More Old Bones.

Comments

1. Y says

   September 22, 2024 at 10:05 pm

   All right then. From (the formidable) Guillaume Jacques and Chris Stevens, “Linguistic, archaeological and genetic evidence suggests multiple agriculture-driven migrations of Sino-Tibetan speakers from Northern China to the Indian subcontinent”, in Quaternary International, here (Open Access). VL, but WR.
2. Dmitry Pruss says

   September 22, 2024 at 10:07 pm

   OK, just not to leave it uncommented – here is a paper we didn’t discuss at LH:
   10 thousand years of genetic continuity in old South Africa.
   https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-024-02532-3
   The Khoe-San peoples today differ from their ancestors before the Iron Age migrations from the East, but it’s easy to see that they local ancestral DNA isn’t the same across the regions. There are significant differences in the old local DNA between the Northern, Central, and Southern Khoe-San.
   The new paper adds ancient DNAs from the Southern region, as old as 10,000 years, and, much to everyone’s surprise, it’s very much the same as the Southern Khoe-San “local DNA component” today! Not much North-South or even Center-South population mixing.
   In contrast, DNA from outside of the region start appearing in more recent centuries, first from Iron Age East African peoples ~1200 years ago, and then from the originally West African Bantu peoples ~800 years ago, with additional waves. And after the colonization, more DNA from even more far-flug regions, of course.
3. David Marjanović says

   September 23, 2024 at 5:39 pm

   From the previous thread:

   And the substrate hunters can work out how the defining soundlaws of Common Turkic are due to a Scythian substrate.

   …Now that I think of it, I certainly expect /ʃ/ and /z/ from an Iranian language… together with absence of /ɬ/ and /rʲ/ or whatever it was… but the same holds for Samoyedic for example.

   AFAIK basically that MCh phonetics are sufficiently well attested (from rhyme books and the like) that the reconstruction (modulo transliteration standard, I guess) is considered to be firm enough to not require an asterisk.

   The MCh transcription simply uses a letter (or two or three) to represent each of the onsets, “nuclei”, medials and finals described in the contemporary rhyme books/tables and dictionaries (where the pronunciation of each character was given with two characters, of which one shared the onset and the other the rhyme). OCh, in contrast, is reconstructed (in part by the comparative method from MCh and the reconstructed Proto-Min, in part from the phonetic parts of the characters, the rhymes, various loans and so on).
4. David Marjanović says

   September 23, 2024 at 8:50 pm

   but the same holds for Samoyedic

   Definitely no /z/ in Samoyedic…
5. Hippophlebotomist says

   September 24, 2024 at 8:44 pm

   The DNA samples for the upcoming Ghalichi et al paper “The rise and transformation of Bronze Age pastoralists in the Caucasus”, have been released on the European Nucleotide Archive. Hopefully the publication itself is soon to follow. The amateur genetics community has had a lot of fun playing with these already. https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/browser/view/PRJEB73987

   The work was previewed by Sabine Reinhold at the Budapest conference, which was also where the two upcoming papers led by the Harvard team (the Genetic Origins of the Indo-Europeans & A genomic history of the North Pontic Region from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age). Her talk is available here:
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UC5_h_qIDaU
6. Hippophlebotomist says

   November 1, 2024 at 3:46 pm

   And the paper (The rise and transformation of Bronze Age pastoralists in the Caucasus) itself is now out, in Open Access, in Nature
   https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08113-5
7. Trond Engen says

   November 2, 2024 at 5:32 am

   Thanks. Dmitry linked to the same paper in the Son of Yamnaya thread a few days ago. I’m still working on it.
8. Hippophlebotomist says

   November 3, 2024 at 3:32 pm

   Ah, I haven’t been checking that thread since I thought this one was supposed to continue it. I must have misunderstood?
9. languagehat says

   November 3, 2024 at 3:35 pm

   No, I think it’s more that people are used to posting in the old one and maybe forget this one exists.
10. Trond Engen says

    November 3, 2024 at 6:37 pm

    Dmitry was the one asking for a new thread, but he chose to use the old one for Yamnaya-related news. That makes enough sense that I’ll follow up the discussion there (if I manage to form a coherent line of thought), but both the old threads and this new one will inevitably be confused.

    This is probably where I link to the XKCD on new unifying standards.
11. Dmitry Pruss says

    November 9, 2024 at 12:43 pm

    A lot of Yamnaya / PIE ancient DNA discussions naturally continue what was being discussed on the old thread, and that’s why I opted to continue. Specifically, I often do a keywords google search with “site:language.com” to find out where we discussed something earlier, and then continue there.

    This bone heap here isn’t dead, though. I will gladly add ancient DNA and archaeology discoveries here – just probably not the ones which directly relate to PIE.

    How about the Pompeii story? The casts of the Pompeii dead, telling dramatic narratives about these victims’ deaths, were a major tourist attraction for over 150 years, but the liquid cement used to create these casts is not that durable, and occasional restoration work is need. A new round of restoration started in 2017 and turned up evidence of bones and bone fragments inside the casts. Surprisingly, it was possible to extract DNA from some of them, and to prove that the most famous narratives (“The family of the Golden Bracelet house”, “The embrace of the sisters”) were all wrong, perhaps misinterpreted, more likely made up by the early archaeologists who might have combined and modified the casts to create the stories the public wanted to hear.

    https://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(24)01361-7
    (alas the paper is paywalled and I haven’t had any luck with procuring it yet; the linguistic / demographic aspect there is that most of the dead are genetically Levantine or Anatolian, mirroring the wave of Eastern Mediterranean immigration which swept Rome 2,000 years ago).
12. languagehat says

    November 9, 2024 at 12:49 pm

    Amazing stuff — we’re all getting spoiled!
13. Brett says

    November 9, 2024 at 1:05 pm

    @Dmitry Pruss:
    Here’s a link to the paper. I’m only a couple pages into it myself, but it is really interesting.
14. Dmitry Pruss says

    November 9, 2024 at 2:34 pm

    Thank you Brett. Interesting and more diverse than I imagined (the paper’s intro mentions that Pompeii was thought to be extremely ethnically diverse due to its proximity to a sea port, but anthropometric evaluations made more recent researchers conclude that it had a homogenous population).

    Cast 52, the famous one with an exquisite golden bracelet, turned out to be a male of Levantine or North African ancestry, most similar to the known ancient genomes from Hellenistic Egypt but not *exactly* from there; the mtDNA and Y-DNA are compatible with the broader Levant from Egypt to Syria. Their analysis suggests that this man had dark skin and hair.

    The previously studied DNA of cast f1R was also Levantine, closest by DNA to Lebanon.

    The remaining 4 DNA sets implied Anatolian / Aegean ancestors. Cast 53 from the Golden Bracelet House may have had a grandparent from Punic-era Sardinia. Cast 25, the tall, lower-class security guy from the Villa of Mysteries, probably had an Anatolian father and a Central European mother, and grew up in a different part of Italy, according to his isotope analysis.
15. David Marjanović says

    November 9, 2024 at 4:22 pm

    the linguistic / demographic aspect there is that most of the dead are genetically Levantine or Anatolian, mirroring the wave of Eastern Mediterranean immigration which swept Rome 2,000 years ago

    Oh. Maybe Oscan died out because the only language all these immigrants and the locals had in common was Latin…
16. David Marjanović says

    November 9, 2024 at 4:29 pm

    A purely linguistic consequence of Greek immigration to Rome.