”

This is not true at all.

Berezkin’s catalogue of folklore motifs distribution clearly shows that majority of Native American folklore is of Eurasian origin. Small part, primarily centered in South America, is of, “Indo-Pacific” origin.

Few concrete examples

https://www.folklore.ee/folklore/vol36/berezkin.pdf

note the maps.

Makuria may have been a more interesting place linguistically even that that: the king lived at Old Dongola where Old Dungulawi was spoken, but written Old Nubian is agreed to be the ancestor only of Nobiin, spoken further north than Dungulawi (Bechhaus-Gerst recommends Old Nubian be called Old Nobiin instead). It is likely that Old Nobiin writing originated in the kingdom of Nobatia (capital Pachoras, which was Faras in Egypt until it was submerged as a result of the Aswan Dam) which Makuria absorbed. The most northerly part of Nubia (Dar Kunuz until the Aswan Dam), which was apparently conquered by Silko of Nobatia from the Blemmyes (Beja), eventually wound up speaking Kenzi, a descendant of Old Dungulawi, though it was separated from the Dungulawi area by a 400-km stretch of Nobiin speakers.

“Ah yes, King Arthur, protector of Wales… or England… or France.”

Scotland, really. Arthur’s Seat is in Edinburgh.

David Eddyshaw: What’s St. Bodhisattva? Can’t find it on Google.

SFReader: Berezkin’s catalogue of folklore motifs distribution clearly shows that majority of Native American folklore is of Eurasian origin.

Thanks. The Berezkin articles are very interesting. Some of his motifs are clearly related, others less so. I read the one about pygmies without mouths very recently, I think, in a retelling of a medieval traveller’s account from the Volga. Now I’ll just have to find that book again…

@DavidEddyshaw: “The rabbit is certainly West African. (He’s Asuong or Asumbil in Kusaal: “Mr Rabbit.”) He’s a rabbit in Hausa too. I’ve got the Tar Baby story in Hausa somewhere (it has more sex in it than in Uncle Remus’ version.)”

The Javanese trickster animal is Kancil the mouse deer, but several of the stories told about him are remarkably similar to Uncle Remus stories. In a field methods course when I was an undergraduate, our language consultant told us the story of Kancil and the tar baby (well, the doll covered with sticky stuff). A bit of search a few minutes ago turned up a version in a paper by R.V. Winsedtt, “Some Mouse-deer Tales“, Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1906, who writes “Mr. George Maxwell and others have reminded me, that one of these tales of mine bears an extraordinary resemblance to that of Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby.”

I’ve always wondered how that story ended up in the American South and in Java. Aurelio Espinosa, “A New Classification of the Fundamental Elements of the Tar-Baby Story on the Basis of Two Hundred and Sixty-Seven Versions“, The Journal of American Folklore 1943, affirms his “belief in the India origin of the tale in the sense that India is as far back as we can trace it, and that it is not of African origin as some have believed”.

But anyhow, neither linguistic phylogeny nor geographical proximity seems to have been especially important in this case…

@Mark Liberman:

Very interesting. Makes the tar-baby story look like a practical human universal (perhaps Brett is right and it’s proto-mammalian …)
Interesting especially in that the Hausa version I know (tar baby as Hot Babe) is obviously not unique.

Even so, the conjunction of Trickster-Rabbit and Tar Baby is a lot more specific, so the coincidence of the appearance of that form of the story in savanna-zone West Africa and the American SE is still striking.

Maybe those of you with more knowledge of statistical analysis and historical linguistics can help me out with this article. My understanding is that in historical linguistics mother-daughter relationships are established from regular sound correspondences and morphological similarities that then allow you to distinguish between genetic and borrowed or chance similarities between any two given languages. Is there analogous method in this study, or for any proposed genetic relationship is the alternate ‘borrowing’ hypothesis essentially unfalsifiable? Or did I completely miss what it’s claiming?

ədv: phylogenetic approaches, like this one, don’t address the issue of chance resemblances. They take lists of cognates that were prepared in some other way, and attempt to use them to generate plausible clusters. If a certain set of words/folktales/etc. make the languages/traditions/etc. in question cluster nicely and consistently, you can argue that these all follow the same pattern of differentiation. If some other words/folktales don’t follow that pattern but are correlated geographically, you can argue for a borrowing scenario.
For folktales there is nothing as precise as linguistic sound laws to judge whether two stories from different traditions are related by chance or historically.

Ah, we’re getting into the distinction of primary homology and secondary homology. 🙂 Primary homology must be established before any phylogenetic analysis; it means “systematically similar enough that it should be coded as the same character state; it could be secondarily homologous/cognate, but it could also be due to convergence/chance resemblance or to lateral gene transfer/borrowing”. You construct a whole dataset of these. Then you calculate the trees that explain the dataset most parsimonously; and then the trees tell you which primarily homologous features are secondarily homologous = are inherited from a common ancestor.

In this case, the assessments of primary homology between tales weren’t made by the authors of the study, but taken from the ATU database. The tree wasn’t made by the authors either, but taken from Bouckaert et al. (2012 – not the best choice as of 2015, but fairly close as far as the topology rather than the length is concerned). They optimized their characters on the tree, or without the jargon they mapped the character states (each ATU number present/absent) on the tips of the tree and had the computer calculate their most parsimonious evolution along that tree, so that at each node they got a probability for the presence/absence of each ATU number. This is a test for how much phylogenetic signal the dataset contains: if there are few changes along the tree, there’s plenty of signal, while if there are many changes, it’s closer to random noise. The authors compared the results from this to an analysis without a tree that used geography as the predictor instead, and found that the tree fared better.

Geographic distance, however, is a rather crude measure of the probability that a tale will spread across language barriers.

Culture is likely to be more significant than simple proximity in the case of horizontal spread of folktales. Obviously culture and geography do correlate, but in the fairly frequent cases of mismatch culture is surely going to be the important thing.

Islam is an obvious vector of stories; I’m also beginning to wonder from this thread if perhaps all the stories in the world are originally Buddhist.

Although Arabic is in one way *the* Islamic language, genuine historic Islam (as opposed to the crippled parody which masquerades as Islam so often on the news) has always picked up cultural strands from many, many different linguistic groups and passed them on to many others; and as for Buddhism …

(Apropos of nothing, reminds me of the catty remark that the Pali Text Society’s translations are in Buddhist Hybrid English.)

For Dimitry read Dmitry. Sorry.

Culture is obviously important, but how to measure it? By using religion, I suppose. Political entities are also important. As are trade connections. The folk tale inventory of different peoples and regions of the Balkans could be illuminating.

The thing about Language is that the form of individual words is *arbitrary* except for particular domains like onomatopoeia and baby-words, so that if different languages show a great deal of resemblance in word forms, that calls far some sort of explanation via descent or borrowing. So far as statistical methods can give meaningful results in comparative work, this is critically dependent on the arbitrariness of speech. Even when you move from vocabulary to syntax within Language the method starts to break down, because there are only so many ways you can string a sentence together so that people can still parse it, and the various combinations of choices you might think it possible to make turn out not to be independently variable – hence all those Greenbergian partial universals (the Good Greenberg.)

None of this arbitrariness is true for stories. There’s nothing very implausible about completely separate groups having come up with very similar stories by pure coincidence, and given the constraints that the story has to be coherent and memorable and relatable-to by actual people, and made out of things that actual people encounter (like animals) a further process of natural selection is going to result in a good bit of convergent evolution. If the groups in question live in similar material circumstances, it’s going to be even less significant if they tell similar stories.

On top of all that, there aren’t really any good metrics for measuring similarity of stories; certainly nothing nearly as reproduceable and objective as you can think up for words.

The whole notion that there is a workable analogy between language change and folktale transmission bears no real scrutiny.

Who do you think was the Wolf in Little Red Riding Hood?

Neanderthal or Denisovan?

-Islam is an obvious vector of stories; I’m also beginning to wonder from this thread if perhaps all the stories in the world are originally Buddhist.

Berezkin has a very short (one page!) article on the Big History (titled “What happened in history?”).

It’s in Russian, but try google translate.

He ends his big history of humankind with the establishment of permanent links between East Asian and Western Eurasian centers and formation of the “world-system” which he dates to last centuries of the 1st millenium B.C.

That’s the last important thing which happened in history so far.

Indeed. Lots of stories about people marrying animals (foxes, in Japan.)
But I don’t think it’s surprising, or needs any sort of explanation by vertical or horizontal transmission.

Story A:

Neolithic Storyteller: Hey! Listen to this! A man killed a seal!
Neolithic Audience: Triffic. What’s on television? How long do we have to wait?

Story B:

Neolithic Storyteller: Hey! Listen to this! A man married a seal!
Neolithic Audience: Disgusting, yet strangely compelling. Tell us more …

I think the problem is that in historical linguistics genetic and borrowing relations aren’t just abstractions over the data, they correspond to two different types of language acquisition (or maybe two poles on a spectrum of language acquisition). You acquire your native language(s) during a critical period of infancy when you learn lots of complicated stuff that for the most part isn’t available to reflection. After that any language acquisition is much more conscious, simpler, and more available to reflection. For stories, everything is borrowed. There is no privileged genetic transmission, so just because story X is highly correlated with language family Y, that in itself doesn’t tell us anything about the relationship between the most recent common ancestor of the language and the origin of the story.

David Eddyshaw: None of this arbitrariness is true for stories.

This is true, but not completely true. Stories are made up of elements that are put together arbitrarily, These elements or subplots may be borrowed wholesale into completely different stories. Some of these elements are in themselves complex, some are simple, but strung together they can make something that hardly could have occured by chance. Repeat this over several stories or whole mythologies, and you have evidence of cultural ties.

It follows that the more general the plots, the weaker the results. The phylogenetic study uses ATU numbers, a classification designed to be general, with no attempt to build an internal phylogeny (or, since this is philology, provenance). This is like doing mass comparison without weeding out borrowings. I’m not sure which way it skews the results, but it certainly makes them weaker.

Berezkins approach is quite different. By comparing stories on the same theme in detail, he’s able to find some instances of quite complex plotlines or metaphysical concepts that are shared between different peoples far apart. I don’t think it’s evidence of pseudo-genetic inheritance along with language, but it does point to (recent or ancient) cultural contacts. I’m e.g. convinced that the circumpolar cultural sphere is one of contact and shared metaphysics rather han common descent. The tundra and the arctic coast have been underappreciated as a spreadzone. Samoyedic and Yukaghir each cover a stretch of coastline equalling roughly half the distance between Dene and Yeniseian, and Inuit even more. All are suspected to be recent arrivals in most of their range.

I don’t think we disagree much. I’m usually annoyed by attempts to attribute certain minimal and very general plotlines (“guy stealing a cow”) to PIE mythology based on scattered evidence, but they gain strength with complexity (“ginger-haired warrior with a thunderbolt weopon killing dragon and stealing cows”). But as you say, there’s never any way to qualify the impression. In this way “comparative folkloristics” is more like archaeology, but without the dating: But as with archaeology, one might discern patterns and build hypotheses that might turn out to be powerful in coordination with other disciplines. The recent advances in ancient population genetics is transforming European archaeology as we speak, as pots turn out to have language and genes after all. I wouldn’t be surprised if general patterns of distribution of complex plotlines over a large number of myths turned out to correlate with genetic evidence. If so, it might predict even linguistic relatedness. But we’re not there yet.

Stories (or better motifs, which are an element of a story) are memes and reproduce by retelling. From one generation to another or from one tribe to another, there is no functional difference. So there is no point in contrasting inheritance and borrowing, both are natural pathways for story transmission.

Once born, a story is basically immortal quite unlike languages.

The reason is simple. Reproduction of story is millions of times easier than transmission of language. It takes several years to teach a child a language, but five minutes to retell Cinderella story!

To kill a story which people find interesting, you’d have to exterminate all tribes where it was ever told without a single survivor.

And fortunately such things are rather rare.

A story told in dozens of unrelated languages across large distances is the most natural thing in the world and doesn’t require explanation.

Explanation is needed when the same story is told in very distant places which don’t have contacts with each other, but nowhere in between. It could be either a parallel invention or very ancient migration.

Now, if we have not one story, but several dozen or several hundred stories which are found only in Alaska and Tierra del Fuego, but nowhere in between, the ancient migration argument is the only valid.

marie-lucie: When enough details are changed, the story might be unrecognizable.

True, or be similar only on the surface. But all the more power when a complex storyline is shared.

Retelling stories does not always mean saying the same thing over and over again.

Indeed. I learned “The Rhyme of the Nancy Bell”, whose meter and rhyme tend to stabilize it, at my father’s knee. Only much later did I find out that it was by W. S. Gilbert, who I already knew and loved, and discover that the text I had memorized was somewhat different from Gilbert’s 1866 version (even to the title; Gilbert called it “The Yarn of the Nancy Bell”). I still preserve many of those variations when I recite it today. Nor are any two recitations quite alike: I accidentally dropped two whole stanzas once when I recited it publicly, no doubt contaminating the memories of who knows how many children who were listening at the time.

Witzel’s recent talk about the hydronyms, like Volga or Saraswati, also “found” thousands miles away from their “canonic locations”, and about a large non-IE layer in the Avestan (and non-IE Vedic personal names of kings and poets) (identified through sound-combinations disallowed in these languages’ native words)… is there anything novel and surprising in there, or it just surprises the non-linguist listeners?

he thought the circumpolar cultural sphere might be behind resemblances between certain Algonkian myths and the Grail cycle.

I would read that retelling. Canoes replacing horses, and Arthur’s warriors paddling forth from his wickiup at Camelot in search of noble adventure?

We tend to overlook the relative ease of travel and the short distances along the arctic coast. The circumference of the Arctic Circle is 16 000 km, of the 70° line 13 700 km. The distance from the North Cape to the Bering Strait is some 6 600 km — or 2,5 times the seaway along the Norwegian coast.

The Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies hasn’t published since 2015, so perhaps somebody took all the pdfs down but left the whole misleading site up anyway. Fortunately the pdf is still accessible on Witzel’s own website.

The distance from the North Cape to the Bering Strait is some 6 600 km —

Going straight across the North Pole used to be impossible. The Northeast Passage used to be frozen year-round along much of the eastern Siberian part of the coast, too.

images of the slides of Witzel’s presentation on @amwkim’s twitter

Here; recommended. Click on twitpics to embiggen.

Forgot to mention that I love Witzel’s typo of “Sintastha” for Sintashta.

travel on the frozen tundra

But why would anyone do that before knowing there’s a place worth going to on the other side?

or along the coast

Frozen for a large part of the way.

Considering that a single language family (Eskimo-Aleut) in found in the North American Arctic, and that another (Uralic) once dominated the Arctic in Eurasia, and since we have established that folktales can spread much more quickly and easily than (proto-)languages, I have no difficulty in believing that there must have been repeated diffusion of folktales across the entire Arctic zone.

Since some language families represented in or near the Arctic have spread from the Far North to the South (cf. Athabaskan in the Americas), and others from the South to the North (the spread of Algonquian throughout the Canadian Subarctic, from a homeland which was surely located much further South, or the spread of Turkic [Yakut/Dolgan] from Southern to Northern Siberia), we cannot be certain whether folktales/folktale themes common to the Arctic and to various more Southern regions first arose South and spread North and thence (potentially) to the entire Arctic region or vice-versa (i.e. arose somewhere in the Arctic and spread South and/or around the Arctic). Such spreads could have taken place repeatedly, with various survivals of earlier spreads found in areas growing ever-more peripheral and thus unaffected by later spreads: for ought we know perhaps some folktale/folktale theme now found in the North American Arctic only might owe its origin to a spread from Central Asia…much in the same way, for instance, that Greenlandic, the most viable language of its family and likely to be the only surviving Eskimo-Aleutian language in a few generations, is geographically the furthest away from the Eskimo-Aleutian homeland.

Such acculturation can take place quite rapidly: Folktales of French origin are quite widespread among North American Indians, for instance, and it is telling that in most cases there is among the keepers of this oral tradition zero awareness of the foreign (European) origin of said folktales.

Aleuts in Russia were settled in Komandor islands by orders of the Russian-American Company in 1825.

They were sort of unfree labor back then, so they went where the managers told them to go (in this case, for seal hunting in rich hunting grounds of previously uninhabited Komandor islands).

a single language family (…) (Uralic) once dominated the Arctic in Eurasia

Hm, when is “once”, and how far is “Arctic”? The Barents Sea coast was still Paleoeuropean speaking as recently as about 600 years ago, ditto the Finnmark coast about 1500 years ago, and probably no part of the tundra zone east of Taimyr Peninsula has ever been Uralic-speaking. (Yukaghir, rather more likely, but even they have probably come in from the southwest.)

I did see a lecture by Johanna Nichols just two days ago on how the entire Northern Hemisphere acts as one mega-linguistic area with major east-to-west clines, but even though a route across the Arctic is often the shortest connection, we don’t really know of big spread events all across it. It seems to me that the Taimyr peninsula instead acts as a minor residual zone, with two unconnected spread zones then running to its east and west, both connected to a N-S spread zone bundle running along the Ob, Yenisei and smaller rivers in-between.

j: even though a route across the Arctic is often the shortest connection, we don’t really know of big spread events all across it.

I’ve spent the better part of the evening trying to retrieve something I read recently about East Siberian material culture and genetic material spreading all the way to Northern Scandinavia. It’s Lamnidis et al: Ancient Fennoscandian genomes reveal origin and spread of Siberian ancestry in Europe (full text available as pdf).

Abstract:

European history has been shaped by migrations of people, and their subsequent admixture. Recently, evidence from ancient DNA has brought new insights into migration events that could be linked to the advent of agriculture, and possibly to the spread of Indo-European languages. However, little is known so far about the ancient population history of north-eastern Europe, in particular about populations speaking Uralic languages, such as Finns and Saami. Here we analyse ancient genomic data from 11 individuals from Finland and Northwest Russia. We show that the specific genetic makeup of northern Europe traces back to migrations from Siberia that began at least 3,500 years ago. This ancestry was subsequently admixed into many modern populations in the region, in particular populations speaking Uralic languages today. In addition, we show that ancestors of modern Saami inhabited a larger territory during the Iron Age than today, which adds to historical and linguistic evidence for the population history of Finland.

From the discussion:

The large Siberian component in the Bolshoy individuals from the Kola Peninsula provides the earliest direct genetic evidence for an eastern migration into this region. Such contact is well documented in archaeology, with the introduction of asbestos-mixed Lovozero ceramics during the second millenium BC​, and the spread of even-based arrowheads in Lapland from 1,900 BCE​​. Additionally, the nearest counterparts of Vardøy ceramics, appearing in the area around 1,600-1,300 BCE, can be found on the Taymyr peninsula, much further to the east​. Finally, ​the Imiyakhtakhskaya culture from Yakutia spread to the Kola Peninsula during the same period​.

The Imiyakhtakhskaya (Ymyjakhtakh) culture was a neolithic culture originating in central Yakutia. It developed a characteristic wool-admixed type of ceramics that spread across northern Siberia from Chukotka to Northern Fennoscandia in the 2nd millennium BCE. Too bad it’s too late for Dene-Yeniseian.

Maybe. It’s surely a good geographical match. Also, the bronze age reached the Arctic when Sejma-Turbino prospecters (or people trading with Sejma-Turbino) came down the Yenisei and set up shop in Western Taymyr. Further east an Ymyyakhtakh* settlement also took up Bronze production, and these two seem to have coexisted for a long time. This seems like a good point of entry for old Uralic loans in Yukaghir.

According to Wikipedia on Ymyyakhtakh, it’s also been associated with the Chukchi and Koryak ethnic groups. If so, we may hypothesize that the core region took up Yukaghir from Sejma-Turbino-connected traders, but the shift never reached the eastern periphery.

*) English spelling.

*) English spelling.

Sometimes my Russian transcriptions mix i, j, and y indiscriminately, and then I try to be consistent. I’m clearly confused.

So Athabaskan- and Eskimoan-speakers were a small elite that passed their language to a lot of locals. Nothing too surprising about that: we wouldn’t expect a huge migration across the Strait.

Yukaghirs came to the Arctic from the Urals or somewhere thereabouts in the 2nd millenium BC.

They weren’t quite Bronze Age warriors, but came in close contact with them (perhaps Yukaghirs were chased by Bronze Age peoples into the Arctic).

People displaced by the Yukaghirs (or maybe another group which migrated with them) crossed the Bering strait and are likely to have been ancestors of the Na-Dene people.

That’s the summary of Russian research on the topic I’ve read somewhere on the net.

Kets going the opposite direction are called bras (according to Dirac).

Brett: Kets going the opposite direction are called bras (according to Dirac).

Hah. This made me go reading. Dirac’s notation was adapted from Grassmann, so it’s linguistically sound.

I don’t know much about the family, but it may be relevant that Eskimos were able to travel in both directions in the winters until the Bering Strait was closed to them during the Cold War.

This was my question. Was there unbroken cross–Bering Strait contact before European sailors came along? Is there evidence of that cross contact? When/why did that contact stop being a migration that brought new languages/DNA in one direction or the other.

Imiyakhtakhskaya culture (…) spread across northern Siberia from Chukotka to Northern Fennoscandia in the 2nd millennium BCE

OK, color me corrected. At least assuming that this really was a culture in the, well, cultural sense and not merely a popular type of pots that got traded all across the Arctic.

There may be possible common substrate vocabulary in Sami + Nenets (in a few cases also in other Samoyedic or in Ob-Ugric), but this generally doesn’t have parallels in Yukaghir that I know of.

“Siberian admixture in Uralian speakers” is still a different issue though. There’s every reason to think that this spread west along the usual more southern forest-steppe route and north only secondarily, for starters because it also turns up in the more southern Leväluhta discoveries in central Finland (possibly Sami speakers, possibly Paleo-European, probably not Finnic), and even modern Finns. So it has nothing to do with the geographically short but culturally inconvenient route along the Arctic.

Here’s a version of the chart with more populations added.

Mmmm, those are very small n-values. And then you have risks such as that a single East Asian great-grandparent, perhaps tagging along with colonial Russians, would be sufficient to introduce the entirety of 12% East Asian ancestry in the modern Athabaskans.

But it’s not easy to understand what’s going on in Eskimoic.

Surely we should make this Eskaleut in general to have a good resolution on the situation?

Trond: What could have been the superior cultural element(s) brought by the Athabaskans?

Difficult or not, the Navajo language was successfully imposed on many non-Navajos, as is shown by the Navajo clan names. The Mexican Clan (Naakai dine’é) still remember that their ancestress (clans are matrilineal) was a Mexican slave woman. The same may well have been true of the remote ancestor of Navajo.

j: OK, color me corrected. At least assuming that this really was a culture in the, well, cultural sense and not merely a popular type of pots that got traded all across the Arctic.

I thought the same thing. It’s clearly a culture east of Taimyr/Yenisei, roughly modern-day Yakutia. It’s less clear further east and west. But either way it does show “horizontal” contact in the circumpolar region.

“Siberian admixture in Uralian speakers” is still a different issue though. There’s every reason to think that this spread west along the usual more southern forest-steppe route and north only secondarily, for starters because it also turns up in the more southern Leväluhta discoveries in central Finland (possibly Sami speakers, possibly Paleo-European, probably not Finnic), and even modern Finns. So it has nothing to do with the geographically short but culturally inconvenient route along the Arctic.

You obviously know more about this than me. But if I remember correctly the authors suggest a combination of both — a rapid western spread along the Tundra, but also southward spread along the usual north-south routes contributing to the Uralic Bronze Age cultures. But the presence in Northern Fennoscandia is too strong for that to be the only route.

Mmmm, those are very small n-values. And then you have risks such as that a single East Asian great-grandparent, perhaps tagging along with colonial Russians, would be sufficient to introduce the entirety of 12% East Asian ancestry in the modern Athabaskans.

Agreed. I was going to write something about the inferred tree possibly being sensitive to slight changes in the input.

Surely we should make this Eskaleut in general to have a good resolution on the situation?

Yes. I don’t know what’s going on there either…

marie-lucie: Trond: What could have been the superior cultural element(s) brought by the Athabaskans?

I don’t know. If it’s material culture, something that made it possible to increase production inland like willow bark fishing nets? Or it could be social culture. A clan system that drew people into the cultural sphere and kept them there?

(My comment on Eskimoan is out of moderation now.)

j.: There may be possible common substrate vocabulary in Sami + Nenets (in a few cases also in other Samoyedic or in Ob-Ugric), but this generally doesn’t have parallels in Yukaghir that I know of.

Would you expand on that?

Using Greenlanders they all but eliminate later Eurasian and Athabascan admixture and get a clearer view at the stage immediately before the Eskimoan expansion.

Why so? Is it shown beyond all doubt that Greenlanders did not pick up Athabaskan ancestors before occupying Greenland?

Is the consensus that Siberian (in a strictly geographic sense) Yupik is a back migration? Otherwise it seems plausible that the proto–Central Alaskan end of the dialect continuum was the one that happened to migrate across the strait, leaving its closer (Naukan) and farther (Siberian) relatives behind, never to be heard from again?

Or more succinctly: why is a fuzzy break the best explanation of Naukan’s intermediate position?

why is a fuzzy break the best explanation of Naukan’s intermediate position?

I’ll have to pass on that one. Some prefer an Eskimo-Aleut homeland in Siberia, some in Alaska. Some see Siberian Yupik as a stay-behind. Others, I believe, see Sireniki as a stay-behind and the other Siberian Yupik languages as later back-migrations. I don’t even know if the interpretation Naukan would be clearer, or any different, in any of those cases.

A very useful summary. I knew Aleutian was messy, but not that it’s part of the trading & raiding sprachbund of the Pacific Northwest. In that case I doubt that genetics will be much help.

Guide for the Perplexed: Uralistic ɜ is not IPA ɜ, it just means “any vowel”.

j.: From what you are saying, especially considering what you call Altaic parallels, *aŋɜ might be an Wanderwort, perhaps with something sound symbolic in it; those are tough to trace down. Could PIE *h₂enh₂-ti- ‘duck’ also be somehow connected?

Found it – it’s on the last page of a report from a conference where Hyllested was present, but it’s not by him. I quoted the paragraph here, but the spam filter doesn’t let it through because it’s in Russian.

In short, nasal + laryngeal clusters in PIE are said to correspond to */ŋ/ in Uralic (2 examples given) and Altaic (1 Proto-Tungusic and 1 Proto-Turkic example, the latter being *aŋɨt corresponding to PIE “*h₂enh₂t-“). Makes sense (as inheritance or as a loan substitution) if *h₂ was [χ] or thereabouts and preceding nasals assimilated by becoming [ɴ].

No, I don’t think this is part of the Warmed-Up War. The spam filter has learned from experience that comments consisting mostly of non-Latin characters (it’s not limited to Cyrillic) tend to be spam, and so it overgeneralizes.

I was provoked to look into this the other week — the Akismet spam recognition service can in fact be told to expect alternative languages such as Russian in the comments, but the plugin available for WordPress cannot be configured to give it that information. Someone could enter a feature request with the plugin author, of course.

Could PIE *h₂enh₂-ti- ‘duck’ also be somehow connected?

There was a recent lively session at Academia.edu on Indo-Uralic lexical parallels. This was indeed brought up, and one opinion was that names for geese of the shape KANK or HANH might very well be onomatopoetic. I’m not sure if this generalises to all waterfowl though, and certainly not for the likes of tarmigans*.

*omission of gratuitous pt- intentional.

There was a recent lively session at Academia.edu on Indo-Uralic lexical parallels.

I wish I’d at least listened in on that!

names for geese of the shape KANK or HANH might very well be onomatopoetic.

If that were so, you’d expect words like that to be more widespread. In California, the area I’m most familiar with, there are hardly any ‘goose’ words of that form. The possible velarization of *n under the influence of the following *h₂, which David mentioned, would show at least some period of regular development.

@Stu, the problem is not to fix the code, because that is easy, it’s that we as outsiders cannot impose on Hat or Songdog to implement a less maintainable solution than they have now. If it were my blog it would have been fixed a while ago, but very different tradeoffs apply when I’m both the tech nerd in charge and the person aggravated by suboptimal functionality.

The world is full of things that could be improved, just volunteer at your nearest open source project 🙂

That’s why there’s room for new people to have fun fixing those security holes. But yes, if you aren’t prepared to help maintain an open source project you shouldn’t build your business on it.

Stu, we are in violent agreement.

But yes, if you aren’t prepared to help maintain an open source project you shouldn’t build your business on it.

That seems an extreme position. I once worked for a company that depended on FreeBSD to run its servers, without the slightest intention (or indeed possibility) of contributing anything to even the applications, never mind the kernel, though they depended on the latter even more than the former. I know they weren’t alone in this respect.

(I don’t mention Linux in this connection because many businesses do help maintain it indirectly — by paying money to Red Hat, Oracle, SUSE, or Canonical, to say nothing of Intel and IBM. There is no analogue to this in the *BSD world.)

Yeah, that would suck. Although Hula was always an over-the-transom-in-reverse open-source project, and those often grind to a halt.

Stu: Which nun?

Here is my WP forum question. One of the developers has already responded !

I think he merely didn’t understand the issue. That’s one reason why I formulated it again in my response, in more detail than originally. I’m hoping he’ll speak to another developer, especially if he feels out of his depth. A sign of that is his remark: “you did mention a linguistic website, which might get more complex, if the same site sports countless languages.” Countless languages ! Sports !

A draft version from last year on Biorxiv. I think we discussed it back then.

The Ancient North Siberians are most closely related to Western Hunter Gatherers, indicating a westerly route of migration. THey must have been all over the northern continent before the Last Glacial Maximum forced them out of the northern parts of their range.

The Ancient Paleo-Siberians came north from East Asia, admixed with the ANS in a complex way, and became the main contributors to Native Americans and some peripheral Modern Siberian populations as well as extinct populations like Paleo-Eskimos and Ancient Beringians. Both the admixture events and the subsequent splits are dated to 20 kya, so it must have been a dynamic time. The Eskimo and Na-Dene have more AP ancestry than other Native American groups. evidence of later contact across the Bering Strait, but the the time depths and the source populations on both sides are different. The Kets are among the Siberian populations with much AP ancestry, but it’s specifically linked to Paleo-Eskimos, so I don’t see any clear genetic link with Na-Dene. However, the relation to Paleo-Eskimos might indicate that the AP ancestors of the Kets were located further north and east. The Paleo-Eskimos in turn had more East Asian ancestry than any of the other groups, Messy, but the patterns will probably become clearer with more data.

Neo-Siberians are a later incoming population from East Asia. They are the main contributors to most Modern Siberians, though to a different degree.

I don’t know how the Ymyyakhtakh fits in all this. They are certainly later.

Here’s Flegontov et al (2016): Na-Dene populations descend from the Paleo-Eskimo migration into America, a paper on the genetic relation between Paleo-Eskimos and Na-Dene that I must have overlooked last time this was up. I can't evaluate the genetics, but the study uses rare alleles to demonstrate a closer relation between Paleo-Eskimos and Na-Dene peoples than what can be gleaned from the whole-genome approach. I'll quote the discussion in extenso;

Discussion

Our results are consistent with a gene flow from the Saqqaq Paleo-Eskimos (19 – 25% admixture ratio) exclusively into the First American ancestors of Na-Dene, and a much later and less extensive bidirectional gene flow was detected between the Na-Dene and Neo-Eskimo branches. A somewhat lower level of Saqqaq-related ancestry of 16% was reported using the admixture graph method in Chipewyans, a Northern Athabaskan ethnic group. We emphasize that only a fraction of modern Na-Dene individuals displays this level of Saqqaq ancestry, with most Na-Dene being admixed with other native groups and/or Europeans.
Methods of rare allele and autosomal haplotype analysis are especially sensitive for reconstructing recent population history within a few thousand years, and in some cases were demonstrated to outperform traditional methods based on unlinked common genetic variants, such as ADMIXTURE, PCA, TreeMix, f3-, f4-, and D-statistics. In this light, we consider discrepancies between our results and those of previous studies in Suppl. Text 2.

We dated the Paleo-Eskimo admixture at about 3,600 YBP using GLOBETROTTER analysis based on autosomal haplotypes (Table 2). Much older dates of the Siberian-Athabaskan gene flow obtained in our analysis based on rare allele sharing, about 6,500-7,000 YBP (Fig. 5, Table 1), probably correspond not to the admixture of Paleo-Eskimos and First Americans (that must postdate the Paleo-Eskimo immigration), but to a time point when Paleo-Eskimo ancestors branched off from the Siberian-Arctic stem. The split date suggested here for this unsampled “ghost population” fits the archaeological record of Siberia remarkably well, as discussed below. And split dates for other nodes inferred here broadly agree with the dates produced with independent methods.

The new wave of population from northeastern Asia that arrived in Alaska at least 4,800 years ago displays clear archaeological precedents leading back to Central Siberia. The rise of the Syalakh culture that flourished across much of Northeastern Siberia between 6,500 and 5,200 YBP involved migrants from the Transbaikal area who possibly mixed with local remnants of the earlier Sumnagin culture (10,500-6,500 BP), bringing the bow and arrow and new types of pottery to Northeastern Siberia. As the Bel’kachi culture (5,200-4,100 YBP) developed from Syalakh along the Lena and Aldan rivers, at least one group of these people might have crossed the Bering Strait into Alaska around 4,800 YBP, giving rise to Paleo-Eskimos. Thus, the Syalakh culture peoples, spreading across Siberia after 6,500 YBP, might represent the “ghost population” that split off around 6,500-7,000 YBP and later gave rise to migrants into America.

The geographic connection between Paleo-Eskimos and the related Siberian groups probably became severed as subsequent waves of hunter-gatherers entering Eastern Siberia from the west during the Late Neolithic (Ymyakhtakh culture, 3,700-2,800 YBP) brought new cultures and new language groups. This phase of North Asian prehistory most likely involved the spread of Yukaghir, Chukchi-Kamchatkan and Eskimo-Aleut languages, whose presence in the extreme northeast of Asia intervened geographically between Paleo-Eskimos, Na-Dene, and their Old World cousins. Notably, the dates of the Siberian-Arctic split obtained under our model (~4,000-4,200 YBP, Table 2) also agree with this scenario that links the spread of the Ymyakhtakh culture (after 3,700 YBP) with the Arctic meta-population, i.e. ancestors of modern Chukchi-Kamchatkan and Eskimo-Aleut ethnic groups.

The success of Paleo-Eskimos and Na-Dene in occupying territories previously populated by First Americans, in some cases (Southern Athabaskans) moving very far from the original homeland in Alaska and northwestern Canada, might be partially attributed to archery, a technological advance lacking among the local populations. Paleo-Eskimos quickly spread from Alaska to Greenland and Labrador and have been credited with introducing the bow and arrow to populations in Eastern Canada by 4,000 YPB, though the Dorset people, the last wave of Paleo-Eskimos, seem to have given up this technology for handheld lances.

Another important observation concerns the distribution of Siberian (Paleo-Eskimo) ancestry among modern North Americans. The methods used in this study detected Central and West Siberian ancestry in a fraction of Na-Dene individuals belonging to all major branches of the language family existing today: Tlingit, Northern Athabaskan (Chipewyans, Dakelh, etc.) and Southern Athabaskan. Importantly, the Central and West Siberian ancestry is almost exclusive to Na-Dene, and missing in other North or South American native ethnic groups, including Haida, a group previously considered a divergent member of the Na-Dene language family. Thus, the current consensus view of the Na-Dene language family and the distribution of recent Siberian ancestry match remarkably well. Although the small population sizes do not allow statistically valid comparisons, individuals with noticeable Saqqaq ancestry are likely more frequent among Northern Athabaskans as compared to Tlingit and Southern Athabaskans, the latter being mixed with southern Native Americans (Suppl. Fig. 1B).

We speculate that a migrating population, starting from Siberia around 6,500 YBP (the Syalakh culture), entering the New World around 4,800 YBP, and later mixing with First Americans, might have carried the Dene-Yeniseian languages into North America. This hypothetical language macrofamily unites multiple Na-Dene languages and Ket, the only surviving remnant of the Yeniseian family, once widespread in South and Central Siberia. For a further description of the Dene-Yeniseian hypothesis and a review of lexicostatistical dating estimates see Suppl. Text 3. Although the Dene-Yeniseian macrofamily is not universally accepted among historical linguists (cf. Hamp), and correlation of linguistic and genetic history is far from universal, the existence of the exclusive Siberian-Dene gene flow makes a genealogical relationship of the language families, either as the closest sister-groups or within a wider clade, an attractive area of future research. Inferred age of the gene flow, 6,500-7,000 YBP, possibly corresponding to the split of Na-Dene and Yeniseian precursors in Siberia, is comparable to the age of the classic Indo-European language family, suggesting that investigation of the Dene-Yeniseian connection lies within the reach of current methods in historical linguistics.

I gather that the admixture came from a limited part of the Paleo-Eskimo population, i.e. somewhat divergent from Saqqaq, and into an American Indian population located in the far northwest of North America. Since it’s only a partial ancestry detected in only a fraction of the population, it looks very much like an incoming elite (and it would be fun to see if there are correlations with the clan system). The main difference from Raghavan et al (2014) has to do with the timing and the relation to Neo-Eskimos.

And in it, we have lived since then.

We provincials tend to think that the Columbian Exchange was a pretty important historical event even at the big scale. Maize in Africa, cucurbits in Australia, wheat on the Great Plains, and those stupid starlings from a deeply stupid attempt to introduce all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare.

and those stupid starlings from a deeply stupid attempt to introduce all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare

This is one of those real stories that sounds like it belongs in a comedic historical fiction novel.

Birdbrained.

Mynas were accidentally released in Israel a decade or two ago. They have become ubiquitous, and devastating to local songbirds. Even sparrows are getting scarce at places.

Even sparrows are getting scarce at places.

Come to think of it, it’s been a while since I’ve seen a sparrow in Moscow… though that’s probably more about pigeons (and partly about land mismanagement).

John Cowan: So we can now construct a deeply flawed theory (to be sent posthaste to Nature) that the Palaeo-Eskimo spoke Proto-Dene-Yeniseian.

Letter to Nature 570 (2019):

Flegontov et al: Palaeo-Eskimo genetic ancestry and the peopling of Chukotka and North America

Abstract:

Much of the American Arctic was first settled 5,000 years ago, by groups of people known as Palaeo-Eskimos. They were subsequently joined and largely displaced around 1,000 years ago by ancestors of the present-day Inuit and Yup’ik. The genetic relationship between Palaeo-Eskimos and Native American, Inuit, Yup’ik and Aleut populations remains uncertain. Here we present genomic data for 48 ancient individuals from Chukotka, East Siberia, the Aleutian Islands, Alaska, and the Canadian Arctic. We co-analyse these data with data from present-day Alaskan Iñupiat and West Siberian populations and published genomes. Using methods based on rare-allele and haplotype sharing, as well as established techniques, we show that Palaeo-Eskimo-related ancestry is ubiquitous among people who speak Na-Dene and Eskimo–Aleut languages. We develop a comprehensive model for the Holocene peopling events of Chukotka and North America, and show that Na-Dene-speaking peoples, people of the Aleutian Islands, and Yup’ik and Inuit across the Arctic region all share ancestry from a single Palaeo-Eskimo-related Siberian source.

The supplements are open access. Here is the supplementary discussion in extensio:

The time and place of the Eskimo-Aleut founder admixture event remains uncertain. Under our demographic model, the admixture event that is shared by all members of this lineage was dated by two independent methods, ALDER and Rarecoal, at 2,700-4,900 ya and 4,400-4,900 ya, respectively (Fig. 2b, Supplementary Information section 12), and involved a substantial (~55-62%) genetic contribution from a Northern First Peoples population distantly related to Athabaskans (Fig. 2). There is no clear archaeological evidence for a Native American back-migration to Chukotka, increasing the weight of evidence that this admixture event occurred in Alaska. Indeed, the Alaskan Peninsula and Kodiak Archipelago have long been suggested as a source of influences shaping the Neo-Eskimo material culture (Fig. 3b). Some of the earliest maritime adaptations in Beringia and America are encountered in this region associated with the Ocean Bay tradition (~6,800 – 4,500 calBP). Around 4,000 calBP, the Ocean Bay tradition was succeeded by the Early Kachemak tradition, which is seen as a dramatic departure from the preceding phase, with some archaeological evidence for contacts with the Paleo-Eskimo Arctic Small Tool tradition. Given the new genetic results, it seems possible that this cultural discontinuity is associated with the emergence of the ancestral Eskimo-Aleut population. Early Paleo-Eskimo people used marine resources on a seasonal basis only, depended for the most part on hunting caribou and muskox, and lacked sophisticated hunting gear that allowed the later Inuit to become specialized in whaling. It is conceivable that a transfer of cultural traits and gene flow between Paleo-Eskimos and First Peoples happened simultaneously.

An important further clue is given by our finding that the ancestors of Inuit/Yup’ik experienced bidirectional gene flow with Chukotko-Kamchatkan ancestors, while Aleuts did not. This is consistent with a scenario of PPE/First Peoples admixture in Alaska, and a subsequent migration of Aleut ancestors into the Aleutian Islands (Fig. 3b), which might have occurred around 4,000 calBP according to known discontinuities in the Aleutian archaeological record (the onset of the Margaret Bay phase, which saw an influx of ASTt and Kodiak elements8). Conversely, ancestors of Inuit and Yup’ik migrated back to Chukotka, where around 2,200 calBP they established the earliest culture securely assigned archaeologically and genetically to Neo-Eskimos, i.e. the Old Bering Sea culture, admixed with local populations, most likely in interior Chukotka, and re-expanded from there to Alaska and later throughout the American Arctic. The Thule expansion was likely driven by innovations in hunting and the food surplus created by whaling. The oldest Old Bering Sea individual in this study was dated to ~1,500-1,900 calBP, which also overlaps our estimated time of the bidirectional admixture between Inuit/Yup’ik ancestors and Chukotko-Kamchatkan-speaking groups (~1,700-2,300 ya).

A succession of western Alaskan cultures, namely the Old Whaling, Choris, Norton, and Ipiutak (with the earliest dates around 3,100, 2,700, 2,500, and 1,700 calBP, respectively), combined cultural influences from earlier local Paleo-Eskimo sources as well as sources in Chukotka and southwestern Alaska. Parallels between these cultures and subsequent Neo-Eskimos are notable, and they might represent partial links between the founding population at 4,800 ya and the Old Bering Sea culture at 2,200 calBP (Fig. 3b). The location and source populations for early Eskimo-Aleuts will likely be resolved if future analyses can include samples from these western Alaskan traditions, as well from the Ocean Bay and Kachemak traditions in southwestern Alaska.

The descendants of the proto-Paleo-Eskimo lineage speak widely different languages, belonging to the Chukotko-Kamchatkan, Eskimo-Aleut, and Na-Dene families. Based on lexicostatistical studies of languages surviving in the 20th century, the time depth of the former two families is likely shallow, and the Na-Dene family is probably much older, on the order of 5,000 years (Supplementary Information section 13). Thus, while the linguistic affiliation of Paleo-Eskimos is impossible to determine from genetic data, the finding that the most diverse linguistic group whose speakers carry large proportions of PPE ancestry is Na-Dene and that Na-Dene linguistic variation may reach back to the Paleo-Eskimo period suggests that proto-Na-Dene may have been spoken by a Paleo-Eskimo population. A Siberian linguistic connection was proposed for the Na-Dene family under the Dene-Yeniseian hypothesis. This hypothetical language macrofamily unites Na-Dene languages and Ket, the only surviving remnant of the Yeniseian family, once widespread in South and Central Siberia. Although the Dene-Yeniseian family is not universally accepted among historical linguists, and correlations between linguistic and genetic histories are far from perfect, evidence of a genetic connection between Siberian and Na-Dene populations mediated by Paleo-Eskimos suggests that future research should further explore Dene-Yeniseian as a genealogical family or as part of a wider clade.

To celebrate multiple links, the open version of the letter at Academia.edu

Interesting idea.

There is no any PIE or Indo-European language in reality. The term Indo-Eropean was created based on British & Eropean political targets in India.

Mr. Mellow Yellow can muster only a sigh now. I noticed that you had two yellow things for dinner recently: chicken curry and lemon meringue pie.

There is no any PIE or Indo-European language in reality. The term Indo-Eropean was created based on British & Eropean political targets in India.

Ha! That’s what they want you to believe!

(And they want me to believe I just passed through Bielefeld an hour and a half ago.)

Wasn’t it Marr who taught that all language families are an invention of the imperialists, while the toiling masses always spoke philogeny-less, non-family Japhetic languages?

At a guess, a worry that este and oeste would sound too much alike. But the Mexicans I was there with weren’t native to the city and couldn’t even supply the expansion for Ote/Pte, I found it somewhere else.

The street numbers are fun, east-west Avenidas have odd numbers increasing to south of the Zocalo, even numbers to the north, while north-south streets are also Avenidas, odd towards the west and even towards the east — those are divided into Sur and Nte parts. Except that if some stretch is too narrow to be an Avenida, it’s a Calle with the same number and direction. And except that the whole system is at a 30 degree angle to the cardinal directions, so Norte is almost north-east, but still more north than east. There is some redundancy in this; if you are where two even-numbered streets cross you know it’s the Oriente and Norte parts of those Avenidas, and vice versa. And you will never run out of street numbers or house numbers as the city grows.

Avenida 1 in all four directions have ‘real’ names — A. de la Reforma to the west, Cinco de Mayo to the north, Don Juan de Palafox y Mendoza to the east, and 16 de Septiembre to the south.

The Dene migrations are discussed in Moccasins and Dene Migration.

Clearly, and I think basically no-one actually actively uses “ɜ” anymore (it got stamped out in the typewriter era together with a few other similar quirks); but the tradition is out there; if we cite items from the UEW as “aŋV” when they’re actually written as aŋɜ, there is bound to be some gaggle of people who would fail to find the word when checking themselves.