It’s been a couple of years since we got into the whole Indo-Europeans-and-Corded-Ware thing (e.g., here), so I thought I’d post Re-theorising mobility and the formation of culture and language among the Corded Ware Culture in Europe, by Kristian Kristiansen, Morten E. Allentoft, Karin M. Frei, Rune Iversen, Niels N. Johannsen, Guus Kroonen, Łukasz Pospieszny, T. Douglas Price, Simon Rasmussen, Karl-Göran Sjögren, Martin Sikora, and Eske Willerslev, from Antiquity 91. Here’s the Abstract:
Recent genetic, isotopic and linguistic research has dramatically changed our understanding of how the Corded Ware Culture in Europe was formed. Here the authors explain it in terms of local adaptations and interactions between migrant Yamnaya people from the Pontic-Caspian steppe and indigenous North European Neolithic cultures. The original herding economy of the Yamnaya migrants gradually gave way to new practices of crop cultivation, which led to the adoption of new words for those crops. The result of this hybridisation process was the formation of a new material culture, the Corded Ware Culture, and of a new dialect, Proto-Germanic. Despite a degree of hostility between expanding Corded Ware groups and indigenous Neolithic groups, stable isotope data suggest that exogamy provided a mechanism facilitating their integration. This article should be read in conjunction with that by Heyd (2017, in this issue).
And here’s an intriguing excerpt:
The new data conforms well to the reconstructed lexicon of Proto-Indo-European (Mallory & Adams 2006), which provides important clues that the subsistence strategy of early Indo-European-speaking societies was based on animal husbandry. It includes, for instance, terms related to dairy and wool production, horse breeding and wagon technology. Words for crops and land cultivation, however, have proved to be far more difficult to reconstruct. These results from historical linguistics are supported by similar evidence from archaeology (Andersen 1995; Kristiansen 2007). With the recent study by Kroonen and Iversen (in press), we can now demonstrate how social and economic interaction with existing Neolithic societies also had a corresponding linguistic imprint. This should not surprise us, as similar results are well documented from the interaction of Yamnaya societies with their northern Uralic-speaking neighbours (Parpola & Koskallio 2007).
Thanks, Trevor!
Thanks for bringing it here. I read it several weeks ago, well before living memory, but I see that I noted:
– The proposed system of “youthful warbands” of younger sons led by an older mentor spearheading settlement in new areas is supported by Baltic, Irish and Indo-Iranian folklore, but it seems like a good description also of Viking Age raids and migrations.
– Nomadism isn’t only about exploiting seasonal differences in grazing conditions, it’s about adding value to goods by bringing it from one end of your range to the other. Yamnaya peoples were in a unique position to take advantage of the first waves of globalisation from the 4th millenium BCE. The paper suggests that one result of this globalisation was a first wave of the plague, weakening the less resistant settled populations in Western Eurasia.
Open access!!!
Most adult women (between 28 and 42 per cent) were of non-local origin and had a different diet during childhood.
Is 28-42% “most”?
Open access!!!
Yes. But unfortunately only that article, not its companion article by Heyd, or any of the other interesting stuff.
I am reading China Condensed, essentially a history of the past 5000 years written for young overseas Chinese (in English, I hasten to say) and published in Singapore. Among its very, very broad scale maps it includes one of the area under the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD) which shows most of the country as Tang, the Tibetan region as Tubo, and the far northeast Pacific, north of Korea, 1000 ks or so north of “Silla” (Korea), as “Magyar”.
I can find no reference to the Magyars originating further east than the current Altai area, several thousand kilometers further west than the map suggests. With Hat’s permission, can anyone elucidate, please ?
Rereading the Wikipedia article on Corded Ware, I see that:
This is stated more clearly in the article on the Sintashta culture:
So “Russian” Corded Ware became a founding element of Shintashta and hence Indo-Iranian! If Shintashta really was Proto-Indo-Iranian, that is — models are changing fast now,
Most adult women (between 28 and 42 per cent) were of non-local origin and had a different diet during childhood.
I read right past that, interpreting it as “28-42% of the total sample (17-25 of 60 individuals of all genders and ages) were women who grew up elsewhere”. But it’s a strange way to say it, so I may have been wrong.
Re: “Magyars” on Pacific.
Most likely it referred to
“The Mohe, Malgal, or Mogher were a Tungusic people in ancient Manchuria. ”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohe_people
Very plausible. Write the publisher to complain!
SFReader, Hat : That seems plausible, though how it became Magyar… The publisher is the respected Straits Times newspaper group, so its strange.
I don’t care how respected a publisher is, these days nobody’s perfect. And that’s not an error that leaps to the eye; “Magyar” looks normal, while Mohe, Malgal, and Mogher all look weird.
I think this was the original map
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/wzGuM1gwdVo/0.jpg
I have a feeling that next generations of editors would replace Mohe with Mohican and wouldn’t even notice anything wrong
Is 28-42% “most”?
For me at least, while “the most things” can mean a plurality, “most things” must be a majority. The was a LLOG flurry about when and if it means a supermajority.
“Most” is definitely some kind of editing error (authors half-reading their text a few times and changing it incompletely), and I agree that it is probably meant to refer to the total sample rather than just the women.
If the original Corded Ware language was Early Proto-Germanic (real early: like 2,000 years early), then why isn’t Macro-Germanic a more widespread family when it first comes into historical view? I guess one would assume that it once was widespread but was later swamped almost everywhere by subsequent Celtic and Balto-Slavic incursions. That’s fine, not implausible, it just requires an additional premise.
Or it’s only late northern Corded Ware – which, it appears, the in-press paper by Kroonen & Iversen will be about – that’s specifically Pre-Proto-Germanic, and the rest was some kind of “Proto-West-IE” (common ancestry of Germanic and Italo-Celtic perhaps). The Bell Beaker culture has occasionally been associated with the origin of Celtic – though, AFAIK, not on more evidence than geography and age.
Anyway, I’ve now read this paper and (through channels darkly) Heyd’s. Heyd basically provides an overview over the findings since 2013 and then warns against going too far and drawing too simple conclusions, before ending firmly on the optimistic side; some of the points he brings up are already mentioned by Kristiansen et omnes. An interesting fact Heyd brings up is the appearance of cultural commonalities (sandals or sandal soles of durable material in graves; anthropomorphic stelae) that show up all over Europe, from Spain to Yamnaya, a while before the latter’s expansion. On the genetic side, Heyd implicitly calls for more and larger samples, including of Bell Beaker people.
Oh, considering Macro-Germanic, check this mystery out.
I think the assumption is that the intruding language was ancestral to both Proto-Germanic and Proto-Balto-Slavic. At 2900 BC it must have been almost undifferentiated Core IE, at least in the mouth of the intruders, but Corded Ware spread so quickly over such a vast area that it can hardly have had a single language for long, if at all.
I’d rather guess that the explosive spread of the superstrate culture was followed by a long period of amalgamation and language shift that panned out differently in different regions. The northeastern end may well have adopted Proto-Uralic. Or maybe satemization can be blamed on Uralic influence.
1-The reference to the work of Rasmussen et al. 2015, on an early form of plague spreading from Siberia to the Baltic in the third millennium, is to my mind unsurprising: what is remarkable about the older Indo-European languages of Europe (attested or reconstructed) is how little substrate influence is actually found in them: some vocabulary chiefly relating to plants and animals. In nature this is not very different from the substrate influence of Native American languages upon transplanted Western European languages in the Americas. Since the latter owe their spread and reduced substrate influence to the catastrophic impact upon native Americans of imported Eurasian diseases, perhaps the spread of, and the weak substrate influence upon, Indo-European languages in Europe is due to the same factor…
2-An additional factor may have been the adolescent warbands whose hunting and, more crucially, raiding activities took place at the (social and geographic) margins of various Indo-European societies: if these sociologically marginal groups were the ones who were most closely and regularly in contact with non-Indo-European societies, it is among such groups that I would expect to see words being borrowed, to see some contact language(s) involving Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages emerge (Pidgins? Mixed languages? Some xenolectal registers for speaking with outsiders? Perhaps all of the above, at different times and places…). If becoming an adult within an Indo-European community meant no longer being involved in these interactions with outsiders, perhaps it also meant shedding anything in one’s speech indicative of being an adolescent, including anything deriving from said contact language(s).
3-Greg Pandatshang: actually, there is evidence that Baltic and Slavic were once in contact with an otherwise unattested branch of Indo-European which shared some features with Germanic, so the “additional premise” you point to has already been proposed in the scholarly literature (I can give the exact reference, should anyone request it downthread).
On Bastarnian as macro-Germanic:
Is there any evidence that Bastarnian was only related to the Germanic languages, rather than one of the Germanic languages?
It’s sometimes possible to identify west-Germanic usage in Gothic contexts. For example, one of Athanaric’s officers was named Lagarimanus. Ammianus book 31 chapter 3. In west Germanic, that can mean “Camp-person.” In Gothic, *Ligramanna would mean “Bed-person,” which is less likely.
Would it be possible to identify near-Germanic in Gothic contexts, if Bastarnian were near-Germanic? e.g. words which defy Grimm’s law.
Or to identify two branches of east Germanic in Gothic contexts?
“On the genetic side, Heyd implicitly calls for more and larger samples, including of Bell Beaker people.”
There are three new pre-print papers that have genomic data for hundreds of Mesolithic, Neolithic, and Bronze Age European samples. Including Bell Beakers and many groups from Southeast Europe.
There is a lot of very interesting stuff in them. Like, the early Iberian Beaker people did not pass on any genes to the Beakers who spread out from around the Lower Rhine and then replaced >90% of the British population in only a few hundred years. The Eastern Beaker were closely related to Corded Ware, but very distinct in direct male ancestry.
The Southeast European genomes have a number of surprises, which make many proposed routes of Indo-European more complicated.
And an abstract for the first of the South Asian ancient genomics papers is out, but so far with almost no details.
The Beaker Phenomenon And The Genomic Transformation Of Northwest Europe
http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/05/09/135962
The Genomic History Of Southeastern Europe
http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/05/09/135616
The Population Genomics Of Archaeological Transition In West Iberia
http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/05/10/134254
Looks like it. As we’ve discussed before, the people who have the largest amount of Yamnaya ancestry today are found in Estonia, the culture that is most plausibly associated with Proto-West-Uralic is the one that started the Bronze Age in the region, and the Corded Ware culture not only encompassed Estonia but reached far north on the Finnish coast. (Heyd 2017 has maps.)
I suppose that’s possible, but it’s unnecessary: increasing the difference between the three velar plosive rows by fronting the frontmost one is the most expected development. I bet it happened several times – at least the Luwian/Lycian case must be independent from the rest.
That’s just one of many possibilities which are practically untestable at the moment. I don’t know anything that’s not in the Wikipedia article I linked to, and I doubt anyone else does either. I merely wanted to raise the possibility; I’m not convinced or anything myself.
Might the substrate in Mexican Spanish be a better comparison? The non-IE European “plants and animals” vocabulary – some of it, like goat, apparently shared with Berber, which may tell us that Early European Farmers got into North Africa – includes more or less all of agriculture except the simplest form of plow and surprisingly much of animal husbandry, not unlike how the substrate vocabulary in Mexican Spanish denotes a lot of food.
After all, the Yamnaya and Funnel Beaker or whatever populations can’t have been terribly mismatched in size, or we’d have a lot more Yamnaya ancestry than we do.
Outside the vocabulary, the substrate influence on the IE language families of Europe is hard to judge. Sure Proto-Germanic grammar is quite distinct from PIE grammar, for example (collapse of the tense/aspect system into just two tenses, etc. etc.), but we have next to no idea what the grammar of the substrate languages may have been like, so we can’t compare.
Good idea.
Yes, please!
As for the ‘most’ usage. The cited paper shows where the errors arose:
“The proportion of non-local individuals is at least 7/25 (28%) at Lauda-Königshofen and 8/19 (42.1%) at Bergrheinfeld.”
“The number and proportion of females with distinctive strontium isotope ratios is notable and suggests that women were more mobile than males in CW society.”
David: Mexican Spanish is indeed one of several “transplanted Western European languages in the Americas” I was thinking of: tellingly, while it has more substrate loans than American English or Canadian French do, its structure is otherwise untouched by the influence of any indigenous Mexican language: indeed, I myself, here at Casa Hat, had pointed to its being a good argument against assuming substrate influence as a matter of course (see this thread, http://languagehat.com/beckwith-on-indo-european/, and my May 2 12:41 comment in response to Jim).
And here is the reference I had promised:
•Holzer, Georg. Entlehnungen aus einer bisher unbekannten indogermanischen Sprache im Urslavischen und Urbaltischen. Wien: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1989. 231 s. Sitzungsberichte / Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Philosophisch-historische Klasse; Bd. 521.
Thank you, Rick!
Interesting stuff. This sequence from The Genomic History Of Southeastern Europe bears directly on the paper that spurred this thread:
Globular Amphora is definitely not a Yamnaya intrusion into Funnel Beaker. Rather, they seem to have been fiercely opposed to mixing until they were suddenly run over. So what is Globular Amphora then?
Not really relevant, but I bet someone here knows.. Do different declensions of Latin noun have closer relationships to other ancient languages or language groupings? Is there any study of whether roots found in each declension are more or less likely to have Indo-European roots, or whether words in one declension are more likely to share cognates in a given branch of IE?
Very interesting on how Anatolian did not get to Anatolia:
So Anatolian probably came into Anatolia from east. (Though, as they say, the genetic Majkop of Eastern Anatolia and the Caucasus is still poorly understood. The picture will soon be much clearer.)
The last paragraph in my 3:44 comment is mine, not part of the quote. (Also, I forgot to remove a hard linebreak in my 6:29 comment, but that’s just ugly, not misleading.)
Fixed!
Do different declensions of Latin noun have closer relationships to other ancient languages or language groupings?
The third declension is pretty much a giant closed set. It has active adjective-forming suffixes, and some of the new adjective become substantivised. Other than that, there are almost no new coinages in the third declension. It contains the wreckage of most of the old IE declensional classes. The fourth and fifth are marginal, the fifth containing only a handful of clearly ancient nouns.
The first and the second are open sets where new nouns are constantly bring created.
And there was another related paper recently about the genomics of Scythians, it is open access at Nature:
‘Ancestry and demography and descendants of Iron Age nomads of the Eurasian Steppe’
“Contemporary descendants of western Scythian groups are found among various groups in the Caucasus and Central Asia, while similarities to eastern Scythian are found to be more widespread, but almost exclusively among Turkic language speaking (formerly) nomadic groups, particularly from the Kipchak branch of Turkic languages. The genealogical link between eastern Scythians and Turkic language speakers requires further investigation, particularly as the expansion of Turkic languages was thought to be much more recent—that is, sixth century CE onwards—and to have occurred through an elite expansion process.”
“carriers of the Yamnaya culture migrated not only into Europe but also eastward, carrying west Eurasian genes—and potentially also Indo-European languages… these observations provide evidence that the prevalent genetic pattern does not simply follow an isolation-by-distance model but involves significant gene flow over large distances.”
Wow, thanks for the preprints! Lots of reading for tonight.
Oh, “Temematian”. I didn’t know it was supposed to be close to Germanic. Anyway, there’s a recent paper that tries to deconstruct every one of Holzer’s example words; I’ll look for it.
And this one. I’m curious if anyone has proposed viable Germanic etymologies for names like Helveconae, Helisii, Nahanarvali and Manimi. All the h’s do look a bit Germanic and Helisii is thought by some to be related to Claudius Ptolemy’s Kalisia (and Slavic *kališь→ Kalisz), with Grimm’s Law (on the other hand, if the names are related it’s curious that Slavs would restore the k – either they lived in close proximity and had an exonym for it or some/all of the names are unrelated; otherwise it would end up as *xališь). Recently I’ve noticed that the twin gods Alcis worshipped by Nahanarvali in a grove remind of the Lithuanian word alkas ‘hill overgrown with trees / place of pre-christian worship / pagan god’, alkė ‘grove’.
I don’t think Kalisz and Ptolemy’s Καλισία are the same place or the same name (unless it can be shown that both the first and the second vowel in Καλισία were long). Transmission via Germanic is entirely out of the question, since there is no way it could account for the Slavic *a. Deriving Helisii from *kalisjā (or the like) would require palatal umlaut to have operated increadibly early (and why not in Harii, Manimi or Hasdingi?).
I’m not familiar with Temematic.
Just looking it up, Kortlandt suggests that Venetic and Vinithic are Temematic and a sister-group to Germanic. But he insists that the lower Vistula wasn’t at least partly Germanic, and that early Germanic loanwords in early Baltic must have come through early Slavic. (Does this also apply to early Germanic loanwords in Estonian or Finnish?)
There are cartloads of early Germanic borrowings in Finnic, and many of them neither occur in Baltic or Slavic, nor bear any indication of having been filtered through an intermediary. For example, Slavic has *useręʒь < EGmc. *ausV-xriŋga- ‘earring’. The progressive palatalisation of *g shows that the *ę comes from *iN, not *eN. The uncompounded ‘ring’ word itself was not borrowed into Slavic or Baltic. But Finn. rengas, Est., Votic rõngas etc. reflect an older form, *xreŋgaz, complete with its (Proto-)Germanic inflectional ending.
-Temematic
Cimmerian sounds better
The “Temematian” etymologies are mostly root equations, and therefore poor-quality evidence. For example, Slavic *proso ‘millet’ is compared with Germanic *βar-iz- ~ βar-z-a- ‘barley’ and Lat far/farris < *bʰar-s- ‘hulled wheat (spelt, emmer, einkorn)’. Germanic and Italic together point to an original s-stem with a fundamental *a in the root syllable and no evidence of a zero grade (which “Temematian” *ro allegedly reflects). Old Prussian prassan ‘millet’ is too close a relative to prove anything (it could even be a loan from Polish), but comparison with Tocharian B proksa ‘grain’ shows that we are probably dealing with *próḱs-o-m, pl. *proḱs-a-h₂. Perfect morphological agreement and no need of a Temematian shift.
Haven’t had time to read any preprints yet.
Ah. Another trip to Kortlandt’s homepage for me, then.
Heh. 🙂 “Temematian” is supposed to indicate that the PIE tenues (p, t, k) show up as Slavic mediae (b, d, g), while the PIE mediae aspiratae show up as Slavic tenues.
A bit late to the party, but regarding the mysterious appearance of the Magyars in the Northeast Pacific, I agree that they most likely meant to put the Malgal.
It isn’t a complete surprise to see such an error appear in a map in a history published in Singapore mainly for an overseas Chinese audience, given that East Asian ethnonyms often appear in quite different forms between English and Chinese—e.g. Jurchens and Khitans are 女眞 Rǔzhēn and 契丹 Qìdān respectively in Mandarin. So it’s understandable that such mistakes would slip through the editors.
For example, Slavic has *useręʒь < EGmc. *ausV-xriŋga- ‘earring’.
That’s where Russian серьга, серёжка comes from, right?
(Apparently Wiktionary says it’s from Turkic; though the supposed Turkic forms sound sufficiently similar that for all I know they were borrowed from Slavic originally.)
Vasmer says “Предполагают преобразование из др.-русск. усерязь (ХI в.)…; однако трудно понять появление вторичного -г- в великорусск.; ср. блр. по златои серазѣ, еще в лютеранском катехизисе 1562 г. …. Правильнее считать русск. слово заимств. из др.-чув. *śürüɣ “кольцо”, чув. śǝrǝ, śørǝ “кольцо”, тат. jözök, тур., чагат. jüzük – то же.” [The suggested derivation from ORuss. усерязь is difficult because of Great Russian secondary -г-; it’s preferable to consider it a borrowing from Old Chuvash *śürüɣ ‘ring.’]
Vasmer’s objection isn’t quite valid. The progressive palatalisation was blocked if the velar was followed by *u or *ū at the time (later *ъ, *y). The blocking endings included probably the gen.pl., the acc.pl. of masculines and feminines, the instr.pl. of masculines and neuters, and the gen.sg. of feminines. After the regular operation of the sound change, most — but not all — case forms had a palatalised consonant. The difference was soon levelled out by analogy, but “soft” and “hard” variants sometimes survived side by side, hence e.g. *ęʒa (Polish jędza) ~ *ęga (Russ. баба-яга) ‘witch, hag’ (analogical after the gen.sg./acc.pl. *ęgy). The Russian idiom ни зги не видно ‘you can’t even see the path’ (= ‘it’s pitch dark’) retains the original, unpalatalised form of the gen.sg. of *stьʒa ‘path’ (*stьgy > z(d)gi). PSl. *useręʒь must have been accompanied by forms like the acc.pl. *useręgy or gen.pl. *useręgъ, so an analogical reversal of the progressive palatalisation was possible as long as those forms lingered on.
It’s Great Russian, not Belorussian, by the way.
Oops, thanks. Fixed now.
As for Temematic, apart from the possibility of alternative etymologies, the sound changes seem unlikely (unless in a very long time frame combined with substrate effects) to me, with the voicing swap (t → d, dh → t).
As for Kalisz, yeah, I’m aware the source form would have to be kālīsj- to yield *kališь regularly (for it’s not Kalesz or Kolesz). Although -išь was a popular hypocoristic suffix so it’s possible that, for instance, *kalьšь would be altered to *kališь via folk etymology, I think. According to wikipedia there was a German study in this decade that claimed to confirm the identity of Kalisia and Kalisz but I have no access to it.
“Der Ort gilt als sicher lokalisiert. Ein interdisziplinäres Forscherteam um Andreas Kleineberg, das die Angaben von Ptolemaios neu untersuchte, bestätigt anhand der entzerrten antiken Koordinaten die bisherige Lokalisierung von Kalisia beim heutigen Kalisch (Kalisz) in der Woiwodschaft Großpolen in Polen. Die polis an einem Übergang der Prosna[3] war offenbar eine Station an der Bernsteinstraße.”
See the 99.9% exhaustive treatment of the subject by Willem Vermeer (it would be 100% exhaustive if he discussed the ‘[ear]ring’ word). I found this article only a few minutes ago, haven’t seen it before, and am reading it now with enormous interest. This example caught my eye:
So the Slavic prototype of the word robot could be combined with the Germanic suffix *-iŋg- already at the time of the progressive palatalisation. Now they have met again:
http://www.springer.com/la/book/9783319400013
(to be sure, the first time it was an occupational term derived from *orbota ‘work, toil’, and now it has returned as a nomen actionis).
Rick: ‘Ancestry and demography and descendants of Iron Age nomads of the Eurasian Steppe’
Afanasevo lasted to 2500 BCE and was replaced by the culture of the neighbouring Siberian forest people, who took up animal husbandry. I’ve wondered if those were the (Pre-)Proto-Turks. Some 1000 years later Andronovo came eastwards and into old Afanasevo lands with the Scythians, Now we learn that Eastern Scythians had mixed local-Yamnaya ancestry, and that the only modern descendants of Eastern Scythians are Turkic speakers. So maybe they included Turkic speakers from the outset, and that the Turkic element came to dominate when non-Scythian Turkic became influential on the Eastern steppe.
Any Ossetes in the dataset?
(I haven’t had time to read the preprints yet. Soon…)
Sure, that takes care of having to assume *ī. But if the name is supposed to be Germanic, it has to be Northwest Germanic, because *ā hardly existed in East Germanic – and isn’t Kalisz rather too far east for that?
I’m curious how this interdisciplinary team “de-distorted” the “coordinates”.
because *ā hardly existed in East Germanic
Do we really know that? Gothic is written in Greek script (modulo handwriting issues), and Greek script has never had a method, however limited or fallible, for distinguishing ā from ă, unless the former happens to have a circumflex accent. So the contrast might have been robust in Gothic and just not representable in writing.
Gothic had ā of native origin at least from denasalised *[ãː] < *[aŋx]. I discuss some other possible sources of Gothic ā in an article which is still in press. Nonetheless, “Calisia” does not offer a segmental environment in which a long ā could have developed.
(I mean, denasalised *[ãː] < *[aŋ] when followed by *[x])
Looked up what Polish etymological sources say about Kalisz.
It turns out they believe that the word comes from Slavic ‘kał’ (feces, excrements, filth).
For the sake of young Kaliszane, I hope better Cimmerian etymology would be found than Big Shit! (Kaliszcze)
David,
Yes. Ossetians are included.
They are most similar genetically to Turkic speaking Balkars and Kumyks, followed by the Northeast Caucasian speaking Lezgians and Chechens, and the Northwest Causasian speaking Adyghs, then Iranians, then Iraqi and Iranian Jews, Abkhazians, Georgians, and the Turkish.
These populations are all very closely related, and all have almost identical Scythian ancestry. That’s some major language diversity for such closely related peoples.
The simplest solutions are the best as long as no facts contradict them. There is a rare but attested Old Polish dithematic name Kalimir in which the first element is connected with the noun kał ‘excrement’ (now a medical term, formely meaning ‘mud, dirt’) via the kalić ‘defile, soil, disgrace’ (only its iterative kalać is used in present-day Polish. The normal hypocoristic form of Kalimir would have been Kalich, and the possessive derivative of that, Kalisz, would perfectly fit into the Polish place-naming pattern. This is, so to speak, the default etymology, involving no special pleading. It leaves unexplained the similarity of Kalisz (which under this hypothesis can’t be pre-mediaeval) to Ptolemy’s Καλισία, but then the similarity (which looks superficial and may be accidental) is the only reason why the identification is insisted upon by some. No other Polish city, no matter how important, has a demonstrably pre-Slavic name (except when it’s derived from the name of a river or a mountain — these are often old — and well, there may be some West Baltic names in the northeast). Remember that the time gap between Ptolemy and the earliest attestation of Kalisz as the name of a town in Poland (1107) is about a thousand years.
SFReader says:
It turns out they believe that the word comes from Slavic ‘kał’ (feces, excrements, filth).
and
Piotr Gąsiorowski says:
kał ‘excrement’ (now a medical term, formely meaning ‘mud, dirt’)
In Croatian “kal” still means mud, though it is not the ordinary word for “mud”. The ordinary word is “blato”, and there are “muddy” places in Croatia – notably Blato on the island of Korčula. The etymology of “kal” as given by the Croatian Dictionary portal is:
pre-Slavic & Old Slavic kalъ (Russian. kal, Polish kał) ← ie. *keh2lo-: “dark” (lat. caligo: “fog”, skr. kālas: “blackish”)
The *ā in brought, thought is of PGmc. origin as Piotr said; it’s written a in Gothic, and given the preservation of vowel length where we can see it it was most probably still present here, too. In addition, Ringe’s 2006 book says that *-aja- (limited to a few verb forms) was contracted to *-ā- on the way to PGmc., so apparently this was preserved in Gothic as well. That makes two sources for a very rare phoneme. Seeing as Gothic didn’t undergo the *ē > *ā shift of Northwest Germanic, any further occurrences must have been derived within Gothic by processes yet unknown – I’m looking forward to Piotr’s paper.
A recent paper, Milk and the Indo-Europeans by Sagart and Garnier, claims to show linguistic evidence to support the idea that the Corded Ware and Yamnaya folks introduced into Europe genes for lactose tolerance, and hence milk-drinking. The idea doesn’t seems far-fetched, but I can’t evaluate their arguments.
Y,
There are some major problems with that theory about milk. The biggest one being that they didn’t actually find high levels of lactase persistence in these ancient groups, but rather imputed the alleles based on modern statistics, which is not appropriate in this case.
When imputing the −13.910:T frequency based on surrounding markers, Allentoft et al. reported a high LP allele frequency (approximately 20%) in ancient steppe populations. However, the major haplotype currently carrying the −13.910:T allele is also found carrying the −13.910:C (LNP) allele both in high frequency in modern Eurasian populations and in one early Neolithic individual. Therefore, the −13.910 genotype cannot be reliably imputed from surrounding sequences, whether from modern or ancient data.
There are problems with the linguistic argument as well. It’s only sketched in the presentation, but my impression is that they for example take the absence of some agricultural terms from Indo-Iranian or their presence there with non-agricultural meanings as evidence of their “regional” character, rather than the consequence of the fact that a group of IEs became specialised in nomadic pastoralism and spent a long time roaming the steppes with their livestock. After all, Proto-Oceanic lost the AN words for ‘rice’ and ‘millet’, and yet the authors don’t regard them as regional.
Lactose tolerance wasn’t widespread in early Bell Beaker times either, according to a comment here (which says that the preprint, which I still haven’t read, shows this).
Has anyone looked at the genetic affinities of the non-national Uralic-speaking peoples? (i.e. everyone but Finns, Estonians, and Hungarians—and, really, I tend to disregard the Hungarians, as the invading Magyars are the textbook example of high linguistic impact along with minimal genetic impact)
I’m trying to wrap my head around the secnario where northeastern Corded Ware adopts/is adopted by … Proto-Uralic? Or Proto-[subset of Uralic]? Wikipedia suggests a wide range of possible time depths for Uralic.
If it’s simply that an IE-speaking Corded Ware élite class conquered the Pre-Proto-Uralics and eventually adopted the commoners’ language (the Norman/Bulgarian model) we’d expect to see the tale told in both genetics and language contact effects. Is it possible that the entire Uralic family originated as a creole combining IE with an otherwise unknown substrate? Sort of the opposite of Kortlandt’s view that IE originated as a Uralic dialect with radical NW Caucasian contact effects.
In Finnish language, Orja means ‘slave’.
Looks like an Uralic elite class conquered Pre-Proto-Aryan tribes and not vice versa.
That is suggestive, but one word in one modern language can just be a coincidence. Is this orja reconstructed to anything like the time depth we’re talking about?
Greg: on the Italian dialect thread (next to last comment) I gave a reference to an Uralicist who argues that there was indeed shift from Indo-European to Uralic in northeastern Europe.
As for creolization in Uralic and Indo-European: creoles are not mixed languages, and thus to speak of a creole as consisting of equal parts of a superstrate and of a substrate is inaccurate. Creole typological distinctiveness has as its source the pidginization of the source language (i.e. what in creolistics is called, inaccurately from the vantage point of historical linguistics, the superstrate), and not the influence of the substrate language(s).
Now, pidginization entails (near-) total loss of bound morphemes, and thus the trouble with any claim that Indo-European or Uralic might have been creolized (as opposed to influencing one another deeply, nota bene!) is the reality that both proto-languages had plenty of bound morphemes.
It’s really annoying that there are two definitions of sub/superstrate, the temporal one (from geology), whereby the substrate was spoken at an earlier time and the superstrate at a later one, and the power/prestige one, whereby the substrate is spoken by the lower classes and the superstrate by the upper. Often enough they coincide, but sometimes they doesn’t.
“Is this orja reconstructed to anything like the time depth we’re talking about?”
Anthony says it’s a common Finno-Ugric root, generally meaning “southerner,” and in Finnish and a few other languages, “slave.” He attributes it to contact between Indo-Iranian Sintashta and Finno-Ugric Volosovo. (2007, p. 385)
Wiktionary purports cognates in Erzya and Udmurt.
common Finno-Ugric root, generally meaning “southerner,” and in Finnish and a few other languages, “slave.”
But possibly common Uralic if the Erzya cognate is valid? Or might that be a borrowing?
In any case it would seem likely that the original meaning was ‘southerner’ and that the shift to ‘slave’ happened in individual branches at a time where the specific southerners were no longer the original Pre-Proto-IE speakers. In fact the consensus seems to be that ‘Aryan’ only became an autonym in Indo-Iranian, whatever you think of its PIE ancestry,
It is of course possible that a Pre-Proto-Uralic-speaking elite once conquered the Pre-Proto-IE speakers and that the latter were already calling themselves ‘Aryan’s at the time, in which case the Finnish meaning of the word would be original, but any number of other scenarios are more likely so ‘looks like’ is a bit strong.
So the traditional connection between Aryan on the one hand, and Old Irish aire ‘free, noble’ and Gaulish names like Ariogaisus ‘noble spear’ on the other, is now abandoned?
Russian archaeology recognizes so called Seima-Turbino phenomenon – traces left by groups of bronze metal workers and warriors of same origin spread along astonishing distances from Finland to Mongolia (including remote Siberian Arctic!) in middle of 2nd millenium BC.
In what capacity they were expanding is not very obvious, elite/mercenaries/highly paid foreign experts are some of the suggested explanations.
Anyway, it is clear that they were relatively small groups of foreigners by no means representing the general population of the regions they are found. It is thought that mapping spread of Seima-Turbino phenomenon matches perfectly with Uralic expansion while some point to Aryan Indo-Europeans instead.
Of course, it could a combination – say, spread of an Uralic military elite accompanied by their Aryan (Orja) metal workers (disparagingly referred to as ‘slaves’).
So the traditional connection […] is now abandoned? — not from what I can see quickly, but its use as an ethnic autonym is no longer dated to PIE, only to II. Wikipedia talks about a ‘root’ *haerós (unclear what that would be in a modern reconstruction) meaning ‘member of ingroup’ — with the real root *haer- meaning ‘put together’. Adolescent warrior bands turning into elites/nobility again?
(There’s a lookalike in Latin (ad)haerere which might (Watkins) be from *ghais- — not the same root as written, and probably not at all, but I wouldn’t trust Wikipedia to know the difference).
The trick is that the Corded Ware/Battle Axe Culture is Neolithic/Chalcolithic; those battle axes were made of polished stone. The Seima-Turbino phenomenon introduced bronze, for which there’s a Uralic wanderwort (traditionally reconstructed as PU *wäśkä, but the vowels don’t line up between at least some of the Uralic branches). That sounds like a reason for a language shift.
It hasn’t been that long since we discussed a whole special issue full of papers about this and related issues. Where was that post again…
Here’s the special issue in any case. Open access.
So the traditional connection between Aryan on the one hand, and Old Irish aire ‘free, noble’ and Gaulish names like Ariogaisus ‘noble spear’ on the other, is now abandoned?
In IIr. *aryá-, the first /a/ can reflect any short non-high vowel, and we don’t even know for sure that the /r/ comes from PIE *r rather than *l. If, as usually proposed, it’s related to RV arí- ‘guest, stranger, alien’ (hence the originally possessive adjective aryá- ‘hospitable’, substantivised as ‘host, master of the house’ –> ‘lord, leader’, then vr̥ddhied into ā́r(i)ya- ‘noble, nobly born, having the qualities of an aryá-), we can at least exclude *o (no Brugmannian lengthening in arí-) but not the other possibilities. Note that the meaning ‘noble’ and the connotations of close ingroup solidarity, as in aryamán- ‘comrade, friend, best man’, are not original but derived within Indo-Iranian, which makes the equation with Celtic Ario- less plausible that it might seem at first blush. On the Celtic side, Ario- may come from *pr̥h₃-jo- ‘foremost, leading’, cf. the common prefix *(φ)ari- ‘in front of, fore-‘ (OIr. air-, Gaulish are-, etc.). Old Irish aire ‘freeman, nobleman’ is a k-stem (*arisak-), not really parallel to anything in Indo-Iranian.
On the Celtic side, Ario- may come from *pr̥h₃-jo- ‘foremost, leading’, cf. the common prefix *(φ)ari- ‘in front of, fore-‘ (OIr. air-, Gaulish are-, etc.).
Could the common Germanic naming element harja- be a borrowing (or mis-translation) of early Celtic *(φ)arjo-?
Of course haria- has its own inner Germanic etymology (*xarja-z ‘troop, host, army’), but there’s little doubt that early Germanic speakers may have identified it folk-etymologically with the (H)aria- proterotheme in the names of their Celtic neighbours. The Roman authors were not very consistent as they recorded Germanic tribal and personal names. We find both Chario- (especially in the west) and Hario- (especially in the east), and since at that time the Romans dropped their own (h)aitches, an initial H- was sometimes omitted or added regardless of etymology. We still don’t know whether Ariovistus had a Celtic or a Germanic name.
Similarly, Slavic -mirъ ‘peace’ was more or less identified with ON -mærr ‘illustrious’ or conflated with it as -měrъ, since they both functioned as second members of dithematic names, sometimes with cognate first members, as in Valdamarr vs. Volodiměrъ/Vladimir.
Incidentally, another blogger I read regularly, normally non-linguistic, once asked his commenters the following trivia question: which two modern countries have names that are derived from Arya? I of course correctly answered Iran and South Ossetia. Sadly, the blogger in question himself remained mired in the delusion that the answer should be Iran and Ireland.
Hm.
der vor dem Heer herzog, ward Herzog genannt
“the one who trekked along in front of the host was called duke”
That’s from a slightly disgusting poem from the 19th or 20th century and an ideological statement, not a serious etymological hypothesis. But now I wonder if the West Germanic “duke” words reflect just this conflation of “army” and “first”.
Ha! Ireland is the copper island next to the tin island, all in Phoenician.
OHG herizogo = OE heretoga < *xarja-tuɣan- ‘army-leader’. The second member of the compound, *tuɣ-an-, is actually a cognate of dux (ziehen = dūcere). Heri, here were perfectly normal words in both languages at the time, and these compounds were fully transparent semantically (which was not always true of Germanic and Celtic proper names).
South Ossetia…
If you mean Alania, that’s North Ossetia.
South Ossetia calls itself Respublikæ Khussar Iryston, which I suspect is what he means.
Ah, but the self-designation ir is no longer regarded as derived from āryana-. The Alani, on the other hand, were etymologically ‘the Aryans’ (with the characteristic “Sarmatian” lambdacism of palatalised *r, shared also by Ossetian), so Alania counts.
Edited to add:
P.S. Johnny Cheung’s study of Ossetian historical phonology supports the derivation of Ir, Iron and Iryston from *wīra- ‘man, hero’.
Ah, once again I am behind the times! Thanks for updating me.
Piotr: OHG herizogo = OE heretoga < *xarja-tuɣan- ‘army-leader’.
Yes, I didn’t mean to suggest that the word itself came from Celtic, only its popularity as a naming element. A name like *harjagastiz makes more sense if understood as “noble guest” at the time of coinage.
I even started wondering if German Ehre f. “honour, fame, respect” and relatives could be borrowed from Celtic, since the IE etymology strikes me as thin. ON eir f. “protection, mercy, help” says no, though. But I do wonder if the WGmc. meaning could be coloured by Celtic.
The impact of Celtic on Germanic is clear. For example, all those names of tribal chieftains ending in *rīk- are copies of a Celtic pattern, and *rīk- itself is a loan. Slavic *mīrъ was partly identified with Germanic *mēri-, but at an earlier date *mēri- was for similar reasons partly identified with Celtic *māro-. There are even dithematic cognates (calques?) like *touto-rīg- (cf. Tudor) and *þeuða-rīk- (Theodoric), and it’s hard to believe that the coining of such strictly cognate tribal names as the Brigantes and the Burgundians was completely independent.
‘Noble host’, more probably. The meanings ‘host’, ‘guest’, ‘stranger’, and ‘enemy’ take forever to sort out, and in some IE languages it never quite happens.
It reminds me of the Indo-Aryan vocative or *ari-, *arai > are!, an exclamation used to get attention (often reduplicated as arere!). It means literally “hey, stranger!” (etymologically, at any rate).
John: it might also be interpreted as a bahuvrihi: “having noble guests”.
Related Celtic loanwords reached Old Norse. Rikr, ambatt, etc.
The northeastern end may well have adopted Proto-Uralic.
As was just argued by Kallio at our conference Contextualizing historical lexicology earlier this week in Helsinki (slides generally forthcoming at some point): probably Proto-Finnic specifically, and with the substrate at the time being clearly Balto-Slavic and not (para-)Germanic. The Volga-Kama area languages (Mordvin, Mari, Udmurt) show no indication of ever having been anywhere else or having ever taken over any substrates, at least not individually.
There are cartloads of early Germanic borrowings in Finnic, and many of them neither occur in Baltic or Slavic, nor bear any indication of having been filtered through an intermediary.
I still wonder about vocabulary with a “Northwestern European” distribution covering Germanic, Finnic and Balto-Slavic. Two of these are related, but that doesn’t mean such vocabulary can’t have originated in one of these groups specifically and been loaned to both of the others.
There are already a small number of known cases where something Germanic goes thru Finnic and then ends up in East Baltic (one long since clear example being ‘ship’: G *flawją̄ → F *lawja > *laiva (> Fi laiva etc.) → Latv. laiva, Lith. laivas); and at least one likely case where something Baltic goes through Finnic and ends up in Germanic (B *žaras ‘branch’ → F *šara > *hara ‘branch’, *harapa ‘rake’ (> Fi harava etc.) → Old Norse harfr > Eng. harrow). Sufficiently early loans directly between B and G would likely be harder to identify, though. Doesn’t Baltic have a bunch of words that “fail Satemization”?
Is this orja reconstructed to anything like the time depth we’re talking about?
There is zero doubt that at least the Finnic + Mordvin + Permic words for ‘slave’ are related, which would traditionally put it as a “Finno-Permic” root. (OTOH my contribution to the conference argues that “Finno-Permic” is not a subgroup as much as something like a contact/diffusion zone featuring distinctive IE loanwords.) A competing loan etymology by Koivulehto derives this as an older Satem-type loan from PIE *werǵ- ‘work’ though, which seems semantically more straightforward. So my trust in Uralic speakers superstrating “Aryans” specifically isn’t very high.
The Samic word for ‘south’, ‘southwest’, ‘west’ (the cardinal direction terms amusingly enough rotate depending on what direction rivers run in in an area) is also an exact phonetic match, but it takes a bit of storytelling to connect the semantics, and there seems to be a complete lack of evidence for the supposed intermediate stages like ‘general name for southerners’.
Of course haria- has its own inner Germanic etymology (*xarja-z ‘troop, host, army’)
Connecting the last side of the triangle: Kümmel now argues that initial laryngeals were retained quite late in Indo-Iranian. I wonder if this Germanic term could not be a loanword from II *h₂arya-.
I wonder if this Germanic term could not be a loanword from II *h₂arya-.
But there are exact cognates in Baltic and Celtic pointing to *kor-jo- and also meaning ‘troop, army’. Even Greek has several personal names with Koiro- and the noun κοίρανος ‘warlord, ruler, commander’ (+ derivatives).
Thanks, Piotr. I never knew that Iron and Iran are false friends. Or that Alan and Iran are, it seems, trusty comrades. (Like the song says “Pinot Noir / Find out who your true friends are”)
They’re in Gothic, too, and therefore were most likely already present in Proto-Germanic – fitting the fact that they’ve undergone Grimm’s law (ríkr).
That’s like the ancient Egyptians calling the Euphrates “the river that runs the wrong way around”! 🙂
Yes, but they could be Celtic loans at least as easily as Germanic ones, AFAIK.
Intriguing idea, but apart from *kor-jo- there’s the sheer geographic distance. The temporal distance is a bit extreme, too: we’d need to postulate that westernmost “Scythian” kept *h₂ for 1500 years longer than the eastern side of II until Germanic had undergone Grimm’s law…
j: The Samic word for ‘south’, ‘southwest’, ‘west’ (the cardinal direction terms amusingly enough rotate depending on what direction rivers run in in an area)
Not only South Saami. Eastern Norwegian rivers traditionally define the local north-south axis. Nord i dala means “further up in the valley”. (I remember I first encountered this in an old yearbook for Den norske Turistforening “The Norwegian Accociation of Hikers”, where it was told as an amusing fact that the hostess of a certain mountain lodge in Jotunheimen was of the old school who still had the cardinal directions 180 degrees shifted, since the valley fell to the north.) I’ve never looked into North Swedish usage, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s the same there.
Riverine coordinates are a standard alternative to egocentric and absolute ones in various languages. I believe m-l has said that the Tsimshianic-speaking cultures she studies use riverine coordinates, and in Hawaiian-flavored English they have seen some use as well.
On Larry Niven’s Ringworld, a huge ring spinning around its sun, as big as the Earth’s orbit and a million miles wide, with gazillions of hominins of many species living on it, the standard directions established by the first explorers from Earth are spinward (the way the Ring turns), antispinward, port (left when facing spinward), and starboard (right when facing spinward).
Nahanarvali: the bastards keep bugging me and I’ve been wondering if they could be Balto-Slavic:
naha- would be the equivalent of the Slavic preposition & prefix *na ‘on’ with ‹h› representing the acute (glottalization); Lith. nuo ‘from’, Prussian no, na ‘on’ are the same thing
naru- Narew river (I think it’s related to Slavic *noriti ‘submerge’, *po-norvъ ‘burrowing worm/slug’, Lith. nerti ‘dive, submerge’)
-(a)l- adjectival suffix (cf. Slavic *-lъ found e.g. in the resultative/perfect participle and in a few old adjectives like *milъ, Germanic *-laz)
So the name would mean: [those living] on the Narew.
Additionally their deities’ name makes better sense in Baltic than in Germanic (unless it’s a Germanic without Grimm’s law).
What do the more knowledgeable think?
Eastern Norwegian rivers traditionally define the local north-south axis. Nord i dala means “further up in the valley”.
Which is a bit different from the Sami usage: direction terms there keep the same meaning on both sides of the watershed division, so glosses like “left of downstream” won’t work. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they’re defined with respect to the reindeer herding areas, which are themselves (usually) defined with respect to major rivers.
The Atlantic coast up to at least Magerøya was “always” held by the Norse though (already by the time the Sami languages arrived), so the Atlantic coast and its north-west-ish flowing rivers might never have been super relevant. Even if we supposed that there once were Atlantic-side Sami-speaking groups who e.g. used nuorti to mean ‘right of downstream’ = ‘west’ ~ standard Northern Sami ‘east’, that probably would have gotten wiped out after the rise of reindeer nomadism in the Middle Ages.
we’d need to postulate that westernmost “Scythian” kept *h₂ for 1500 years longer than the eastern side of II until Germanic had undergone Grimm’s law
No need to wait that long: early IE *h₂ gets loaned as *k into Uralic, and Anatolian /ḫ/ as /kʰ ~ k/ into Greek. The same could in principle work for Germanic (likewise even Baltic).
Celtic and Greek cognates however sound like a stronger counterargument. Direct loaning is indeed not really an option, and even mediated loaning doesn’t work if these show *o.
“On Larry Niven’s Ringworld, a huge ring spinning around its sun, as big as the Earth’s orbit and a million miles wide, with gazillions of hominins of many species living on it, the standard directions established by the first explorers from Earth are spinward (the way the Ring turns), antispinward, port (left when facing spinward), and starboard (right when facing spinward).”
Marc Miller’s Traveller uses coreward, rimward, spinward, and trailing over a significant portion of the galaxy. Although it doesn’t address distances port/north or starboard/south of the galactic plane.
What do the more knowledgeable think?
That’s not me, but I like it. I gave up trying to make it work with Germanic. *nēhwa- “near”.
The Atlantic coast up to at least Magerøya was “always” held by the Norse though (already by the time the Sami languages arrived), so the Atlantic coast and its north-west-ish flowing rivers might never have been super relevant.
I should say that the riverine system as far as I know was purely Southeast Norwegian, used in the watersheds emptying into the Skagerrak, where the rivers mosty run parallel, just as in Northern Sweden. In western and northern Norway, north was always along the coast. (Also, I have no idea if these local systems were all-encompassing. The seafaring coastal population obviously maintained the knowledge of the celestial directions and saw the litoral directions as a practical local adaptation. I suspect this to have been the case even for many inland dwellers with the riverine directions.)
Re: Nahanarvali. Beware of lookalikes!
A. Is there any reason to locate the Nahanarvali on the Narew?
B. Slavic tribal names derived from rivers (with or without a prepositional prefix) almost invariably end in -jane (pl.). As for the Balts, the usual ethnonymic suffix is -iai. No such names end in -al-, and the suffix *-lo- forms deverbal adjectives (*milъ and Lith. míelas ‘nice, dear’ are not exceptions: *meiH- ‘ripen, flourish’ was a verb root). As for prefixes, one could expect po- (as in the name of the Polabians), possibly nad- or za-, but hardly na-.
C. The early Slavic name of the Narew was *Nary (gen. *Narъve) — an ū-stem (like *kry, *krъve ‘blood’). In Tacitus’s time, this would have been *Nārū (gen. *Nāruwe). I don’t think one could expect to find the development *Nāruwjāne (?) > *Nāruwljāne so early — /l/-epenthesis is a late, dialectal development, so such a source of the /l/ in Nahanarvali can also be ruled out.
Good point.
In the meantime, I found (and already can’t find the source anymore) that an exact cognate of κοίρανος, Herjann, was an epithet of Óðinn.
Is Tacitus the only source for the name Naharvali?
Have we considered the possibility of a isolated band of peripatetic narwhals?
Nahanarvali could be a name formed from a town.
-l’ – is quite common Slavic ending for towns – Yaroslavl, Pereyaslavl, Przemyśl.
The hypothetical town on Narev would have been called something like Nanarevl’ (Slavicized form).
If Nahanaruali is the Roman transcription, and if it is Germanic, then perhaps “People at [nigh] the little narrows”? How often does “narrows” refer to passes and other land features?
Is there any reason, besides the name, to associate a branch of the Lugii with the Narew?
-l’ – is quite common Slavic ending for towns – Yaroslavl, Pereyaslavl, Przemyśl.
Nope. The ending is *-jь < *-jos. In Yaroslavl’ and Pereyaslavl’ the -l- is “intrusive”: in many dialects (East and partly South Slavic) an epenthetic lateral was inserted between a labial (*m, *p, *b, *v) and /j/, or rather */j/ came to be pronouced [ʎ] after labials. This is why Russian and Ukrainian have земля́ while Polish has ziemia, Czech země, and Upper and Lower Sorbian zemja. In Przemyśl, the -l- is not a suffix but part of the personal name (Przemysł) to which the possessive suffix *-jь was added.
Even assuming for the sake of the argument that /l/-epenthesis is oder than most people think, the lateral should directly follow the labial.
Greg P.: Have we considered the possibility of a isolated band of peripatetic narwhals?
I was going to suggest an isolated band of peripatetic Nahuatl, but I agree that your suggestion has more going for it.
Nope. The ending is *-jь < *-jos. In Yaroslavl’ and Pereyaslavl’ the -l- is “intrusive”: in many dialects (East and partly South Slavic) an epenthetic lateral was inserted between a labial (*m, *p, *b, *v) and /j/, or rather */j/ came to be pronouced [ʎ] after labials. This is why Russian and Ukrainian have земля́ while Polish has ziemia, Czech země, and Upper and Lower Sorbian zemja. In Przemyśl, the -l- is not a suffix but part of the personal name (Przemysł) to which the possessive suffix *-jь was added.
As visible in the city name Vladimir (where the epenthesis never happened, and the ending ultimately disappeared) and, possibly, Ryazan’ and Voronezh (though in both cases there are other competing etymologies not involving personal names).
Celtic-type coins (staters) minted in Poland in areas associated with the Lugii show two goddesses, identified by Andrałojć & Andrałojć (2014, “The unknown face of the Lugian Federation – Celtic coinage in the Polish lands”) with a shield-carrying Athena (= Alcis; Alkis/Alkidemos are known epithets of Athene at Pella, Macedon) and Nehalennia (seated upon a boat, like her Zeelandic prototype). The authors suspect that the “twin gods” whose priests wore “female attire” were in fact female themselves. The Lugian Federation seems to have been ethnically mixed (at least at the time it was established), possibly with Celtic refugees from Northern Gaul and the Danubian/Carpathian region having been integrated into the local East Germanic groups at the élite level. The A&A article (which can be found in English at Academia.edu) makes a lot of sense to me. I can only add that the name of the Lugii may simply mean ‘united, oath-bound’ cf. Goth. liuga ‘marriage’, OIr. luige ‘oath’. A connection can be suspected between the Nahanarvali and Nehalennia, but unfortunately the latter name, though well attested in Roman-period inscriptions, also remains obscure (Celtic *nāwā ‘boat’?).
I don’t think there’s a historical reason to precisely locate them anywhere in, roughly speaking, present day’s Poland (except that not near the sea coast as it was occupied by other, non-Lugian peoples). The Lugii are described as a “great people”, “immense host” (so not county-sized tribelets I assume). Well, the Roman interest in peoples they didn’t directly border and weren’t at war with wasn’t particularly high.
As for ‘prepositional’ prefixes in Slavic tribe names, there was even czres – if Czrezpienianie happened not to be attested, who would’ve thought? 🙂 Apart from Slavic, there’s no nad in Balto-Slavic afaik, so if they weren’t Slavic, they can hardly be expected to use the Slavic innovative preposition. It appears Lithuanian has prie in this meaning but na isn’t a bad candidate (and closely tied to nad etymologically). The prefixes would be constricted by whatever prepositions were present to them to describe locations relative to rivers.
I wasn’t operating by the assumption it would be a good pre-Slavic/pre-attested-Baltic name, rather a wayward branch — I think it highly probable Balto-Slavic was more varied than just Western Baltic, Eastern Baltic and Slavic before events like the Hunnic invasion and the Slavic expansion wiped out other branches.
As for the use of the reflexes of *-los I was expecting the criticism — indeed it most often creates deverbal adjectives in IE languages — but then there’s also Latin nubilus ‘cloudy’, Greek χθαμαλός ‘low’, -alas diminutives in Lithuanian like draugalas. Admittedly I don’t know of any geographical derivates containing it. From this point of view, it would be more convincing if an adequate IE verb could be found to derive the word from. Or a common noun.
EDIT: Andrałojć? Very strange-sounding surname, I thought it was some Serbian-Sorbian crossbreed before a quick google search told me it’s of Lithuanian origin.
Lithuanian names with the (originally patronymic) suffix -aitis are Polonised with -ojć. Andralaitis is, I think, a variant of Andriulaitis, Andriukaitis (all from Andrius). In Polish the surname is a unisex one (which is why both authors of the article use the same form), but of course in Lithuanian the wife of Mr. X-aitis would be Mrs. X-aitienė.
They’re certainly causing a commotion…
Even assuming for the sake of the argument that /l/-epenthesis is oder than most people think
I was going to change “oder” to “older” but then it occurred to me it might be a riverine pun.
I was going to change “oder” to “older” but then it occurred to me it might be a riverine pun.
We have a winner!
The Nahrwhal/Nahuatl stuff being a distant third.
I was going to change “oder” to “older” but then it occurred to me it might be a riverine pun.
That’s a Neisse pun.
I was going to change “oder” to “older” but then it occurred to me it might be a riverine pun.
I try to avoid those Inn jokes.
Oh, on Proto-Germanic *ā, I forgot a lengthy conference handout by Eugen Hill from January 2014 which argues in considerable detail that where and there – just two words, though common ones – had this rare phoneme as the result of a regular lengthening of monosyllabic words in *-r, which happened in a total of three words (the third being here, which incidentally solves the mystery of “*ē₂“). I’ve summarized it here, with a link to the original.
The guesstimate timeframe Janhunen gives doesn’t seem to line up well with the northeastern Corded Ware scenario. If late Corded Ware is circa 2350 BCE, that puts it during the process of differentiation between Magyar-Mansi and Mainstream Finno-Ugric (I’m calling it mainstream only in hindsight, of course). Presumably the Corded Ware Uralic speakers would be the latter. But this ruins the neat east-to-west migration model that Janhunen argues for. If Proto-Finno-Khantic was spoken in roughly Estonia or so, that would require that Khanty, Komi, Mari, and Mordvin are all later reverse migrations back eastward.
Oh, on Proto-Germanic *ā, I forgot a lengthy conference handout by Eugen Hill from January 2014
If I’m right about another source of “Late” PGmc. *ā (by “late” I mean later than Verner’s Law), the phoneme was not so rare (though still pretty marginal, more like Mod.Eng. /ʒ/ or /ɔɪ/ than /p/ or /aʊ/).
I’m awaiting it with bāted breath 🙂
OK, it’s basically *-osr-ˈ > *-azr- > *-ār- in some words.
The guesstimate timeframe Janhunen gives doesn’t seem to line up well with the northeastern Corded Ware scenario.
Janhunen’s specific family tree is … mildly put, to be taken with a pinch of salt. It seems to be particular to this one article, and to be based solely on perceived innovations in the basic numeral system. There are people who are sceptical about the traditional Ugric or Ob-Ugric (me included), but I’m pretty sure Janhunen is the only person ever to have proposed “Finno-Khantic”, and also in fairly limited company in proposing Hungarian-Mansi. Focusing on other individual features would easily generate tens of similarly weird new family trees (e.g. you could base one on just the reflexes of the “palatal spirant” *ď).
Which then of course puts a whole additional fudge factor to any timeframe guesstimates as well.
Fair enough. But not to put too fine a point on it, any of the specific details of Janhunen’s Uralic family tree strike me as quite negotiable, e.g. maybe it’s not Finno-Khantic exactly. But one thing that is an important theme in his article is that various forms of evidence are consistent with a model of gradual but consistent Uralic migration from east to west. But it’s logically impossible to square that with Uralic speakers in northeast Corded Wareistan 4300 years ago unless you shift back the time depth of principal Uralic branches a lot.
So it’s pick two out of three: major branches of Uralic diverged less than 4300 years ago; Uralic spread consistently from east to west; northeastern Corded Ware people spoke Uralic.
“So it’s pick two out of three: major branches of Uralic diverged less than 4300 years ago; Uralic spread consistently from east to west; northeastern Corded Ware people spoke Uralic.”
Number 3 is obviously false. So, Uralic spread consistentently and quickly, less than 4300 years ago.
JC: I believe m-l has said that the Tsimshianic-speaking cultures she studies use riverine coordinates
That’s right. This is a mountainous area divided by two major rivers (the Nass and the Skeena) running roughly parallel to each other and emptying into the Pacific Ocean. Each of the river valleys is home to a different ethnic group. In each language variety a number of morphemes refer to travel on the river and to traditional village locations fronting the river and backed by the slopes. Words referring to directions upstream and downstream have been coopted to mean Northward and Southward respectively when referring to modern travel to and from the area by car or plane, largely ignoring the river.
This is why Russian and Ukrainian have земля́ while Polish has ziemia, Czech země, and Upper and Lower Sorbian zemja.
And in Zemblan, there has been a further epenthesis, perhaps influenced by or influencing Early Modern English Nova Zembla (still so in Dutchland, it seems).
Rick, I agree that seems likely. But I interpreted (perhaps misinterpreted) comments above by Trond Egen and David Marjanović as saying that we should expect Uralic to have been spoken in late northeastern Corded Ware areas, and I was trying vainly to fit that premise together with Janhunen’s account.
Oh, sorry. Corded Ware first, Uralic later.
Yesterday, in Nature:
(Full text available at the link.)
The find is from a Srubnaya (i.e. Post-Yamnaya) graveyard in Samara from around 3800 BP, after the eastward spread of Corded Ware had brought European Farmer genes to the Central Steppe, so I guess it’s possible that the aggressive form of the Plague emerged in Europe. A Central Asian origin seems more probable, though, given the diversity of Yersinia pestis strains in rodents in the region.
Thanks for the update!
I realised after posting that the most recent plague discussion was in the thread CALVERT WATKINS, RIP, starting from here.
They say that the virus is genetically very close to the root of the tree — but stop just short of suggesting that these deaths were part of the very epidemic that first spread the bubonic plague and gave rise to all later flea-transmitted strains.
In China the old neolithic cultures disappeared around 2000 BCE, with signs of depopulation, before new cultures associated with the historical kingdoms and dynasties emerged. The Harappan cities were abandoned in the period 1900-1700 BCE. In the same period BMAC centres decreased sharply in size. The Hittites took over Hatti, Assyria contracted and consolidated, and Mesopotamia reorganized, with the final demise of Sumer and the rise of Babylonia. Around 1700 BCE Egypt’s Middle Kingdom broke down and the Minoan civilization went through an abrupt decline and then repopulation. These events aren’t exactly contemporaneous, but it wouldn’t have to be one big pandemic disaster. The Black Death kept coming back for centuries.
If the plague is supposed cause, that provides a (weak; statistical, of the kind that Karl Popper never managed to understand) prediction: The die-off would be expected to begin in China, since that has been where the plague bacterium had an endemic reservoir in black rats.
On a purely linguistic point, “black death” and “bubonic plague” are frequently treated as synonyms; however, the bubonic disease is only one possible form of plague infection. “Black death” probably refers to the even deadlier (and nearly as common) pneumonic form of Yersinia pestis infection, which features copious coughing up of black blood. Ignorant of this fact, writers trying to make sense of the name commonly attribute the adjective “black” to describing the coloration of buboes, but this would be better described as the “purple death,” to match the usual color of intense inflammation. (For comparison, one of the early Spanish names used for yellow fever, another one of the three deadliest epidemic diseases in history, was “el vomito negro.”)
Brett: The die-off would be expected to begin in China, since that has been where the plague bacterium had an endemic reservoir in black rats.
Yes. Though I understood the paper as saying Central Asia has the largest diversity of strains endemic in rodents.
I agree that (what should be) uncapitalized ‘black death’ is used loosely and confusingly, often just as a more dramatic word for “plague”. In the above I used capitalized ‘Black Death’ as “the Late Mediaeval Plague Pandemic & the Lesser Outbreaks in Its Aftermath”. Not sure about the argument about ‘black’, though. The word had a wider range, and ‘purple’ wasn’t part of the vernacular pallette yet.
In a 2000-1700 BCE plague scenario, the Indo-Iranians moved south into depopulated regions. So why would the Indo-Iranians thrive when others succumbed to the plague? Several reasons are possible, maybe in combination. First, 300 years is a long time. Having been exposed to the plague for 10 generations, the steppe nomads had developed resistance to the plague. If so, we should be able to see it in their genes. Second, while more settled cultures adapted to the new situation by concentrating on food production, the nomads, being dependent on long distance trade, had to increase their range to fill the gaps in the network. Third, being inherently mobile, they might simply have been better at filling whatever gap that presented itself.
If the pandemic plague started in China in 2000 BCE and reached the Eastern Mediterranean in 1700 BCE, we would expect a ¨~1700 BCE depopulation in Europe as well. This could have led to a new wave of Indo-Europeans from the steppe. The Beaker culture ended around 1800 BCE, the Unetice culture gave way to the Tumulus culture around 1600 BCE, and the beginning of the Nordic Bronze Age is conventionally dated to 1700 BCE. But that’s hardly evidence of anything. I just picked cultural changes that happened to fit the timeline. I don’t know of any evidence for dramatic upheaval or depopulation.
To continue this discussion with myself: Based on the extant lines of flea-adapted Yersinia pestis the paper suggests that the adaptation to transmission by fleas and hence the potential for aggressive virulence in humans took place as early as 4500-5500 BP. This would mean that there may have been even earlier outbreaks of the plague, giving the steppe population even longer time to develop resistance.
Also, as my son just noted: A 2000 BCE depopulation event in China may actually speak against China as the point of origin of the plague. Maybe we shouldn’t look for the first massive depopulation but for the region that seems least affected by the first pandemic.
Yersinia pestis is a bacterium.
There’s evidence for deforestation causing the decline of the Indus Valley civilization. The BMAC seems to have partly depended on trade with the Indus valley.
David M.: Yersinia pestis is a bacterium.
I know. Stupid, stupid mistake.
There’s evidence for deforestation causing the decline of the Indus Valley civilization. The BMAC seems to have partly depended on trade with the Indus valley.
Yes. There’s also evidence for draught in China and a generally deteriorating climate. But one thing doesn’t preclude the other.
Stupid, stupid mistake
I think I made it because I was thinking of mentioning the likelihood that other diseases, many of which are virus-borne, spread across Eurasia at the same time, following the first globalization. The flu, measles, small pox, polio, the common cold… Some of the populations that came in contact were deeply separated and would have had very different endemic pathogens.
Having been exposed to the plague for 10 generations, the steppe nomads had developed resistance to the plague. If so, we should be able to see it in their genes.
This reminds me of one of the many surprising things I’m learning from Reich’s Who We Are and How We Got Here
: I knew that the sickle-cell mutation thrived in West Africa because one copy of it protects against malaria, but I did not know that it arose three times independently — in the far west (e.g., Senegal), in west-central Africa (e.g., Nigeria), and in central Africa (“whence the mutation spread to eastern Africa and southern Africa via the migrations associated with the Bantu expansion”). This is evidence that the rate of migration among those populations “has been extraordinarily low since the need for these mutations arose.”
I had no idea.
This open-access paper recently found the reason why leprosy disappeared from Europe in the 16th century: basically, all the susceptible people had died out. Natural selection.
The Black Death also depends on the Black Rat, which can live in cities, and a mutation in the rat flea, which allowed it to eat grain as well as blood.
Ole Benedictow’s book goes into that.
I doubt that the fleas would evolve that trait before the rats colonized the cities, or at least the rural granaries. Also, the closest relatives of Black Rats come from Southeast Asia, so it’s likely the Black Rats themselves come from there.
I doubt that Yersinia pestis would evolve hyper-virulent strains in relatively small and/or relatively isolated populations.
…That doesn’t sound like it’s possible in a single mutation. Do you mean a mutation that improved the ability to live with rats, or something like that?
Granaries are not a recent invention, though. Here’s a Neolithic one from France with massacred people in it.
Of course it would occasionally, but it wouldn’t generally spread before just killing that whole population like Ebola.
Jernalderdrøm (Iron Age Dream) by Steinar Løding
This has nothing to do with corded ware or plagues, but I’m not going to make a separate post about it, and since Trond is in this thread I thought I’d ask if he knows anything about this “giant literary project” that has “garnered comparisons to James Joyce, Hermann Broch, Umberto Eco, and Thomas Pynchon.”
Granaries are more important in farming cultures than in herding cultures.
Between the Southeast Asian origin of the Black Rat, and the preference for cities and rural granaries, I suspect Yersinia pestis met the Black Rat in a farming culture, probably one with cities, closer by trade routes to Southeast Asia. Not in a herding culture on the Volga.
As for the fleas, Benedictow, *The Black Death* page 20:
“It turned out that the fleas of the black rat had actually developed the ability to live off grain and grain debris, being dependent on blood only for laying eggs.”
draught in China — the common cold is a killer, they really should have put in better doors.
Hat: Jernalderdrøm (Iron Age Dream) by Steinar Løding
Oh, that one! I actually briefly thought of it when you first pointed to The Untranslated. I read the first volume, Flukten til Ninive, when it came out, probably following (as I used to) the advice of Dagbladet’s late great critic Øystein Rottem. It was… overwhelming in its detailed account of the social and intestinal shortcomings of its protagonist on his mission to Ninive. I can’t remember the other layers of the novel, or if I finished it, but I think I must have, because it was before family life, or ageing eyes, or the Internet, or whatever, took me and I stopped reading demanding novels. The later volumes have gone under my radar.
draught in China — the common cold is a killer, they really should have put in better doors.
tt’s why they eventually built the Great Wall.
Marja Erwin: I suspect Yersinia pestis met the Black Rat in a farming culture, probably one with cities, closer by trade routes to Southeast Asia. Not in a herding culture on the Volga.
Agreed. But the nomadic herders who travelled those trade routes would have brought the two together — and into the wider world.
Thanks for the Løding report!
A new (open source) paper on the genetic affinities between the Battle Axe Culture in Scandinavia and the Corded Ware Culture: Malmström H et al. 2019: The genomic ancestry of the Scandinavian Battle Axe Culture people and their relation to the broader Corded Ware horizon. Proc. R. Soc. B 286: 20191528.
There’s no snappy abstract, so I’ll quote the discussion:
It’s getting too late for finer thinking. I’ll just note that we are in the period following the plague epidemic posited by Nicolás Rascovan et al: Emergence and Spread of Basal Lineages of Yersinia pestis during the Neolithic Decline (previously discussed in the RIP CALVERT WATKINS thread)..
PWC is not explained in the quote; I suppose it’s the Pitted-Ware Culture.
Yes. PWC = Pitted Ware, the Baltic neolithic harvesters. FBC = Funnel Beaker, the neolithic farmers of southern Scandinavia and Central Europe north of the loess belt.
It’s still few genomes, but it’s clear that there must have been large migrations into Scandinavia after the Battle Axe people. If one of these carried ((Pre-)Proto-)Germanic, the Battle-Axe Culture could have been something else. Since other peoples with Corded Ware DNA went on to form Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic, BAC could be Para-Indo-Iranian as well. Or they could have kept the Ante-IE language that was lost in the more Eastern branches of CWC.
Interesting, then, that nobody has yet reported evidence of an IE substrate in Germanic (compared to several such attempts for Greek).
There was a paper or a thesis sometime in the noughties claiming to find evidence for an archaic IE substrate in Norwegian river names. I don’t think I ever read it, only an interview with the linguist(s) behind it. I should try to dig it up.
I believe Scandinavian Bronze Age was Germanic.
There were several subsequent waves of migration, but it was mostly Germanic peoples displacing other Germanic peoples – from the continent to Scandinavia and back.
For example, I’ve read somewhere that modern Danes are actually Swedes and the Swedes are actually Danes…
Me: I should try to dig it up.
No luck yet. There are very few opaque names in Southern Scandinavia, and there seems to be more clout to the opinion that most of those are of the same age as known Germanic names, but from words and roots that have been irretrievably lost.
SFReader: I believe Scandinavian Bronze Age was Germanic.
Don’t we all! But we should adjust beliefs to the data. We know that there was a major migration event at the start of the Battle Axe Culture, but also that this wasn’t the final wave of migration — and that any later wave of similar size would have been equally able to bring a new language. And until there’s genetic evidence to the contrary, there’s no lack of events that may be interpreted as migrations, both before and after the beginning of the Bronze Age:
Ca. 2300 BCE: The transition to Late Neolithicum brings a new era of monumental cist graves.
Ca. 1700 BCE: The start of the Bronze Age introduces the chariot and tumulus graves to Scandinavia — arguably diagnostic features of Indo-Europeanism.
Ca. 1100 BCE: The transition from the older to the younger Nordic Bronze Age is marked by cremation burials and even urnfields.
Ca. 800 BCE: The arrival of the Iron Age is associated with the Celtic expansion in Central Europe, but might have been mediated by Germanic tribes up here.
Finally, ca. 200 CE: Etienne has told us that Östen Dahl believes Germanic was formed on the continent and came to Scandinavia with Roman military technology. The latest possible date since this is the era of the first runestones in Proto-Norse.
Genetics will soon help fill out the picture. There’s no gene for Germanic, but with so little trace of a substrate in Scandinavian, the most sudden and interruptive population event will arguably be a likely candidate for its arrival.
There was a paper or a thesis sometime in the noughties claiming to find evidence for an archaic IE substrate in Norwegian river names. I don’t think I ever read it, only an interview with the linguist(s) behind it. I should try to dig it up.
There was more than a millennium between BAC and pre-proto-Germanic as I understand, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the CWC languages were directly ancestral and organically transformed into proto-Germanic? Archaic but organically related?
If we assume that the ancestors of the Finns came from the East in a time frame which can be relatively precisely defined by archaeological artifacts and DNA, and acquired numerous “ancient Germanic” borrowings, would it possibly shift the time frame of pre-proto-Germanic to the earlier epoch?
“Pre-Proto-Germanic” is everything from the split of the Germanic branch from its closest documented relative (probably Italo-Celtic) to the last common ancestor of all documented Germanic varieties (apparently around the beginning of the Roman era). That covers thousands of years, and a lot of change in the language.
My question was different though. I understand that the phonetic evolution of the proto-German can be traced back more or less to 500 BCE. And that there are reported archaic IE vestiges in the area hydronimics but we don’t know if they may be traced to a direct ancestor or an “uncle” of the earliest pre-proto-German about which we have a more or less detailed understanding.
So I wondered if the phonetic forms of old Germanic borrowings into Finnic, when juxtaposed with the archaelogical and genetic evidence about the arrival of the ancestors of the Finns, may gives us substantially earlier dates for the oldest known forms of pre-proto-Germanic.
But it does without saying that even earlier, and not characterized at all, forms should have existed. I wasn’t talking about these unknowns. I was just try to understand what the earliest breadcrumbs of the “known”.
Oh yes, they can, and it’s been done. In the URCHIN thread we discussed Mika Heikkila’s massive thesis on the timeline of changes in Finnic and Germanic — also in relation to articles on the Uralic expansion by Petri Kallio and others.
Sorry, his name is Mikko Heikkilä. The first name was a brainfart, the final vowel a phone finger failure. The link is broken too. I didn’t bother to check the big pdf on my phone. Here’s one that works.
And since it’s in Swedish, I should quote the abstract:
I wonder why a guy with clearly Finnish name and surname would write his dissertation in Swedish at the Finnish university.
Checked the dissertation output of University of Helsingfors (sic!).
Out of first 100 dissertations 9 are written in Finnish, 2 in Swedish, 89 in English.
Both Swedish dissertations are written by people with Swedish names and surnames, so I assume they are Finnish Swedes.
Update: answer found in preface to his dissertation. He says he started as doktorand i nordiska språk at Tammerfors universitet.
So his major is Nordic linguistics and his dissertation is about Nordic linguistics, then it makes sense that he would write it in Swedish.
I remember him saying something about it in the Swedish preface, I think it was a desire to support the place of Swedish in Finnish Academia and non-English in international academia — and, I think, a protest against the idea that Finns shouldn’t learn Swedish as a matter of national pride. Tammerfors universitet is the University of Tampere, in the most fennophone of the big Finnish cities, so that is unlikely to have anything to do with it. The traditional Swedish language institution of higher education is Åbo akademi.
While Germanic is featured, there’s much more about Finnic and Saami.
…where lots of people find it easier to read Swedish than Finnish.
IIRC Heikkilä’s main stated motivation for writing in Swedish, though I am not sure where this might be found in print, has been to make the work more accessible to Scandinavian researchers and North Germanicists in more general; i.e. to get them to stop ignoring the rich amount of evidence loanwords into Uralic provide for the reconstruction and chronology of Germanic (pre)history. There’s an unfortunate tradition for Uralic research to get kind of siloized by language barriers and be unaccessible to other researchers even when the results would be relevant to other disciplines.
Of course, though that objective alone might have suggested English.
An interesting breakthrough for the Single Grave Culture, an important part of the CWC continuum in around Northern Germany. They first appear in Jutland, chopping up the forests for pastures, and spread South, West, and, eventually, East. The bones of their dead are mostly gone due to the area’s acidic soils and the millennia that passed, but the contours of the skeletons are more or less clear from the depressions in the soil. In Eastern Denmark, there is a 200 years old “dark age” around 2600 BC when the originally marine forager Pitted Ware peoples are gone, and forests start growing everywhere, before an offshoot of Single Grave peoples moves in. Due to a quirk in the local burial customs, some of their bones survive – and attest to bloody battles between different Single Ware clans. Still, the DNA in those bones decayed a lot. Yet in the new paper, they extracted reasonable DNA yields from several bones, including one really excellent genome. Just like other Corded Ware skeletons, their DNA is heavy on the Steppe component with just a little of content from the Neolithic cultures which predated them (but mitochondrial DNA is heavily Neolithic in composition, indicating that the invading men took local wives).
But the greater surprise is the Y-chromosomal DNA. Most known Steppe Yamnaya-continuum males known to date are R1b’s, while most CWC males are R1a’s, leaving many researchers perplexed. The overall DNA composition leaves no doubt that the fathers of the Corded Ware came from the Steppe, but so far there were no finds of the |right” Y-chromosomes on the Steppe. Well, with Danish Single Grave it’s something else entirely. They are R1b’s of an unusual archaic lineage R1b-V1636 (R1b1a2) which has been seen before in the foothills of Northern Caucasus in the graves of supposed predecessors of the Yamnaya (Progress 2 burials as described by Wang 2019 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-08220-8 ). So here we have another flavor of Steppe Y-chromosomes which were present “before” Yamnaya and after it, but not yet “during it”, confirming that our sampling of Steppe Y-DNAs to date must have been biased, missing a segment of the genetic variety.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0244872
Amazing what we’re learning with these new methods!
Ooh… must read.
The dark years around 2600 BP is very likely the aftermath of a plague epidemic.
dark years around 2600 BP
about 2800 to 2600, BCE rather than BP of course. They cite several chapters of a just-published book, The Pitted Ware Culture on Djursland Supra-regional significance and contacts in the Middle Neolithic of southern Scandinavia. Aarhus University Press and East Jutland Museum; 2020, and an old bog pollen analysis in Aabye B. Norddjurslands landskabsudvikling gennem 7000 år. Belyst ved pollenanalyse og bestemmelse af støvindhold i højmosetørv. Antikvariske Studier. 1985;7: 60–84.
I meant BCE too!
The title of the the latter reference means “The landscape development of North Djursland through 7000 years. Illuminated by pollen analysis and determination of dust content in peat.” If it’s not online, I don’t think I have easy access to it.
There is actually a murky period around the transition to the Iron Age, i.e. 900-700 BCE or so, which could be the result of another epidemic, but that has nothing to do with the arrival of the Single Graves.
Dmitry: They are R1b’s of an unusual archaic lineage R1b-V1636 (R1b1a2) which has been seen before in the foothills of Northern Caucasus in the graves of supposed predecessors of the Yamnaya (Progress 2 burials as described by Wang 2019 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-08220-8 ). So here we have another flavor of Steppe Y-chromosomes which were present “before” Yamnaya and after it, but not yet “during it”, confirming that our sampling of Steppe Y-DNAs to date must have been biased, missing a segment of the genetic variety.
Intriguingly, we learn that this lineage was recently reported also from a genome in Anatolia, referring to Skourtanioti E. et al. Genomic History of Neolithic to Bronze Age Anatolia, Northern Levant, and Southern Caucasus Cell. 2020. Unfortunately the full paper doesn’t seem to be available online.
R1b-V1636 is still the widest spread in the Middle East, with its different lines there converging about 4,000 years ago, as well as among the Dungan whose paternal lines are often Central Asian / Iranian / Scythian
https://www.yfull.com/tree/R-V1636/
It’s a lot less common in Europe now, although there are some Nordic carriers too.
I know that it’s a fast moving field, but is there an up to date, accessible book summarizing the research on this genetic tracking of prehistoric peoples, especially in Inner Eurasia? The last thing I read about this general topic must be 20 years old by now.
Exactly 20: Cavalli-Sforza, 2000.
A good place to start catching up would probably (still!) be David Reich’s Who We Are and How We Got Here, discussed by Hat himself in Indo-European and the Yamnaya (spurring a long thread with interesting diversions and cross-references to this and others).
David Reich’s Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past (see this post).
Edit: Pipped!
Ordered. Thx.
185 comments and lots of genetics, and not a single reference to how is babby formed?!? Shame on all of us.
Cavalli-Sforza, 2000
“Old Battle Horse” was my inspiration too (and a kind of a “scientific grandfather” – as a teacher of my teacher), but a lot of things turned out to be not what people thought in 2000. Even Reich’s book is getting outdated fast – although more in important details than in the principal concepts.
It\s a rich day for Corded Ware ancient DNA today – a paper on Fatyanovo Culture is just out, haven’t checked yet what may be new in there. Later.
Nevermind, we discussed the Fatyanovo paper (Saag 2020) a few months ago when it came out as a preprint
http://languagehat.com/they-perished-like-avars/#comment-3969536
The final version is here:
https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/7/4/eabd6535
@David Marjanović: Primed by the topic of genetics, I initially misread “185” as “18S.”
And in open access!
Heh. 🙂
Me: Intriguingly, we learn that this lineage was recently reported also from a genome in Anatolia, referring to Skourtanioti E. et al. Genomic History of Neolithic to Bronze Age Anatolia, Northern Levant, and Southern Caucasus Cell. 2020. Unfortunately the full paper doesn’t seem to be available online.
It turned up in my inbox. Thanks!
Dmitry: R1b-V1636 is still the widest spread in the Middle East, with its different lines there converging about 4,000 years ago […]
I’ll first note that there must be an error in the paper:
Also the lists of specimens are somehat mangled in the report. For the site of Arslantepe, the paper says that 22 individuals were sampled for genetic analysis, and then goes on to list them.
First there are seven found in diverse locations, of which four are mid-early third millennium cal. BCE, and the rest are mid-early 4th millennium cal.BCE.
The next group is 11 individuals from a single pit full of skeletal remains, mainly skulls, many of which display signs of trauma. Most of the dates are in the vicinity of 3300 cal. BCE, but a couple are older.
The problem is that the list of 11 contains 15 individuals, but closer reading reveals that the final four are misplaced in this section, since they each have individual context information that doesn’t describe the mass deposit. Two of these (incl. the female tagged ART038) seem to belong around 3300 cal. BCE. Two are older, on par with the older group among the first seven.
Both errors look like typos/editing errors in the report rather than real mix-ups that would have changed the results. It means, however, that there’s not much to learn about the individual from its archaeological context.
I haven’t bothered to go into the other lists in such detail.
weird, a female down in the list indeed. The insistence that their R1b-V1636 was deeply divergent from anything in the Steppe and hence probably not from the steppes at all is also hard to stomach since all other known ancient R1b-V1636’s are from the Steppe area (two from N Caucasus and one from the Volga basin, they are all plotted in PLOS Single Grave paper. These ancient chromosomes aren’t directly descended from one another and their shared root is somewhat deeper in time, but not much deeper than the oldest Northern Caucasus specimen (which in turn predate Arslantepe by about a millennium). So I’d say, on the contrary, it’s more reasonable at this point in time to describe R1b-V1636 as another Steppe marker.
I read that more as a careful hedge than insistence of deep divergence. Since the lineage broke off before anything sampled on the steppe to date, it’s no smoking gun. But I agree that there’s both a hot gun and smell of gunpowder. And I believe the authors do too, since they do list it under notable exceptions provid[ing] rather anecdotal but nonetheless important evidence for long distance mobility and extended Y-haplogroup diversity.
But I wonder what ‘anecdotal’ is doing there. Surely this is physical evidence collected in a formal manner. Do they think it means “isolated” or “disconnected”?
In my simplified view, although Y-haplogroups R, Q, and N may have emerged eons ago in the South-East Asia, and some branches of their tree are rich in the East, they were probably never a part of the spectrum in the Mediterranean or Near East until the formerly Eastern lineages started seeping in by the way of Northern Eurasia. Steppe or virgin Northern forest or tundra, but they just weren’t coming from the South of the Caucasus yet around 3,000 BCE
Yes. But I learned yesterday that the oldest R1b-chromosome found is from a 14000 year old Western Hunter-Gatherer from Villabruna in Italy.
They think it means “not the singulative of data“.
David M.: They think it means “not the singulative of data“.
It took me a week to realize what you meant by that. “Anecdote is the paucitive of data”! “A small number larger than one” is a weird but perfectly valid understanding of “not the singulative”, but I think you’re right.
Also: The misnumbered individual is starting to bother me. I’m pretty sure it’s just an editing error among the others in the list, but that’s no comfort. it’s been almost a year and a number of citations and no proof-read and corrected version has been published.
…no, I meant that “anecdotes” are “isolated data points that don’t constitute data even when put together”, reading data is not the plural of anecdote backwards.
Apparently nobody else has noticed. Write to the corresponding author and ask.
Done. Thanks.
Exitingly, I got a reply from the first author. We are now corresponding!
Excitingly, I got the clarifications:
– The table was not meant to contain 11 individuals, but the author agrees that it’s a reasonable reading of the preseding paragraph.
– Individual ART0398 is a sub-adult who was tentatively described as female by the physical anthropologist but securely determined as male by genetic analysis.
They’ll try to change the phrasing in the paper.
Kroonen and Iversen (in press) must be:
Rune Iversen & Guus Kroonen (2017): Talking Neolithic: Linguistic and Archaeological Perspectives on How Indo-European Was Implemented in Southern Scandinavia.
Me (way up):
We know that there was a major migration event at the start of the Battle Axe Culture, but also that this wasn’t the final wave of migration — and that any later wave of similar size would have been equally able to bring a new language. And until there’s genetic evidence to the contrary, there’s no lack of events that may be interpreted as migrations, both before and after the beginning of the Bronze Age:
Ca. 2300 BCE: The transition to Late Neolithicum brings a new era of monumental cist graves.
Ca. 1700 BCE: The start of the Bronze Age introduces the chariot and tumulus graves to Scandinavia — arguably diagnostic features of Indo-Europeanism.
Ca. 1100 BCE: The transition from the older to the younger Nordic Bronze Age is marked by cremation burials and even urnfields.
Ca. 800 BCE: The arrival of the Iron Age is associated with the Celtic expansion in Central Europe, but might have been mediated by Germanic tribes up here.
Finally, ca. 200 CE: Etienne has told us that Östen Dahl believes Germanic was formed on the continent and came to Scandinavia with Roman military technology. The latest possible date since this is the era of the first runestones in Proto-Norse.
Genetics will soon help fill out the picture. There’s no gene for Germanic, but with so little trace of a substrate in Scandinavian, the most sudden and interruptive population event will arguably be a likely candidate for its arrival.
A new study in preprint in the Son of Yamnaya.
A new downloadable preprint on BioRxiv (link from Dmitry):
Hugh McColl et al: Steppe Ancestry in western Eurasia and the spread of the Germanic Languages:
My reading so far:
There were indeed several “Indo-European” population movements into and within Scandinavia:
This paper sets the arrival of the Corded Ware/Battle Axe people ~4800 BP and say their ancestry was “Western Corded Ware” and the male lines predominantly R1-a. Archaeology has told us (but not in this paper) that their economy was based on animal husbandry.
Around 4400 BP there’s a new wave of “Bell Beaker” and R1-b ancestry. This would seem to reintroduce agriculture.
From 4000-3600 BP a population with mixed “Eastern Corded Ware” and Baltic Hunter-Gatherer ancestry shows up in southern Sweden and the Danish islands, bringing the Y-chromosome I, that would eventually become the most common in Scandinavia. They start spreading west- and northwards, blending into both the “Corded Ware” people of Norway and the “Bell Beaker” people of Jutland. It’s not yet possible to tell if or to which degree this happened gradually or as discrete events. The paper connects this population to the spread of cist graves and a new breed of sheep that I suppose are both part of the transition to Late Neolithicum as listed above, but I don’t know if the data are fine-grained enough to say for sure what came with the Bell Beaker “Southerners” and what with the “Easterners”. It seems that it took some time before East Scandinavian ancestry started blending into South Scandinavians in Denmark, but East and West Scandinavians started blending early enough that the groups arriving in Norway were mostly already admixed,
Anyway, the homogeneous Nordic Bronze Age culture developed within these blending-but-different populations, and it does seem that the East Scandinavians had the upper hand during that transition (including, but not mentioned in the paper, the introduction of tumulus graves and chariot imagery). Since the oldest Germanic loanwords in Finnic and Celtic loans in Germanic are dated to the late Bronze Age, Pre-Proto-Germanic must have been spoken at least from the Danish Isles to Southern Finland/Estonia, i.e. the genetically ~100% East Scandinavian regions.
No new migrations are detected with the transitions to the Late Bronze Age as defined above and the Iron Age. Rather, the structured populations stabilize around the admixtures that developed during the Bronze Age. But the “New” South Scandinavians now start spreading southwards into Germany, admixing with local populations and making it possible to discern between “Southern” and “Northern” South Scandinavians. These migrations aren’t dated, probably due to lack of genetic data from Germany, but could well have been very recent when the first Germanic peoples are mentioned by the Romans.
Something I really didn’t see coming: There was a Migration Era back-migration of Southern South Scandinavians into Southern Scandinavia, apparently completely replacing the population of the Danish Islands and Southern Sweden, i.e. the central realm of the later Danish kingdom. meaning that the Danes may have brought Proto-Norse from the south. This fits well with the middle part of Östen Dahl’s scenario,
The East Scandinavians retract to the Baltic islands and then all but disappears from Scandinavia before the Viking Age. It strikes me that the mythical island home of the Goths might actually have been Sealand, The “Gothic” Wielbark culture is definitely East Scandinavian, but there’s not enough data to hone in on the Scandinavian point of origin. Goths from graves in southern Europe have only Southern and Eastern European ancestry, suggesting that by the time of the historical Gothic migrations, the East Scandinavian founding population had been far outnumbered by conquered peoples and local recruits.
The Langobards and the Anglo-Saxons came from the same Southern South Scandinavian source population as the Danes. Only a few outliers had other Scandinavian ancestries.
The West Norse area is fairly untouched by Migration Era movements, meaning that a “Southern” Old Norse must have spread through trade and prestige rather than migrations. The genetic divide between South and West Scandinavians corresponds closely with the linguistic divide between East and West Scandinavian. (This is confusing enough that I think we should consider the usefulness of the terms.)
There’s a Viking Age movement of “Baltic” ancestry into Scandinavia and also of British and Irish ancestry into Norway. These are historically known processes. The former are presumably the Vends, but also slaves from trading & raiding in the east, the latter from trading & raiding in the west.
Thanks, this stuff is fascinating!
Agreed. Interesting stuff!
I paused here:
> Later in the Iron Age around 1700 BP, we find a southward push of admixed Eastern and Southern Scandinavians into areas including Germany and the Netherlands
Are they just moving too fast in the abstract? Or am I missing a nuance because they haven’t written well? Clearly there were Germans in Germany before 300 CE. Are they writing about a second movement south? Your longer version seems to say so, but I’m still hung up on this.
I glossed over that, but think it’s about a more westward push, toward the mouth of the Rhine. They suggest that the Roman Era Frisi were Celtic.
That begins to make sense of a whole lot of details, I think.
And southwards, toward the Danube.
As the Leiden School has been saying. Edit: ah, Guus Kroonen is the second author in the page-long list of authors.
Is the notion that the “Ostrogoths” and “Visigoths” that played an important role in Mediterranean-adjacent parts of Europe during and after the collapse of the Western Empire were almost exclusively assimilated recruits of non-Teutonic blood ancestry a new one, or has this been a theme for a while in relevant specialized scholarship?
I think the most common assumption has been that the Goths were a ruling elite with (some) Germanic ancestry while their subjects were mostly local.
So parallel to the Mitanni and the Varangians then.
They refer to lexical borrowing into “Finno-Saamic”. Isn’t that sloppy? Even if one accepts Finno-Saamic as a clade, which many don’t, this implies something like a borrowing into Proto-FS. My understanding is that Finnish and the Saami languages were distinct geographically and linguistically and borrowed from Germanic languages separately and maybe at different times. Since this is in the middle of what they describe, I wish they’d gotten an Uralicist into their team.
I agree. It’s why they mention both Finland and Estonia as having had Pre-Proto-Germanic speakers, but that argument would have been much clearer if they’d written “Proto-Finnic and Proto-Sami”.
A couple of other thoughts:
I’m wondering about the political situation outside the Limes. Were the expansive “Danes” political allies of Rome who were allowed to subjugate their neighbors in a bid to bring order, or did they take advantage of their southern and western neighbors being busy defending their borders with Rome, or both? (Should we look for a Latin etymology of ‘Dane’?)
The paper says that before the Germanic expansions described here, a distinct Eastern North Sea population formed from the amalgamation of Bell Beaker and Western Corded Ware groups. I would like to know more about the expansion of this people before the arrival of the later groups. I think it might be a factor on the western coast of Norway.
The East Scandinavians are interesting. For one, they come with a non-IE male line, which is pretty much unheard of in the age of IE expansions. All the more need to understand how they formed and how they got the Indo-European cultural package. If it’s true that they brought chariot imagery to Scandinavia not long after 2000 BCE, we should find them as part of a cultural chain from Sintashta, probably one that also includes bronze trade. I’ve speculated before that they are Baltic Pitted Ware harvesters that got indo-europeanized through trade and powerful by controlling the Baltic, but I don’t know if that works or if they were just overrun by some other group from the east.
The paper is centered on Denmark, which is natural given the available data, but to have hope of understanding the genesis of Germanic (and the peoples of northeast Europe), we need to understand population, power and prestige around the Baltic Sea from the beginning of the neolithic and at least through the Viking Age.
Quicquid id est, timeo Dan[…]is.
The problem with most burials in the areas further South and South-West of Eastern Denmark is that the soil acidy degraded ancient DNA.
In the preprint, an almost un-discussed tidbit which fascinated me was that a couple Iberian Visigoths were “half-Northerners” by DNA, but their Norther European component looked Slavic rather than Germanic.
There are also announcements of new posters to be presented at an archaeological conference on Bronze Age next month
https://www.transformeurope2budapest2024.com/copy-of-programme
which are on the much later great migrations era. One studies genetic shifts in V-VIII c. CE & reportedly claims genetic continuity of Prague culture (the earliest affected by the change) with the later Slavic cultures of Slovakia and Moravia. Another one more specifically connects the demographic shifts after Vth century with the influx of DNA from Northern Ukraine and adjacent areas of Belarus.
Something about being given something in trust?
No, I actually think the standard etymology “lowlander” < *dʰen- “lowland” fits better it they came from (say) the Lower Elbe than from Southern Sweden. But actually actually, I think the other standard etymology < *dʰenh₂- “flow” may work even better if interpreted as “river-lander”.
Both etymologies have been evoked for a homeland around modern Gothenburg, but that’s not big enough.
The lower Elbe doesn’t sound like a bad idea if Denmark is the March of the Danes as seen from Rome. And conveniently, there must have been a lot of ethnic back-and-forth in the Hamburg area to erase any onomastic traces of a Danish Urheimat. (Hamburg did later end up under the Danish crown, sort of, but that’s neither here nor there).
If the Saxons had pushed the Danes up to Jelling by the time Cassiodorus got there (or wrote down what the various Goths told him), it all fits!
Ancient reminder (with ensuing discussion) that Langobardic doesn’t actually look West Germanic at all and seems to be North Germanic instead.
Trond referred to the Osten Dahl hypothesis. I don’t know whether this is an up to date reflection of it, nor where you all stand, but for me this paper helped make sense if some of the arguments here by those who know enough to speak in shorthand.
I thought the language of the Longbeards was Semitic?
The latest thing here in Denmark is a big DNA study that claims two wholesale replacements, an early Yamnaya one in 3900 BCE and a later recension of Yamnaya (“Steppe”) in 2900 BCE. So when Östen Dahl posits an imposition of a single elite variety on lots of small “lands” with different Para-Germanic languages around 1000-500 BCE, ahead of the split into East/West/North, that actually sounds like a reasonable timeline if the 2900 BCE event brought some core IE dialect.
(Nice graphic here).
the language of the Longbeards was Semitic
but was it the same semitic language the tribe of dan brought to the lower elbe?
Awesome, and in open access!!!
Yes…
No.
1) Western Hunter-Gatherers (specifically Western, not Scandinavian or Baltic) throughout the Mesolithic (Maglemose, Kongemose & Ertebølle) and in the two oldest Neolithic individuals (one Funnel Beaker, one without context*; also one individual from the west coast of Sweden from the same time);
2) then, around 5900 cal. BP (3950 BCE, not 3900), an almost total replacement by Early European Farmers (almost all of whose WHG ancestry is not local) in the Early Neolithic (Funnel Beaker) and two of the three earliest Single Grave individuals (4600 cal. BP, 2650 BCE);
3) then (Single Grave begins around 4800 cal. BP, but there are no skeletons until 4600 cal. BP, the age of the three I just mentioned), a mostly complete replacement by Corded Ware people (most of whose EEF ancestry is not local but from Globular Amphora people; Y haplogroup R1a) who were also buried by the Battle Ax culture in Sweden;
4) then “an intermediate stage largely coinciding with the Dagger** epoch (around 4,300–3,700 cal. bp), in which Danish individuals cluster with central and western European LNBA individuals dominated by males with distinct sub-lineages of R1b-L51”;
5) then “a final stage from around 4,000 cal. BP onwards, in which a distinct cluster of Scandinavian individuals dominated by males with I1 Y-haplogroups appears (Extended Data Fig. 8e). Y chromosome haplogroup I1 is one of the dominant haplogroups in present-day Scandinavians, and we here document its earliest occurrence in an approximately 4,000-year-old individual from Falköping in southern Sweden (NEO220). The rapid increase in frequency of this haplogroup and associated genome-wide ancestry coincides with increase in human mobility seen in Swedish Sr isotope data, suggesting an influx of people from eastern or northeastern regions of Scandinavia, and the emergence of stone cist burials in Southern Sweden^60, which were also introduced in eastern Denmark during that period^54,61.
Using genomes from LNBA phase III (Scandinavia_4000BP_3000BP) in supervised ancestry modelling, we find that they form the predominant ancestry source for later Iron and Viking Age Scandinavians (Extended Data Fig. 6d) and other ancient European groups with a documented Scandinavian or Germanic association (for example, Anglo-Saxons and Goths; Extended Data Fig. 6e). When projecting 2,000 modern Danish genomes^62 on a PCA of ancient Eurasians, the modern individuals occupy an intermediate space on a cline between the LNBA and Viking Age individuals (Fig. 4). This result shows that the foundation for the present-day gene pool was already in place in LNBA groups 3,000 years ago, but the genetic structure of the Danish population was continually reshaped during succeeding millenia.”
There aren’t any Pitted Ware burials in Denmark, but “the genomes of two approximately 5,200-year-old male individuals (NEO33, NEO898) found in Danish wetland deposits proved to be of hunter-gatherer ancestry related to that of PWC individuals from Ajvide on the Baltic island of Gotland”. They show up in Fig. 1c, where they look like Scandinavian Hunter-Gatherers.
Anyway, if the origin of the Germanic branch is associated with a genetic turnover, the youngest option is the spread of the Sons of I1 around 2050 to 2000 BCE around the very start of the Nordic Bronze Age.
* That’s because it’s not a post-mortem sample. It’s human DNA from a C14-dated piece of chewed birch pitch – natural chewing gum.
** “The following Late Neolithic ‘Dagger’ epoch (around 4,300–3,700 cal. BP) in Denmark has been described as a time of integration of culturally and genetically distinct groups^54. Bronze became dominant in the local production of weapons while elegantly surface-flaked daggers in flint were still the dominant male burial gift.”
I admit that I took the dates from a semi-popular writeup in Danish that at least gave the DOI link; I haven’t internalized all the haplogroup relations, so my eyes simply glazed over trying to read the article, but I’ll probably manage to parse DM’s summary. Later.
Oh, I’ve quoted the only mentions of haplogroups in the entire paper.
The paper is unusually readable, BTW. (Well, I didn’t try the Methods section at the end, but.)
>I haven’t internalized all the haplogroup relations, so my eyes simply glazed over trying to read the article, but I’ll probably manage to parse DM’s summary. Later.
I suffer from a sort of two-way informational half-life issue on DNA posts, or really on many of the technical posts here that are within areas of interests but well beyond any proper training of mine — where I have to read them more than once, each time take in only 50% of what I hadn’t previously understood, and the knowledge immediately begins decaying. Sigh.
I too will return to David’s post and try to sort it out more fully. Later.
each time take in only 50% of what I hadn’t previously understood, and the knowledge immediately begins decaying
This is my case as well. But I enjoy the scraps of knowledge I manage to absorb!
Another preprint link from Dmitry:
Speidel et al (preprint 2024): High-resolution genomic ancestry reveals mobility in early medieval Europe
I haven’t had time to read it, but it’s from the Stockholm lab (not Copenhagen), it seems to bring yet another strong tool tool to the toolkit, and it reveals Scandinavian population in the period just after McColl et al.
A general question to the geneticists.
Jared Diamond famously traces the great modern epidemics of the Americas (and Oceania) to diseases which jumped to humans from domesticated animals, to which the newcomers were relatively immune. It stands to reason that the older populations of Europe were equally vulnerable to such diseases, and hence that similar epidemics would have struck there when domesticated cattle, pigs, and maybe horses arrived, or at least when the humans who carried their diseases did. Are there genetic signals of sudden demographic drops among e.g. Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, around the time of arrival of domesticated animals and their keepers?
Yes, they more or less disappear. But it’s hard to discern mass death from marginalization and ethnic cleansing from here. There’s no smoking gun of mesolithic skeletons with smallpox or measles.
(Not that I’m a geneticist.)
Sounds awesome.
I don’t think enough have been found and sequenced yet. However, the plague seems to have made the Corded Ware invasion much easier, turning fields into undefended grassland…
But not at the first sight of a cow (purple or otherwise). There’s that cave in northern Germany that was used as a cemetery by “parallel societies” of Mesolithic WHG and Neolithic EEF for two thousand years…
Here’s a book I just put on my wishlist:
Jonathan Kennedy: Pathogenesis – A History of the World in Eight Plagues.
(The Norwegian translation was touted today.)
I’ve said (maybe upthread) that I think comparing genetic sequences very soon will make us able to date genetic samples relatively to eachother. Absolute dating will follow.
It’s already been done (with large error margins) – the proportion of Neandertal DNA has been shrinking linearly for tens of thousands of years.
@dm
What is the evolutionary advantage of less Neandertal DNA? Or do Neandertals just smell different, so they are less likely to be chosen as mates? EDIT: I suppose there are no fullbloods left to provide a fresh injection, but does that really explain it?
@David M.: I know. And I expect that to be done much more precisely with whole genomes by treating all sequences of genes as molecular clocks. But what I’m thinking about is ordering sequences according to direction of change. My prediction is that they’ll first determine the direction of ancestry in related individuals, then they’ll date distantly related individuals relatively, and then they’ll do absolutely dating.
Not sure; apparently Neandertal genes just don’t play so well with others.
You mean which are the parents and which their children? That’s already standard. Just not across a lot of generations.
I don’t think Neanderthal ancestry fractions have been dropping in the last 30+ thousands years, can find references to support that if needed. Earlier on, there were individuals with much higher percentage of Neanderthal DNA, but only because it didn’t mix well yet.
There are parts of the genome where Neanderthal DNA is poorly compatible with ours, and washed out over time. They are largely the same areas where our species’ DNA washed out from the Neanderthal genomes during an earlier episode of admixture (when the humans of our species got out of Africa but dissolved in the mass of the Neanderthals).
There are also parts of the genome where their DNA was favored and replaced much of ours. But on average the balance has been stable for a very long time.
The two new Northern European ancient DNA papers cited by Trond use a similar premise, that one can use bundles of nearby mutations to tell apart population groups which are too similar in terms of individual mutation frequencies. The mathematical apparatus is a little difference, and the lists of the presumed source populations differ too, but many conclusions are the same. Like the Northward migration from Jutland / Friesland to Denmark and Sweden which predated the Viking age, or a mixed Jutland / Scandinavian origin of the Langobards, or East Scandinavian origin of the Wielbark Goths.
The second paper also shows that the Germanic populations of the Great Migration era Poland left no trace in its Medieval DNA makeup, which was dominated by the Slavs returning to the areas close to where they emerged, but having picked some 20-25% of Roman Imperial DNA while they ventured across Danube…
The broad movements are the same, but there are also interesting differences in distributions and timing.
I haven’t had time to read the preprint; are you saying they went into the former Pannonia and then back to Poland?
That’s what the preprint suggests. Into Roman Pannonia for long enough to substitute a quarter of the genes, and then to Poland. I don’t know about “back” though.
Fascinating. Folk etymology of Iazyges from язык in 3… 2… 1…
Me: From 4000-3600 BP a population with mixed “Eastern Corded Ware” and Baltic Hunter-Gatherer ancestry shows up in southern Sweden and the Danish islands, bringing the Y-chromosome I, that would eventually become the most common in Scandinavia.
And later: The East Scandinavians are interesting. For one, they come with a non-IE male line, which is pretty much unheard of in the age of IE expansions. All the more need to understand how they formed and how they got the Indo-European cultural package. If it’s true that they brought chariot imagery to Scandinavia not long after 2000 BCE, we should find them as part of a cultural chain from Sintashta, probably one that also includes bronze trade. I’ve speculated before that they are Baltic Pitted Ware harvesters that got indo-europeanized through trade and powerful by controlling the Baltic, but I don’t know if that works or if they were just overrun by some other group from the east.
David M.: Anyway, if the origin of the Germanic branch is associated with a genetic turnover, the youngest option is the spread of the Sons of I1 around 2050 to 2000 BCE around the very start of the Nordic Bronze Age.
The background of the East Scandinavians is really intriguing. I understand that most of the “Germanic” I1 branch is very shallow, with an estimated age of divergence around the beginning of Corded Ware. They could perhaps be something like Funnel Beaker people taking refuge at some outpost of little interest to the Yamnaya herders, and eventually growing rich and powerful from amber — say Rügen or Usedom/Wolin or the Vistula or Curonian Spits. Very little I1 in the Baltic countries would push it to the west, but “Eastern Corded Ware” would pull it back east. Maybe the Vistula then?
How old is the amber trade, BTW – Mesolithic?
The oldest Baltic amber in Mycenae and Egypt dates to the Nordic Bronze Age. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. Something had to be given in exchange for all that incoming metal. I suppose it could also be products from the Baltic Sea (seal oil?) or Scandinavia (furs?). Or flint!
But I didn’t mean to suggest that the East Scandinavian invasion was a single wealthy family from the southern shore of the Baltic Sea. The Nordic Bronze Age seems to represent a merger of the Bell Beaker derived Cist Grave culture and Pitted Ware. This means that the incoming Eastern Scandinavians ought to be a subset of the Pitted Ware Culture. There’s some evidence that the Pitted Ware Culture had a military-political system. If so, the arrival of the East Scandinavians could be an organized invasion, and the I1 male line could represent a certain clan or caste.
The obvious problem with this is that no pre-invasion Scandinavian I1 has been found in Pitted Ware, but it hasn’ been found anywhere else either. I’m trying to guess where it might be hiding.
There’s been a serious proposal that an Akkadian term sometimes interpreted as ‘amber’ (elmešu) would be a loan from a Finnic term *helmV-, generally reconstructed as ‘pearl’, but meaning ‘amber’ in Livonian (jēļmaz < *helmäs). Very likely anachronistic in several ways alas, starting from the Finnic arrival into the Baltic being by current dating much younger than most of the attested time-range of Akkadian … though even this would not be entirely a no-selling point if it was, as also proposed, a substrate loan in Finnic. I’d like to see it turn up wider than just Livonian if it really was an old trade term for ‘amber’ however. (And do Old Norse raf or East Baltic ⁽*⁾gintaras have any known etymologies?)
J.Pystynen: (And do Old Norse raf or East Baltic ⁽*⁾gintaras have any known etymologies?)
The only etymology I’ve seen of O.N. rafr is the one offered by Wiktionary (under Icel. raf):
Thin, because “the verb *rebaną” is pretty thin. It’s not very far from *rīfaną v, “tear” and *reufaną v. “tear” (attested in e.g. Eng, rive and rub), which I think may have cross-contaminated, but I don’t believe either of them would work phonologically, no matter how much I want “rub”. There’s also the first element of Eng. raft, ON raftr “pole”, but that semantic gap is too wide even for me.
I have no idea about Baltic.
Me: Maybe the Vistula then?
It dawned on me that I’m describing the Aesti two millennia early.
That’s a nice thick plot.
@DM
are you saying they went into the former Pannonia and then back to Poland?
the preprint isn’t concentrated on Eastern Europe’s populations and therefore the conclusions are based on comparisons with somewhat haphazardly selected putative ancestral populations. They just have one “Northern” ancestral group in Eastern Europe, the Irone Age Lithuania peoples, and only one “Southern” group, Italian peninsula of the Roman times (which, as we know, was becoming very much Greek / Anatolian and to a large extent also Illyrian). So the medieval Slavs of Poland look as 75-80% of the former plus 20-25% of the latter. It’s hard to imagine their ancestors getting the Southern component anywhere except across the Danube, but it would have been much better to use more locally appropriate source populations…
Ah, so maybe this is Celts in Galicia or who knows what.