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.
17. Dmitry Pruss says

    December 3, 2024 at 4:48 pm

    A study with lots of ancient genomes applies IBD methodology to systematically trace the spread of early IE peoples into Europe, Mediterranean, and Southern Caucasus.

    They separate 3 major waves of expansion of the Steppe ancestry. The earliest one is directly descended from the Yamnaya groups, and spreads South on both sides of the Black Sea, reaching Greece, Anatolia and Armenia.
    The next source is the Corded Ware groups, whose Steppe DNA comes pre-mixed with the DNA from Globular Amphora peoples. Originally confined to North-Central Europe, by 2,000 BCE it spreads South to the Balkans and Anatolia (partly displacing the earlier Yamnaya wave arrivals there and pushing the South to Greece, Cyprus and Levant) and further East to the steppes East of Volga.
    Finally, additional mixing with local Northern European peoples yields Beaker groups which spread across France to Spain and Italy, undergoing much dilution along the way.

    Cyprus appears to be a giant melting pot of local and Steppe-related peoples, and a trickle of migrations continues to arrive there from as far as Scandinavia. Lots of migrations towards the later part of the Bronze Age in Greece and Italy too is visible by strontium isotopes, sometimes with members of the same family being locals and migrants.

    One Phrygian sample is added, with a relatively small fraction of Steppe ancestry which is the same in origin as in Balkan / Greek Late Bronze Age … not surprisingly given what we know about Phrygian culture and language.

    Trialeti culture, a post Kura-Araxes (late III millennium BCE) phenomenon absorbing both Mycenean-like and Hattic/Hittite influences, appears to be an undeniable antecedent to Armenian. I am surprised that I haven’t heard much. It is actually slightly earlier than mature Mycenean. Interestingly, one Balkan ancient sample, “G23” from a previous publication, now appears to show blood ties with early Armenians. This comes just after another paper attempted to refute Herodotus about the Balkan roots of Armenians! (to be discussed separately).

    https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.12.02.626332v1.full.pdf
18. languagehat says

    December 3, 2024 at 4:51 pm

    Wow. I can’t wait to read a book that gathers, correlates, and summarizes all the stuff they’re discovering. Ancient history is being completely rewritten!
19. Dmitry Pruss says

    December 3, 2024 at 4:55 pm

    Oh, yes, and the ancient R1b Y-chromosomes in the Bronze Age Armenia turned out to be rooted deeper in the Yamnaya past than most anywhere the world, all the way to 5th millennium BCE.

    In the most basic linguistic terms, the new Yediay 2024 paper just confirms that Italo-Celtic and Greek-Armenian groupings are real…
20. Dmitry Pruss says

    December 3, 2024 at 5:06 pm

    The Hovhannisyan 2024 on ancient Armenians appeared just one week earlier
    https://www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltext/S0002-9297(24)00391-4
    and concluded that there was much genetic continuity over millennia in Armenia, with the strongest inflow of genetic material from Levantine farmers in Early Bronze Age, but no discernible flow from the Balkans.
    But they didn’t look into the gory detail of IBD, and may have been led astray by the fact that the strong local substrate of ancient Greece, which diluted the incoming Yamnaya Steppe DNA, was unique for Greece and very different from Southern Caucasus. So whatever migrated to Armenia did so either before mixing with local populations of the Balkans, or even along a different route around the Black sea…
21. David Marjanović says

    December 3, 2024 at 5:37 pm

    Amazing. I’ve downloaded the preprint and might have time to read it in 2 weeks.

    The linguistic evidence for Greek + Armenian has been falling apart, BTW; but Paleo-Balkan-Whatever + Armenian might still work, what with all those zetas in Thracian-and-stuff.
22. Dmitry Pruss says

    December 3, 2024 at 7:10 pm

    Another important history of linguistics tidbit to add, which feels strangely relevant to these recent studies, is that Colin Renfrew of the Anatolian Theory fame has died. In his younger days he helped bury the classic idea that everything cultural flowed from Ancient Greece….
23. languagehat says

    December 3, 2024 at 7:25 pm

    I’ll be damned. Here’s a brief but informative obit (from Kathimerini).
24. David Marjanović says

    December 3, 2024 at 7:59 pm

    The second author of the 3-waves preprint is Guus Kroonen, and there’s a .docx file called “Linguistic Supplementary”; I’ve downloaded it along with the “Archaeological Supplementary”.

    The whole thing is formatted for Nature; no other journal has “Extended Data Figures”.
25. David Marjanović says

    December 3, 2024 at 8:48 pm

    I’ve now read the Linguistic Supplementary Information. Reference numbers not edited out:

    Previous palaeogenomic studies have modeled LBA Greeks as admixed with either Yamnaya individuals or LBA Armenians82,83. On the basis of this evidence, the hypothesis of an arrival of the Greeks from the Caucasus84 could still not be excluded. Later studies85,86 have demonstrated a flow of Steppe ancestry in the MBA, but without narrowing down a more proximate source of this admixture. In this study, we show that MBA individuals from both Greece and Armenia are best modeled as having shared ancestry with previously unpublished samples from Moldova, associated with the Late Yamnaya culture (2,600–2,200 BCE). These results are therefore not inconsistent with the Graeco-Armenian primordial grouping, and they suggest that independent migrations on both sides of the Black Sea provide the best explanation for the arrival of the Greek and Armenian languages in their respective regions.

    […]

    As previously mentioned, our new IBD analyses show that BA individuals from both Greece and Armenia are best modeled as having shared ancestry derived from a population closely related to previously unpublished MBA samples from Moldova, associated with the Late Yamnaya culture (Genetics and Strontium Supplementary Fig. S6.21; S6.42). This contrasts with, e.g., individuals associated with Italic languages, who derive their Steppe ancestry by a vector of Corded Ware and Bell Beaker individuals. These results are consistent with the assumption of a primordial Graeco-Armenian subgroup that started diverging during the middle of the 3rd millennium at the latest. And thus, the rather sudden replacement of the previously widespread Transcaucasian Kura-Araxes culture by the Trialeti culture by the end of the 3rd millennium BCE97, with certain similarities to early Mycenaean culture26, probably represents the first tangible sign in the region of an Indo-European element that can be ancestral to the Armenian branch (Anthony 2024; Lazaridis et al. 2022a).

    […]

    Subtle amounts of Steppe ancestry appear in Armenia (Main Text, Fig. 6) before the 3rd millennium BCE. Despite justified doubts about the relevance of some of the cultural contexts120, Steppe ancestry additionally appears in previously reported genomes of 2nd millennium BCE Anatolia (Main Text, Fig. 6). This recalls and complements recent findings of ancestry from an Eneolithic Lower Volga source entering Anatolia, presumably through the Caucasus, appearing in individuals from EBA Ovaören and MBA Kalehöyük, and possibly being related to the dispersal of the Anatolian Indo-European branch133.

    5. Conclusion

    Italy and Spain received a significant amount of their Steppe ancestry from Bell Beaker-derived populations. Greeks and Armenians, on the other hand, derive their Steppe ancestry directly from a western Yamnaya subpopulation. Previous studies have revealed Corded Ware ancestry among Balts, Slavs and Indo-Iranians82,134,135. It is now increasingly feasible to hypothesize the demographic channels through which Indo-European spread and split. The precursors of Italic and Celtic, as well as Lusitanian, were possibly mediated by the Bell Beaker population that genetically formed in Central Europe. A shared ancestor of Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic (i.e. “Indo-Slavic”) evolved among populations of the Corded Ware in East Europe. Both of these populations were formed by admixture with European farmers. In contrast, the predecessor of Armenian and Greek evolved among Yamnaya populations that had remained on the Steppe until the Middle Bronze Age. Finally, however, it does not yet seem feasible to identify an archaeologically defined vector for a Steppe intrusion of Anatolian into Anatolia.
26. Hans says

    December 4, 2024 at 1:23 pm

    The linguistic evidence for Greek + Armenian has been falling apart, BTW; but Paleo-Balkan-Whatever + Armenian might still work, what with all those zetas in Thracian-and-stuff.
    Yes, it looks like those isoglosses that Greek and Armenian share are shared retentions, not common developments.
    On the other hand, Armenian clearly is a member of the Graeco-Aryan club, which developed innovations like the augment. But that must have been an areal group, not a genetic subfamily.
27. Dmitry Pruss says

    December 4, 2024 at 4:12 pm

    A classic archaeology paper without direct connection to languages, but touching on the mechanisms of great migration of Germanic peoples.
    The authors argue that miniature spoons for snorting substances were a must-have part of the toolkit of Germanic warriors, and were attached to the warrior belts by lanyards just long enough to put the stimulants by the nose.
    Some spoonlet styles were pan-Germanic, but stubby copper spoons were mostly Scandinavian, while flat-disk spatulas were typical for the early Gothic populations South-East of the Baltic
    https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/pz-2024-2017/html
28. languagehat says

    December 4, 2024 at 4:39 pm

    The movie scenarios write themselves.
29. Trond Engen says

    December 4, 2024 at 5:45 pm

    Pretty speculative, though. I see no actual evidence that they were used as spoons (although that may be a reasonable inference from the shape), and none that they had something to do with intake of hallucinogenic substances. Why couldn’t they have been used for adding luxury condiments like spices, or salt, or honey to bland military food?
30. Trond Engen says

    December 4, 2024 at 5:48 pm

    I’ll read the genetics papers, but I don’t know when.
31. Dmitry Pruss says

    December 4, 2024 at 6:56 pm

    They use of the tiny spoons may be for anything which is respectable in a sacred context and needs to be used in the field. Spoons and kettles, for example, are just as important for food prep but aren’t found in similar contexts?
32. Trond Engen says

    December 4, 2024 at 7:53 pm

    I wonder about the material. Everyday utensils were carved from wood or bone or soapstone. Wealth symbols were made of precious metals or ivory. Iron seems to suggest that the strength of the material was important, and so does the attachment of the “spoon” to the leather thong.

    I also wonder why a warrior would have something like that dangling from their belt in a foot-long strap. It would be an annoyance at best, at worst a deadly trap. I’d look for a practical function that kept it tied up when in use. Could it have been for fastening some type of equipment, perhaps when riding?
33. Dmitry Pruss says

    December 4, 2024 at 9:05 pm

    and they mention that numerous other metal implements were commonly attached to the thongs threaded through belt buckles, citing the thorough typological classification of Madyda-Legutko 2011. I would assume that it makes sense to consider “spoons” not in isolation but within the broader variety of similar objects… The reference is a book on Przeworsk culture and its metal artifact published in Polish in Krakow, where Renata Madyda-Legutko is a university professor. The current paper’s authors are from a different university in Poland, in Lublin.
34. Trond Engen says

    December 15, 2024 at 7:39 pm

    I’ve finally read the Yediay et al paper on the Eastern Mediterranean. Not much to say on the overall conclusions except that it’s yet another leap forward in methods.

    I got hung up in the Bronze Age individual from Cyprus with Scandinavian ancestry and upbringing. From the paper:

    Additionally, there is genetic evidence of long-distance interaction with Northern Europe, as seen in a Scandinavian genetic outlier (CGG_2_022535) from a rock-cut tomb at Vounous Bellapais, excavated by the Swedish-Cyprus expedition and dated to c. 4,000–3,800 BP. (Genetics and Strontium Supplementary Fig. S6.45, Archaeology Supplementary 2.2.7). This outlier clusters with Scandinavian Bronze Age individuals and, intriguingly, this origin is also supported by the Y-haplogroup I1 and by a non-local highly radiogenic strontium isotope signature compatible with some parts of Scandinavia (Genetics and Strontium Supplementary S10; Supplementary Table S8). The implications of this observation are not conclusive, since we do not have radiocarbon dating from this individual.

    […]

    In Cyprus, despite the high levels of genetic variation, only four Cypriot samples are characterized by non-local strontium isotope signatures (Supplementary Table S8). The genetic outlier from Vounous-Bellapais (CGG_2_022535) with unusual Scandinavian ancestry is also confirmed by the strontium isotope results. Another non-local Iron Age individual (CGG_2_022526) exhibits an admixture signature consistent with Greece Late Bronze Age (Genetics and Strontium Supplementary Fig. S6.45; S6.46). In contrast, the remainder of the outliers resemble populations from the Anatolia/Levant Bronze Age (Genetics and Strontium Supplementary S10). For many genetic outliers in which strontium data is also presented, long-term mobility was not detected (Genetics and Strontium Supplementary S10).

    […]

    By the early 4th millennium BP, an archaeological connection additionally existed between the Únětice culture and the Eastern Mediterranean, including Cyprus, as exemplified by the presence of Únětice ring ingots and dress pins81. This connection is potentially supported by genetic evidence from a single individual, although its historical significance remains enigmatic.

    I got particularly hung up by the coincidence that the specimen had been found by a Swedish expedition to Cyprus. Sometimes when things look too good to be true…

    This is what the Archaeological Supplement has to say:

    2.2.7. Vounos-Bellapais, (de facto) Kyrenia district, Northern Cyprus
    The exact Latitude and Longitude of the site is missing. However the modern village of Kazafana has Latitude: 35.317222 and Longitude: 33.354167.

    Sample provider: Christian Mühlenbock, Mia Broné
    Serena Sabatini

    Vounous-Bellapais, Tomb 69.

    The site was found southeast of the village of Kazaphani (today, Καζάφανι/Kazafana or Ozanköy), and east of the Abbey of Bellapais (Map 1). It was excavated between 1931 and 1938, by different expeditions40. In 1931-1932 P. Dikaios from the Cyprus Museum excavated tombs 1-4879. In 1933 the Cyprus Museum and the National Museum of France, represented respectively by P. Dikaios and C.F.A. Schaeffer excavated tombs 49-7980. In 1937-38 the British School at Athens excavated tombs 80-16481. Some of the skeletons excavated by Schaeffer were sent to C.M. Fürst in Sweden. Since Fürst passed away before any investigation was done, the osteological analyses were made by C.H. Hjortsjö73. As far as the chronology of the context is concerned there is a letter written by R.S. Merrillees to Paul Åström (28/02/1980) which says “nothing earlier than MC I”40, thus c. 2000-1850 BCE.

    Tomb 69 consisted of a single chamber and looked disturbed at the moment of the excavation40. Cranium 2 (CGG_2_022535/Rise 1678) was found immediately to the right of the entrance together with finds 1-1040. The skull was probably not in situ. According to Hjortsjö73 the skull belonged to a male of approximately 30 years. Fischer74 defined the find as belonging to a male adult of c. 18-20 years. Dunn-Vaturi questions both results, because the grave seems to have contained just one individual, who was furnished with grave goods including a spindle whorl and a pin, typical for female burials.

    As a curiosity, it is interesting to mention that according to Hjortsjö’s craniometrics studies73 (such studies were still carried out at the beginning of last century) cranium II was considered a sort of outlier, compared to the other skulls from the region.

    So it was not found by the Swedish Cyprus Expedition but by a joint effort by Cyprus Museum and the Naional Museum of France. The excavation report (Dunn-Vaturi et al 1933) identified the burial as female based on typical female grave goods.

    The specimen was one of a number of skeletons from the French collection that were sent to professor Carl Magnus Fürst in Lund. Sweden, for examination. He died in 1935, before any investigations of the bones had been made.The osteological analyses were made by professor Carl-Herman Hjortsjö and published in 1947. The remains were also investigated by the archaeologist Peter M. Fischer, apparently for his habilitation thesis in 1986. The two disagree to some extent on the description of the specimen, but agree that it’s a younger male.

    The DNA samples would obviously have been taken after Fischer’s investigations in the eighties.

    As much as I want this to be true, there’s an obvious risk that there’s been a mixup of two skeletons in one of these transitions — one I would gladly have brushed away if it weren’t for the Swedish connection. So does a Mediterranean female show up in an unexpected context in Sweden?

    If it isn’t an error, it’s extremely interesting also for understanding the forming of the Scandinavian population. He shows up exactly when the Y-haplogroup I1 wave enters Scandinavia and sets off the Nordic Bronze Age (or maybe even on the early side).
35. David Marjanović says

    December 16, 2024 at 1:08 pm

    Maybe he personally brought the amber mentioned in that thread…
36. Trond Engen says

    December 16, 2024 at 2:31 pm

    Yeah. I don’t mean to deny that goods from the Baltic reached the Mediterranean, and vice versa. Neither do I mean to deny that some people traveled very far. We’ve seen that in the Pre-Yamnaya Steppe, millennia earlier. Scandinavian Bronze Age imagery is full of chariots and ships. The I1 clan(s) as itinerant soldiers and/or merchants would make sense.

    But that man isn’t just out of place. Add the archaeological uncertainties and the one big unpleasant coincidence, and I end up being skeptical. For now.