Son of Yamnaya.

Comments

1. Trond Engen says

   November 17, 2020 at 5:24 pm

   I did recently link to a paper on Mongolia and the, eh, genetogenesis of the Xiongnu and the Mongolians in They Perished like Avars, where we have discussed much Post-Indo-European Steppe stuff. It didn’t attract any follow-up comments, so feel free to move it here.
2. David Eddyshaw says

   November 17, 2020 at 5:33 pm

   Will we be seeing “Bride of Yamnaya” in due course?
3. languagehat says

   November 17, 2020 at 5:37 pm

   And possibly eventually Second Cousin Twice Removed of Yamnaya.
4. Owlmirror says

   November 17, 2020 at 7:47 pm

   Canonically, “Bride of Yamnaya” should have come first. Then “Son of Yamnaya”, then “Ghost of Yamnaya”, then “Yamnaya meets Dravidian”, then “House of Yamnaya”. The final(?) one should probably be a duo of comedians meet Yamnaya — I’d suggest “Nyland and Goropius”, but there is a surfeit of them to choose from.

   /Hammertime
5. David Eddyshaw says

   November 17, 2020 at 8:26 pm

   Yamnaya in the KONGO. (Perhaps too controversial for these politically correct times …)
6. John Cowan says

   November 17, 2020 at 9:34 pm

   Oh, the wind that blew through the whiskers on the flea in the hair on the tail of
   the dog of the daughter of the wife of the Dayak has just come to town….
7. Y says

   November 17, 2020 at 11:24 pm

   A new paper by Ioannidis et al., Native American gene flow into Polynesia predating Easter Island settlement is the most careful approach I have seen toward demonstrating early Polynesian-American contact using genetics. The paper finds an American genetic signature in Eastern Polynesian populations. What’s distinguishes this paper from earlier such studies is that it clearly separates the purported American signal from a European one; that it dates both plausibly; and that it clearly distinguishes different coastal American populations, and ties the source of the Polynesian signal specifically to a population in Colombia.
8. languagehat says

   November 18, 2020 at 9:11 am

   Interesting!
9. Trond Engen says

   November 18, 2020 at 3:47 pm

   Y: Ioannidis et al 2020

   We briefly discussed it here back in July. I still haven’t read the full text.

   Dmitry (in Mother of Yamnaya): (Huang et al 2020).

   I love it. This seems to take historical genetics to a whole new level, using the sheer power of numbers to shake out genetic commonalities that can be traced back to a common ancestor. The multi-ethno-linguistic matrixes are essentially the comparative method on genomes, but used to identify the oldest common elements rather than to reconstruct a complete ancestral genome.
10. Trond Engen says

    November 18, 2020 at 4:05 pm

    A few seconds late to edit I meant to add a few random observations:

    They identify a “Northeast Asian Cluster”, which must be more or less identical with what Jeong et al dub ‘Ancient North Asians’ in the paper on the genetic history of Mongolia..

    They identify a gene flow from “European” into “Inland South Asian” (likely including the group speaking Proto-Sino-Tibetan) at ~5800 kA. I wonder where that came from.

    Note the predictive force. They posit a yet unsampled group in a specific location and with a specific genetic signature as the linguistic ancestors of Kra-Dai.
11. Y says

    November 18, 2020 at 4:43 pm

    Thanks, Trond. I somehow missed that discussion (and what followed it, which was very interesting, too.)
12. Trond Engen says

    January 9, 2021 at 9:43 pm

    (This connects to several discussions. Most immediately me (July 29, 2020 at 7:25 am) in They perished like Avars:

    I got the Yu paper (thanks!) and just finishen reading it. Not much time to digest, but my takeout is that it’s a complementation to what we already knew about Eastern Siberia. On the ancient and basal level, it fills out the picture of the North Asian population that is ancestral to Non-Arctic Native Americans. Additionally it starts to untangle the movements and admixtures of the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age that eventually would lead to the formation of the ethnic and linguistic groups we know today. The plague is part of that. Intriguingly it’s found in two individuals without Steppe ancestry. They were from the same site, but one of them had migrated in his early childhood. The date and the strain of Yersinia pestis are practically identical to those of a Corded Ware individual from the Baltic. This fits well with the population crisis in Scandinavia before the arrival of the Bell Beakers.)

    A new Siberian archaeo-genetics paper from Dmitry on Facebook:

    Kılınç et al “Human population dynamics and Yersinia pestis in ancient northeast Asia” Sci. Adv. 2021; 7 : eabc4587.

    Their conclusions corroborate and expands on earlier studies:

    Conclusions
    Northeast Asia, particularly the Baikal adjacent area and the entire Russian Far East, presents a complex demographic picture with hitherto unknown genetic shifts since the post-LGM. The Trans-Baikal area displays few genetic turnovers with an extended period of genetic continuity over a period of c.6000 years. This unique demographical pattern throughout the Holocene stands in sharp contrast to the recurrent gene flow events of Cis-Baikal and Yakutia. We document that the human group that was represented by Khaiyrgas-1 must have dispersed to Yakutia after the LGM. This group was genetically distinct from the first inhabitants of the Siberia who settled the area before the LGM. The genetic legacy of this group is visible among human groups in the area ~6000 years later. Our data fit well with Belkachi groups as having key position in the ancestry of Paleo-Inuits who launched the second wave of gene flow into the Americas c.5000 years ago. We also document the presence of the most northeastern occurrence of ancient Y. pestis in the less populated Yakutia region and in the highly connected Cis-Baikal area. The bacterium may well have had consequences in shaping human population dynamics in both regions, visible in the reduction in the effective population size and the genetic diversity levels ~4400 years ago. Consistent with the finding of the same bacterium in the Lake Baikal region during the Bronze Age ([Yu et al 2020]), this finding suggests that a plague pandemic in this part of northeast Asia could be a hypothesis worth exploring with more data. Our results demonstrate a complex demography in northeast Asia from the Late Upper Paleolithic up until the Medieval era in which Siberian populations expanded interacting with each other and with populations from distant geographical areas.

    Apart from that, the paper is unusually hard to digest, but the supplementary text is more readable. I guess they had to edit it down to the available number of pages. Anyway…

    Expanding on Yu et al this study makes it very likely that there was a regional plague pandemic at around the year 2500 BCE. In my view the region could well turn out to be the entire continent, but there’s not enough data to tell yet. A few centuries later the bacterium is found at the Kolyma river in the farthest end of Yakutia. I’d think that to spread in a sparsely populated region like that, this early incarnation of the plague must have been both a slow killer and independent of rats.

    Something close to the source population of Paleo-Eskimos (and hence also of Na-Dene?) is found with the sampling of two 7th millennium BP individuals from the region of Yakutsk in Yakutia, associated with the Belkachi culture and its immediate predecessor, the Syalakh culture. This is in line with earlier hypotheses based on material culture. The two seem to be close to a mid-9th millennium BP individual from east of Lake Baikal, also in line with hypotheses from material culture. All three are said to show genetic affinity with modern Chukotko-Kamchatkans — as is Saqqaq.

    Two 5th millenium BP individuals from the Lena Basin and three 4th millenium BP individuals from the Kolyma River further northeast form a distinct group, apparently descended from Syalakh/Belkachi with additional admixture from southeast. An interesting outlier was left unmentioned in the main text but shown on the maps and diagrams, where it’s intriguingly grouped with the Yakutian individuals. This is a mid-5th millenium BP individual from south of Krasnoyarsk who seems to fit perfectly within the contemporary population in the Lena Basin. Is this the first Yeniseian? This individual also shows evidence of a recent genetic bottleneck, in line with the plague hypothesis.

    The Syalakh/Belkachi cultures are also thought to be ancestral to the Bronze Age Ymyyakhtakh culture that spread almost explosively along the Arctic coast in the late 2nd millennium BCE. The Kolyma individuals are late enough that they could be part of this movement, but I can’t find anything on their cultural affinity.
13. Trond Engen says

    January 10, 2021 at 5:01 pm

    I’m on record suggesting a Dene-Yeniseian homeland (providing there is such a thing as Dene-Yeniseian) on the Arctic Coast. I’ll note that a mobile riverine culture on the Lena could easily spill over into the Yenisei Basin via the Angara or Tunguska rivers (or vice versa). It’s the distance from there to Alaska that disturbs me. The ancestors of the Paleo-Eskimos (and/or Na-Dene) would have migrated from the Lena Basin long before those of the Syalakh-Belkachi descendants found on the Kolyma River. For the Yeniseian branch to have been brought from the Lena to the Yenisei in the 5th millennium BP, we’d have to suppose that the stay-behind groups on the Lena were Pre-Proto-Yeniseian for a long time, even as new East Asian groups moved into the area and were integrated in its genetic profile. If so, also the movers north should be (Para-)Pre-Proto-Yeniseians. Maybe these coastal Leniseians were yukagrified from the west.
14. SFReader says

    January 11, 2021 at 12:00 am

    It is a mainstream view in Russia that Yukaghir languages came into region with the Bronze Age Ymyyakhtakh culture in late 2nd millennium BC.

    From Baikal region, but their original homeland was further west, closer to Urals.
15. Trond Engen says

    July 18, 2021 at 7:09 pm

    Since this is the Great Eurasian Plague thread, I’ll link to

    Julian Susat et al: A 5,000-year-old hunter-gatherer already plagued by Yersinia pestis Cell Reports, 2021

    Summary
    A 5,000-year-old Yersinia pestis genome (RV 2039) is reconstructed from a hunter-fisher-gatherer (5300–5050 cal BP) buried at Riņņukalns, Latvia. RV 2039 is the first in a series of ancient strains that evolved shortly after the split of Y. pestis from its antecessor Y. pseudotuberculosis ∼7,000 years ago. The genomic and phylogenetic characteristics of RV 2039 are consistent with the hypothesis that this very early Y. pestis form was most likely less transmissible and maybe even less virulent than later strains. Our data do not support the scenario of a prehistoric pneumonic plague pandemic, as suggested previously for the Neolithic decline. The geographical and temporal distribution of the few prehistoric Y. pestis cases reported so far is more in agreement with single zoonotic events.

    (Link from Dmitry, as usual)

    The oldest and most basal strain of Y, pestis yet has been discovered in a 5300-5050 cal. BP hunter-gatherer from northern Latvia. Needless to say, the last line of the summary is controversial. But since every instance of the plague is a zoonosis, the controverse is really about whether the plague is spreading as a pandemic among rodent parasites on human society. It’s when Y. pestis becomes pandemic (or endemic) among rodents, and the bacterium gains the ability to infect humans easily, that the zoonosis in humans becomes pandemic by extension.

    Here’s a thought-provoking paragraph from the discussion:

    Modern Y. pestis can be transmitted from animals (e.g., rodents) to humans (Demeure et al., 2019). It is possible that hunter-gatherers, who frequently killed rodents for food or personal decoration, contracted Y. pestis or its antecessor Y. pseudotuberculosis directly from animals. Interestingly, at the Riņņukalns site, beaver (Castor fiber) was the most frequently recorded species among the archaeozoological finds excavated by Sievers (Rütimeyer, 1877). Beavers are a common carrier of Y. pseudotuberculosis, which directly precedes our early Y. pestis strain (Gaydos et al., 2009). Despite this interesting observation, it remains unknown to what degree hunter-gatherers may have played a role in the zoonotic emergence, early evolution, or spread of Y. pestis.

    The question of how a rodent disease could trigger a human pandemic in a sparsely populated region of Eurasia is important, and I’m trying to get my head around it upthread. So maybe the authors are right and the first instances were isolated infections. Maybe, even, that the plague never was pandemic among hunter-gatherers. Still, I think hunter-gatherers with early Y. pestis are significant. As incrisingly deadly ad/or infectious strains of Yersinia spread among wild rodents, hunter-gatherers (beaver hunters?) could have adapted (by non-fatal exposure or genetic selection) before it infected the rats of the agriculturalists, and they would then be in a position to fill the void after the first plague.
16. Brett says

    July 18, 2021 at 7:55 pm

    @Trond Engen: It seems to me that the terminology with early plague strains is bit tricky—being based, in part, on what appears to have been an erroneous assumption about how the modern plague strain developed (and thus where to place the dividing line between Yersinia pseudotuberculosis and Y. pestis). As I understand it, it is conventional to call all bacterial lineages with the pMT1 and pPCP1 plasmids Y. pestis. However, it is now known from very early genomes (and according to that Cell Reports paper, the Rinnukalns genetic data confirms this) that pMT1 was actually acquired without the gene for the key virulence factor ymt (Yersinia murine toxin). Only later was the gene for ymt, which makes it much easier for the bacteria to thrive inside the flea vectors, added to the plasmid—meaning that assimilation of the plasmid itself was not one of the primary enablers in the development pestis-level human infectivity. Nomenclature will presumably get even trickier if fossil genomes with only one of the pMT1 or pPCP1 plasmids are found (which has not, to my knowledge, been observed thus far).
17. Trond Engen says

    July 18, 2021 at 8:22 pm

    @Brett: Thanks. I couldn’t have written that, but I agree.
18. languagehat says

    September 18, 2021 at 9:29 am

    Dmitry Pruss on Facebook linked to these interesting papers:

    The origins and spread of domestic horses from the Western Eurasian steppes:

    Our results reject the commonly held association between horseback riding and the massive expansion of Yamnaya steppe pastoralists into Europe ~3,000 BCE driving the spread of Indo-European languages. This contrasts with the situation in Asia where Indo-Iranian languages, chariots and horses spread together, following the early second millennium BCE Sintashta culture.

    Dairying enabled Early Bronze Age Yamnaya steppe expansions:

    Our results point to a potential epicentre for horse domestication in the Pontic–Caspian steppe by the third millennium bc, and offer strong support for the notion that the novel exploitation of secondary animal products was a key driver of the expansions of Eurasian steppe pastoralists by the Early Bronze Age.
19. Stu Clayton says

    September 18, 2021 at 9:36 am

    horse domestication … the novel exploitation of secondary animal products

    Is transport an “animal product” ? Or is primarily horse dung meant ?
20. Ryan says

    September 18, 2021 at 9:47 am

    Aren’t dairy products the reference there — meat being the only use considered primary?
21. languagehat says

    September 18, 2021 at 10:03 am

    Yes, if one bothers to click through, one finds (bolding added):

    Here we draw on proteomic analysis of dental calculus from individuals from the western Eurasian steppe to demonstrate a major transition in dairying at the start of the Bronze Age. The rapid onset of ubiquitous dairying at a point in time when steppe populations are known to have begun dispersing offers critical insight into a key catalyst of steppe mobility. The identification of horse milk proteins also indicates horse domestication by the Early Bronze Age, which provides support for its role in steppe dispersals.

    Of course, the reference to “dairying” in the title might have been a clue.
22. Stu Clayton says

    September 18, 2021 at 10:35 am

    Adding a reference to “Horsing around” in the title would have been yet another welcome clue.
23. Owlmirror says

    September 18, 2021 at 10:36 am

    Perhaps “dairying” was misread as “draying”, a nonce synonym for “drayage” . . .
24. Trond Engen says

    September 18, 2021 at 12:44 pm

    It”s the same paper jack morava linked to in another thread recently. I haven’t had time to read it, but I immediately like it. And I don’t know if it rejects the horse hypothesis as much as nuances and complements it.
25. jack morava says

    September 18, 2021 at 1:36 pm

    @Trond Engen,

    I started trying to take this seriously when I saw

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trundholm_sun_chariot
26. David Marjanović says

    September 24, 2021 at 6:59 pm

    Open-access paper on how Japan was settled in three stages.
27. David Marjanović says

    October 8, 2021 at 4:27 pm

    Five open-access papers and their abstracts:

    Ancient Mitochondrial Genomes Reveal Extensive Genetic Influence of the Steppe Pastoralists in Western Xinjiang

    The population prehistory of Xinjiang has been a hot topic among geneticists, linguists, and archaeologists. Current ancient DNA studies in Xinjiang exclusively suggest an admixture model for the populations in Xinjiang since the early Bronze Age. However, almost all of these studies focused on the northern and eastern parts of Xinjiang; the prehistoric demographic processes that occurred in western Xinjiang have been seldomly reported. By analyzing complete mitochondrial sequences from the Xiabandi (XBD) cemetery (3,500–3,300 BP), the up-to-date earliest cemetery excavated in western Xinjiang, we show that all the XBD mitochondrial sequences fall within two different West Eurasian mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) pools, indicating that the migrants into western Xinjiang from west Eurasians were a consequence of the early expansion of the middle and late Bronze Age steppe pastoralists (Steppe_MLBA), admixed with the indigenous populations from Central Asia. Our study provides genetic links for an early existence of the Indo-Iranian language in southwestern Xinjiang and suggests that the existence of Andronovo culture in western Xinjiang involved not only the dispersal of ideas but also population movement.

    Genomic Insight Into the Population Admixture History of Tungusic-Speaking Manchu People in Northeast China

    Manchu is the third-largest ethnic minority in China and has the largest population size among the Tungusic-speaking groups. However, the genetic origin and admixture history of the Manchu people are far from clear due to the sparse sampling and a limited number of markers genotyped. Here, we provided the first batch of genome-wide data of genotyping approximate 700,000 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in 93 Manchu individuals collected from northeast China. We merged the newly generated data with data of publicly available modern and ancient East Asians to comprehensively characterize the genetic diversity and fine-scale population structure, as well as explore the genetic origin and admixture history of northern Chinese Manchus. We applied both descriptive methods of ADMIXTURE, fineSTRUCTURE, FST, TreeMix, identity by decedent (IBD), principal component analysis (PCA), and qualitative f-statistics (f3, f4, qpAdm, and qpWave). We found that Liaoning Manchus have a close genetic relationship and significant admixture signal with northern Han Chinese, which is in line with the cluster patterns in the haplotype-based results. Additionally, the qpAdm-based admixture models showed that modern Manchu people were formed as major ancestry related to Yellow River farmers and minor ancestry linked to ancient populations from Amur River Bain, or others. In summary, the northeastern Chinese Manchu people in Liaoning were an exception to the coherent genetic structure of Tungusic-speaking populations, probably due to the large-scale population migrations and genetic admixtures in the past few hundred years.

    Genomic Insight Into the Population Structure and Admixture History of Tai-Kadai-Speaking Sui People in Southwest China

    Sui people, which belong to the Tai-Kadai-speaking family, remain poorly characterized due to a lack of genome-wide data. To infer the fine-scale population genetic structure and putative genetic sources of the Sui people, we genotyped 498,655 genome-wide single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) using SNP arrays in 68 Sui individuals from seven indigenous populations in Guizhou province and Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in Southwest China and co-analyzed with available East Asians via a series of population genetic methods including principal component analysis (PCA), ADMIXTURE, pairwise Fst genetic distance, f-statistics, qpWave, and qpAdm. Our results revealed that Guangxi and Guizhou Sui people showed a strong genetic affinity with populations from southern China and Southeast Asia, especially Tai-Kadai- and Hmong-Mien-speaking populations as well as ancient Iron Age Taiwan Hanben, Gongguan individuals supporting the hypothesis that Sui people came from southern China originally. The indigenous Tai-Kadai-related ancestry (represented by Li), Northern East Asian-related ancestry, and Hmong-Mien-related lineage contributed to the formation processes of the Sui people. We identified the genetic substructure within Sui groups: Guizhou Sui people were relatively homogeneous and possessed similar genetic profiles with neighboring Tai-Kadai-related populations, such as Maonan. While Sui people in Yizhou and Huanjiang of Guangxi might receive unique, additional gene flow from Hmong-Mien-speaking populations and Northern East Asians, respectively, after the divergence within other Sui populations. Sui people could be modeled as the admixture of ancient Yellow River Basin farmer-related ancestry (36.2–54.7%) and ancient coastal Southeast Asian-related ancestry (45.3–63.8%). We also identified the potential positive selection signals related to the disease susceptibility in Sui people via integrated haplotype score (iHS) and number of segregating sites by length (nSL) scores. These genomic findings provided new insights into the demographic history of Tai-Kadai-speaking Sui people and their interaction with neighboring populations in Southern China.

    Peopling History of the Tibetan Plateau and Multiple Waves of Admixture of Tibetans Inferred From Both Ancient and Modern Genome-Wide Data

    Archeologically attested human occupation on the Tibetan Plateau (TP) can be traced back to 160 thousand years ago (kya) via the archaic Xiahe people and 30∼40 kya via the Nwya Devu anatomically modern human. However, the history of the Tibetan populations and their migration inferred from the ancient and modern DNA remains unclear. Here, we performed the first ancient and modern genomic meta-analysis among 3,017 Paleolithic to present-day Eastern Eurasian genomes (2,444 modern individuals from 183 populations and 573 ancient individuals). We identified a close genetic connection between the ancient-modern highland Tibetans and lowland island/coastal Neolithic Northern East Asians (NEA). This observed genetic affinity reflected the primary ancestry of high-altitude Tibeto-Burman speakers originated from the Neolithic farming populations in the Yellow River Basin. The identified pattern was consistent with the proposed common north-China origin hypothesis of the Sino-Tibetan languages and dispersal patterns of the northern millet farmers. We also observed the genetic differentiation between the highlanders and lowland NEAs. The former harbored more deeply diverged Hoabinhian/Onge-related ancestry and the latter possessed more Neolithic southern East Asian (SEA) or Siberian-related ancestry. Our reconstructed qpAdm and qpGraph models suggested the co-existence of Paleolithic and Neolithic ancestries in the Neolithic to modern East Asian highlanders. Additionally, we found that Tibetans from Ü-Tsang/Ando/Kham regions showed a strong population stratification consistent with their cultural background and geographic terrain. Ü-Tsang Tibetans possessed a stronger Chokhopani-affinity, Ando Tibetans had more Western Eurasian related ancestry and Kham Tibetans harbored greater Neolithic southern EA ancestry. Generally, ancient and modern genomes documented multiple waves of human migrations in the TP’s past. The first layer of local hunter-gatherers mixed with incoming millet farmers and arose the Chokhopani-associated Proto-Tibetan-Burman highlanders, which further respectively mixed with additional genetic contributors from the western Eurasian Steppe, Yellow River and Yangtze River and finally gave rise to the modern Ando, Ü-Tsang and Kham Tibetans.

    The Opportunities and Challenges of Integrating Population Histories Into Genetic Studies for Diverse Populations: A Motivating Example From Native Hawaiians

    There is a well-recognized need to include diverse populations in genetic studies, but several obstacles continue to be prohibitive, including (but are not limited to) the difficulty of recruiting individuals from diverse populations in large numbers and the lack of representation in available genomic references. These obstacles notwithstanding, studying multiple diverse populations would provide informative, population-specific insights. Using Native Hawaiians as an example of an understudied population with a unique evolutionary history, I will argue that by developing key genomic resources and integrating evolutionary thinking into genetic epidemiology, we will have the opportunity to efficiently advance our knowledge of the genetic risk factors, ameliorate health disparity, and improve healthcare in this underserved population.
28. languagehat says

    October 8, 2021 at 4:29 pm

    Thanks for those!
29. David Marjanović says

    October 8, 2021 at 5:55 pm

    I haven’t had time to read them myself yet.
30. Trond Engen says

    October 9, 2021 at 6:53 am

    Thanks! Will read.
31. Trond Engen says

    October 22, 2021 at 5:02 pm

    I’m frantically trying to get up to date with all these papers.

    The origins and spread of domestic horses from the Western Eurasian steppes has showed up as open access in Nature.

    (Quoting a bit more)

    Abstract
    Domestication of horses fundamentally transformed long-range mobility and warfare. However, modern domesticated breeds do not descend from the earliest domestic horse lineage associated with archaeological evidence of bridling, milking and corralling at Botai, Central Asia around 3500 BC. Other longstanding candidate regions for horse domestication, such as Iberia and Anatolia, have also recently been challenged. Thus, the genetic, geographic and temporal origins of modern domestic horses have remained unknown. Here we pinpoint the Western Eurasian steppes, especially the lower Volga-Don region, as the homeland of modern domestic horses. Furthermore, we map the population changes accompanying domestication from 273 ancient horse genomes. This reveals that modern domestic horses ultimately replaced almost all other local populations as they expanded rapidly across Eurasia from about 2000 BC, synchronously with equestrian material culture, including Sintashta spoke-wheeled chariots. We find that equestrianism involved strong selection for critical locomotor and behavioural adaptations at the GSDMC and ZFPM1 genes. Our results reject the commonly held association between horseback riding and the massive expansion of Yamnaya steppe pastoralists into Europe around 3000 BC driving the spread of Indo-European languages. This contrasts with the scenario in Asia where Indo-Iranian languages, chariots and horses spread together, following the early second millennium BC Sintashta culture.

    […]

    Discussion
    This work resolves longstanding debates about the origins and spread of domestic horses. Whereas horses living in the Western Eurasia steppes in the late fourth and early third millennia BC were the ancestors of DOM2 horses, there is no evidence that they facilitated the expansion of the human genetic steppe ancestry into Europe as previously hypothesized. Instead of horse-mounted warfare, declining populations during the European late Neolithic may thus have opened up an opportunity for a westward expansion of steppe pastoralists. Yamnaya horses at Repin and Turganik carried more DOM2 genetic affinity than presumably wild horses from hunter-gatherer sites of the sixth millennium BC (NEO-NCAS, from approximately 5500–5200 BC), which may suggest early horse management and herding practices. Regardless, Yamnaya pastoralism did not spread horses far outside their native range, similar to the Botai horse domestication, which remained a localized practice within a sedentary settlement system. The globalization stage started later, when DOM2 horses dispersed outside their core region, first reaching Anatolia, the lower Danube, Bohemia and Central Asia by approximately 2200 to 2000 BC, then Western Europe and Mongolia soon afterwards, ultimately replacing all local populations by around 1500 to 1000 BC. This process first involved horseback riding, as spoke-wheeled chariots represent later technological innovations, emerging around 2000 to 1800 BC in the Trans-Ural Sintashta culture. The weaponry, warriors and fortified settlements associated with this culture may have arisen in response to increased aridity and competition for critical grazing lands, intensifying territoriality and hierarchy. This may have provided the basis for the conquests over the subsequent centuries that resulted in an almost complete human and horse genetic turnover in Central Asian steppes. The expansion to the Carpathian basin, and possibly Anatolia and the Levant, involved a different scenario in which specialized horse trainers and chariot builders spread with the horse trade and riding. In both cases, horses with reduced back pathologies and enhanced docility would have facilitated Bronze Age elite long-distance trade demands and become a highly valued commodity and status symbol, resulting in rapid diaspora. We, however, acknowledge substantial spatiotemporal variability and evidential bias towards elite activities, so we do not discount additional, harder to evidence, factors in equine dispersal.

    Our results also have important implications for mechanisms underpinning two major language dispersals. The expansion of the Indo-European language family from the Western Eurasia steppes has traditionally been associated with mounted pastoralism, with the CWC serving as a major stepping stone in Europe. However, while there is overwhelming lexical evidence for horse domestication, horse-drawn chariots and derived mythologies in the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family, the linguistic indications of horse-keeping practices at the deeper Proto-Indo-European level are in fact ambiguous (Supplementary Discussion) . The limited presence of horses in CWC assemblages and the local genetic makeup of CWC specimens reject scenarios in which horses were the primary driving force behind the initial spread of Indo-European languages in Europe. By contrast, DOM2 dispersal in Asia during the early-to-mid second millennium BC was concurrent with the spread of chariotry and Indo-Iranian languages, whose earliest speakers are linked to populations that directly preceded the Sintashta culture. We thus conclude that the new package of chariotry and improved breed of horses, including chestnut coat colouration documented both linguistically (Supplementary Discussion) and genetically (Extended Data Fig. 8), transformed Eurasian Bronze Age societies globally within a few centuries after about 2000 BC. The adoption of this new institution, whether for warfare, prestige or both, probably varied between decentralized chiefdoms in Europe and urbanized states in Western Asia. The results thus open up new research avenues into the historical developments of these different societal trajectories.

    That is, the rapid spread of Steppe ancestry in Europe wasn’t carried on horseback. It wasn’t even bringing horses along. Horses bred for riding and chariotry came a millennium later, and we may ask what upheavals that caused.
32. David Marjanović says

    October 22, 2021 at 8:26 pm

    Oddly, the paper on the genetic history of the Tibetan plateau does not cite this one by a reshuffling of the same authors, published half a year earlier in the same journal.
33. Etienne says

    October 23, 2021 at 9:10 am

    Trond: the contrast between the Indo-Iranian speaking zone and the European zone (=Indo-European minus Anatolian, Tocharian and Armenian) is reminiscent of another such contrast: whereas in Europe there is a layer of place-names that seems to go back to a nearly undifferentiated Indo-European (=Krahe’s “Old European”), nothing like this has been found in the Indo-Iranian zone.

    So, if I may speculate wildly here: perhaps in Europe the original bearers of Steppe ancestry (whatever the original cause(s) of their expansion across Europe may have been) were the first wave of Indo-European speakers and were the ones responsible for “Old European” place-names, with a later wave of Indo-Europeanization in Europe taking place as a result of the domestication of the horse (wholly replacing, partly replacing, or simply heavily influencing, the older Indo-European varieties? All possible. Would it be possible to associate the later Indo-Europeanizing wave with some linguistic innovation(s)/isogloss(es) within Europe? The RUKI-rule, perhaps?). Because in the Indo-Iranian zone the spread of Indo-European was due to the domestication of the horse, Indo-Iranian spread across an area which, unlike Europe, had not been previously Indo-Europeanized.

    Hm. Thinking out loud here…this scenario fits with the linguistic facts well for another reason: Indo-Iranian shows far more non-Indo-European influence (in vocabulary) than any of the European branches of Indo-European, which seems odd since we have much older records for Indo-Iranian than for European Indo-European (All other things being equal, we would expect that the languages attested earlier would show less outside influence).

    BUT…if Indo-Iranian did indeed spread at the expense of non-Indo-European languages, and (later, domestic horse-using) European Indo-European spread over a substrate of (earlier) Indo-European varieties (which may well have formed a dialect continuum, and been mutually intelligible with, the expanding varieties), well, that would explain the contrast, wouldn’t it?

    Okay, enough with the soliloquy, thoughts, anyone?
34. languagehat says

    October 23, 2021 at 9:17 am

    I like it, but I await what better-informed folks will have to say.
35. Dmitry Pruss says

    October 23, 2021 at 3:12 pm

    Two potentially important considerations are

    1) Male-dominated, Steppe ancestry-rich population turnovers in Europe didn’t end with the initial spread of Yamnaya across Dnieper and up the Danube. Rather, they just started. A replacement event every 200-300 years all the way to the end of the III millennium BCE. As documented recently e.g. in
    https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abi6941

    2) Military technologies spread somewhat independently of the main population moves. Take Sintashta. Their principal genetic ancestors were the Fatyanovo who didn’t have horses and didn’t live on the Steppe in the first place. They were grazing sheep and raising pigs on the riverside meadows of the forests. Fatyanovo did form an early offshoot East of Volga since they needed copper ores lacking in their core lands. It overlaps in time with Turganik and its proto-domestic horses, but Turganik is assigned to a very different Samara culture. Even though it’s geographically close to Sintashta which soon flourished. But Sintashta is known to have been something of a melting pot, with the DNA of some of Sintashta remains being quite dissimilar from its main population. So I believe that Sintashta got its horses from one of the Steppe populations which contributed less, genetically, to its population. A sort of a culturally important minority. The horse technology could have spread West in the same way, as a cultural import or a contribution of a minority group.
36. David Marjanović says

    October 23, 2021 at 4:45 pm

    Leiden press release, pretty long and readable. I still haven’t read the real thing, but I’ll try to do that right away.

    in Europe there is a layer of place-names that seems to go back to a nearly undifferentiated Indo-European (=Krahe’s “Old European”)

    There may not actually be any evidence for this. Check out Piotr’s conference presentation “Against Old European: Why we need to be more specific” from 2012.

    More than one wave of IE language spread in western & central Europe (not to mention the Apennine and Balkan peninsulas with the whole Crotonian business, or the Italic loanwords in Proto-Slavic) are a given, e.g. because the Bell Beaker expansion was simply too early to be Proto-Celtic or anything like that. But those probably all came from within that region; e.g., there’s no reason, AFAIK, to assume the origin of Celtic was any farther east than Bavaria.

    1) Male-dominated, Steppe ancestry-rich population turnovers in Europe didn’t end with the initial spread of Yamnaya across Dnieper and up the Danube. Rather, they just started. A replacement event every 200-300 years all the way to the end of the III millennium BCE. As documented recently e.g. in

    That’s a fascinating open-access article! Abstract:

    Europe’s prehistory oversaw dynamic and complex interactions of diverse societies, hitherto unexplored at detailed regional scales. Studying 271 human genomes dated ~4900 to 1600 BCE from the European heartland, Bohemia, we reveal unprecedented genetic changes and social processes. Major migrations preceded the arrival of “steppe” ancestry, and at ~2800 BCE, three genetically and culturally differentiated groups coexisted. Corded Ware appeared by 2900 BCE, were initially genetically diverse, did not derive all steppe ancestry from known Yamnaya, and assimilated females of diverse backgrounds. Both Corded Ware and Bell Beaker groups underwent dynamic changes, involving sharp reductions and complete replacements of Y-chromosomal diversity at ~2600 and ~2400 BCE, respectively, the latter accompanied by increased Neolithic-like ancestry. The Bronze Age saw new social organization emerge amid a ≥40% population turnover.
37. Trond Engen says

    October 25, 2021 at 4:59 pm

    Fascinating it is. This opens so many doors it’s hard to know where to go. For now. Soon this fine-grained approach will be applied everywhere, and we’ll have migration history on a level I couldn’t imagine.

    Obviously, the whole process of indoeuropeanization just became very chaotic. I was surprised, but I realize I shouldn’t be. A culture established through full replacement of the male line won’t stop having male lines replaced just like that. The period from the late 4th to the early 2nd millennium BCE was one long migration era, and migrations went in all directions. Funnel Beaker and Global Amphora were intrusive to Bohemia from the north. Then came Corded Ware from the northeast, probably (but not necessarily) introducing Indo-European, Bell Beaker from the west, and then Únětice from the northeast again.

    So why did it calm down for a while in the Bronze Age? Or is the Bronze Age just as restless, and we just haven’t got the data yet?
38. David Marjanović says

    November 6, 2021 at 6:28 pm

    The genomic origins of the Bronze Age Tarim Basin mummies in open access. Abstract:

    The identity of the earliest inhabitants of Xinjiang, in the heart of Inner Asia, and the languages that they spoke have long been debated and remain contentious. Here we present genomic data from 5 individuals dating to around 3000–2800 bc from the Dzungarian Basin and 13 individuals dating to around 2100–1700 BC from the Tarim Basin, representing the earliest yet discovered human remains from North and South Xinjiang, respectively. We find that the Early Bronze Age Dzungarian individuals exhibit a predominantly Afanasievo ancestry with an additional local contribution, and the Early–Middle Bronze Age Tarim individuals contain only a local ancestry. The Tarim individuals from the site of Xiaohe further exhibit strong evidence of milk proteins in their dental calculus, indicating a reliance on dairy pastoralism at the site since its founding. Our results do not support previous hypotheses for the origin of the Tarim mummies, who were argued to be Proto-Tocharian-speaking pastoralists descended from the Afanasievo or to have originated among the Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex or Inner Asian Mountain Corridor cultures. Instead, although Tocharian may have been plausibly introduced to the Dzungarian Basin by Afanasievo migrants during the Early Bronze Age, we find that the earliest Tarim Basin cultures appear to have arisen from a genetically isolated local population that adopted neighbouring pastoralist and agriculturalist practices, which allowed them to settle and thrive along the shifting riverine oases of the Taklamakan Desert.

    Later on:

    In contrast to the EBA Dzungarian individuals, the EMBA individuals from the eastern Tarim sites of Xiaohe and Gumugou (Tarim_EMBA1) form a tight cluster close to pre-Bronze Age central steppe and Siberian individuals who share a high level of ancient North Eurasian (ANE) ancestry (for example, Botai_CA).

    […]

    Outgroup f3 statistics supports a tight genetic link between the Dzungarian and Tarim groups (Extended Data Fig. 2A). Nevertheless, both of the Dzungarian groups are significantly different from the Tarim groups, showing excess affinity with various western Eurasian populations and sharing fewer alleles with ANE-related groups (Extended Data Fig. 2b, c). To understand this mixed genetic profile, we used qpAdm to explore admixture models of the Dzungarian groups with Tarim_EMBA1 or a terminal Pleistocene individual (AG3) from the Siberian site of Afontova Gora, as a source (Supplementary Data 1D). AG3 is a distal representative of the ANE ancestry and shows a high affinity with Tarim_EMBA1. Although the Tarim_EMBA1 individuals lived a millennium later than the Dzungarian groups, they are more genetically distant from the Afanasievo than the Dzungarian groups, suggesting that they have a higher proportion of local autochthonous ancestry. Here we define autochthonous to signify a genetic profile that has been present in a region for millennia, rather than being associated with more recently arrived groups.

    […]

    The Tarim_EMBA1 and Tarim_EMBA2 groups, although geographically separated by over 600 km of desert, form a homogeneous population that had undergone a substantial population bottleneck, as suggested by their high genetic affinity without close kinship, as well as by the limited diversity in their uniparental haplogroups (Figs. 1 and 2, Extended Data Fig. 4, Extended Data Table 1, Supplementary Data 1B and Supplementary Text 4). Using qpAdm, we modelled the Tarim Basin individuals as a mixture of two ancient autochthonous Asian genetic groups: the ANE, represented by an Upper Palaeolithic individual from the Afontova Gora site in the upper Yenisei River region of Siberia (AG3) (about 72%), and ancient Northeast Asians, represented by Baikal_EBA (about 28%) (Supplementary Data 1E and Fig. 3a). Tarim_EMBA2 from Beifang can also be modelled as a mixture of Tarim_EMBA1 (about 89%) and Baikal_EBA (about 11%). For both Tarim groups, admixture models unanimously fail when using the Afanasievo or IAMC/BMAC groups as a western Eurasian source (Supplementary Data 1E), thus rejecting a western Eurasian genetic contribution from nearby groups with herding and/or farming economies. We estimate a deep formation date for the Tarim_EMBA1 genetic profile, consistent with an absence of western Eurasian EBA admixture, placing the origin of this gene pool at 183 generations before the sampled Tarim Basin individuals, or 9,157 ± 986 years ago when assuming an average generation time of 29 years (Fig. 3b). Considering these findings together, the genetic profile of the Tarim Basin individuals indicates that the earliest individuals of the Xiaohe horizon belong to an ancient and isolated autochthonous Asian gene pool. This autochthonous ANE-related gene pool is likely to have formed the genetic substratum of the pre-pastoralist ANE-related populations of Central Asia and southern Siberia (Fig. 3c, Extended Data Fig. 2 and Supplementary Text 5).

    […]

    Although the harsh environment of the Tarim Basin may have served as a strong barrier to gene flow into the region, it was not a barrier to the flow of ideas or technologies, as foreign innovations, such as dairy pastoralism and wheat and millet agriculture, came to form the basis of the Bronze Age Tarim economies. Woollen fabrics, horns and bones of cattle, sheep and goats, livestock manure, and milk and kefir-like dairy products have been recovered from the upper layers of the Xiaohe and Gumugou cemeteries, as have wheat and millet seeds and bundles of Ephedra twigs. Famously, many of the mummies dating to 1650–1450 bc were even buried with lumps of cheese. However, until now it has not been clear whether this pastoralist lifestyle also characterized the earliest layers at Xiaohe.

    Yup, they were already living off cow, sheep and goat milk products (despite not making any lactase). Ephedra = Mormon tea = soma/haoma as already used in the BMAC.

    The Tarim mummies’ so-called Western physical features are probably due to their connection to the Pleistocene ANE gene pool, and their extreme genetic isolation differs from the EBA Dzungarian, IAMC and Chemurchek populations, who experienced substantial genetic interactions with the nearby populations mirroring their cultural links, pointing towards a role of extreme environments as a barrier to human migration.

    In contrast to their marked genetic isolation, however, the populations of the Xiaohe horizon were culturally cosmopolitan, incorporating diverse economic elements and technologies with far-flung origins. They made cheese from ruminant milk using a kefir-like fermentation, perhaps learned from descendants of the Afanasievo, and they cultivated wheat, barley and millet, crops that were originally domesticated in the Near East and northern China and which were introduced into Xinjiang no earlier than 3500 BC, probably via their IAMC neighbours. [IAMC = Inner Asian Mountain Corridor, basically the Tian Shan.] They buried their dead with Ephedra twigs in a style reminiscent of the BMAC oasis cultures of Central Asia, and they also developed distinctive cultural elements not found among other cultures in Xinjiang or elsewhere, such as boat-shaped wooden coffins covered with cattle hides and marked by timber poles or oars, as well as an apparent preference for woven baskets over pottery. Considering these findings together, it appears that the tightknit population that founded the Xiaohe horizon were well aware of different technologies and cultures outside the Tarim Basin and that they developed their unique culture in response to the extreme challenges of the Taklamakan Desert and its lush and fertile riverine oases.

    This study illuminates in detail the origins of the Bronze Age human populations in the Dzungarian and Tarim basins of Xinjiang. Notably, our results support no hypothesis involving substantial human migration from steppe or mountain agropastoralists for the origin of the Bronze Age Tarim mummies, but rather we find that the Tarim mummies represent a culturally cosmopolitan but genetically isolated autochthonous population. This finding is consistent with earlier arguments that the IAMC served as a geographic corridor and vector for regional cultural interaction that connected disparate populations from the fourth to the second millennium BC. While the arrival and admixture of Afanasievo populations in the Dzungarian Basin of northern Xinjiang around 3000 BC may have plausibly introduced Indo-European languages to the region, the material culture and genetic profile of the Tarim mummies from around 2100 BC onwards call into question simplistic assumptions about the link between genetics, culture and language and leave unanswered the question of whether the Bronze Age Tarim populations spoke a form of proto-Tocharian. Future archaeological and palaeogenomic research on subsequent Tarim Basin populations—and most importantly, studies of the sites and periods where first millennium ad Tocharian texts have been recovered—are necessary to understand the later population history of the Tarim Basin. Finally, the palaeogenomic characterization of the Tarim mummies has unexpectedly revealed one of the few known Holocene-era genetic descendant populations of the once widespread Pleistocene ANE ancestry profile. The Tarim mummy genomes thus provide a critical reference point for genetically modelling Holocene-era populations and reconstructing the population history of Asia.
39. languagehat says

    November 6, 2021 at 6:33 pm

    Amazing stuff — early history is getting progressively rewritten.
40. David Marjanović says

    November 6, 2021 at 6:46 pm

    We’ve very quickly come a long way from nos ancêtres les Gaulois (or, farther east, from pre-Celtic “Illyrians” who “died out” as my sister was still taught). I envy the generation of current kindergarten kids the prehistory chapters they’ll have in their history schoolbooks.
41. Y says

    November 6, 2021 at 6:57 pm

    As they will envy the kids in a few decades…

    Even with all the new data pouring in, I fear that there’s no sign yet of a coherent picture crystallizing. It seems like every new discovery scrambles the history afresh. I fear that we’re far off indeed from being able to codify much at the level of children’s schoolbooks.
42. languagehat says

    November 6, 2021 at 9:44 pm

    But that’s good! It’s better to have a complicated, unclear picture than a simple-minded fairy tale.
43. Y says

    November 6, 2021 at 9:48 pm

    Of course, but it’s nice to be at a point where we know that we at least have an approximation to what’s going on. It feels like we are not even to the “let’s start filling in the details” stage.
44. SFReader says

    November 6, 2021 at 10:26 pm

    If we taught kids in the kindergarten the real prehistory, I imagine it would look like this.

    Our great-great-great…..grandpa came from the east and raped our great-great-great…..grandma and thus our great and glorious nation was born.

    But not yet! Because another two centuries passed and our great-great-great…..grandpa came from the east and raped our great-great-great…..grandma and thus our great and glorious nation was born again.

    And so on for five thousand years.

    That’s what literally these papers amount to.
45. David Eddyshaw says

    November 7, 2021 at 12:39 am

    Alternatively, great-great-great .. grandma may just have preferred men with chariots to pedestrians.
46. SFReader says

    November 7, 2021 at 1:33 am

    You are absolutely right.

    That’s exactly what would be written in the version for kindergarten kids.
47. David Marjanović says

    November 7, 2021 at 7:54 am

    Even with all the new data pouring in, I fear that there’s no sign yet of a coherent picture crystallizing. It seems like every new discovery scrambles the history afresh.

    The impression I’m getting is that we’ve been having a coherent picture for a few years now. Every new discovery complicates it considerably, but generally in ways that make more sense than the simplicity we had before.
48. Dmitry Pruss says

    November 7, 2021 at 1:59 pm

    Ah, so this thread is where it is more appropriate to discuss these sorts of discoveries. I posted about the Tarim discovery in the Tocharian thread but it wasn’t really noticed there
    https://languagehat.com/tocharian/#comment-4311399

    preferred men with chariots

    sometimes it’s the opposite disconnect between the conventionally accepted history narrative and what the genes say (the rape was always posited but something different must have happened in reality). Like one of the genes I spent decades with is BRCA1, a scourge of early-age breast and ovarian cancers. The Ashkenazi Jewish population has two common mutations in it, one with venerable, likely middle Eastern roots, another much younger in origin and shared in all peoples of Baltic / Eastern European origins, from Denmark to Greece. One can follow the history of the mutation by checking what else in its neighborhood is passed along from parent to child, and building a phylogenetic tree of these patterns. The root of the tree is buried in the post-Roman Great Migrations age somewhere in the Denmark / South Sweden area. The Ashkenazi sub-branch is relatively young, and grows from a larger Polish / Kresy branch, splitting off in the XVII century, give or take a century or two.

    It’s been known for over 15 years, and people immediately jumped to an interpretation: this genetic scourge must be a lasting legacy of the Chmielnicki rapes. Except the more recent studies show that the massive infusion of East Slavic DNA into the Ashkenazi Jewish population was female-mediated, and took place largely in the 1500s as small founder groups of the Ashkenazim moved to Mazovia and on to the Lithuanian Grand Duchy. Most parsimoniously, it’s the pioneering migrants taking local wives, in a pattern repeated by so many peoples in so many places and circumstances across the globe. Here goes the rape story…
49. Y says

    November 7, 2021 at 2:35 pm

    I imagine that in those days a Jewish man could marry a gentile woman without her ritualistically converting, and it would be overlooked, and a few generations later none would be the wiser.
50. Dmitry Pruss says

    November 7, 2021 at 3:33 pm

    It is safer to assume that conversions did occur, but the process might have differed in some important details from today’s extremely high bar. The rabbinical authorities, including some even in Israel, already consider mitochondrial DNA tests when making halachaic decisions. Their favorite mtDNA haplotypes are the most common among the Ashkenazi Jews but are, ultimately of Western Mediterranean origins, rather than from the Middle East. So these “authentically Jewish” mtDNA lineages are undoubtedly of a female convert origin too, only from an earlier era. By extension, the additional Eastern Europe-specific mtDNA types ought to be considered convert too. Since they’ve been added to the population DNA more recently, they can’t be used to tell Jewish vs. gentile maternal lines apart, but it’s the only difference.

    Very few Ashkenazi maternal lines can be traced by DNA back to the Middle East. Only the paternal lines lead there with few exceptions.
51. Y says

    November 7, 2021 at 4:01 pm

    Could those W. Mediterranean lineages be Roman/Italian?
52. rozele says

    November 7, 2021 at 4:05 pm

    embroidering on @Y:
    /hops on hobby horse/

    i don’t think it’s a matter of “overlooking” – i think it’s part of a very pervasive pattern!

    to my eye, data like this helps strengthen the argument that jewish communities that emerged in earlier periods did so in quite similar ways to the more recently-established ones that we know a great deal about (from the abuyadaya back to the beta israel). which is to say, primarily through non-institutional affiliation, in many cases with the presence of a small number of jewish people (mostly men) from other places, but not necessarily any (as with the abuyadaya). those communities have then had varying degrees of harmonization of some parts of their practice to neighboring or influential older communities, often in many waves over time.

    we know (from daniel boyarin’s research, among others) that the different gender systems and dynamics of gendered power in jewish communities made them desirable points of affiliation for women, in particular, in the period when rabbinic jewishness was emerging. that seems likely to have also been true in the later stages of the christianization of eastern europe (which came especially late to the baltic, of course) – though i’d guess that as in the red sea basin and elsewhere, the chance to at least partially opt out of the structuring conflicts between empires and actively proselytizing religions was a bigger factor.

    this process of ethnogenesis through affiliation is also, i’d say, the easiest way to explain why jewish communities not only look like their neighbors but generally* speak the same languages, or ones that have only recently diverged, with minimal substrates, and why linguistic and minhag/nusakh boundaries line up so precisely. if there were in fact an ancient-greek-style colonial process, you’d expect to see a patchwork of reappearing languages (or at least substrates) and minhogim based on where the founding populations came from. and we don’t, except in some exceptional cases – either communities that remained quite small (the sefardi community in madras; the baghdadi community that began in surat; &c) or were established through mass displacements or migrations (the sefardi diaspora; the yiddish emigration wave) rather than settlement by small core groups.

    .
    * yiddish is the most confusing exception, though the 19thC evidence of 18thC communities speaking something slavic is suggestive about the date that it became the dominant jewish language in eastern europe. and, more importantly, we have very little evidence of what anyone but rabbis and other wealthy men who dealt with the state authorities spoke. and those guys were/are a highly endogamous elite class – one that does seem to have been established by migrants and is often explicitly contrasted with the majority of yiddish jews. the other exceptions (judezmo/ladino being the main one) all have pretty clear explanations.
53. Dmitry Pruss says

    November 7, 2021 at 4:18 pm

    Could those W. Mediterranean lineages be Roman/Italian?

    Possibly. There is no 100% certain answer, because ancient DNA from the region isn’t sampled well enough, and because the Ashkenazi founder effects may have enriched some previously rare lineages just by chance, potentially reducing the odds of finding similar mtDNAs in the ancient samples.

    A classic paper tries to stay vague
    https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms3543

    On the up-to-date trees combining literature and user-submitted DNAs, it looks like the roots of the lineages date back to Roman times, not later than II c., but without any ancient DNAs in the comparisons. One example:
    https://yfull.com/mtree/K1a1b1a/
54. Dmitry Pruss says

    November 7, 2021 at 5:12 pm

    @rozele interesting, 1700s and 1800s Slavic usage evidence, can you please elaborate? We discussed 1600s about a year ago here, it sounds like a very exaggerated interpretation of a quote of a prescriptivist rabbi…

    https://languagehat.com/lost-yiddish-words/#comment-4049403

    There is talk about even earlier Canaanitic but it seems to be smoke without a fire too
55. David Marjanović says

    November 7, 2021 at 6:56 pm

    Oh, yes, I overlooked the Tocharian thread.

    we know (from daniel boyarin’s research, among others) that the different gender systems and dynamics of gendered power in jewish communities made them desirable points of affiliation for women, in particular, in the period when rabbinic jewishness was emerging.

    Intriguing. Could you elaborate?
56. D.O. says

    November 7, 2021 at 10:42 pm

    rozele, I join Dmitry Pruss in asking for more details. How is that possible that low class Jews in Russian empire in 19th century have spoken Yiddish, but before that a Slavic language? This makes no sense to me, which is not the same as being wrong, of course.
57. rozele says

    November 8, 2021 at 12:35 am

    i’ll see how much i can post tonight, and get to anything that’s left later!

    first, @DM:

    all of this adapted from daniel boyarin [i had thought Border Lines was mainly what i’m remembering, but i looked at my copy and it seems to be something else – i’ll see if i can figure it out]…

    rabbinism emerges during the centuries on either side of christian year 0 – first as a countercurrent to temple-centered judean ritual practice, and then as its successor – through the emergence of the studyhouse/synagogue as an institution, the development of the texts that now get grouped as the talmud, and the decreasing power of the hereditary temple priesthood and monarchy. all of this largely* under roman hegemony, which is to say within a society whose gendered structures (which become christianized to form the core of the contemporary euro/colonial gender system) leave barely any space for women to have a public role, much less economic or institutional power.

    rabbinism develops a whole other gender system [this is boyarin’s Unheroic Conduct and Carnal Israel], which is equally binary and committed to privileging men, but very different in content. one of those differences is an openness to women’s active participation in economic and institutional life. if i remember right, this shows up in the early synagogue epigraphy, as well as being quite clear from the polemical writing by writers affiliated with both of the gradually disentangling christian and (rabbinist) jewish movements.

    during this same period, there’s a wave of affiliation with what we can start to see as jewishness, partly enabled by the way that rabbinism makes it exist as something other than “what judeaens do”. there’s enough of it that the rabbis make a ritual for it, and formally decide (though arguments last into the early modern period**) that by affiliating, a person becomes a descendent of abraham just like any other jew [this is s.j.d. cohen]. that wave is, to my eye, what makes something we can properly call jewishness out of the constellation of judean emigrant communities.

    it’s not much of a stretch to see these two processes as connected. if the question is “why become jewish?”, the answer has to be the things distinguishing jews from other segments of roman society. and one of the big ones is their gender system, and the greater space of possibility it offered women.

    that analysis is reinforced, i think, by the way that the same dynamic played into the expansion of early christianity through women’s affiliation [this i think is well-established]. i won’t even glance at the whole question of how to even distinguish that from the expansion of jewishness in the same period – the point is that they’re largely one and the same. the way paul and his successors combined attacks on women’s influence with an insistance on the non-jewishness of christianity shows quite clearly that they understood the two to be related.

    * i know less about what’s up in the persian imperial zone, the other main center of rabbinic jewishness’ emergence. i’m not gonna open that can of worms, except to say that i think it’s arguable that the rabbis’ ideological decision to present themselves as the heirs of the jerusalem temple put the emphasis on the roman sphere even as the mesopotamian rabbis became authoritiative beyond the persian empire.

    ** relevantly, once they exist, rhineland and then eastern european rabbis are very consistently on the ‘pro-convert’ side in their decisions, in contrast to iberian and north african rabbis.
58. rozele says

    November 8, 2021 at 2:16 am

    @DP, @DO:

    this is a whole kettle of worms, and nobody has any decent answers. what’s clear is that the conventional explanations for (as of the 19thC) both the presence in eastern europe of the world’s biggest jewish population and its use of a germanic language don’t hold up. there were no mass migrations to the east; weinreich’s rhineland hypothesis doesn’t hold up to scrutiny; western yiddish probably isn’t monogenetic (though the whole family of yiddishes probably is)*; and so on and so forth.

    and, even worse, the jewishness of the khazars is both historically unclear and probably irrelevant!

    but: the piece of the puzzle i was referring to is this:

    R. Isaac Ber Levinsohn (1901, 33–34 note 2; from Hebrew), who lived from 1788 to 1860, was also of the opinion that Russian Jews, in the first instance, spoke Russian:

    “and our elderly told us that the Jews, a number of generations before us, only spoke the language of this Russia in these districts [Volhynia, Podolia, Kiev, and the other districts], and that the Yiddish that we now speak had not been disseminated among all the Jews who lived in these districts, and they also told me, on behalf of […] (Czacki) […] that some hundreds of years ago, the Jews in these districts said their prayers in Polish and not in the holy language as they are used to do nowadays, and this as proof that their language was Polish or Russian”

    this is jits van straten in his tendentious The Origin of Ashkenazi Jewry, whose analysis i wouldn’t rely on, but who i’ve got no reason to distrust on his sources (he’s no paul wexler). levinsohn was an anti-yiddishist enlightener, so we probably have this tidbit thanks to his excitement about finding evidence of eastern european jews using something he could consider a “real language”. but there’s no reason for us to think (as van straten seems to) that the language his informants were talking about was what we’d call russian. if “this russian” is a decent translation of levinsohn’s hebrew, it seems much more likely to be referring to whatever the local slavic vernacular(s) were at the time than to any state language.

    but what we can glean is that at the edge of living mid-19thC memory, the jews of a core region of eastern europe were speaking something slavic rather than yiddish, and that some time before that they had also prayed in a slavic language*.

    this harmonizes pretty well with what alexander beider writes: “The Yiddish literature of Eastern Europe known to us dates from the 16th century only and comes from Poland. No Yiddish publication from the territories of modern Ukraine, Belarus, or Lithuania is known even for the 17th century.” [Contested Origins of Eastern European Jewry: Clues from History, Linguistics, and Onomastics – in Avotaynu 33:2, 2017]

    and even for poland, the yiddish material is quite sparse into the 17thC. one of the earliest eastern yiddish texts – and possibly the earliest printed one by well over a century!*** – is a 1613 refue / remedy book, seyfer derekh ets ha-khayim, that ewa geller says shows that its writer was a fluent polish speaker, while “taytsh, on the other hand, seems to have been an acquired language for the author”.

    i’ll leave it at that, with no pretense of being able to make it all make sense!

    .
    * i’m trusting alexis manaster ramer on this, partly because he actually talks about methodology in ways that make sense.

    ** the time period here is uncertain; oral testimony of “some hundreds of years” could mean anything past living memory. and what exactly “said their prayers” refers to here is an interesting question. it could be anything from synagogue liturgy – which seems quite unlikely, though not impossible given how much everyone seems to agree that there weren’t many rabbis in eastern europe – to some or all of the many genres that were later mainly performed in yiddish.

    *** i’m not gonna go looking further, but geller’s article cites another refue-bukh from 1790 as the previous “first literary document of Eastern-Yiddish”.
59. David Marjanović says

    November 8, 2021 at 7:03 am

    Interesting indeed, thanks!

    western yiddish probably isn’t monogenetic (though the whole family of yiddishes probably is)

    I don’t get this part, though: how can the whole family be monogenetic when its parts aren’t?
60. languagehat says

    November 8, 2021 at 7:45 am

    Interesting indeed, thanks!

    Seconded!

    this is jits van straten in his tendentious The Origin of Ashkenazi Jewry

    I copyedited that book! (He thanks me nicely in the acks.) I too found it tendentious and wondered how much of it to take seriously, but he’s a great guy (and paid me promptly).
61. PlasticPaddy says

    November 8, 2021 at 7:58 am

    @rozele, dm, dp, do
    What I am missing here is what different authors mean by “said their prayers”, “spoke the language”, etc. These are multilingual communities with exogamy and transnational or even transcontinental networks involving both Jews and non-Jews. So a significant proportion of people might have been code-switching and what language they “spoke” or “said their prayers” in might depend on the individual and the context. So could Yiddish be a sort of lingua franca adopted over time and in parallel with the rise of nations in Europe?
62. languagehat says

    November 8, 2021 at 8:03 am

    So could Yiddish be a sort of lingua franca adopted over time and in parallel with the rise of nations in Europe?

    That’s what it’s sounding like, and it’s an exciting idea (to me, anyway).
63. SFReader says

    November 8, 2021 at 9:10 am

    Since Ashkenazi Jews are of West German origin (there can be no doubt about it), it means that they originally spoke some other West German dialect (not Yiddish).

    They lost it within few generations after migration to Grand Duchy of Lithuania in 15th century, switched presumably to some version of Old Ruthenian and then reacquired another West German dialect which became Yiddish sometime in 18th century.

    Or alternatively (and perhaps more plausibly) this is what happened to some groups of Lithuanian Jews, not all of them.

    So some isolated groups of Jews who lost Yiddish, spoke Ruthenian and even prayed in Slavic were later reintegrated back to the Yiddish-speaking majority.

    Anyway, sounds very interesting.
64. January First-of-May says

    November 8, 2021 at 12:02 pm

    I sadly don’t recall the details – I’ve heard about it about two or three years ago – but supposedly one Eastern European… either language or highly divergent dialect… is attested from one word list (and/or a few sentences), written in a notebook found by a Soviet teenager in the 1970s, which was then reportedly thrown away by his mother, but fortunately some parts of the text had been copied.

    There’s a lot we don’t (and, often, can’t) really know about the linguistic landscape of Eastern Europe even as recently as the 19th century, never mind the 18th. So much just either didn’t happen to be written down, or was lost later.
    I guess in a lot of cases there’s always the hope for some accidental further discovery…
65. rozele says

    November 8, 2021 at 1:12 pm

    @DM:

    quickly as i run to work:

    manaster ramer argues that all yiddishes do share a common origin, but that the major/earliest historical splitting is not between the varieties have been clustered (on reasonable linguistic grounds) as “western yiddish” and “eastern yiddish” – roughly west and east of the oder – but between varieties east and west of the elbe (or a line west of it). so the eastern dialects of “western yiddish” are more closely related to the dialects of “eastern yiddish” than they are to the western dialects of “western yiddish”.

    here’s the paper.

    this matters more than it may seem because the big cultural and community-identity division in central & eastern european jewry runs along the elbe, and very much not the oder. proverbially, minhag ashkenaz ends, and minhag poyln begins, at the Dammtor in hamburg. one of the big implicit arguments for the idea that eastern european jews can be considered a subset of german jewry – i.e. as “ashkenazim”, despite having a distinct minhag and nusakh from the rhineland-centered minhag ashkenaz – is the idea that even if yiddish isn’t a pure dialect continuum, its western branch includes a sizeable section of poyln along with ashkenaz. if manaster ramer’s right, that simply doesn’t hold up.

    and that speaks to SFReader’s proposals, too. pace SFReader, there’s metric tons of doubt about the rhenish hypothesis, and always has been. dovid katz, alexander beider, and others have pointed out the shakiness in the – very few – concrete arguments weinreich made to back up his assertions, and i don’t know that anyone has actually tried to make a well-grounded case for it since (as opposed to simply using uncle max’s name as an amulet). but ultimately, how much that matters depends on what we’re trying to explain. west-of-the-elbe yiddish – the yiddish of minhag ashkenaz – may indeed have a rhenish center point. but that doesn’t say much of anything meaningful about the history of east-of-the-elbe yiddish – the yiddish of minhag poyln – which is, after all, the only piece that’s confusing! west of the elbe, it makes sense for jewish communities to speak a germanic language; east of the elbe, not so much, since (again pace SFReader) there’s no evidence for mass migration east.

    (the question of when and why eastern european jews started to be talked about as a subset of german jews (as “ashkenazim”) is its own whole can of worms – all i’ll say here is that my bronx-born grandfather’s line on his jewish identity was “whaddya mean, ashkenazi? i’m a galitsianer!”)
66. drasvi says

    November 8, 2021 at 1:35 pm

    @January First-of-May, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudovian_language#Polish-Yotvingian_vocabulary
    I agree.
67. D.O. says

    November 8, 2021 at 2:09 pm

    rozele, thanks for a detailed explanation and good for your grandfather to be a proud galitzaner (usually, not the most envied Jewish subsubidentity, but I remember in Munich the movie another proud galitzaner denouncing a “yekke potz”). Even if the gradient hypothesis (from Rhine eastward) is correct, there is no reason for religious and language boundaries to coincide.
68. Etienne says

    November 8, 2021 at 2:24 pm

    The spread of Yiddish among Central and Eastern European Jews does seem oddly similar to the nearly contemporaneous spread of Ladino (A.K.A Judeo-Spanish, A.K.A. Judezmo) among Jews of the Mediterranean world and the Balkans: and I do recall one monograph on a variety of Ladino which made a strong case that Ladino had spread, in hellenophone Europe, at the expense of whatever variety/varieties of Greek Jews of the region had originally spoken. The discussion upthread on Yiddish having possibly spread, among Jews, at the expense of Slavic in Russia and Poland reminded me of this, and more broadly makes me suspect that the dynamics of Ladino and Yiddish language spread may have more than a few points in common.
69. FJ says

    November 8, 2021 at 2:39 pm

    Well, in case of the Greek Jews and the spread of Ladino, there’s a clear case of swamping — the number of Jews in present-day Greece and surrounding areas immediately prior to the 1492 expulsion was tiny compared to the the exiled newcomers.

    On the other hand, rozele says there was no large-scale eastward migration of Yiddish speakers.
70. Trond Engen says

    November 8, 2021 at 6:22 pm

    Dmitry: Ah, so this thread is where it is more appropriate to discuss these sorts of discoveries. I posted about the Tarim discovery in the Tocharian thread but it wasn’t really noticed there

    I’ve very much noticed it, but I haven’t had time to dive into it. Will do.

    Since these were ANE people related to the Botai, here’s a speculation on Botai and Mongolia in what for a while was the horse thread. The rest of the discussion needs updating in light of the new dating of riding.

    (LanguageHat: Where everything is discussed but never under the right headline.)
71. SFReader says

    November 8, 2021 at 7:58 pm

    I think there are genetic studies which prove West German origin of all Ashkenazi Jews.

    It’s also perfectly compatible with idea of no mass migration eastwards – all millions of Eastern European Jews are descendants of a very small original founder population – numbering in low hundreds in 14th century.

    Kind of like Quebec, really.

    IIRC, all 9 or 10 million Franco-Canadians and Franco-Americans are descendants of about 800 young French women sent by king to Canada between 1663 and 1673.
72. FJ says

    November 9, 2021 at 2:43 am

    Re the Ashkenazi bottleneck, I’ve found the following:

    https://systemsbiology.columbia.edu/news/study-sheds-light-on-ashkenazi-jewish-genome-and-ancestry
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1216062/
    https://www.nature.com/articles/5201156
    https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/107/37/16222.full.pdf
    https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1007329
73. Lars Mathiesen says

    November 9, 2021 at 2:56 pm

    Headlines? What headlines?
74. David Marjanović says

    November 9, 2021 at 3:33 pm

    I’ve read it all now. The paper is from 1997. Manaster Ramer made three claims:

    1) the most conspicuous division in Yiddish is not between “Western” and “Eastern” (of the Oder, very roughly), but between “Westerly” and “Easterly” (of the Elbe or even farther west); Western is therefore paraphyletic with respect to Eastern.
    2) There’s little evidence on whether Westerly Yiddish is monophyletic, though he prefers to think so for the moment and calls for further research.
    3) Yiddish as a whole is monophyletic, as shown by “a very large number” of mostly lexicosemantic innovations with regard to German and Hebrew/Aramaic, notably including both a few Romance and a few Slavic words.

    Much more recently, Beider has agreed with 1) (unfortunately, as Manaster Ramer pointed out in a recent paper, keeping the terms “Western” & “Eastern” and applying them to Westerly & Easterly), but not with 3) or the stronger form of 2): Easterly is not descended from Westerly but has a separate origin (and I think he also offers the possibility that Westerly itself might be polyphyletic, but I haven’t read his book), and the innovations found all across Yiddish must have spread between the mutually intelligible Yiddishes later. I think we have to assume that for the Slavic ones anyway. In particular, it seems to me that khotsh(e) “although” has a specifically Polish form, not Czech.

    On 3), Manaster Ramer presented what he called a small sample “for lack of space (indeed, it seems to call for a monographic treatment).” Has anyone made one? He himself seems not to have – I can’t find any on his very, very long academia.edu page*. Of the three “in press” papers he promised, I can only find one, Yiddish origins: the Austro-Bavarian problem by him and Meyer Wolf (also from 1997). Not having read Beider’s book I don’t know what Beider says about any of the examples.

    But I can say a few things about both of Manaster Ramer’s papers anyway. 🙂

    In sections 3 and 4 of the first paper, Manaster Ramer talks about the megamerger of MHG ei, öu, ou** as /aː/, which has often been taken as the defining phonological feature of Western Yiddish. In section 4, he quotes Beranek (1961 apparently) as saying that it spread across Western Yiddish later, and that it became popular not only because it’s a simplification but also because it was present in “the language of” Frankfurt, the Sudetes and Austria. It’s not present in Austria. MHG ou is indeed /a/ (length is no longer phonemic), but ei is /a/ only in the east (e.g. Vienna) and along the western railway, and the (long unrounded) öu has merged not with the old ei, but with the new one, i.e. MHG î – as in Swiss and Alsatian Yiddish interestingly.

    “Beranek (1965:8, 10) reports scattered traces of relic forms with /eː/ for E4 [MHG ei] and similar traces of relicforms with /oː/ for O4 [MHG ou] in Yiddish dialects of the Rhineland, an area which in general, like all of Western Yiddish, has /a:/ in both cases.” Those are the Low and Central German outcomes.

    The report of [ç] in Swiss Yiddish is fascinating, because Swiss German lacks [ç] and even [x] entirely; it famously has all [χ] all the time, no allophony, like Eastern (or apparently all of Easterly) Yiddish.

    The report, in the same paragraph, of an actual separate /ç/ that does not depend on the preceding vowel in unspecified Westerly Yiddish varieties (“as is well known”; apparently up and down the Rhine) is downright mind-blowing.

    At the end of section 4 is the claim that there’s no “/ç/” in Bavarian. There isn’t, but Manaster Ramer doesn’t seem to use brackets anywhere in the section, and in footnote 13 he says more or less the same dialects “have no ich-Laut”; [ç] very much exists (in Bavarian other than Tyrolean, and in Swabian but not the rest of Alemannic) as the usual allophone (spectrum of allophones really).

    Near the end of section 5 there’s a paragraph on different reflexes of “2”. These could be complicated by the fact that German used to distinguish all three genders by different forms of that word – into the 17th or 18th century in written works (zween, zwo, zwei), and apparently still in a few dialects in Bavaria.

    Section 8 (iii) presents “a large set of additional characteristically Yiddish vocabulary whose etymologies and/or particular semantic, morphological, or phonological developments are specifically Yiddish”, starting with shmeykhlen “smile”. I wonder if that’s a mixture of schmeicheln “flatter” and śmiech- “smile”… Also, horkhen for “hear” isn’t as surprising as its membership in this list makes it seem. Bavarian generally has taken the contrast of sehen “see” (involuntarily) and schauen “look” (deliberately), consolidated it to the point that zusehen “watch” is considered a contradiction in terms and replaced by zuschauen, and extrapolated it to involuntary hören vs. deliberate horchen and zuhorchen. For shabeyse-nakht(s) I’m not sure what the unexpected innovation is supposed to be: “night” for “evening”? My grandma’s way of saying “in the evening” is literally “onto the night”.

    Footnote 40 talks about “the lengthening of vowels in certain stressed final syllables (i.e., usually monosyllables)” as a “possible Proto-Yiddish phonological development”. Guess what? All of High German has lengthened the vowels of monosyllabic words that end in less than two consonants.

    The other paper is off to an odd start: “the Austro-Bavarian dialects, which once covered not only Bavaria and Austria but also parts of the Czech lands and Hungary”? Hungary in the pre-1921 sense, yes, but barely since then.

    Section 2 repeats the gaffe about öu & ei.

    Section 4 teaches me about double diminutives in Bavarian. This is not sarcasm; if it’s in Schmeller’s grammar from 1821, it’s probably real and has merely been lost widely. It also looks like it explains a few things about the weird behavior of -/l̩/ and -/ɐl/ in my dialect (basically, words mostly take one or the other without rhyme or reason, and -/ɐl/ triggers phonological phenomena that only make phonetic sense for -/l̩/). – I didn’t know about the Westphalian island with ink for euch either, nor about 17th-century grammars of Yiddish (both mentioned in section 6), nor about the -s plurals in East Central German (section 8).

    Interesting that vowel length in Courland Yiddish was apparently lost very late (section 5), but not surprising: in Latvian, vowel length is srs bzns.

    The statement (still in section 5) that vowel length is not phonemic in Austro-Bavarian is accurate (except for a few South Bavarian dialects, where it remains phonemic when a consonant cluster follows – long consonants don’t count). But the description of the phonetic situation is really muddled, and not just because slashes are used instead of brackets throughout. The key to understanding is the fact that consonant length has been phonemic ever since Proto-Germanic at the very least, and that the affricates, even though they don’t participate in the inherited length contrast, are by default long in postvocalic position both by their historical origin (from long plosives) and by current phonetics.
    I’ll stick with the noggin example from the paper.
    It starts with More or Less Classical Latin cuppa [kʊpːa]. Either get that into Germanic very early (before Proto-Northwest Germanic; Varus could have done it), or wait for Early Romance to give it to early West Germanic***. Either way, once the Empire is over and the High German consonant shift dawns, it has become *[kʰopːʰ]. It shifts straightforwardly to *[kxopːf] (I’m omitting the tie bars for simplicity).
    Immediately thereafter, OHG passes a total ban on word-final long consonants. Affricates are treated as word-final as a unit, but the long part is the stop, not the fricative – so the stop is shortened. Result: *[kxopf] in the nominative singular.
    By whatever analogy, this word acquires an *-i plural with umlaut. Before OHG is even over, in the last third of the 11th century, the short rounded front vowels are already unrounded**** in Bavarian as I just learned, so, by the time MHG begins in the middle of the following century, the plural is *[kxepːfə].
    Then, the intervocalic three-way contrast of /d t tː/ – all voiceless, all unaspirated – breaks down in Central Bavarian just as MHG officially begins (and South Bavarian implements the “NHG diphthongization”). As a byproduct, all word-final postvocalic fortis consonants are shifted to their lenis counterparts if they have any. Affricates are again treated as word-final as a unit, but only the stop part is shifted, because the fricatives never participated in the fortis/lenis contrast.***** Result: *[kxob̥f] vs. unchanged *[kxepːfə].
    Toward the official end of MHG in the mid-14th century, apocope hits. (Or, perhaps more likely, a general loss of /ə/ in most environments.) At this point, the ban on word-final long consonants is lifted, and we get a phonemic contrast for word-final affricates: singular *[kxob̥f], plural *[kxepːf].******
    Finally, /kːx/ is deaffricated in Central Bavarian, and at some point the vowel lengthening of monosyllabic words ending in less than two consonant moras is introduced from Switzerland. /bf/ counts as one, /pːf/ as two or more, so the modern forms result: [koˑb̥f], [kepːf].
    And then Anatoly Liberman comes in, notices the vowel length but not the consonant length, and goes mad from the incomplete revelation, gibbering about “nominative lengthening” as an utterly eldritch morphological process. Apparently the same happened to Manaster Ramer & Wolf’s source, Жирмунский (1956), and maybe even to the mighty Kranzmayr. But I digress. 🙂

    In section 7, about “word”-final “devoicing” and its absence, it is stated that “Yiddish generalized the devoiced variant in many nouns ending in -nt”. The examples given, hunt & hant, don’t illustrate this, because they had nt in OHG before final fortition showed up in MHG, coming quite regulary from *-nd as the English cognates – hound, hand – show. Either the Central Bavarian postvocalic lenition process also operated after nasals (it did not after /r/; coda /l/ no longer existed), or Bavarian participated in the weird and never mentioned shift of nt, lt to nd, ld that happened in the ancestry of Standard German, which looks like straightforward voicing except there’s still no voice in Bavarian. So, to find out whether “Yiddish generalized the devoiced variant”, we need to find words that had nd in OHG, from *nþ. But Jugend “youth” and Tugend “virtue” have exactly the kinds of abstract meanings that I’d expect Yiddish to lexify from Hebrew… did it? – Anyway, I’m still not sure whether the MHG final fortition ever covered all of Bavarian. The forms cited from Kranzmayer (1956) as showing fortition clearly do so, but they’re equally clearly South Bavarian, and that group has a wide east-west spread…

    The conclusion of the second paper seems fully compatible with Beider’s scenario: Easterly Yiddish starting as a Bohemian koiné composed in about equal parts of Bavarian and East Central German, Westerly Yiddish without any direct Bavarian contribution.

    * So many puns and variations on Wörter und Sachen…
    ** Those are the 19th-century normalizations anyway; öu is probably spelled ou throughout the manuscripts or nearly so, and must at some point have been entirely front & rounded, so öü would have been a better choice of normalization.
    *** Actually, that way I could explain why the word is masculine: after WGmc had lost the m. nom. sg. *-z, *-a was suddenly a masculine ending. There’s that famous comb with kaba on it that shows the *-a- did not drop out first.
    **** What a fascinating text (transcribed in full in the article). Check out megi, leski, wirdiglihen, modern Standard möge, lösche, würdig-. I think the long ones & diphthongs are all still rounded, though; they seem to be spelled uo, o, oi, iu and maybe u.
    ***** If you don’t like that hypothesis, I can offer others, but this seems the simplest.
    ****** This becomes a productive pattern, e.g. Tisch – Tische [tɪˑʃ] – [tɪʃː], Fisch – Fische [fɪˑʃ] – [fɪʃː] have a specially created short /ʃ/ from what was still a consonant cluster /sk/ in OHG. Schuh – Schuhe, both [ʃʊɐ̯xː] with long /xː/, must have joined this pattern before leaving it again; otherwise both forms would have had to keep their etymologically short /x/. Note that extra consonants don’t get in the way, e.g. Strumpf – Strümpfe [ʃtʀʊmb̥f] – [ʃtʀɪmpːf].
75. rozele says

    November 9, 2021 at 4:50 pm

    thanks so much for that deep read, DM!

    i don’t have the chops to even start evaluating the (quite friendly) disagreements between beider and manaster ramer on the technical merits (having read most of beider’s book, and a lot of what manaster ramer’s put on academia.edu). on a gut level, i lean away from beider on purely aesthetic grounds: he seems to both want a clear and fairly unitary answer and to think he’s found one, which makes me doubly skeptical.

    leyzer burko’s review of beider’s book may be useful for folks who want to keep on going down this rabbithole; it mostly deals with the bohemian and east franconian parts of the argument (with some criticism of beider’s depiction of bohemian as a fairly unified dialect).

    o, and off the top of my head i don’t know a cognate for Tugend, but standard yiddish does take ‘youth’ from the germanic side: יוגנט / yugnt (i don’t know how old the word is in the language, though); the hebrew/aramaic-origin words in that semantic zone that come to mind are all more specific (בתולה / bsule ‘maiden, virgin’ and such).
76. David Marjanović says

    November 9, 2021 at 6:32 pm

    Oh, that article! It featured prominently in this thread a few years ago. 🙂 I commented – and conclude that Standard German and Easterly Yiddish may very well continue different registers of late medieval Prague German that went in different directions (geographic and otherwise).
77. languagehat says

    November 9, 2021 at 6:36 pm

    That’s an interesting thread. Dmitry Pruss said:

    In places where Jews were in regular contact with a German-speaking majority, their Yiddish naturally picked up features of the local characteristic

    Not just German. Occasionally, Slavic as well? Alexander Beider explained that the phonetics of the Litvak Yiddish are lifted from Polish dialects of Mazovia (where the Jews were especially few in numbers when they moved, or were expelled to, Lithuania in the 1500s). Since the DNA tells us that the early founders disproportionately took local wives, then the hypothesis may be that the outsize influence of the Mazovian Polish may have been mediated by intermarriage…
78. Ryan says

    November 9, 2021 at 6:53 pm

    >Oh that thread…

    More proof that you guys have forgotten more than I’ll ever know about this stuff, despite my interest.

    It is funny how many threads reach the “Oh, yeah, we did discuss that” moment. I think largely a sign of the range and depth of what is said, rather than oncoming senility. The latter, or at least a senescent inability to remember as large a volume of data, may be an issue for me though.
79. David Eddyshaw says

    November 9, 2021 at 6:58 pm

    All topics are discussed somewhere by LH. However, despite JC’s best efforts, some of the conclusions cannot now be retrieved in polynomial time, and are inaccessible to all currently known search methodologies. Nevertheless, we believe that they exist.
80. languagehat says

    November 9, 2021 at 7:26 pm

    Credo quia inaccessibile.
81. Y says

    November 10, 2021 at 12:41 am

    We are all monkeys with typewriters here.
82. Ryan says

    November 10, 2021 at 2:58 am

    Auto-correct vastly reduces the number of monkeys you have to put in front of keyboards to have a shot at producing Shakespeare.
83. Dmitry Pruss says

    November 10, 2021 at 12:13 pm

    Kind of like Quebec, really.

    IIRC, all 9 or 10 million Franco-Canadians and Franco-Americans are descendants of about 800 young French women sent by king to Canada between 1663 and 1673.

    Yes, only more severe in terms of impact on genetic diversity. There are other parallels, like hereditary inequality of the reproductive success further reducing the effective bottleneck size (in Quebec it was linked to the size and location of the land holdings which critically affected reproductive success, while in Eastern Europe, it is also partly an economic-niche effect but also augmented by restrictions on who can marry / reside / have a business in town, and on the social class-selective military draft). Or like continuing migration of the clergy / the rabbis long after the initial migrant waves settled.

    Inland Finland is the Western world’s other example of severe historical founder effects.

    (Yes, I realized that we discussed Bohemia and Mazovia and the migrate-and-send-sons-further-afield modus operandi of the Litvak Jews before, but people already found it before I could even get to it)

    The specific problem with the Ashkenazi bottleneck effect is the historians’ tradition of ascribing it to the pogroms and community annihilation of the Middle Ages, crusades and plagues. It is a superficially plausible and kind of attractive hypothesis but it doesn’t survive the detailed testing. So the ethnogenesis of the Ashkenazim becomes somewhat less unique … also primarily driven by migrations in search of opportunity, like in so many other peoples, and less so by the persecution of a kind uniquely experienced by the Jews.
84. Ryan says

    November 10, 2021 at 7:13 pm

    One question I have – one of the points of Tim Snyder’s Bloodlands is that the systematic murder of Jews in the Holocaust happened in a particular region. And that in some ways, it was a consequence of the Holodomor, which had terrorized many of the same people, destabilized the same areas, drew its blood-price from the some of the same populations.

    And even prior to this, at least in the US, Jewish immigration was heavily weighted towards those who lived in Germany and Western Europe.

    So the Jewish populations of today may not reflect the Jewish populations of the 19th century very well. Would studies of the genetics of Ashkenazi Jews that didn’t attempt to oversample people whose heritage was in Eastern Europe be prone to overstate the bottleneck?

    Also, in another reference to ugly points of history, the Quebecois bottleneck is also overstated, since Franco-Canadian heritage includes native women not counted in that figure.
85. Brett says

    November 10, 2021 at 8:26 pm

    Ryan: And even prior to this, at least in the US, Jewish immigration was heavily weighted towards those who lived in Germany and Western Europe.

    I don’t think so. My recollection of the genetic situation is that most American Jewish ancestry comes from central and eastern Europe. American Jewish culture is definitely more based on eastern practices than western. The very trop used for reading the Torah is different between American synagogues and those in western Europe today; American Jews use the eastern European version.

    Moreover, while the Ukraine in the 1930s and 1940s was certainly a horrific place in multiple ways, calling the Shoah a consequence of the Holodomor is pretty absurd. It makes no sense ideologically or geographically (Poland having been the center of the Nazi extermination campaign and the also the country that lost the largest number of Jews).
86. Dmitry Pruss says

    November 10, 2021 at 10:13 pm

    at least in the US, Jewish immigration was heavily weighted towards those who lived in Germany and Western Europe

    Depends on what era you are taking about. Before the 1860s, it was generally true. After the Polish uprisings, immigration from Poland and Lithuania increased, Catholic but also Jewish. And starting from late 1880s, a rather conscious effort of the Czarist government to reduce their Jewish population by promoting emigration created a near-deluge of Russian Empire Jews.

    But the “Jews who lived in Germany and Western Europe” in mid-XIX century were to a great extent of Polish extraction, a consequence of the Partitions which made masses of Polish Jews subjects of Prussia and Austro-Hungary. The Prussian partitioned area of Poland generated particularly strong migration currents. And from the areas further East, Eastern Belorussia Jews moved to Belgium and the Netherlands and Courland Jews, to Germany, supplanting the local communities.

    It’s true that the Holocaust and migrations left us with virtually no original regional Ashkenazi populations to study. There remain nearly-endogamous cultural groups to this day, but there is a well-known gap of misunderstanding between geneticists on the one hand, and linguists, historians and anthropologists on the other, and so the geneticists to this day sample the Ashkenazim by the modern country of origin or by continent, rather than by a more granular cultural and dialectal afficilation. One possible exception is the South African Jewish community which still closely corresponds to the Kovno Governorate Litvaks of yore, due to an accident of steamer line cartel policies of the XIX-early XX centuries.
87. Ryan says

    November 10, 2021 at 10:48 pm

    Sorry, Brett. One lesson for me is never to make asides when talking about the Holocaust, or I’m certain to sound fatuous. To the point of offensiveness. “To some degree a consequence” wasn’t central to my point, nor was it what I really meant. Of course Hitler, the Nazi Party and the willingness of too many Germans and others to commit genocide take overwhelming responsibility for the Holocaust.

    I was trying to allude to Tim Snyder’s point in Bloodlands, if I remember the argument properly, that both the Holodomor and the Soviet invasion after the Stalin Ribbentrop pact destroyed social and governmental structures before the Nazi onslaught, which in other places would diminish the ability of the Nazis to achieve total control. That in the rest of conquered Europe, the genocide had to contend with, not so much sympathy for Jews, though in some places that helped at the margins, but punctiliousness about what Germans could do to Jewish citizens of countries that remained sovereign, even if only nominally. Jews and others in the Bloodlands had effectively become stateless, and he argues that had a significant effect on whether large numbers of people survived. That was what I was trying to say with “to some degree a consequence.” That the brutalization of the region by the Holodomor had some impact on how many people were killed later.

    Naturally, I can’t find my copy of Bloodlands right now, and I imagine someone here knows the book and/or the facts better, and can explain how I’m still mangling it. But perhaps this does a bit more justice to Snyder than I did previously.

    But my main point in mentioning the Holodomor wasn’t that it had any impact on the Holocaust, but simply that many Ukrainian Jews were victims of the famine even before the genocide, and that this compounded the focused effect of the Holocaust in destroying particular Jewish communities.
88. D.O. says

    November 10, 2021 at 11:22 pm

    Ryan, most Ukrainian Jews leaved in cities and towns, not in the villages. The Great break and the famine decimated mainly villages. Far it be from me to praise Soviet system, but I should note that in USSR a good number of Jews were evacuated during the war and many men fought Nazis, not just suffered from them (obviously, many suffered). It also worth remembering that the occupied territories were under the scorched earth warfare on all sides.

    I am not sure how much trust one should put into the Wikipedia figures, but if they are true, Western European Jews faired much less badly (numerically speaking) than Eastern European, independent of the country. This speaks mainly to a relative comparative restraint that Germans exercised in the West. USSR, in 1939 borders, did relatively less badly than other Eastern European countries, perhaps mostly because a lot of Jews lived on never to be occupied territories and some were evacuated.
89. X says

    November 10, 2021 at 11:52 pm

    The USSR Jews who ended up in Nazi hands (either because they couldn’t flee, or because they couldn’t flee fast enough and were overrun by the German advance, or because they were taken prisoner), they fared much worse than Polish or Western Jews. The rule of thumb is, everyone in this misfortunate category was dead, typically in 1941. A few women survived by white-passing, a few able-bodied men joined the guerrilla partisans, but these options were for a tiny fraction of one percent. There were no concentration camps out East, just bullets in the nearby ditches or quarries. In contrast, the mass extermination in Poland and Western Europe gained steam only by 1943, and some people survived in the camp, in ghettos, and in deportation queues. A minority, but not an infinitesimally tiny minority like in the USSR. They were more survivors overall in the USSR because people were called up or evacuated in an organized fashion or just fled ahead of the German advance. Also because a part of the USSR was in the Romanian occupation zone, which was about as bad as Poland, meaning that a small percentage survived. Unlike under the German occupation to the North.

    Snyder’s Bloodlands tried to bring more light to the Nazi atrocities outside of the better-known concentration camps, and it’s a commendable goal in itself, but the actual goal of the book is broader. It is to expose both Hitler’s and Stalin’s crimes and to elevate the idea of their moral (immoral) equivalence. This, in itself, might be also a worthy goal, but it really comes out weird. It begins to look like a regurgitated Nazi propaganda point that Stalin’s / Kaganovich’s / “alleged Jewish-Comminist” crimes against Poland and Ukraine justified, or paved way to, the Holocaust. If the book juxtaposes both regimes’ crimes in such a way that in the eyes of the readers, it blames the victims, then it’s a really bad way to narrate the history.
90. Ryan says

    November 11, 2021 at 2:56 am

    X, I didn’t see Bloodlands as lending itself to a theory of blaming the victims, and I’m sorry if my initial cursory statement gave the impression I was doing so.

    This article doesn’t give the impression that the famine left Ukrainian Jews untouched. Nearly 1,000 Jewish dead on the streets of Kyiv in one month, numbers of dead and starving in various stetls, more than 1000,000 Jews who had been encouraged to become (well, suppressed into becoming) agricultural workers and suffered the same fate as their neighbors. Ihttps://www.academia.edu/43629946/The_Holodomor_and_Jews_in_Kyiv_and_Ukraine_An_Introduction_and_Observations_on_a_Neglected_Topic

    “Your mother died from starvation… Her last wish was that you, our only son, say Kadish for her.”

    It’s hard to see how it could be otherwise, with most Jews living in small towns dependent on the produce of the nearby collectives whose output was being sent elsewhere.

    The scale of death was different in towns, more so in cities, but I suspect the idea that Jews didn’t die in large numbers in the famine is largely a product of the anti-Semitism some adopted as a way to try to make sense of the calamity that rained down on the peasantry.
91. SFReader says

    November 11, 2021 at 3:08 am

    Jews who had been encouraged to become (well, suppressed into becoming) agricultural workers

    Jewish agricultural settlements in the Ukraine are not Soviet invention, but an old Tsarist project dating back to early 19th century.

    It is often described as a failure, it probably was if we consider that majority of Jews in Tsarist Russia remained town dwellers instead of becoming prosperous peasants as the Tsarist government wanted.

    But on the other hand – several hundred thousand Jewish farmers in the Ukraine at the eve of Revolution ought to count for something.

    PS. I particularly liked an interesting linguistic detail about this experiment. The Tsarist officials understood that the Jews had no knowledge of farming, so several German farming families were allocated to each Jewish agricultural settlement to teach Jews how to farm. As the bureaucrats noted, the Jews and Germans understand each other since they speak “the same language”.
92. Y says

    November 11, 2021 at 4:04 am

    Kuznetsov supposedly wrote that the Holodomor made the population of Kyiv so inured to death and suffering, that it dulled their reaction to the Babi Yar massacre.
93. Dmitry Pruss says

    November 11, 2021 at 2:34 pm

    LH – it seems like Google no longer indexes this site? Or perhaps does it too infrequently? “Recently commented posts” page was out of commission and I tried finding this discussion as
    https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Alanguagehat.com+beider+&biw=1366&bih=625&tbs=qdr%3Aw&sxsrf=AOaemvLQEXqvB08t39zmXDQ0ABr4Adx5Ug%3A1636653917282&ei=XVuNYYe4ELqyqtsP67ap8A8&oq=site%3Alanguagehat.com+beider+&gs_lcp=Cgdnd3Mtd2l6EANKBAhBGAFQ_RJYnh1gpCNoBHAAeACAAWOIAcQFkgEBOJgBAKABAcABAQ&sclient=gws-wiz&ved=0ahUKEwjH2u_68pD0AhU6mWoFHWtbCv4Q4dUDCA8&uact=5

    but no such luck.

    @Ryan – Holodomor (as opposed to the more general famine and starvation in the USSR in the same timeframe) is specifically understood as genocide against the Ukrainian people by the enemies who are officially ethnically blank Soviet, but in the Nazi propaganda, there were no such ethnic ambiguity about the alleged masterminds of the genocide.

    Both Czarist and Stalinist Russia were of two minds about the Jewish agricultural activities. There were numerous rounds of eviction of the rural Jews, the earliest known to me was the mass eviction which uprooted my ancestors and killed many of their fellow Jews in the dead of the winter 1825 near Vitebsk; the biggest known was a part of the “Temporary Statute” of 1883 (which, despite its name, never expired until 1917) which made another relative of mine sell his apple orchard in Podolia, and, after a few destitute years, emigrate; and latest one, which also affected a branch of the Vitebsk area family, happened right before the Revolution, and affected the Jewish veterans of the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-1905 who were granted residency privileges after coming home, only to be stripped of the right to live in the villages 10 years later. In the USSR times, collective / communal farming was promoted, but the better-off Jewish farmers were literally run off the land.

    The agricultural colonies of Kherson and Tavria Governorates of Southern Ukraine (both Jewish and German) are probably the best known because after generations of misery, they achieved lasting success and their population grew in numbers and influence. But most Jewish villagers were not Kherson colonists (in Podolia and on the North-Eastern fringes of the Pale, a huge percentage of the Jews lived in the villages, and in Polesye, were colonists on the infertile government lands, although with a few exceptions, they didn’t till the land, but worked as blacksmiths, horse-dealers, fishermen, loggers, ash-burners, cart drivers, orchard-keepers etc., all of them being occupations where the head of the household could make living without much reliance on the women and children in the household … because in the traditional family, the women weren’t expected to work outside at all, and the boys needed to study long hours)
94. languagehat says

    November 11, 2021 at 2:40 pm

    LH – it seems like Google no longer indexes this site?

    No, it’s keeping up the good work. It’s true it doesn’t find this thread if you search on “beider,” but it’s the second hit for “Yamnaya.”
95. Y says

    November 11, 2021 at 2:41 pm

    all of them being occupations where the head of the household could make living without much reliance on the women and children in the household … because in the traditional family, the women weren’t expected to work outside at all, and the boys needed to study long hours

    How are these occupations less reliant on the family than farming? Surely some farming could be adapted to be a one-man job, albeit less productive?
96. Brett says

    November 11, 2021 at 3:46 pm

    In general, the farther east they were, the more brutally the Nazis behaved. Some of the reasons for this seem to have been largely just contingent, but there was also a significant ideological component lying behind these geographical differences. Hitler proclaimed that the people in the East were Untermenschen. Slavs were worthy only of behind enslaved, but the more Asiatic groups even further east were considered even lower. In contrast, however much the Nazis may have despised the French and considered them decadent, they never denied that France had a distinguished and culturally meaningful history.

    Of course, no ethnic or religious group—except maybe the Romany (the most authentically Aryan group in Europe, actually!)—was considered as vile as the Jews, but the level of brutality of Nazi actions against the Jews in a particular region was often influenced by how brutal the Nazi regime was there more generally. The broader milieu affected the level of background barbarity to which the both local Jewish and non-Jewish populations were exposed. In largely democratic western Europe, where Jews were typically better integrated into the national culture and identity, the occupation regimes were generally less violent and more accepting of the existing local communities and power structures. There was at least a minimal degree of respect for the occupied peoples in places like France, Denmark, or the Netherlands and a concern that the non-Jewish populations of those countries would object more strongly to actions taken against their Jewish countrymen and countrywomen. In contrast, in the Soviet Union, the invading Germans viewed the existing people as fundamentally corrupt—politically, socially, and racially (with Jewish influence being perceived as practically omnipresent). So the Germans had few qualms about conducting mass executions in relatively public fashions, using Einsatzgruppen to machine gun the local Jews and other undesirables, rather than the more secretive death camp system that took over most of the killing in 1942.
97. Dmitry Pruss says

    November 11, 2021 at 3:56 pm

    some farming could be adapted to be a one-man job, albeit less productive?

    Never been a subsistence farmer in Belarus myself, but I imagine that with the poorly fertile soils and colder, wetter climates, it’s already “less productive” and without literally throwing all people at work dawn to dusk when the weather allows making hay or harvesting, one risk certain death in winter. The government policies explicitly discouraged peasants’ children from attending schools because the boys’ labor was desperately required in the fields.

    Interestingly, Jewish farmers weren’t officially put in the specific sub-class of peasants, but instead, in the broadly equivalent subclass of “earth-tillers” (земледельцы rather than крестьяне), even though they didn’t plow the soil. The post-1883 “Temporary Statute” evictions paperwork is a golden trove of documentation on Jewish families and their economy, because the papers were filed with the police departments and ended up preserved much better than vital or tax records (everything related to persecution was so much better preserved in Russia!). So generally one can learn occupations of all families, both grandfathered under the statute and the evictees. Up in a very rural Nevel district, for example, nobody farmed. My relatives there, the Konsons, were village blacksmiths, burly light-haired people who picked equally strongly built brides, and who looked genuinely Slavic despite being, as the name suggests, real Kohanim. Some rural residents of Nevel held not-so-rural occupations, like cobblers or small traders, but most just occupied the genuinely rural but non-plowing economic niches. Another branch of rural Neveler relatives, the Neploks, were generally into anything about horses. Drove carts, traded horses. One police file investigated a Neplokh who improperly rented land from a Christian villager for a horse-pasture. Another police file investigated a suddenly-missing Neplokh who was never found, but was rumored to be on trial in the neighboring county for horse thievery. Not the classic “poor huddled masses” of the shtetls.
98. languagehat says

    November 11, 2021 at 4:56 pm

    Neplokh

    Not bad!
99. Dmitry Pruss says

    November 11, 2021 at 5:06 pm

    Goodenough is a classic English surname
100. drasvi says

     November 11, 2021 at 5:26 pm

     Nekrasov of Neyelovo, Neurozhayka tozh follows a different approach.
101. Ryan says

     November 11, 2021 at 8:24 pm

     >Not the classic “poor huddled masses” of the shtetls.

     The following is an understanding I drew from The Golden Age Stetl, a New History of Jewish Life in Eastern Europe, by Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern.

     Stetls were chartered trading sites, literally belonging to nobility or the state, protected by law, by monopoly profit, and by networking effects. Traditionally, peasants couldn’t break into a business like horse-trading, practically or legally. One could decide to adopt a town-based occupation without making the whole family work because much of the competition was locked out.

     >For example, the 1740 agreement between a magnate and the Zaslav (Iziaslav) Jewish communal elders outlined the key functions of the Jews, who would organize five annual fairs during Eastern Orthodox and Catholic holidays such as Spas (Savior) and St. Martin in the old part of the town, and another four, also on Christian holidays such as St. Peter and St. Virgin Mary, in the new part of the town, and still three more brief fairs in the town’s central square.

     This was both a right and a privilege. The community had to fulfill the terms or lose out. And they paid taxes, unlike peasants. But no one else could conduct trade in the stetl, and typically, that meant no one else within easy travel. A peasant from a village around Zaslav basically had to buy his tack, his horseshoes and his liquor from the stetl, or newly, the “mestechko”.

     Petrovsky-Shtern goes on to say that the “marriage of convenience between Jews and magnates was in reality not an equal partnership and sometimes took the form of humiliation, exploitation and abuse.” I’ll bet.

     But the privilege, the exclusion of peasants from such trade and industry, is certainly the answer to why the occupations of townsmen could give a life of leisure.

     He argues that the system began to break down after partition, because the new Russian bureaucrats didn’t feel the same tenderness and obligation towards the szlachta landlords.
102. Dmitry Pruss says

     November 11, 2021 at 9:22 pm

     Petrovsky-Shtern captures a snapshot of the shtetle history between the end of early period when the Jewish business was largely limited to financing and customs collection, and the dissolution of the Jewish communal self-rule. His title has the word “Golden Age” for a reason. Those towns (some on government land, but many on magnate-owned lands) with their cozy hereditary market stall arrangements were quite different from the hamlets of the “huddled masses” of Lady Liberty, separated in time by two or more generations. Many opportunities disappeared in the interim. First, Eastward migration stopped. Then, migration to the South-East reached near-saturation as well. Finally, migration to the smaller hamlets which didn’t have a shtetle status was permanently closed by the “Temporary Statute”, locking most of the community in the same old and increasingly overcrowded places. The end of community self-rule opened up all opportunities for competition. Other traditional lines of business were decimated with the end of Polish magnate landownership, and with the construction of the railroads which undermined the traditional commodity-transportation and export businesses. And finally the system of skilled-artisan guilds was abolished too. In the end, if something was still guaranteed for life, it was the economic and legal uncertainty.
103. languagehat says

     November 11, 2021 at 9:38 pm

     We discussed Petrovsky-Shtern’s book in 2014.
104. Ryan says

     November 11, 2021 at 10:28 pm

     In August of 2014, to be specific. And I remember where I was when I was reading the book, at my in-laws’ dacha, which we always visited in August at the time. It must have been 2014, obviously prompted by the mention here.

     >migration to the South-East reached near-saturation as well. Finally, migration to the smaller hamlets which didn’t have a shtetle status was permanently closed.

     Dmitry, sure. But saturation is such an interesting word. Another way of describing saturation is that the monopolies were so lucrative that they had so many kids that there simply weren’t enough towns for them in all of Slavdom! Increasingly, it was hard to find a spot that ensured the wife and kids didn’t have to work, as you point out.

     At the time, at least some of my ancestors were killing Native Americans to make way for their kids. Or moving into territories recently cleansed. I’m not pointing fingers in any way that doesn’t ultimately lead to Algren’s captain, whose “finger of guilt, pointed so sternly for so long across the query-room blotter, had grown bored with it all at last and turned, capriciously, to touch the fibers of the dark gray muscle behind the captain’s light gray eyes.”

     But the myth-making must be as jarring to folks descended from the peasantry as a cowboy movie for those of a different heritage or a different sensibility.
105. Dmitry Pruss says

     November 12, 2021 at 12:11 am

     I am not sure what my decidedly non-monopolistic but sometimes cutthroat businesslike ancestors did to draw a parallel with the killers of the Native Americans or maybe those who enslaved and raped the Africans. Actually I AM sure that there are all sorts of different degrees of descendant’s guilt but being a descendant of a severely persecuted & dehumanized minority goes a long way to alleviate guilty feeling of the sort. So I strongly suggest that you stop measuring your alleged ancestor myths against mine.

     But just to dispose of the idea of the old shtetle Jews being the same as hereditary monopoly merchants. Yes, the private towns’ community self-rule books repeatedly describe which family shall trade in what goods at which street. But it is a bias of ascertainment to conclude that this is what the community was doing. You see, the self-rule council (the Kahal) was an intermediary between the landowner and the taxpayers, and accordingly, it regulated the matters of commercial real estate. Because commerce meant taxes and real estate meant the town’s owner’s property. The Kahal also regulated public bathhouses and houses of worship, for exactly the same reason. It did not regulate any trade outside of the town owner’s properties, or employment of artisans and laborers. Most of the moneyed class’s income was from outside of the city street, typically in contract management (factorship), tax collection (otkup) and sales of agricultural commodities. One of my ancestral families, the Lapitskys, were among the richest merchants in such privately owned towns, Gorki & Romanovo, but their businesses weren’t shop fronts. It was the otkup collection & shipments of local and Ukrainian grain up the Dnieper, on horsecarts across the divide, and down Dvina to the export markets in Riga. The patriarch of the family boasted of riding a carriage with 8 horses because the town’s owner had 6. A whole group of top merchants was involved in such activities covering the wide area, and in no way restricted by the Kahal. Like in nearby Shklov a group of merchants specialized on importing diamonds and jewelry & wholesaling it in big cities. It wasn’t a local storefront business, and therefore it wasn’t regulated in any special way. Then a bit lower rung of the merchant class was actually running local retail through the Kahal-controlled storefronts. A lot more Jews, as you can find from the Census (Revision) records, were designated skilled artisans of the guilds (цеховые) – bakers and brewers, cobblers and tailors, coppersmiths and blacksmiths and so on. Lots and lots of them compared to the small merchant class. But most of the town’s Jews were even lower on the social scale and belonged to the “plain” townsfolk classes. Laborers and porters, house painters and glass installers, cart drivers and bath workers (and many peddlers and traders in this same category) (and most rabbis and melameds and spectors belonged to the plain townsmen category as well) … none of these occupations had guilds, but they far outnumbered both the guild members and the merchants even early in the XIX c. (Before 1795, the censuses are in Polish and therefore much harder for me to read, but I read plenty of pre-Napoleonic ones). For Gorki there is actually a 1770s Census surviving in a 1784 Polish copy and annotated in Russian, and from it, you can see that a private town wasn’t this imaginable neat formation of shopfronts even before the “Golden Age” book. It’s just the Kahal specifically regulated the storefronts and that’s why we know so much about them.

     But in most of the occupations, the employment opportunities didn’t grow as fast as the population, so the sons had to diversify into new opportunities or move to the frontier. Nothing an American wouldn’t understand, i suppose.
106. SFReader says

     November 12, 2021 at 1:57 am

     Basically, the Jewish population of the “Pale of Settlement” was demographic equivalent of the Israeli Haredim today who are currently at about 12.6% of Israel’s population, but double every 16 years with probably the highest population growth rate in the world.

     This has to account for a lot of what happened there later.

     I wonder if anyone compared Ukraine-1919 with Rwanda-1994.
107. Ryan says

     November 12, 2021 at 2:57 am

     Employment opportunities didn’t grow for peasants either. But they were locked out of competing for town jobs and barred from moving, at least on their own decision. They ate less and had fewer kids. The urban class in the region was, as you point out, communal. Though it was not literally hereditary, and people competed within the class, the communal aspect was enforced by law and social norms. While higher level businesses like shipment of agricultural surpluses were less regulated, the peasants still had to sell their surplus to the stetl. The export firms grew out of the strongest of the firms benefitting from protection in the stetl.

     I only made the post after repeated mentions of how oppressive it was to be in a shtetl. I do believe that. But not nearly so oppressive as to be in a village. That’s a truth that shouldn’t be erased.

     I make no comments about your direct ancestors as individuals. I mentioned my “ancestors” by way of saying there is oppression behind many stories. I was saying “people have done worse.” It seems strange to get anti-American insults precisely because I raised the fact that there are such horrors in American history. I also meant it broadly, my ancestors as a class. I know of no relative who fought on a frontier, nor even moved in very quickly afterwards. None of them lived anywhere that slavery was legal in the last 210 years, nor in areas where slavery was widespread in the last 280, where the trail goes dead. Arguably, they benefited indirectly from slavery elsewhere.

     The timeline of abolition across the US is not that different from the timeline of the emancipation of the serfs from Poland to the Russian empire.

     Those of my direct ancestors that weren’t European in the early 1700’s were all Pennsylvanians, to our knowledge. William Penn bought the land they moved into, and relations with natives were still good when they appear in the genealogies. Some moved into eastern Ohio two decades after the Battle of Fallen Timbers in western Ohio. That’s as close to a frontier as anyone ever got.

     Still, they benefitted indirectly from the later, pressured sale of Native lands in Pennsylvania, and from conquest elsewhere, just as others did from the conquest of Tatar and Muslim lands, as you seem to acknowledge. Opportunities South-east that were eventually saturated.

     As you know, the DNA stuff is littered with references to an inexplicable demographic miracle that needs some explanation. But it seems explicable.

     The stetl was an institution that oppressed the peasantry and advanced the townsmen, even as it served the interests of a higher class that routinely punched downward at the stetl, and was entangled with a lower, agricultural class that sometimes bit savagely upward. That doesn’t taint your ancestors any more than mine are tainted. Maybe less.

     I disagree pretty strongly that it “accounts for a lot of what happened later,” as was just posted above now that I’m about to post my comment. I don’t agree with the premise, much of it is at a remove of a century or more, and I find it an unfortunate way to refer to genocide.

     But the fact that later horrors occurred doesn’t make the truth of the stetl’s place in an oppressive society unspeakable. If anything, attempting to elide that history has fed the demon.
108. D.O. says

     November 12, 2021 at 3:59 am

     Ryan, judging by the numbers there are about 45 million African Americans in the US and about 3.5 to 5 million Native Americans. This is very different from the situation in 1600. How can we explain this demographic miracle? Maybe African slaves and their descendents under the protection of European emigrants took all the opportunities for development from Native people? I hope no one would take this sort of argument seriously.

     Jews didn’t establish serfdom in Western Ukraine and there was plenty of oppression in Eastern Ukraine and in Great Russia where there were no Jews at all. Jews also didn’t decide that the extractive economy is the best way to organize life in Western Ukraine. And somehow people who denied Ukrainians the possibility of development are the Jews. This is completely and entirely absurd. In Eastern Ukraine and in Great Russia merchant classes were Ukrainian and Russian. Did it make oppression of the peasants any better?
109. drasvi says

     November 12, 2021 at 4:00 am

     . Arguably, they benefited indirectly from slavery elsewhere.

     Well, I absolutely benefit from labour of people who sewed my clothes elsewhere. (but they are not angry at me, because they do not see me).
110. drasvi says

     November 12, 2021 at 4:35 am

     Is it possible to discuss it without distributing guilt/blame/responsibility?
     “Saturation” is a neutral term.
     “Serfs were oppressed too” is a valid point.
     The claims made above are fine, but their moral interpretations…
111. PlasticPaddy says

     November 12, 2021 at 7:54 am

     @drasvi
     It is hard to avoid tendentiousness in “X prepared the ground for Y” or “Group A was privileged in comparison with Group B” statements, because they lead to associations and linkages not justified by the facts. For example, “The provisions of the Treaty of Versailles prepared the ground for the rise of Fascism and associated authoritarian movements.” Some people could and did argue that the Versailles settlement inevitably led to, and provided justification for, various actions of Fascist agitators and governments. But I do not believe such an argument provides anything like a full explanation, only “window-dressing”. The other point is that inter-ethnic rivalry/conflict is not a dialectical process, leading to a synthesis😊. It is more like a fire that flares unpredictably, but never burns out.
112. languagehat says

     November 12, 2021 at 8:49 am

     It seems strange to get anti-American insults precisely because I raised the fact that there are such horrors in American history.

     There were no anti-American insults that I could see; Dmitry Pruss said “I am not sure what my decidedly non-monopolistic but sometimes cutthroat businesslike ancestors did to draw a parallel with the killers of the Native Americans or maybe those who enslaved and raped the Africans,” and that was my reaction as well, even though I’m neither Jewish nor of Eastern European descent. It seems an unfortunate and unhelpful comparison.
113. Ryan says

     November 12, 2021 at 10:54 am

     >And somehow people who denied Ukrainians the possibility of development are the Jews.

     I’m not trying to say that. I’m trying to make a smaller point, that a class or group that is deeded a legally protected, significant economic role denied to a much larger portion of that society is a privileged group. Not the most privileged group, nor the most responsible. I tried to make those points, but maybe not strongly enough. I did mention a number of times the ways the system bit back.

     I certainly don’t balk at saying, as D.O. asks me, that the merchant class beyond the Pale benefitted from the system that oppressed the serfs in the same way. No, that didn’t make the oppression of peasants any better.

     I don’t think any of those things undermine the point I was making, which I continue to think is fair, and gets lost sometimes. But again, it’s a small point, in a whole world of oppression and privilege. Perhaps to belabor it is to make it loom larger, when it really belongs against the backdrop of a thousand other groups and classes that have benefitted historically from systems of oppression, so I’ll drop it now.
114. Dmitry Pruss says

     November 12, 2021 at 11:17 am

     no anti-American insults

     Thanks LH , I was starting to get worried that I sounded offensive when I only wanted to sound perplexed.

     even though I’m neither Jewish nor of Eastern European descent.

     I suspect that most people of Western descent also have ancestors from the members of Medieval and post-Medieval trade corporations and guilds, which all regulated and restricted who can do business where and how, and typically passed it from farther to son. Sometimes this self organization of businessmen and artisans achieved wonders of economic and technology development , but perhaps just as often, the micromanaging regulation stifled innovation and caused monopoly stagnation… but that’s simply how they thought the economic activity must self organize. I imagine that they both took some lessons from, and simultaneously needed to counterbalance, the feudal power, and that’s how trade corporations became what they were. Out East, these forms might have lingered into obsolescence a bit longer, but there isn’t really anything narrowly specific to the shtetle in these types of business self-regulation. In fact some of their vestiges still linger today in the US, in commercial zoning and licensing and in a few officially sanctioned guilds like the electricians
115. languagehat says

     November 12, 2021 at 11:19 am

     Yeah, and all that stuff is so complex and confusing that I tend to ignore it, even though I know I shouldn’t.
116. Ryan says

     November 12, 2021 at 11:32 am

     >worried that I sounded offensive when I only wanted to sound perplexed.

     On first read, the passage about rapes of African Americans felt like “my ancestors were much better than yours” particularly since I doubt that my ancestors had much to do with any slaves. But that is not a fair assessment of what you wrote. And I imagine reading my earlier post felt the same way to you, though that was not really what I was saying.

     A somewhat different point – most of us experience privilege not the way Cortez and his men did, or the Tsar and his boyars, or Thomas Jefferson on his hilltop, but the way stetl residents and Pennsylvanians of the late 18th century did, or as drasvi mentions in his line about inexpensive clothing, mostly as indirect benefits that they/we may not have any useful way to unwind, in a setting in which other things press down on us, and the sacrifices we might make seem to sacrifice far more, individually, than the amount of collective redress they add up to.
117. Dmitry Pruss says

     November 12, 2021 at 11:49 am

     I tend to ignore it, even though I know I shouldn’t

     Not sure then if I should add more confusing historical details 🙂 but the basic concept should be simple, I believe. Pretty much all the guild rules date back to the X c. Magdeburg Rights. These town self rule principles gave the merchants and artisans control of their trades, regulating who can do what and how – including even when and how the junior guild members cam marry. The self regulation system included only Catholics. The cities and the Crown soon realized that regulation of the Jewish business was important too, but they couldn’t possibly invite the Jews into the Councils, so they built a parallel regulation system, where the Jews were the Royal chattel and negotiated their trade rules directly with the Crown. By XIV c. Poland, devastated by wars, started inviting Germans and the Jews to establish or rebuild towns, under the Magdeburg Law with the same royal-slaves Jewish addenda. Eventually the Polish crown abandoned its formal role of the legal slave-owner of the Jews, and the German migration slowed, so knock-off quasi-Magdeburg arrangements were put in place, with a similar town’s business community self rule but substituting Catholicism with Judaism.
118. SFReader says

     November 12, 2021 at 12:06 pm

     The Tsarist officials kept complaining that Jews exploit Ukrainian peasants by selling them alcohol so the peasants would then get drunk and ruin themselves.

     This was actually one of the justifications for the Pale of Settlement – if we abolish it, the Jews will come and start selling vodka to Great Russian peasants too and they will get even poorer than they are now.

     Of course, the small point that the Russian government itself essentially employed Jewish tavern keepers to sell vodka to peasants (and derived much of the fiscal revenue from tariffs on alcohol and state monopoly on production of hard spirits) was never mentioned.
119. Dmitry Pruss says

     November 12, 2021 at 12:55 pm

     the small point that the Russian government itself essentially employed Jewish tavern keepers to sell vodka to peasants (and derived much of the fiscal revenue from tariffs on alcohol and state monopoly on production of hard spirits) was never mentioned.

     As I understand, Jewish tavern-keeping took an outsize importance only after the Partitions when the Czarist government outlawed Jewish arenda, a traditional line of business of middlemen in land leases and agricultural sales, because they worried that it may become a slippery slope to the Jewish land control. Suddenly destitute, many Jews with rural connections turned to rural tavern-keeping, a business which absolutely required some literacy and numbers skills, rare in the countryside, for commercial viability (because the tabs needed to stay open until after the harvest time if one hoped to sell any volume of booze worth doing business)
120. Ryan says

     November 12, 2021 at 1:26 pm

     I’m sure the factual points here are true. But to quibble about adjectives, is a word like destitute properly applied to those who can let others hold their tabs open till harvest time, and can send their kids (200 years ago) to school, rather than to those who can’t afford their summer purchases till after harvest, and can’t afford to let their children learn to read.
121. languagehat says

     November 12, 2021 at 2:09 pm

     Not sure what you’re trying to prove here. These people were better off than those people but worse off than other people. So?
122. D.O. says

     November 12, 2021 at 3:11 pm

     Ryan, I am not an expert on 18/19c Ukrainian agriculture, but a little that I understand is that there are two relatively short (few weeks) periods of sowing and harvest that required enormous physical effort and all available hands. Outside these two periods there was plenty of time for children to get elementary education if there was a will to do so. And obviously, schooling needn’t to be a full-time occupation and children could have keep up doing their chores. There simply wasn’t enough incentive for education because of the serfdom.

     Farmers/peasants in all societies need some system to smooth the consumption (and everyone else as well, but to a lesser degree). Including modern US. I know the banks are not the most popular of institutions, but honestly, do you think keeping farmers’ accounts in modern US is a form of exploitation? Alternative is keeping a stockpile of money under a mattress, which is inefficient now and wasn’t available in the olden days Ukraine because peasants didn’t own mattresses.
123. Ryan says

     November 12, 2021 at 3:25 pm

     People react more strongly than I did, with essentially a raised eyebrow, to inaccuracies that seem to unfairly condition sympathies, especially when they have a deep emotional attachment to the group being ignored.

     It was suggested above that Tim Snyder telling the truth about the deaths of millions of Ukrainians might be unfortunate, because it might get pulled into ugly propaganda. I don’t know what my old Slavic soccer team would make of reading this thread, where mentioning the Holodomor can be called problematic; and pointing out that stetl tavernkeepers were anything but destitute, and in fact had significant resources, unlike the peasants they sold to on credit, is a point not even worth making.

     I doubt it would improve their understanding and broaden their sympathies about the disasters of the 20th century in the way people seem to hope.
124. Ryan says

     November 12, 2021 at 3:45 pm

     Were debt peons who were also legally bound to the land they were on exploited by their various creditors, prime among whom was probably the noble landowner? I suspect it does depend to some degree on the tavernkeeper, the peasant, the estate owner, and other contingencies we can’t measure. But I suspect that it didn’t consistently work out as well for the serf as modern American bank-farmer relationships do. But that wasn’t even my point. To use your analogy, however exploitive modern banks may or may not be, would you call the banker destitute?

     And yet. Americans are in fact annually primed to feel sorry for Jimmy Stewart, the banker and prime vessel for our sympathy with the victims of the Depression. Gah! People.
125. languagehat says

     November 12, 2021 at 3:49 pm

     Perhaps you’re not aware of the “Jews complain too much, they’re well off, maybe too well off if you know what I mean” (with potential segue into running the world through banking) trope. Obviously that’s not what you’re saying, but you seem bizarrely unaware of the problematic nature of your stubborn attitude of “Jews had it pretty good.” It’s like people not seeing what might be wrong with focusing on the biology of race.
126. Dmitry Pruss says

     November 12, 2021 at 4:11 pm

     I am not sure that further details about schooling, poverty, and suffering of various groups in the early XIX so-called “golden age of the shtetle” are of further interest here. It’s a kind of a niche knowledge, anyway. But if there a burning desire to discuss the actual historical details, rather than general (and generally misguided) attitudes, then please let me know.
127. Ryan says

     November 12, 2021 at 4:25 pm

     If you’d like to give more, I’ll read but refrain from further comments.
128. D.O. says

     November 12, 2021 at 4:32 pm

     Ryan, I don’t think Dmitry Pruss meant that tavern-keepers were destitute. It was an occupation some Jews assumed when other opportunities closed. Some Jews were “destitute” until they switched to doing something else like inn-keeping.

     I don’t think anyone thinks that the death of millions of Ukrainians is not worth remembering, but as anything under the sun, it might simply be irrelevant to some other awful things happening in the same place.

     Everyone who spent any time with the history of Russian Empire knows how completely screwed the system of serfdom was. Whatever minuscule advantage tavern keepers, itenerant merchants, and all sorts of tradesmen might have had while interacting with serfs is utterly irrelevant compared to the fact that people couldn’t improve their lot by simply changing what they were doing or just moving to a different place. Which many demonstrated quite clearly by simply running at the first opportunity they’ve got. It is a bog standard story of nationalism as a tool of the governing class to deflect the blame for maintaining and benefitting from an inefficient (and in the case of serfdom, deeply inhumane) system toward the ethnic minorities, foreigners etc. That makes me sound as some sort of Lenin, but the basic story is true, that’s what it is. The fact that nationalism is a more complicated thing than just a concoction of the governing classes doesn’t change the fact that it is used that way. I am not sure what a modern American example can be. How about blaming Chinese and Mexicans for stealing American jobs? This is about the same level of dishonesty and blame-shifting as blaming Jewish innkeepers and tradesmen for keeping Ukrainian peasants down.

     This sort of finger-pointing is really dangerous in Eastern Europe where everyone learned to blame everyone else for just about anything, but it is simply wrong and there is no need to bring it all here, where it is not dangerous, but just wrong.
129. languagehat says

     November 12, 2021 at 4:42 pm

     Well said.
130. John Cowan says

     November 14, 2021 at 5:40 pm

     Jimmy Stewart, the banker

     Distinguo. Henry Potter, his antagonist, is a genuwine American bankster and robber baron of the old school; George Bailey is the founder of a savings-and-loan society chartered to take individual deposits and write house mortgages. It is mutualistic but profit-making, the stockholders being the depositors and mortgagees, and Bailey technically serves at their pleasure. It’s not clear whether Potter owns his bank outright (probably) or has minority investors. In any case, their roles are as different as chalk and cheese.
131. David Marjanović says

     December 14, 2021 at 1:29 pm

     Genetic history of Croatia: almost pure Anatolian Farmers in the Neolithic, possibly completely unadmixed in some cases; Copper Age individuals indistinguishable from the Neolithic ones and others that look like Corded Ware lived just 60 km apart – notably the latter have the usual amount of Western Hunter-Gatherer ancestry, unlike the former; the one individual from Roman times is indistinguishable from the locals today. There’s also a lot of archeology and anthropology in the open-access paper.
132. David Marjanović says

     December 14, 2021 at 2:23 pm

     Genetics of Greek-speaking Calabrians: basically, they’re the most isolated of the locals, with no sign of any immigration since the Copper Age. (Least amount of Yamnaya ancestry outside Sardinia.) Also in open access.
133. languagehat says

     December 14, 2021 at 2:25 pm

     Fascinating!
134. Y says

     December 18, 2021 at 3:04 pm

     Evidence for pre-Norse occupation of the Faroe Islands, supporting indirect evidence of an earlier population coming (slightly earlier) from the British Isles.
135. Trond Engen says

     December 18, 2021 at 5:57 pm

     A lot of reading for the holidays. And then it’s the backlog.

     The potential of sedimentary DNA (or broader yet, sedimentary bio-chemistry) is huge and every time I blink the field has expanded in yet another direction. Archaeologists and biologists should be taking broad soil samples from wherever landscapes are destroyed by development and seal them off for later analysis.
136. David Marjanović says

     December 18, 2021 at 6:00 pm

     That’s an amazing paper. It’s also in open access.
137. Trond Engen says

     January 9, 2022 at 2:56 pm

     I’ve finally read the papers:

     David M. : Genetic history of Croatia: almost pure Anatolian Farmers in the Neolithic, possibly completely unadmixed in some cases; Copper Age individuals indistinguishable from the Neolithic ones and others that look like Corded Ware lived just 60 km apart – notably the latter have the usual amount of Western Hunter-Gatherer ancestry, unlike the former; the one individual from Roman times is indistinguishable from the locals today.

     Yes, Now I’m yearning for a wide study of the genetics of the Balkan Neolithic..Anatolian Farmers came in several waves and along different paths,

     David M.: Genetics of Greek-speaking Calabrians: basically, they’re the most isolated of the locals, with no sign of any immigration since the Copper Age. (Least amount of Yamnaya ancestry outside Sardinia.)

     Yes. They could be modeled as a mix of Sardinians and Aegaeans, if I understand it correctly. The authors do consider a continuous contact with the Aegaean/Eastern Mediterranean from way before the spread of the Greek language and until the Byzantne Era..

     Y: Evidence for pre-Norse occupation of the Faroe Islands, supporting indirect evidence of an earlier population coming (slightly earlier) from the British Isles.

     Great paper, timing the advent of husbandry to within a few years from 500 CE by detecting chemical signal of mammalian feces and ovine DNA in the sedimentary layers. Before reading I actually imagined they would have been able to use sedimentary DNA even more, e.g. for suggesting the origin of the livestock, but that’s just me expecting too much too fast. But we’ll get there.

     The site of Eyði is at the far end of the Faroes as seen from both Britain and Scandinavia, and the valley where the sediment samples were taken is situated inland from the main settlement on the coastal plain. It’s hardly among the earliest places to have been exploited by agriculture or the first place for free-roaming sheep to have transformed, Unless the first settlers of the islands were primarily exploiting the marine resources and agriculture was a way of broadening the economic base. But there’s no traditional arcaeological evidence of that. How far are we from detecting bio-chemical evidence of human slaughtering of marine mammals in marine sediments?
138. David Marjanović says

     February 20, 2022 at 5:59 pm

     Open-access paper from October 2021: “The origins and spread of domestic horses from the Western Eurasian steppes”

     Abstract:

     Domestication of horses fundamentally transformed long-range mobility and warfare1. However, modern domesticated breeds do not descend from the earliest domestic horse lineage associated with archaeological evidence of bridling, milking and corralling2,3,4 at Botai, Central Asia around 3500 BC3. Other longstanding candidate regions for horse domestication, such as Iberia5 and Anatolia6, have also recently been challenged. Thus, the genetic, geographic and temporal origins of modern domestic horses have remained unknown. Here we pinpoint the Western Eurasian steppes, especially the lower Volga-Don region, as the homeland of modern domestic horses. Furthermore, we map the population changes accompanying domestication from 273 ancient horse genomes. This reveals that modern domestic horses ultimately replaced almost all other local populations as they expanded rapidly across Eurasia from about 2000 BC, synchronously with equestrian material culture, including Sintashta spoke-wheeled chariots. We find that equestrianism involved strong selection for critical locomotor and behavioural adaptations at the GSDMC and ZFPM1 genes. Our results reject the commonly held association7 between horseback riding and the massive expansion of Yamnaya steppe pastoralists into Europe around 3000 BC8,9 driving the spread of Indo-European languages10. This contrasts with the scenario in Asia where Indo-Iranian languages, chariots and horses spread together, following the early second millennium BC Sintashta culture11,12.

     Also:

     Analyses of ancient human genomes have revealed a massive expansion from the Western Eurasia steppes into Central and Eastern Europe during the third millennium bc, associated with the Yamnaya culture8,9,11,12,21. This expansion contributed at least two thirds of steppe-related ancestry to populations of the Corded Ware complex (CWC) around 2900 to 2300 bc8. The role of horses in this expansion remained unclear, as oxen could have pulled Yamnaya heavy, solid-wheeled wagons7,22. The genetic profile of horses from CWC contexts, however, almost completely lacked the ancestry maximized in DOM2 and Yamnaya horses (TURG and Repin) (Figs. 1e, f, 2a, b) and showed no direct connection with the WE group, including both C-PONT and TURG, in OrientAGraph modelling (Fig. 3b, Extended Data Fig. 5).

     […]

     By around 2200–2000 BC, the typical DOM2 ancestry profile appeared outside the Western Eurasia steppes in Bohemia (Holubice), the lower Danube (Gordinesti II) and central Anatolia (Acemhöyük), spreading across Eurasia shortly afterwards, eventually replacing all pre-existing lineages (Fig 2c, Extended Data Fig. 3c). Eurasia became characterized by high genetic connectivity, supporting massive horse dispersal by the late third millennium and early second millennium bc. This process involved stallions and mares, indicated by autosomal and X-chromosomal variation (Extended Data Fig. 3d), and was sustained by explosive demographics apparent in both mitochondrial and Y-chromosomal variation (Extended Data Fig. 3e, f). Altogether, our genomic data uncover a high turnover of the horse population in which past breeders produced large stocks of DOM2 horses to supply increasing demands for horse-based mobility from around 2200 BC.

     Of note, the DOM2 genetic profile was ubiquitous among horses buried in Sintashta kurgans together with the earliest spoke-wheeled chariots around 2000–1800 BC7,9,23,24 (Extended Data Fig. 6). A typical DOM2 profile was also found in Central Anatolia (AC9016_Tur_m1900), concurrent with two-wheeled vehicle iconography from about 1900 BC25,26. However, the rise of such profiles in Holubice, Gordinesti II and Acemhöyük before the earliest evidence for chariots supports horseback riding fuelling the initial dispersal of DOM2 horses outside their core region, in line with Mesopotamian iconography during the late third and early second millennia BC27. Therefore, a combination of chariots and equestrianism is likely to have spread the DOM2 diaspora in a range of social contexts from urban states to dispersed decentralized societies28.

     Also of note:

     Finally, our analyses have solved the mysterious origins of the tarpan horse, which became extinct in the early 20th century. The tarpan horse came about following admixture between horses native to Europe (modelled as having 28.8–34.2% and 32.2–33.2% CWC ancestry in OrientAGraph19 and qpAdm17, respectively) and horses closely related to DOM2. This is consistent with LOCATOR20 predicting ancestors in western Ukraine (Fig 3c) and refutes previous hypotheses depicting tarpans as the wild ancestor or a feral version of DOM2, or a hybrid with Przewalski’s horses34.

     Early 20th century???

     Anyway, there’s ample Discussion and Supplementary Tables (pp. 38 & 39 of this PDF) about more language-related things, including language spread and language itself.

     No justification is given for the use of neighbor-joining, a method that (if used for phylogenetics) falls hard for almost every known source of error; the sheer size of the dataset would make all other methods hard to use, though.
139. Trond Engen says

     February 21, 2022 at 1:41 am

     Thanks. I’ve seen it and tried to get my head around the implications. Wouldn’t it be fun if Anatolian came to Anatolia around 2200 BCE, and the older intrusions into Europe were Non- or Para-IE?
140. SFReader says

     February 21, 2022 at 2:44 am

     Early 20th century???

     https://truenaturefoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/last-tarpan.jpg

     The last captive tarpan died in Moscow Zoo in 1905.
141. Lars Mathiesen says

     February 21, 2022 at 4:19 am

     So maybe the CWC spoke a sister language to Sumerian (low odds, though). That whole thing about using IE vocab for horse things in Sumeria, does that fit with the timeframe? (If it’s in one of those appendices, I’ll just wait for Trune to report).
142. David Marjanović says

     February 21, 2022 at 7:05 am

     Ah yes, I must have managed to confused tarpans and auerochsen last night.

     Wouldn’t it be fun if Anatolian came to Anatolia around 2200 BCE

     We’ve discussed that Nature paper that showed lots of Anatolian names in southeastern Anatolia/northern Syria down to 2500 BCE.

     If it’s in one of those appendices

     Those, too, are openly accessible, and I linked to the PDF with the language-related stuff in it. There’s no mention of Sumerian, though, and no text, just tables of the distribution of various horse-related words across IE branches.

     The only one given for all of Anatolian, however, is Hieroglyphic Luwian a₂-su “horse”. Likewise for Tocharian. This fits their argument that the domestication of horses happened after Anatolian and Tocharian had moved off.
143. Ryan says

     February 22, 2022 at 1:06 pm

     I for one will be amused if it turns out that David Anthony’s synthesis was right in broad outlines and many details and went wrong only where and to the extent he relied on equine archaeology, which is his specialty. I did some looking around last night, before which I hadn’t realized the degree of skepticism for his theory of early domestication/riding, which this study reinforces.

     Maybe that’s natural – you’re only willing to advance risky ideas in the heart of your own investigation, relying more on consensus or at least a growing body of scholarship to fill in your understanding of the areas around your focus.

     >Sumerian

     I thought the relationships between Corded Ware, Sintashta and the IE arrival in Southwest and South Asia were fairly well understood, making it likely that Corded Ware spoke an IE language. Anything is possible, but eliminating Corded Ware from the IE tree would open a big gap between Indo-Iranian and the western families in need of explanation and connection, without any clear alternatives on a scale that could explain later IE dominance, wouldn’t it? Is there a body of scholarship pursuing the idea that Corded Ware was related to Sumerian, or non-IE?

     The study David linked to didn’t seem to challenge CW as IE. Though I thought the throw-away line they wrote — more or less “maybe the Steppe just took advantage of an independent Neolithic population decline…” — was idle speculation that should have been left out.

     Speak to what you’ve proven. I would have left it at “With little evidence of a strong equine presence in Corded Ware and clear evidence that an equine population explosion took place very late in the 3rd Millennium, our study casts doubt on the idea that the steppe expansion into northeast and north-central Europe in the early 3rd M. arrived on horseback.”

     On the other hand, I’m inclined to wonder whether CW did in fact utilize horses at a somewhat lower scale, building the knowledge and networks that would make this new, more manageable breed of horse so desirable and successful once the adaptations took place, were recognized and bred for. It sounds like it was a genetic package, and it would take some time to center all such adaptations into an otherwise genetically healthy line or set of lineages.
144. ə de vivre says

     February 22, 2022 at 1:42 pm

     That whole thing about using IE vocab for horse things in Sumeria, does that fit with the timeframe? (If it’s in one of those appendices, I’ll just wait for Trune to report).

     I think it’s fairly uncontroversial that horses began to enter Mesopotamia from the north at the end of the third millennium via Hurrians who had come into direct contact with Indo-European speakers. The amount of IE-derived vocabulary that made it into Sumerian (usually via at least Hurrian and/or Akkadian) isn’t clear, and fits with the importation of vocabulary related to a novel technology. Rubio’s On the Alleged “Pre-Sumerian Substratum” remains probably the best summary of loan-words in Sumerian.
145. David Marjanović says

     February 22, 2022 at 2:45 pm

     Is there a body of scholarship pursuing the idea that Corded Ware was related to Sumerian, or non-IE?

     No.

     The study David linked to didn’t seem to challenge CW as IE.

     No, it only means to drive another nail in the coffin of the idea that the IE-speakers who founded CW did so specifically by riding in and massacring people.

     Hurrians who had come into direct contact with Indo-European speakers

     Specifically speakers of pre-Indic. Do a tiny bit of internal reconstruction on Vedic, and you get that language (as far as can be told from a few cuneiform characters).
146. Ryan says

     February 22, 2022 at 6:32 pm

     >by riding in and massacring people

     Right. Now we know they raced to and from the massacres in their ox carts.
147. David Marjanović says

     February 22, 2022 at 8:26 pm

     Rubio’s On the Alleged “Pre-Sumerian Substratum”

     Masterful use of “No comment is necessary here.” at the end of footnote 1.

     However, I find the treatment of Whittaker’s “Euphratic” too short and of course outdated, because Whittaker didn’t stop in 1998: see the discussion starting here, with a link to the 2012 book chapter which almost competely lacks mentions of internal reconstruction of Sumerian and mentions features of the cuneiform script that Rubio did not bring up at all. Much more on the script is here (from 2001, though).

     Of this paper (2004/5) I’ve only read the first footnote:

     In each of my previous articles I have sought to explain that the terms ‘Euphratean’ (for the culture and society) and ‘Euphratic’ (for the language) were chosen for convenience – that is, for lack of a better term – and do not reflect a theoretical unity or relationship with Landsberger’s 1944 ‘Proto-Euphratic’ substrate, nor an affiliation to Oppenheim’s 1964 ‘Euphrates Valley’ civilization. I referred in my first article (Whittaker 1998: 114) to “this Indo-European language, which I shall henceforth call Euphratic in deference to (but also in distinction from) Landsberger.” In my next paper (Whittaker 2001: 41 n. 9), I wrote: “Neither this term [Euphratic] nor its referent should be confused with the ‘Proto-Euphratic’ substrate proposed by Landsberger.” Despite such disclaimers, and despite personal exchanges with him on this matter in 2002, Rubio (most recently, 2005a: 323-324) persists in misrepresenting my position, alleging that “Whittaker attempts to identify the pre-Sumerian substratum (Landsberger’s “proto-Euphratic”) with an as yet unknown Indo-European language.” This strategy, which smacks of gross academic dishonesty, is embraced in order to criticize, as he has done before (Rubio 1999: 6), the “lack of coherence” of the substrate theory, although there clearly is no such unitary theory shared by Landsberger and others – nor any intrinsic reason why there should be one.

     and the other two footnotes, which scold Rubio some more.

     Also interesting: this undated work (youngest cited reference from 2008) on the “fire in water” complex in Sumerian and IE mythology.

     Nowhere mentioned in any of this is that the IE “wine” word has an IE-internal etymology, which bolsters Whittaker’s conclusions.
148. Ryan says

     February 22, 2022 at 9:25 pm

     >I’ve only read the first footnote.

     He gave his proposed language a name that had already been used for a different but similar proposal, and he’s upset people think they’re related? I don’t need to read anything else.
149. ə de vivre says

     February 22, 2022 at 10:34 pm

     I don’t have a very high opinion of Whittaker’s internal reconstruction of Pre-Sumerian. He has a knack for combining main-dialect and Emesal word forms in idiosyncratic ways that just so happen to evoke the IE form he has in mind. From Euphratic – A phonological sketch, he associates ‘kilim₂’ (reed bundle, rope) with *klh₂-m- (straw, reed) without mentioning that kilim₂ is usually read gilim₂ and that the Sumerian word for ‘reed’ is gi. He gives *dukud (sweet, good) as the Pre-Sumerian form that gave rise to EG dug and ES zeb, which would suggest a monosyllabic root, but he uses kuk(k)ud to somehow jam another syllable in there. Et ainsi de suite…

     I predict that our idea of what a good Sumerian root looks like will change significantly over the coming years. A lot of evidence is pilling up for syncope in verbal prefixes creating more complex syllable structures than just CVC, and it wouldn’t surprise me if we find more complex forms in roots too.
150. languagehat says

     February 22, 2022 at 11:02 pm

     Man, I love having a Sumerianist gracing this hattery.
151. Lars Mathiesen says

     February 23, 2022 at 5:17 am

     This is my strategy: Ask a stupid question, and experts will fall out of the woodwork. Only works in the Hattery, though.
152. David Marjanović says

     February 23, 2022 at 7:27 am

     I predict that our idea of what a good Sumerian root looks like will change significantly over the coming years. A lot of evidence is pilling up for syncope in verbal prefixes creating more complex syllable structures than just CVC, and it wouldn’t surprise me if we find more complex forms in roots too.

     That’s promising!

     I don’t need to read anything else.

     A lack of creativity is actually a very good sign in this case…
153. David Marjanović says

     April 5, 2022 at 1:54 pm

     Evolutionary Trajectories of Complex Traits in European Populations of Modern Humans

     Humans have a great diversity in phenotypes, influenced by genetic, environmental, nutritional, cultural, and social factors. Understanding the historical trends of physiological traits can shed light on human physiology, as well as elucidate the factors that influence human diseases. Here we built genome-wide polygenic scores for heritable traits, including height, body mass index, lipoprotein concentrations, cardiovascular disease, and intelligence, using summary statistics of genome-wide association studies in Europeans. Subsequently, we applied these scores to the genomes of ancient European populations. Our results revealed that after the Neolithic, European populations experienced an increase in height and intelligence scores, decreased their skin pigmentation, while the risk for coronary artery disease increased through a genetic trajectory favoring low HDL concentrations. These results are a reflection of the continuous evolutionary processes in humans and highlight the impact that the Neolithic revolution had on our lifestyle and health.

     That’s the abstract. I haven’t read the paper yet.
154. Y says

     April 5, 2022 at 2:51 pm

     Whaaa…?

     Since when are “intelligence scores” a heritable trait, so uncontroversial that it can mentioned by unconcerned conjunction with other uncontroversial ones, such as height?
155. languagehat says

     April 5, 2022 at 3:04 pm

     Yeah, that whole abstract reeks of, well, something that makes me exceedingly dubious.
156. Y says

     April 5, 2022 at 3:08 pm

     Blech. They use HDL/LDL cholesterol as a proxy for intelligence, since some studies show that in individuals, some cognitive scores may, kind of, be correlated with their cholesterol scores for whatever unknown reasons (people who start taking statins also get better at crossword puzzles or whatever.) Generalizing from that to claiming that people 30,000 years ago were less intelligent because of some statistical trend of genetic markers is a travesty. It shows, at the minimum, that this paper was not subject to competent editorial evaluation.
157. David Eddyshaw says

     April 5, 2022 at 3:23 pm

     These would have been intelligence scores recorded in flints. You can tell a lot from flint flakes. The paper is certainly flaky.

     The discussion does in fact hint (and not that obliquely, either) that Europeans are just, well, cleverer, because Europeans and cholesterol. (Presumably the observation that agriculture has not, in fact, ever been confined to Europe, would have spoilt the “logic” a bit.)
158. David Marjanović says

     April 5, 2022 at 3:50 pm

     Me on February 21st…

     Hieroglyphic Luwian a₂-su “horse”

     That actually struck me as suspicious at the time. Apparently I was right: “horse” in HL is a₂-zu₂-, and while there is a word a₂-su, it means “stone”, “stone monument” and/or suchlike.

     (BTW, I think that paper’s main argument is half right, and a₂ was [ha].)
159. David Eddyshaw says

     April 5, 2022 at 3:51 pm

     The Fat, yet Clever European thing reminds me something else I was reading lately:

     https://ia903400.us.archive.org/18/items/ebbesen-psy-ar-xiv-2020/Ebbesen_PsyArXiv_2020.pdf
160. languagehat says

     April 5, 2022 at 4:00 pm

     It never ceases to amaze me how many Scientifickal Studies are still dedicated to the proposition (however guilefully disguised) that Aryan Iz Best.
161. David Marjanović says

     April 5, 2022 at 4:42 pm

     The real culprit for the “let’s just call everything ‘intelligence'” thing is this cited paper from 2018, to which I don’t currently have access.

     But this part of the new paper

     Interestingly, we also observe an increase in the genetic factors that lead to the development of coronary artery disease, which is related to a constant decrease in HDL cholesterol in European populations after the Neolithic revolution (Ali et al., 2012). If this adaptation causes disease, we could wonder why it might be evolutionarily advantageous to have lower HDL cholesterol concentrations. A reason for this could be related to cognitive functions since cholesterol is fundamental for the development and functioning of the brain.

     is just a blatant failure. Cholesterol is an important component of all cell membranes, and any brain contains a lot of cell membranes, so “cholesterol is fundamental for the development and functioning of the brain” in the same sense that, say, water is! It gives me the impression that the ten authors, two reviewers and one editor don’t know any biology above the molecular level…

     Some genetic polymorphisms in cholesterol-related pathways are connected to cognitive functions, while variations in the levels of HDL and LDL have been linked with alterations in intelligence, learning, and memory, although the full implications and the mechanisms are still far from being understood

     …so we’ll waffle about it for the fun of it.

     Since, some genetic polymorphisms in cholesterol-related pathways are connected to cognitive functions, in the last set of analyses, the evolution of genetic factors related to cognitive functions were estimated. Result obtained reveals that increased cognitive functions are an evolutionary advantage to adapt to the environment.

     No explanation, no citation, nothing.

     As for the changes in PRS for the cognitive traits we included in this study it is important to put these in perspective. The measure of educational attainment in years is largely a trait influenced by socioeconomic factors so the changes we observe only affect approximately 20% of the actual variation we observe in this trait as reported in the original GWAS by Okbay et al. (2016). For the fluid intelligence test performed in the UK-Biobank a similar heritability is estimated although the test itself only consists of 13 questions severely limiting the reliability of this specific test. The overall Intelligence reported by Savage et al. (2018) refers to a meta-analysis of various different tests that aim to capture overall intelligence and though the heritability is reported to be approximately 60% for intelligence this trait might be less accurate due to the heterogeneity of the tests included in the meta-analysis. Similarly, the measure of unipolar depression is also based on a meta-analysis by Nagel et al. (2018) that compromised various measures from the UK-Biobank the Genetics of Personality Consortium collected through the use of various questionnaires which means the reliability of this trait as measure of depression is hard to ascertain.

     In short, although we see an increase in PRS for cognitive functions over time this does not necessarily translate to an evolutionary pressure towards an increasing intelligence. What this means is that there is an increase in allelic frequencies for alleles that positively impact multiple different measures of cognition but only to a limited extent in relation with the heritability of these traits.”

     So the previous quote is completely useless, then.

     The closing quotation mark is in the original. I find that very interesting.

     From the technical point, data imputation was applied for handling missing data, which could limit the power of the study.

     …uuuuh… yes, it does.

     I should have mentioned the paper is in open access and has the names and affiliations of the editor and the two reviewers in the left sidebar.
162. David Marjanović says

     April 5, 2022 at 4:49 pm

     It never ceases to amaze me how many Scientifickal Studies are still dedicated to the proposition (however guilefully disguised) that Aryan Iz Best.

     I don’t think that’s the case here. I think this is a lazy, unthinking paper: it takes a list of alleles that are “known to” correlate with anything, looks for them in sequenced ancient genomes of different ages, plots the frequencies over time and turns them into a Least Publishable Unit.

     Judging from the authors’ names, including at least one each of the two first and the two last and corresponding authors, few of them could have much interest in declaring any sort of “Aryans” The Best…
163. Y says

     April 5, 2022 at 5:02 pm

     has the names and affiliations of the editor and the two reviewers in the left sidebar

     “Or, you can just find them across the street at their usual seats at the bar. That’s where we got them in the first place.”
164. David Marjanović says

     April 5, 2022 at 5:26 pm

     That’s how megajournals often work, except cyber.
165. Trond Engen says

     June 20, 2022 at 7:50 pm

     Going back to the plague theme, there’s a new paper out locating the origin of the Black Death to modern day Kyrgyzstan:

     Spyrou, M.A., Musralina, L., Gnecchi Ruscone, G.A. et al. The source of the Black Death in fourteenth-century central Eurasia. Nature (2022).

     Abstract
     The origin of the medieval Black Death pandemic (AD 1346–1353) has been a topic of continuous investigation because of the pandemic’s extensive demographic impact and long-lasting consequences. Until now, the most debated archaeological evidence potentially associated with the pandemic’s initiation derives from cemeteries located near Lake Issyk-Kul of modern-day Kyrgyzstan. These sites are thought to have housed victims of a fourteenth-century epidemic as tombstone inscriptions directly dated to 1338–1339 state ‘pestilence’ as the cause of death for the buried individuals9. Here we report ancient DNA data from seven individuals exhumed from two of these cemeteries, Kara-Djigach and Burana. Our synthesis of archaeological, historical and ancient genomic data shows a clear involvement of the plague bacterium Yersinia pestis in this epidemic event. Two reconstructed ancient Y. pestis genomes represent a single strain and are identified as the most recent common ancestor of a major diversification commonly associated with the pandemic’s emergence, here dated to the first half of the fourteenth century. Comparisons with present-day diversity from Y. pestis reservoirs in the extended Tian Shan region support a local emergence of the recovered ancient strain. Through multiple lines of evidence, our data support an early fourteenth-century source of the second plague pandemic in central Eurasia.
166. AntC says

     June 20, 2022 at 10:53 pm

     Two reconstructed ancient Y. pestis genomes represent …

     Yikes! Does this mean digging up ancient cemeteries is hazardous? Could they release more Yersinia pestis? To hitch a ride on passing fleas, to hitch a ride on passing rats.

     one of the largest infectious disease catastrophes in human history

     I think that should be in “recorded human history”(?) IIRC there’s been various ‘bottlenecks’ detected in human DNA that suggests there were several times when nearly the whole species was wiped out.

     Would the Covid-19 have had a similar effect if it weren’t for producing a vaccine so quickly? That is, if certain bloody-minded populations had had their way with resisting lockdowns/masks/etc?
167. Lars Mathiesen says

     June 21, 2022 at 1:43 am

     It took a while before the difference between “detectable traces of SaRS-II RNA” and “infectious amounts of complete virus particles” started to be reported, and in the scarier parts of the reporting I’m not sure they ever cared.

     (Or is that SArs? There is something funky going on with the capitalization in some institutions’ usage).
168. David Marjanović says

     June 23, 2022 at 5:48 pm

     Does this mean digging up ancient cemeteries is hazardous?

     No, unless you have a mad scientist at hand who takes the reconstructed genomes from in silico [argh] to in vitro and then in vivo.

     Would the Covid-19 have had a similar effect if it weren’t for producing a vaccine so quickly?

     Unlikely, because it only ever killed a few % of infected people, as opposed to fully half.

     Or is that SArs?

     I’ve only ever seen SARS-CoV-II.
169. Lars Mathiesen says

     June 24, 2022 at 5:05 am

     Must have been the lowercase o from Co[rona]V[irus] echoing in the back of my brain, then.

     (SARS-CoV-II seems a bit redundant — Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, the one that’s a coronavirus. also the one that’s number 2. Or is it because MERS was also severe and acute and a coronavirus, so SARS-CoV-II is the second one that doesn’t happen to be called MERS? NGL, I thought the SA part was for Southeast Asian or something like that, as opposed to Middle Eastern)
170. Brett says

     June 24, 2022 at 10:42 am

     xkcd on the failure to come up with a better name for the pandemic virus
171. languagehat says

     June 24, 2022 at 11:01 am

     Good comic, but I find myself wondering when it first appeared, which led to the discovery that xkcd comics don’t appear to be dated, which is annoying. Or am I missing something?
172. Hans says

     June 24, 2022 at 12:16 pm

     If you go to the archive, there’s a list of the comics by title; there it says to hover (I assume with the cursor) over the title to see the date. As I’m on my phone, I can’t test that.
     (It confirms my general view of mankind that an intelligent fellow like Randall Munroe nevertheless comes up with such a clunky solution for his web site.)
173. languagehat says

     June 24, 2022 at 12:41 pm

     Thanks, that works and it turns out the comic is 2020-3-2. But Jesus, what a crappy way of doing things.
174. Brett says

     June 24, 2022 at 3:02 pm

     I have noted before that xkcd, unlike most comics, has a full transcript of each comic on the site. That means you can search for a given comic by name, text, date, or whatever; it’s all locatable in the metadata. That makes it really easy to find particular xkcd comics; most comic sites are much worse. (And that’s not even counting the wealth of additional information at explainxkcd.com.)
175. January First-of-May says

     June 25, 2022 at 4:04 pm

     (And that’s not even counting the wealth of additional information at explainxkcd.com.)

     Indeed that’s the place I typically go to find out xkcd comic dates (most recently here).

     i don’t think I’ve ever seen SARS-CoV-II [sic] – in my experience it had always been SARS-CoV-2 (and AFAIK it got the name because it’s a very close relative of the original SARS-CoV; of course MERS could have gotten that too, but historically it didn’t, so the option was free).
     For a while I continued the mixed capitalization by spelling the disease name “CoViD-19”, but I can’t recall seeing anyone else doing that, and eventually I just switched to the more mainstream “Covid-19” and/or “the Covid”.

     (Unrelated fun fact: the official announcement of the disease was on December 31, 2019. I like to joke that it was a miracle to song writers that “Covid-19” rhymed with “quarantine”, and that if the announcement was a few hours later we would all have been talking about Covid-20 and that would have been far harder to rhyme.)
176. Brett says

     June 25, 2022 at 9:44 pm

     @January First-of-May: I’m sure I agree that lyricists would have a hard time finding rhymes for “Covid-20.” In fact, I think there are plenty.
177. David Eddyshaw says

     June 25, 2022 at 10:03 pm

     Well, there is plenty.
178. Ryan says

     June 26, 2022 at 12:24 am

     Sunny. Funny.
179. D.O. says

     June 26, 2022 at 11:42 am

     Yes, but it is hard to rhyme “covid-20” with “quarantine”.
180. David Marjanović says

     June 26, 2022 at 2:57 pm

     SARS-CoV-2

     Oh! Yes.

     it got the name because it’s a very close relative of the original SARS-CoV

     Also correct.
181. Y says

     August 26, 2022 at 10:46 pm

     A trio of papers by Iosif Lazaridis et al., in a new issue of Science:

     Ancient genomes and West Eurasian history (a non-technical critique, Open Access),
     https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.add9059#core-R1

     The genetic history of the Southern Arc: A bridge between West Asia and Europe
     https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm4247

     A genetic probe into the ancient and medieval history of Southern Europe and West Asia
     https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq0755

     Ancient DNA from Mesopotamia suggests distinct Pre-Pottery and Pottery Neolithic migrations into Anatolia
     https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq0762

     A news item (in Dutch), with comments by IEist Alvin Kloekhorst:
     https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2022/08/25/de-taalsleutel-ligt-op-de-kaukasus-daar-ligt-de-oorsprong-van-veel-wereldtalen-a4139898

     Kloekhorst laments the lack of linguists among the team, and proposes a different scenario to fit with the genetics, which doesn’t require an unreasonably old date (8000 ybp) for the Anatolian split.
182. languagehat says

     August 27, 2022 at 11:24 am

     Kloekhorst laments the lack of linguists among the team

     As do I. When will they learn?
183. Ryan says

     August 27, 2022 at 3:01 pm

     >The naming of the Southern Arc conjures a map projection that centers on the western tip of Eurasia rather than the Anatolian peninsula

     There are many things to be said about the focus, assumptions and predilections of those studying ancient genomes. But this isn’t one of them.

     Generally, the Science article first linked really wants to press a prehistoric moral relevance without giving much thought to where it leads. All in all, I’m quite glad Lazaridis do not focus more attention on the fact that the incoming men established their genetic preponderance in large part by raping the local women, (which, after criticizing L and co. for sanitizing things, they describe with the euphemism of ‘sexual violence.’).
184. drasvi says

     August 27, 2022 at 3:24 pm

     8000

     I am a bit confused, because Lazaridis mentioned 5000 BC and 7000-5000 bp.
185. Trond Engen says

     September 1, 2022 at 5:38 pm

     Thanks, Y. I’ll read, but it’ll have to wait.
186. David Marjanović says

     September 2, 2022 at 4:33 pm

     The genetic history of the Southern Arc: A bridge between West Asia and Europe

     That, too, is in open access, and I’ve started reading it.

     From the “Structured Abstract”: “The Yamnaya expansion also crossed the Caucasus, and by about 4000 years ago, Armenia had become an enclave of low but pervasive steppe ancestry in West Asia, where the patrilineal descendants of Yamnaya men, virtually extinct on the steppe, persisted.”
187. David Marjanović says

     September 4, 2022 at 6:20 pm

     That, too, is in open access

     Nope! The reason the page is so long is that there are several types of abstract, including a figure, followed by all the 483 footnotes (references to the “paper” and the “supplementary information”).

     The supplementary information, i.e. the actual paper, is in open access, though.

     Likewise for the two related papers in the same issue, except they have only one abstract and fewer footnotes.
188. Y says

     September 14, 2022 at 3:18 am

     Poulsen and Olander, Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic. A presentation (pdf) in which they make the case (not overwhelming, but reasonable) for subgrouping the above two together.

     (This is mostly linguistics. I wasn’t sure which would be the infinite IE linguistics thread.)
189. David Marjanović says

     September 14, 2022 at 5:09 am

     Interesting, and they do take genetics into account.
190. Hans says

     September 14, 2022 at 8:16 pm

     I guess behind this is a largely Graeco-Aryan model of PIE morphology, so that the many morphological correspondences between Greek and Indo-Aryan count as retentions.
     If you don’t assume that, their neat model stops working.
     Other assumptions that are at least debated:
     1) Original split Dat. Pl. in -*m- vs. Instr. Pl. in -*bh-: this weakens a BSl – Germanic isogloss
     2) The *sye/o-future is not convincingly attested for Slavic (the only form usually adduced here, OCS participle byšǫšt-, has also been explained otherwise)
     3) They downplay the evidence from Luwian (and ignore the evidence from Albanian) that PIE had indeed three velar series (OTOH, the idea that satem is a subgroup and that kentum-satem is not a primeval split is pretty uncontroversial nowadays)
     I’m not saying they’re wrong, and this certainly is a serious proposal, just how good it is hangs on a lot of assumptions that are not common opinion.
191. David Marjanović says

     September 15, 2022 at 4:51 am

     1) Original split Dat. Pl. in -*m- vs. Instr. Pl. in -*bh-: this weakens a BSl – Germanic isogloss

     There are good reasons to think that the distribution of *-m- and *-bh- was originally phonological instead of morphological: *-bh- after *n, *-m- otherwise. This concerns not just the dat. pl. & inst. pl. suffixes, but derivational ones as well.

     Of course this still means that BSl and Germanic generalized the same allomorph in the dat./inst. pl. that the other branches lost. But I’d think that can be attributed to the well-known contact that also spread such things as the definite/indefinite distinction in adjective flexion (which is accomplished by completely different means in BSl and in Germanic) and the *-uj- > *-ij- shift (which is also shared with Celtic, and I forgot about Italic, but that’s in another paper by the same author as it happens).

     They downplay the evidence from Luwian (and ignore the evidence from Albanian) that PIE had indeed three velar series

     I think that’s actually irrelevant to their model of satemization – though I haven’t understood all the details of that model and hope they get around to publishing it soon.

     the idea that satem is a subgroup and that kentum-satem is not a primeval split is pretty uncontroversial nowadays

     The latter, yes; the former, no – that’s what they’re trying to establish.
192. Hans says

     September 15, 2022 at 11:53 pm

     Of course this still means that BSl and Germanic generalized the same allomorph in the dat./inst. pl. that the other branches lost. But I’d think that can be attributed to the well-known contact that also spread such things as the definite/indefinite distinction in adjective flexion (which is accomplished by completely different means in BSl and in Germanic) and the *-uj- > *-ij- shift (which is also shared with Celtic, and I forgot about Italic, but that’s in another paper by the same author as it happens).
     Don’t get me wrong – I’m not claiming that Germanic and BSl form a clade. My view is rather that there were several overlapping areal groupings – the ones you mention, satemisation, spread of Graeco-Aryan morphology (which hit Slavic more fully than Baltic), etc. By downplaying the other isoglosses, the authors arrange the evidence to support their cladistic model to the detriment of such an areal-based model.
     Concerning the three-velar series, they make a bit of an effort in their presentation to knock it down, so I assume that it actually would pose a problem for them. But let’s see what they will say on this in the future.
     the former, no – that’s what they’re trying to establish
     I’ve seen assumed that satem is a subgroup so often in various papers and dsicussions that I maybe underestimate how controversial that still may be. Although if they take satemisation as diagnostic for a clade and not as an areal feature, than yes, that Needs to be proven.
193. David Marjanović says

     September 16, 2022 at 2:37 pm

     By downplaying the other isoglosses, the authors arrange the evidence to support their cladistic model to the detriment of such an areal-based model.

     Their assumption is that there is a tree, and that it can be found by identifying and peeling back (“downplaying”) all the areal layers; so that’s what they try to do.

     After all, a precisely simultaneous split into 10 clades is simply improbable. Perhaps we’re ultimately unable to identify the tree, but we definitely won’t if we don’t try.

     Although if they take satemisation as diagnostic for a clade and not as an areal feature, than yes, that Needs to be proven.

     Exactly. They’re trying to show (or at least presenting that they’re trying to show in a forthcoming paper) that it’s a clade and not (just) an area.
194. Hans says

     September 16, 2022 at 3:11 pm

     Their assumption is that there is a tree, and that it can be found by identifying and peeling back (“downplaying”) all the areal layers; so that’s what they try to do.
     I don’t mind if they try. I just think it’s wrong to fit everything in a cladistic straitjacket. As you probably have guessed from my remark, for me, B-Sl is a clade, part of which (Slavic) later became more similar to Graeco-Aryan under Iranian influence.
     I also seem to remember that RUKI doesn’t even apply to the same degree in all Indo-Iranian, and that there’s partial RUKI outside of it – something that would be no surprise in an areal model, but needs to be explained in a clade model.
195. David Marjanović says

     September 16, 2022 at 3:53 pm

     As you probably have guessed from my remark, for me, B-Sl is a clade, part of which (Slavic) later became more similar to Graeco-Aryan under Iranian influence.

     Poulsen & Olander clearly agree.

     I also seem to remember that RUKI doesn’t even apply to the same degree in all Indo-Iranian

     Nuristani just has RIK, though that’s been explained as a later partial reversal.

     something that would be no surprise in an areal model, but needs to be explained in a clade model

     Areal influence is available as an explanation in both models, the difference being just that common inheritance is not available to a purely areal model, so that the latter hypothesis must explain all shared innovations as either coincidence or areal influence.
196. J Pystynen says

     September 18, 2022 at 2:35 pm

     Nuristani just has RIK

     … and the surviving Baltic data has RK, though loanword evidence in Finnic shows that this, too, probably used to be RUKI; the most often-cited example is Lithuanian liesas vs. Finnish laiha > *laiša for ‘lean, thin’. (Related to the important point that *š from RUKI would not have been phonemic in any of the branches before various other changes.)
197. David Marjanović says

     September 19, 2022 at 3:49 am

     Feeding right into a pet peeve of mine: sounds can be easier to reconstruct in phonetic detail than the phonemes they belonged to, because sound changes (and borrowing) work on sounds, not on phonemes.
198. Trond Engen says

     December 29, 2022 at 11:31 am

     David M. (November 6, 2021 at 6:28 pm): The genomic origins of the Bronze Age Tarim Basin mummies in open access.

     I don’t think I ever got around to reading this last year. I have now. I don’t have much more to say about the Tarim mummies except that it was unexpected and interesting. The Dzungarian EMBA genomes show beyond doubt that there was movement of Afanasievo pastoralists into Dzungaria, strengthening the Afanasievo origin hypothesis for Tocharian. Also interesting is the somewhat later Kanai MBA individual, from just over on the Kazakh side. It’s shown in this paper as a three way mix of Dzungaria EBA1 with Tarim EMBA1 and Baikal, but it plots as pure Okinevo. That seems to add further evidence that the Okunevo peoples started moving south as well, as briefly (and speculatively) dicussed here.
199. TR says

     March 3, 2023 at 6:40 pm

     First bioanthropological evidence for Yamnaya horsemanship, arguing for Yamnaya horseback riding c. 3000 BC based on skeletal evidence.
200. Ryan says

     March 3, 2023 at 7:55 pm

     >However, it is apparent that organized cavalry was introduced not before the very end of the second millennium BCE (4).

     Is there a distinction I’m not catching here? Horses were unused in organized armed warfare for nearly two millennia after riding began? Surely not. But what is the feature required before they’re willing to call it “organized cavalry”?
201. drasvi says

     March 4, 2023 at 3:51 am

     Honestly, I understand nothing about it.
     Why did charoits dominate for a while and why did they become obsolete?
202. Trond Engen says

     March 4, 2023 at 6:38 am

     Organized cavalry means “strategic units of mounted soldiers trained and equipped for warfare from horseback”. I think the assumption is that it took long time to develop a breed of horses that could be taken into close battle without panicking and becoming unpredictable. Thinking of that, the chariot may also be seen as a way to constrain the movements of the horse.
203. Trond Engen says

     March 4, 2023 at 7:13 am

     The study is interesting and looks solid to this layman, but since it’s the first of its kind and (by design) limited to Yamnaya contexts, it’s not clear how widespread similar pathologies were outside of horse-using cultures.

     Edit: Or outside of that specific horse-using culture.
204. Trond Engen says

     March 4, 2023 at 8:22 am

     Horses for movement, for scouting and for managing herds. That’s a huge advantage over settled farmers — even without direct confrontations and mounted warfare. Perhaps it wasn’t really the Pontic-Caspians who overran Old Europe but their herds. But the herders may have given the farmers offers they couldn’t refuse.

     [Western movie theme playing]

     But this doesn’t really work out. There’s no value in a herd without anyone to consume the yield. The ranch economy of the American frontier couldn’t develop without industrialization, urbanization and the railway. No Yamnaya chief would need more cattle than could be consumed. Maybe we should think of the herd as a means of extortion. Farmers paid tribute to the herders (in produce and marriage) to spare their fields, and the herders gave some of it back by feeding their most loyal tributaries in conspicuous feasts.
205. David Marjanović says

     March 4, 2023 at 10:21 am

     Horses for movement, for scouting and for managing herds. That’s a huge advantage over settled farmers — even without direct confrontations and mounted warfare.

     Also, long-distance communication.
206. Trond Engen says

     March 4, 2023 at 12:18 pm

     Yes, indeed.

     I keep thinking about herd size. The horse would presumably make it possible to manage larger herds with fewer people, but also to have more herders, allowing for even larger herds. But large herds need a large market to be profitable.

     Herd size to population size is an interesting measure. How many animals does it take to feed a person and a family? How many herders do you need per 100 heads of cattle (sheep, goats, etc.), and how many people can you feed? The difference can be converted to trade surplus and luxury goods (if there’s a market), maintaining an entourage or a court of soldiers and artists, buying allegience, or increasing the number of wives and children. Could the latter be the mechanism for male line replacement? Would it be fast enough to explain the turnovers suggested by ancient DNA?
207. Hans says

     March 4, 2023 at 12:26 pm

     My understanding is that historically, cattle was much smaller and produced by far less meat and milk than modern cattle, so I guess herds needed to be bigger to feed the herder’s family.
208. Trond Engen says

     March 4, 2023 at 12:31 pm

     Yes. But the economy is interesting. And how did the horse change it?
209. David Marjanović says

     March 4, 2023 at 5:36 pm

     The difference can be converted to trade surplus and luxury goods (if there’s a market), maintaining an entourage or a court of soldiers and artists, buying allegience, or increasing the number of wives and children.

     Or maybe we should look at it the other way around: a social expectation to support the entourage and buy allegiance and support the largest family possible makes it necessary to have a large herd – heroes eat beef and pretty much only beef, even in the Iliad where they’re surrounded by fish –, and if anything is left after that, that’s where trade for luxury goods comes in. Most of the luxury goods are promptly invested in buying allegiance anyway.
210. drasvi says

     March 4, 2023 at 11:46 pm

     “develop a breed”, “constrain the movements” – @Trond, I thought about it too, but I don’t know how we can test the former idea…

     As for economy, I don’t know how to come to simple conclusions from the notion of suprlus alone. As I understand you, you’re saying that herding can be more efficient (labour, time).

     Your population reaches the maximum and surplus yok (but you have lots of free time) – unless the constraint on the size of population is imposed not by the land but by something else. So either you have this constraint or surplus is associated with inequality or it may appear dynamically due to instability of the system. Either way, it is not simple.
211. drasvi says

     March 4, 2023 at 11:47 pm

     I also don’t understand how gender roles work. Usually people assume (a) men are only good for warfare and food production (b) women are only good for child birth, breastfeeding (or otherwise raising children) and for farmers also food production (for some reason Europeans rarely discuss role women in production among herders). (c) the society as a whole is an extreme r-strategist, it tries to give birth to as many children as possible, so all young females are busy. Is all of this right?
212. John Cowan says

     March 5, 2023 at 1:52 am

     What is this yok of which you speak?
213. AntC says

     March 5, 2023 at 3:48 am

     so all young females are busy. Is all of this right?

     The modelling I’ve seen (sorry, can’t remember where) suggested hunter-gatherer ‘economy’ kept people ‘working’ only about 15 hours per week. Note this was an average, with wild variations: long hours at harvest or on hunting trips; idle when you were only waiting for the crops (or prey) to grow.

     The human physiology for storing body-fat suggests humans are adapted for a feast-or-famine sort of lifestyle.

     How would “young females” be kept busy by childcare?: babies just lie in their cribs and gurgle most of the time — it’s like leaving crops to grow.

     It isn’t ’til humanity gets to industrial society/trade surplus/luxury goods/(wage-)slavery that anybody needs to worry about producing more stuff than you can eat before it goes rotten. Surplus Value is the Economists’ term. I’m agin’ it.
214. Alon Lischinsky says

     March 5, 2023 at 9:18 am

     How would “young females” be kept busy by childcare?: babies just lie in their cribs and gurgle most of the time

     As the meme goes: tell me you’ve never done any real childcare without saying you’ve never done any real childcare.

     Even in a society like ours where kids spend a lot of time in school or otherwise under the care of non-parents “parents spend 50 hours per child per week in child care [averaged] over the first twelve years of the child’s life” (Schoonbroodt, A. (2018). Parental child care during and outside of typical work hours. Review of Economics of the Household, 16, 453-476. Emphasis mine).
215. Trond Engen says

     March 5, 2023 at 9:28 am

     Hunter-gatherer economies and lifestyles are so diverse that generalization almost becomes meaningless. We tend to think of the mobile never-keep-anything-you-can’t-carry-with-you type, but others were settled, using local resources and storing food for consumption between seasons. Ceramics was invented by hunter-gatherers. Others changed lifestyles between seasons, or kept the lifestyle but changed locations.

     As for the economy of the herders, I don’t claim anything, but it seems to have made it possible for a fairly small population to transform the landscape, the culture and the population of a continent in a few generations. I don’t think surplus of meat and dairy is enough to explain it, so what else did it yield?
216. David Marjanović says

     March 5, 2023 at 10:00 am

     How would “young females” be kept busy by childcare?: babies just lie in their cribs and gurgle most of the time — it’s like leaving crops to grow.

     You don’t have any younger siblings, do you.

     I don’t think surplus of meat and dairy is enough to explain it, so what else did it yield?

     Prestige and the plague.
217. Stu Clayton says

     March 5, 2023 at 3:48 pm

     How would “young females” be kept busy by childcare?: babies just lie in their cribs and gurgle most of the time — it’s like leaving crops to grow.

     When ignorance is bliss, ’tis easy to be wise.

     A more charitable take would be that this view of childcare originates in a childhood of neglect. As Topsy replied when asked where she came from: “I ’spect I growed. Don’t think nobody never made me.”

     Circumspice, dude. Women break their balls taking care of kids, wherever you look. Even I know this, who never bothered about families or women.
218. Y says

     March 5, 2023 at 4:13 pm

     I don’t know any of the vast anthropological literature about family planning in various societies around the world, and how family size correlates with this or that mode of living, but certainly modern Europeans didn’t invent birth control. The contrast between survival and population pressure, or between mouths to feed and helping hands (and social prestige) is not a subtle thing.
219. AntC says

     March 5, 2023 at 7:11 pm

     You don’t have any younger siblings, do you.

     Yes, I’m the eldest of 5. Also have lots of cousins. Elder siblings/grandparents do the childcare as much as mothers.

     “parents spend 50 hours per child per week in child care [averaged] over the first twelve years of the child’s life”

     So you’re suggesting my parents spent 250 hours per week? There aren’t that many hours in a week after allowing time to sleep (let alone my father’s mere 40-hour office job). Your numbers don’t pass the sniff test.

     And anyway that’s not a hunter-gatherer economy/is nuclear families. The point of the research (that I can’t now find) was that h-g’s had an easier life than in modern industrial economies. Who needs ballet lessons and soccer practice?
220. Ryan says

     March 5, 2023 at 9:59 pm

     I’m certainly not siding with antc’s “It’s like watchin’ the corn get taller.” At the same time, Schoonbrodt’s post-millennial American parents are out at the point where the bell curve flatlined in spending 50 hours a week on the kids *till they’re twelve.* That was my generation’s tv budget while mom and dad did other stuff.

     I still get texts about “playdates” for my 11 year old. I wanna be like “Why don’t you tell your kid to knock on our door every day at 3:45 like normal people?” But that’s not normal anymore.
221. David Marjanović says

     March 6, 2023 at 4:37 pm

     Elder siblings/grandparents do the childcare as much as mothers.

     That’s a very different statement from “babies just lie in their cribs and gurgle most of the time — it’s like leaving crops to grow.”
222. Trond Engen says

     March 11, 2023 at 5:21 pm

     Back to the horseriding study: I didn’t notice that a skeleton from Hungary with four markers of horseriding is very early, directly dated and supported by context to ~4300 cal. BCE, and believed on independent grounds to be an immigrant from the steppe to the Tisza culture. That’s centuries before the still inconclusive archaelogical evidence of horseriding from the Botai culture, about a millennium before the Yamnaya expansion, and even longer before any significant increase in horse remains. It’s a single instance (of riding, not of early immigration from the steppe), but if it bears out it’s wild. Wild and puzzling, Wild and puzzling and maybe not unreasonable at all.

     Let’s say the horse was used by steppe dwellers for long-distance journeys (trade? diplomacy? exploration?). That might explain how such a large portion of the Western steppe developed into a single culture in the fifth millennium BCE, but it could still have taken centuries of selective breeding before it was useful for managing large herds of cattle and sheep, allowing (or forcing) rapid and sweeping expansion across and out of the Steppe.

     Or it could indicate that the full story of interaction between steppe nomads and settled populations in the formation of the Yamnaya culture is not yet told.
223. Trond Engen says

     March 12, 2023 at 7:58 am

     I was hoping for Dmitry to say something about this, but here we are. Disclaimers apply.

     There’s a preprint on BioRxiv introducing a new tool for identifying close relatives in ancient DNA. The paper is partly a proof of concept, but since the samples they used are ancient Eurasian DNA, it also purports to add insights into the great migrations around 3000 BCE.

     Ringbauer et al (2023): ancIBD – Screening for identity by descent segments in human ancient DNA

     Abstract

     Long DNA sequences shared between two individuals, known as Identical by descent (IBD) segments, are a powerful signal for identifying close and distant biological relatives because they only arise when the pair shares a recent common ancestor. Existing methods to call IBD segments between present-day genomes cannot be straightforwardly applied to ancient DNA data (aDNA) due to typically low coverage and high genotyping error rates. We present ancIBD, a method to identify IBD segments for human aDNA data implemented as a Python package. Our approach is based on a Hidden Markov Model, using as input genotype probabilities imputed based on a modern reference panel of genomic variation. Through simulation and downsampling experiments, we demonstrate that ancIBD robustly identifies IBD segments longer than 8 centimorgan for aDNA data with at least either 0.25x average whole-genome sequencing (WGS) coverage depth or at least 1x average depth for in-solution enrichment experiments targeting a widely used aDNA SNP set (‘1240k’). This application range allows us to screen a substantial fraction of the aDNA record for IBD segments and we showcase two downstream applications. First, leveraging the fact that biological relatives up to the sixth degree are expected to share multiple long IBD segments, we identify relatives between 10,156 ancient Eurasian individuals and document evidence of long-distance migration, for example by identifying a pair of two approximately fifth-degree relatives who were buried 1410km apart in Central Asia 5000 years ago. Second, by applying ancIBD, we reveal new details regarding the spread of ancestry related to Steppe pastoralists into Europe starting 5000 years ago. We find that the first individuals in Central and Northern Europe carrying high amounts of Steppe-ancestry, associated with the Corded Ware culture, share high rates of long IBD (12-25 cM) with Yamnaya herders of the Pontic-Caspian steppe, signaling a strong bottleneck and a recent biological connection on the order of only few hundred years, providing evidence that the Yamnaya themselves are a main source of Steppe ancestry in Corded Ware people. We also detect elevated sharing of long IBD segments between Corded Ware individuals and people associated with the Globular Amphora culture (GAC) from Poland and Ukraine, who were Copper Age farmers not yet carrying Steppe-like ancestry. These IBD links appear for all Corded Ware groups in our analysis, indicating that individuals related to GAC contexts must have had a major demographic impact early on in the genetic admixtures giving rise to various Corded Ware groups across Europe. These results show that detecting IBD segments in aDNA can generate new insights both on a small scale, relevant to understanding the life stories of people, and on the macroscale, relevant to large-scale cultural-historical events.

     […]

     Discussion

     […]

     Detecting IBD segments in modern DNA has yielded unprecedented insight into the recent demographic structure of present-day populations, allowing researchers to infer population size dynamics [Browning and Browning, 2015, Al-Asadi et al., 2019], genealogical connections between various groups of people [Ralph and Coop, 2013, Han et al., 2017, Nait Saada et al., 2020], and the geographic scale of individual mobility [Ringbauer et al., 2017, Al-Asadi et al., 2019]. In principle, such analysis can also be applied to ancient DNA. It is particularly promising that the number of sample pairs that can be screened for IBD grows quadratically with sample size. The rapidly growing aDNA record together with this even quicker growth of pairs that can be screened for IBD will provide aDNA researchers with a powerful new way to address demographic questions about the human past. We believe that the method to detect IBD in aDNA presented here is only a first step towards creating a new generation of demographic inference tools, giving insights into the human past at an unprecedented fine scale.

     In the case of Corded Ware and descendants, the paper claims to settle the question of descent from Yamnaya itself rather than some Para-Yamnaya population. 75% of the genetic material is from a small group of people with close relatives buried in kurgans on the steppe. The remaining 25% is visibly recent ancestry from Globular Amphora. Both ancestries are evenly distributed in all descendant groups..

     As usual this raises (or leaves) as many questions as it answers. Here are two:

     The source of the R1a Y chromosome is still not found, and there aren’t many places left for it to hide. Where did it come from?

     The even distribution of Globular Amphora ancestry in Corded Ware groups from Sweden to Russia is hinting at a systematic, maybe even formalized, process of merger at the onset of the northern expansion. How did that play out?
224. David Marjanović says

     March 12, 2023 at 3:34 pm

     Interesting indeed.

     10,156 ancient Eurasian individuals

     That’s… a lot.
225. Trond Engen says

     March 12, 2023 at 4:30 pm

     Yes, it’s pretty much every ancient Eurasian individual with enough coverage. In this study they just looked at the Yamnaya expansion, but there must be much more in there. And as they say, the power increases quadratically with the number of genomes, so this is going to give increasingly sharp pictures of large scale movements and small scale interactions. The power would also increase with the completeness of the genomes, which is likely to improve as well, technology doing what technology does.

     They say they can’t discern the direction of a relationship (e.g. grandparent from grandchild), just identify it by genetic distance, but I wonder about that. With increasing coverage I think it should be feasible to identify up- and downstream genomes from splitting and recombination of long segments. But I’m no spesialist at all.
226. Brett says

     March 12, 2023 at 5:18 pm

     I don’t like the abbreviation “aDNA.”
227. Trond Engen says

     March 12, 2023 at 5:49 pm

     Neither do I, but for some reason nobody ever asks me before inventing terminology in a field where I have no business interfering.

     Well, ancIBD is even worse. it’s especially jarring as the first word in the title of the paper. (I put that “Well,” in front just to avoid it.)
228. drasvi says

     March 13, 2023 at 9:25 pm

     In Russian I usually hear “Battle Axe” (культура боевых топоров) rather than “Corded Ware” (культура шнуровидной керамики), e.g. in the context of Fatyanovo culture in my part of Russia.

     But English WP uses Battle Axe and Boat Axe synonymously (and the corresponding page in Russian WP is культура ладьевидных топоров, that’s Boat Axe). Is WP wrong?
229. drasvi says

     March 13, 2023 at 9:30 pm

     ancIBD is a Python package (but an ugly name).

     aDNA in the context of mRNA, tRNA etc. looks very weird…
230. Trond Engen says

     March 14, 2023 at 3:15 am

     Yes, it’s stridsøkskulturen in Norway too, while Denmark uses enkeltgravskulturen “the Single Grave Culture”.

     I’m not sure of the difference between “battle axe” and “boat axe”. My impression is that the latter is used east of the Baltic and that the words represent slightly different designs of essentially the same object.
231. Brett says

     March 14, 2023 at 3:28 am

     I am too tired to write the setup properly, but there’s a joke here about the German government research bureau responsible for studying the long-term maternal history of human populations. The punchline is “amtDNAamt.”
232. Hans says

     March 14, 2023 at 5:12 am

     stridsøkskulturen
     I first parsed that as strid-søks-kulturen and internally translated that as “battle-socks culture”. My brain plays tricks like that on me sometimes.
     In German: Streitaxtkultur, which according to WP is an now outdated designation for Schnurkeramische Kultur. It was still frequently used at least in popular books on prehistory when I became interested in the topic almost 50 years ago.
233. David Marjanović says

     March 14, 2023 at 1:04 pm

     And before “pots, not people”, it was often Streitaxtleute…

     Anyway, I’ve seen the equivalence stated, but I’ve also seen Streitaxtkultur claimed to be a subset of Schnurkeramik(kultur). I’m getting the impression archeological taxonomy is as messy as rank-based biological taxonomy.
234. Trond Engen says

     March 14, 2023 at 5:36 pm

     Stridsøksfolket up here. I think it has made a renaissance in this new era of peoples, not pots.

     Snorkjeramisk does exist, but it’s used more for the continental forms and is not commonly known. Tellingly,, there’s no article about den snorkjeramiske kulturen on wp.no, and the article on stridsøkskulturen confuses it with den båndkjeramiske kulturen “Linear Pottery”.
235. drasvi says

     March 14, 2023 at 8:45 pm

     @Trond, does “east of the Baltic” refer to researchers or artefacts located east of Baltic?

     And do you use in Norway “battle axe” narrowly (to refer exclusively to a Scandinavian culture as in en.WP) or widely for Corded Ware in general ?

     I am quite confused by en.WP, because I am only familiar with the wider sense…
236. John Cowan says

     March 14, 2023 at 11:41 pm

     I still get texts about “playdates” for my 11 year old.

     I solve this problem by ruthlessly ignoring all texts (except those containing authentication codes I have requested, and even then I’ll take them by robot-voice if that’s an option) and the great majority of phone calls sent to my cell phone. I scrupulously answer calls to my landline, read my email, and come to the door when my doorbell is rung. I consider that that is quite sufficient.

     I wanna be like “Why don’t you tell your kid to knock on our door every day at 3:45 like normal people?”

     And then what? I’m not quite prepared to send my kid and your kid off to the park at age 11, half a mile (0.8 km) away, by themselves. So playdates, yes.
237. FJ says

     March 15, 2023 at 2:55 am

     “I’m not quite prepared to send my kid and your kid off to the park at age 11, half a mile (0.8 km) away, by themselves.”

     I think Ryan was complaining about this bit, not about texts per se.

     Isn’t it strange how, at least in the US, crime rates have been going down since about 1991, but it’s become much less normal to send your ten-year-old with their friend to a park half a mile away?
238. AntC says

     March 15, 2023 at 3:25 am

     in the US, crime rates have been going down since about 1991

     Might we need to drill into those figures somewhat? My perception (from outside U.S.) is that random gun crime has been increasing. Also the number of people who are off their heads on drugs, and liable to lash out with no warning. (Those two categories maybe overlap.) Indeed aren’t they the sort of people more likely to lurk in parks?

     Perhaps the crime rates in parks have been going down (if they have) only because parents no longer send their kids unattended?
239. David Marjanović says

     March 15, 2023 at 7:14 am

     I’m not quite prepared to send my kid and your kid off to the park at age 11, half a mile (0.8 km) away, by themselves.

     …Back in the Cold War, when I was 6, I walked to school for a quarter of an hour every day on my own, and then back the same way. That was by no means unusual. ~:-|

     My perception (from outside U.S.) is that random gun crime has been increasing.

     Define “random”, and then look at the statistics – I think they’re all accessible from Wikipedia. There’s been a strange spike recently because somehow the pandemic made Americans and only Americans weirdly aggressive, but other than that it’s been going down for most definitions of “random” I can imagine right now. (I have to run, sorry.)
240. AntC says

     March 15, 2023 at 8:31 am

     look at the statistics

     Here (first graph) shows a steady increase in gun homicides since the 90’s — which was FJ’s start point. Yes there’s a spike over the pandemic, but the increase was there already. And of course U.S. gun homicide rates far outpace any other OECD country (later graph). There is a DoJ study saying it decreased 1993~1998 — which seems to be the nadir, just before that wp graph.

     By “random” I meant to exclude police/criminals killing criminals/police; family/close relationship violence where the victim is known to the shooter; but include recent school shootings where the victims might have vaguely ‘known of’ the shooter — since we’re talking about kids walking to school.

     Can’t find a specific analysis on wp. ‘Mass shootings’ graphed here vary wildly but show an upward trend since the 90’s. (spike in 2017~2018). BBC agrees.

     Figures for drug-related gun violence will be mostly police- or criminal-on-criminal, not off-their-head user on rando.

     it’s been going down for most definitions of “random” I can imagine right now

     Doesn’t look like it to me.

     somehow the pandemic made Americans and only Americans weirdly aggressive

     Oh, no. In NZ we had some very nasty violent incidents. Vigilantes setting up road blocks; other vigilantes demolishing them; stand-over tactics. And an occupation of Parliament’s grounds very much mimicking the assault on the Capitol. The difference was no guns. Although gun ownership in NZ is high in rural areas — of course I mean high relative to civilised countries.

     (Yeah from about age 10 I used to walk home about 40 minutes through a fairly remote bit of parkland. Once got thumped about the head by one of a bunch of ‘traveller’ kids — probably I was being an unbearable toff.)
241. Brett says

     March 15, 2023 at 8:51 am

     Random mass shootings, tragic as they are, are still so rare as to be statistically meaningless. If your kids are going to a park, the danger of being killed by a car on the way there is astronomically greater than of their being assaulted or abducted by a stranger. (Abducted by your non-custodial ex may be another story.)
242. Lars Mathiesen (he/him/his) says

     March 15, 2023 at 9:17 am

     It may even be that there is a greater risk of something bad happening if you drive the kid there than if you let her walk. (I’ll give better odds on that being true in Denmark where we build roads with sidewalks, than in the US).
243. Hans says

     March 15, 2023 at 10:09 am

     When we were kids, we used to play outside for hours; nobody controlled where we were between finishing our homework and supper. But it wasn’t without dangers; my little brother managed to almost drown twice.
244. David Marjanović says

     March 15, 2023 at 3:41 pm

     look at the statistics

     Oh! My knowledge was out of date since 2015.

     When we were kids, we used to play outside for hours; nobody controlled where we were between finishing our homework and supper.

     Same here, 90s.

     Got stuck on a raft on a lake once (yes, in the city of Vienna).
245. John Cowan says

     March 15, 2023 at 6:17 pm

     Isn’t it strange how, at least in the US, crime rates have been going down since about 1991, but it’s become much less normal to send your ten-year-old with their friend to a park half a mile away?

     Danger has gone way down; fear has gone way way up.

     And of course U.S. gun homicide rates far outpace any other OECD country

     Talking about “U.S.” homicide rates[*] in this context is as meaningless as talking about “European (including Russia)” homicide rates. In NYC (which is relevant), there were 1,927 homicides in 1993, 633 in 1998, 597 in 1998, 523 in 2008, 335 in 2013, 295 in 2018, 319 in 2019, 462 in 2020, 488 in 2021, and 433 in 2022. Meanwhile, the population rose from 7.3 million in 1993 to 8.4 million in 2018 (the bottom of the homicide curve) to 8.8 million, meaning that homicides per 100,000 (the standard statistical measure) went from 26.4 to 3.5 to 4.9. Hardly a crime wave.

     [*] Knife homicide kills you just as dead.

     …Back in the Cold War, when I was 6, I walked to school for a quarter of an hour every day on my own, and then back the same way. That was by no means unusual.

     So did I. But I wouldn’t have sent my daughter at that age (too irresponsible) or my grandson (his mother was too fearful).

     Figures for drug-related gun violence will be mostly police- or criminal-on-criminal, not off-their-head user on rando.

     Bullets often miss. I don’t live in a “nice middle-class neighborhood”.

     If your kids are going to a park, the danger of being killed by a car on the way there is astronomically greater than of their being assaulted or abducted by a stranger.

     Sure. But hanging out there together for hours would be another matter, which is why David’s point isn’t so relevant. And the main concern isn’t major crimes, it’s getting into one of various kinds of trouble that might or might not involve other people. I had at one point to rescue Dorian from an (illegally climbed) tree because he couldn’t get down by himself.

     Denmark where we build roads with sidewalks

     Here in St. Petersburg West, we do too.

     But it wasn’t without dangers; my little brother managed to almost drown twice.

     Just so.
246. AntC says

     March 16, 2023 at 3:11 am

     homicides per 100,000 (the standard statistical measure)

     Yes, that’s the measure I was using — or rather wp was. So the growth of population in NYC with a fall in that gun rate just means the rest of U.S. has got less safe. The OP didn’t specify where in U.S.

     Hardly a crime wave.

     If I might hold up a mirror to our U.S. friends:

     By any standards in OECD countries (excluding Russia [**], as you say), those figures are a crime wave. That nobody in U.S. cares enough to do much about it doesn’t stop it being a crime wave. We in NZ had one mass shooting of around 50 people by a ‘rando’. Within a month there had been dramatic changes to the law. Somebody I know with an all-official gun licence had the police all over him.

     Yes, it’s difficult to understand the objective risk of random shooting vs car accident vs etc. But since it’s a risk I don’t need to take, and my most unpleasant experiences in international travel were crossing the U.S. (not even trying to enter the country) from gun-toting border security, I now travel Europe to/from NZ only via Asia. Thank you.

     [**] I can’t see any grounds these days to count Russia in with Europe for any statistics.
247. David Marjanović says

     March 16, 2023 at 9:10 am

     That nobody in U.S. cares enough to do much about it

     Oh, they care. They just insist on canned solutions that are all blocked by the opposing party because all existing proposals for solutions have been completely politicized.
248. languagehat says

     March 16, 2023 at 9:19 am

     They just insist on canned solutions that are all blocked by the opposing party because all existing proposals for solutions have been completely politicized.

     The second part of this sentence is correct, but I don’t know what you mean by the first: what “canned solutions”? This has been a problem for decades, and over that time pretty much every solution you could think of has been put forward. The problem does not lie with the people proposing solutions but with the people who will resist to the death any idea that even threatens to limit full access to guns for everyone everywhere. Please do not engage in both-sidesism.
249. John Cowan says

     March 16, 2023 at 10:44 am

     If I might hold up a mirror to our U.S. friends:

     This is no news to us, and the reasons are clear (Pinker spells them out with statistics). It’s a path-dependent result: in Europe, the pacification of society came before liberalization, whereas in the U.S. the order was reversed, so that private possession of weapons came to be seen as itself a liberty.

     Within a month there had been dramatic changes to the law.

     You inherited European notions of what counts as liberty. We didn’t. (You also didn’t have the historical experience, either in Enzed or in Britain, of having to defend your liberties by force.) Note that I am not defending the behavior of either my country or its citizens here, just pointing out the historical basis for their beliefs and consequent behavior.

     But since it’s a risk I don’t need to take, and my most unpleasant experiences in international travel were crossing the U.S. (not even trying to enter the country) from gun-toting border security

     Believe me, I have had the same experiences (except that I expected them and know how to behave in the presence of gun-toting etc., whereas you perhaps do not). So I don’t go anywhere, which suits me fine in the first place. I am Dennett’s Oxford lectern.

     what “canned solutions”? This has been a problem for decades, and over that time pretty much every solution you could think of has been put forward

     I think you and David M are in violent agreement: the solutions are already on the shelf, where they will remain for the reasons I gave above.
250. languagehat says

     March 16, 2023 at 11:52 am

     “They just insist on canned solutions” sounds deeply pejorative to me, as if “they” were ignoring innovative solutions that DM is presumably willing to offer them. If he meant it the way you suggest, I’m sure he’ll say so.
251. AntC says

     March 16, 2023 at 5:38 pm

     You inherited European notions of what counts as liberty. We didn’t.

     The UK (and most European states) had a civil war/revolution with actual shooting guns. I rather think it’s the Europeans who brought guns to the U.S. NZ (and especially Aus) suppressed native uprisings with gun violence. In our ‘Wild West’/pre-establishing Colonial government histories there were no gun controls. There is to this day high gun (rifles, not handguns) ownership in rural areas for killing vermin.

     So your “We didn’t” is a description, not an explanation. What different notions of liberty did Europeans bring to U.S., and why weren’t the European deaths in religious and civil wars remembered as a terrible warning?

     (You also didn’t have the historical experience, either in Enzed or in Britain, of having to defend your liberties by force.)

     English Civil War. (actually two of them) Persecution of Huguenots, French Revolution/The Terror.

     NZ Maori wars aka ‘Land wars’. NZ didn’t have white-on-white ‘wars’ as such, but there was plenty of gun violence against the colonial administrations trying to ‘regulate’ — that is, tax — sealers and gold prospectors.
252. J.W. Brewer says

     March 16, 2023 at 6:15 pm

     There is quite considerable regional variation in the U.S. both in absolute homicide rate and in historical trends in homicide rate, including not just urban v. non-urban variation but metropolis-A v. metropolis-B variation. In New York City, the rate came down further from the early Nineties peak than the national average and has rebounded in recent years less dramatically, although still enough to alarm residents who got an unwelcome reminder that positive historical trends sometimes stop trending in the positive direction. Indeed, the NYC homicide rate has recently been below that of some of the more violent Canadian cities (typically out on the Prairies: Winnipeg & Regina etc.) In certain other large U.S. cities (e.g. Chicago and Philadelphia), by contrast, the decline from the early-Nineties peaks was shallower and the more recent rebound sufficient to wipe out most/all of the gains.

     High-level American-distinctiveness theories that purport to explain why America is more violent than Luxembourg or whatever often lack explanatory power for intra-U.S. variation.

     BTW, foreigners familiar with the classic song “Streets of Laredo” about cowboy-on-cowboy gun violence may be surprised to learn that Laredo, Tex. is one of the less violent cities of its size in the U.S. these days. https://www.lmtonline.com/local/article/Laredo-ranks-13th-safest-cities-in-2022-improves-17084308.php

     Indeed, although stereotypes about Texas-at-large have considerable global reach, there is quite considerable intra-Texan variation in this area among the largest cities – the homicide rate in Houston is more than quadruple that of El Paso (as of a few years ago, I could probably find stats a year or two more recent if I did more work than I have time for right now); that in Dallas almost quintuple that of Austin. That’s four of the six most populous cities in the state – the homicide rates for the remaining two, Ft. Worth and San Antonio, are sort of roughly in the middle of those extremes.
253. David Marjanović says

     March 16, 2023 at 7:44 pm

     I’m too tired to be sure what exactly I meant by “canned solutions”, I’ll be back tomorrow. 🙂

     You inherited European notions of what counts as liberty. We didn’t.

     It’s not that simple. In Germany, on many highways, there is no speed limit, and that’s treated as a freedom issue more important than people’s lives just like guns in America. A general speed limit was introduced during the oil crisis, but abolished again very soon under the alliterating slogan Freie Bürger fordern freie Fahrt “free citizens demand free passage/driving” which was pushed especially loudly by the Liberal Party, i.e. the closest thing Germany has to libertarians. All more recent attempts to introduce a general speed limit faded out very, very quickly.

     There’s a stretch of highway close to Berlin that was so deadly a court found it legal to introduce a speed limit there; that was done, and now the death rate there is lower than the threshold the court set, so a court (I think the same one) found that the speed limit must be abolished again (and that’s about to happen, as far as I understand).

     As it happens, the scarcity of speed limits doesn’t kill as many people as the scarcity of gun regulations in the US (either in total or per capita); but still.

     There are even, sort of, equivalents to good guys with a gun. I’ve heard of an accident where a car crashed into the side of a truck at Ludicrous Speed, possibly 280 km/h. The people in the car ducked in time, and so they survived: the top half of the car was cleanly sheared off, the rest passed under the truck and emerged on the other side slowed down but without further damage. If the car had been slower, the whole car would have been crumpled at the edge of the truck, with the people in it. (…Or the crash wouldn’t have happened in the first place…)

     foreigners familiar with the classic song “Streets of Laredo”

     Never heard of it, FWTW.
254. AntC says

     March 16, 2023 at 9:54 pm

     Never heard of it,

     I suggest you stay that way. Even if I had heard of it, I’d vehemently deny all knowledge. Horribly schmaltzy. Cowboy in white linen? Huh? Seems terribly impractical.

     … about cowboy-on-cowboy gun violence

     There’s only oblique hints of that in the actual words — at least in the version I found. (Gun violence, yes. Cause unspecified.) Was this a well-known incident ‘immortalised in song’? “primarily descended from an Irish folk song” says wp. The Irish has cause of injury unspecified “All by a young woman” (sounds like he knew he deserved it)/no mention of gun violence.
255. John Cowan says

     March 16, 2023 at 11:01 pm

     If you look at the different versions of the song, beginning with “The Unfortunate Rake” (Wikipedia, Mudcat), it’s clear that the woman is a prostitute and the hero of the tale is dying of syphilis. There are dozens of versions. Here’s one of my favorites (only the first five lines actually belong to “Streets of Laredo”):

     As I walked out in the streets of Laredo,
     As I walked out in Laredo one day,
     I spied a poor cowboy wrapped up in white linen,
     Wrapped up in white linen as cold as the clay.

     I see by your outfit that you are a cowboy.
     You see by my outfit that I am one too.
     We see by our outfits that we are both cowboys.
     Now you get an outfit an’ you can be a cowboy too.

     Now you got no outfit, so you’re not a cowboy.
     I got two outfits. You take one of mine.
     Now you got an outfit, and I got an outfit,
     And in our outfits now don’t we look fine?

     You fit in my outfit. I fit in your outfit.
     We fit in our outfits. We’re outfitted fine.
     They’re fine-fitted outfits. They’re out-fitted fine-fits.
     They’re fit-outed b-b-l-l-r-r-b-b. I’m fit to be tied.

     As I walked out in the streets of Laredo,
     As I walked out in Laredo one day,
     I spied a young outfit wrapped up in his cowboy,
     Wrapped up in his outfit, so I let him lay.
256. Brett says

     March 17, 2023 at 5:46 am

     @J.W. Brewer: It is especially ironic that for some years now, El Paso has neen rated as one of the safest large cities in the country, while it’s right across from Ciudad Juarez, one of the most dangerous cities in the world.

     @AntC: The linen in “The Cowboy’s Lament” is bandaging. It’s really a wonderful cowboy song. My favorite recording is by Burl Ives, even though he doesn’t sing the verses that I like best.* It’s also a very influential song, much better known than the antecedent John Cowan mentioned, about leprosy instead.** References to its lyrics crop up in some possibly unexpected places. The chorus to “The Green Fields of France” by Eric Bogle runs:

     Did they beat the drums slowly?
     Did they sound the fife lowly?
     Did the rifles fire o’ ye as they lowered you down?
     Did the bugles sing “The Last Post” in chorus?
     Did the pipes play “The ‘Flowers of the Forest”?

     Moreover, many other performers, apparently unsatisfied with the extent of Bogle’s allusion, change the third line to a variation of, “Did they play the death march as they carried you along?” corresponding to the next like from “The Cowboy’s Lament.”

     * It’s not Ives’ best cowboy song either. That’s “Ghost Riders in the Sky.”

     ** “The Unfortunate Rake” has come to be associated with a St. James infirmary in New Orleans (where there is a St. James parish). However, that hospital apparently never existed. There may have been some confusion with a similarly named leprosarium in London.
257. J.W. Brewer says

     March 17, 2023 at 10:20 am

     @Brett: Similarly, the homicide rate in Nuevo Laredo, Tamps., right across the river from Laredo, Tex. and with similar demographics in many dimensions, has recently been orders of magnitude higher, as discussed here: https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/article/Laredo_vs_Nuevo_Laredo_Dudley.pdf
258. Brett says

     March 19, 2023 at 12:32 am

     @J.W. Brewer: It occurs to me that for the Mexican (drug*) cartels, cities close to the northern border are probably more attractive territory to control than similarly sized cities farther away from American border. In fact, the proximity to America would seemingly be valuable for two separate reasons. The first is simply related to cartel business; controlling the area around a concentration of border crossings should be extremely lucrative for a smuggling enterprise. The second reason is that it gives the members of the cartel easy access to American consumer goods and to America itself. El Chapo ensured that some of his children were born in America, to get them American citizenship.

     * I was reading something today that claimed that the avocado industry in Mexico (or at least the transportation and resale parts of the supply chain) are also controlled by criminal cartels. However, it was not clear whether these were separate operations from the drug cartels.
259. David Marjanović says

     March 19, 2023 at 12:37 pm

     …and if yes, how much longer they managed to stay separate operations from the drug cartels.
260. rozele says

     March 19, 2023 at 2:53 pm

     most versions of Streets of Laredo i’ve heard include a line specifying “i’m shot in the breast and i’m dying today”. i’m not sure whether that’s a defining element of the cowboy branch of the Unfortunate Rake song family, but to my ear it’s part of what distinguishes it from Saint James Infirmary and other cousins from the gambler/reprobate branch, where i think the cause of death is generally not explicitly named.

     thanks for the outfit-centered version, JC! i’d never run across it, and it’s excellent.
261. Brett says

     March 20, 2023 at 12:19 pm

     There was a 1960 Folkways Records album, composed entirely of songs from “The Unfortunate Rake” family. The seem to represent a pretty comprehensive cross section of the traditional repertoire, and there are also some more recent parodic* versions included.

     * The most famous parody is probably the Smothers Brothers’ version of “Streets of Laredo.”. I’m not sure whether the lyrics John Cowan quotes are an elaboration of the Smother Brothers’ words, or whether their version is an abridgment of the version he quotes.
262. ktschwarz says

     March 20, 2023 at 4:37 pm

     Brett: Aha! That’s where this comes from, which I heard once on the radio decades ago:

     When I was a-skiing the hills of Sun Valley
     As I was a-skiing Old Baldy one day
     I spied a young skier all wrapped in alpaca
     All wrapped in alpaca and cold as der schnee

     Mystery solved!
263. languagehat says

     May 8, 2023 at 9:11 am

     Ancient human DNA extracted from 20,000-year-old deer tooth pendant found in Denisova Cave:

     Scraps of ancient DNA coaxed out of a deer tooth pendant show it likely hung around the neck of a woman or girl around 20,000 years ago.

     We don’t know what she looked like, but she was related to a population of humans further east of Denisova Cave in southern Siberia, in which the pendant was unearthed.

     These insights into the pendant-wearer were made possible by a new technique — reported today in Nature — that can non-destructively extract ancient human DNA from objects made from porous materials like bone or teeth.

     The Nature article, Ancient human DNA recovered from a Palaeolithic pendant.
264. Ryan says

     May 8, 2023 at 9:37 am

     From Denisova but not Denisovan
265. David Marjanović says

     May 8, 2023 at 11:14 am

     These insights into the pendant-wearer were made possible by a new technique — reported today in Nature — that can non-destructively extract ancient human DNA from objects made from porous materials like bone or teeth.

     I remember when this was thinkable but universally considered infeasible several times over.

     lo! these onescore years ago
266. Dmitry Pruss says

     May 8, 2023 at 12:38 pm

     Very little DNA, just about 20,000 tiny snippets, but it was enough to determine sex (by the X-chromosome fraction) and to see close similarity of the genetic profile to a few other better-studied ancient Siberian humans.
     The authors tried the same trick on the artifacts from the older excavations but were stumped by the abundant modern DNA contamination from the digs where the archaeologists didn’t yet use gloves or masks. They also tried a more modern samples but extracted just a handful of short DNA molecules, not enough to conclude anything.
     Perhaps the pendant success will remain a singular exception…
267. David Marjanović says

     May 8, 2023 at 4:07 pm

     but it was enough to determine sex

     And to determine it’s from a human and not from the deer!
268. Dmitry Pruss says

     May 8, 2023 at 6:37 pm

     They got deer DNA too. Sometimes even the quality of species ID is marginal, like I recently read a paper on the horses of Gaya confederation, an early Korean state, where they proudly confirmed that DNA confirms that the teeth from the royal graves belonged to horses. It was based on a lone DNA fragment, and it still had three sequencing errors separating it from the clean match with the horse sequence…
     https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4435257
269. Trond Engen says

     July 24, 2023 at 5:22 am

     Another interesting study (and again thanks to Dmitry):

     Sandra Penske et al: Early contact between late farming and pastoralist societies in southeastern Europe Nature (2023)

     Abstract
     Archaeogenetic studies have described two main genetic turnover events in prehistoric western Eurasia: one associated with the spread of farming and a sedentary lifestyle starting around 7000–6000 BC and a second with the expansion of pastoralist groups from the Eurasian steppes starting around 3300 BC. The period between these events saw new economies emerging on the basis of key innovations, including metallurgy, wheel and wagon and horse domestication. However, what happened between the demise of the Copper Age settlements around 4250 BC and the expansion of pastoralists remains poorly understood. To address this question, we analysed genome-wide data from 135 ancient individuals from the contact zone between southeastern Europe and the northwestern Black Sea region spanning this critical time period. While we observe genetic continuity between Neolithic and Copper Age groups from major sites in the same region, from around 4500 BC on, groups from the northwestern Black Sea region carried varying amounts of mixed ancestries derived from Copper Age groups and those from the forest/steppe zones, indicating genetic and cultural contact over a period of around 1,000 years earlier than anticipated. We propose that the transfer of critical innovations between farmers and transitional foragers/herders from different ecogeographic zones during this early contact was integral to the formation, rise and expansion of pastoralist groups around 3300 BC.

     […]

     Discussion
     The genetic homogeneity observed in and across the four CA sites (PIE, YUN, PTK and VAR) of the fifth millennium BC matches the cultural homogeneity of the archaeological records and suggests an extended period of a relative stable sociopolitical network and absence of large-scale cultural and genetic transformations. Shared shorter IBD tracts between sites are consistent with the transregional connectivity visible in the material culture. We can only speculate about the reasons that led to decreasing settlement densities at the end of the CA. Conflict arising from an early expansion of supposedly ‘Indo-European’ groups from the steppe, an idea that was put forward by M. Gimbutas, is possible but internal competition and strife between CA groups is equally likely. In fact, given the near-identical genetic ancestry profiles of SEE CA groups, we caution that genetic analyses would be blind to internal conflicts, causing the replacement of one CA group by another. Long-lasting droughts and forest fires or infectious diseases and ensuing epidemics are other factors that could deplete lands. Indeed, evidence for early forms of Yersinia pestis as old as 5,000 years has been reported and even further back in time for Salmonella enterica for individuals associated with transitional foraging and pastoralism. Despite the systematic screening of teeth, we found no evidence for pathogens among the CA individuals of the fifth and fourth millennium BC, apart from two individuals (YUN048 and VAR021), who were positive for the Hepatitis B virus (HBV)52, while individual VAR021 was also positive for Salmonella enterica.

     A principal finding from our study indicates early contact and admixture between CA farming groups from SEE and Eneolithic groups from the steppe zone in today’s southern Ukraine, possibly starting in the middle of the fifth millennium BC when settlement densities shifted further north, connecting the lower Danube region with the coastal steppe and Cucuteni–Trypillia groups of the forest–steppe. Archaeological evidence shows that the early CA Gumelniţa groups had already settled deep into the steppe zone by the mid-fifth millennium BC, introducing elements of a farming lifestyle but also carrying cultural influences from local HG groups. The succeeding Cernavodă I and Usatove archaeological cultures were heavily influenced by local CA cultures and surrounds. During the fourth millennium BC, the northwestern Pontic region experienced intensified contact with Steppe Eneolithic groups, while these in turn also had contact with groups in the North Caucasus, such as Maykop, all of which are mirrored by the genomic data presented here. Moreover, despite the close geographical proximity of the Ukrainian sites studied, we were able to trace different admixture histories. Here, the heterogeneity of the individuals from the site Kartal stands out, which is located on the Danube delta at the northern end of the former distribution of the Chalcolithic Gumelniţa–Kodžadermen–Karanovo VI complex and thus represents the transformative nature and dynamics of the fourth millennium BC in action. By contrast, the more homogenous Majaky and Usatove groups, located north of the Dniester River, show that such assimilation processes had already occurred, suggesting that contact and exchange between transitional foragers and early pastoralist groups from the forest–steppe zone and non-local SEE farmer-associated groups had started already in the late fifth millennium BC. Moreover, variable cultural influences attested by the archaeological record are also traceable genetically. We argue that livestock, innovations and technological advances were exchanged through these zones of interaction, which then led to the establishment of fully developed pastoralism in the steppe by the end of the fourth millennium BC. Gene flow from both contact zones into the steppe could also explain the small amounts of farmer-related ancestry in the emerging Yamnaya pastoralists, which differentiates them from the Steppe Eneolithic substrate and accounts for subtle geographical structure in the vastly expanding territory/range.

     The early admixture during the Eneolithic presented in this study appears to be local to the northwestern Black Sea region of the fourth millennium BC and did not affect the hinterland in SEE. In fact, EBA individuals from the fourth and third millennia BC from YUN and PIE do not show traces of steppe-like ancestry but instead a resurgence of HG ancestry observed widely in Europe during the fourth millennium BC. This indicates the presence of remnant HG groups in various non-farmed regions, for example, highlands and uplands or densely forested zones and wetlands and a mosaic of ancestries rather than a genetically uniform CA and EBA Europe.

     While only a few tell sites have been resettled by local and/or incoming groups who did not originate in the North Pontic region, we can trace the appearance of migrants from the steppe, clearly attributed to Yamnaya culturally and genetically, in the local time transect at Majaky but also at Boyanovo in the Bulgarian lowlands of the Thracian Plain. The subtle differences in genetic ancestries between these two when compared to different Yamnaya-associated groups account for their geographical locations and different stages of genetic and perhaps, cultural assimilation. Two outlier individuals from EBA YUN and BOY bear witness to occasional admixture between inhabitants of EBA tells and incoming steppe pastoralists. Ultimately, the third millennium BC form of ‘steppe’-ancestry is expected to have reached the Great Hungarian plain, from where it diversified and spread further west. The interaction between local and incoming groups in SEE did not result in archaeologically visible conflicts or a near-complete autosomal genetic turnover as observed in Britain or a replacement of the Y-chromosome lineages in the Iberian Peninsula.

     Further integrated archaeogenomic studies are needed to disentangle the dynamics at play around the Black Sea during the formative periods of the admixture clines demonstrated in this study. High-quality genome-wide data from the fifth and fourth millennia BC that allow the direct tracing of IBD blocks shared by contributing groups will hold the key to understanding the population history of West Eurasia.

     Long quote. I’ve tried to get my head around it and boil it down to a couple of paragraphs, but it’s not easy. Here’s an attempt, mixed with my own interpretations:

     1. About 4200 BCE the Early European Farmer cultures of the Lower Danube collapsed for unknown reasons and disappeared from the record. No invasion is visible archaeologically, but internal conflicts are possible. It could even have been a revolution of sorts, with the elite settlements being abandoned and the agricultural economy continuing without the central powers.

     2. The Cucuteni-Tripolye megacities appeared before 4000 BCE, and there was also a gradual settlement of the Steppe by agro-pastoralists. This population is essentially Balkan farmers mixed with local foragers.

     3. In the 4th millennium BCE a distinct population developed on the Pontic coast between roughly Danube and Dniepr. This population is Cucuteni-Tripolye shifted slightly towards Maykop and local foragers. The neighbouring (Eneolithic, Pre-Yamnaya) populations of Khvalynsk, Sredny Stog and Steppe Maykop still show very little European Farmer ancestry.

     4. The Pontic coast and Steppe populations stayed distinct for about a millennium, though both populations interacted with Maykop and there’ a slow stream of Steppe genes into the Pontic coast..

     5. Around 3000 BCE the Steppe and Pontic coast populations merged and Steppe culture entered the Danube Valley. The Balkan Yamnaya is not uniform R1-a or R1-b, maybe owing to the Pontic coast element.

     6. At the same time there was a resurgence of recorded Early Farmer ancestry in the Balkans, especially south of the Danube. I think this could be because farmers again established organized hierarchic societies under pressure from the incoming Yamnaya, The authors say that the resurging European Farmers show increased Forager ancestry that points to an unrecorded survival of indigenous groups, but it might perhaps also be due to a retraction south of the Danube by more northern and eastern farmer groups.
270. David Marjanović says

     July 24, 2023 at 7:16 am

     It could even have been a revolution of sorts, with the elite settlements being abandoned and the agricultural economy continuing without the central powers.

     Like the collapse of the Maya cities. Interesting idea…
271. Trond Engen says

     July 24, 2023 at 7:34 am

     Well, I probably owe it to the Maya. The Maya and the Cahokians and Graeber/Wenslow.
272. Trond Engen says

     July 24, 2023 at 4:23 pm

     I meant to say that the trade in metals that made the Varna elite so spectacularly rich may have been seaborn. Hence the location in Varna.

     I meant to sigh that we really need ancient DNA from Crimea. Also from sunken vessels in the Black Sea.
273. PlasticPaddy says

     July 24, 2023 at 4:35 pm

     Aphrodite was seaborn, but trade is usually seaborne. Ok also sigh, so someone was dictating a post😊
274. Trond Engen says

     July 24, 2023 at 5:17 pm

     Nope. I’ve never dictated a comment yet. “Seaborn” was an error. Not sure if I misspelled or thought autocomplete would finish for me. “Meant to sigh” was carefully crafted in contrast to the first paragraph.
275. David Marjanović says

     July 24, 2023 at 5:38 pm

     Also from sunken vessels in the Black Sea.

     Most of it has actual ocean floor and is some 3000 m deep, IIRC.
276. drasvi says

     July 24, 2023 at 10:17 pm

     Well, yes, sigh.

     But I wonder how volume of maritime trade changed over time.

     Somehow when you say “vessels” I imagine bulk carrier loaded with grain Greek or Phoenician ships from the Iron age, but what could prevent them from doing it 2000 years before that? The technology must be older…. (and I’m not even speaking about bronze, whose components were hardly widely available)

     Or are large ships a recent invention?
277. V says

     July 24, 2023 at 10:23 pm

     Trond Engen : The older golden treasure burials were actually inland from Varna, around Provadia. As in the Varna necropolis is larger, but the Provadia one is older. The theory is that it was related to the salt trade with south of the mountains.
278. January First-of-May says

     July 25, 2023 at 2:49 am

     Or are large ships a recent invention?

     Not as late as the Iron Age, at least. The famous Uluburun shipwreck is from well into Late Bronze Age, and IIRC there are some less well preserved shipwrecks that are even older.

     And then there’s those semi-infamous supposedly-predynastic petroglyphs featuring long boats with lots of warriors…
279. drasvi says

     July 25, 2023 at 5:57 am

     Aha: 10 tons of copper, 1 ton of tin, 1 ton of resin….

     …and “black cumin”. In this case nigella.

     PS: “The Dokos shipwreck is the oldest underwater shipwreck discovery known to archeologists.[1] The wreck has been dated to the second Proto-Helladic period, 2700–2200 BC.”
280. Trond Engen says

     July 25, 2023 at 5:33 pm

     On petroglyphs and early Scandinavian sailing rowing paddling ships.

     Short summary: A new scientific consensus is emerging, saying that the petroglyphs depict real ship travel rather than mythological concepts. There are petroglyphs of really large vessels that are almost 4000 years old, and there are found paddles of the right type in Northern Norway that may be even older. One archaeologist is quoted as saying that Scandinavians with these vessels could have traded directly with the Mediterranean.

     Scandinavia got connected to the world trade fairly late. I would think the technology spread here from the south.

     Other interpretations are possible. The oldest depicted ships may have been foreign trading ships visiting regularly, and the petroglyphs may be expressions of a cargo cult. That doesn’t change the age or size of the ships and the trade.
281. drasvi says

     July 25, 2023 at 6:59 pm

     “I would think the technology spread here from the south.”

     I suppose, lack of connection is an argument.
     Spread “from the center to periphery” is but one pattern, which is not observed universally, and Scandinavia may have the right conditions…

     “cargo cult”
     Long ships came from the south and brough prestige consumption goods, silver and gold. And shining discs descended from the sky and brought women. And men began to think, and they were thinking three thousand years and one day. And three thousand years later the wisest of them stood up and said: let’s build a long ship and capture a flying saucer and go where the goods and women are brought from and take more.

     So there were two brothers, one went to where prestige consumption goods are brought from and conquerred the land and was the king there, and the other went to Betelgeuse.
282. David Marjanović says

     July 25, 2023 at 7:17 pm

     One archaeologist is quoted as saying that Scandinavians with these vessels could have traded directly with the Mediterranean.

     Certainly bolsters the idea that the thick layer of pre-Grimm Celtic loanwords in Proto-Germanic came in across the sea and not on foot.
283. Dmitry Pruss says

     July 27, 2023 at 6:55 pm

     Don’t blame me, I chuckled but posted for you enjoyment. Supposedly PIE is now 2 thousand years older than it was yesterday?
     “Language trees with sampled ancestors support a hybrid model for the origin of Indo-European languages”
     https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abg0818
284. Y says

     July 27, 2023 at 7:45 pm

     Sigh. I haven’t seen the article, but just like AI: until they make the algorithm show its work, they are playing with their poo.
285. Trond Engen says

     July 28, 2023 at 4:02 am

     We find a median root age for Indo-European of ~8120 yr B.P. (95% highest posterior density: 6740 to 9610 yr B.P.). Our chronology is robust across a range of alternative phylogenetic models and sensitivity analyses that vary data subsets and other parameters. Indo-European had already diverged rapidly into multiple major branches by ~7000 yr B.P., without a coherent non-Anatolian core. Indo-Iranic has no close relationship with Balto-Slavic, weakening the case for it having spread via the steppe.

     This sounds to me as if they’ve loosened the constraints so much that they end up assuming a conclusion of no constraints. But I’m no Bayesian.
286. David Marjanović says

     July 28, 2023 at 8:54 am

     There are Kümmel and Kim among the authors, and the abstracts look fine, except for the dismaying information that the dataset is entirely lexical. Where do people get the idea that phylogenetics can’t be done on morphological or phonological characters?

     The replacement of numerous inherited words in Indo-Iranian has caused long-branch attraction between Indo-Iranian and the root before. I wonder if that’s why this paper doesn’t find Indo-Slavic.

     Reading it now…
287. David Marjanović says

     July 28, 2023 at 5:57 pm

     I’m not; lack of access. I’ve downloaded the supp. inf., though.

     I wonder if making the ancestry constraints optional ruined everything.
288. X says

     July 28, 2023 at 7:00 pm

     @DM, is your address at gmx dot at good for sending a copy?
289. David Eddyshaw says

     July 28, 2023 at 9:42 pm

     except for the dismaying information that the dataset is entirely lexical

     Not so much dismaying as altogether vitiating.

     In Oti-Volta there are at least two languages which are bizarrely divergent lexically (Nawdm and Hanga) which have quite certain close relatives (respectively, Yom and Dagbani) whose lexicon is perfectly proper and obediently aligns with the real criteria for subclassification, viz shared non-trivial innovations.)

     Do they make Armenian an Iranian language, or does their technique manage to avoid such chestnuts? (can’t be bothered to look at flat-earther nonsense like this myself … I’ve got better ways to occupy my time.)

     The only interesting aspect of this tosh is how it gets published. The sociology of science.
290. Y says

     July 28, 2023 at 10:54 pm

     The ~100 page supplementary information explains their methods in good detail, and is bound to be less glib than the article. At a glance, the crux of the difference between their date and that of Chang et al. is that they changed the particular tree topology imposed by the latter.
291. Phil Jennings says

     July 29, 2023 at 7:03 am

     It seems like they took all the P.I.E. origin theories, including Euphratic, and wondered why couldn’t they all be true.
292. Nelson Goering says

     July 29, 2023 at 1:04 pm

     “Do they make Armenian an Iranian language, or does their technique manage to avoid such chestnuts?”

     Yes, they avoid that. The lexical data set is, as far as I can tell, very good and well-vetted, and based on assessing things as a linguist would. The problem, of course, is that it’s still a lexical data set.

     Or one of the problems. There are plenty of others. Here are some I shared on a FB group a couple days ago:

     -It’s a little weird to see the raw Anatolian hypothesis taken so seriously, when I don’t think even Renfrew believes in it now, and few linguists ever gave it any credance. I guess this is for rhetorical punch (maybe necessary in a glitzy journal like Science), but it’s still strange to see.

     -Phylogenetic splits are still(!) assumed to correlate with ‘migrations’, and the possibility of deeper dialectal divergences within a ‘homeland’ area is not taken seriously.

     -Not addressed (in the main paper; haven’t read the supplementary materials yet) is the possibility (probability?) that rates of change are not just variable, but systematically biased during the earlier histories of most branches due to initial language contacts during the primary spread period(s). These may have been more extensive, and led to more rapid vocabulary turnover, than models whose chronological parameters are based in later periods will anticipate. I don’t see how any phylogenetic (fancy glottochronological) dating method can really deal with this, and it remains an unsolved (unsolveable?) problem in all computational chronological estimates.

     -This study is better than some in regularly giving date ranges, but too often median dates are presented too strongly, sometimes with consequences. For instance, on p. 8 it says:

     We also find that Indic and Iranic had diverged from each other already by ~5520 yr B.P. (4540 to 6800 yr B.P.). To reconcile this with a steppe origin would require an alternative scenario in which Indic and Iranic split from each other approximately two millennia before entering South Asia and Western Asia.

     This is clearly taking the median date as ‘the date’, and ignoring the full millennium later that should be given as just as reasonable a possibility at the younger end (younger and older edges are what matter when talking about interpretative options, not the middle dates!). The gap is then exaggerated a bit on archaeological grounds by focusing on presence of steppe ancestry in the Indus region as the benchmark for ‘entering South Asia and Western Asia’, which is my first problem repeating itself. If Proto-Indo-Iranic is associated with, say, Sintashta (a rather popular idea that should be taken seriously), then there is a gap of only a few centuries between that and the lower edge of the divergence between Indic and Iranic produced by this model. Maybe still a point to address, but it lacks the rhetorical punch gained by latching on to the median date and trying to anchor linguistic divergence only in dramatic migrations.

     -The wheel-vocabulary is, how should I put it, not treated with nuance. The idea that parallel semantic change is sufficient is not convincing. The discrepancy between Anatolian and the other branches is potentially very significant, but not discussed. The exact significance of it for dating is, as usual, not treated very well (again, if there are early dialect divergences *within* the [secondary?] ‘homeland’, this could be consistent with the dates of their linguistic model, but are no help in getting an earlier dispersal of speech communities — the kind of dispersal archaeologists are interested in).

     (As I said, I haven’t gone through the supplements yet, so this is just on the published article.)

     (Posting again, since my original version seems to have been eaten.)
293. David Marjanović says

     July 29, 2023 at 1:42 pm

     @DM, is your address at gmx dot at good for sending a copy?

     Yes 🙂

     -It’s a little weird to see the raw Anatolian hypothesis taken so seriously, when I don’t think even Renfrew believes in it now, and few linguists ever gave it any credance. I guess this is for rhetorical punch (maybe necessary in a glitzy journal like Science), but it’s still strange to see.

     I think it’s the other way around: they got a date that was OVER 9000, figured “huh, that fits Renfrew’s old idea and the first Nature paper”, and were merely honest in mentioning it.

     Not addressed (in the main paper; haven’t read the supplementary materials yet) is the possibility (probability?) that rates of change are not just variable, but systematically biased during the earlier histories of most branches due to initial language contacts during the primary spread period(s).

     That’s a very good point. I think some programs for molecular dating can take this into account, but I’d be quite surprised if that was done here. (Haven’t read the supp. inf. yet either.)

     younger and older edges are what matter when talking about interpretative options, not the middle dates!

     This is a Bayesian analysis, though. The “edges” are edges of the 95% confidence interval (or perhaps some other confidence interval) of a distribution, by default a bell curve; the chance that the “true” date lies close to the median is much higher than that it’s close to an edge. In other words, the reasonable scenario comes out as possible-but-noticeably-unlikely.
294. Nelson Goering says

     July 29, 2023 at 1:58 pm

     Yes, I meant the edges of the 95% confidence range, which is already about as precise as it’s safe to get with this sort of thing. Of course if you limit things to within that range, you can discriminate meaningfully, but the whole point of using a confidence interval is to draw attention to the reasonable range of precision in question. An edge date is already very likely. It’s the vastly longer tails beyond that that we can be a bit more skeptical about (granting everything else, which we of course shouldn’t), though even then it’s possible to be too dogmatic.
295. John Cowan says

     July 29, 2023 at 3:02 pm

     Yes, being dogmatic in one’s skepticism is always a thing to avoid.
296. Dmitry Pruss says

     July 29, 2023 at 3:12 pm

     In the supplement they explain that the rate of change in their model varies with time and branch, unlike in conventional glottochronology. But I believe that there isn’t enough linguistic data to narrow down the range of credible rates of change in many branches and periods, and therefore, if dome properly, a model of this sort would give winder and wider confidence intervals owing to increasing rate uncertainty, instead of ruling out earlier timing hypotheses. The fact that it’s claimed to rule them out, therefore, must be attributed to inclusion of additional genomic data, which is, on occasions, questionable too.
297. jack morava says

     July 29, 2023 at 3:34 pm

     Carleton Hodge, Anthropological Linguistics 23 (1981) 227 – 244, Indo-Europeans in the Near East

     suggests the Nile Valley \circa 20,000 BP as the UrAryan homeland. I think this might fit with

     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki%C3%B6bekli_Tepe

     as a waypoint. Not to mention the Black Sea Flood and the Younger Dryas …

     [Major Motion Picture Rights Reserved]
298. Y says

     July 29, 2023 at 3:38 pm

     p. 57 of the supplement gives a consensus tree, which I find easier to read. Even before dealing with the PIE split, there are some other eyebrow-raising dates: Germanic and Celtic splitting at about 3,000 BC, and that branch splitting from Italic at about 3,700 BC. Is there anything in those dates, specifically, that is hard to reconcile with other knowns (e.g. archaeology)?
299. Y says

     July 29, 2023 at 3:45 pm

     Also, Ossetic is shown to split frim Iranic (-Avestan) at about 1500 BC. The Scythians didn’t get to where Ossetia is now until about 1,000 years later, right?
300. David Eddyshaw says

     July 29, 2023 at 4:08 pm

     rates of change are not just variable, but systematically biased during the earlier histories of most branches due to initial language contacts during the primary spread period(s)

     I’ve wondered about this with Western Oti-Volta, the current geographical spread of which must surely be connected in some way with the expansion of the Mossi-Dagomba kingdoms, Trouble is, that that expansion must have begun less than a millennium ago, and the WOV languages seem surprisingly divergent if that’s the time scale. They look about as divergent as the Romance languages.

     The WOV languages are pretty stripped-down morphologically, at least as far as verb conjugation goes, which would fit a scenario of large-scale uptake of WOV languages by speakers of other languages, I suppose.

     I suppose the other aspect is that the WOV languages may already have been fairly divergent even before the Mamprussi took to their career of world conquest, bringing the languages along.

     I can’t think of any way of making all this anything more than pure speculation, unfortunately. And I’m not sure that there is even anything there that really needs actual explanation, given the basically pseudoscientific nature of all efforts to get absolute chronolological dates out of rates of lexical change.
301. David Marjanović says

     July 29, 2023 at 4:45 pm

     suggests the Nile Valley \circa 20,000 BP as the UrAryan homeland. I think this might fit with

     Oh, that’s the outlier that put the IE homeland in the Nile delta on a map of proposed IE homelands that I once saw!

     Twenty thousand BP is the peak of the Last Glacial Maximum. It does not fit with Göbekli Tepe, which is half that old, nor with the Black Sea flood or the Younger Dryas, which are even younger. It does not fit the fact that nothing IE-like is known from Egypt or surroundings any closer than the northern fringe of Syria, it does not fit the lack of genetic or archeological evidence for a migration from there, it does not fit even the slowest models of language change (like the one we’re talking about right now)…
302. languagehat says

     July 29, 2023 at 4:53 pm

     In short, it’s nuts, as is anything that takes it seriously.
303. David Marjanović says

     July 29, 2023 at 5:25 pm

     So I’m reading the Guide to the Supplementary Information.

     2.2 LANGUAGE DATA ENCODED IN BINARY FORMAT: NEXUS AND .XML FILES
     So that they can be used by quantitative and phylogenetic analysis software, the language data in the IE-CoR raw data tables need to be converted into a dataset in a format that such software can process. In particular, most such analyses require the data to be encoded as binary data characters, i.e. with the presence/absence of each cognate set in each language taxon expressed in binary form: 0=absent, 1=present.

     And then I looked up the specific meaning of a Russian swearword I had first seen a few days ago. (Wiktionary has everything, it seems.)

     “Most such analyses”!?!?! Not the tip-dated phylogenetic analyses, constrained or otherwise. I’ve only used the BEAST once, in a course, so I don’t know how many states exactly it can deal with, but… it’s meant first of all for molecular data. It can inevitably deal with four states per character, and I’d be surprised if it couldn’t deal with 23. Probably 32 or 36* or 64 or something, quite possibly more.

     Coding the states of each character as characters is the basic fundamental mistake that Gray & Atkinson made in the paper that founded this entire field. It made their branches too long.

     The constraints used in the 2015 paper should have made this irrelevant for most purposes, and apparently did. But now they’ve relaxed the constraints.

     * 0–9 followed by A–Z
304. X says

     July 29, 2023 at 5:38 pm

     And did you get the main PDF, DM? Sent it over but from a gmail address, sometimes the emails from gmail are just snagged unseen by spam filters
305. David Marjanović says

     July 29, 2023 at 5:47 pm

     Oh. There is:

     Sensitivity analysis SA10, which used a recoding of cognate sets not in binary but in multistate terms. That is, each cognate set is taken in this analysis not as a binary character either present 1 or absent 0, as in all other analyses, but as one state of the corresponding IE-CoR meaning, each taken as a multistate data character (170 in total). This entails no binary data block in the .xml file, but a completely different data structure, converted into the multistate format in the .xml file specific to that analysis.

     So why did they do the binary ones at all…

     Sensitivity analysis SA10 used a BEAST2 add-on package newly written by Benedict King to implement a multistate phylogenetic analysis model, the code for which is available at: https://github.com/king-ben/ConceptModels.

     what

     I checked: BEAST can use continuous data, i.e. at least 100 states per character, likely more.
306. Y says

     July 29, 2023 at 6:00 pm

     They did a lot of robustness checks. The only thing which made PIE earlier was imposing Chang et al.’s tree prior.
307. David Marjanović says

     July 29, 2023 at 6:27 pm

     Haven’t checked my e-mails yet, will do that “tomorrow” – it’s half past midnight.

     Here’s the part of the supp. inf. concerning sensitivity analysis 10:

     7.10.2 RESULTS
     Our multistate model produces root age estimates distinctly younger (by 2057 years, or 25.1%) than any produced by the covarion model: 6153 BP (4926–7884 BP).

     Well, well, well.

     In tree topology, the multistate results show a similar lack of resolution at basal nodes of the phylogeny, although there remains strong support for a European clade of Germanic, Celtic and Italic, and for a nesting of Nuristani within Indic. In the following sections we seek to determine why the multistate produces these different results, and then to assess the relative performance of the multistate and covarion models. Although this analysis does reveal sensitivity of the results to model choice, there are three principal arguments (detailed below) for preferring the covarion model to the multistate model.

     […]

     One reason for these younger node ages across the phylogeny is that the multistate model reconstructs less innovation on terminal branches, and in particular the branches to non-modern languages, which are central to time calibration. Using phylograms — i.e. trees with branch lengths expressed as the amount of lexical change rather than time — as output by BEAST2, we compared the lengths of all terminal branches.

     Terminal branches to non-modern languages are in general significantly shorter (on average, by c. 70%) than terminal branches to modern languages. This is an entirely expected result from the IE-CoR analyses, given the structure and diversity of the major branches within Indo-European, and the patterns of which ancient languages survived with rich enough documentation.

     We found a noticeable difference between the covarion and multistate analyses. In the main covarion analysis, terminal branch lengths to non-modern languages are shorter than those to modern languages by a ratio of c. 0.29:1. In the multistate analysis, however, they are shorter still: c. 0.235:1 (Fig. 7.10.4). And since non-modern languages are the basic source of time calibration, this explains the younger node age estimates in the multistate analysis.

     Good news, isn’t it? No:

     To investigate this discrepancy between the models and their results, we evaluate which performs best on a series of qualitative criteria in the following sections §7.10.4 to §7.10.7. We first assess their results with respect to known language histories (§7.10.4) and tree topologies (§7.10.5), and then identify two particular forms of misspecification in the multistate model (§7.10.6 and §7.10.7) which both lead it to underestimate time-depths. In particular, we assess this by using ancestral state reconstruction in BEAST2 to pinpoint which particular linguistic innovations were inferred to occur on terminal branches to non-modern languages in both the covarion and multistate analyses.

     7.10.4 UNREALISTIC AGE ESTIMATES FOR KNOWN HISTORIES
     The very last branches towards the tips of the output trees represent the splits between the present-day language varieties most closely related to each other. Importantly, these splits in the phylogeny by no means represent any breakdown in mutual intelligibility; rather, they must by definition have arisen already by the time of even just the first lexical difference between two language varieties, in any single meaning within the IE-CoR 170 meaning set (see §8.3 below). Given this, the covarion MCC tree itself shows a tendency for the time-depths of the splits before the tips to be rather too shallow, with respect to the known histories of those varieties over recent centuries. That is, many varieties were already significantly distinct from each other, as visible in written documents in those varieties, already a few centuries before the split date returned in the MCC. This tendency is markedly exacerbated in the MCC tree from the multistate analysis. Branch-lengths here are extremely compressed towards the tips of the tree, leading to distinctly unrealistic underestimates of the time-depths of the splits.

     Luxembourgish and standard (High) German, for instance, are returned in the multistate MCC as an
     undifferentiated single variety until as late as 1650, Czech and Slovak until 1770, European and Brazilian Portuguese until 1926. In Italy, Standard Italian and Milanese are returned as not divergent until 1775, Friulian and Neapolitan not until 1625. In fact, what became standard Italian was first effectively codified c. 1300, in large part by Dante on the basis of the speech of his native Florence, and in deliberate contradistinction to other regional descendants of Latin elsewhere in Italy, very diverse already in Dante’s day. The multistate MCC also returns Dutch and Frisian as a unitary lineage as late as 1722, a millennium or so too late. Overall, outside the fixed calibration points, the multistate model seriously underestimates time-depths widely across the tree, where they can be set against the evaluation criterion of historical documentation over the last millennia or two. This undermines confidence in the overall chronology of the tree, and implies some serious model misspecification within the multistate model as currently implemented.

     Fair enough, but that doesn’t make the other analyses any better!

     Also, if you have Standard German in a phylogenetic dataset, facepalm yourself. Hard.

     The next section explains that the topology of the tree from the multistate dataset is also clearly wrong. For example, “Tocharian is relatively deeply nested within the tree, forming an unexpected common branch with Albanian (albeit also with support as low as 0.35), and further back also with Greco-Armenian (0.32).” Also: “That Greek and Armenian may form a common deep clade is widely entertained within Indo-European linguistics, even if still hotly contested. What is clearly not plausible, however, is the implication from the chronology of the multistate MCC tree, that Greek and Armenian are more closely related to each other, with a more recent common ancestor, than Indic and Iranic, for instance.” Worse, Tocharo-Albanian comes out as younger than Indo-Iranic. And these are just the most blatant examples.

     7.10.6 and 7.10.7 explain the too young ages: they’re not a property of the dataset, they’re a property of the weird multistate add-on which can’t handle polymorphism and therefore consistently estimates too high rates of evolution. “Flawed Program Produces Wrong Tree, So We Used Flawed Dataset Instead of Flawed Program” may not be too long for the title of a Science paper, but it’s a strange course of action.
308. Dmitry Pruss says

     July 29, 2023 at 7:10 pm

     Cool. So using just presence / absence of a cognate as a binary (the main method in the paper) creates anachronisms, placing 2-3 thousand years old population events at a lot earlier dates not compatible with the archaeological data.
     But using a large number of states of the cognates instead of mere presence /absence results in considerably younger dates, especially for the splits which are merely centuries old. It’s probably tied to the situation where minor variations in the cognate forms are very well known for the recently diverged languages, resulting in the inflated estimate of the rate of change. My question is, why it isn’t equally inflated in the recent vs. ancient languages? Inflated compared to the past, apparently, because in the historical data, variability / polymorphism of the cognate forms is less known? Or the real reason is that the variability on the recent timescale is sort of like ripples on the water, now here, now back there, and it gets smoothed out in the longer term evolution of languages?
     The flip side of the question is, why does the binary presence-of-a-cognate lead to a deflated estimate in the recent languages as compared with the ancient ones. Is it because retention of cognates is overreported in the extant languages?
309. jack morava says

     July 29, 2023 at 9:24 pm

     @ DM above, I agree of course.
310. drasvi says

     July 29, 2023 at 10:39 pm

     “Well, well, well.”

     Aha. (Russain “aha” that is yep)
311. drasvi says

     July 29, 2023 at 11:29 pm

     “we evaluate which performs best on a series of qualitative criteria in the following sections §7.10.4 to §7.10.7.”

     They are reinventing glottochronology.
     Does their model contribute anything to glottochronology?

     I understand that they deduce the phylogeny, but the claim posted here was about dating. And their dating method (which takes the phylogeny and accumulated innovations as the input) seems to be glottochronology.
312. drasvi says

     July 30, 2023 at 10:06 am

     “In the supplement they explain that the rate of change in their model varies with time and branch, unlike in conventional glottochronology. ” – But: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottochronology#Modifications

     Of course by “conventional” you may mean “not this”. But they say: “Note that this approach has nothing to do with the early and now discredited technique of ‘glottochronology’ in linguistics (75). ”

     Ugly.
313. David Marjanović says

     July 30, 2023 at 11:27 am

     They are reinventing glottochronology.
     Does their model contribute anything to glottochronology?

     I understand that they deduce the phylogeny, but the claim posted here was about dating. And their dating method (which takes the phylogeny and accumulated innovations as the input) seems to be glottochronology.

     Glottochronology was invented in the 1950s. It didn’t catch on except to some extent in the Moscow School and never really took advantage of computers, which is one reason why it didn’t catch on: it made some glaring oversimplifying assumptions without which the computations wouldn’t have been feasible.

     Molecular dating was invented in 1962. It took advantage of computers as soon as the computers were able to handle it. One simplifying assumption after another was abandoned as computer speed increased in the 1990s and later. By now, the phylogeny and the divergence dates are often even calculated in a single step, not two; the new paper is an example of this – it conducted tip-dated phylogenetic analyses. That’s the successor of “stratocladistics”, the idea of taking the ages of fossils into account in phylogenetic analyses so the calculated trees fit the ages in the fossil record as well as possible.

     The two remained in blissful ignorance of each other until 2012 when Gray & Atkinson got into Nature. The poor linguists had no frame of reference other than the half-forgotten clumsy algorithms of “grottoclonology”, so they barely even looked into why Gray & Atkinson got such strange results and figured they could just ignore them. And now they wince every time another such paper gets published.

     So let me play Grand Interdisciplinary Phylogeneticist for a while:

     But using a large number of states of the cognates instead of mere presence /absence results in considerably younger dates, especially for the splits which are merely centuries old. It’s probably tied to the situation where minor variations in the cognate forms are very well known for the recently diverged languages, resulting in the inflated estimate of the rate of change. My question is, why it isn’t equally inflated in the recent vs. ancient languages? Inflated compared to the past, apparently, because in the historical data, variability / polymorphism of the cognate forms is less known? Or the real reason is that the variability on the recent timescale is sort of like ripples on the water, now here, now back there, and it gets smoothed out in the longer term evolution of languages?

     Nothing like that. I’ll quote the whole sections this time:

     7.10.6 UNDERESTIMATING TIME-DEPTHS IN CASES OF POLYMORPHISM AT AN ANCESTRAL STAGE

     As noted in §7.9, although IE-CoR followed strict protocols to keep the proportion of synonyms encoded in the actual data languages to within strict limits, in its output trees the covarion model infers a somewhat higher frequency of multiple cognate sets per meaning at the Proto-Indo-European root — although SA9 shows that the effect on root age estimates is minimal. The multistate model, meanwhile, does not allow any cases of multiple states at all (indeed for this analysis, all the limited cases of synonymy in the IE-CoR data languages had to be converted to ambiguity). So in those cases where more than one cognate set (in the same meaning) would indeed normally be inferred at some ancestral stage, the multistate model “overcorrects”.

     As an illustration, consider the meaning ANT (https://iecor.clld.org/parameters/ant) across the West Germanic languages. English ant, Frisian eamelder and German Ameise, for instance, are all cognates derived from a reconstructed Proto-West-Germanic *amaitjō- (IE-CoR cognate set 5281 [link], the ‘ant’ set). English, Frisian and German do not form a common sub-branch within West Germanic, however, so this pattern would generally lead to this cognate set being inferred as present in the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) of the West Germanic clade.

     In Dutch and Flemish, meanwhile, the word for ANT is mier, derived instead from Proto-Indo-European *moru̯i- (5007 [link]). Although this is not the cognate set used for ANT in other branches of West Germanic, it is widely found across North Germanic, and indeed in most other deep branches of Indo-European (Latin formica, Ancient Greek mýrmēx, and so on). This data pattern would also generally lead to this cognate set too being inferred as present in the MRCA of the Germanic clade, and inherited into West Germanic.

     The multistate model only allows a single state to be present at any one time, however, so to explain this situation it requires one or other of the following scenarios:
     • The ‘mier’ cognate set is present at the West Germanic root and continues into Dutch and Flemish, but there are multiple mutations from the ‘mier’ to the ‘ant’ cognate set, independently in the other branches within West Germanic (since German, English and Frisian do not form a common sub-branch).
     • Alternatively, ‘mier’ is present at the Germanic root, then a first mutation from the ‘mier’ to the ‘ant’ cognate set arises into Proto-West-Germanic, followed by a further mutation from ‘ant’ (back) to ‘mier’ into the Dutch/Flemish branch.

     (Note for comparison that if all five languages had only the ‘ant’ cognate set, then only a single mutation would have been required in the same time frame.)

     So where (even transitional) stages of synonymy did exist, the limitation in the multistate model that only a single state can be present at any one time leads this model to infer an increased number of mutations, and thus a faster clock rate. This is also because — unlike in the covarion model that allows fast and slow mutation in the same site — in the multistate model there is no other way to absorb the effect on the clock rate of these extra mutations where stages of synonymy existed. Increasing the clock rate contributes to the multistate model reducing root and internal node age estimates, which in turn explains why this model returns a younger root age, and underestimates the time-depths of splits in known historical cases.

     7.10.7 MISSPECIFICATION IN HANDLING SINGLETON INNOVATIONS

     To further investigate why the multistate model returns shorter terminal branches, particularly to non-modern languages, we identified all cognate sets returned with >0.5 probability of being innovations along the terminal branch to each non-modern language, under each model.

     The covarion and multistate models differ slightly in how many innovations they return along terminal branches to modern languages overall: 517 in the covarion analysis, 481 in the multistate. This is part of the explanation for the shorter branch lengths and thus younger dates in the multistate analysis, as explained in 6.10.3 above. A more important driver of this effect, however, is that the models differ very significantly also in which cognate sets they return as innovations — and in ways that reveal a model misspecification in the multistate analysis.

     The most obvious candidate for an innovation along a terminal branch is any cognate set that is a ‘singleton’, i.e. present in only one language taxon, e.g. English kill or dog, which are not cognate with the primary words for those meanings in any other language taxon in IE-CoR, Importantly, ‘present’ here means not whether a cognate set is just present in the vocabulary at all, but strictly as the primary word in the precise target meaning as tightly defined in IE-CoR. The hound cognate set is thus not ‘present’ in English as the data for the IE-CoR meaning DOG, because it is not the primary word for that meaning, which is dog instead.

     The covarion analysis performs as expected: the vast majority of cognate sets that it returns as innovations on terminal branches are indeed singletons in that one language. The few other cases are also expected: innovations in parallel with other taxa that are not its closest sister languages, indeed often very distant ones. The covarion analysis correctly returns as innovations, for example: 6 singleton cognate sets in Old Irish, 5 in Gaulish, 8 in Early Vedic, and 6 in Avestan (all in the strict sense of a singleton outlined above).

     In the multistate analysis, however, many singletons are not returned as innovations on that terminal branch at all. In the four languages just listed above, the multistate analysis returns as innovations only 1, 1, 1 and 2 respectively. This entails that the multistate model returns all 20 other singletons in these languages as also present in the most closely related parallel branch, but then lost along that branch before it began to diverge. The effect is to artifactually shorten the branch to the ancient language, and correspondingly delay the divergence of its closest sister languages. The net results on the chronology estimation are those already noted: taxa diverge far later than historical evidence shows, and time-depths are underestimated overall.

     (I still don’t know why they call the binary-characters-only analysis a “covarion” analysis. That’s a technical term that exists, but I don’t think that’s what it means.)

     For a purely phylogenetic analysis, it shouldn’t matter whether ancestors can be reconstructed as being polymorphic (e.g. Proto-West-Germanic as using the ancestors of both mier and ant, both inherited straight from PIE, as synonyms) or only as partially uncertain. But when the topology of the tree and the rates of evolution along each branch are calculated together and recursively influence each other, as is the case here, then suddenly it matters. Being unable to reconstruct polymorphism for ancestors, the multistate add-on used in this paper is forced to calculate a larger number of changes along many branches. Because some of the ancestors have their ages constrained (within a range), these larger numbers need to be squeezed into about the same amount of time. That means higher rates of evolution are calculated. And that means the ancestors whose ages are not constrained will be younger, because the amount of change between them and their attested descendants is not much higher than in the binary-only analysis but is expected to have happened faster.

     The flip side of the question is, why does the binary presence-of-a-cognate lead to a deflated estimate in the recent languages as compared with the ancient ones. Is it because retention of cognates is overreported in the extant languages?

     No, it’s because it makes all branches longer. Instead of counting a change from ‘mier’ to ‘ant’ as the primary word for ANT as one step (the character ANT changes states from ‘mier’ to ‘ant’), it counts it as two: loss of ‘mier’ (the character “‘mier’ for ANT” changes states from “present” to “absent”) and gain of ‘ant’ (the character “‘ant’ for ANT” changes states from “absent” to “present”).

     This is what made the branches in the original Gray & Atkinson paper too long. Chang et al. (2015) got this effect under control by constraining the ages of certain ancestors and thus making all branches shorter: they masked the problem instead of addressing it. Now the constraints are relaxed, the mask has slipped, and the original problem shines through.
314. languagehat says

     July 30, 2023 at 11:57 am

     I think I actually understood a fair amount of that — thanks!
315. ktschwarz says

     July 30, 2023 at 3:32 pm

     The ‘mier’ set left a relic in English in pismire. OED thinks this mire was inherited directly from Germanic, while the obsolete variant maur or mour came in from Scandinavian.

     AHD in the first (1969) edition linked pismire, as well as myrmeco- and formic, to PIE *morwi- in the Indo-European Roots Appendix. But that root was deleted in the 1992 and subsequent editions. Anyone know why?
316. David Marjanović says

     July 30, 2023 at 3:48 pm

     Many thanks to Dmitry Pruss for the paper.

     Among the authors, I overlooked at least Matthew Scarborough, Roland Pooth and Tijmen Pronk among the professional historical linguists, and, importantly, Benedict King, who is a paleontologist and has published on missing data as an unexpected source of error in Bayesian phylogenetic analyses, though now he’s at the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, so he should be the Grand Interdisciplinary Phylogeneticist…

     Potentially important quote:

     Ancestry constraints used in previous analyses produced lineage split dates far too recent to be compatible with known histories: no divergence among West Norse languages until 1650 CE, none in Romance until 1000 CE, and none in Indic until 100 CE (12). These artifacts disappear from the ancestry-enabled analysis in Fig. 2. Icelandic and Faroese, for example, are now dated as splitting from the mainland Scandinavian lineages ~830 CE (470 to 950 CE), closely in line with the first Norse settlement of the Faroes and Iceland in the ninth century. Initial divergence within Romance is accurately dated to the Roman Empire in the first centuries CE. Divergence within Indic is dated to ~4370 yr B.P. (3640 to 5250 yr B.P.), in line with Vedic Sanskrit already being slightly divergent fromthe lineage(s) ancestral to modern spoken Indic languages (30). The inference of an Indo-Iranic split at ~5520 yr B.P. (4540 to 6800 yr B.P.) may, at first glance, seem surprising. Established expectations are for a more recent date, based on the perceived level of similarity between Vedic Sanskrit and Avestan—the earliest known ancient languages in the Indic and Iranic branches, respectively. However, these judgments of linguistic similarity have been largely impressionistic (36) rather than quantified. In the precisely defined IE-CoR meanings, Early Vedic and Younger Avestan share only 58.7% cognacy (37). This matches the level of cognacy that survives between the most divergent sublineages within the Romance clade, for instance, after roughly two millennia since the spread of the Roman Empire. Early Vedic and Younger Avestan themselves date back to at least the mid-fourth and mid-third millennia before present, respectively. A time depth two millennia earlier (~5520 yr B.P.) for the split between their lineages (Indic versus Iranic) is thus consistent with the 58.7% cognacy overlap between them.

     This last one is precisely where lexical replacement by early contact comes in: Indic has more local loans than Iranic, and another layer is shared by both. If any of the affected cognate sets were scored as absent instead of unknown, the Indic branch and the Indo-Iranian branch are too long. And if the program didn’t cope with missing data correctly, the same could have happened. (The mentioned Ben King has published on the surprising impact of missing data on undated Bayesian phylogenetic analysis: it downweights characters with missing data and thereby sometimes gets the topology wrong. I don’t know what the effect on branch lengths is.)

     The support for Greco-Armenian (posterior probability 0.86) is interesting in the light of this paper by one of the authors – though note that it only claims the evidence for Greco-Armenian is weak, not that the evidence for any alternative is stronger than that.

     It’s interesting that the Balto-Slavic + West IE clade, excluding Indo-Iranian and Albanian, has a posterior probability of only 0.63. For molecular data that would be considered borderline negligible.

     The considerable number of Pre-Indo-Iranian loans in Proto-Uralic is nowhere mentioned in the main paper; I haven’t read enough of the supplementary material yet.
317. ktschwarz says

     July 30, 2023 at 3:50 pm

     As the flip side of pismire, the ‘ant’ set has some survivors in regional Dutch, according to the OED’s (2012) etymology of ant: “Cognate with Middle Dutch amete, eemt (Dutch regional emt, empt, emte, empe)”, then the German cognates.
318. languagehat says

     July 30, 2023 at 3:52 pm

     But that root was deleted in the 1992 and subsequent editions. Anyone know why?

     Xerîb will know if anyone does.
319. John Cowan says

     July 30, 2023 at 4:35 pm

     It’s interesting that the Balto-Slavic + West IE clade, excluding Indo-Iranian and Albanian, has a posterior probability of only 0.63.

     It would be interesting to know if it gets better if Germanic is taken out.
320. David Marjanović says

     July 30, 2023 at 4:50 pm

     Germanic is in what I’m calling the West IE clade, like Celtic and Italic, so the support for an exclusive Balto-Slavic + West IE clade is not likely to go up if Germanic is removed from the dataset.

     I think this clade is more likely long-branch attraction: Indo-Iranian and, even more so, Albanian have replaced so much vocabulary they end up attracted to the root of the tree. I’m reminded of all those early (i.e. late 1990s) molecular phylogenies where mice and rats were pulled out of Rodentia and ended up outside a clade that contained all placentals except them. Actual Nature headline: “The guinea pig is not a rodent” – mice and guinea pigs were the only sampled rodents in that paper. No, mice just evolve faster, and the clock in that paper was too strict, that’s all.

     Anyway, the abovementioned Euphratic didn’t make it into the main text (haven’t checked the supplement yet), but it’s in reference 55, which is here in open access. (In Russian, with a long English summary at the very end.) BTW, the entire journal seems to be in open access.
321. David Marjanović says

     July 30, 2023 at 5:16 pm

     Euphratic isn’t in the supplement either. The loans in Proto-Uralic are, but in the vaguest way possible (2.2.2): “Proto-Uralic is variously seen as borrowing from — and thus contemporaneous with — Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Indo-Iranic or Proto-Iranic. Majority view now inclines towards the later of those stages, but this does not provide exclusive support for the Steppe hypothesis. Alternative hypotheses, including the hybrid hypothesis set out in Fig. 1D in the main paper, also entail early Indo-Iranic or early Iranic having already spread northwards into Central Asia at time-depths compatible with the range of possibilities for Proto-Uralic.” Should have cited Sampsa Holopainen’s thesis.

     Anyway, I see the whole paper as confirming the importance of treating Proto-Indo-Anatolian, Proto-Indo-Tocharian and Proto-Indo-Actually-European as three different things.
322. ktschwarz says

     July 30, 2023 at 5:46 pm

     Piotr Gąsiorowski discussed the development of ant and mire here a few years ago, including how ant lost a syllable that emmet kept.
323. David Marjanović says

     July 30, 2023 at 8:12 pm

     Section 1.3 explains, at some length and exasperation, why Bayesian tip-dating phylogenetics “is not lexicostatistics, and it is not glottochronology” and “has nothing to do with those outdated and widely discredited techniques”! An important difference I’ve never mentioned is that it’s a phylogenetic method, not a phenetic one: it does not use overall similarity to build its trees. Every historical linguist should read that section.

     1.1 and 1.4 explain, at greater length and quite convincingly, why the new dataset is much better than the previous ones (up to and including that of Chang et al. 2015). This is expanded upon in 3.4–3.6, which explain how the cognate sets work.

     Section 2 is about the aDNA. The first paragraph of 2.1.4 is worth quoting (bold and italics in the original):

     Recently published aDNA findings in Europe significantly update and refine the first major results (16). Notably, populations of the Yamnaya culture on the Pontic-Caspian Steppe no longer appear as the whole or even main source of the new ancestry component that spread into Central Europe from c. 5000 BP, from further to the east. The ancestry predominant in aDNA samples from early Corded Ware contexts has recently been reported (39) to have originated not on the Pontic-Caspian grassland steppe, but further to the north in the ‘forest steppe’ of the Middle Dnepr region, and towards the Baltic (85). The ancestry predominant in Yamnaya samples entered Central Europe via the Danubian corridor in a separate expansion further to the south. This conclusion has been challenged in (23), arguing that the Yamnaya culture on the Pontic-Caspian cannot be excluded as a primary source for Corded Ware samples, within the limits of the statistical resolution of their analysis. That inference, however, is a function of the low resolution of their chosen analysis, and of the fact that both Yamnaya and Corded Ware ultimately derive from a very similar Eneolithic ancestry background that formed c. 7000 BP once CHG ancestry spread north across the Caucasus.

     2.1.5 is called “Ancient DNA and the Indo-Iranic Branch”. It’s long and strikes me as waffling; it tries to doubt everything, including the identification of Andronovo, Sintashta and several other archeological cultures as Indo-Iranian. Interestingly, the hypothesis that the arrival of Indo-Iranian is associated with the destruction of the Bactria-Margiana Archeological Complex, as opposed to its prosperous existence before that, seems to be unknown to the authors. In the end they call for more aDNA.

     3.7 explains how the 170 reference meanings were chosen (they’re not simply copied from a Swadesh or other such list). 3.8 goes into detail about identification and treatment of loans; quotable paragraph:

     A first step to try to limit any potential confounds is that the set of reference meanings for a cognate data-set can be optimized to meanings that are typically as resistant as possible to loanwords. IE-CoR implements this optimization (see §2.7), resulting in the particular selection of 170 reference meanings. Nonetheless, in particular historical contexts of intense language contact that affected a number of IE-CoR languages, loanwords are found in up to a few dozen of these 170 meanings. English itself has loanwords in 25 of the IE-CoR meanings. Languages whose histories exposed them to even more loanwords include Albanian, and a large set of languages in the Indic and Iranic branches that for centuries were in extended contact with Persian as a dominant, high-status language.

     3.8.3 states that when the primary word for a meaning is a unique loan, all cognate sets for that meaning were scored as “absent” in the main analysis instead of “unknown” (“inapplicable”, which is the same thing in all available software). In sensitivity analysis 2, these cases were instead coded as single-member cognate sets of their own. Both approaches are basic errors that phylogeneticists in biology wrote papers about in the early 1990s, i.e. about as early as possible. It is bound to artificially increase the branch lengths of… oh, let’s say… Albanian, Armenian, Indo-Iranian, and maybe Tocharian as well: exactly the branches that are under suspicion of long-branch attraction.

     This, BTW, is yet another case where linguistic data have more in common with morphological than with molecular data in biology.

     From 4.11:

     The Propontis form of Tsakonian Greek ceased to be spoken only in the twentieth century (142). The IE-CoR calibration is therefore set to just 40 BP, with a standard deviation of 10 years.

     That’s what put the a in İstanbul! Note that, as the main paper makes explicit, “BP” is consistently incorrectly used for “B2K”.

     The last 2 of the 3 paragraphs of 5.3 (“Estimating Chronology”) read like an angry reply to a reviewer:

     The chronological estimation is based on these two parameters c and σ, and the set of known date calibrations of all languages in the data set (§4). Note that this approach has nothing to do with the early and now discredited technique of ‘glottochronology’ in linguistics (75). That was founded on an assumed constant rate r of change/retention in cognacy. In the relaxed clock model used here, there is nothing — no parameter setting — that corresponds to any ‘glottochronological constant’, certainly not the lineage ‘birth rate’ and ‘death rate’ parameters mentioned in §5.2 above. Those refer to the birth and death of lineages, i.e. splits and extinctions respectively, in the phylogeny. They do not refer to changes or ‘mutations’ in the state of a data character switching between being absent (0) and present (1) along branches in the tree.

     This distinction is best understood also by clarifying the relationship between branching events in the phylogeny, and change events in language data. Strictly, branching events occur independently of, and are not defined by, actual changes in the language data. Once a split has arisen, however, the conditions are set in which different changes can then arise along the different branches. Similarly in actual language histories, a speaker population may split into two (by some long-distance migration, for example), but that need not automatically create language changes. It does, however, establish newly separated speaker populations whose language lineages may thereafter undergo different changes, and thus progressively diverge from each other.

     5.5 makes clear that the authors are well aware that BEAST can use multistate characters, and that they made use of this: “SA10 started out from the main IE-CoR nexus export file (with each cognate set expressed as a binary presence/absence character), but used ad hoc code to convert this to the equivalent multistate format (with each meaning as a multistate character, and cognate sets as the various states of that character). Details of the process are included in section 7.10.1.”

     Fig. S6.1 (p. 57) is a representation of the main results as a single tree. Section 6.1 explains why the messy representation by DensiTree in the main paper is preferable. Still, the single Maximum Clade Credibility tree shows a few things that otherwise disappear in the fog. For example, the main text and one or two sections in the supplement (8.2 notably) explain, and I agree, why Sanskrit, even Rigvedic, is not Proto-Indic and why Strictly Classical Latin isn’t Proto-Romance or a direct ancestor of it. Fair enough, but the branch between Classical Latin and its last common ancestor with Proto-Romance is 600 years long in the MCC tree, and that between Rigvedic and Proto-Indic is 800 years long. Aren’t these a bit much? Compare the much shorter branches for Mycenaean, Ancient (Attic) and New Testament Greek or Classical Armenian.

     Speaking of Armenian, the split between Eastern and Western Armenian comes out as just 400 years old. Isn’t that too short?
324. V says

     July 30, 2023 at 9:20 pm

     David Marjanović : There are Kümmel and Kim among the authors […]

     That’s some major serendipity.
325. drasvi says

     July 30, 2023 at 9:25 pm

     “Note that this approach has nothing to do …” – they are discrediting Swadesh’s work.

     By “this approach” they mean “relaxed clock”. The first link in google for “relaxed clock”: link. The first two lines in the Introduction are much more respectful to predecessors in biology (“the basis of clock-model-based phylogenetics”).
326. Y says

     July 30, 2023 at 11:24 pm

     Glottochronology has not been “widely discredited”, or correctly evaluated at all, for all I know. Objectors to glottochronology quote Hymes’s critical paper, directly or indirectly. Every one of Hymes’s criticisms (as I recall, I haven’t looked at the paper in a while) are due to that he didn’t understand statistics, or what error bars are. Glottochronological dates have two kinds of inherent error: counting statistics (same as the carbon dating which inspired it), and variation in lexical replacement rates. Of course lexical replacement sometimes happens fast and sometimes slow. But the distribution of these rates is probably universal, with similar means for, say, Austronesian and Bantu. That spread should be accounted to by putting error bars on inferred dates, which nobody did (except maybe Gudschinsky?) So what wonder is it if you read that two languages split on June 5th, 829 AD, and find that the date is 100 years off wrt known history, and hence glottochronology is bunk? Whereas, if the two languages are calculated to have split probably some time between 600 and 1000 AD, that is less exciting, but correct.
327. Y says

     July 30, 2023 at 11:31 pm

     DM, does the paper list individual authors’ contributions? From the supplement, I gather that the professional historical linguists were the one who assembled the word lists, and evaluated cognacy. Did any participate in the theoretical part as well?
328. Trond Engen says

     July 31, 2023 at 4:04 am

     @David M.: Thanks for taking us through.

     I think the main problem with these papers are that they’re sold on the wrong premise. They shouldn’t (yet) be understood as attempts to use bayesian phylogenetics to understand the development of Indo-European but rather to use the fairly well understood history of Indo-European to develop bayesian phylogenetics for historical linguistics.
329. drasvi says

     July 31, 2023 at 7:20 am

     I’m tired of papers that intimidate linguists with mathematical terms.

     Linguists can only (1) trust (2) mistrust (3) study math. Possibly linguists should actually study mathematics, but:

     “It took advantage of computers as soon as the computers were able to handle it. One simplifying assumption after another was abandoned as computer speed increased in the 1990s and later” (DM)

     I think I can reproduce “relaxed clock” with pen and paper:-/

     Could someone correct me if that’s wrong?
330. AntC says

     July 31, 2023 at 7:39 am

     Strictly Classical Latin isn’t Proto-Romance or a direct ancestor of it. Fair enough, but the branch between Classical Latin and its last common ancestor with Proto-Romance is 600 years long in the MCC tree,

     Thank you @DM for the summary. Are you able to unpack that bit?

     Where and when was the ancestor of Proto-Romance being spoken? In particular, where was it when Classical Latin was the language of Empire?

     And thanks @Y, I appreciate any dating will have error bars.
331. drasvi says

     July 31, 2023 at 8:00 am

     Consider a simple tree of three languages a, b, c (a and b are closer to each other) and you know all history but dates. You know how many innovations what language has compared to what.

     All “dating” that you can do:

     step 1: determining the age of P[roto]-ab relative to P-abc.
     step 2: either

     – using a known date of one protolanguage to infer the absolute date of the other (IE case)
     or
     – matching some cross-linnguistical average to your tree’s average.

     The latter would be Swadesh’s (discredited) case if Swadesh did not say in the (discredited) publication they reference as discredited that we “can’t assume” that English changes equally fast. He said that “very few scholars have any conception whatever of the degrees of relationship or the stretch of time needed” and that “It is the aim of the present paper to provide some approximate answer” – but then he said this “can’t assume” and limited himself to relative dates.

     So, relative ages. The most straightforward thing you can do here is just averaging.

     We don’t know the age of P-ab – let it be T-ab and we don’t know the age of P-abc – let it be T-abc.
     But we know that a innovated n forms and b innovated m forms over T-ab, while P-ab innovated k forms between T-abc and T-ab.

     So we can assume that P-ab was innovating (n+m)/2 forms over every T-ab, and thus determine how large T-abc can be relative to T-ab.

     A schoolgirl can do that.

     I think this method can be extended to complex trees without too many calculations (correct me if I’m wrong). Now is not this “relaxed clock” (just without probability distributions and confidence intervals)?
332. drasvi says

     July 31, 2023 at 8:04 am

     Of course if I know dates for several langauges (in a more complex tree) I will find that my tree is distorted – its proportions don’t match relative known dates!

     What it means is that there is not a straighforward way to use these known dates for calibration, all at once.

     One way to do that would be resorting to those probability distributions which will require more calculations (still I think doable with paper). But those distributions are actually based on nothing.
333. John Cowan says

     July 31, 2023 at 8:07 am

     Strictly, branching events occur independently of, and are not defined by, actual changes in the language data.

     Perhaps I misunderstand the terminology, but this seems staggeringly metaphysical. All L1 anglophones today distinguish between KIT and FLEECE vowels, though the phonetic nature of the distinction varies. Suppose that a few hundred years from now, some anglophones have merged them whereas others have not. I would say that the populations split sometime between now and then, as seems only commonsense. But our authors are seemingly committed to the idea that the split is in effect right now in 2023, and for that matter may have been in effect already in 1873, so that we are a century and a half past the branching point despite the fact that nothing happened. Then again it may not happen until 2073. So it is not possible, however closely we examine speakers today, to figure out whether they have split or not; there is literally no evidence one way or the other.

     Once a split has arisen, however, the conditions are set in which different changes can then arise along the different branches.

     Can then arise. So perhaps it may be the case that our presently split population will never materialize into an actual division between merged and unmerged speakers?

     Similarly in actual language histories, a speaker population may split into two (by some long-distance migration, for example), but that need not automatically create language changes. It does, however, establish newly separated speaker populations whose language lineages may thereafter undergo different changes, and thus progressively diverge from each other.

     That’s empirically right, but privileges mere geographical division over linguistic division as the One True Meaning of division. Raymond Brown (the conlanger and Eteocretanist) once referred to until the cows come home as a characteristically BrE expression, and I pointed out that it also existed in AmE by saying that the Sundering Sea had not sundered our metaphors. In other words, seen through the lens of this expression, there has been no split at all. But our authors seem to want to say that in fact there has been, it just hasn’t shown up yet.
334. drasvi says

     July 31, 2023 at 8:20 am

     Note that it is not obvious that one method of calibrating (known dates within the family or cross-linguistical average) is inherently better than the other.

     The former seems good when you know several dates within the family.

     Otherwise horrible things may happen. If there is a limit on how innovative a language can be, and a and b happen to be VERY innovative, T-ab is small, P-ub is conservative, c is reasonably innovative – our method will (wrongly) assume that P-ub is also VERY innovative.

     And c which is much more innovative will become пиздец как innovative, well beyond the limit of possible, while T-abc will be small.

     I’d say that cross-linguistical average is informative when there is wild variation within the family, one date within the family is informative when there is little variation within the family, both are good when there is little variation in family and globally, and many dates within the family are always good. Cross-linguistical studies could possibly tell, what of these is the case, but:

     You simpy can NOT use ths method of calibration for Cushitic. You only have several known dates for IE and Semitic.
335. Dmitry Pruss says

     July 31, 2023 at 10:40 am

     Thank you very much, DM. Really helpful. Please pardon me for trying to simplify again.

     So it looks like everything would have worked great if the selected cognates turned up in all languages. But it’s impossible in practice. But they still tried selecting the most universal set of cognates, with impressive results. The loss of cognacy is relatively small but unevenly distributed, with the known outliers such as Albanian in Europe, Iranian and especially Indic.

     In a model with multiple states, when a replacement happens, it counts not as one change but as many changes as there were characters, as if the word was replaced by systematically mutating each character, rather than in one act of horizontal transfer. For the reasons which I don’t understand, such would-be ultramutation events are counted towards the estimated change rate, instead of being discarded as outliers. And voila, the change rate estimate becomes unrealistically large. As a result, calculated dates become too young in the branches with less borrowing in the selected cognate set. That’s clear.

     With the 1/0 presence or absence framework, replacing cognates creates an opposite bias in dates estimates, but it’s less clear why. Counting replacement events as 2 (1 loss and one gain) is a way to overestimate the numbers of changes, and may inflate the ages. But what is different between counting a replacement as several changes instead of one, which, as we just discussed, makes ages younger, and counting it as 2 which makes it older?? And how does coding the possible replacement as missing info achieve the same?
336. Trond Engen says

     July 31, 2023 at 2:29 pm

     Do they use phonological changes in the lexical set or only replacement rates?

     Y: Glottochronological dates have two kinds of inherent error: counting statistics (same as the carbon dating which inspired it), and variation in lexical replacement rates. Of course lexical replacement sometimes happens fast and sometimes slow. But the distribution of these rates is probably universal, with similar means for, say, Austronesian and Bantu.

     I think this is the major flaw of glottochronology. Carbon dating is using a nuclear process that is happening slowly at a known average rate largely independent of the physical and chemical environment, and the unpredictability of single atoms is evened out on the large total number of carbon molecules. Lexical replacement is far from independent of changes in the physical, cultural and linguistic environment, but will be a direct result of it, so it’s reason to believe that it comes in waves. Since no two languages will ever be in the same environment, calculated rates can’t be transferred. Add to that that the lexical set used is small — by design, even.

     I’m more optimistic about statistical phylogenetics, but it would need to use phonological and morphological markers as characters. That’s not to say I’m sold on it. The tree model is good from a distance and with stylished sets, but it’s not meant for the kind of messy continuum that is characteristic of actual language communities. When biologists work with hundreds or thousands of species over maybe millions of generations, that doesn’t matter much, but linguists work with a handful of languages over at best a couple of thousand generations. Some split events probably happen abruptly, for others the time between the beginning and the end may be 10-50% of the age of the family. I have no idea what that means or how to account for it, but I know I wouldn’t try to use it to build a tree of dialects of German.
337. Dmitry Pruss says

     July 31, 2023 at 3:02 pm

     Carbon dating uses an invariable decay rate, but still suffers from two problems it has in common with the comparative language dating. The starting state isn’t known, and admixtures influence the results.
338. Trond Engen says

     July 31, 2023 at 3:05 pm

     True.

     (I considered mentioning the reservoir effect, but dropped it since I couldn’t think of a linguistic parallel. Maybe exposure to literature and oral recitation,)
339. Dmitry Pruss says

     July 31, 2023 at 3:11 pm

     The Ephratean paper, understandably, deals with Proto-Kartvelian interactions, and, to a lesser extent, with potential early IE borrowings in Semitic and with the Mitanni corpus. I believe that all of these interinfluences belong to a much later age than the hypothesized urheimat somewhere in today’s Kurdistan? Are there any “really early” suspected borrowings between nascent IE and its presumed Middle Eastern neighbors?

     The paper also has totally cringeworthy genetic tidbits, like they always describe any genomic data as a “haplogram”, a collection of mtDNA or Y-haplotypes :/
340. David Marjanović says

     July 31, 2023 at 3:33 pm

     they are discrediting Swadesh’s work

     They’re simply saying it doesn’t work – it’s of purely historical interest – and they’re doing so in a passage that reads like an exasperated reply to a nasty reviewer.

     This does mean that there was a linguist among the reviewers. 🙂

     does the paper list individual authors’ contributions?

     Yes; I didn’t try to decipher the list, though. Here it is:

     R.D.G. initiated and coordinated the study. P.H. and C.A. designed the IE-CoR database and data collection methodology and coordinated the linguistic coding team. M.Sc. oversaw all determination of cognacy at the deep Indo-European level. C.A., M.Sc., L.J., M.J.K., T.J., B.I., R.P., H.L., R.F.S., G.H., M.M., R.I.K., E.A., T.P., O.B., T.K.D.-F., M.B., C.F., R.T., M.Se., N.L., K.St., K.Sc., and G.K.G. were major contributors to the 25,918 lexeme and 5013 cognate determinations in the IE-CoR database. R.B., B.K., S.J.G., and D.K. conducted the phylogenetic analyses, with input from R.D.G., Q.D.A., P.H., and C.A. W.H. and J.K. advised on the aDNA data. P.H., R.D.G., D.K., B.K., and C.A. wrote the text. All authors commented on the manuscript.

     I think the main problem with these papers are that they’re sold on the wrong premise. They shouldn’t (yet) be understood as attempts to use bayesian phylogenetics to understand the development of Indo-European but rather to use the fairly well understood history of Indo-European to develop bayesian phylogenetics for historical linguistics.

     The early history of IE is not well enough understood for this: neither most of the relationships between the main branches nor the absolute chronology. That’s where this paper tries to help.

     If the problems I highlighted were fixed, maybe it actually could help, certainly to some extent. But I’d really like to see more conventional comparative-historical research on early IE phylogeny. It’s obviously a difficult problem, but I think there’s some circularity going on: people have been treating it as unsolvable and therefore not worth studying, or at least not a good PhD topic for a student who wants to finish in time; therefore it hasn’t been studied; therefore there’s no progress toward a solution; therefore the problem looks unsolvable. And that would still leave the chronology – though once you have a robust tree you can at least try to match it to archeology or aDNA and see if you can rule anything out.

     I’m tired of papers that intimidate linguists with mathematical terms.

     You can’t do science without math. Math is a description of, and generalization over, how physical objects behave. Scritta in lingua matematica and all that.

     I think I can reproduce “relaxed clock” with pen and paper:-/

     With a million pens and a billion sheets of paper and a billion years.

     Seriously, we’re talking about calculations that take a desktop weeks or months.

     Where and when was the ancestor of Proto-Romance being spoken? In particular, where was it when Classical Latin was the language of Empire?

     Right there in Rome: “Vulgar Latin” as opposed to the written/oratorial/… register. The paper takes pains to make clear that a split in the trees they get is not when languages become mutually unintelligible or anything like that, it’s when, or even a bit before, one difference appears in their which-word-for-which-meaning dataset.

     So far, so good. But their “Classical Latin” is defined as Caesar-and-Cicero as usual, and placed at 50 BC. This means that “Classical Latin” and “Vulgar Latin” must have separated – Latin must have developed the “Classical” register as far as the dataset is concerned – when Rome was still a kingdom, and both “Classical” and “Vulgar” must have gone through the whole “Old Latin” period in tandem, separately. I wonder if that isn’t stretching it.

     a known date of one protolanguage

     Not available. That’s why tip-dating was necessary.

     Except in some of their sensitivity analyses, Heggarty et al. did not assume that any language in their dataset is an ancestor of any other. They let the program sort this out (i.e. the program was free to find branches with zero length); they didn’t constrain it.

     The program found (Table S6.2) a posterior probability of 0.7191 that Mycenaean Greek was ancestral to all other forms of Greek in the dataset; 0.5006 that Classical Armenian was ancestral to modern Eastern + Western Armenian; 0.3878 that New Testament Greek was ancestral to all modern forms of Greek (they have quite a lot in their dataset); 0.3073 that “Ancient Greek” (mostly or entirely Classical Attic) was ancestral to New Testament + modern Greek; and 0.0024 that “Old English” (Early West Saxon!) was ancestral to Middle and modern English (i.e. mostly Anglian). The probabilities that any other language in their dataset is strictly direclty ancestral to any other is given as 0 in the table.

     That’s a bit extreme, actually. For instance, Old Welsh, Middle Welsh and Early Modern Slovene are among these zeroes. But given how strict the definition of “ancestral” used here is – the slightest dialect or register difference that shows up in the dataset is enough for disqualification – it may not be absurd. Conversely, keep in mind that Mycenaean Greek has a lot of missing data in the dataset, so anything is hard to exclude.

     You know how many innovations what language has compared to what.

     Not in this case – the dating and the phylogeny are calculated in one step here.

     – matching some cross-linnguistical average to your tree’s average.

     No, that’s not how this method works. It uses enough math to avoid such averages.

     Perhaps I misunderstand the terminology, but this seems staggeringly metaphysical.

     No, mathematical. There’s a birth-death model in the method; one of the relaxed clocks is for how often lineages split and for how often they go extinct. The parameters are calculated from the dates supplied for each tip – and they, too, come with probability distributions, AFAIK.

     So it is not possible, however closely we examine speakers today, to figure out whether they have split or not; there is literally no evidence one way or the other.

     Correct.

     Can then arise. So perhaps it may be the case that our presently split population will never materialize into an actual division between merged and unmerged speakers?

     Yes, but that is astronomically unlikely because it would require an improbably low rate of evolution along both of these branches.

     In other words, seen through the lens of this expression, there has been no split at all. But our authors seem to want to say that in fact there has been, it just hasn’t shown up yet.

     The model may or may not infer one, with a certain probability, if fed with future data after evidence for the split has shown up.

     Note that it is not obvious that one method of calibrating (known dates within the family or cross-linguistical average) is inherently better than the other.

     The former seems good when you know several dates within the family.

     In this case, you know a date with an error margin for every language in the dataset. (Not all of these error margins are equally wide. Those for Early Vedic and Young Avestan, which were orally transmitted for a long time before they were written down and we don’t know the oldest manuscripts anyway, are uncertain enough that there’s a sensitivity analysis with no dates for these two. It doesn’t change much.)

     Where would you get a cross-linguistic average from, and where would you get its error margins, its probability distribution, from?

     I’d say that cross-linguistical average is informative when there is wild variation within the family

     If there’s wild variation, the calculated rates of evolution will be wildly wrong for almost every branch (the terminal and the internal branches of course – “branch” meaning “internode”).

     one date within the family is informative when there is little variation within the family

     But you don’t know beforehand if that’s the case.

     You simpy can NOT use ths method of calibration for Cushitic.

     Correct, because no Cushitic language was sufficiently documented before the 20th century.

     So it looks like everything would have worked great if the selected cognates turned up in all languages.

     No, because that would make all the languages identical for the purpose of this analysis. The characters are “cognate set x is the basic word for meaning y: present / absent”, except for sensitivity analysis 10, where they are “basic word for meaning y: cognate set x / w / v / u”. Great pains were taken to narrow each language down to one state per character; although this wasn’t quite achieved, the process is described in the supplement at some length. One of the given examples is why small is more basic in English than little.

     In a model with multiple states, when a replacement happens, it counts not as one change but as many changes as there were characters, as if the word was replaced by systematically mutating each character, rather than in one act of horizontal transfer. For the reasons which I don’t understand, such would-be ultramutation events are counted towards the estimated change rate, instead of being discarded as outliers.

     When all characters are “basic word for meaning y: cognate set x / w / v / u”, each replacement of one cognate set by another for the meaning in question is one change. That was how sensitivity analysis 10 was done. When all characters are “cognate set x is the basic word for meaning y: present / absent”, as in all other analyses, each such replacement is two changes: one character changes from “present” to “absent”, another from “absent” to “present”.

     If the pissmire is forgotten and ant becomes the basic word, sensitivity analysis 10 counts that as one change: the character “basic word for ANT” changes states from “a cognate of mire” to “a cognate of ant“. The other analyses counted it as two: the character “a cognate of mire is the basic word for ANT” changes states from “present” to “absent” (one change), and the unrelated character “a cognate of ant is the basic word for ANT” changes states from “absent” to “present” (the other change).

     This way, all branches become twice as long in terms of numbers of changes that need to be modeled. What branch lengths in terms of time that translates to depends on the rates of evolution; those are calculated from the numbers of changes and the time calibrations. By playing with the calibrations, you can get the program to calculate rates that are twice as fast; that’s what Chang et al. (2015) accomplished. But if the calibrations are the same, the program has no reason to infer faster rates, and so it was entirely predictable that sensitivity analysis 10 got shallower dates than the rest.

     Does that help?
341. drasvi says

     July 31, 2023 at 3:41 pm

     “I think this is the major flaw of glottochronology. ”

     Of course it is. But the alternative is not to estimate dates at all.

     “Lexical replacement is far from independent of changes in the physical, cultural and linguistic environment”

     I intended to say that “relaxed clock” – a model based on an assumption that innovativeness of Romance is most likely to be similar to innovativeness of Latin – looks natural in the context of biology.
     Linguists first think about environment – contact etc – that triggers change.

     On the other hand, Semitic is in many ways conservative.
342. Dmitry Pruss says

     July 31, 2023 at 4:14 pm

     Yes, thank you again, DM, you can see that I greatly misunderstood the multistate model.
     To try to recap, it should have as many value for each meaning as there are cognates in the entire set of languages. But each language may have only one value, as if there was only one way to express this meaning.
     The ANT example with two different cognates appearing haphazardly in Germanic languages seems to me to indicate that both words coexisted with similar meanings or in interconnected dialects, frequently occupying each other’s place without really going out of circulation. The multistate model would instead describe the situation as multiple changes in two opposite directions, ach time obliterating one of the words, and exaggerate the pace of change. The languages without such back-and-forth changes will look comparably younger, and I guess that’s most of the extant languages and all of the ancient ones?

     The binary model would have many variables for each meaning, as many as there are distinct basic words for it. In the same ANT example, it would probably count two changes any time the word changed in the back-and-forth chain, so it would also overestimate the rate of change? In exactly the same fashion in extant and ancient languages? But then it shouldn’t give different results than the multistate approach. Yet it does, so I suspect that these changes are counted differently in the new and old languages…
343. David Marjanović says

     July 31, 2023 at 4:27 pm

     Do they use phonological changes in the lexical set or only replacement rates?

     Neither phonological nor morphological characters are used. The supplement laments that there are so few* and that they can’t be used for dating because, while vocabulary may generally change like molecular data do, morphological systems can stay pretty stable for millennia (Lithuanian is given as an example) and then suddenly collapse. Also (I haven’t checked if that’s mentioned), giving each of the lexical characters they actually used the same weight is more or less reasonable, because they’re all basic vocabulary and numerous; how to weight lexical, phonological and morphological characters relative to each other is anybody’s guess at this point.

     * I don’t think that’s right. The ones relevant to early IE phylogeny are definitely underresearched, though.

     Carbon dating uses an invariable decay rate, but still suffers from two problems it has in common with the comparative language dating. The starting state isn’t known, and admixtures influence the results.

     The starting date (when continuous exchange with the atmosphere/hydrosphere ended) is exactly what carbon dating calculates.

     The Ephratean paper

     That’s not one of the papers that proposed the Euphratic substrate in Sumerian; those are all in English, and we’ve discussed them before – I’ll try to look for that tomorrow.

     potential early IE borrowings in Semitic and with the Mitanni corpus. I believe that all of these interinfluences belong to a much later age than the hypothesized urheimat somewhere in today’s Kurdistan? Are there any “really early” suspected borrowings between nascent IE and its presumed Middle Eastern neighbors?

     That is the question.

     Wine has an IE-internal etymology (it’s a root cognate of wind), yet it’s all over Semitic.

     “7” is suspiciously similar in much of western Eurasia, and seems to have had religious significance in early Semitic-speaking cultures, so it’s plausible as a Wanderwort, though there’s no good proposal of how that worked exactly.

     I’m pretty sure Gamq’relidze & Ivanov postulated a bunch of others. But their work has largely been ignored, probably because they also proposed (at least in the 1980s version; haven’t checked the 2013 paper) a bunch of new phonemes for PIE.
344. David Marjanović says

     July 31, 2023 at 4:35 pm

     The ANT example with two different cognates appearing haphazardly in Germanic languages seems to me to indicate that both words coexisted with similar meanings or in interconnected dialects, frequently occupying each other’s place without really going out of circulation. The multistate model would instead describe the situation as multiple changes in two opposite directions, ach time obliterating one of the words, and exaggerate the pace of change. The languages without such back-and-forth changes will look comparably younger, and I guess that’s most of the extant languages and all of the ancient ones?

     Yes. The trick is that the software used for the multistate dataset (sensitivity analysis 10) is unable to reconstruct ancestors as having had synonyms. That’s why it has to assume all these multiple back-and-forth changes. More changes per branch between modern languages, but more consistency among older languages, coupled with unchanged dates for each attested language, mean higher rates of evolution for the terminal branches, and that means they’re shorter in time, so the splits between them are pulled toward the present. The software used for the binary-characters-only dataset reconstructs polymorphic ancestors just fine and therefore doesn’t end up reconstructing far too young ages in messy families like West Germanic or Slavic.
345. rozele says

     July 31, 2023 at 6:49 pm

     an inability to deal with the existence of synonyms seems like a disqualifying problem for any useful representation of language change to me (which could be my anglophony at work, since english is so absorbtive). but it sure feels like a way to introduce a whole layer of invisible errors, especially for extinct languages with small corpuses, and especially with a definition of language “split” as one not-necessarily-realized-or-documented change in one word.

     (i’m thinking about the incoherence that would result from applying this to the soda/pop/coke/tonic divide* in u.s. english’s “sweetened carbonated drink” term [a contemporary basic comparable to “beer”, “wine”, “soup”, and other such common generics], if the available sources were reduced to the quantity we have from a rarely-written ancient language. i think it’s sensible to assume that these kinds of variations are very common, and an approach that can’t handle them hardly seems useful.)

     .
     * as an example that roughly correlates with other differences among regional lects, but largely ones that are understood by speakers as synonym preferences within a shared language.
346. Ryan says

     July 31, 2023 at 7:22 pm

     >The ANT example with two different cognates appearing haphazardly in Germanic languages seems to me to indicate that both words coexisted with similar meanings or in interconnected dialects, frequently occupying each other’s place without really going out of circulation.

     This seems the core problem with setting a definite date of divergence. Languages/dialects/registers go on in conversation with each other, sometimes for decades. Hypothetically, if in 563 BC, languages a, b and c (Classical, Vulgar and a Third Latin which came to be spoken by the descendants of an island in the Atlantic…) diverged, they would get the same divergence date in this paper, though what I’ll call “Insular Atlantic Latin” speakers hadn’t taken books with them and never heard another word of the mother tongue, while Classical Latin and Vulgar Latin went on sharing changes, alternately emphasizing and downplaying synonyms for centuries, a process that only scaled down significantly when the geographic scope of the two languages changes as the Republic expanded, and perhaps could be said to end only when Vatican II radically diminished the likelihood that Church Latin might influence fads of diction in the Romance vernaculars.
347. Dmitry Pruss says

     July 31, 2023 at 8:31 pm

     The software used for the binary-characters-only dataset reconstructs polymorphic ancestors just fine and therefore doesn’t end up reconstructing far too young ages in messy families like West Germanic or Slavic.

     I understand that the problems with falsely implied ancestral monomorphism disappears in the binary model. But I don’t yet understand why it is any better for the estimated rate of change. In the ANT example, it would have separate values for both ant-words, but wouldn’t they flip from 1 to zero and from 0 to 1 every time one of these words is replaced by the other? Leaving the reconstructed ancestor fully polymorphic (1,1) but the descendant languages just as falsely monomorphic as in the multistate model?

     I’m pretty sure Gamq’relidze & Ivanov postulated a bunch of others
     Scrolling through the paper I saw just one small section listing a bunch of those, which didn’t strike as convincing actually. But if there is a need, then please let me know, I can go back to the PDF and just copy and paste the relevant passages.
348. AntC says

     July 31, 2023 at 9:27 pm

     … synonyms for ANT in Germanic languages …

     @DM The trick is that the software used for the multistate dataset (sensitivity analysis 10) is unable to reconstruct ancestors as having had synonyms. That’s why it has to assume all these multiple back-and-forth changes.

     So it’s mis-representing the amount of ‘churn’? And risks failing to follow cognates? What if one of the synonyms drops out of use in one/some languages, but the other synonym drops out of use in others?

     I take @rozele’s point that non-English languages (especially pre-widespread literacy) aren’t so generously burdened with synonyms, so I looked at Polynesian languages for such a common [**] meaning as big[***]/large.

     NUI

     LASI/Rahi

     seem to be stable and persistent across all branches of Polynesian.

     [**] ‘Big’ appears on all SWADESH lists AFAICT.

     [***] Which sidelined me into ‘big’ being actually not stable or persistent across Germanic. It appears out of nowhere in Northern English c.1300 — mysterious like ‘dog’. And ‘large’ ain’t Germanic either. “Old English used micel (see much) in many of the same senses.” The Germanic comparand is ‘Great’/’groß’ — “perhaps from PIE root *ghreu- “to rub, grind,” via the notion of “coarse grain,” then “coarse,” then “great;” but “the connextion is not free from difficulty” [OED]” — quoted in etymonline.
349. Hans says

     August 1, 2023 at 5:57 am

     micel is the synonym that actually goes back to PIE, it’s related to Greek megalo-, Latin magnus, etc. So it and great must have coexisted for a time, perhaps with some different nuances of meaning or some difference of register, as both are also attested in other Germanic languages. In Modern German, the cognate to micel only survives in place names, of which Mecklenburg (Low German form) is probably the best known.
350. Trond Engen says

     August 1, 2023 at 6:34 am

     ON mikill survives in Insular N.G. and as the adverb/mass noun modifier e.g. Sw. mycket, Da. meget. It’s also fossilized in placenames like No. Myklebust and Da, Maglemose.

     The unmarked Continental N:G. adjective for “big” is stor < PIE *sth₂-ró- “big, old, strong”, which certainly must have been a synonym for a long time.

     Yet another synonym with a long pedigree is ON digr “(extra) large, big in volume or extent”.

     The closest there is to a cognate of great in North Germanic is e.g. Nyn. graut, Da. grød “porridge”.
351. AntC says

     August 1, 2023 at 6:41 am

     the cognate to micel only survives in place names

     Same in English: Micklegate in York (‘gate’ = ‘gaße’ = street); Micklethwaite town near Bingley; Mickle Fell in the Pennines, highest point in Yorkshire (proper boundaries).

     Oh, and the (Scots?) dialect mumbo-jumbo “Many a mickle makes a muckle”.
352. David Marjanović says

     August 1, 2023 at 8:00 am

     I understand that the problems with falsely implied ancestral monomorphism disappears in the binary model.

     The model itself has nothing to do with it. The software used with the binary dataset happens to be able to reconstruct polymorphism, the add-on programmed in-house for the multistate dataset happens to be unable to do that. That’s all.

     As I said: with a flawed program (the add-on for the multistate dataset) they got a flawed tree (some nodes younger than known attestations of their descendants), so they used a flawed dataset (purely binary) instead. The tree they got is probably also flawed, but it isn’t known to be outright false, so they published it…

     So it’s mis-representing the amount of ‘churn’?

     Exactly. The add-on for the multistate dataset has to assume more churn along some lineages.

     In Modern German, the cognate to micel only survives in place names, of which Mecklenburg (Low German form) is probably the best known.

     I’m currently in hiking distance from a Micheldorf (which was until recent times the largest village in the valley). It is thought that this word is why the name Michael, formerly universal nickname Michel, became so popular – and I suspect that this popularity is actually what drove the word to extinction. (“‘Mike’? What’s ‘Mike’ about this? …And why does it look like a diminutive?”)

     stor < PIE *sth₂-ró-

     More like a twice- or thrice-derived *stah₂-u-ró-. Mahlow’s law: *au vowel clusters become Proto-Germanic *ō in underresearched environments, otherwise they turn into *aw.

     German stur “stubborn/pigheaded”.
353. AntC says

     August 1, 2023 at 8:07 am

     @Trond Yet another synonym with a long pedigree is ON digr

     Thanks Trond, etymonline (link above) conjectures “[‘big’] possibly from a Scandinavian source (compare Norwegian dialectal bugge “great man”). ”

     My highly limited Norw sources don’t even know the word. “From Old Norse buggi. “ says wiktionary. But of course that doesn’t prove transmission via longboat. ‘Northern English’ is at least the right place to appear, but there’s some 250 years’ gap to explain.
354. languagehat says

     August 1, 2023 at 8:49 am

     it isn’t known to be outright false, so they published it…

     That’s an… interesting way to do scholarship.
355. Dmitry Pruss says

     August 1, 2023 at 9:21 am

     they used a flawed dataset (purely binary) instead
     The binary dataset correctly tracks synonyms as far as I can see. If both are present then the respective values are 1,1 and if only one is attested, it’s 1,0 or 0,1.
     What the dataset apparently fails to represent is the fact that both of these cognates correspond to the same meaning, and it probably leads to a substantial negative correlation between the respective binary values. That is, there will be more 1,0s and 0,1s then expected by chance? Perhaps it’s fraught with severe consequences but I don’t really see why it’s such a problem. Sure, due to this anticorrelation, a change of the word usage will be frequently misrepresented as TWO changes. But if it happens with similar frequency across all the languages, then isn’t it going to be calibrated away?
     Yet the most problematic result obtained under the binary model is the overestimated age of many splits. IMVHO for that to happen, the affected languages must possess unusually high numbers of replacements of one synonym by another, compared to the languages with known dates used for the calibration. Is it really the case? Can you please explain why?

     Intuitively, it seems to me that almost all changes in the binary model will be replacements of one synonym by another, and therefore, almost all changes will be counted as 2. Am I wrong? Are there any situations where a word for a given meaning just disappears without a replacement by anything else in the dataset? Or reappears out of nowhere? Which would count as 1 rather than two? Perhaps in the recent languages, simultaneous presence of multiple synonyms is much more frequently implied and that’s why the “1 changes” are disproportionately common there???
356. drasvi says

     August 1, 2023 at 9:47 am

     ” with a flawed program (the add-on for the multistate dataset) they got a flawed tree”

     Likely it is a consequence of representation. The binary format let’s you encode synonyms:
     100100
     010100
     010001
     you can turn it in 110100.
     The multistate format for the same is
     AA
     BA
     BC
357. Trond Engen says

     August 1, 2023 at 9:54 am

     David M: More like a twice- or thrice-derived *stah₂-u-ró-.

     Quite possibly. Gmc. does at least show *steh₂-ro-.

     I’ve also thought of the semantic identification of St. Michael with mikill. The identification of Augustinus with the name Eysteinn is attested. Also forms of Severinus and Sigurðr seem to have merged.

     @AntC: ON buggi “rich/powerful man” does exist, but ME bigge would rather seem to be < ON **byggi, which I immediately would interpret as a formation to byggja “settle/live (with/in)”.

     I guess the suggested derivation might instead presuppose an unattested homonym **byggja v. “make swell” < **bug(r) “swollen, swelling”, parallel to hyggja “come to think of” < hugr “mind”. An indication that the parallel existed would be Mod. Da. bugne “swell, bulge”, Norw. bugne “abound” and ON hugna “be agreeable, like (dep.)”,
358. Trond Engen says

     August 1, 2023 at 10:07 am

     … and that’s a pretty weak indication.
359. David Marjanović says

     August 1, 2023 at 3:08 pm

     That’s an… interesting way to do scholarship.

     Isn’t it.

     What the dataset apparently fails to represent is the fact that both of these cognates correspond to the same meaning

     Correct.

     Yet the most problematic result obtained under the binary model is the overestimated age of many splits. IMVHO for that to happen, the affected languages must possess unusually high numbers of replacements of one synonym by another, compared to the languages with known dates used for the calibration. Is it really the case?

     No. The potential source of error I can see is simply that every change is counted double, meaning most branches are too long in terms of number of changes. Given the same tip dates, that should exaggerate the dates of all splits systematically.

     If enough node dates are constrained, this problem is masked: that’s what Chang et al. (2015) effectively did. But here, the only calibration date that isn’t a tip date is a maximum age of 10,000 B2K for everything.
360. Dmitry Pruss says

     August 1, 2023 at 5:02 pm

     here, the only calibration date that isn’t a tip date is a maximum age of 10,000 B2K for everything

     but some tip dates are millennia old, right? Often, it would be a very lopsided tree fork, which a short branch leading to an extinct language a longer one, to the extant ones. “Short” and “Long” in terms of time since the split node. Scaling the entire tree by using an unrealistic ratio of number of changes to the change rate will run into date constraints with such ancient tips. So my gut feeling is that simply ~doubling the number of changes between languages in a context where tip dates span a wide period will result in effectively ~halving the rate of change, to satisfy the date constraints at the tips. Additional constraints at the nodes wouldn’t even be necessary.

     And only if *most* of the branches suffer from the double-count of changes, but some of the more informative branches (like the ones with the tip dates wide apart) don’t, then we have a problem?
361. David Marjanović says

     August 1, 2023 at 5:26 pm

     So my gut feeling is that simply ~doubling the number of changes between languages in a context where tip dates span a wide period will result in effectively ~halving the rate of change, to satisfy the date constraints at the tips. Additional constraints at the nodes wouldn’t even be necessary.

     Evidently that’s not what happened; the tip ages don’t prevent the node ages from moving around.

     And only if *most* of the branches suffer from the double-count of changes, but some of the more informative branches (like the ones with the tip dates wide apart) don’t, then we have a problem?

     Yes, but all branches should suffer equally from this, except that the loss of one synonym is only one change either way.

     (Sorry for my short explanations today. The weather is extremely tiring.)
362. Trond Engen says

     August 1, 2023 at 6:05 pm

     David M.: Neither phonological nor morphological characters are used. The supplement laments that there are so few* and that they can’t be used for dating because, while vocabulary may generally change like molecular data do, morphological systems can stay pretty stable for millennia (Lithuanian is given as an example) and then suddenly collapse.

     That’s why I asked for phonological changes. I’d expect phonology to be less responsive to shifts in the environment than lexicon. Makeover or collapse of a morphological system could be driven by external forces like massive language replacement or bilingualism. Arguably it’s lexical replacement on steroids.

     Also (I haven’t checked if that’s mentioned), giving each of the lexical characters they actually used the same weight is more or less reasonable, because they’re all basic vocabulary and numerous; how to weight lexical, phonological and morphological characters relative to each other is anybody’s guess at this point.

     Constant lexical replacement rates is a huge and unjustified assumption. If one can’t take rates calculated in one language family, in one cultural system and one era, and use it on any other family, contemporary or in the distant past, why would it be acceptable to take rates calculated for one branch of a known family and apply to others, or for the recorded history of a language and apply to the reconstructed pre-history? Those are also set in very different cultural environments and have different language-internal constraints. Wouldn’t it be better to let the model weight characters based on calculated individual rates of replacement? With increasing lexical sets and increasingly sophisticated models, that should even allow calculation of different weights for different periods and branches, and it ought to be possible to set error bars based on variability (and co-variability) for any subset and the whole tree.

     (Prediction: The error bars on dates based on lexical replacement would turn out to be ridiculously large. But that would also be a useful result.)
363. languagehat says

     August 1, 2023 at 6:15 pm

     Constant lexical replacement rates is a huge and unjustified assumption.

     That’s what’s always bothered me about glottochronology.
364. drasvi says

     August 1, 2023 at 6:18 pm

     “Evidently that’s not what happened; the tip ages don’t prevent the node ages from moving around.”

     Evidently yes. I would put it differently:
     (1) having two changes instead of one results in a scaling, but not in a distortion of proportions of the tree.
     (2) calibration of two trees with identical proportions must give identical dates. By defiition of calibration.

     So if two changes instead of one affect the tree ANYHOW it must be tree topology or distribution of changes.
     Which is very strange.
365. David Marjanović says

     August 1, 2023 at 6:19 pm

     That’s why I asked for phonological changes. I’d expect phonology to be less responsive to shifts in the environment than lexicon. Makeover or collapse of a morphological system could be driven by external forces like massive language replacement or bilingualism. Arguably it’s lexical replacement on steroids.

     But likewise, phonological systems can be partially or entirely replaced by those of a substrate.

     The complete lack of affricates (except the special case /kʂ/) and voiced fricatives, together with the presence of palatal plosives, in Sanskrit looks awfully Dravidian.

     The loss of consonant length and replacement of the fortis-lenis contrast by a voice contrast in Carinthian German is obviously Slovene.

     Wouldn’t it be better to let the model weight characters based on calculated individual rates of replacement?

     Actually, I have to check if that’s done. Molecular datasets are routinely divided into rate categories, and both which characters go into which category and what the rate (for each branch!) of each category is is calculated from the data.
366. David Marjanović says

     August 1, 2023 at 6:23 pm

     (1) having two changes instead of one results in a scaling, but not in a distortion of proportions of the tree.

     Correct.

     (2) calibration of two trees with identical proportions must give identical dates. By defiition of calibration.

     Then tip-dating isn’t calibration. 😐 Only the attested languages are anchored in time in this paper; the nodes are not, and the root is only given a distant maximum of 10,000 B2K which is not reached.

     That’s what’s always bothered me about glottochronology.

     In molecular dating the assumption of a single constant rate was abandoned in the 1990s. Separate rates are calculated from the data for each branch and for each rate category of characters as I just mentioned.

     That’s why more than one calibration date is required!
367. Trond Engen says

     August 1, 2023 at 6:29 pm

     David M.: But here, the only calibration date that isn’t a tip date is a maximum age of 10,000 B2K for everything.

     How do they avoid assuming the conclusion? The suggested age is suspiciously close to that. Say for simplicity that the model makes the most rugged path from one tip of a branch to the common root exactly 10 000 years long, and every time two branches are merged, the tree is shortened a little.
368. Trond Engen says

     August 1, 2023 at 6:50 pm

     David M.: In molecular dating the assumption of a single constant rate was abandoned in the 1990s. Separate rates are calculated from the data for each branch and for each rate category of characters as I just mentioned.

     Yeah. But is it feasible with reasonable error bars for lexical data sets?
369. drasvi says

     August 1, 2023 at 9:06 pm

     “That’s what’s always bothered me about glottochronology.””

     @Trond, @LH, no.

     I really mean it. It is not so wild an assumption.

     Moreover, “relaxed clock” is also based on some assumption. Namely something like a random walk.
     It is a model too, an possibly even worse – or better. No way to know.

     Theoretically: of course some cross-linguistical average exists:-)

     I could write something long and philosophical, but imagine that linguists are betting on how many lexemes will change in some (obscure) language in the next 200 years. They WILL come up with some probability distribution. It WILL have some mean, median, maximum (perhaps more than one) etc.

     The question is only how wide it will be!
370. Trond Engen says

     August 2, 2023 at 3:53 am

     Everything (well, everything but a Cauchy distribution) has a mean. But for lexical replacement the mean itself will be defined by a stochastic process, with the auto-covariance defined by another stochastic process, and different lexical sets will have different means and variances, and covariances inside and outside the set, which all will be defined by stochastic processes. Even the definition of sets will be a stochastic process. These processes may be co-dependent, but to a degree that is itself a stochastic variable. All this may well be within the reach of some Markov type model, but how useful will it be? I guess another way to express my pessimism is that I don’t think it will converge to a stationary process for the intervals we want to use it for.
371. drasvi says

     August 2, 2023 at 6:08 am

     @Trond, sorry, I was sleepy and did not read your whole paragraph, so I thought, like the authors you contast their method to glottochronology (here I disagree).

     It seems you don’t and have reservations about both.
372. David Marjanović says

     August 2, 2023 at 9:07 am

     How do they avoid assuming the conclusion? The suggested age is suspiciously close to that.

     I had indeed overlooked that, in the publicly accessible figure ( = fig. 2 of the paywalled paper), the posterior distribution of the root-node age “ends” precisely at 10k B2k. However, the authors had not:

     7.3 VARYING THE PARAMETERIZATION OF THE TREE PRIOR: CONDITIONING ON THE ORIGIN (SA3) We further tested the robustness of our results by varying aspects of the parameterization of the tree prior that are in principle open to alternative approaches, as covered here in §7.3, and in §7.4 below.

     In the main analysis we conditioned on the origin (the beginning of the root branch), as also in previous published analyses (12). This entails that we had to set an upper bound for the maximum age of Indo-European, which in our main analyses was set to 10,000 years. To assess whether this upper bound played a role in the date estimates, we applied a different parameterization without the origin boundary. In this sensitivity analysis SA3, we conditioned on the root (the first branching event) instead, and the result was an older average root age, with more uncertainty: 8900 BP (6750-11700 BP).

     (7.4 is about the tree prior itself; messing with it changes very little.)

     In short, you have a good point.

     It’s not quite as bad as it could be, because two of the dated languages are found to have a probability > 0.5 to be ancestors, so their ages are effectively maximum ages for the clades formed by their descendants (post-Bronze-Age Greek and modern Armenian). But still.

     I’ve actually published on the importance of maximum ages in molecular dating… if you don’t have enough, lots of nodes will come out too old.

     In molecular dating the assumption of a single constant rate was abandoned in the 1990s. Separate rates are calculated from the data for each branch and for each rate category of characters as I just mentioned.

     Yeah. But is it feasible with reasonable error bars for lexical data sets?

     Why would it be any harder than for molecular ones?

     Moreover, “relaxed clock” is also based on some assumption. Namely something like a random walk.

     A strict clock is a random walk. A relaxed clock is more like a random walk of random walks.

     I guess another way to express my pessimism is that I don’t think it will converge to a stationary process for the intervals we want to use it for.

     Oh, the programs for Bayesian inference let you check if convergence has been reached. If it hasn’t, you run your analysis for longer. (Or, in very rare cases, you eventually give up and try a different dataset.)
373. drasvi says

     August 2, 2023 at 9:54 am

     @DM, but what does “fixed” mean?

     What you have is a list of related languages who have accumulated different number of innovations.
     How exactly you apply fixed clock here?
374. drasvi says

     August 2, 2023 at 10:11 am

     Let it be two languages. One innovated 5 words since their split, the other innovated 1.
     Our actions?

     Or are we speaking about algorythms that do reconstructions (and which can decide that both langauges innovated three words each)?
375. drasvi says

     August 2, 2023 at 10:29 am

     These are two different tasks.

     One situation is when we are given data on divergence between languages in a family. You can use this data to build a phylogeny and a reconstruction (of meaning-cognate pairs in the proto-language).
     And in this case you can assume a fixed clock within the family.

     The other situation is when you have phylogeny and language A innovated 5 words and B innovated 1 word, period. You can use information about other families to calibrate the date of split. E.g. just the average. But this mean (alongside with other characteristics of distribution) is not “fixed clock”.

     Moreover, it exists objectively.
376. David Marjanović says

     August 2, 2023 at 11:48 am

     @DM, but what does “fixed” mean?

     The word “fixed” only appears twice in this thread before your comment. The first is a quote from the paper about “fixed calibration points”, the second is from me and means “repaired”, “set right”.

     So what do you mean?

     How exactly you apply fixed clock here?

     You don’t. That’s what the “relaxed clock” stuff is all about. It’s also what the angry statement in section 1.3 of the supplement – that Bayesian tip-dating “is not lexicostatistics, and it is not glottochronology” and “has nothing to do with those outdated and widely discredited techniques” – is about.
377. Trond Engen says

     August 2, 2023 at 12:11 pm

     drasvi: It seems you don’t and have reservations about both.

     Yes, but maybe not exactly the same and to the same degree. And I do think it’s a worthwhile effort. We just have to keep in mind that the results won’t be helpful until the methods are good enough (if they ever will be). I’ll maintain that what’s going on now is development of methods with IE as a test case. It’s just too bad that it has to be framed as solutions to IE problems.

     David M.: I’ve actually published on the importance of maximum ages in molecular dating… if you don’t have enough, lots of nodes will come out too old.

     That sounds … avoidable. Wouldn’t it it be possible to calibrate unknowns after knowns?

     Why would it be any harder than for molecular ones?

     Short timespans and small data sets. But I really don’t know what I’m talking about.

     Oh, the programs for Bayesian inference let you check if convergence has been reached. If it hasn’t, you run your analysis for longer. (Or, in very rare cases, you eventually give up and try a different dataset.)

     I’m not sure if we’re talking about the same convergence. I’m not even sure that I’m talking about the same convergence. First, I imagine that a hypothesis for a stochastic process that is itself the result of interlocked stochastic processes would be complex, and that it would take lots of data over long timespans for the inference to converge. Or maybe rather that the number of prior hypotheses is so big that it will take lots and lots of data to converge on one. Second, I imagine that if the calculations eventually converge on a stationary process and an expectation value (and higher order moments) for lexical replacement can be calculated, it will be variable on too long timescales to be used for dating of branches. Measuring the ripples and forgetting the tides.
378. drasvi says

     August 2, 2023 at 1:31 pm

     @DM, it was your strict clock, and I MEANT to type so. I don’t know how it mutated into “fixed”:(

     (There is a term ‘fixed local clock’, but I doubt my subconscious meant it)

     You don’t.

     Agree!
     Because it is physically impossible.
379. drasvi says

     August 2, 2023 at 2:10 pm

     “It’s also what the angry statement in section 1.3 of the supplement ”

     This statement is what people do when they face a stigma. “I’m not a whore, Masha is a whore, I’m temporary wife!”

     But it is nonsense, and they confuse two unrelated things:

     Strict clock (an alternative to relaxed clock) and using cross-linguistical observations to calibrate a tree. The latter is complementary to relaxed clock.

     For IE you could choose between calibrating based on “cross-linguistical” observations and calibrating based on dates within the tree…. But when your “cross-linguistical” observations are observations about Indo-European – the two approaches are strictly identical.

     For most other families, you simply can’t feed your relaxed clock with “dates within the tree” because no dates. So you will feed the distribution from IE, Semitic etc.

     They are complementary.
380. David Marjanović says

     August 2, 2023 at 3:19 pm

     Wouldn’t it it be possible to calibrate unknowns after knowns?

     Which knowns? In the fossil record, absence of evidence isn’t very often evidence of absence. (Sometimes it is good enough, and I’ve published on that.) With languages, there are fewer cases because writing is such a young technology.

     Agree!
     Because it is physically impossible.

     By no means is it physically impossible. Doing it will just give you wrong results in most cases.

     This statement is what people do when they face a stigma.

     That says nothing about whether the accusation is factually true if we ignore the stigma. The method used in this paper are really not similar to lexicostatistics or glottochronology.

     But it is nonsense, and they confuse two unrelated things:

     They don’t. You sound confused. I’m not sure what you’re confused about.

     using cross-linguistical observations to calibrate a tree

     A rate is not a calibration; you use calibrations to get rates. If you think a single rate fits the entire tree and you think you know this rate already, you don’t need any further calibrations.

     For most other families, you simply can’t feed your relaxed clock with “dates within the tree” because no dates. So you will feed the distribution from IE, Semitic etc.

     Of course not. If all tip ages are 0, you have to calibrate some nodes with very high confidence; and if you can’t do that, well, garbage in, garbage out. Wake me up when somebody tries…
381. drasvi says

     August 2, 2023 at 3:58 pm

     “By no means is it physically impossible”

     Again, there are two languages (currently spoken). One disagrees with the common proto-langauge in one word, the other in five.

     Use strict clock to obtain wrong results. I don’t see how this is possible logically, technically, anyhow. And telling that the flaw of some “glottochronology”, whatever they mean by this (apparently not the same thing as I – for I understand “glottochronology” as dating lanaguages based on statistics, especially based on retentions/innovations in basic vocabulary, but this is just a particularity of glottochronological methods common today. This paper absolutely is glottochronology – as I understand and always understood the word) is that they are preoccupied with something which is logically impossible to be preoccupied with is…. Crazy.

     Once you have phylogeny and reconstruction – and this is a common situation – your data contains both conservative and innovative languages.

     No matter what method you are using to date them, you have to face the difference.
382. drasvi says

     August 2, 2023 at 4:00 pm

     What you can do is:
     (1) move nodes up and down in relative time units.
     This won’t eliminate the variation, but it can minimise some function of variation.
     (2) equate your relative time units to a certain amount of actual years.

     Only in step 2 you can (if you like) use some mean obtained from other languages.

     In step 1 you can also use (if you like) other characteristics of the distribution obtained from other languages.
     IF you have real dates for more than one node in the tree, you also can use their relative difference during the step 1.
383. drasvi says

     August 2, 2023 at 4:35 pm

     “The method used in this paper are really not similar to lexicostatistics or glottochronology.”

     It is directly based on it!

     You accurately described the situation with lexicostatistics above. Indeed, methods used by linguists are very simple.

     G. Starostin compiles a list of cognates for an African family, derives the % of shared words between pairs and… thinks. Other considerations are linguistical rather than statistical.
     G. Starostin actually comaped the ratio of shared cognates in the upper part of the list (the most basic and stable words) and in the lower part (less stable) – the expectation is that if similarity is due to contact, then the ratio will be smaller. But he did not team up with his brother (a programmer) to devise something super-duper complex and make a program. Partly I suppose just because a lot of preparatory linguistical work must be done before complex algorytms become reliable.

     Biologists meanwhile use something more sophisticated for phylogeny. Nevertheless these sophisticated methods are improvement of simplified methods rather than “correct” idea replacing “wrong” idea.

     This paper is even directly based on Swadesh’s. They could independently come up with idea of applying statistical methods to infer phylogeny (lexicostatistics) or dating (glottochronology).

     But not to the idea of measuring exactly innovations/retentions in “basic vocabulary”. Here they follow Swadesh’s paper that they name as representative of “discredited” g.
     Besides they use Swadesh lists (they united 207 words from Swadesh’s lists with 100 items for L-J, obtained 235, eliminated those that don’t suit their purposes, got 170. Their shared property they say is “stable”. Swadesh in that publications has 165, again, “stable” and present in questionnaires).

     So respect your predecessors, say thank you, and say you can now do it better, because you have a computer. No, oops. “widely discredited”.
384. David Marjanović says

     August 2, 2023 at 5:44 pm

     It is directly based on it!

     No!

     Emil Zuckerkandl had no idea of lexicostatistics in general or glottochronology in particular when he invented molecular dating in 1962! Even though he used a strict clock!

     This is a matter of actual history. Lexicostatistics & glottochronology was safely compartmented in “the humanities”, and molecular dating in “the sciences”, and both lived in complete ignorance of each other until 2012 when two molécularistes applied molecular dating to languages and all hell broke loose.

     Use strict clock to obtain wrong results. I don’t see how this is possible logically, technically, anyhow.

     The protolanguage will simply be reconstructed wrongly in the process.

     This paper absolutely is glottochronology – as I understand and always understood the word

     You misunderstand the word.

     No matter what method you are using to date them, you have to face the difference.

     Again: the program can, and does, infer a separate rate of evolution for each and every branch, including both the terminal branches and the internal branches ( = internodes).

     No, oops. “widely discredited”.

     Glottochronology means using a strict clock – a single average rate of evolution for the entire tree. Lexicostatistics, including glottochronology, means the data matrix is used only to calculate a distance matrix, and then the topology and (in glottochronology) the branch lengths are calculated from the distances, not directly from the characters. These are two very big differences. They lead to dramatically different results in many cases. As far as 21st-century molecular dating is concerned, glottochronology is a separate invention of the square wheel.

     Did you read the supplement? It’s in open access.
385. rozele says

     August 2, 2023 at 11:30 pm

     a separate rate of evolution for each and every branch

     which doesn’t, it seems to me, solve any part of the problem, which is that these rates of change are – not hypothetically, but in observed fact – variable over time within any single language*, and variable within any branch of any proposed tree.

     i may be misunderstanding mathematics that are, i’ll admit, well beyond my pay-grade, but part of what seems to be happening here (and in glottochronology, to my eye) is an assumption that if you use large enough datasets you can act as if the underlying processes are random and make accurate models by proceeding based on that fiction. and that assumption seems to keep running head-on into the fact that language change is just not a random process, and breaking its nose.

     .
     * i bet a statistically-minded grad student could get a paper or two out of calculating rates of change in english by various methods and seeing what happens when you exclude changes first documented between 1590 and 1630 – and a few more if they managed to turn it into either a pro- or anti-stratfordian argument.
386. David Marjanović says

     August 3, 2023 at 9:26 am

     which doesn’t, it seems to me, solve any part of the problem, which is that these rates of change are – not hypothetically, but in observed fact – variable over time within any single language*, and variable within any branch of any proposed tree.

     That’s a separate problem, but you’re right that it isn’t necessarily solved this way.

     Similarly, in biology, it’s been proposed that natural selection is relaxed after certain kinds of mass extinction events and rates of evolution spike, leading to inferences of inflated ages unless there are enough calibrations that are precise enough. That would certainly explain a few obvious mismatches with the fossil record.

     and a few more if they managed to turn it into either a pro- or anti-stratfordian argument

     Heh.
387. drasvi says

     August 3, 2023 at 1:34 pm

     @DM,

     Claim 1: what glottochronologists speak about is not strict clock.

     Claim 2: strict clock is used in biology.

     Are you ready to say that strict clock in biology
     (a) “discredited”
     (b) “just doesn’t work” (your words which you use to gloss “discredited”. though I happen to see difference)

     (c) not a crude model which has evolved/been improved to become a family of more complex (still crude) models, including relaxed clock – not by biologists proper but by programmers, but because of the enthusiasm of biological community about dating, even with programs based on crudest models (unlike linguistic community which grumbles “imprecise” and discourages further work) – but literally “has nothing to do” with relaxed clock?

     If not, then why the difference?

     I understand that crowds are different. But in my view science is a space of ideas and questions (and people united by collaborative effort – and not just teams competing for grants, and interested in discrediting each other) and I understand a field (like glottochronology) based on its problems – not based on who’s looking for answer.

     ____
     Regarding claim 1:
     There is of course a certain range of variation. It is just a fact.

     The question is how wide is it? If we knew the range, we could say that “95% of langauages in the world who have 20% of replacements in basic vocabulary got them in no more than N and no less than M years”, and that would be just true.

     Would this N to M range be narrow enough to be informative (historically, linguistically, etc.)?
     If not, can further study of factors affecting variation help us narrow it down to ?

     All of this is simply not “strict clock”.

     Strict clock… it seems it is when you impose a restriction that “the clock is the same for all organisms in this set” (NOT corresponding to the average clock for all organisms”) and let your software recalculate either phylogeny or numbers of substitutions based on this artificial restriction.
     The software may introduce additional substitutions just in order to make some branches longer.

     Or when you exclude some lineage from your sample, because it is too weird.

     Linguists don’t do that.
388. David Marjanović says

     August 3, 2023 at 2:05 pm

     Claim 2: strict clock is used in biology.

     Not in decades, except in very special cases (e.g. very short timeframes).

     Are you ready to say that strict clock in biology
     (a) “discredited”
     (b) “just doesn’t work”

     Yes and yes, except in very special cases.

     not by biologists proper but by programmers

     There’s a lot more overlap than you’d think.

     but literally “has nothing to do” with relaxed clock?

     They’re both “clocks”, but that’s it. Also, strict clocks have never been used in phylogenetic analyses in biology; that’s limited to glottochronology.

     Strict clock… it seems it is when you impose a restriction that “the clock is the same for all organisms in this set” (NOT corresponding to the average clock for all organisms”) and let your software recalculate either phylogeny or numbers of substitutions based on this artificial restriction.

     “Strict clock” means the model contains a single rate parameter that is applied to all branches. “Relaxed clock”, as used here, means a separate rate parameter is inferred for each branch (the terminal and the internal ones). That’s something that would take billions of years with pen & paper.

     If we knew the range

     We don’t need to assume we know it. We can let the program fit the model, including all the rate parameters in it, to the data.

     Really, almost every aspect of the method is an order or two more complex and computation-intensive than any glottochronologist, including the most careful and sophisticated ones like G. Starostin, seems to have ever imagined. That doesn’t make it immune to long-branch attraction or wrong approaches to coding or simple mistakes in the dataset, but it does take care of more issues than, again, any glottochronologist seems to have ever imagined.

     That’s no surprise. The community of people who have ever published on glottochronology, or lexicostatistics in general, is orders of magnitude smaller than the community of people who have ever published on molecular evolution or phylogenetics with molecular data. Of course the latter community is going to have more ideas.
389. drasvi says

     August 3, 2023 at 5:22 pm

     If we knew the range

     We don’t need to assume we know it.

     But we want to know. “How much variation there exists in the world” with respect to some parameter is absolutely normal question:) This is enough to write all those formulas.

     It’s just an attempt to understand langauge change, statistically.

     And then if the range is narrow enough (to be useful for, say, a historian) then the historian will be happier.
     If no, then all right, but at least we learn more about language change, which is not bad for a linguist.
390. drasvi says

     August 3, 2023 at 5:24 pm

     The main issues here are:

     – HOW ON EARTH we know it (but of course we have a good reason to study vocabulary replacement in langauges where it can be studied)
     – if it is wide,

     (a) can we make it more narrow by identifying and modelling various factors that contribute in it (thus including in the formula some f(language contact), f(community size) etc.) – as narrow as if we were tossing coin, which itself would give some dispersion – or
     (b) there are so many factors that we can’t make it narrow in principle.
391. drasvi says

     August 3, 2023 at 5:28 pm

     The formula itself is solid (if we don’t count some obvious improvements like accounting for different stability of different words) if:

     – some distribution exists (it exists)
     – time is not a factor that affects stability of vocabulary.

     This second reservation is interesting. There was a proposal that words can wear with time (stability of a word depends on how recent it is) – and this will modify the formula.
     If this is true, it is a more exotic option than if it is false.

     But it’s a formula for the mean.
392. David Marjanović says

     August 3, 2023 at 7:00 pm

     The formula itself is solid

     What formula? That’s not how this method works.
393. Dmitry Pruss says

     August 3, 2023 at 9:12 pm

     Incidentally I was just pointed to a facebook thread where this question is discussed by Starostin, Kassian and Militarev. Feel free to chime in if needed. They didn’t really drill it down to details, more like dismissed it out of hand as Atkinson v.2
     https://www.facebook.com/borinskaya/posts/pfbid0zsYv13kL9oXkHcvpsvNZK3RAkSJX79xutUe8W5fEJRvsnhDNshXaM24x46KCTttCl
394. David Marjanović says

     August 4, 2023 at 5:54 am

     Thanks, soon I’ll have to visit Farcebork for the first time in over a year anyway. 🙂 Atkinson 2.0 isn’t far from what it is!
395. drasvi says

     August 4, 2023 at 9:20 pm

     @DM, the initial glottochrono-formula. I think it is what people mostly know about G.

     There are other formulas, but this one is the most famous and I think it confuses people.

     @DP, oh, that’s funny.
     I (to no avail) was trying to understand how glottochronologists apply the formula when they date families (I believe it can’t be ‘strict clock’, but wanted a confirmation) and was looking for various publications. So I tried to browse those about Afro-Asiatic and when you posted your link I was looking for Alexander Militarev, “Towards the chronology of Afrasian (Afroasiatic) and its daughter families” in Renfrew, C., McMahon, A., & L. Trask, Eds. Time Depth in Historical LInguistics (to no avail again).

     In this FB thread he names a more recent paper (and a draft), but agian, does not explain the method.
396. drasvi says

     August 4, 2023 at 9:37 pm

     G. Starostin calls the formula he is using (in one of his methods, the other is called “Bayesian MCMC” whatever it means) “strict clock”.
     The clock he is using runs faster with time. :-/
     Mad.
397. Trond Engen says

     August 5, 2023 at 5:07 am

     That may well be justified by theory. You might want to adjust for higher frequency of replacement with wider and faster networks for technological and cultural exchange. You might also want your model to reflect that a thinly documented (stage of a) language will have had undocumented lexical change. But “runs faster with time” sounds like a very crude approximation.
398. drasvi says

     August 5, 2023 at 5:29 am

     Trond, no, I don’t object to the formula (see WP, Glottochronology#Modifications).

     But I’m trying to understand what people mean by “strict clock”.
     The phrase appears here:
     https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/ling-2020-0060/html
399. David Marjanović says

     August 5, 2023 at 4:32 pm

     @DM, the initial glottochrono-formula. I think it is what people mostly know about G.

     There are other formulas, but this one is the most famous and I think it confuses people.

     Ah, OK.

     But I’m trying to understand what people mean by “strict clock”.

     The opposite of “relaxed clock”. 🙂 The Wikipedia article “Molecular clock” seems good to me, from looking at it very briefly.

     “Bayesian MCMC” whatever it means

     Just that in mathematical terms it’s a Markov-chain Monte Carlo simulation.

     (Even a Metropolis-coupled Markov-chain Monte Carlo simulation, or MCMCMC or MC³.)
400. Brett says

     August 5, 2023 at 8:11 pm

     The Metropolis algorithm doesn’t model change over time though. It’s purpose (and, indeed, the purpose of the vast majority of Markov chain Monte Carlo calculations) is to locate the temporarily stable distribution of the Markov chain and the fluctuations around that stable distribution. In the Metropolis algorithm, this is also a way of calculating a canonical partition function.
401. David Marjanović says

     August 6, 2023 at 9:55 am

     Yes; the distribution of trees and their branch lengths is what’s calculated this way.
402. drasvi says

     August 6, 2023 at 12:24 pm

     In linguistics the discipline that calculates it is “comparative linguistics”, not “glottochronology”.
403. January First-of-May says

     August 6, 2023 at 1:58 pm

     Even a Metropolis-coupled Markov-chain Monte Carlo simulation, or MCMCMC or MC³.

     So is there such a thing as a Metropolis-coupled Markov-chain Monte Carlo molecular clock, to make MC⁴?

     (I’m sure I’m absolutely mixing up the notations here but the idea is hilarious)
404. Stu Clayton says

     August 6, 2023 at 2:42 pm

     Someone has to keep the show running smoothly: the Master of Ceremonies for a Metropolis-coupled Markov-chain Monte Carlo molecular clock simulation, or MC + MC⁴. Also known as a Master Control Program.
405. David Marjanović says

     August 6, 2023 at 3:29 pm

     🙂
406. Brett says

     August 6, 2023 at 3:30 pm

     “You shouldn’t have come back, Clayton.”
407. drasvi says

     August 6, 2023 at 3:32 pm

     Yes, my yesterday’s unfinished answer to DM was

     @DM, yes, I know what MCMC means. MC Bayes and DJ Markov. Though i did not know the longer name:) I ironise because I find the name very inconvenient. Of course if your software calculates probabilities it can be Bayesian, and if it is you will mention that fact when describing what it does.

     “Did you read the supplement?” – Partly. Now I’m reading publications by molecular biologists.

     “Yes and yes, except in very special cases.” – thank you!

     …etc. [the unfinished part]
408. Trond Engen says

     August 9, 2023 at 3:46 pm

     Connecting the dots? Filling out the picture? Adding background texture? I don’t know yet. These things come faster than I can read.

     Tiina M. Mattila et al: Genetic continuity, isolation, and gene flow in Stone Age Central and Eastern Europe, Communications Biology (2023):

     Abstract
     The genomic landscape of Stone Age Europe was shaped by multiple migratory waves and population replacements, but different regions do not all show similar patterns. To refine our understanding of the population dynamics before and after the dawn of the Neolithic, we generated and analyzed genomic sequence data from human remains of 56 individuals from the Mesolithic, Neolithic, and Eneolithic across Central and Eastern Europe. We found that Mesolithic European populations formed a geographically widespread isolation-by-distance zone ranging from Central Europe to Siberia, which was already established 10,000 years ago. We found contrasting patterns of population continuity during the Neolithic transition: people around the lower Dnipro Valley region, Ukraine, showed continuity over 4000 years, from the Mesolithic to the end of the Neolithic, in contrast to almost all other parts of Europe where population turnover drove this cultural change, including vast areas of Central Europe and around the Danube River.

     […]

     Conclusions
     In this study, we have investigated the genetic landscape of Central and Eastern Europe before and after the European Neolithic expansion. One of the most striking findings was that before the dawn of the European Neolithic, Central and Eastern Europe was inhabited by a population that descends from a gradient admixture population between genetically distinct West European and Siberian hunter-gatherer groups. Such a pattern suggests long distance population genetic connectivity, likely via a stepping-stone admixture model. The genetic descendants of these Mesolithic populations were in many areas assimilated or replaced by incoming farmers during the Neolithic, and the genetic group common during the late Mesolithic remained dominant only in the East and Northeast European frontier and some geographical regions in Southern Scandinavia. In the lower Dnipro Valley region in Ukraine, the direct descendants of the Mesolithic population continued being the dominant group for thousands of years after the start of the European Neolithization, and the end of this continuity was associated with the Eneolithic/Bronze Age migration wave from the East. Hence, we conclude that the Dnipro Valley region’s Neolithic cultural innovations, such as adoption of pottery (further from pointed-bottom vessels to flat bottomed ones), pioneer animal husbandry (cattle, pig, sheep & goat, agriculture e.g., barley)48 and the changes from contracted to extended supine burials were not associated with gene flow from Anatolia. This is opposite to the pattern observed in regions further to the west, where Neolithic transition was associated with large-scale migration.

     Our analysis of close genetic relatedness, on the one hand, revealed the role of genetic relatedness in burial practices in cultures across Mesolithic, Neolithic, and Eneolithic Europe. One the other hand, the results also pointed to a possibility of non-genetic connections such as in the Neolithic Late Lengyel culture Kruza Zamkowa case exemplified here. These observations, together with previous investigations of close kin relations in the Stone Age, suggest a variety of different views and practices of biological and potentially non-biological kin relations.

     Maciej Chyleński et al: Patrilocality and hunter-gatherer-related ancestry of populations in East-Central Europe during the Middle Bronze Age, Nature Communications (2023):

     Abstract
     The demographic history of East-Central Europe after the Neolithic period remains poorly explored, despite this region being on the confluence of various ecological zones and cultural entities. Here, the descendants of societies associated with steppe pastoralists form Early Bronze Age were followed by Middle Bronze Age populations displaying unique characteristics. Particularly, the predominance of collective burials, the scale of which, was previously seen only in the Neolithic. The extent to which this re-emergence of older traditions is a result of genetic shift or social changes in the MBA is a subject of debate. Here by analysing 91 newly generated genomes from Bronze Age individuals from present Poland and Ukraine, we discovered that Middle Bronze Age populations were formed by an additional admixture event involving a population with relatively high proportions of genetic component associated with European hunter-gatherers and that their social structure was based on, primarily patrilocal, multigenerational kin-groups.

     Apart from being published almost simultaneously, the two studies look pretty parallel at first glance, and both have a last named & corresponding author from Human Evolution, Department of Organismal Biology, Uppsala University.
409. David Marjanović says

     August 9, 2023 at 4:03 pm

     Awesome.
410. Dmitry Pruss says

     August 9, 2023 at 5:23 pm

     Sredni Stog as a fusion population makes total sense. I didn’t yet figure out what archaeological culture is called Dnipro Neolithic in the paper. Too busy days at work to keep up with the flow of interesting research.
411. John Cowan says

     August 9, 2023 at 5:58 pm

     Dnipro Neolithic

     … a Ukrainian soldier who has lost his rifle.
412. Dmitry Pruss says

     August 10, 2023 at 12:09 pm

     The archaeological context is in the 1st supplement, staring from page 21
     https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs42003-023-05131-3/MediaObjects/42003_2023_5131_MOESM2_ESM.pdf

     The intro describes the Neolithic culture of the Dnieper area as Tripolye (which makes sense because Tripolye town is on the Dnieper riverbank. The very name is loaded for me. It is a part of the family lore of my mother’s kin, the Gonikbergs, one of whom was conscripted in WWI, spent years in a Hungarian POW camp, returned to an economically devasted and pogromed shtetle, escaped to Kiev only to be drafted again into the Red troops, and was killed in Tripolye in a mass murder of the Red POWs, who were bayonetted at a steep riverbank and thrown into Dnieper to die).

     Several samples were already sequenced and reported in Mathieson 2018 ( https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25778 )
     Most are new. They are from river bluff cemeteries along the Dnieper. The digs date back to the 1950s and 1960s and the documentation is somewhat limited. The relevant references are below, with the umbrella publication covering all sites at #123

     120 Telegin, D. Ya. Deriivka. A Settlement and Cemetery of Copper Age Horse Keepers on the
     Middle Dnieper, BAR International Series 287. (BAR, 1986).
     121 Danilenko, V. N. Neolit Ukrainy: glavy drevnej istorii ûgo-vostočnoj Evropy (Naukova
     Dumka, 1969).
     122 Zalizniak, L. L. Mesolithic Origins of the First Indo-European Cultures in Europe
     According to the Archaeological Data. Ukrainian Archaeology: selected papers from
     Ukrainian journal Arkheolohiia 2016, 26-42 (2017).
     123 Телегин, Д. Я. Неолитические могильники мариупольского типа. (Наукова Думка,
     1991).
     124 Telegin, D. Ya. & Potekhina, I. D. Neolithic cemeteries and populations in the Dnieper
     Basin. BAR International Series 383 (BAR, 1987).
     125 Potekhina, I.D. The prehistoric populations of Ukraine: Population dynamics and group
     composition. In: Lillie, M. and Potekhina, I.D (Eds.) Prehistoric Ukraine. From the First
     Hunters to the first Farmers. 155-186 (Oxbow Books, 2020).
     126 Потехина, И. Д. К антропологической характеристике Дереивского неолитического
     могильника. in Использование методов естественных наук в археологии (ed. Генинг, В.
     Ф.) 109–128 (Наукова Думка, 1978).
     127 Зиневич, Г. П. Очерки о палеоантропологии Украины. (Наукова Думка, 1967).
     128 Lillie, M. C. The Dnieper Rapids Region of Ukraine: A Consideration of Chronology,
     Dental Pathology and Diet at the Mesolithic-Neolithic Transition (Sheffield University,
     1998).

     BTW comments which don’t reflect the values of this community are kind of like eyesores…
413. Dmitry Pruss says

     August 10, 2023 at 1:10 pm

     Going through Telegin’s 1991 book.
     https://www.academia.edu/31335267/%D0%94_%D0%AF_%D0%A2%D0%B5%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%B3i%D0%BD_%D0%9D%D0%B5%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%B8%D1%82%D0%B8%D1%87%D0%B5%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B5_%D0%BC%D0%BE%D0%B3%D0%B8%D0%BB%D1%8C%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B8_%D0%BC%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%B8%D1%83%D0%BF%D0%BE%D0%BB%D1%8C%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B3%D0%BE_%D1%82%D0%B8%D0%BF%D0%B0_Neolithic_burial_Mariupol_type_Neolitick%C3%A1_poh%C5%99ebi%C5%A1t%C4%9B_Maripolsk%C3%A9ho_typu

     Mariupol Style Burial Culture is a subset of Dnieper-Donets Culture & appears to be distinct from the classic Cucuteni-Tripolye (and very distinct from LBK). It’s absent West of Lower Dnieper but present in Crimea and Azov Sea shores. Its ocher-rich burials with the bodies laid flat on their backs are linked to the Mesolithic Baltic, while necklaces of flat rings of black jet stone and elk teeth brooches are among the influences from the Caucasus.

     Mathieson 2018 already demonstrated that the Lower Dnieper Neolithics were genetically on the grand hunter-gatherer cline, and extremely different from the Cucuteni-Tripolye (represented in the paper by the 4 remains sets from Verteba Cave in Western Ukraine, and harboring ~80% Anatolian Farmer ancestry).

     The broader Dnieper-Donets culture is linked by Telegin to the Mesolithic sites in Belarus.
414. languagehat says

     August 10, 2023 at 1:59 pm

     BTW comments which don’t reflect the values of this community are kind of like eyesores…

     I’m sure JC was just making a spur-of-the-moment joke and didn’t mean any harm by it. I agree it wasn’t especially well timed.
415. Trond Engen says

     August 12, 2023 at 6:30 am

     No, this is background:

     Allentoft et al: Population Genomics of Stone Age Eurasia, bioRxiv preprint (2022):

     Summary
     Several major migrations and population turnover events during the later Stone Age (after c. 11,000 cal. BP) are believed to have shaped the contemporary population genetic diversity in Eurasia. While the genetic impacts of these migrations have been investigated on regional scales, a detailed understanding of their spatiotemporal dynamics both within and between major geographic regions across Northern Eurasia remains largely elusive. Here, we present the largest shotgun-sequenced genomic dataset from the Stone Age to date, representing 317 primarily Mesolithic and Neolithic individuals from across Eurasia, with associated radiocarbon dates, stable isotope data, and pollen records. Using recent advances, we imputed >1,600 ancient genomes to obtain accurate diploid genotypes, enabling previously unachievable fine-grained population structure inferences. We show that 1) Eurasian Mesolitic hunter-gatherers were more genetically diverse than previously known, and deeply divergent between the west and the east; 2) Hitherto genetically undescribed hunter-gatherers from the Middle Don region contributed significant ancestry to the later Yamnaya steppe pastoralists; 3) The genetic impact of the transition from Mesolithic hunter-gatherers to Neolithic farmers was highly distinct, east and west of a “Great Divide” boundary zone extending from the Black Sea to the Baltic, with large-scale shifts in genetic ancestry to the west. This include an almost complete replacement of hunter-gatherers in Denmark, but no substantial shifts during the same period further to the east; 4) Within-group relatedness changes substantially during the Neolithic transition in the west, where clusters of Neolithic farmer-associated individuals show overall reduced relatedness, while genetic relatedness remains high until ~4,000 BP in the east, consistent with a much longer persistence of smaller localised hunter-gatherer groups; 5) A fast-paced second major genetic transformation beginning around 5,000 BP, with Steppe-related ancestry reaching most parts of Europe within a 1,000 years span. Local Neolithic farmers admixed with incoming pastoralists in most parts of Europe, whereas Scandinavia experienced another near-complete population replacement, with similar dramatic turnover-patterns also evident in western Siberia; 6) Extensive regional differences in the ancestry components related to these early events remain visible to this day, even within countries (research conducted using the UK Biobank resource). Neolithic farmer ancestry is highest in southern and eastern England while Steppe-related ancestry is highest in the Celtic populations of Scotland, Wales, and Cornwall. Overall, our findings show that although the Stone-Age migrations have been important in shaping contemporary genetic diversity in Eurasia, their dynamics and impact were geographically highly heterogeneous.

     Caveat: It’s a preprint from last year, and it doesn’t seem to have been published yet. That may mean something. OTOH, pretty much every name attached to the Copenhagen lab is on it, so it ought to be solid enough.

     Where do I start? Methods keep improving. They now have tools to work statistically with much smaller samples of ancient DNA than before, meaning that a lot more material, esp. old material, can be analysed. And so they do.

     One of the questions I’ve been having is why the Western Eurasian Paleolithic samples have been clustering in just a small region in the center of the PCA plots. If I understand it correctly, they now see that this is an artifact of small samples and plotting on to a map of modern populations. The large paleolithic genetic variation is along other axes than those that are important for more recent populations.

     They identify a “HG Ukraine” element that is a major element in Mesolithic populations in the Baltic and peninsular Scandinavia. It’s also significant in Iberia, mainly in the far north and west. It contributed much less to Mesolithic Denmark and France, and not at all (or insignificantly) to Italy and the British Isles. One explanation is that this is the people that first reached and made use of the Atlantic marine resources, and then spread south along the coast, while the “Italians” settled the inland and in some regions eventually replaced it completely. I remember a weird mt-DNA haplotype that has it maximums in Senegal, Iberia and the Sami. Could that be connected? Anyhow, while the Mesolithic comes out largely as a time of continuity and cultural diffusion in Central/Western Europe, its initial phase must have been much more complex. Scandinavia and the Baltic seem to show something very different, with full or partial replacements during the Mesolithic. Or are those patterns really regional variation that shows up as temporal change because of skewed sampling?

     From the start of the Neolithic, several full or near full population replacements can be shown. Here I’ll point to the really cool graphs, especially F3 and F4. Look at the clear breaks in time and space when the Anatolian Farmers arrive. Look at how local ancestry resurges (or not) after a while. Look how it pops up in single samples long after its apparent replacement. Look how the farmers are replaced by people with Steppe ancestry.

     They identify a Mesolithic population at the middle Don that “contributed significantly to Yamnaya”. Not only significantly, methinks. It could be the source population. Or at least: When this population is used as a source element, it shows up in later populations as the major part of the Steppe component. The other elements are Caucasus HG and Anatolian Farmers.

     But look how the Steppe mix changes in time and space. The first wave, with more Caucasus and nearly without AF ancestry, is seen in Siberia, as should be expected, but also in the Baltic. The Baltic is interesting. After a couple of centuries this population is changed, and it’s the Caucasus component that is reduced. It seems to me that it’s been admixed about 50/50 with a closely related population without the Caucasus element (or replaced by such a mix), resulting in what’s essentially the Corded Ware people.

     But while Corded Ware spread all over, in the Baltic it’s replaced again by what seems to be its CHG-free source. I wonder where that came from. I would say Globular Amphora, but it can’t be that, or at least not all of that, since it’s not in Poland before the Yamnaya expansion. I think it’s hiding in the Forest Steppe, or maybe in Belarus. It might be a more northern wave of early Yamnaya pastoralists, lurking unsampled on the outskirts of GAC until its southern cousins arrive. I also think it’s the population that brings R1-a to Corded Ware and beyond.

     Scandinavia also had several population waves after the arrival of Steppe ancestry, dominated by different male lineages. The first is R1-a Corded Ware, then almost full replacement with Central/Western European R1-b, and then I1, which I think must come from the Pitted Ware people, those stubborn marine harvesters of the Baltic. We could actually hypothesize that Germanic is what happened when PWC peoples adopted Indo-European from their neighbors and trade in amber and other northern goods for bronze made them rich and territorially expansive.

     This feeds into this and this.

     There’s more, but I have to stop somewhere.
416. languagehat says

     August 12, 2023 at 8:28 am

     Thanks for that very clear analysis! (“Clear” = I can understand most of it.)
417. Stu Clayton says

     August 12, 2023 at 12:06 pm

     There’s more, but I have to stop somewhere.

     [When the second volume of that work appeared, it was quite in order that it should be presented to His Royal Highness in like manner. The prince received the author with much good nature and affability, saying to him, as he laid the quarto on the table:]

     Another d-mn’d, thick, square comment ! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr Engen ?

     #
     . . . I have presumed to mark the moment of conception: I shall now commemorate the hour of my final deliverance. It was on the day, or rather night, of the 27th of June, 1787, between the hours of eleven and twelve, that I wrote the last lines of the last page, in a summer-house in my garden [At Lausanne]. After laying down my pen, I took several turns in a berceau, or covered walk of acacias, which commands a prospect of the country, the lake, and the mountains. The air was temperate, the sky was serene, the silver orb of the moon was reflected from the waters, and all nature was silent. I will not dissemble the first emotion of joy on recovery of my freedom, and, perhaps, the establishment of my fame.
     — Autobiography of Edward Gibbon (World’s Classics edn.,1907), pp. 155-9,160,205.
     #

     Anecdotes about Edward Gibbon
418. John Cowan says

     August 12, 2023 at 1:16 pm

     All this talk of “complete replacement”, much less multiple complete replacements, seems to me to be going far beyond what evidence we could possibly have. What kind of sense does it make to look at a couple of dozen people in one place at time t₀ and another couple of dozen people in another place at time t₁ who don’t have the same haplotypes, and conclude that the population of Scandinavia (or whatever large geographic area) was totally replaced between t₀ and t₁? If we compare the language of Lancaster County, PA in the early 18C with the language of South Philadelphia today, can we conclude that the “language of Pennsylvania” was formerly Pennsylvania German, but that this has been totally replaced by AAVE?
419. Trond Engen says

     August 12, 2023 at 3:27 pm

     A dozen of people here and a dozen there at another time says nothing. But an increasingly fine-grained net in time and space says more. But what does it say? Nothing directly about language, but much about populations, and populations are made of people, and people have language. People learn that language (or those languages) from people around them, often their parents. They also get their genes from people around them, even more often their parents, so transmission of language correlates strongly with transmission of genes. It’s easier for a person to acquire or lose language than genes, so the correlation isn’t perfect, and it’s reason to believe that it’s weaker with time. What does that mean? Abrupt changes in the genetic makeup of a geographical area are likely to mean change in language, just as it means change in archaeological culture. Slow changes has less to tell, but since language change often follows economic opportunities or social prestige, some scenarios are more likely than others.

     If the genetic traces of a population disappears from the archaeological record without ever reappearing, that’s a population replacement. There’s very little chance that the language of the disappeared aboriginals would have been taken up by the newcomers, so unless they already had been in contact for a long time, that would seem to mean language shift. Full or near full replacement really seems to have happened in Scandinavia at least a couple of times. Nothing is known for certain about the mechanisms, but we can imagine that the hunter-gatherers were flexible enough to be pushed out to the outskirts by the first farmers. When the first farmers in turn were replaced by Corded Ware-related people from the continent, depopulation from the plague or other epidemics is suspected to have been important.

     When a population suddenly disappears from the record and then reappears, maybe gradually as a minority element in later population, it’s not a complete replacement, but a temporary marginalization. Even here it’s hard to see how that would transfer language from the aboriginals to the newcomers. Maybe the marginalized hunter–gatherers of Scandinavia would have made a gradual rebound if the farmers had gotten more than a few centuries, but we don’t know. Or actually we do, because we do carry a proportion of their genes today, but we don’t speak their language.

     When what you see is a new population that merges native and newcomer ancestry, that’s admixture for the geneticists. Which language (or languages) that end up being spoken is a hard guess. Proportions of ancestry, economic advantage and cultural prestige are at least indicators, but they don’t always point in the same direction, and even if they do it’s not determinism. In the Iberian peninsula the male line of the First Farmers was almost completely replaced by Yamnaya in a couple of generations. That’s not a full replacement, since most of the total gene pool is from the local females, but it also tells of social prestige and economic advantage. A lot of advantage and prestige, because it’s incredibly fast. Still, the Basques speak Basque. Was that the language of the mothers? Dmitry once suggested that Basque came in a first wave from the Steppe and actually was the language that replaced that of the First Farmers. If so, it didn’t replace the native languages in all Iberia, or other languages came later and replaced it in much of the peninsula without the same sort of massive event.

     In Scandinavia, after the Corded Ware wave, there doesn’t seem to have been any full population replacements, but there are huge changes in the male line along with smaller changes in the overall genetic makeup, probably meaning that new people came in and gained a social advantage also here. We can’t know which of all these population waves that carried language, much less which language they carried, or exactly which wave that brought (Pre-)Proto-Germanic. At least not yet, and maybe never.

     And finally yes, there is a clear risk of over-interpreting small samples. That’s why I end the paragraph on Mesolithic replacements in Scandinavia and the Baltic with a question.
420. Dmitry Pruss says

     August 12, 2023 at 4:57 pm

     I worry more not about the samples sizes of the ancient genomes (they are becoming unassailable) but about systematic biases of sampling. If a culture cremated its dead, or buried it in acidic soil (commonplace in wooded Northern Europe) or in scattered and inauspicious places, then it will tend to get lost from sight.
     Living fossils have been discovered time and time again in biology.
     Languages, cultures, and populations can and do survive in small, undesirable habitats (although it’s a lot harder for civilizations relying on large masses of people and specialized labor than for humble foragers).
     So an observed replacement may have been far less complete than it seemed, at the time frames in the analysis. Western hunter-gatherer ancestry made a quite spectacular comeback in Late Neolithic, so it wasn’t gone for good …
421. Trond Engen says

     August 12, 2023 at 5:47 pm

     Sure. The fact that a skeleton is preserved makes it special enough that it shouldn’t be taken as completely representative — and more so the more rare it is.

     I also agree that complete population replacement is an extreme event, but it does happen. Newfoundland and Tasmania are recent examples of marginalization of the native population leading to quick extinction. Other, less isolated populations may be experiencing rebound.
422. AntC says

     August 12, 2023 at 6:24 pm

     Tasmania … examples of marginalization of the native population leading to quick extinction.

     Hmm. In Tasmania that needed firearms.

     Wouldn’t an invader enslave the local population? Yes, that’d maybe lead to no preservation of their skeletons; but it might will give some language transfer. At least vocab for unfamiliar (to the invaders) stuff.
423. Trond Engen says

     August 12, 2023 at 6:39 pm

     Firearms, and disease, and marginalization.

     Enslavement is one option. But maybe you just want Canaan and not the Canaanites.
424. Trond Engen says

     August 13, 2023 at 6:20 am

     Back to Allentoft et al’s F4.

     I like that there are timelines of isotope levels. The sudden change in diet away from marine sources with the arrival of the farmers is very visible in the δ13C and δ15N plots. The Strontium plot may show that the farmers were more mobile during their lifetime, or that they had access to (or had to resort to) more varied food sources.

     They even plot a timeline of vegetation cover inferred from pollen analysis of lake sediments. My first thought was that something dramatic must have happened to the Neolithic economy around 5000 BP, and even more just before the Battle Axe transition, but apparently not. This timeline is from a single lake in Zealand, and the changes probably reflect the local slash-and-burn-cycles. The end of the last clearing episode, around 4850 BP, could be different though, since it’s followed by primary forest.regrowth. This lasts for a century until the first people with Steppe ancestry arrive. The neolithic chamber grave in Gökhem/Falköping in Sweden where Yersinia pestis infection was found in several of the skeletons is dated to ~4900 BP.

     The plots of physical type are neat too, although I’d have thought it would be even more interesting to look for and plot genetic adaptations to diet and disease. And for the actual diseases, obviously. I imagined testing for germs and antibodies was standard by now.
425. Trond Engen says

     August 13, 2023 at 6:34 am

     Also, to tie this up with the plague theme upthread: There’s evidence that riverine hunter-gatherers caught Y. pseudotuberculosis from beavers. Allentoft et al have identified a possible source population for the Yamnaya. living as hunter-gatherers at the middle Don. It’s just the type of population you’d expect to develop genetic resistance to Y. pseudotuberculosis and presumably even early strains of Y. pestis
426. David Marjanović says

     August 13, 2023 at 9:54 am

     (I’m disappointed to find there’s no Gökhem in Turkey.)
427. Brett says

     August 13, 2023 at 2:42 pm

     @Trond Engen: Your mention of Canaan actually made me think about how hard it probably is to have wholesale population replacement without either modern military and transportation technologies, or previous isolation that made one people particularly vulnerable to diseases carried by the other. In spite of the lore that the Canaanites were either slain or driven out of the large swaths of territory by the Hebrews (who later retconned their history to make this kind of genocidal behavior not merely necessary, but an affirmative goal), there is little evidence of significant genetic changes among the Afro-Asiatic people of the Levant in the second millennium B. C. E.
428. Trond Engen says

     August 13, 2023 at 5:23 pm

     True enough. It goes to show how extreme a full replacement is. Or how extreme it is if it’s achieved by manual action. In the case of Scandinavia. it’s not actually a complete replacement in the whole peninsula, but in the archaeological record from the southern/central parts, and it wasn’t necessarily violent (but it certainly may have been).

     The first shift might have been voluntary, in the sense that the hunter-gatherers just moved away from the newcomers. They were probably used to move when resources became sparse or the neighborhood unpleasant. If there were cases of armed resistance, the aboriginals were too few and far between to win in the long run. Some moved far away, others would have stayed on the outskirts and established relations with the farming economy, but may have been slowly wiped out by new diseases (and alcohol?). The SHG genes did eventually rebound, but probably by way of the Pitted Ware Culture*.

     The second shift may have been repopulation after a devastating pandemic. Maybe there were so few of the Funnel Beaker farmers left that their genes were crowded out in a couple of generations without any trace in the record. If Y. pestis was endemic, they would have had an evolutionary disadvantage, and if it was noticed that children of mixed marriages were at high risk, that disadvantage might have been compounded by stigma.

     * The PWC was something else. It was based on harvesting economy and neolithic technology and took up genes from both Funnel Beaker and Corded Ware. I believe that its establishment might have been a deliberate political response to encroaching farmers and that it may have put up a common organization and even some sort of territorial defense. If there was a pandemic in 4900 BP, it weathered it better than the farmers and expanded into former Funnel Beaker realms. After the Yamnaya intrusion it stayed “independent” for centuries, until it eventually became a founding member of the Nordic Bronze Age culture. I don’t know who took over who in that transaction. Or that’s what I’ve been thinking. It bothers me that there’s no visible Pitted Ware period in the Scandinavian timeline.
429. John Cowan says

     August 14, 2023 at 1:51 am

     Tasmania … examples of marginalization of the native population leading to quick extinction.

     There are no full-blood Native Tasmanians now, but there are rather more N.T.s than there were in 1803 when British colonization began. so they are not extinct in a genetic sense. Their languages are extinct, it’s true.
430. Trond Engen says

     August 14, 2023 at 2:22 am

     Me: (and alcohol?)

     No, forget that. Alcohol can’t have been very available as a traded commodity.

     But I do wonder if and when there’s been selection for genetic resistance to alcoholic diseases in populations that actually used and produced alcohol. If there is such a thing at all. Maybe cheap liquor just hasn’t been around long enough for selection to work.
431. Trond Engen says

     August 14, 2023 at 2:31 am

     @John C.: You’re right. I was wrong. It seems that modern examples of replacements with no genetic legacy are very hard to find.
432. Christopher Culver says

     August 14, 2023 at 3:44 am

     … may have been slowly wiped out by new diseases (and alcohol?)

     Is there any case of an indigenous population being severely impacted by alcohol prior to the invention of distillation? It seems hard to believe that just beer/wine/kumis could have the same detrimental effects that we saw with Native Americans and real firewater.
433. AntC says

     August 14, 2023 at 4:18 am

     just beer

     In early settler New Zealand, the only way to keep ‘water’ safe to drink was via fermentation. From early accounts, it seems whalers/sealers/gold panners/lumberers (if that’s the word) spent most of their time slightly sozzled.

     OTOH as fast as those ne’er-do-wells got here, the priests were hot on their heels (having moved through the Pacific Islands already). Their temperance got in amongst the natives pretty thoroughly.

     So here it was the guns and disease formula.
434. Trond Engen says

     August 14, 2023 at 5:11 am

     Yeah. I slept on the idea and took it back. What I mean is that it would be interesting to see if there’s been selection on genes associated with risk of alcoholism.
435. Lars Mathiesen (he/him/his) says

     August 14, 2023 at 8:53 am

     A relatively distant relation was adopted from SE Asia, and as a young adult they developed a alcohol dependency. At the time the family was living in the US, and the “system” told them that there was a genetic predisposition in the adoptee’s ethnicity. (The parents used it as a “not our fault” card, outside observers found it prudent to keep the peace).

     (This was in the 90s, and I doubt there was any scientific backing that we’d accept today).
436. Dmitry Pruss says

     August 14, 2023 at 11:40 am

     Back to the topic of new publications about the Bronze Age Eastern Europe.
     A paper on Fatyanovo and Abashevo was published in Russian in May but just got to my attention
     https://www.researchgate.net/publication/370414570_Ancient_DNA_of_the_Bearers_of_the_Fatyanovo_and_Abashevo_Cultures_Concerning_Migrations_of_the_Bronze_Age_people_in_the_Forest_Belt_on_the_Russian_Plain

     It appears to disprove the notion that Fatyanovo was a direct predecessor of Abashevo. The signature Abashevo burial of men killed in a battle at Pepkino Mound in today’s Mari-El (Middle Volga) is united by burial customs but turns out to be a bipartite amalgamated society, with relatives buried near each other.
     One end of the burial trench is occupied by bodies of young men who, as per isotopic composition, grew up a few hundred miles to the West in Oka Basin. They frequently harbor mtDNA haplogroups dating back to Neolithic Europeans, and typical for Corded Ware, while their Y chromosomes are shared with Fatyanovo and some later East Steppe peoples. Their grave goods include various bone implements.
     In contrast, the other side of the grave includes a man buried with bronze metallurgy tools, and hailing from the Ural mountains according to the isotope composition. He and his neighbors share a different branch of R1a Y-chromosomes, common with Sintashta and several other Steppe peoples.
     The metal of Abashevo has been reported to come from the Southern Ural mines, while their pottery and jewelry styles are decidedly Corded Ware (and distinct from Fatyanovo).

     So the conclusion appears to be that after Fatyanovo, there were other waves of migrations from ~ Germany to the Russian plain, and that Abashevo peoples made the migration over the course of two or more generations, aided by a tribal merger with a local bronze-making people.

     (Such amalgamations of professional casts are not unheard of, just think of my and Trond’s fav Seima-Turbino phenomenon)
437. David Marjanović says

     August 14, 2023 at 12:09 pm

     LBK? Not Corded Ware?
438. Dmitry Pruss says

     August 14, 2023 at 12:56 pm

     Right, my mistake but it’s too late to edit it
439. languagehat says

     August 14, 2023 at 1:00 pm

     I’m happy to fix it, but should it be changed both times?
440. Dmitry Pruss says

     August 14, 2023 at 1:02 pm

     Thank you LH, yes
441. Brett says

     August 14, 2023 at 1:03 pm

     @Trond Engen: The rates of alcoholism among American Indians (about six times the national average in the United States, last time I checked) seems pretty unlikely to be a chance effect. Distilled liquors are only a few centuries old, so that probably is not what people in the Old World adapted to. However, drinks with moderate alcohol content like wine are commonplace in the Old World, in a way they probably never were in the pre-Columbian Americas.
442. Y says

     August 14, 2023 at 1:24 pm

     The rates of alcoholism among American Indians (about six times the national average in the United States, last time I checked)

     This has 8.0% of American Indians over 18 with reported heavy alcohol use in the past month, as compared with 7.2% of Whites. And that does not go further into factors such as unemployment and isolation. I think the case for a genetic factor is weak.
443. Dmitry Pruss says

     August 14, 2023 at 1:52 pm

     There is a lot of past talk about “different alcohol genetics” but it’s a substantially misconstrued legacy of a pre-genomic era. Decades ago, it was already commonplace knowledge that Asians and Native Americans tend to have a less productive version of alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH), an enzyme which removes alcohol from circulation. And it’s heritable. So in the ancient age of the human genetics ADH has become the poster child of the notion that there are biochemical differences between “races”. Some people made far reaching superiority arguments out of this observation, some tried to make far-fetched “ethnic genetic weapons” based on it (in the times of USSR’s Sinophobia, Soviet military biologists ran some pilot ADH weaponization projects using Yakuts in lieu of Chinese), and most people just kind of assumed that, aha, this must be why Native Americans were so susceptible to alcoholism. But the ADH link is more complicated. It matters a lot for the rate of body’s natural alcohol detox, true … but the genetic component of alcohol dependence is comprised of great many other factors. Incidentally a study in the UK Biobank showed that genetic predisposition to alcohol dependence doesn’t change from generation to generation, contrary to the old eugenicists’ wild guess that the drunkards out-proliferate them…
444. Trond Engen says

     August 14, 2023 at 1:52 pm

     There’s a lot of contradictory numbers out there, not at least because the problem is hard to define and quantify. It’s also a fraught issue in a contemporary setting, for good reasons. But perhaps it’s easier to handle historically, and as just one set of many genetic variables correlated with health.
445. David Marjanović says

     August 14, 2023 at 2:13 pm

     Also, the product that alcohol dehydrogenase makes is a toxic aldehyde; if you don’t make enough of the next enzyme in the chain, aldehyde dehydrogenase, you have a problem…

     The version of the story I heard was actually that East Asians’ alcohol dehydrogenase is so fast that the aldehyde dehydrogenase can’t keep up.
446. Trond Engen says

     August 14, 2023 at 2:19 pm

     Dmitry: But the ADH link is more complicated. It matters a lot for the rate of body’s natural alcohol detox, true … but the genetic component of alcohol dependence is comprised of great many other factors.

     No doubt. I was careful not to name ADH. I saw a study not long ago that identified a number of genes associated with alcohol consumption, most of them probably subtly regulatory in complex interaction, if I remember correctly. It’s not at all clear that evolution would have had enough time to work on that, or if there were any benefits in changing it. But all the more interesting to see if anything did happen in our recent genetic history

     Incidentally a study in the UK Biobank showed that genetic predisposition to alcohol dependence doesn’t change from generation to generation, contrary to the old eugenicists’ wild guess that the drunkards out-proliferate them…

     So evolutionary neutral, then?
447. Trond Engen says

     August 14, 2023 at 2:32 pm

     To clarify: My reason to mention alcohol in the context of marginalized hunter-gatherers was its compounding effect on social factors related to marginalization, but I realized that this was probably less of an issue before the invention of the still, and that what I’m actually interested in is if there’s been genetic adaptation in societies with regular access to alcohol.
448. Dmitry Pruss says

     August 14, 2023 at 2:38 pm

     the problem is hard to define and quantify
     plenty of good recent papers did quantify it with strong results. The problem is with cultural confounding rather than with quantification per se. People of different ethnic / regional / religious backgrounds can drink more or drink less for social and cultural reasons, and it can be misconstrued as a genetic effect.
     For example, in a classic 10 years old study, the “Asian / Native American” ADH variant was found to be strongly protective against alcoholism (some 3-fold difference in odds) in White and Black Americans, but one might have argued that it’s because we are observing effects of an Asian admixture which is also cultural, and causes people to drink less for non-genetic reasons.
     Luckily it’s also known to reduce the odds of alcohol abuse by about 4-fold in the Asian populations as well, in multiple studies, so in this case one comes to the conclusion that the effect is indeed biological rather than cultural.
     https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3252425/
     Anyway, in the hindsight of the genomic era it’s pretty clear that the old-age tale of “Asian alcohol genetics” got it backwards.

     Did you see my actual ancient DNA post, BTW, Trond? It’s easy to get it lost in an off-track discussion
449. languagehat says

     August 14, 2023 at 2:39 pm

     Corded Ware problem fixed!
450. Trond Engen says

     August 14, 2023 at 2:54 pm

     @Dmitry: Thanks, I’ve seen it! I just wanted to get to my computer before following the link. It’s hard enough reading Russian through automated translation if I shouldn’t also do it on a small screen.

     Before trying to read the paper I wonder:
     – if the multi-ethnic joint venture operation that was (early) Sintashta started already here.
     – if there’s operational continuity between Fatyonovo and the western branch of Seima-Turbino.
451. Trond Engen says

     August 14, 2023 at 5:03 pm

     Still not really reading, but:

     This study addresses a fundamental question of the origins and migration patterns of paleopopulations of the Fatyanovo and the Middle Volga Abashevo archaeological cultures. It is for the first time that we report a paleogenetic analysis of 14 Abashevo individuals (Pepkino and Starshy Nikitinsky sites). Besides, we analysed ancient DNA samples of 25 Fatyanovo individuals.

     Specifically, we performed analyses of STR marker and haplogroups of the Y chromosome, which revealed the distinct R1a (Z93) haplogroup in Fatyanovo samples. It indicates the influence of the founder effect and gene drift, confirming the hypothesis of their migrant origin. In contrast, the Abashevo culture samples are heterogenous, as we discovered 2 groups with different origins on the paternal line. To be more specific, three men from Pepkino mound are haplogroup R1b (Z2103) carriers, while seven other individuals have haplogroup R1a (Z93>Z94). In addition, close relatives with identical STR haplotypes of the Y-chromosome were identified in both Fatyanovo and Abashevo groups.

     The comparative analyses of autosomal markers from 19 samples and previously published data uncovered similarities between Abashevo men from Pepkino mound (the haplogroup R1a (Z93>Z94)) with the Fatyanovo people, as well as with some representatives of the Unetice culture. These results are suggestive of the genetic continuity in the Russian Plain. Yet, less recent ancestors of Abashevo group interred in Pepkino mound could have migrated from the same region as the Fatyanovo predesessors.

     Únětice? Maybe I should have known, but this blew my mind. Carpathian bronzeworkers trekking east towards the mines of Ural? The cultures were contemporary. Showing that individual people must have been much more mobile than we often imagine. Should we think that a transcontinental clan system (or some such) was in operation, granting passage and accomodation?

     Also: This from 2020 on the Fatyanovo and related cultures. Untangling the multiethnic makeup of Sintashta and the Seima-Turbino system is important for understanding the forming phases of Indo-Iranian, Uralic and maybe Turkic. Sintashta may have inherited the multiethnic profile from Abashevo, and Abashevo may well have it from Fatyanovo and Volosovo.

     Also also: The fast route between Abashevo and Northern and Western Europe might have been Upper Volga and the Baltic Sea.
452. Dmitry Pruss says

     August 14, 2023 at 5:19 pm

     Únětice
     That’s Fig. 4 and it’s kind of the other way around, if you trust the analysis (and you shouldn’t).

     In their so-called autosomal data, two Únětice individuals appear to be similar to the main Fatyanovo and Abashevo cluster, as if travelled back West. One has to realize that the autosomal data in this analysis is incredibly limited (100 loci selected for a chance to make guesses about the ancients’ appearance) and therefore subject to high noise. Not sure how much to trust it. It’s my never stopping gripe, that researchers in the less technologically advanced countries and centers waste ancient DNA in cheaper, but limited utility applications. One actually needs less DNA to read the whole genome than to read these 100 locations!

     To further underscore how poor is their autosomal DNA analysis, they show on the same picture that two of their Fatyanovo individuals, and one from Saag’s earlier publication, landed in a “cluster” made of completely assorted peoples of different ages and areas.
453. John Cowan says

     August 16, 2023 at 4:47 pm

     It seems that modern examples of replacements with no genetic legacy are very hard to find.

     Which suggests to me that if guns, germs, and gas chambers[*] can’t do it, it can’t be done at all.

     [*] Amazingly, some 35% of Canadian Jews (about 330,000 people, 1.5% of all Canadians) are Holocaust survivors or their descendants. The comparable figure for the U.S. is 8%, out of about 8 million Jews, 2.5% of the U.S. population.
454. Lameen says

     August 17, 2023 at 10:56 am

     The genomic history of the indigenous people of the Canary Islands may be of interest. Looks like overwhelmingly Berber Y-haplogroups. The islands divide neatly into two clusters, “with all western islands (El Hierro, La Palma, La Gomera, and Tenerife) placed closer to Upper Paleolithic and Early Neolithic North Africans, and all eastern islands (Gran Canaria, Fuerteventura, and Lanzarote) cluster closer to ancient and modern Europeans”.

     Data from the CIP [Canary indigenous people], who colonized the archipelago around the first centuries CE, indicate that this North African population was composed of four main ancestral components. First, as observed for Late Neolithic Moroccans5, the Canarian indigenous people have both North African Paleolithic/Early Neolithic and European Early Neolithic components. However, the contribution of the North African Paleolithic/Early Neolithic component is greater in the indigenous people than in the Kef El Baroud individuals, confirming that the impact of European Neolithic migrations was not homogenous in the North African region. In addition, the indigenous people show the presence of a steppe component, most probably associated with the migration of North Mediterranean populations into North Africa during the Bronze or the Iron Ages. Finally, we detect a small sub-Saharan African component implying the existence of trans-Saharan migrations in North Africa already before the first centuries CE, predating such gene flow inferred from modern DNA data6,42.
455. Trond Engen says

     August 17, 2023 at 1:31 pm

     That sounds like two distinct migrations. The first colonized the whole Canary, the second only the eastern islands. Should the substrate hunters look for two distinct substrates too?
456. PlasticPaddy says

     August 17, 2023 at 1:48 pm

     @Lameen
     Re sub-Saharan component, at the risk of seeming politically incorrect, are we talking about trade goods (i.e., slaves) rather than “trans-Saharan migrations”?
457. David Eddyshaw says

     August 17, 2023 at 2:26 pm

     I am delighted to discover that my son therefore seems to have married into ancient Berber stock.
458. Lameen says

     August 18, 2023 at 2:17 am

     Trond: It would be interesting to re-examine the scanty attestations of Guanche and see if they can better be accounted for in terms of two languages rather than one.

     PlasticPaddy: It’s possible – at a rather more easterly location in modern Libya, Herodotus attests to slave raids southwards, and maybe that was already happening in Mauritania. But it can’t be taken for granted. Perhaps this reflects small preexisting Saharan populations (“Melanogaetulians”?), or occasional arrivals by pirogue from the mouth of the Senegal, or something else. In historic times, the Guanches were regular targets for European slave raids, but not as far as I know significant purchasers.

     David: A clear sign of his good taste. Wishing you many happy Macaronesian grandchildren!
459. Y says

     August 18, 2023 at 2:46 am

     Quoth Lameen:

     As for Guanche, as Galand [here] reminded us recently, we don’t even know for sure that it is Berber; all we know is that it contains a number of obviously Berber words, alongside a number of very basic words that look nothing like Berber. That could reflect common ancestry, or it could reflect later contact.
460. Trond Engen says

     August 18, 2023 at 7:27 am

     I thought I remembered reading something like that.
461. Dmitry Pruss says

     August 22, 2023 at 3:11 pm

     Another possible paleogenomic hint at the Indo-Iranian origins from the analysis of a 3-generation burial of a post-Sintashta Alakul Culture clan burial complex at kurgan-1 of Nepluyevsky necropolis, just 50 km N of Sintashta but a few centuries younger. These people are linked by distant relationships with the ancient graves from Altay and Tian Shan, The core of the patrilocal / exogamous family was a group of brothers sharing, surprisingly, Y-haplogroup Q-L275 (Q1b), of Siberian origins and present at lower levels in today’s Iranians and Indians (and in Iron Age Xinjiang), although 2 very distant male relatives with the more classic Y-haplogroup R1a were also buried near the top of their mound. One of the two wives of the clan’s leader also had substantial local Siberian / Central Asian ancestry, although her mtDNA was purely Corded Ware-like. The clan’s stopover at this location was short-lived, at most a few decades before they moved on.

     So here we have population mixing at the forest-steppe interface of Western Siberia, and autosomal and Y-DNA links to the locations much further East and South in the centuries that followed.

     https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2303574120
462. Trond Engen says

     August 22, 2023 at 5:18 pm

     Oh, interesting! Is this intermarriage between ethnic groups in the Sintashta alliance, or could it be long-distance alliance-building?
463. Dmitry Pruss says

     August 22, 2023 at 6:04 pm

     There is no Strontium isotope mobility analysis in the Neplyuevka paper. But it’s dated to Late Alakul when the distant migrations across the Eastern Steppe were already the fiat acompli.
464. John Cowan says

     August 24, 2023 at 5:34 am

     I ran into yet another unfortunate rake today, attributed to Doris, Dee, Rose, and Bonnie Beetem:

     As I walked along on the sands of Arrakis
     As I walked along on Arrakis at noon,
     I saw a young Fremen all dressed in a stillsuit
     A-ridin’ a sandworm ‘way out on a dune.

     I see by your stillsuit that you are a Fremen,
     You see by my stillsuit that I’m a Fremen too.
     We see by our stillsuits that we are both Fremen.
     Climb down from your worm, I’ll share water with you.

     He was a Fedaykin, a Fremen commander.
     He was a Fedaykin, though only a lad.
     We’ll crush the cruel Baron and win for Atreides.
     The green and black banner will rule the jihad.

     I see in a vision this young Fremen dying.
     I see that he dies in a Sietch Tabr cave.
     He gives me his life and the tribe gets his water;
     Thirty-three liters–the rest to the grave.
465. Brett says

     August 24, 2023 at 10:53 am

     The second line surely ought to be: “Walked without rhythm on Arrakis at noon.”
466. Y says

     August 24, 2023 at 11:57 am

     Some comments on Heggarty et al. by Andrew Garrett, a co-author of Chang et al., here. He makes several points which didn’t come up in this discussion.

     He also refers to a paper by Goldstein et al., Divergence-time estimation in Indo-European: The case of Latin, which uses similar methods to look at the diversification of Romance. Here the ground truth is much better understood.
467. Trond Engen says

     August 24, 2023 at 6:59 pm

     Dmitry: There is no Strontium isotope mobility analysis in the Neplyuevka paper. But it’s dated to Late Alakul when the distant migrations across the Eastern Steppe were already the fiat acompli.

     True, but intermarriage within the multi-ethnic Sintashta communities would be expected, so it’s interesting if for some reason it didn’t happen. It’s also interesting if Andronovo clans established long-distance relationships before their expansion.
468. Trond Engen says

     August 24, 2023 at 7:14 pm

     @Y: Thanks!

     “I’ll maintain that what’s going on now is development of methods with IE as a test case. It’s just too bad that it has to be framed as solutions to IE problems.”
469. Hans says

     September 22, 2023 at 12:42 pm

     I guess this is the best place to put this:
     New Indo-European language discovered.
     Well, it’s a new minor Anatolian language from the Boghazköy archives, so nothing too surprising, but I guess it’s worth notifying the Hattery.
470. Trond Engen says

     September 22, 2023 at 1:21 pm

     As I just wrote to Hat in an email:

     It seems that the Hittites collected the rituals (or centralized the cults) of the conquered peoples making up the empire. If so, more languages can surely be expected to come.

     The news about this specific language is a little premature, maybe, since all they can say so far is that it was spoken in a region called Kalasma, that it’s Anatolian, and that within Anatolian it seems to share features with Luwian.
471. languagehat says

     September 22, 2023 at 1:33 pm

     Hans commented as I was putting together a post on it, which is now up.
472. Trond Engen says

     September 22, 2023 at 1:49 pm

     Thanks. I took my comment over there. Might be fun trying to discuss a subject in the designated thread for a change.
473. David Marjanović says

     September 22, 2023 at 4:13 pm

     It seems that the Hittites collected the rituals (or centralized the cults) of the conquered peoples making up the empire.

     Like the Romans, the Hittites believed that all deities anyone worshipped were real, so they had to worship them too or risk pissing them off.

     Unlike the Romans, the Hittites believed the worship had to be done in the original language. Quite a few languages are known today exclusively from prayers in a Hittite context.
474. Y says

     September 22, 2023 at 10:24 pm

     Like the Romans, the Hittites believed that all deities anyone worshipped were real, so they had to worship them too or risk pissing them off.

     The explanation I heard (from my middle school history teacher) was that the Pantheon, in particular, was meant to acknowledge and draw a wide spectrum of worshippers, but in centralizing them, make them subject to the same political power.
475. John Cowan says

     September 23, 2023 at 12:20 am

     BTW comments which don’t reflect the values of this community are kind of like eyesores…

     Indeed. I apologize and withdraw the remark.

     What is this yok of which you speak?

     I’m still wondering.

     JC: So perhaps it may be the case that our presently split population will never materialize into an actual division between merged and unmerged speakers?

     DM: Yes, but that is astronomically unlikely because it would require an improbably low rate of evolution along both of these branches.

     To restate: Linguist A believes that the population has split between KIT-FLEECE mergers and KIT-FLEECE non-mergers and this will be detectable a century from now. Linguist B says there is no evidence for any such split. Linguist A agrees that there is no evidence, but says the absence of a split would imply something improbable happened along both branches.

     What stops Linguist B from saying that there is no reason to believe that there are two branches at all, given the lack of empirical evidence as of now?

     (Theologian A says that it is wildly unlikely that every single person will be saved from Hell, and therefore universalism is almost certainly not true. Theologian B says there is no empirical evidence that Hell exists at all. How is Theologian A to refute this?)
476. January First-of-May says

     September 23, 2023 at 6:51 am

     What is this yok of which you speak?

     Presumably this: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yok#Turkish

     (or probably rather some of its Central Asian cognates, but AFAICT those are usually spelled differently)
477. Stu Clayton says

     September 23, 2023 at 7:11 am

     How is Theologian A to refute this?

     By reminding B that theology is not linguistics.
478. David Marjanović says

     September 23, 2023 at 10:12 am

     So perhaps it may be the case that our presently split population will never materialize into an actual division between merged and unmerged speakers?

     DM: Yes, but that is astronomically unlikely because it would require an improbably low rate of evolution along both of these branches.

     […] What stops Linguist B from saying that there is no reason to believe that there are two branches at all, given the lack of empirical evidence as of now?

     Here’s the context again:

     The last 2 of the 3 paragraphs of 5.3 (“Estimating Chronology”) read like an angry reply to a reviewer:

     The chronological estimation is based on these two parameters c and σ, and the set of known date calibrations of all languages in the data set (§4). Note that this approach has nothing to do with the early and now discredited technique of ‘glottochronology’ in linguistics (75). That was founded on an assumed constant rate r of change/retention in cognacy. In the relaxed clock model used here, there is nothing — no parameter setting — that corresponds to any ‘glottochronological constant’, certainly not the lineage ‘birth rate’ and ‘death rate’ parameters mentioned in §5.2 above. Those refer to the birth and death of lineages, i.e. splits and extinctions respectively, in the phylogeny. They do not refer to changes or ‘mutations’ in the state of a data character switching between being absent (0) and present (1) along branches in the tree.

     This distinction is best understood also by clarifying the relationship between branching events in the phylogeny, and change events in language data. Strictly, branching events occur independently of, and are not defined by, actual changes in the language data. Once a split has arisen, however, the conditions are set in which different changes can then arise along the different branches. Similarly in actual language histories, a speaker population may split into two (by some long-distance migration, for example), but that need not automatically create language changes. It does, however, establish newly separated speaker populations whose language lineages may thereafter undergo different changes, and thus progressively diverge from each other.

     So you’re looking at this from the wrong side. None of this is meant to predict the future from the present. This part of the model simulates tree growth: Every once in a while, a split happens, or a branch stops growing. Given various parameters, classes trees of different shapes and sizes will result.

     (I can’t find this on Wikipedia. Google Scholar finds plenty for fossilized birth-death model, though.)

     Some of these can’t fit the evolution of the data: if a character state changed along a branch, the branch had to exist first, so any tree that has that branch appearing too late is out. Splits must happen at the same time as or earlier than any changes to character states in the resulting branches.
479. John Cowan says

     September 23, 2023 at 1:44 pm

     Similarly in actual language histories, a speaker population may split into two (by some long-distance migration, for example), but that need not automatically create language changes.

     Ah, so this is the key to it: split means a division of the population, and not (ut est eorum mos) a division of the language they speak. Now it makes sense.
480. Y says

     September 23, 2023 at 10:07 pm

     A new paper, Genome-wide variation in the Angolan Namib Desert reveals unique pre-Bantu ancestry, by Oliveira, Fehn, Amorim, Stoneking, and Rocha, also discussed at phys.org. The genetic news are that there is a very old genetic component which shows up in people of the Angolan Namib Desert, distinct from that of other Khoisan speakers (but apparently showing traces in Sandawe-speaking and other East African populations). The linguistic news are that there are still two speakers of Kwadi, thought to have been extinct since the 1960s.
481. David Eddyshaw says

     September 23, 2023 at 10:17 pm

     Güldemann (IIRC) reckons that Khoe-Kwadi arrived in Southern Africa comparatively recently, and is possibly related to Sandawe, but not to the Tuu or Kxʼa families.

     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khoe_languages#History
482. languagehat says

     September 23, 2023 at 10:25 pm

     Forgive the elementary question, but where does the stress go in Sandawe?
483. drasvi says

     September 23, 2023 at 10:52 pm

     ” two speakers of Kwadi”

     Wow.
484. Y says

     September 23, 2023 at 11:28 pm

     LH: Sandawe is tonal, so Sàndàwé.
485. Lameen says

     September 24, 2023 at 2:05 am

     Güldemann (IIRC) reckons that Khoe-Kwadi arrived in Southern Africa comparatively recently

     I was looking into the distribution of Y-haplotype A the other day (Y-haplotypes are transmitted through the male line only). The only populations in the world where it seems to account for a majority are the Dinka and Shilluk up in South Sudan, on the one hand, and the Nama and Tsumkwe San in Namibia, on the other. I have to guess that it must have had a reasonably high frequency among the first cattle herders in eastern Africa…

     ” two speakers of Kwadi”

     I second drasvi’s “wow”. Hope someone’s working with them!
486. Y says

     September 24, 2023 at 2:23 am

     The linguist among the authors, Anne-Maria Fehn, appears to have done a great deal of fieldwork in the area, and on Khoe-Kwadi languages in particular. Surely she is working with them. “Despite the Kwepe’s recent shift to the Bantu language Kuvale, we identified the descendants of the Kwadi speakers recorded in 1965 by the linguist Ernst Westphal and found two women who still remembered a considerable amount of the now extinct language’s lexicon and grammar.”
487. languagehat says

     September 24, 2023 at 9:38 am

     LH: Sandawe is tonal, so Sàndàwé.

     Thanks! I guess my question then becomes “How do people generally say it in English”; I just thought to check the OED, which turns out to include it as an entry and says /sanˈdɑːweɪ/.
488. David Marjanović says

     September 24, 2023 at 11:08 am

     split means a division of the population

     In effect, yes.

     Güldemann (IIRC) reckons that Khoe-Kwadi arrived in Southern Africa comparatively recently, and is possibly related to Sandawe, but not to the Tuu or Kxʼa families.

     Starostin, too, opposes Central Khoisan (Khoe-Kwadi) to Peripheral Khoisan (Tuu/South + Kx’a/North).

     Wow.

     Thirded, even if they’re “last hearers” more than “last speakers”.

     I was looking into the distribution of Y-haplotype A the other day

     As the article makes clear, Haplogroup A is not a clade – it’s paraphyletic with respect to all other Y-haplogroups (a clade collectively called BT).
489. Lameen says

     September 24, 2023 at 7:25 pm

     As the article makes clear, Haplogroup A is not a clade

     Thanks – I should have looked more closely: “The subclade A1b1b2b (M13; formerly A3b2) is primarily distributed among Nilotic populations in East Africa and northern Cameroon. It is different from the A subclades that are found in the Khoisan samples and only remotely related to them”. (Though nothing cited in the article seems to support “northern Cameroon”.)
490. drasvi says

     September 24, 2023 at 10:13 pm

     “A1b1b2b (A-M13)
     The subclade A1b1b2b (M13; formerly A3b2)”

     This is absolutely confusing.

     Anyway, A1b1b2 and A1b1 seem to be found among both Dinkas and Khoisan :

     Haplogroup A3b2-M13 is common among the Southern Sudanese (53%),[22] especially the Dinka Sudanese (61.5%).[30] Haplogroup A3b2-M13 also has been observed in another sample of a South Sudanese population at a frequency of 45% (18/40), including 1/40 A3b2a-M171….

     ….

     A1b1a1a (A-M6)
     The subclade A1b1a1a (M6; formerly A2 and A1b1a1a-M6) is typically found among Khoisan peoples. The authors of one study have reported finding haplogroup A-M6(xA-P28) in 28% (8/29) of a sample of Tsumkwe San…

     …

     A1b1b2a (A-M51)
     The subclade A1b1b2a (M51; formerly A3b1) occurs most frequently among Khoisan peoples (6/11 = 55% Nama,[20] 11/39 = 28% Khoisan,[23] 7/32 = 22% !Kung/Sekele,[20] 6/29 = 21% Tsumkwe San,[20] 1/18 = 6% Dama[20]). …
491. David Marjanović says

     September 25, 2023 at 1:58 pm

     This is absolutely confusing.

     Oh yes. I’ve often wondered how Y-haplogroup nomenclature works – though never quite enough to look it up.
492. Trond Engen says

     September 25, 2023 at 4:30 pm

     Wow indeed!

     Anne-Maria Fehn

     I recognized the name and thought that this must tie into another paper on the Namib desert we discussed recently, but it turns out it’s the same one. Discussed here.
493. languagehat says

     September 25, 2023 at 4:34 pm

     I think you mean: Discussed here.
494. Trond Engen says

     September 25, 2023 at 4:41 pm

     Yes, thanks..
495. drasvi says

     September 25, 2023 at 11:29 pm

     “I’ve often wondered how Y-haplogroup nomenclature works – though never quite enough to look it up.”

     Names like “a1b1..” look simple, I suppose they represent branching in a binary tree.
     Then a3b2 also makes sense.
     I suppose they did not know who of then a1, a2, a3 is a child of whom.

     But as result the same group is referred to by multiple names:-( I see two ways to sort it out: assign unique names to mutations, or to add a date to a3b2…

     “The subclade A1b1b2b (M13; formerly A3b2) is primarily distributed among Nilotic populations in East Africa and northern Cameroon. It is different from the A subclades that are found in the Khoisan samples and only remotely related to them”.

     The closest relative of Dinka
     A1b1b2b must be Khoisan
     A1b1b2a
     The question is how many kya. But it does imply a migration.
     And this migration can be arbitrarily more recent than these two groups (what if they initially populated two valleys?).

     Hm. It just occured to me that one of two must always be paraphyletic…
496. Trond Engen says

     September 26, 2023 at 6:22 pm

     I don’t get that last point.
497. Dmitry Pruss says

     September 26, 2023 at 7:21 pm

     I discussed the Namibia genetics/ linguistics paper when it first appeared as a preprint in winter
     https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.16.528838v1
     My discussion is in Russian which you may dare to auto-translate with the network’s own stupidest translation
     https://www.facebook.com/dmitry.pruss/posts/pfbid0j4sY57R84wAAm5aNx93rK46BL7qjLWXoQ4DQXyNKJfbRWKTmTuZTW3oXhh7QqNzLl
     but the huge surprise about the rediscovery of Kwadi was shared in my February post, too.

     As to the Y-haplotype nomenclature, one may need to remember that DNA sequencing used to be very expensive, and whenever possible, the researchers used variation in DNA fragment lengths as a cheap proxy for the variation in their nucleotide content (sequence). In those bygone years, STRs (short tandem repeats, where the same string of 3, 4, or sometimes 2 letters is repeated within a DNA fragment and the number of such repeats, and therefore the length of the fragment, differs from person to person). Actually, although STRs long fell out of use in research, law enforcement still uses this ancient tool.

     Anyway an STR marker doesn’t come in just 2 or 3 versions. There may be dozens of distinct repeat numbers (and sizes). Because of such abundance of sizes, in those days, Y-chromosome researchers would sometimes discover, and name, multiple forks in their phylogenetic trees. To make the matters worse, the STR marker sizes change a little from generation to generation, making the naming-by-STR-length science inherently inexact. As new genotypes poured in, the haplotype definitions were from time to time reconsidered.

     In modern technological settings, sequencing rules, and Y-haplotype phylogenies nowadays generally come only with bifurcations. The multiple-branch past tree concepts are gone. The contested changes in the tree’s very shape are gone too, because in comparison to the shape-shifting STRs, single-nucleotide sequence variations are pretty much immutable. But the conflicting naming systems are still with us, largely because there is a huge commercial dimension in Y-genotyping, not just research dimension.

     The best free site to try to make sense of Y-DNA diversity is probably yfull. For example, at https://www.yfull.com/tree/A-M13/ you can immediately grasp that A-M13 differs from nearby branches by whopping 367 DNA changes, and that it took about 30,000 years to accumulate all these changes.
498. Y says

     September 26, 2023 at 7:37 pm

     Dmitry, any idea why they didn’t include the usual tree diagram, with divergence time and admixture estimates?
499. Dmitry Pruss says

     September 26, 2023 at 7:59 pm

     I think that their goal is to display all contemporary and ancient samples which went into each tree branch model, and it’s probably too rich to display graphically (and wouldn’t be searchable to boot). For example, A-M13 branch is based on 141 samples. Most of them are from Arab countries, because males there volunteer to share expensive full sequences at a greater rate than Sub-Saharan Africans. But Kenya is also represented (as well as Sudan and Chad).

     Admixture is not an issue with Y which doesn’t recombine. Divergence times are given as branch-emergence dates (in this case between 41 and 48 thousand years). There is also a smaller TMRCA estimate, which is when all known sub-branches converge.

     If you want to move up a notch or a few, just click on the tabs above the tree. There are 6 of them, corresponding to 6 bifurcations known earlier in history. Say, going one branchpoint deeper to https://www.yfull.com/tree/A-YP4735/ gives you emergence ~55,000 years ago and the first known split ~44,000 years ago. Sister branches to A-M13 are also mostly attested from the Arabic countries, but also from Ethiopia. And so on…

     Say, continuing deeper to https://www.yfull.com/tree/A-M32/ (age 125,000 years) you start seeing South African and Namibian samples.
500. Dmitry Pruss says

     October 2, 2023 at 11:53 pm

     Two ancient DNA preprints on the genesis of Uralic (and Yeniseian) languages, and my and Trond’s long-time favorites, the itinerant bronze-makers of Seima-Turbino and Ymyyakhkakh cultures (the latter simplified in spelling as Ymyakhtakh, and then simplified even further as Yakutia Late Neolithic / Bronze Age aka Yakutia_LNBA)
     https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.10.01.560195v1.full.pdf
     https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.10.01.560332v1.full.pdf

     Ymyyakhkakh is born in a sex-based displacement/admixture of Yakutia’s local Syalakh-Belkachi peoples and intrusive populations from Transbaikalia. The mixture is about 50:50. The timing is about 4.5 thousand years ago. The Transbaikalia males contribute the N-haplogroup Y-chromosomes which will latter serve as a marker of the Uralic peoples. The autosomal DNA of the Yakutia_LNBA (Ymyyakhtakh) mixed population turns out to be another marker of the genesis and spread of the Uralic peoples (who turn out to have received their Eastern genetic components solely from Ymyyakhtakh).

     On the other, Western side of Lake Baikal, about 5.1 thousand years ago, a different admixed population takes place, its DNA comprised of ancient Paleo-Siberian and Inland North Asian components. Y-haplotype Q-YP1691 is widespread among them, and both this Y-chromosome and, especially, autosomal DNA serve as a marker of the past spread of the Yeniseian languages (which used to be located further up the Yenisei river than their remnant, the Ket). Today they are mostly dissolved in the South Siberian Turkic peoples who moved in, and assimilated, the Yeniseian peoples (but some of their DNA is found further North due to Samoyedic interaction and to the Yakut and Dolgan’s migrations far out of Southern Siberia).

     Both preprints concur that Seima-Turbino was a multiethnic / multicultural corporation (but we were certain about it from the archaeological data already, since they ST combine Sintashta-derived bronze metallurgy with Forest Siberian bone / horn and pottery technologies). But we didn’t know if the “Steppe” and “Taiga” segments of the ST existed alongside with familial mixing / were fused together into one family / remained an inequal agglomeration of masters and slaves… Now it looks like the ST of Rostovka and several nearby sites were mostly of recently three-way mixed stock (Ymyyakhtakh + Sintashta + local taiga hunter-gatherers), extremely diverse, albeit a few of them were “pure Siberians” and “pure Sintashta”. Further East and closer to Yenisei, an ST burial of Tatarka Hill yielded only genetically Yakutia_LNBA individuals. At the Western-most site at Satyga-16 (Middle Ural Mountans), the mixing is the most uniform. The particular subgroup of Yakutia_LNBA populations present at Tatarka Hill, and getting admixed at Rostovka and further West, is specifically enriched in the Uralic Y-haplogroup N-L1026 > Z1936. Both preprints assume, therefore, that Seima-Turbina was a link between Yakutia and the later Uralic populations (and further speculate that proto-Iranian influences in Uralic were mediated not so much by the Sintashta contact zone, but more by the shared enterprise of Seima-Turbino)

     In addition to the aforementioned 3-way admixture, a couple Seima-Turbino individuals came from the presumed proto-Yeniseian Cisbaikalic population, and one from as far West as the Baltics.
501. David Marjanović says

     October 3, 2023 at 9:01 am

     Slowly the fog clears…
502. Trond Engen says

     October 3, 2023 at 11:28 am

     I just knew the Ymyyakhtakh were up to something, but I didn’t suspect this.

     A few quick notes as a start:

     The Cis-Balkaians are a surprise to me. Not as ancestors of the Yeniseians, especially, but as close kins of the ancestors of Ancestral North Americans. The probable homeland of American language families turning up west of the homeland of Uralic is bonkers.

     We already knew that Ymyyakhtakh spread north and then widely both west and east through Northern Eurasia. What I think they show here is that one group, let’s call it the southwestern branch, came in touch with Sintashta and local HG peoples and decided to join forces. This soon spread almost continent-wide in the forest/forest steppe belt. The authors wonders about the cultural mechanisms behind that, and so do I.

     I don’t think the Kola Peninsula specimens are Seima-Turbino. I suspect that their Ymyyakhtakh genetic heritage (which we already suspected) came through the northern route.
503. David Marjanović says

     October 3, 2023 at 11:42 am

     The probable homeland of American language families turning up west of the homeland of Uralic is bonkers.

     It does make it easier to connect Uralic and Yukagir in some way… and Yeniseian with Burushaski or, uh, Hattic.
504. Dmitry Pruss says

     October 3, 2023 at 1:06 pm

     The Cis-Balkalians are a surprise to me. Not as ancestors of the Yeniseians, especially, but as close kins of the ancestors of Ancestral North Americans. The probable homeland of American language families turning up west of the homeland of Uralic is bonkers.

     It isn’t so much about the homeland of American peoples, but about the similar principal ancestral streams which gave rise to both the Cisbaikalians and some early Americans. But the sources are much further East. What they call “Inland NE Asians” is exemplified by Yumin (8.4 kya from Inner Mongolia, only about 400 km from Yellow Sea). I assume that some Yumin-like peoples traveled West and others, North-East.
     There is a set of useful maps at page 39 of the PDF.

     I don’t think the Kola Peninsula specimens are Seima-Turbino

     Most definitely not. The BOO sounds Halloween like but just stands for Bol’shoy Oleniy Ostrov, Big Reindeer Island, and the first DNA samples from there have been already know for years. In some superficial way they look similar to Seima-Turbino, being an East-West mix of somewhat similar components, but there are clear differences. For one thing, BOO lack the European Neolithic farmer ancestry, and, therefore, can’t be descended from Abashevo / Sintashta. They are also rather uniformly mixed, indicating an earlier population fusion.

     one group, let’s call it the southwestern branch, came in touch with Sintashta and local HG peoples and decided to join forces

     exactly. And culturally mysterious it may seem, but it wasn’t as innovative as it looks. Similar professional amalgamations of different tribes were already a thing at the Abashevo and Sintashta stages. The classic Volga riverbank burial of the Abashevo war dead clearly tells the same “technological joint venture” story some centuries earlier.
505. Trond Engen says

     October 3, 2023 at 4:28 pm

     @Dmitry: I got short on time, and the quick notes got too quick. Thanks for straightening it out.

     It isn’t so much about the homeland of American peoples, but about the similar principal ancestral streams which gave rise to both the Cisbaikalians and some early Americans. But the sources are much further East. What they call “Inland NE Asians” is exemplified by Yumin (8.4 kya from Inner Mongolia, only about 400 km from Yellow Sea). I assume that some Yumin-like peoples traveled West and others, North-East.
     There is a set of useful maps at page 39 of the PDF.

     I obviously hadn’t read the discussion of the Cisbaikalians well enough. I read it as suspecting a close but unsampled population would be a good fit. The Yumin people could probably be the very same that went north and admixed in the paper on ancient admixture in North Asian populations. I’ll have to dig up that again.

     I agree that the map is good. The illustrations are excellent all over. If I had a wall above my desk, the chart of cultures and technological phases at page 41 would be there. It’s not beautiful, but it’s very useful.

     The BOO sounds Halloween like but just stands for Bol’shoy Oleniy Ostrov, Big Reindeer Island, and the first DNA samples from there have been already know for years. In some superficial way they look similar to Seima-Turbino, being an East-West mix of somewhat similar components, but there are clear differences. For one thing, BOO lack the European Neolithic farmer ancestry, and, therefore, can’t be descended from Abashevo / Sintashta. They are also rather uniformly mixed, indicating an earlier population fusion.

     Yes, that’s what I meant to say.

     And culturally mysterious it may seem, but it wasn’t as innovative as it looks. Similar professional amalgamations of different tribes were already a thing at the Abashevo and Sintashta stages. The classic Volga riverbank burial of the Abashevo war dead clearly tells the same “technological joint venture” story some centuries earlier.

     Exactly. There was an era of several centuries when a long belt in the middle of the continent was dominated by apparently internally peaceful, multi-ethnic, amalgamating communities of local residents and long-distance travelers from different cultures. That’s very different from the population turnover seen on the western edge.

     Or is that really how we should see the emergence of Corded Ware as well? The ethnogenesis of the Yamnaya somewhere near the lower Volga (which must have happened just after the Samara people started to make copper)?
506. Dmitry Pruss says

     October 3, 2023 at 5:18 pm

     “Internally peaceful” is a good choice of words given that much of the technological power of these groups was intended for warfare. But I always wondered if some of the Seima-Turbino craftsmen might have been slaves or slave-like captives. Now it appears increasingly likely that they were all family, from how the gene pools mixed and the divergent paternal and maternal DNA lines remained. Maybe that’s the explanation for the short-lived nature of the ST phenomenon, some sort of a problem of lack of “blood cohesion” / “blood affiliation with a larger tribal structure”??

     Two more observations on economic niches.

     Cisbaikalian_LNBA Serovo culture and related Angara river peoples left behind numerous petroglyphs of fish, perhaps indicating continuity with the present-day Ket whose livelihood was still based on fishing below the enormous Siberian rapids.

     Yakutia_LNBA Ymyyakhtakh are reported to have produced tin bronzes, and perhaps it was their access to tin which gave them the competitive edge early on. Rich cassiterite deposits are out there in Eastern Yakutia, in Yana and Indigirka Basins. I wonder if their bronzes have been analyzed by metal admixture and isotope content to pinpoint the origin of their materials…
507. Trond Engen says

     October 3, 2023 at 6:04 pm

     Access to tin trade seems like an obvious advantage.

     I’m thinking about the system for discovering metal resources and making them available. There are special skills involved: Discovery of resources, extraction technology, metalworking distribution. One thing is random discoveries, but the Eurasian continent was pretty much sieved through in a few centuries. I wonder how much of this was planned efforts involving visiting specialists or young people traveling out to learn. Maybe an era of traveling metal specialists established systems of hospitality and cooperation that could be extended to multiethnic societies of metal workers.
508. drasvi says

     October 3, 2023 at 6:08 pm

     Are there any medieval professional societies that cross language borders?
509. David Eddyshaw says

     October 3, 2023 at 6:26 pm

     “The Barber-Surgeons of Dublin was the first medical corporation in Ireland or Britain, having been incorporated in 1446 (by Royal Decree of Henry VI).”

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

     Prior to the end of the Roman Empire in 1453, so mediaeval. Got in under the wire.
510. drasvi says

     October 3, 2023 at 6:45 pm

     Well, I think by “society” I mean anything from an actual organisation with hierarchy and everything to itenerant craftsmen (unless we treat the latter as an ethnicity or caste – say, based on endogamy).

     As for language borders, the most extreme case would be something like Jewry and other communities with diasporas, just on professional rather than ethnic (I don’t know how to apply religion here – what if these professionals have a dedicated god in polytheistic society?) basis.
511. Dmitry Pruss says

     October 3, 2023 at 7:05 pm

     I wonder how much of this was planned efforts involving visiting specialists or young people traveling out to learn
     I only read reports of a much later era, from the early days of Russian colonial exploitation of today’s Yakutia in the 1600s in the transcripts of surviving Siberian Prikaz paperwork. With the sable nearing extinction, bands of Cossacks roamed the rivers and tributaries in search of something, anything, to plunder, including escapees from the amanat system (whole tribal bands took off to the wilderness when it became impossible for them to pay yasak tribute), walrus tusks and any reports of unusual veins of rock. The Yakuts were better organized and quickly realized that by delivering fabulous gifts to the Czar himself, they can arrange better terms for their yasak, like using second-rate quality furs on lieu of sables. In contrast, many tribes around them were driven to starvation and extinction by impossible tributes. But the point is, the roaming Cossacks didn’t know much but reported everything unusual they saw or heard about minerals. Only then, the more knowledgeable people would sometimes investigate. The idea wasn’t to go there to exploit some natural riches. It was to take hostages from the locals so their kinsmen pay yasak in whatever riches were there. Perhaps a similar economic model could have been in use in the Bronze age already? Use superior arms to defeat faraway locals and make them pay tribute in necessary raw materials…

     The archeologists who uncovered Allakakh copper smelters and bronze metallurgy camps of the 1200s BC (a Northwestern-most offshoot of Ymyyakhkath at the outskirts of today’s Norilsk) assumed that the artisans relied on river transportation by canoes (primarily because they uncovered large quantities of birch tar which was used to seal birch-bark canoes, but also because raindeer weren’t domesticated yet). But perhaps dog-sleds were used too?
512. David Marjanović says

     October 3, 2023 at 7:14 pm

     Yakutia_LNBA Ymyyakhtakh are reported to have produced tin bronzes, and perhaps it was their access to tin which gave them the competitive edge early on. Rich cassiterite deposits are out there in Eastern Yakutia, in Yana and Indigirka Basins.

     Oh.

     at the outskirts of today’s Norilsk

     That’s insane. Our whole idea of the Bronze Age was fundamentally wrong from sea to frozen sea.
513. J.W. Brewer says

     October 3, 2023 at 7:46 pm

     I’m not sure what “professional society” would mean in a medieval context but would e.g. the Knights Templar qualify? (The sources that say the ones who weren’t L1 French-speakers learned enough French to manage it as an intra-Templar lingua franca seem offhand like the most plausible ones to me.) See also this re how their longer-lived rivals broke down on ethnolinguistic lines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langue_(Knights_Hospitaller). And yet when members from all over with different L1’s congregated in Rhodes or Malta or whatever (depending on the century) they must have had some sort of common L2 as a working language.
514. rozele says

     October 3, 2023 at 8:33 pm

     @drasvi:

     i’m not sure whether we can talk about meaningful, much less clear, lines between craft/profession and ethnicity before the early modern period – and i tend to think that even there it’s a stretch. the tracking of particular lineage groups to particular crafts is very strong almost everywhere until very recently, to a degree where it’s hard to say which one defines the field of possibility of the other. it’s now much less rigid, and persists across generations less, but in a particular place and time it’s still a very strong dynamic: bodega owners in much of nyc as almost axiomatically yemeni and palestinian, for example, or the concentration of patels* as hotel operators in the u.s. southeast (very true in the 1990s, not sure how much so now).

     —
     internally peaceful, multi-ethnic, amalgamating communities of local residents and long-distance travelers from different cultures

     this seems like a prototypical description of the kinds of non-state societies that have had such a long (if fluctuating) history in roughly that geography!

     .
     * itself a caste (hereditary and occupation-linked) label turned surname.
515. J.W. Brewer says

     October 3, 2023 at 8:49 pm

     Within living memory (meaning my own, and I didn’t move to the NYC area until I was 27 years old), NYC bodega owners were stereotypically Korean-immigrant. But the strategy from the get-go was for their American-born kids to pursue higher-status economic niches rather than take over the bodega and pass it on in turn to their own kids. Thus the occupation rapidly transitioning to a newly-arrived “lineage group” in search of a niche.
516. rozele says

     October 3, 2023 at 9:34 pm

     absolutely! i don’t expect the kids of the teenage afterschool-shift workers at my bodega to have the same jobs when they’re the same age. as i understand it, the rough (and overlapping*) sequence has been:

     – greek / yiddish jewish (in the candy store/corner grocery form, and the “deli” version with a sandwich counter);
     – puerto rican / dominican (marking the emergence of the “bodega” as we know it);
     – korean (mostly in the versions closer, in my worlds’ vernacular taxonomy, to a “greengrocer” than a classic bodega);
     – yemeni / palestinian.

     i’m very interested to see who inherits the role next!

     .
     * my first spot in brooklyn, in 2007, had an arab-run bodega on the corner, a korean-run bodega/greengrocer a block north, and a dominican-run bodega/deli a block south, plus a palestinian-run grocery store within a block.
517. Y says

     October 3, 2023 at 9:52 pm

     In San Francisco, Palestinians have been the stereotypical corner store (= ‘bodega’) owners for decades, except of course in Latino and Asian neighborhoods. The cheap coffeehouse renaissance, starting in the 1980s/1990s, was also largely due to Palestinians. Donut shops were almost all Cambodian, but these days there are some Chinese ones.
518. Ryan says

     October 3, 2023 at 10:31 pm

     >But perhaps dog-sleds were used too?

     All branches of Indo-European share cognate terms for the key element of a dog-pulled travois. That’s why theorists believe the family must have diverged shortly after the inventions of dog traction and spun pottery (whence our word wheel.). At least I think that’s the story.
519. drasvi says

     October 4, 2023 at 8:05 am

     “Generally, however, it is not difficult to detect the clan allegiance of a website”
     (link)

     I have no idea if the article is interesting, I just found the phrase hilarious.
520. drasvi says

     October 4, 2023 at 8:13 am

     I remember there was some… Austronesian? New Guinean? society where occupations were associated wtih ancestry [both paternal and maternal] but due to exogamy their situation was described by some anthropologist as : every member belongs to [nearly] all castes at once.
     I can’t remember what it was:(

     (possible objections to applying “caste” here are obvious – perhaps I just read it in WP “caste” but can’t find it there now)

     rozele, well, ethnicity itself is a fluid notion.

     I was thinking about modern examples of what Trond was speaking about, “multiethnic societies of metal workers.” Perhaps he simply referred to multi-ethnic societies of metal workers in the sense “possessed knowlege”, “there were some metal workers among them” – but I read it as a professional group that includes people of different ethnicities (and presumably crosses borders).

     Jews are an obvious example of a group who could cross (for example) the Mediterranean Christian-Muslim rift* (also there were e.g. fishermen – but I don’t know whether they succeeded in crossing military borders) but even though there were an are “Jewish professions”, what makes a person a Jew is not her profession.

     Perhaps
     (1) we could consider a group that practices marriage outside of the group less “ethnic”.
     (2) apprenticeship can be a way of recruiting member from outside the group (or also slavery)
     (3) there are men’s and women’s professions.
     Perhaps many of the latter are hereditary, but I’m not sure if marriage restrictions (like “a daughter of a [female] healer] must marry a son of a [female] healer and [male] blacksmith” were common for those

     * I’m frequently irritated with how the south and north coasts are seen as two different worlds with independent histories, where one of the two “histories” once spanned both shores but withdrew from the south with Muslim conquest…
521. January First-of-May says

     October 4, 2023 at 9:00 am

     but also because raindeer weren’t domesticated yet

     Reindeer. But apparently “raindeer” is an actual old spelling; and indeed Google Books finds many 18th and early 19th century examples.
     Apparently not related to either rain or (probably) reins. Previously on LH.

     I was surprised that the domestication of reindeer was this late; but of course 1200 BC is not exactly “late”. Apparently the usual estimates date it to the 1st millennium BC, so indeed slightly after that particular period – though even after domestication the idea of using them as draft animals might have been nontrivial.
     (OTOH AFAICT the “usual estimates” refer to regions well to the west of Taymyr; there were apparently two or three independent domestication events.)
522. David Eddyshaw says

     October 4, 2023 at 9:26 am

     Ethnicity is often associated with particular occupations in West Africa. Among Songhay, blacksmiths are often Tuareg, and griots are often Fulɓe, for example. Aid workers are traditionally French …

     Kusaasi don’t usually do cattle-farming; locally, that’s generally the preserve of Fulɓe or Mossi. However, the cultivator versus pastoralist thing is a whole other issue. (And the Fulfulde word for “cow” seems to have been borrowed by practically everybody in the savanna zone, unless you can manage to believe that it’s a Niger-Congo common inheritance.)
523. drasvi says

     October 4, 2023 at 10:15 am

     Reindeer in Spein, dear… (not sure if English speakers are as familiar with the line as Russians)

     @DE, not only West Africa. Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_systems_in_Africa

     _____
     Regarding the table in Madhiban#Cognate_castes_in_East_Africa (also in the link above in #Somali. “Cognate”?):

     I remmemeber, when reading about al-Akhdam/Muhamashīn in Yemen I found:

     Similarly, in correspondence sent to the Research Directorate, the President of LDDH [1] stated that [translation] “[t]he Al-Akhdam minority living in Djibouti is an Arab ethnic group from Yemen” (President 28 Dec. 2014). The Joshua Project, a research project that gathers information about ethnic groups around the world to support Christian missions (Joshua Project n.d.a), also states that the Al-Akhdam are Yemeni Arabs (ibid. n.d.b). Other sources note the presence of the Al-Akhdam minority in Yemen (IDSN 3 July 2013; UN 1 Nov. 2005).

     A former member of the Djibouti Republican Guard, who now lives in Belgium and who comes from a Yemeni Arab family, wrote to the President of ARDHD that, in addition to Yemen and Djibouti, the Al-Akhdam are present [translation] “in countries on the Gulf [of Aden], in Somalia and in Ethiopia, where they are called Midgans” (ARDHD 15 Dec. 2014b). Corroborating information could not be found among the sources consulted by the Research Directorate within the time constraints of this Response.

     I don’t know if the speaker implied merely functional equivalence of unrelated populations, or shared ancestry or what – some confusion is happening here. I guess Indian castes also are not “groups of people that share ancestry”, merely groups of groups who share.
524. John Cowan says

     October 4, 2023 at 1:08 pm

     The OED found the OE cognate of hreinn, the ancestor of the first morph in reindeer exactly once:

     Compare Old English hrān ‘reindeer’, attested only in the late 9th-cent. account of Norway obtained by Ælfred from a Norwegian called Ohthere and interpolated in the Old English translation of Orosius:

     He [sc. Ohthere] wæs swyðe spedig man on þæm æhtum þe heora speda on beoð, þæt is on wildrum. He hæfde..tamra deora unbebohtra syx hund. Þa deor hi hatað hranas; þara wæron syx stælhranas, ða beoð swyðe dyre mid Finnum, for ðæm hy foð þa wildan hranas mid.

     So “these animals he called hranas“. It’s not even clear if this is a legit OE word that survived only here, or an etymological nativization of what Ohthere said, or what.
525. languagehat says

     October 4, 2023 at 1:14 pm

     Good point — that’s a very shaky basis on which to postulate an OE word.
526. Trond Engen says

     October 4, 2023 at 3:42 pm

     Caste systems. I had already been thinking about how the three-or-so-part joint ventures of Sintashta and Seima-Turbino might have served as a prototype for the organization of society when the Proto-Indic peoples migrated south through Central Asia. It may all start as a mutual understanding. “If we keep doing this and you keep doing that, there will be room for both of us, and we’ll all be better off. And your sons marry our daughters, and your daughters marry our sons, and we will live happily ever after.”

     Sometimes such systems will break down after a few generations, without anyone missing them, as families intermarry and young people learn new trades. Other times they become institutionalized. In India they became — after an initial phase of intermarriage — endogamous sub-societies with inherent social status and hereditary access to positions and trades, enforced through millennia by strict moral codes and taboos.

     However common they are globally, I think the Early Bronze Age is the first time we really see them rise out of nothing and be clearly visible in archaeology as apparently stable local societies and regional systems organized around multi-ethnic alliances. But there’s a predecessor of everything, so maybe there will be more, and older, cases once we start looking. Sintashta had its predecessor in Abashevo-Fatyanovo. Corded Ware and Globular Amphora co-existed for many generations. Does it mean that they tried something similar? I they did, how did it play out? Did the Caspian harvesters and the Samara hunter-gatherers/copper suppliers form an alliance?

     What does the availability of this type of arrangement mean for the interpretation of some very different outcomes in the same era, like the near-full replacements of the male line in Iberia, Britain, and now far northeast Yakutia?
527. Lameen says

     October 4, 2023 at 3:46 pm

     These “joint ventures” sound very much like the kind of social setups you find in parts of the western Sahel – Fulani do the herding, Bozo do the fishing, Gabibi do the farming, etc.
528. Dmitry Pruss says

     October 4, 2023 at 3:50 pm

     In the era of states, even in the antiquity, there was nothing unusual about ethnic specializations within the militaries (and, we can be assured, among the military suppliers). In the pre-state societies, of course there were ethnic specializations in both artisanship and ways of warfare, too, but we generally expect these specialties to be spatially isolated, and only combined by trade and by alliance-building. We generally don’t expect the pre-state artisans of different ethnic tripes to live, work, intermarry, and migrate together. That’s what made the “business models” of the Abashevo / Sintashta, and especially Seima-Turbino, so unusual. Not merely specialization in complicated crafts.

     And, yes, I noticed my misfortunately spelled reindeer, and SEVERAL misspellings of the spelling-defying Ymyyakhtakh, but it didn’t really impact the meaning and I was like, so be it. Surprised that nobody weighed in on the Yeniseian story BTW.
529. Trond Engen says

     October 4, 2023 at 3:55 pm

     Dmitry: We generally don’t expect the artisans of different ethnic tripes to live, work, intermarry, and migrate together. That’s what made the “business models” of the Abashevo / Sintashta, and especially Seima-Turbino, so unusual. Not merely specialization in complicated crafts.

     Thanks. I struggled to formulate that.

     Surprised that nobody weighed in on the Yeniseian story BTW.

     I will. I just haven’t gotten there yet!
530. drasvi says

     October 4, 2023 at 4:01 pm

     There is also the system/division nomads-farmers-people of cities – discussed by Ryan (as a bipartite division, though) in the context of the Great Steppe, also in the context of Arabia and matching the traditional division of Arabic dialectology.
531. Trond Engen says

     October 4, 2023 at 4:34 pm

     Me: But there’s a predecessor of everything

     E.g., Dmitry introduced the idea of a a possible Baikal genetic element in Uralic in 2020. I was sceptical. I was wrong.

     That discussion also mentions the Taymyr copper ore. There were actually two contemporary mining enterprises, one at the western side near the mouth of the Yenisei and one at the eastern side. They were operated by different archaeological cultures. The eastern one is Ymyyakhtakh, the western is some kind of Central Siberian. I have had two speculations about that. One is that the Yeniseians monopolized the river between the ore and the coppersmiths of the Altai (and an origin of the Yeniseians in the taiga west of the Baikal would be compatible with this). The other is that Proto-Samoyeds supplied Sintashta or Seima-Turbino through the Taiga belt. The two are not mutually exclusive.

     I also suggested Bronze Age Taymyr as the Uralic-Yukaghir contact zone. We’re now in the situation that both a deep common origin (in early Ymyyakhtakh) and extensive contact may be true.
532. John Cowan says

     October 4, 2023 at 10:58 pm

     endogamous sub-societies with inherent social status and hereditary access to positions and trades, enforced through millennia by strict moral codes and taboos

     In other news, Bihar state in India has just held the first full caste census since 1931 (i.e. since independence) and the results were a jolt. When you add up the members of “backward castes” (socially and economically), “extremely backward castes”, “scheduled castes” (i.e. “untouchables”), and “scheduled tribes” (i.e. aboriginals) you get to 84% of the population, leaving only 16% as members of “forward castes”. The result is that even though 50% of political representation is reserved for these four caste groups, they are still under-represented. Now pressure is spreading to have a nationwide caste census and adjust many things accordingly.

     (Some have asked why representation should be proportional to the size of caste groups. The answer in general is that it is for the same reason that representation in a federal system should be proportional to the size of federal subjects: a lack of common interest.)
533. AntC says

     October 5, 2023 at 1:01 am

     Some have asked why representation should be proportional to the size of caste groups.

     We have similar bones of contention in NZ — and there’s a general election right now, so you can imagine the undercurrents from Parties of a certain colour.

     Half the Parliament is elected according to a national Proportional Representation by Party — so reserving a small number of the other half, geographic-based seats for Māori ends up having no imbalancing effect at all. If a Party were to get a disproportionally high number of seats from Māori-allocated geographical seats, they’d just get no Party-list (proportional-based) members; if that still doesn’t meet proportionality, _other_ Parties’ allocations of seats would get increased.

     Of course this sounds ‘dodgy’ to people who are disinclined to trust Democratic Institutions and/or arithmetic — which demographic aligns rather closely with supporters of the aforementioned “Parties of a certain colour”.

     a lack of common interest

     The whole awkward arrangement reflects the embarrassment of our Colonial set-up: a (deliberately) misleading translation of our founding Treaty never ceded ‘Sovereignty’ from Māori to The Crown, so the non-Māori continue to be squatters/illegal immigrants of a sort.
534. Lars Mathiesen (he/him/his) says

     October 5, 2023 at 11:30 am

     FWIW, the Danish system of proportional representation adds a small number of seats to each region according to their area, to make sure the Danes (Zealanders) don’t outbreed the Jutes. This can in theory break the arithmetic for extra allocations per party, in which case more members of Parliament are added like in NZ.

     (This hasn’t happened yet, but somebody got to spend X time implementing the rules, probably in ’58 COBOL).

     There used to be more edge cases involving FPTP single-candicate districts, but those are now amalgamated into 2-5 candidate local districts making it not impossible, but very unlikely, for that to happen. (If the numerically second-largest party were to get N-1 seats from a lot of those local districts, they might have more seats before proportionality than they were “supposed” to and we’d end up with an embiggened Parliament. There are multiple multi-page documents on the home page of the Ministry of the Interior setting out the rules in all their horrorglory, with worked numerical examples).
535. David Marjanović says

     October 5, 2023 at 1:37 pm

     Nilotic father tongues.
536. Trond Engen says

     October 6, 2023 at 5:02 pm

     I’m still digesting the papers.

     The Cis-Baikal population could just as reasonably be called the Angara people. If the similarity to a hypothetic source population of Native Americans means that they are related to people from further east, from before the formation of Ymyyakhtakh, their ancestors might have spread up the Lena and across the ridge to the greater river. That would allow for a Dene-Yeniseian homeland in central Yakutia. But I don’t know enough Siberian archaeology to know if this makes sense.

     As for knowing too little, I learned from the maps that there’s something called Samus-Kizhirovo that is contemporary with Seima-Turbino. The authors seem confident that the two can be joined without further explanation.

     Finally, I’m not sure the dates are clear enough to tell which came first, Seima-Turbino or Sintashta, or if the two really are two sides of the same coin, maybe with slightly different specializations..
537. David Marjanović says

     October 6, 2023 at 6:36 pm

     Dene-Yeniseian homeland

     This article consists of a paper by G. Starostin being very skeptical of Dene and Yeniseian being each other’s closest relatives, followed by a reply from Vajda that pretty much agrees.
538. David Eddyshaw says

     October 6, 2023 at 7:07 pm

     Interesting paper.

     That said, the typological argument on its own hardly means anything from the genetic point of view if the actual morphemes that occupy the morphological slots cannot be shown to share a common etymological origin in sound and meaning.

     Preach it, brother! (In particular, preach it to the “NIger-Kordofanian” fans.)

     I like Vajda’s conclusion (in which, it seems to me, he implicitly acknowledges that patient descriptive and bottom-up work is the the only really secure foundation of comparative studies):

     “Maybe the best way to demonstrate a language family is not to try so hard.”
539. Stu Clayton says

     October 6, 2023 at 8:56 pm

     “Maybe the best way to demonstrate a language family is not to try so hard.”

     Hm. Not trying hard at all is a prominent feature of the ChomskIan approach, is it not ? No describing, just top-down aerobics.
540. Dmitry Pruss says

     October 6, 2023 at 9:09 pm

     On Facebook, people mentioned V. Napolskikh of Tatarstan Institute of Archaeology as their go-to popular Uralic antiquity expert. At a first glance his 2015 book primarily capitalizes on the research by others, but may still be interesting, so here is a link to its pdf:
     https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/235149815.pdf
541. Dmitry Pruss says

     October 6, 2023 at 9:31 pm

     Samus-Kizhirovo can be searched for in Russian as самусь-кижировская культура. My first impression is that the term came into circulation relatively recently, but Wikipedia states that Самусь IV (Samus-IV) on Tom’ river in 20 km downstream from Tomsk has been excavated in the 1950s (and published vy the late 1960s) and again in the 1990s. Kizhirov Island is on the Tom’ river by the confluence with Samus’ka river.
     https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A1%D0%B0%D0%BC%D1%83%D1%81%D1%8C_(%D0%BF%D0%BE%D1%81%D1%91%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%BA)
     Samus’ represents the earliest Bronze Age on the Tom’ (XVII-XIV c. BCE), with intrusive technologically skilled populations supplementing local hunters-gatherers. The discoverers of the site concluded that the cultural influences were spreading to the North, that the ores were procured in the Altai mountains, probably traded for furs. The ornaments and sacred symbols of the Samus’ are quite famous locally in Tomsk, but probably not widely popularized elsewhere. See
     https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/287437407.pdf
     and quite a lot of images online
542. Trond Engen says

     October 7, 2023 at 6:10 am

     David M.: This article consists of a paper by G. Starostin being very skeptical of Dene and Yeniseian being each other’s closest relatives, followed by a reply from Vajda that pretty much agrees.

     I remember the Starostin paper — we’ve probably discussed it here before — and I’ve been waiting for new development ever since. IIRC, Starostin points out real weaknesses, which are acknowledged by Vajda, but I didn’t find his argument for a larger Dene-Caucasian family very strong. With no other language families included in the hypothesis, as in Vajda’s work, I think it’s perfectly fine to name the hypothetical macro-family Dene-Yeniseian. If more families are included eventually, a new name can be assigned .

     I agree that Na-Dene and Yeniseian are very distant relatives (if related at all) — they must be, at that time depth, regardless of whether any other relatives exist or ever existed — but their common ancestor would still have to have been located somewhere at some time and spoken by somebody. With the linguistic evidence inconclusive, a lack of clear archaeological and genetic paths between them weakens the hypothesis, while, OTOH, a plausible path would mean that the hypothesis can’t be ruled out on archaeological grounds alone. And even if Dene-Yeniseian is a mirage, there were several waves of migration into America, and you have to pull in whatever thread you can to untangle the origins. But I should have said “That would allow for a hypothetical Dene-Yeniseian homeland in central Yakutia.”

     @Dmitry: Thanks. I’ll try my best to read them.
543. David Marjanović says

     October 7, 2023 at 8:59 am

     Me in July:

     the Black Sea.

     Most of it has actual ocean floor and is some 3000 m deep, IIRC.

     Correction: 2000 m. Map in Romanian.

     I didn’t find his argument for a larger Dene-Caucasian family very strong

     Most of that work is his father’s, accessible in semi-published form here along with Bengtson’s paper on the comparative grammar that we’ve also discussed before.
544. languagehat says

     October 7, 2023 at 9:32 am

     “Crimeea” looks very funny.
545. David Marjanović says

     October 7, 2023 at 2:01 pm

     These are people who write ydeea, so I was prepared…
546. Dmitry Pruss says

     October 7, 2023 at 4:34 pm

     The “Dene-Yeniseian” observation in the genomic paper is very tentative, but may be worth mentioning. They tried modeling various ancient Native American genomes with ancient NE Asian sources and the models never required any proto-Yeniseian / Cisbaikalian sources to fit, with one major exception. Ancient Athabaskan DNA wouldn’t come out right is Cisbaikalian wasn’t added to the mix. The author don’t construe it as anything on the level of “proof” of Dene-Yeniseian, but note that at the current state of genomic knowledge of ancient DNA, the hypothesis can’t be ruled out and merits more investigation.
547. Dmitry Pruss says

     October 7, 2023 at 4:48 pm

     The significance of Samus’ seem to be two-fold.
     – Tatarka-Hill is considered to be a Samus’ site, although typical Samus’ sites slightly postdate typical Seima-Turbino locations (and the paper posits that the migration, and mixing, of Seima-Turbino started from the earliest Eastern sites like Tatarka-Hill and continued until the Western-most studied sites like Satyga
     – Samus’ technologies are also associated with later Bronze Age cultures like Cherkaskul just East of the Urals (probably already discussed due to possible connections to proto-Finno-Ugric) and Iron Age cultures such as Anan’ino / Ananyino. If these connections are true, then it is likely that Seima-Turbino was an early wave of two or more waves of successive Uralic migrations out of the Ob-Yenisei interfluve, but not THE migration wave which succeeded in creating proto-Finno-Ugrics (that would have to wait until another spurt of similar migrations). So Samus’ would be close to the root but Seima-Turbina more of an exotic side branch…
548. Trond Engen says

     October 8, 2023 at 7:19 am

     Thanks again.

     I’m impressed by the graphics, but I didn’t figure out before yesterday how the “Figure Legends” and “Extended Data Figure Legends” relate to the graphics… And it didn’t strike me until this morning that I should look up the supplementary materials. Unfocused, I am.

     Anyway, here’s the doi link to the paper:
     Tian Chen Zeng et al: Postglacial genomes from foragers across Northern Eurasia reveal prehistoric mobility associated with the spread of the Uralic and Yeniseian languages, preprint
     There’s plenty of supplementary data, and I see that there’s already a new version of the pdf since Dmitry’s link. On first glance there’s not much difference, except that the graphics are in a different order.

     A few comments based on the first version and before diving into the supplementaries:

     On page 39 they highlight Cis-Baikalian and Yakutia_LNBA ancestry in modern-day populations with orange and grey stars over the admixture plots, but there’s no visible correspondence to anything in the plots. The map is beautiful, but I would also wish for color coding of the dots for linguistic affiliation,

     I really can’t find support for “the Dene-Yeniseian observation”. That doesn’t mean it isn’t there, but it’s not shown in a way I can understand.

     The doi to the other paper:
     Ainash Childebayeva et al: Bronze Age Northern Eurasian Genetics in the Context of Development of Metallurgy and Siberian Ancestry, preprint
549. Dmitry Pruss says

     October 8, 2023 at 10:02 am

     Verbatim:

     604 Yeniseian languages are related to the Na-Dene languages in North America under the Dene-Yeniseian
     hypothesis 76
     605 . We investigated this connection by using qpAdm to distinguish sources of APS ancestry in
     606 ancient (<4kya) Siberian and American Arctic groups that have been connected to present-day
     607 Yukaghirs, Chukotko-Kamchatkans, Eskimo-Aleuts, and Athabaskans (SI Section VI.B). We find strong
     608 evidence that all such ancient groups show at least partial descent from Paleo-Eskimo-related
     609 populations (represented by Greenland_Saqqaq.SG), and by extension Syalakh-Belkachi and other
     610 “Route 2” populations, except Athabaskans from ~1.1kya (SI VI.B.iiii-iv), consistent with some previous
     inferences 19,30,31, and contradicting other work, including from our own team 77
     611 . We instead find weak
     612 evidence that ancient Athabaskans may require a small quantity of ancestry from a population related to
     613 Cisbaikal_LNBA—genetic evidence for the linguistic hypothesis of a distinctive link between Yeniseian
     614 and Na-Dene languages. This suggestive result awaits corroboration with further sampling and more
     615 sensitive analytic methods.
550. Trond Engen says

     October 8, 2023 at 10:55 am

     Yes, I did see that, and I believe them.

     We instead find weak evidence that ancient Athabaskans may require a small quantity of ancestry from a population related to Cisbaikal_LNBA—genetic evidence for the linguistic hypothesis of a distinctive link between Yeniseian and Na-Dene languages.

     … is what made me write:

     The Cis-Balkaians are a surprise to me. Not as ancestors of the Yeniseians, especially, but as close kins of the ancestors of Ancestral North Americans.

     Upon which you replied:

     It isn’t so much about the homeland of American peoples, but about the similar principal ancestral streams which gave rise to both the Cisbaikalians and some early Americans. But the sources are much further East. What they call “Inland NE Asians” is exemplified by Yumin (8.4 kya from Inner Mongolia, only about 400 km from Yellow Sea). I assume that some Yumin-like peoples traveled West and others, North-East.

     If the source specific for Athabaskans is an ancestral stream related to the Yumin people and not especially close to Cisbaikalians, I would have expected the paper to say so, so I assume it’s more complicated. But how complicated? If the source of the shared stream were somewhere around the Altai or Yenisei, it could get to America along the coast, but if it’s eastern, I don’t understand how it got into Cisbaikalian and Athabaskan without also showing up in Yakutia LNBA. I wish I could see this hint of an ancestral stream into Cisbaikalian and Athabaskan for myself, i.e. digested and presented in colorful graphcs. As it is, I’m just confused about what it means.
551. Trond Engen says

     October 8, 2023 at 11:54 am

     And of course, this is not a gripe with you or your explanations, just me being frustrated with not being able to find support or substantiation within the paper. I guess I’m complaining that there’s not put even more effort into making an obviously extremely important paper accessible. But in fairness, this is a preprint, and we’ve seen before that the presentation is improved in the final version.
552. J Pystynen says

     October 10, 2023 at 2:29 pm

     I’ve been waiting for new development [in Dene-Yeniseian/Caucasian] ever since.

     Good timing: there’s a new exploratory lexicostatistic paper from an A. Kozintsev out just a few days ago. Yeniseian and Burushaski end up notably close, as already in the earlier discussion. There’s also some discussion about Basque appearing particularly close to Nakh, or the possibility of breaking up Na-Dene, but surely those have got to be noise…

     My main takeaway so far is however that, even if we accept proponents’ own claims about cognacy, Sino-Tibetan is the most tenuous member of the full Dene-Caucasian and looks to be connected more thru specifically Sinitic (+ Tujia, interestingly) than organically as a whole. What I’ve looked into the base data suggests a similar issue there too. ST is big enough that it’s easy to cherrypick a few forms that happen to resemble the Moscow School Northeast Caucasian reconstruction (the linchpin of the theory), and then assume that they’re more archaic in their shape and other, more different ST cognates aren’t. Basque, Burushaski and Yeniseian are small enough that this cannot be done and hence there’s more reason to think their resemblances with North(east) Caucasian cannot be just coincidence. Conveniently Sino-Tibetan is also a family that already has other competing macro-relationship hypotheses for it too, e.g. Sino-Austronesian, which could be some day furthermore pitted against Sino-Dene to see which works better.

     (I don’t really have any opinion so far myself on how well Na-Dene or Dene-Yeniseian fits in this overall picture — if it pulls Yeniseian away or helps push it closer; should develop that understanding some day though.)
553. Y says

     October 10, 2023 at 3:10 pm

     @JP: I don’t see any value in Kozintsev’s paper. How can you do lexicostatistics without demonstrated cognates? He quotes Starostin et al.’s database, but that only shows cognates in accepted families. I can’t tell how he derives any of his cognates, and he gives no examples. Right now even a single historically-related word shared between any of these groups would be news.

     Moreover, and to be unnecessarily nit-picky, distance methods are a crude approach to such delicate work. The NeighborNet diagrams, in particular, look like what you’d expect from a bunch of languages in internally clear but externally unrelated families.
554. J Pystynen says

     October 10, 2023 at 3:39 pm

     He’s following along, I think, with the Dene-Caucasian cognates already asserted by Starostin & co. (not in the business of asserting new ones at least), though yes the sourcing on that fact looks vague: they have a separate database for them from the one for Swadesh lists.

     NeighborNets of a family dividing in clear smaller units often look about the same too. Distance methods are crude but they might still have hints on what should be best priorities at looking at in closer detail, one hopes.
555. Dmitry Pruss says

     November 2, 2023 at 6:28 pm

     At the ASHG today: the ancient Turks in their Altai craddle were largely composed of the local Bulan-Koby horsemen and blacksmiths, while the legendary Ashina clan, exiled to Altai after losing a fight with the Rouran in 460 CE, contributed only marginally to the early Turk genomes (which include the Avars). Many contemporary Taiga Turkic groups (such as the Tubalar, the Shor, and the Zabolotye Tatars) still carry overwhelming fractions of Bulan-Koby DNA, while Steppe Turkic peoples picked a variety of other components over time.
     The Bulan-Koby culture seem to be that of the legendary Tele people (who, together with the first Turks, finally had their revenge on the Rouran in 551 CE), but much of Tele’s homeland was further South-East in today’s Mongolia and the question remains somewhat open.

     Bulan-Koby (II-V c. CE) immediately postdate the Pazyryk “Scythians” after the defeat of the latter by the Huns and/or their auxilliaries, and fall into the spectrum of “Sarmato-Hunnic” cultures, but their material culture has a huge imprint of Northern Xiongnu (and a little bit, of Iranic Kushan-Yuezhi) and relatively little continuity with the Pazyryk, making some archaeologists conclude that Bulan-Koby were merely a branch of Xiongnu. But now, their DNA is predominantly Pazyryk, with an added Cisbaikalian Late Neolithic / Bronze Age layer. So the defeated Pazyryk may have surrendered much of its culture but contributed a lot of DNA to Bulan-Koby, and, in turn, to the Turks.

     1. https://twitter.com/DanTabin/status/1719933938355834981
     2. https://www.cambridge.org/…/5720C1A241C0646FB05C3895AA1…
     3. https://www.sciencedirect.com/…/abs/pii/S2352226718300047
556. Dmitry Pruss says

     November 2, 2023 at 6:43 pm

     (links https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2352226718300047
     https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/radiocarbon/article/first-combined-radiocarbon-and-archaeological-dating-of-the-great-migration-period-materials-in-northern-altai-the-necropolis-of-karbani/5720C1A241C0646FB05C3895AA1060DC )
557. David Marjanović says

     November 3, 2023 at 6:50 am

     the early Turk genomes (which include the Avars)

     Oh, interesting.
558. Dmitry Pruss says

     November 3, 2023 at 11:45 am

     @DM – rereading the text going with Fig. 2, I see that I oversimplified it about the Avars. By broader similarities of DNA fragments, Bulan-Koby formed a interconnected group with Turks and Mongols. Stronger similarities were observed in a tighter interconnected group which consisted of Bulan-Koby, early Turkic peoples, and the Avars.

     But the genomes of the latter didn’t “consist” of similar DNA (as was my first incorrect impression), they just possessed large amounts of similar DNA fragments.

     Probably the Eastern ancestors of the Bolan-Koby were also among the ancestors of the Avars
559. Trond Engen says

     November 3, 2023 at 6:42 pm

     … and suddenly the geneticists have become able to locate exact source populations for historical ethno-linguistic groups. A few weeks ago it was the diagnostic male line in the spread of Uralic. Here we have the source of Western ancestry in early Turks.

     The variation between Saka groups is also interesting, a very similar Sintashta-BMAC mix and different local substrates. We knew that already, I guess, but now I’m going to expect that each ancestral element soon will be figured out with a location, a date, and a gender profile.
560. David Eddyshaw says

     November 3, 2023 at 6:47 pm

     And a favourite colour.
561. David Marjanović says

     November 3, 2023 at 7:19 pm

     All of that becomes harder in cultures that burn their dead.

     But not impossible…
562. Dmitry Pruss says

     November 4, 2023 at 11:29 am

     Warm climates also make it harder. And so do contemporary traditional proscriptions of the destruction of the bones. But the preprint of the Judah / Israel ancient DNA from the period of the destruction of the 1st Temple shows that sometimes, the difficulties can be overcome.
     The looted burial cave in Kiryat Yearim, by the time the salvage archaeologists descended on it, contained just a tiny corner of the cave still saved from destruction, and a heap of displaced bones. No direct signs of Jewish identity, so the ancient DNA extraction was greenlighted. But the pottery is typical Iron IIB / some Iron IIC, the late First Temple period of Judah. And the carbon dates,while imprecise, are in the 500s-600s BCE.
     The authors hoped to unveil the first data at an special event in Israel, but the war intervened. The first preprint on mtDNA just came out; they also reported one Y-chromosome, and are pushing ahead with the whole genomes.
     The initial impression is that the Judah people had a strong continuity with the earlier Canaanites.
     https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Arie-Shaus/publication/375004626_Ancient_Mitochondrial_DNA_Analysis_of_an_Iron_II_Burial_Cave_on_the_Slope_of_Tel_Kiriath-Yearim/links/653b5b7424bbe32d9a72187b/Ancient-Mitochondrial-DNA-Analysis-of-an-Iron-II-Burial-Cave-on-the-Slope-of-Tel-Kiriath-Yearim.pdf
     https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/2023-10-09/ty-article/in-first-archaeologists-extract-dna-of-ancient-israelites/0000018b-138a-d2fc-a59f-d39b21fd0000

     As to the pre-Christian Slavs and their cremation burials, I hope that we’ll get answers from the occasional tradition-defying burials (such as mercenaries killed in foreign battles) and from the mixed-ancestry neighbors. Proto-Slavic connections have already been drawn from the dead of the Chimera battle on Sicily, and from the Goths (but likely part-proto-Slavs) cemetery in today’s Eastern Poland
563. Dmitry Pruss says

     November 4, 2023 at 4:25 pm

     And there is another investigation relying on sharing of short DNA segments to reveal the roots of ancient peoples. Nothing but an abstract at this moment, presented at an archaeology symposium in Poland.

     “Genetic identification of Slavs in Migration Period Europe using an IBD sharing graph”

     Concludes that the earliest Slavs were very close to Late Bronze / early Iron Age Baltics, but quickly picked additional East Germanic and Scythian admixtures during their formative period.
     https://www.archeologia.uw.edu.pl/archeologia-i-numizmatyka-europy-wschodniej-2/
     The talk apparently mentioned “Scythian Farmers” as the implied source of the gene flow, which may be something like Belsk, Ukraine?
     https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0245996
564. Dmitry Pruss says

     November 4, 2023 at 8:18 pm

     PS the poster on the Slavs is at
     https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F9-0XHuWYAAFCuw?format=jpg&name=4096×4096
565. Trond Engen says

     November 4, 2023 at 9:02 pm

     Nice graphics. I should learn how to read these new clustering graphs.
566. Dmitry Pruss says

     November 5, 2023 at 11:43 am

     @Trond, there are unique strengths and weaknesses of the IBD methods (identity-by-descent where segments of DNA are the same in two individuals because of a shared ancestor long time ago).
     Segments of DNA, containing multiple variable sites, are much more diverse than individual variable positions, and therefore can pinpoint the origin of the ancestors with a vastly higher precision than one can tell from the same set of variations but considered separately, without taking into account their linkage to one another within a segment. That’s how modern consumer DNA test may tell you which province, district, and ever town your ancestors were from – and that’s in Europe, which is remarkably homogenous by DNA that few DNA variants appreciably vary in frequency even between the continent’s far-flung corners. Or sometimes the lack of geographic precision is also telling, like about 6 to 8% of my own DNA is marked as “Finnish” by its spectrum of individual SNPs, but doesn’t match ANY region of Finland by IBD (of course I know very well that my great grandmother Pelagea wasn’t from Finland, but rather, from Russia’s North, where the Russian-speaking population was predominantly of Finno-Ugric ancestry by their DNA)
     But IBD is also remarkably non-quantitative. Only a fraction of the DNA segments are highly informative about their origins, and it differs from location to location. On an individual descendant level, only a fraction of this fraction is actually inherited, and it’s highly variable too. When one compares a large population of descendants with a large population of ancestors, then these variabilities can be averaged and controlled, but in practice, the numbers of genomes are almost always too small to quantify anything. So IBD conclusions tends to be qualitative.
     With ancients DNAs (or contemporary “low-pass sequencing” DNA data which I work a lot with recently, also looking for its ancestral origins, among other things), the problem is exacerbated by the fact almost nothing is known for certain about the genome’s two chromosomes. When the coverage of sequencing is low, then most locations aren’t covered at all, and most of the rest are covered by just one read from one of the chromosomes. Very recently, we started leveraging the fact nearby positions in DNA are correlated to extract something out of almost nothing by statistically imputing the missing data. With ancient DNAs, it works with those segments where correlations between DNA positions still exist in the genomes of the contemporary people. But if the ancient segments have been lost by now, imputation becomes iffy and such genomic locations disappear from the IBD comparisons.
     In the end, clusters and their link tell us amazing details about ancestral connections, but the strength of the links is hard to quantify, and some links may remain invisible if these once-common DNA segments have gone out of circulation in today’s humans.
567. Trond Engen says

     November 5, 2023 at 8:00 pm

     @Dmitry: Thanks. I understand the premise, and now I think I also understand its limits better. What I’m not able too is read the diagrams and intuit meaning. I see clusters, but I don’t know how they are formed.

     Still interesting stuff, though, and maybe especially the outliers in time and space. Early “Baltic” and “Slavic” descendants at the Roman Limes don’t need much explanation, but trying to understand that big orange dot at the Middle Volga, I found

     Leonid A. Vyazov et al: Demographic Changes, Trade Routes, and the Formation of Anthropogenic Landscapes in the Middle Volga Region in the Past 2500 Years,

     a chapter from

     Liang Emlyn Yang, Hans-Rudolf Bork, Xiuqi Fang, Steffen Mischke (ed:); Socio-Environmental Dynamics along the Historical Silk Road, Springer Open Access (2019)

     I didn’ know that the Kyiv Culture reached to the Volga and beyond in the 3rd century CE. I certainly hadn’t heard of its replacement, the agriculturally advanced Imenkovo culture from the 5th century. It’s conspicuous that the Imenkovo culture takes off just as the Roman-based economy breaks down. I obviously don’t know what’s going on here (and the paper doesn’t seem to either), but i I’ll speculate that the early Kyiv settlements were trading posts, making iron and trading furs with the Uralic peoples north and east of the Volga as local agents of the Sarmatians on the Steppe. When the Roman empire collapsed, and the Sarmatians got caught up in Steppe warfare, they made a new alliance with the Huns, got serious about farming, and started trading to the east and up and down the Volga. The spot and the deal was sweet enough for the culture to flourish and grow, even as the rest of Europe was in decline, but with the climate worsening after 536 CE, increasing Turkic raiding, and Hungarian semi-nomads moving in from the east, the permanent Imenkovo settlements were gradually abandoned, and after the early 8th century, there’s nothing left. The people may have been assimilated into the Hungarians or the Volga Finns. Soon after, the Bulgars set their eye on the Middle Volga, pushed the Hungarians out, reestablished long-distance trade, and brought in new settlers from the Don-Dniepr region. Could it also be the Imenkovo farmers taking up contacts with the old homeland? Whoever they were, the land of the Volga Bulgars grew prosperous on both trade, agriculture, and urban production of luxury goods.

     Anyway, there where (para-)Slavs at the Volga and Kama from the 3rd century CE — lasting for 5 centuries, or maybe even to the arrival of the Bulgars!.I suspect we’ll be able to follow this ancestry wherever it went. I almost want to suggest that the weirdly old northern Russian towns on the upper Volga are survivals of Imenkovo trading posts.

     Edit: @Dmitry: Elsewhere you connect the “Slavic” IBD’s on the Volga with the Imenkovo culture. That’s a relief — it makes my speculation on continuity between Kyiv and Imenkovo appear a litte less speculative. My speculation on continuity also with the farmers of Volga Bulgaria is still bereft of evidence.
568. Dmitry Pruss says

     November 5, 2023 at 9:08 pm

     There are names of the cultures in the legend above the figure on the right. The one with the chronology. I must admit that I was skeptical about Imenkovo – Kiev – Zarybintsy links before, these seem to be archeologically poor and geographically remote sites, but I am convinced now…
569. drasvi says

     November 5, 2023 at 10:48 pm

     Trond, wow.

     “weirdly old northern Russian towns on the upper Volga ”

     I’m not sure what exactly you mean here, but yes, [pre-]history of upper Volga and how exactly it is connected to histories of known ethnicities is what I always wanted to learn more about.

     Also there are Sarsky fort and Timeryovo. “Scandinavians there played chess for Arab dirhams” of course is cool, and “After Soviet archaeologists resumed excavations, they rejected the traditional attribution of the site to the Norsemen, proclaiming it the largest centre (perhaps the capital) of the Merya, a Finnic tribe which inhabited the region prior to the arrival of the Slavs.” is also cool, but.
570. David Marjanović says

     November 6, 2023 at 8:57 am

     The people may have been assimilated into the Hungarians or the Volga Finns.

     By “Volga Finns”, do you mean Mordvin and/or Mari?

     For a long time, anything Uralic that wasn’t Samoyed or Hungarian was automatically called “Finnic”. Merya for example.
571. Trond Engen says

     November 6, 2023 at 10:13 am

     I was deliberately vague, but I understand current convention to be “any one of the MVr’s, and Udmurt if you mean it geographically”.

     I mean any or all of the above, but Merya could certainly be one.
572. January First-of-May says

     November 6, 2023 at 6:33 pm

     the weirdly old northern Russian towns on the upper Volga

     How upper – Kostroma, Uglich, Tver, Ostashkov?

     (Yaroslavl and Dubna have known post-1000 foundation dates, though apparently Yaroslavl at least has evidence of pre-official-foundation settlement. Nizhny Novgorod is old but 1. a natural site for a town, 2. not very upper, 3. with that name it can’t be that old.)
573. Dmitry Pruss says

     November 6, 2023 at 8:14 pm

     Nizhny Novgorod is officially a boundary between Upper and Middle Volga.
     Many of the oldest cities of the Rus are “New” (even Torzhok is originally “New Market”) but that’s only to juxtapose them with the roaming Rus’ original haunt at Old Ladoga. Anyway towns seem to be a Western invention in these backwoods, not a Slavic heritage.
     Now that the DNA of Imen’kovo is revealed, it becomes a valid question of course, did they leave any descendants.
574. Trond Engen says

     November 6, 2023 at 8:53 pm

     I think I was thinking on Yaroslav, Rostov, and Suzdal, even if only the first is actually on the Volga. The weirdness is that they formed in the far end of the Slavic expansion.
575. AntC says

     November 7, 2023 at 12:14 am

     3. with that name it can’t be that old.

     To the contrary: anything with ‘new’ in its name but still in existence is almost certainly older than anything else standing: Pont Neuf; Newcastle (upon Tyne); New England (oldest European settlements); New South Wales (ditto); New Brunswick = Nouvelle-France.
576. Dmitry Pruss says

     November 7, 2023 at 1:03 am

     Rostov and Suzdal owe their existence to the dead-end Fatyanovo Bronze Age farmers who gradually slashed and burned the great forest around there. I haven’t seen any IBD analysis of Fatyanovo DNA which might have revealed if they disappeared without a trace as inferred, or left an imprint in the latter peoples.
     The era of Christianization of the Suzdal-Rostov open-country is traced by DNA in amazing detail ay Shekshovo. But just searching for Shekshovo in this thread, I can’t spot any discussion. Maybe elsewhere?
577. PlasticPaddy says

     November 7, 2023 at 3:37 am

     Shekshovo:
     https://languagehat.com/language-in-medieval-europe/#comment-4504083
     and following 4 comments
578. January First-of-May says

     November 7, 2023 at 3:13 pm

     I think I was thinking on Yaroslav, Rostov, and Suzdal, even if only the first is actually on the Volga. The weirdness is that they formed in the far end of the Slavic expansion.

     …I really should have thought of Beloozero, which is even further northeast (past the Volga, though still in the basin) but traditionally goes right back to the founding of Rus in 862. One imagines that the East Slavic founding myth wouldn’t have put one of the founders too far past the actual range of Slavic settlement…

     The part of Nizhny Novgorod’s name that implies a non-overly-ancient age is “Nizhny” [i.e. “Lower”], not “Novgorod” (as much) – it must have been named so when the original Novgorod already existed, to be (in effect) “not that Novgorod, the other one”.
     IIRC the original name actually translated to something like “Novgorod of the Lowland”, and could have been assigned independently from big-Novgorod; in any case it was probably founded as a boundary fort, well after the 10th century.

     A good deal of the places in the vaguely-Upper-Volga area were supposedly founded by Yury Dolgoruky (“George Long-Armed”) over the 1140s and 1150s. Some of those (notably including Moscow) seem to have existed prior to his reign, so one does wonder what he was actually doing up there…
579. Dmitry Pruss says

     November 7, 2023 at 3:59 pm

     A totally unrelated (except by DNA uses) paper on Mingrelians (a Western Kartvelian language), Abkhaz, and neighboring peoples (and ancient samples).
     As it is common in the Caucasus, neighboring peoples share pretty much the same mtDNA spectra, and a great deal of autosomal DNA, despite historical endogamy and despite belonging to different language groups, different religions, and having natural barriers in between (consider Ossetians, Abkhaz, Svan and Mingrel). Y-chromosomal pools are somewhat more distinct.
     With the Mingrelians and the Abkhaz, even autosomal patterns showed a near-perfect overlap to a degree which is unusual between distinct ethnic groups of the region. Confirming long-standing endogamy, admixture with other local peoples was observed only in the descendants of mixed marriages with the Slavs (the latter seems to have released the progeny from the traditional endogamy restrictions). Yet the extreme diversity of mtDNA pools and their high similarity between peoples imply that the wives used to be drawn from other groups in the old days, before strict endogamy set in.
     Some of the matrilines and some of the patrilines were “local” (if you include Maykop culture) and fairly ancient (Neolithic and Chalcolithic).
     Eneolithic North Caucasus showed genetic continuity with the South Caucasus but moved it away beginning with the Bronze Age Steppe migrations
     https://academic.oup.com/gbe/advance-article/doi/10.1093/gbe/evad198/7341981
580. languagehat says

     November 7, 2023 at 4:20 pm

     Very interesting! It’s amazing what we’re able to learn about prehistory with these techniques.
581. Trond Engen says

     November 7, 2023 at 4:31 pm

     @J1F: Yes, maybe Beloozero. And I forgot Kholopiy Gorodok. Both are on the Volga-Onega traverse rather than the Volga.
582. Stu Clayton says

     November 7, 2023 at 4:35 pm

     I’m expecting, any day now, for Dmitry Pruss to repeat (mildly but convincingly): I don’t think that it’s the best idea to discuss “everything DNA” in this, already oversize, thread…

     Will the new one be called Grandson of Yamnaya ?

     Eta: I see that Owlmirror prevented me right from the start:

     Canonically, “Bride of Yamnaya” should have come first. Then “Son of Yamnaya”, then “Ghost of Yamnaya”, then “Yamnaya meets Dravidian”, then “House of Yamnaya”
583. languagehat says

     November 7, 2023 at 4:39 pm

     Or Mitochondrial Descendant of Yamnaya.
584. Keith Ivey says

     November 7, 2023 at 5:00 pm

     Dr Tongue’s 3D House of Yamnaya.
585. Dmitry Pruss says

     November 7, 2023 at 5:25 pm

     well, we never had to stay on topic in the LH threads, and THIS thread was sort of conceived as “whatever DNA” so I am not going to ask for the third iteration.
     My gripe is different, if you allow. Lots of things are happening and lots of comments are very far from the topic titles, so I pretty much gave up reading all but the newest and the most familiar perennial threads. If there was something cool and attention-worthy in the 100th comment under a two weeks-old discussion, then I probably missed it. Even it WAS a familiar old thread, I probably missed it too, because even in the list of recently commented-on posts, it may have shifted several screens down before I even checked. No clue if it can be helped but it’s a problem for me.
586. John Cowan says

     November 7, 2023 at 10:04 pm

     anything with ‘new’ in its name but still in existence is almost certainly older than anything else standing

     The New World, no; Newfoundland, yes; New Brunswick, no; New York, no; New Jersey, no; New Brunswick, New Jersey, doubly no.
587. rozele says

     November 8, 2023 at 12:10 am

     Yamnaya IV: The One With the Welsh
588. drasvi says

     March 16, 2024 at 3:49 pm

     An abstract of a study of Pomor Y-chromosome haplogroups, in Bulletin of Russian State Medical University (it has been renamed Russian National Research Medical University).

     The peculiarity of the Russian North gene pool has long become scientific fact, but has yet to receive informative explanation. Genetic drift cannot be the only contributing factor in the striking genetic differences between not only northern Russian populations and the southern ones, but among individual northern populations as well. Studying Russian North gene pools previously underrepresented in scientific literature may help understand this phenomenon. The work aimed to perform a subtotal study of the gene pool of the Arkhangelsk Oblast Pomors (Onega Coast, Summer Coast, the western fragment of the Winter Coast; n = 130) using a panel of 60 Y-chromosome SNP markers through multidimensional scaling and mapping of genetic distances. The frequencies of 14 identified haplogroups differ drastically in Pomor populations: haplogroups I1, R1a, and N3 each comprise a quarter of the total Pomor gene pool, I2-P37.2, and R1b each comprise about 8%, and the rest of the haplogroups are rare. The Onega Coast Pomors showed genetic similarity to a wide range of North-Eastern Europe Finnic-speaking populations, as well as to Russian populations with a strong pre-Slavic substratum. The Summer Coast Pomors are close to the Scandinavian gene pools, and the Winter Coast Pomors are similar only to specific Finn and Swede populations. None of the Pomor populations demonstrate genetic similarity with the Novgorod Oblast Russian populations, with which the origin of the Pomors is traditionally associated. The genetic distances between Pomor populations are so great, they are comparable to the general range of variability between the Eastern Slavic, Baltic, and Finno-Ugric peoples of the region. The reasons for such pronounced originality of Pomor populations presumably include, along with genetic drift, the gene pool of each population being underlied by a different pre-Slavic substrate, with later gene flows as an additional factor.

     https://vestnik.rsmu.press/archive/2022/5/2/print?lang=ru# (pictures can be enlarged by a right click, open in new tab)
     Or: https://vestnik.rsmu.press/archive/2022/5/2/abstract?lang=ru (no supplement:()

     Not much, but Pomors are always interesting.
     I wonder how reliable are “distances” in such cases: men of the Summer Coast appear to have haplogroup composition more similar to that of Frenchmen than of any of “Russian” populations (but the adjacent one).
589. drasvi says

     March 16, 2024 at 3:54 pm

     GT: “Previously, we concluded that the autosomal genome of Novgorodians differs from Russians in the north of the Arkhangelsk region [8].”

     [8] is a study that only has one co-author in common with “we”:
     10.34680/2076-8052.2021.3(124).51-57
590. languagehat says

     March 16, 2024 at 4:21 pm

     Pomors are always interesting.

     Agreed; thanks for that!
591. David Marjanović says

     March 16, 2024 at 6:04 pm

     I wonder how reliable are “distances” in such cases: men of the Summer Coast appear to have haplogroup composition more similar to that of Frenchmen than of any of “Russian” populations (but the adjacent one).

     A few Vikings in the White Sea, a few Vikings in the Channel, and pretty soon it adds up to…
592. drasvi says

     March 16, 2024 at 6:23 pm

     Ah, the Summer Coast has 1/5 of R1b.
593. Xerîb says

     March 16, 2024 at 6:47 pm

     drasvi, здравствуй! с возвращением!
594. Hans says

     March 17, 2024 at 7:07 am

     Yes, welcome back!
595. Trond Engen says

     March 17, 2024 at 2:03 pm

     drasvi: An abstract of a study of Pomor Y-chromosome haplogroups, in Bulletin of Russian State Medical University (it has been renamed Russian National Research Medical University).

     Thanks! Interesting indeed, but a haplotype study of modern day Y-chromosomes can barely scratch the surface of the story. We need more and historical DNA to understand how and when and from where that fifth of the male ancestry came to the Summer Coast and how they interacted with the local populations(s). Judging from the maps it could be the genes of Norwegian settlers in the Bjarmaland of the sagas — but the sagas also tell of medieval immigration from Bjarmaland to Northern Norway.

     And really weird that those geograpically adjacent Pomor populations are so different. The Winter Coast seems to be unique, while the Onega Coast population looks like a local Finnic people. But I wonder how much of this is founder effects and drift in a patrilocal society. We’ll have to wait for whole genome studies to tell.

     The Novgorod study is based on autosomal DNA, but I haven’t looked at the actual methods. Fun to see that those old North Russian towns are connected. And what’s going on on that spot on the Northern Dvina?
596. Trond Engen says

     March 17, 2024 at 7:36 pm

     Me: Judging from the maps it could be the genes of Norwegian settlers in the Bjarmaland of the sagas — but the sagas also tell of medieval immigration from Bjarmaland to Northern Norway.

     Not that we should judge that from the map. I trust neither the exact distributions nor the finer shades.
597. drasvi says

     March 17, 2024 at 11:48 pm

     @Xerîb, Hans, спасибо!
     As I said, I never exactly “decided” to stop writing here, rather I “hanged”.

     “and when and from where that fifth of the male ancestry came to the Summer Coast”
     @Trond, well, it is just R1b… wait. L51 (aka R1b1a1a2a1). Anyway, if the source population is not Welsh and is not completely r1b their share can be higher….

     “but a haplotype study of modern day Y-chromosomes can barely scratch the surface of the story.”
     I think it must be possible to build an exact genealogy (up to: “they came from such and such town”) and at the very least resolution better than just “R1b” would help…

     “from the map” – I think black dots in the distance map correspond to coordinates in their database of frequences of Y-chromosome haplogroups. I would much prefer coloured dots with labels. But presumably the neighbourhood of each dot has more or less the right colour…
598. Dmitry Pruss says

     March 18, 2024 at 12:08 am

     I thought the Pomor story sounded familiar and indeed I wrote about it a year and a half ago
     https://www.facebook.com/dmitry.pruss/posts/pfbid022Baa9YQZbpPWcYvccVFreUxQwKkT84uNbXGq8dQ8HebLsVVmrd4gw9UpbZ8m6LDQl

     but wasn’t sure how much one can get it from it without a finer-grained Y-DNA analysis which might be able to establish times to common ancestors with other ethnic groups’ carriers of related Y-chromosomes (or, indeed, without autosomal information). My interest was piqued nevertheless because it’s the legendary Pomors who are supposedly my own ancestors…
599. drasvi says

     March 18, 2024 at 12:26 am

     Is suppose it’s a matter of expensive equipment.
600. Dmitry Pruss says

     March 18, 2024 at 1:20 am

     IMVHO what’s priceless is the samples. Outdated technologies are disproportionately expensive and up-to-date technologies can be paid for by international grants or collaborations, but in the countries gripped by genomic paranoia (ranging from the fear that the enemies will interpret the data in politically fraught ways to even crazier fears that the enemies will extract something of strategic value from the genomes) everything must be homebrewed and the precious samples are essentially wasted on the altar of nationalism…
601. drasvi says

     March 18, 2024 at 1:31 am

     We are at war now (with EU), so there are all sorts of complications.
     Hopefully the samples are still somewhere in the fridge in some lab:(
602. Dmitry Pruss says

     March 18, 2024 at 1:53 am

     So is Hungary?
603. drasvi says

     March 18, 2024 at 2:17 am

     Well, I don’t mean that “everyone went crazy” is not one of all sorts of complications:) (not sure in what exact causal relationship are the war and madness)

     But I guess international collaboration won’t work for many reasons…
604. drasvi says

     March 18, 2024 at 3:20 am

     As for Hungary, it’s becoming a popular example of… something. I saw it recently when reading about Hugos. (I appreciate that the author remembers Museveni..)
605. David Marjanović says

     March 18, 2024 at 10:26 am

     up-to-date technologies can be paid for by international grants or collaborations

     Between Russia and the EU or NATO, those practically don’t exist anymore.

     fridge

     Ultrafreezer (−80 °C), I hope.
606. Dmitry Pruss says

     March 18, 2024 at 10:46 am

     In the field of ancient DNA, and archaeology in general, collaborations between Russian and European research teams continue. One example is a doublet of preprints on Seima-Turbino Bronze Age published a few months ago and discussed here
     1. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.10.01.560332v1
     2. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.10.01.560195v1

     but there are numerous other examples (although technologically backward, and wasteful with respect to scarce aDNA, but local studies become more common). With contemporary DNA sources, it’s a lot harder and the breakdown of cooperation started much earlier, long before the war, and it’s informed by the politicians’ moronic fears that the West will find something to its advantage in the DNA from Russia.
607. drasvi says

     March 18, 2024 at 2:38 pm

     Well, yes.
     Once one of two Tunisian roommates of my half-Moroccan freind lost her sweater and the two girls (nice and friendly until that moment) remembered that my friend is Moroccan and everyone knows that Moroccans are sorcerers (cf. the Magrebinets from the Soviet Aladdin movie) so she apparently took the sweater to perform black magic or something.

     And that was just a sweater. Can you imagine what a Moroccan sorceress could do with a blood sample?
608. drasvi says

     March 18, 2024 at 4:50 pm

     Just listen to these words: blood sample. Sounds chthonic, eh?

     Genes themselves have always been a subject of … er, yes, “chthonic” worries of many people.

     Actually, I even understand them. Say, the anti-GMO movement. Basically: “we know from experience that intervention in various areas previously inaccessible to humans often has unpleasant side effects. People discover nuclear fission and only then they discover how dangerous pollution and radiation can be, people change ecosystems and systems become ugly. We don’t know what to expect from genetic engineering but the area is important and we can’t trust professionals who (from experience) can be ignorant themselves“.
     The position is reasonable.

     And I don’t know how exactly it works, but demography in turn always bothers some other (politics-adjacent) group of people. Recently I saw (online) a Russian quoting Arafat about “womb of the Palestinian woman” – in the context of Russian demography.
     This line of concern, while adjacent to politics, patriotism etc. is somehow also adjacent to “chthonic” stuff.

     Intuitively, I’m not surprised if our idiot MPs chose to protect our family jewels this way. But I can’t precisely describe why I’m not surprised.
609. drasvi says

     March 18, 2024 at 5:14 pm

     Hm. Perhaps the whole “progressive/liberal vs. right-wing” dichotomy can be described in terms of pagan cults.
610. Dmitry Pruss says

     March 18, 2024 at 5:54 pm

     It’s pretty much all saliva samples now, BTW.

     The roots of the fears of “enemy access to DNA” date back to the pre-genome era, the 1980s, and the visceral fear of the Chinese military which made the USSR invest into proof-of-principle ethnic weapons which would theoretically kill or disable the Chinese but leave the Russians untouched. In lieu of the actual Chinese DNA, they worked with the Yakut samples, playing around with alcohol dehydrogenase gene (remember, not many humans genes were known in molecular details yet).
     Decades later, it’s become clear to the actual geneticists that all large ethnic groups of Eurasia have so much overlap in their DNA makeup that any genome-based “ethnic weapons” are bound to be extremely non-specific, striking “friend” almost as often as the “foe”. But the old beliefs didn’t die among the military types. And some colleagues are fanning the flames, I assume for profit rather than out of conviction. Putin himself professed beliefs in ethnic-genetic weapons on numerous occasions, and condemned consumer genomics giants like 23andMe as “fronts for the enemy military research”. All foreign consumer genomics is banned in Russia now. Never mind the fact that hundreds thousand already tested, so if there were any secrets to reveal, then the enemies would already be in the know…
611. David Eddyshaw says

     March 18, 2024 at 5:57 pm

     @drasvi:

     Well, right-wing Americans very often belong to a pagan cult (the Parachristian Trumpodules.) So yes …
612. Brett says

     March 18, 2024 at 7:20 pm

     “Genetic tests, Mandrake. Children’s genetic tests.”
613. Y says

     March 18, 2024 at 7:32 pm

     I vaguely recall something (HIV?) that was supposed to have been engineered by evils, to specifically kill Black people, in the US but especially in Africa. Bleh.

     Probably something similar for Covid oh-so-suspiciously sparing particular countries or other populations (until it didn’t).

     On the other hand, surreptitious genetic sampling was indeed used to track down Osama bin Laden.
614. Dmitry Pruss says

     March 18, 2024 at 7:48 pm

     Mass genetic genealogy testing makes it a lot easier to track people who haven’t been tested themselves but share roots with the others who did. One of the cases I know involved an immigrant from a small South Italian town whose crime scene DNA revealed his town of origin – and the rest was easy.
     It may even be possible to target, narrowly, a specific family with custom bioweapons. But not whole wide groups.

     (I’m sure Mr. Kennedy is already explaining that Covid was a broad-action ethnic weapon … and then cited as an expert somewhere in the Duma)
615. drasvi says

     March 18, 2024 at 9:25 pm

     “saliva’, yes.

     But in Pomor study it was their blood.

     Yes, I heard this narrative.
     Honestly I processed it as yet another possible rational story that may appeal to people because of their “chthonic” worries – but maybe there is more to it and some people just believe this particular story for some other reason than “genes are chthonic”.
616. drasvi says

     March 18, 2024 at 9:31 pm

     It is difficult, for example, to say what of Ukraine-related propaganda contributed into the decision to start the war merely by increasing the popular support, and what affected decision-makers themselves.
617. D.O. says

     March 18, 2024 at 11:54 pm

     He got “reelected”, like Augustus, but I think we should resist using plural of majesty.
618. drasvi says

     March 19, 2024 at 12:43 am

     @D.O., I learned that we are going to have elections 3 or 4 days ago from a forum post. The post was titled “хотят ли русские войны”, it was long and boring. When I scrolled down I saw with a surprise that the guy wrote it to… urge everyone to make the right choise at the upcoming election. One commenter advised to think what choice the West wants everyone to make before voting (which is consistent with what I usually see in Russian TV).

     And now I know the result. From you:) If by “he” you mean whoever Russians voted for. It’s a boy! Hurrah!

     In other words: this election does not seem to have been discussed particularly widely (though I’m a bit of a hermit).
619. David Marjanović says

     March 19, 2024 at 7:08 pm

     this election does not seem to have been discussed particularly widely

     Mocked, sure, but not discussed.

     Anyway: Population genomics of post-glacial western Eurasia, open access.

     These results indicate that there were at least three distinct waves of northwards HG ancestry into Scandinavia: (1) a predominantly southern European source into Denmark and coastal southwestern Sweden; (2) a source related to southeastern European HGs into the Baltic and southeastern Sweden; and (3) a northwest Russian source into the far north, which then spread south along the Atlantic coast of Norway^15 (Extended Data Fig. 4c). These movements are likely to represent post-glacial expansions from refugial areas shared with many plant and animal species^40.

     There are indeed eastern and western hedgehogs, carrion crows, bears (brown and cave) and many others, separated anew in each glacial and slowly mixing in the longer interglacials. The news here is that Baltic and “Scandinavian” HGs were apparently not simply in the middle of a WHG-EHG-ANE cline, but WHG, EHG and Romanian-Baltic-southeast Swedish HGs came from three different glacial refugia (Italy, somewhere east, Balkan peninsula). As previously found in the paper on the genetic history of Spain, the Iberian peninsula was also a glacial refugium, but the people that survived there didn’t spread afterwards; they only made a small genetic contribution to Mesolithic Iberian HGs, who were otherwise WHG-derived. And Ukrainian HGs were different again… though in Fig. 2a the Balkan-derived HG are modeled as a mixture of WHG and Ukrainian HG.

     Later, Balkan-derived HGs spread to Ukraine and all the way to Spain.

     Of note, two newly reported approximately 7,300-year-old genomes from the Middle Don River region in the Pontic-Caspian steppe (Golubaya Krinitsa, NEO113 & NEO212) were found to be predominantly derived from earlier Ukrainian HGs, but with around 18-24% of their ancestry contributed from a source related to HGs from the Caucasus (Caucasus_13000BP_10000BP) (Extended Data Fig. 4a and Supplementary Data 12). Further lower-coverage (non-imputed) genomes from the same site project in the same PCA space (Fig. 1d) shifted away from the European HG cline towards Iran and the Caucasus. Using the linkage-disequilibrium-based method DATES^43, we dated this admixture to around 8,300 bp (Supplementary Data 14). These results document genetic contact between populations from the Caucasus and the steppe region that is much earlier than previously known, providing evidence of admixture before the advent of later nomadic steppe cultures—in contrast with recent hypotheses—and further to the west than has been previously reported^5,44.

     And that’s important because:

     Although the broader effects of the steppe migrations around 5,000 cal. bp are well known, the origin of this ancestry has remained a mystery. Here we show that the steppe ancestry composition (Steppe_5000BP_4300BP) can be modelled as a mixture of around 65% ancestry related to herein-reported HG genomes from the Middle Don River region (MiddleDon_7500BP) and around 35% ancestry related to HGs from Caucasus (Caucasus_13000BP_10000BP) (Extended Data Fig. 6 and Supplementary Data 9). Thus, Middle Don HGs, who already carried ancestry related to Caucasus HGs (Extended Data Fig. 4a), serve as a hitherto-unknown proximal source for the majority ancestry contribution into Yamnaya-related genomes. The individuals in question derive from the burial ground Golubaya Krinitsa (Supplementary Note 3). Material culture and burial practices at this site are similar to the Mariupol-type graves, which are widely found in neighbouring regions of Ukraine; for instance, along the Dnepr River. They belong to the group of complex pottery-using HGs mentioned above, but the genetic composition at Golubaya Krinitsa is different from that in the remaining Ukrainian sites (Fig. 2a and Extended Data Fig. 5). A previous study30 suggested a model for the formation of Yamnaya ancestry that includes a ‘northern’ steppe source (EHG + CHG ancestry) and a ‘southern’ Caucasus Chalcolithic source (CHG ancestry), but did not identify the exact origin of these sources. The Middle Don genomes analysed here show the appropriate balance of EHG and CHG ancestry, suggesting that they are candidates for the missing northern proximate source for Yamnaya ancestry.

     Father of Yamnaya.

     Also, the ancestry of people buried in the Corded Ware Complex is Steppe + Globular Amphora specifically; other ancestry from Early European Farmers came in after the CWC people had spread. And so…

     A stylistic connection between GAC and CWC ceramics has long been suggested, including the use of amphora-shaped vessels and the development of cord decoration patterns^52. Moreover, shortly before the emergence of the earliest CWC groups, eastern GAC and western Yamnaya groups exchanged cultural elements in the forest–steppe transition zone northwest of the Black Sea, where GAC ceramic amphorae and flint axes were included in Yamnaya burials, and the typical Yamnaya use of ochre was included in GAC burials^53, indicating close interactions between these groups. Previous ancient genomic data from a few individuals suggested that this was limited to cultural influences and not population admixture^54. However, in the light of our new genetic evidence, it seems that this zone—and possibly other similar zones of contact between GAC and groups from the steppe (for example, the Yamnaya)—were key in the formation of the CWC, through which steppe-related ancestry and GAC-related ancestry co-dispersed far towards the west and the north^55. This resulted in regionally diverse situations of interaction and admixture^14,32, but a substantial part of the CWC dispersal happened through corridors of cultural and demic transmission that had been established by the GAC during the preceding period^33,56.

     …and the Steppe ancestry in Europe before 3000 cal. BP is not precisely Yamnaya, but a bit closer to Afanasievo.

     Then the paper is done with Europe and looks at Siberia:

     Supervised admixture modelling (using the ‘deep’ set of ancestry sources; Supplementary Data 9) revealed contributions from three major sources in these HGs from east of the Urals: early west Siberian HG ancestry (SteppeC_8300BP_7000BP) dominated in the western forest steppe; northeast Asian HG ancestry (Amur_7500BP) was highest at Lake Baikal; and Palaeo-Siberian ancestry (SiberiaNE_9800BP) was observed in a cline of decreasing proportions from northern Lake Baikal westwards across the forest steppe13 (Extended Data Figs. 7 and 10a).

     […]

     Genomes reported here also shed light on the genetic origins of the Early Bronze Age Okunevo Culture in the Minusinsk Basin in Southern Siberia. In contrast to previous results, we find no evidence for Lake Baikal HG-related ancestry in the Okunevo^13,58 when using our newly reported Siberian forest steppe HG genomes jointly with Lake Baikal LNBA genomes as putative proximate sources. Instead, we find that they originate from the admixture of a forest steppe HG source (best modelled as a mixture of clusters Steppe_6700BP_4600BP and SteppeCE_7000BP_3600BP) and steppe-related ancestry (Steppe_5300BP_4000BP; Extended Data Fig. 7, set ‘postBA’ and Supplementary Data 11). We date the admixture with steppe-related ancestry to around 4,600 bp (Supplementary Data 14), and find it to be modelled exclusively from an Afanasievo-related source in proximate modelling separating the Yamnaya and Afanasievo steppe ancestries (Extended Data Figs. 9d and 10c,e). This is direct evidence for gene flow from peoples of the Afanasievo Culture, who were closely related to the Yamnaya and existed near Altai and Minusinsk Basin during the era of the steppe migrations^1,58.

     From around 3,700 cal. bp, individuals across the steppe and Lake Baikal regions show markedly different ancestry profiles (Fig. 5 and Extended Data Figs. 7 and 9b). We document a sharp increase in non-local ancestries, with only limited ancestry contributions from local HGs. The early stages of this transition are characterized by an influx of steppe-related ancestry, which decays over time from its peak of around 70% in the earliest individuals. Similar to the dynamics in western Eurasia, steppe-related ancestry is here correlated with GAC-related farmer ancestry (Poland_5000BP_4700BP; Fig. 5 and Extended Data Fig. 10b), recapitulating the previously documented gene flow from GAC groups into neighbouring groups of the steppe and the forest steppe, and the eastward expansion of admixed western steppe pastoralists from the Sintashta and Andronovo complexes during the Bronze Age43,63. However, GAC-related ancestry is notably absent in individuals of the Okunevo culture, and individuals with steppe ancestry after 3,700 bp show a slight excess in affinity to Yamnaya over Afanasievo in proximate modelling (Extended Data Fig. 10d), providing further support for two distinct eastward migrations of western steppe pastoralists during the early (Yamnaya-related) and later (Sintashta and Andronovo) Bronze Age. The later stages of the transition are characterized by increasing central Asian (Turkmenistan_7000 BP_5000BP) and northeast Asian-related (Amur_7500BP) ancestry components (Fig. 5 and Extended Data Fig. 10b). Together, these results show that deeply structured HG ancestry dominated the eastern Eurasian steppe substantially longer than in western Eurasia, before successive waves of population expansions swept across the steppe within the last 4,000 years. These included a large-scale introduction of domesticated horse lineages concomitant with new equestrian equipment and spoke-wheeled chariotry^63,64, as well as the adoption of millet as a robust subsistence crop^65.

     That’s broomcorn millet from East Asia. Rice apparently came along, judging from the title of ref. 65.

     The paper accompanies the one on the genetic history of Denmark.
620. AntC says

     March 20, 2024 at 12:35 am

     this election does not seem to have been discussed particularly widely

     Mocked, sure, but not discussed.

     Indeed. All the news sources I monitor (both syndicated in NZ and internationally) have ‘covered’ the election in the sense of saying it’s a mock-election. They’ve mentioned the (few — but then they would be) outbursts of demonstration against it; they’ve reported the result.

     As I understand it within Russia, the anti-Putin element has urged people to go out and vote against him. (I don’t get what counts as a protest vote, since the only candidates are Putin-approved or now dead.) The pro-Putin element urged voting to show Putin’s popularity.

     So @drasvi’s not having heard much I suspect reflects the “hermit” rather than anybody within Russia trying to suppress information. But yeah, it’s all guessing.
621. Y says

     March 20, 2024 at 12:56 am

     The protest vote, encouraged by Navalny’s supporters, especially where voting was forced, was to vote at 12 noon sharp. There were long lines as a result sometimes.
     At least that’s what I heard.
622. Hans says

     March 20, 2024 at 3:45 am

     The protest voters were also asked to spoil their ballots.
623. drasvi says

     March 20, 2024 at 4:44 am

     Back to Pomors, Arkhangelsk oblast and surrounding regions have the smallest percent of votes for Putin.
624. J.W. Brewer says

     March 20, 2024 at 8:13 am

     Re the Pomors, I was struck (before inquiring as to what they might have in common other than geography) by the fact that the only parts of Russia where Putin’s reported voteshare dipped modestly below 80% were all in the northwest and contiguous to each other: the Nenets Autonomous Okrug, Arkhangelsk Oblast, Republic of Karelia, and Vologda Oblast. FWIW Putin did somewhat better, although still below his national average, in Murmansk Oblast, also part of historical Pomor territory. Karelia maybe you could attribute to Finnish-irredentist saboteurs and wreckers, but how far from the border could those effectively penetrate? Of course it’s not that implausible that all of the numbers are phony and that the scriptwriters in charge of the charade realized that some geographical variation in the reported results would lead to a more convincing veneer of verisimilitude than if each oblast or other “federal subject” reported the exact same percentage for Putin. But on that view, it’s unclear whether e.g. the denizens of Vologda Oblast should be flattered or concerned that the scriptwriters had cast them in the role of appearing notably less supportive of Putin than the national average.

     All of that said, I am in the market for explanations of what distinguishes that region “culturally” (in a way that would have downstream political effects) beyond “this is where the Pomors lived,” although “because of the Pomors, concrete cultural distinctions A B & C can still be observed here” would be fine.

     At the other end of the spectrum, Putin got a reported 98.9% of the vote in Chechnya, where the local authorities may not have gotten the memo about how letting the nominal-opposition candidates collectively get at least 5 or 10% of the vote creates better optics for the legitimacy of the regime.
625. drasvi says

     March 20, 2024 at 10:33 am

     “that some geographical variation in the reported results would lead to a”

     @JWB, if the ballots were actually counted, the result would be circa 80%.

     There was a period when they tried to obfuscate their bullshit so it would be that obvious from graphs. But they abandoned the practice, this election was the most shameless.
     See this beautiful turnout graph. (x turnout y number of voters from the stations with this turnout)
     Compare the graph for 2018 (also bullshit but) and you’ll see what I mean by shameless.

     Usually bullshit is reported by stations themselves and correctly represented on the site. In some regions bullshit is produced at regional level (e.g. DNR).

     For those who read in Russian, I’m (mostly) summarising this.
626. David Marjanović says

     March 20, 2024 at 12:47 pm

     I don’t get what counts as a protest vote, since the only candidates are Putin-approved or now dead.

     Boris Nadezhdin is alive, well, and not even in prison as far as currently known. He wasn’t allowed to be on the ballot, though; too many of the signatures he got were declared faulty.
627. J.W. Brewer says

     March 20, 2024 at 1:20 pm

     I must say that the way in which Nadezhdin was reportedly kept off the ballot (finding enough hypertechnical flaws with enough of his petition signatures to get him below the required number of valid signatures even though no one can really claim with a straight face that many/most of the invalidated signatures were those of actual voters who actually subjectively wanted this candidate to have ballot access) is one that has been used to keep “insurgent” candidates off the ballot in New York state with some frequency in recent decades. In fact N.Y. candidates with reason to believe the establishment-insider types may challenge their petitions are often advised to gather two or three times as many signatures as the requisite number to have an adequate cushion against the sort of hypertechnical challenges that will succeed under the law if those motivated to find technical flaws devote enough time to looking for them. I’m not saying that this should make anyone feel better about Russia’s electoral system versus worse about N.Y.’s electoral system, but it’s not (to me) a mysterious or alien or “oriental-despotism” sort of tactic.

     I heard an unsourced claim (although via someone not generally prone to propagating pure BS) that in at least some quarters the opposition strategy was for people to spread their votes comparatively randomly/evenly among the three on-the-ballot challengers rather than try to rally around one of the three, because the point was to try to reduce Putin’s aggregate share not to support or legitimize any of the other three as, individually, a worthy alternative. There was a claim that a phone app was in circulation that would just randomly pick one of the three for you if you didn’t want the burden of having to choose among them (perhaps because you viewed their mere presence on the ballot as evidence that they were of insufficient rigor in their challenge to the status quo). OTOH, the piece drasvi linked to claims (as very imperfectly rendered into English by Google Translate) that there was not only hanky-panky to overstate Putin’s vote but hanky-panky to understate Davankov’s vote in comparison to the figures reported for the other two challengers, presumably because Davankov was viewed in relevant quarters as the most “threatening” (on some metric of “threat”) of the three that had been allowed on the ballot, albeit presumably less threatening than Nadezhdin. Which I guess would be a compliment to him if true.
628. David Marjanović says

     March 20, 2024 at 1:35 pm

     it’s not (to me) a mysterious or alien or “oriental-despotism” sort of tactic

     That’s unsettling. I thought even in the US “machine politics” had been dead for a few decades at least.
629. J.W. Brewer says

     March 20, 2024 at 1:47 pm

     David M. was misinformed. I’m not sure that it’s worth him being unsettled to boot. OTOH, this is in the context of the rather open U.S. practice where, assuming ballot access, an incumbent office holder can be blocked from running from reelection by a successful primary challenge, even if the office holder’s party leadership doesn’t want that to happen. In e.g. European countries where party insiders control who is on the party’s candidate list for some complex proportional representation system, I don’t know if a parallel phenomenon is possible.

     More generally, there is quite considerable state-to-state variation in the U.S. in how loose versus restrictive ballot access requirements are, and no particularly strong or organized pressure for everyone to converge on the same model beyond a limited number of features where federal law has imposed standardization. States at the loose end of the range do not necessarily demonstrate superior public-policy outcomes! FWIW, some other features of N.Y.’s unusually restrictive electoral rules (e.g. having an atypically long lead-time to change your party registration to vote in the primary of a party with which you had not previously been affiliated, which made it harder for “outsider” candidates to drum up “outsider” support) have been moderated in recent years.
630. Ryan says

     March 20, 2024 at 2:37 pm

     I don’t know about NY, but in Chicago/Cook County, most of the “hypertechnical” issues are when voters don’t actually live in the district they signed the petition for.
631. drasvi says

     March 20, 2024 at 5:55 pm

     @JWB, yes. I remember when Yabloko was the only pre-Putin democratic party (and only opposition) who could get in Duma they were adding votes to United Russia at the expence of imaginary turnout and votes for Yabloko.

     Actually, much of this dynamics relies on the fact that people won’t vote for someone who is not “popular” and will vote for someone who is “popular”.
632. drasvi says

     March 20, 2024 at 6:01 pm

     Some observer mentioned that in Crimea, either during the referendum or some election, I don’t remember, he told the chair(wo)man of the comission about some issue and… she offered him to tell her what figure she should write in the report instead of what she wrote.

     The ballots were not counted yet:)))))
633. drasvi says

     March 20, 2024 at 6:20 pm

     That is, she was not insisting on her bullshit, she was totally open to a liberal observer’s bullshit. Again, she’s a former Ukrainian citizen, so she perhaps did not know that liberals are evil and Russia is encircled by enemies and so on.
634. drasvi says

     March 20, 2024 at 6:44 pm

     @JWB and about the text in Russian that you read. The whole genre was invented some 15 years ago simultaneously by two bloggers, both phycists: Maxim Pshenichnikov (oude-rus.livejournal.com, Groningen) and Sergey Shpilkin (podmoskovnik.livejournal.com, here). They noticed that distributions are in many ways anomalous, published some joint articles… P. was soon forgotten by general public, perhaps because he is not Moscow based (which is sad, because I know the guy)

     So there are two anomalies: first the “Churov’s saw”, the serrated shape of the graph. The thing is, when you intend to report some 80% irrespectively of the actual percent, you are more likely to either pick the round number (like 80) or something like 81 and something. But not 83.73% and NOT 78 and something or 79 and something.

     And the second anomaly is that usually such graphs look like graphs of a normal distribution. They are bell-shaped. When a country has two distinct and different large sub-populations (some countries do… France?), the distribution can be bimodal, with two bells superimposed. But they don’t look like crap that you see on the picture I called beutiful – or even like crap from the earlier pictures.
     For some reason, turnout graphs are always particularly affected.

     There was a silly mistake made by first posters of graphs: they will have (NOT artificial!) peaks at 50%, 1/3 and 2/3 %, 25% and 75% (1/4th) and so on, the harmonics. That is because when the number of voters at a station is small 50% is possible (in principle) in any station with even number of voters, while 61% just becomes impossible. So when at the y axis the number of stations who reported such result is displayed, there will be huge peaks at 50% etc.(They fixed it somehow)
635. David Marjanović says

     March 20, 2024 at 6:47 pm

     I don’t know if a parallel phenomenon is possible.

     Various kinds of ballot initiatives do exist. In Austria, “popular demands” that get 100,000 signatures have to be discussed by parliament (…where they get circular-filed afterwards, but that’s another story). There’s never been one that was submitted and then got any noteworthy number disqualified, certainly none that was submitted with more than 100,000 and ended up with less than that.

     The ballots were not counted yet:)))))

     Nothing will top Azerbaijan’s election in, if I’m not confusing things, 1994. The result leaked a few days before the election. To prove that the leak was fake, the dictator* had to win by an even more ridiculous margin than the leak had said… so he did.

     I think it was a few years earlier that there was an election in Algeria for the first and last time in decades. The result wasn’t published for weeks. People were saying the generals hadn’t agreed on a result yet.

     * Monarch, arguably. His son is now in charge.
636. drasvi says

     March 20, 2024 at 7:15 pm

     Many in Russian opposition tend to believe that “technical analysis” (using a term from stock market/forex) of such graph allows us to learn the actual situation.
     Anyway they are not interested in exaggerating Putin’s success and it seems only some 7% are bullshit.

     This does NOT mean that there is not some other anomaly they haven’t noticed and that they won’t say “hey, it is 70%, not 80%!” and will be terribly surprised.

     @DM what I meant is that much of this nonsense simply reflects attitudes of heads of comissions at stations.

     Yes, likely sometimes they want to please “superiours” with “right” results and perhpas often the latter just tell them what the result should be. Especially in Chechnia, but in Chechnia bullshit is likely produced at regional level.
     The author of the article linked above says based on graphs that the desired result was 70% turnout 85% for Putin.
637. AntC says

     March 20, 2024 at 7:33 pm

     @JWB [ballot-challenging] it’s not (to me) a mysterious or alien or “oriental-despotism” sort of tactic.

     All the news about U.S. elections seems to involve skullduggery at a level of detail in the weeds but that has actual anti-democratic effects. (Its severe consequences have come to light in the past 8 years maybe, but I still remember the hanging chads.). That election officials are party-aligned and themselves elected seems appalling. I think USA should just shut the fuck up about ‘beacon of democracy’ and go get its house in order.

     Also the whole judicial appointment system seems exactly what you’d get from oriental despotism. From the Supreme Court downwards.
638. Brett says

     March 20, 2024 at 8:14 pm

     @David Marjanović: Genevieve’s uncle was* the “hereditary dictator” of Pontoppidan, which serms a very rational and matter of fact description of that kind of political situation. Casher might have been happier with her, if his spacesuit hadn’t been so itchy. Perhaps I would have bern better off his Genevieve too, but she showed up the very day I had steeled myself to ask her for an official date with one of the worst perms I have ever seen.

     * Perhaps “will be” is better, since the story takes place tens of thousands of years in the future.
639. AntC says

     March 20, 2024 at 8:34 pm

     [pseudo-elected dictator*] * Monarch, arguably. His son is now in charge.

     Singapore’s democracy is an interesting case: The Lee family has ruled almost unbroken since independence. The country scores pretty badly on openness. (Despite getting only 61% of the vote, the PAP has 83 seats out of 95.) And yet I can’t help feeling both Lee Kuan Yew and his son Lee Hsien Loong have been better Prime Ministers than in many more open politys.

     The younger Lee has announced then delayed his retirement. Perhaps waiting for a child to come up the ranks?
640. David Marjanović says

     March 20, 2024 at 9:00 pm

     Here’s an election video! It’s 1:01 long and much funnier than the many, many from 2018 where people boringly walk back and forth between the ballot box and the photocopier.

     I think USA should just shut the fuck up about ‘beacon of democracy’

     On the contrary, it should resume arming Ukraine.
641. Lameen says

     March 21, 2024 at 12:22 am

     “hereditary dictator”

     A couple of decades ago, someone coined a fun (or depressing, YMMV) portmanteau for this system of government in Arabic: jumlukiyyah (blending jumhūriyyah “republic” and malakiyyah “monarchy”).
642. D.O. says

     March 21, 2024 at 12:39 am

     JWB, don’t underestimate Russians (remember, they sent first sputnik before Americans, you (or us, I guess?) stole Werner von Braun, and they (or we?) stole blueprints, fair game!). If I understand the rules correctly, when X signatures are required, a candidate is allowed to collect however many signatures they care, but are able to submit 1.05*X presumably best checked. If out of this number 0.05*X of the signatures are rejected, the candidate goes to the doghouse.

     As for Chechnya, it is a territory in personal union with Putin. I am not sure on which basis internal Russian parties even operate there. The most unique results are not 80% give or take in some regions, it’s absolutely fantastic results out of “reunited territories” which are not even controlled in their entirety by Russian forces. I propose to christen them Khlestakov elections.
643. Ryan says

     March 21, 2024 at 12:47 am

     >> shut the fuck up about ‘beacon of democracy’

     > On the contrary, it should resume arming Ukraine.

     Sometimes, though not always, appeals to an unrealistically positive self-image help convince people to do the right thing.

     Crossing my fingers and calling my congresswoman.
644. drasvi says

     March 21, 2024 at 2:38 am

     @JWB, actually the northern anomaly has a large overlap with 11 (10) reference regions used in the linked article.
     Possibly they did not “vote” for Putin less, they just happened to be more honest.
     _____
     WP has a list of jumhūriyyāt. To my surprise I find there Dagestan and Crimea.

     Not Azerbaijan (even though Azerbaijan People’s Republic of 1918 (آذربایجان خلق جمهوریتی) seems to be the first country to call itself so….).
645. drasvi says

     March 21, 2024 at 3:54 am

     I don’t know if jumluk exists in some arabic variety but google has a picture of
     Samsarat al-Jumluk / Samsarat al-Gumruk in Sanaa (“caravanserai, or samsara, where merchants would come and unload their wares” says some book).

     So if it is jumruk “customs” (from commercium > kommérkion)… well, I can imagine imperial customs going feral and then expanding.

     Does this sound as a way a modern state could arise? It does.
646. Hans says

     March 21, 2024 at 4:28 am

     @AntC: Singapore is the go-to example for a lot of free-market right-wingers as a showcase that authoritarian government by experts is better than liberal democracy (maybe you remember the Singapore-on-Thames Britain was supposed to become after Brexit?) What they forget is that it’s easier to rule a small city state than a large country, that in smaller communities social obligations and the fact that people know each other can stand in for the kinds of formal checks and balances a democracy has, that the rulers had the incentive for good behavior that if they fucked the city up, their big neighbor might pounce and take it away from them, and that one example doesn’t prove much.
647. AntC says

     March 21, 2024 at 6:06 am

     Singapore is the go-to example for a lot of free-market right-wingers

     Yes I remember the ‘Asian Tigers’ total bollox: all those countries were corporate states at the time, with huge amounts of state intervention in the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy, and large-scale public ownership of housing and land.

     Only _after_ they’d ceased to be economic power-houses did they privatise the state to some extent — and now nobody talks of ‘Tigers’ because all of their economies got undercut by cheap Chinese labour.

     one example doesn’t prove much.

     Yeah neither Singapore nor Hong Kong had anything recognisable as democracy under the Brits. And as you say they’re now much more worried about upsetting you-know-who. Singapore is trying to appear liberal to the West, and not-very-liberal when facing China/Myanmar, so it can make deals as a go-between. Merely I admire the Lee dynasty for mostly successfully toeing a very narrow line.
648. J.W. Brewer says

     March 21, 2024 at 7:43 am

     @drasvi: if what we’re seeing is not so much regional variation in voting patterns but regional variation in honesty/integrity in local bureaucrats that would also be an interesting phenomenon in need of explanation, historical/cultural or otherwise. Why would historically Pomor regions have local bureaucrats least willing to distort the reported figures at Moscow’s behest?

     I am indebted to D.O for the interesting tidbit about requiring candidates to submit signatures that are approx. 95.24% or more valid, which does make the process more challenging than in New York.
649. Ryan says

     March 21, 2024 at 8:59 am

     I’d be interested to see a citation of that. I see nothing of the sort in the NY St. Board of Elections petition handbook, and it doesn’t ring true to me.

     If there’s any truth, it’s that candidates are meant to do validation searches and strike invalid signatures before submission.
650. J.W. Brewer says

     March 21, 2024 at 9:25 am

     @Ryan: We may be talking past each other. D.O.’s claim was about the Russian process, which (if the report is accurate) does create strong incentives for campaigns to do their own quality control checks before submission.
651. Ryan says

     March 21, 2024 at 10:15 am

     Ah. I thought you guys were still discuss New York. Thanks for the clarification.

     I would mention that in US states with signature requirements for ballot access, you typically (perhaps always, but state-by-state laws make it hard for me to be sure) have the right to bring your petitions to the board and compare them to the registration signature to validate them.

     There are sometimes maximum requirements, but it’s usually something like double the minimum, rather than the minimum plus 5%. The point is to avoid a campaign providing so many invalid signatures as to make it impossible to prove they didn’t have sufficient valid signatures.
652. J.W. Brewer says

     March 21, 2024 at 10:33 am

     In N.Y. all petition signatures must be witnessed, and if the person who signs the form as the “Subscribing Witness” was not technically qualified for that role, or didn’t personally with their own eyes witness the signature (because as often happens petition-gatherers were working in teams etc.), or otherwise screws up the formal attestation required of the SW, the signature is no good even though there is no genuine doubt that it’s the actual signature of an actual registered voter who resides in the relevant district. That’s traditionally a fruitful source of technical disqualifications of petition signatures, and is one topic discussed in this 150+ (!) page guide to the ballot access process in N.Y. – not written so much for the Idealistic Candidate but for the lawyer whom the IC has been well advised to retain to make sure there are no technical screw-ups. Although even as of the date this went to press (2012) the old hypertechnical rule that (unless a notary public or otherwise exempt from this requirement) the Subscribing Witness had to personally reside in the same district as the candidate and signers had been loosened. But you still can’t use e.g. Idealistic College-Kid Volunteers who are not themselves residents of the state in the SW role.
     https://www.stroock.com/uploads/pub1508.pdf
653. Ryan says

     March 21, 2024 at 10:46 am

     ‘Signature witness”.

     It’s not like there is some magical levitating petition that people sign on their own as they walk past. The “signature witness” is the candidate’s volunteer. Working in teams doesn’t really make much sense. You have a clipboard, you ask someone to sign, and you wait 47 seconds while they sign. If there’s someone else on the “team” they have their own clipboard.

     The requirement addresses a real problem — paid petition passers (or supporters eager for a government job) will “roundtable” or otherwise fake the signatures. Roundtabling is where a few petition passers sit around a table passing the petition, each signing every fourth or fifth line with anew name, so that at a glance, you don’t immediately notice that all the handwriting is the same.

     Two GOP candidates for Governor in Michigan last year were knocked off the ballot for exactly this (link.) Massively fraudulent petitions.

     The point of the “witness” requirement is that you can trace fake signatures back to the person who faked them.

     Typically if more than one person passed the same petition sheet, it’s a sign they were trying to muddy up the line of accountability, or at minimum, that they didn’t provide any guidance to those passing, let alone oversight. Which really isn’t a high standard. And think about the degree of failure that has to be present before a competing candidate can prove that the person claiming to pass one or more of your petitions (enough to move you below the threshold) wasn’t really the person passing it…
654. J.W. Brewer says

     March 21, 2024 at 11:19 am

     Obviously there are good-government rationales proffered for the strictness of the requirements, but in N.Y., at least, everyone understands that they have long operated in fact to make ballot access for “outsider” or “insurgent” candidates more difficult — basically because the party establishment will have a pre-existing infrastructure for generating the requisite number of technically-compliant signatures for the candidates the establishment wants on the ballot.* They are repeat players and there are economies of scale, whereas an insurgent/outsider either has to learn how to play the game from scratch or hire potentially sketchy “consultants” more interested in getting paid than in the particular candidate’s message and who may have their own incentives to cut corners. In any event, those who seem to have knowledgeable opinions about such things generally agree that there’s a considerable range of looseness versus strictness in ballot access among the various U.S. states and N.Y. is all the way at the strict end of the range, such that it could probably loosen up without particularly dire consequences.

     We just had a contentious and close election here in my little suburban village where the challengers claimed they were confident they were ahead based on the perceived likely loyalties of those who turned out on election day but then the incumbents squeaked out a victory once all the early/absentee ballots were counted after the polls closed – with extra drama because the ballot-counting machine the absentee votes were being fed into supposedly malfunctioned circa 10:30 pm with the count incomplete, which the supporters of the challengers found highly suspicious. (Supposedly the ballots were all left overnight for safekeeping in the custody of the village police department, but of course they work for the incumbents …)

     *As well as a pre-existing infrastructure for challenging petitions of insurgent candidates where there’s some chance such a challenge would knock them off the ballot. It’s not that an insurgent couldn’t (with funding) get a competent hired-gun for that process but the insider-selected candidates are less likely to be vulnerable to such a challenge, although I guess you can have scenarios where insurgent A wants to keep insurgent B off the ballot in order to better consolidate the anti-status-quo vote.
655. David Marjanović says

     March 21, 2024 at 12:16 pm

     I forgot… candidates for president of Austria have to bring the signatures of either five members of Parliament or a much larger number of other citizens. I’m not aware of anyone being turned away after submitting signatures, and last time the candidates supported by the two major parties didn’t make it to the runoff (along with a few not supported by any party, who got similar numbers nonetheless); the eventual winner had earlier been the “Federal Speaker” of the Green party, which has had great trouble breaching 15% in elections for parliament.

     For some reason, turnout graphs are always particularly affected.

     In 2018, there was plenty of commentary in the West that Putin would have won anyway, but with turnout so embarrassingly low he felt he had to do something about it.
656. J.W. Brewer says

     March 21, 2024 at 2:51 pm

     Being president of Austria is not that powerful a position; having a majority of the Nationalrat behind you is rather more important. And as I understand it, the way voting works in Nationalrat elections is that a given voter decides to mark their ballot for, z.B., the SPÖ. And there is a list (maybe broken down in part by Bundesstaat) of which candidates will then end up in the Nationalrat depending on how many voters in which parts of the country mark their ballots for the SPÖ. And maybe there’s a tweak in which you can vote to move a particular name on the SPÖ’s list closer to the front. But who decides who is on the SPÖ’s list in the first place, and is there a mechanism by which a bunch of insurgents outside the SPÖ establishment can seize some control of who goes on the list? Or is the insurgents’ only remedy to try to start a rival party with its own list and do whatever is necessary to get that list on the ballot and then hope the new party attracts enough voter support to get one or more candidates from its list actually seated in the Nationalrat?
657. David Marjanović says

     March 21, 2024 at 4:57 pm

     Ah, that. The trick here is that being a member of parliament is a much less powerful position than it can be when the members are individually elected as in the US or the UK: party discipline is enforced much more strongly, so most of the time it really doesn’t matter much who’s sitting in parliament for a particular party, just the number matters. You’ll still want to have experts on certain topics so they can work to the party’s advantage in the committees, but other than that only loyalty seems like a consideration.

     What matters more is who the party’s “top candidate” is (the one who becomes chancellor or vice chancellor if the party gets enough votes, and ends up as pretty much the public face of the party in any case). These people are not necessarily members of parliament.

     Not being a member of a party, I don’t know firsthand how they’re chosen; but Wikipedia has the details on how this worked in the somewhat unusual case of the SPÖ’s choice of “federal chair” just last year, indeed there’s a dedicated article. First, the party lost dramatically in the election for the state parliament of Carinthia, and the xenophobic chair of the state party of the Burgenland challenged the notoriously incompetent incumbent. That kind of situation is considered a crisis. “In order to clarify the leadership question”, the board in charge – it’s not called a politburo; the word is also used for corporate boards of directors – decided to ask the members. Although that was originally intended as a duel, no less than 73 people declared their candidacy (four of them women, including the incumbent; some of the men were running as a joke). Next, “the electoral commission” (apparently the party has one) decided that only three candidates and “none of the above” would be allowed; the three were the incumbent, the challenger, and the great young hope who had organized a left wing in the party and been in the media since 2014 because he was the mayor of the town with the largest camp of asylum seekers and had thrived in that role. 147,993 people (that was probably the entire membership) had the right to vote (by mail or online, disturbingly enough); the incumbent finished last with 31.35%, the young hope got 31.51% (less than 200 votes more than the incumbent), and the xenophobe got 33.68%. (3.46% went for “none of the above”.) The incumbent resigned from politics. The young hope proposed a runoff election; the board was 22 : 25 against that, so instead there was a “battle vote” at the next party convention (having more than one candidate is unusual; consensus is assumed in Austria generally). After it turned out that the vote totals had been accidentally switched in the Excel spreadsheet (…did I just say “disturbingly enough”? Is it ever enough?), the head of the electoral commission resigned, the xenophobe had the votes of 280 delegates, the young hope had 317 and is now in charge. I have no idea how you become a delegate or a board member and couldn’t find that in Wikipedia; I don’t have time today to look elsewhere.

     New parties are occasionally founded, and it doesn’t seem difficult to make it to the ballot. But the electorate has a lot more inertia than in, say, France. The number of parties in parliament has varied between 4 and 6 in the last 40 years or so.

     BTW, it’s Bundesland or just Land, like in Germany; Bundesstaat is reserved for e.g. the US (whenever Staat is too ambiguous).
658. drasvi says

     March 21, 2024 at 6:53 pm

     @JWB, heads of comissions are not exactly bureaucrats (actually the author posted a photo of his application for homeschooling for his children, where the reason he gives is that teachers take part in it).

     But of course their behaviour depends on various officials. I also see that Oryol oblast’ reports 80%, neighbouring Kaluga has more and all other neighbours have much more).

     It would be interesting to see the graphs – as in the article – for regions.
659. drasvi says

     March 21, 2024 at 6:53 pm

     As for culture, people tend to believe that there is a cline/gradient from north to south, Norway-Germany-France-north Mediterranean-south Mediterranean. Technically one could interpret the distribution of results as a part of such a cline in the European part of Russia.

     A Russian will tend to dismiss impressive results in a Caucasian republic (not all of them reported anything “impressive”, North Ossetia is 89) as an outcome of cultural difference: “it’s the Caucasus!”. But Krasnodar Krai is 92.59% while the most Caucasian Dagestan is 92.93% (and Adygea which is embedded in Krasnodar Krai is 90.18%).
     So who said that this “difference” is not a cline?

     (alas the Yamalo-Nenets region is strikingly different from the Nenets region).
660. Hans says

     March 22, 2024 at 3:40 am

     I have no idea how you become a delegate or a board member
     If it’s like in Germany, there are local party organizations, each of which send a delegate to the national party conference; they are formally elected by the delegates of a local party conference, although quite often the candidate has been decided by local party bigwigs beforehand and is just rubber-stamped by the conference. Board members are also elected by the party conference, not as a slate, but one-by-one; the composition of the board usually also has been agreed by internal party factions, but sometimes upsets happen, which then lead to disturbances in the internal equilibrium between the factions and need to be remedied by giving some other post to the losing faction.
661. Dmitry Pruss says

     April 8, 2024 at 11:13 pm

     @Trond re:Imenkovo, here is a linguistic paper claiming “para-Slavic” (not quite proto-Slavic and sometimes more related to Baltic) borrowings from Imenkovo to the Volga-Kama Finno-Ugric laguages
     https://www.academia.edu/5038093/%D0%91%D0%B0%D0%BB%D1%82%D0%BE_%D1%81%D0%BB%D0%B0%D0%B2%D1%8F%D0%BD%D0%B5_%D0%B2_%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B6%D0%BD%D0%B5%D0%BC_%D0%9F%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B0%D0%BC%D1%8C%D0%B5_2006
662. drasvi says

     April 9, 2024 at 11:40 am

     Ah, so the idea is to take ibn Fadlan’s reference to the king of Bulgar as “king of Saqaliba” literally?
     (not this paper’s idea, but from a paper that refers to this one)
663. Dmitry Pruss says

     April 9, 2024 at 11:56 am

     … and more details of the still-unpublished DNA study of the Imenkovo “para-Slavs” as well people from Viminacium in Roman Pannonia and Tanais on the Sea of Azov, who are genetically related to the proto-Slavs but buried according to the local custom rather than cremated (the graves of Viminacium Slavic-related people show that they were warriors at Roman service, while the two sets of remains of Tanais are buried according to the Sarmatian customs, and have mixed Slavic /Sarmatian / Caucasus ancestry).
     The presentation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGmSY_Ie0Sc is in Russian but the slides themselves are almost all in English.
     One new detail which the new lecture adds is the systematic shift in ancestry of the Slav-like people of the first centuries CE. The earliest remains are very North-European in their DNA makeup, perhaps the closest to the Iron Age peoples of the North-Eastern Baltic shores. Over time, and generally only after the Imenkovo migration from Dnieper to mid-Volga and Kama, this Northern DNA is strongly supplemented by the Southern European genetic components. It transpires in III-IV c. CE. There are parallel cultural developments, of which the authors pay the most attention to simplified Champlevé technologies such as enamel-decorated fibula pins. The enamel techniques spread out of Constantinople’s barbaric-trade industry, and become locally practiced, in a considerably more primitive form, both in the Danube provinces of Rome and along the Dnieper and in the wider Eastern Europe. The raw materials remain imported from Constantinople, until these trading paths dry out. Imenkovo fibulae are even more simplified. Interestingly, amber is also widely used in Imenkovo grave goods, perhaps indicating this group’s ancestral links to the Baltic shores.
     The authors’ dataset of the ancient DNA didn’t allow them to pinpoint the source of the III c. Southern admixture into the Slavic peoples, although the speculation is that it may have the Bastarnae of the Dniester, who fought wars in the Balkans in the III-I c. BCE but eventually retreated North, and whose influences are thought to have impacted Zarubintsy culture, identified with the early Slavs.
     Another linguistic speculation around the pre-Slavs in the Roman military centers around putative Latin loans in Slavic and their dating. Specifically the legendary swords, меч-кладенец, is said to be derived from the Roman gladis (which disappeared from the military after III century).
664. languagehat says

     April 9, 2024 at 12:10 pm

     Fascinating stuff! (For those who are wondering, as I was, Imenkovo has the stress on the second syllable, which I would not have guessed.)
665. Dmitry Pruss says

     April 9, 2024 at 12:42 pm

     I only learned of Imenkovo culture from the first report on this IBD study of the “para-Slavs” which appeared in November, and didn’t even mention it by name in my post earlier in this thread
     https://languagehat.com/son-of-yamnaya/#comment-4557909
     The original report posited that the “agricultural Scythians” (millet-growers) might have mediated the Southern gene flow.

     It was Trond who gave more background on Imenkovo in his follow-up
     https://languagehat.com/son-of-yamnaya/#comment-4558082

     Most sites used in this study are further down the Volga than the eponymous village. Interestingly, Napolskikh, the Udmurtia linguist who studies para-Slavic borrowings into the area languages, finds most borrowings in the area of rye cultivation and forest clearing for rye fields. Rye was a historically recent innovation then. Although the plant is native in the Mediterranean, it remained an undesirable contaminant in wheat for a very long time, and purposeful cultivation only started towards the latter part of Northern European Iron Age. The plant is hardy but this advantage was tempered by impossibility of making yeast bread from rye flour (the Romans already knew that it can grow more successfully than wheat along their Northern frontier, but only considered it a famine food).
     Interestingly, Slavic peoples retain some super-traditional techniques for eating rye without making (sourdough) bread: fermenting the grain until it softens and boiling it to make thick, sour soups.

     The publication is said to be planned no earlier than in summer…
666. Trond Engen says

     April 9, 2024 at 2:49 pm

     Pre-Proto-Slavic came from the Baltic shores too? Together with the Goths, or parallel, or just before or after?We really need to understand the history of the Baltic Sea.

     The Bastarnians as mediators of southern ancestry makes sense. Did they also bring the old Celtic loans?
667. Dmitry Pruss says

     April 9, 2024 at 3:14 pm

     As I understand, the lecture mentions proto/para-Slavic similarities with Kivutkalns in Latvia (~800 BCE) and later Iron Age in Estonia / Ingria, rather than with anything from the South Baltics. But of course they have a huge data hole the size of Ukraine+Belarus+Lithiania++ where cremation might have left no known traces of ancient DNA. So it may be impossible to rule out migrations from the more Southern shores…
     The lecturer himself mentions Tacitus and his tale about amber-collecting “Aestii”

     Until more knowledgeable linguists tell me otherwise, I remain very skeptical about the claims of Roman or Celtic loans in proto-Slavic, or about the claims of para-Slavic loans in the Finno-Ugric and Turkic peoples of the Volga Basin. I can’t tell if it’s legit, or merely the work of lone-wolf fringe language researchers…
668. Hans says

     April 9, 2024 at 4:35 pm

     Latin / Roman loans are unproblematic; just keep in mind that Proto-Slavic basically only ended in the 5th century CE or so, 5 minutes before the Slavs start to expand into the Balkans and the history books.
669. drasvi says

     April 9, 2024 at 6:48 pm

     A linguist can only evaluate quality of matches.

     But they don’t know how to calculate how likely are language contact and chance correspondence.
670. Dmitry Pruss says

     April 9, 2024 at 6:50 pm

     Latin loans are possible, but for example the enchanted sword of Russian fairy-tales, меч-кладенец, isn’t considered to be a derivation of “gladis” by such esteemed researcher as Vasmer, who derives it, instead, from Buovo d’Antona’s magic sword Chiarenza / Clarenzia, via Belorussian intermediary кгляденция / кгляренция, likely folk-re-etymologized by similarity with клад “cache, hidden treasure”.

     Indeed, apparently the fair-tale word is only attested late, and usually in the context of finding the sword in a treasure hoard of the bygone days.
671. Hans says

     April 9, 2024 at 10:24 pm

     Well, yes, that specific etymology (кладенец from gladius) looks fishy.
672. drasvi says

     April 10, 2024 at 4:59 am

     kglyarentsiya

     wow.
     that does invite a reanalysis…
673. PlasticPaddy says

     April 10, 2024 at 6:45 am

     In the ME version (the original is Anglo-Norman and the material is English, Antona = Hampton), the sword is called Morgelai and the horse Arundel.
     https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/salisbury-four-romances-of-england-bevis-of-hampton
     Clarent is a sword from Arthurian legend(name from Welsh sword name?).
     In the Bovo-Bukh the horse is Pumele and the sword is Rundele.
     And in the Italo-French the horse is Rondelo and the sword Chiarenza.
     —
     Ela disse: «Tu no andaré desarmado,
     dele arme delo re Galaço tu seré’ armado:
     sì te darò Chiarenza, lo bon brand amolado,
     po’ fo Alteclera d’Oliver l’aprexiado.
     Sì ve darò Rondelo, lo bon destrer asortado,
     mior de lu no fo may trovado.
     —
     http://www.rialfri.eu/rialfriPHP/public/testo/testo/codice/bovoLaurenziano
674. David Marjanović says

     April 13, 2024 at 4:55 pm

     wow.
     that does invite a reanalysis…

     I’ve seen кг before; it’s a spelling for [g] as opposed to the native [ɣ].

     Until more knowledgeable linguists tell me otherwise, I remain very skeptical about the claims of Roman or Celtic loans in proto-Slavic

     Celtic and even Italic loans in very early Pre-Slavic are uncontroversial as far as I know; they’ve been mentioned here before, but I can’t find it.
675. J Pystynen says

     April 15, 2024 at 7:04 pm

     para-Slavic loans in the Finno-Ugric and Turkic peoples of the Volga Basin

     Insofar as Baltic is one form of para-Slavic, there’s a long tradition of research on loans from there into Mordvinic. Also some proposals even further into Mari and Permic, but those get contentious and e.g. Anthony Jakob’s recent book / PhD thesis concludes that there is no solid evidence for contacts. Para-Slavic → Turkic would to me seem like it’s even further into wild speculation.

     Anyway the majority of Napolskikh’s proposals actually seem like correct connections to me (and most of them per se are not even his in origin) — but I don’t see a lot in them that would call specifically for Balto-Slavic. There would be other routing options; at least *gor ‘mountain’ even readily fits as an Iranian loan instead, and if there are entirely lost IE lineages involved, my money would be on para-IIr. instead; some Corded Ware stragglers in the forest steppe or the like.

     At least ‘rye’ and ‘goose’ would make good sense even as relatively late Wanderwörter, but most of the others, perhaps not.
676. Hippophlebotomist says

     April 18, 2024 at 10:13 am

     Two new upcoming papers on the Yamnaya and Proto-Indo-European , the first of which is debuting as a two-part conference talk
     https://www.transformeurope2budapest2024.com/
     The Genetic Origin and Linguistic Expansion of the Indo-Europeans
     David Reich, David W. Anthony and Dorcas R. Brown

     Part 1 David Reich: The Genetic Origin of the Indo-Europeans

     “The Yamnaya archaeological complex appeared around 3300 BCE across the steppes north of the Black and Caspian Seas, and by 3000 BCE reached its maximal extent from Hungary in the west to Kazakhstan in the east. To localize the ancestral and geographical origins of the Yamnaya among the diverse Eneolithic people that preceded them, we studied ancient DNA data from 428 individuals of which 299 are reported for the first time, demonstrating three previously unknown Eneolithic genetic clines. First, a “Caucasus-Lower Volga” (CLV) Cline suffused with Caucasus hunter-gatherer (CHG) ancestry extended between a Caucasus Neolithic southern end including people from Neolithic Armenia, and a steppe northern end including Eneolithic people from Berezhnovka in the lower Volga. Bidirectional gene flow across the CLV cline created admixed intermediate populations in both the north Caucasus, such as the Maikop people, and on the steppe, such as those at the site of Remontnoye north of the Manych depression. CLV people also helped form two major riverine clines by admixing with distinct groups of European hunter-gatherers. A “Volga Cline” was formed as lower Volga people mixed with upriver populations that had more Eastern hunter-gatherer (EHG) ancestry, creating genetically hyper-variable populations as at Khvalynsk in the Middle Volga. A “Dnipro Cline” was formed as CLV people bearing both Caucasus Neolithic and lower Volga ancestry moved west and acquired Ukraine Neolithic hunter-gatherer (UNHG) ancestry to establish the population of the Serednii Stih culture from which the direct ancestors of the Yamnaya themselves were formed around 4000 BCE. This population grew rapidly after 3750–3350 BCE, precipitating the expansion of people of the Yamnaya culture who totally displaced previous groups on the Volga and further east, while admixing with more sedentary groups in the west. CLV cline people with lower Volga ancestry contributed four fifths of the ancestry of the Yamnaya, but also, entering Anatolia from the east, contributed at least a tenth of the ancestry of Bronze Age Central Anatolians, where the Hittite language, related to the Indo-European languages spread by the Yamnaya, was spoken. We thus propose that the final unity of the speakers of the “Proto-Indo-Anatolian” ancestral language of both Anatolian and Indo-European languages can be traced to CLV people living in the north Caucasus, lower Don and lower Volga sometime between 4400–4000 BCE.”

     Part 2 David Anthony and Dorcas R. Brown: The Yamnaya Origins and the Expansion of Late PIE Languages

     The origin and expansion of the Yamnaya culture is difficult to understand without adequate aDNA sampling of populations from the Pontic-Caspian steppes. A new study from the David Reich lab of aDNA from more than 400 Eneolithic and Bronze Age individuals from the Pontic-Caspian steppes reveals a complex chronological layering and admixture of multiple ancestries that contributed to Yamnaya genetic origins, probably within the eastern range of Seredni Stih populations in the early to mid-4th millennium BCE. As the Yamnaya population expanded, after about 3000 BCE, people who shared steppe genetic ancestry innovated to create new material (archaeological) cultures on both the eastern (Afanasievo) and western (Corded Ware) wings of the expansion, creating what archaeologists often regard as independent cultural entities that obscured a shared genetic and perhaps linguistic heritage. It seems that people who shared genetic ancestry often created distinct material cultures, and occasionally people with similar material cultures had distinct genetic ancestries (Lower Don and Core Yamnaya). Genes and material culture can follow different trajectories, and the comparison of aDNA & archaeology provides a tool to explore their complex relationship.

     The preprint of the second paper was uploaded this morning

     A genomic history of the North Pontic Region from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age
     https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.04.17.589600v1.supplementary-material
677. languagehat says

     April 18, 2024 at 10:38 am

     Interesting stuff, thanks! “It seems that people who shared genetic ancestry often created distinct material cultures, and occasionally people with similar material cultures had distinct genetic ancestries” is a useful reminder.

     (Also, I like your moniker. They bleed horses, don’t they?)
678. Stu Clayton says

     April 18, 2024 at 11:54 am

     Hippopotamus inventing phlebotomy

     #
     ‘Naturalists say that the inventor of phlebotomy was the hippo, an animal that lives on the Nile river, as big as a Frisian horse, of both earthly and aquatic nature; when it feels heavy for the excessive quantity of blood in its body, it goes into a reed bed or a similar place and under the push of a natural instinct he cuts its veins and lets blood out until it feels better. Then the hippo finds out some mud and patches up its wounds’.
     #
     [Tarduccio Salvi da Macerata, 1613]
679. David Marjanović says

     April 18, 2024 at 1:01 pm

     Oh, that must be about the reddish sunscreen hippos produce.
680. Stu Clayton says

     April 18, 2024 at 1:17 pm

     How Does a Hippo Make Its Own Sunscreen?
681. Trond Engen says

     April 18, 2024 at 5:03 pm

     @Hippophlebotomist; Thanks! I’ll be devouring not only that paper but the whole book of abstracts

     The Nikitin et al preprint too, of course. It should probably be compared and contrasted to Penske et al (2023) introduced upthread.
682. Hippophlebotomist says

     April 18, 2024 at 8:05 pm

     @Stu Clayton – Thanks for the link, very fitting!

     I’ll admit to never having had anything to do with bleeding horses, riverine or otherwise, but I find the name euphonious in an odd way. Better than Equine Exsanguinator at least

     To those interested, the preprint for the main paper was also posted today (the first abstract in my prior comment)

     The Genetic Origin of the Indo-Europeans
     https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.04.17.589597v1
683. Dmitry Pruss says

     April 19, 2024 at 6:25 am

     So we are told that the Hittites were cousins rather than descendants of the Yamnaya?
684. Ryan says

     April 19, 2024 at 10:08 am

     Dmitry, does “so we are told” imy that you’re not yet convinced, or is it just a manner of speaking?
685. Trond Engen says

     April 19, 2024 at 10:12 am

     I have believed that for a long time, but lacking a clear hypothesis for how the ancestor of either Core IE or Anatolian got through the Caucasus, I haven’t wanted to rule out a Balkan homeland. I’ll read the paper.
686. Dmitry Pruss says

     April 19, 2024 at 10:17 am

     I haven’t read the papers yet, and for now, just express my surprise that the Anatolian theory croaked so suddenly. The old story was that the traces of Steppe DNA failed to be detected in the available DNAs of the Hittite period, although the archaeological context left plenty of room for doubts if the available bones were actually Hittite.
     Now the story goes that ~10% of the Steppe-origin DNA is there after all (not yet sure if these new samples or the same samples as previously analyzed), and that it carries telltale signs of *Eastward* migration out of the Pontic Steppe prior to the mixing in the Hittite Empire.
687. Ryan says

     April 19, 2024 at 12:00 pm

     You (both of you) know this stuff better than I do. I read it with a somewhat different emphasis closer to your “cousins rather than descendants”. That the shared DNA is the Caucasus-Lower Volga cline (“suffused with Caucasus hunter-gatherer (CHG) ancestry, extending between a Caucasus Neolithic southern end in Neolithic Armenia, and a steppe northern end in Berezhnovka in the Lower Volga.”) which contributed to both Yamnaya (4/5ths) and central Anatolia (10%).

     Is it accurate to describe this as “Steppe ancestry” in Anatolia? Maybe that’s right. I took it to be Caucasus ancestry in both the steppe and Anatolia. You put “Eastward” migration in quotes, but I don’t see it here or in the longer excerpt at the Dispatches from Turtle Island blog.

     But in keeping with your “eastward” point, the color-coded admixture chart embedded in the map at that blog seems to suggest Berezhnovka ancestry as a common denominator. And they mention an IBD segment that suggests a particular Berezhnovka individual is ancestral to individuals on the Middle Volga, the Dnipro area and the South Caucasus.

     I’m still trying to sort out exactly what they’re proposing.

     Certainly, as you say, they’re not showing an Anatolian cradle from which the various people and/or interactions flowed outward. I’m just not sure whether they’re putting the origin in the Caucasus or the Steppe; or a dynamic process between the two regions. At some level, the latter seems right.

     I read it as pulling the center of gravity away from the Steppe and back into the hills.
     >Bidirectional gene flow across the CLV cline created admixed intermediate populations in both the north Caucasus, such as the Maikop people, and on the steppe, such as those at the site of Remontnoye north of the Manych depression.

     This seems to put Maykop or at least the Maykop area closer to the center of the Anatolian-Yamnaya linkage. Or maybe Anthony’s “Steppe Maykop”, which I’ve seen elsewhere treated as being culturally but not genetically related to Maykop itself. But I’m interested to hear more discussion. Just putting some impressions out to advance the discussion, since I don’t know this stuff well.
688. Ryan says

     April 19, 2024 at 12:29 pm

     I realized that my reference was to one of two color-coded ancestry charts. The one I referred to is explaining the relationships between later people, after the “suffusion” of Caucasian Hunter Gather ancestry.

     The smaller chart reflects how the CHG ancestry expanded. The narrative for this, the “Roots of the Caucasus-Lower Volga population chart” seems worth quoting in full, since it seems an apt summary of the paper.

     >The people of the homeland of Indo-Anatolian had ancestry from the Caucasus neolithic (Aknashen) and the Lower Volga eneolithic (Berezhnovka).

     >Caucasus hunter gatherer ancestry was common to both groups. In the lower Volga eneolithic there was also Eastern hunter gatherer (Lebyazhinka) and Central Asian-Siberia (Tutkaul) ancestry. In the Caucasus Neolithic, there was also ancestry from the people of neolithic Anatolia-Mesopotamia. (Çayonu).

     Pre-Indo-European languages were spoken by at least some of these diverse ancestors, but living Indo-European languages trace their origins to the Yamnaya expansion ca. 3300 BCE out of (3)* and the earlier Indo-Anatolian expansion ca. 4400-4000 out of (1)**

     * (3) is the lower Dnipro Ukrainian steppe.
     ** (1) is a region extending from the north Caucasus to Berezhnovka, about 100 miles NNE of Volgograd, but five of seven sites sampled are in the Caucasus.
689. Ryan says

     April 19, 2024 at 12:55 pm

     Maybe the thread should be renamed Son of Berezhnovka?
690. Trond Engen says

     April 19, 2024 at 2:01 pm

     David Anthony has been on this track for some time. In 2020 I pondered over an earlier paper of his starting here. At that that time he still had the Anatolians taking the Balkan route from the Pontic-Caspian Steppe.

     (I’ll read the new paper now.)
691. David Marjanović says

     April 19, 2024 at 3:06 pm

     Hipposudoric acid does look fairly scarily acidic!

     And now I’ll read the preprints…
692. David Marjanović says

     April 19, 2024 at 4:11 pm

     I’m still just gazing upon the “summary figure” of the first paper (right after the abstract), but it clarifies a bunch of things.

     On the left, the four components are CHG, EHG (“Middle Volga (Lebyazhinka)”), “Central Asia (Tutkaul)” and “N. Mesopotamia Neolithic (Çayönü)”, which, by the way, is right in the latest estimate for the Semitic homeland. Mixing these gives, among others, “Berezhnovka-2/Progress-2 group” (CHG + EHG + Central Asia) and “Caucasus Neolithic (Aknashen)” (Çayönü + CHG).

     On the right, these two are taken as basic components, along with “Dnipro-Don (Golubaya Krinitsa-2)”. Mixing these three, without adding any extra EHG, gives the two Yamnaya samples (as well as the three Serednii Stih samples – mentioned upthread as Sredny Stog – and “Dnipro-Don (Golubaya Krinitsa-1)”. And while the Khvalynsk culture has been interpreted as ancestral to the Yamnaya culture, the Khvalynsk samples are not ancestral to the Yamnaya samples – they’re Berezhnovka-2/Progress-2 plus extra EHG in varying proportions and contain neither Aknashen nor Dnipro-Don.

     “C. Anatolia Bronze Age (Kalehöyük / Ovaören)”, meanwhile, is almost pure Çayönü with traces of Berezhnovka-2/Progress-2 and Aknashen. In other words, it has a bit of Steppe ancestry , but no Yamnaya ancestry – there’s no Dnipro-Don in it.

     Maikop, however, is Aknashen with a bit of B2P2. It doesn’t look ancestral to CABA, which has twice as much B2P2 as Aknashen in it.

     Taken together, there is EHG and Central Asian ancestry in CABA, so a migration from the north must have happened, and the Indo-Anatolian homeland is more likely to have been north than south of the Caucasus after all. However, that migration is very unlikely to have taken the detour all around the Black Sea and across the Bosporus; if it had, there should be Dnipro-Don in CABA, and there isn’t.

     What’s interesting is that Tutkaul is on the southern edge of Central Asia, in Tajikistan. I’m surprised the Neolithic sample from there is used as a proxy for West Siberian Hunter-Gatherers instead of for Iranian Neolithic, i.e. CHG.
693. David Marjanović says

     April 19, 2024 at 5:06 pm

     From the introduction (refs omitted):

     Third, it was discovered that the Yamnaya had not only CHG-related, but also Anatolian Neolithic ancestry, absent in the early known steppe inhabitants, and derived from European farmer neighbors west of the steppe. This ancestry was later shown to be of rather Anatolian-Levantine-Mesopotamian origin, and to be mediated not from Europe but from the Caucasus neighbors south of the steppe. Such ancestry must have been added following the expansion of Neolithic farmers into the Caucasus, introduced thence into the steppe as a later exogenous element, distinct from the earlier CHG-related one. Finally, it was recognized that European steppe populations were formed not only by northern-southern admixture, but included, in at least some Eneolithic and Bronze Age people of the North Caucasus, contributions related to Siberians from further east. What was the extent of the spread of this eastern ancestry and did the Yamnaya themselves possess it?

     So I guess the WHG component, which is not mentioned here but was used to argue that the Anatolian component had come through central Europe, is actually Dnipro-Don, which wasn’t known yet? Dnipro-Don, aka UNHG (Ukraine Neolithic Hunter-Gatherers), is said to be “more WHG-admixed” EHG earlier in the paragraph.
694. Trond Engen says

     April 19, 2024 at 5:33 pm

     I wondered if the use of Tutkaul might have to with the southern element in CLV being Caspian rather than Caucasus proper, following the hint in Anthony (2019), but if so, it will be the subject of a later paper.

     A lot of interesting details are added, some of them expected and some very unexpected — like the close genetic relationship between Khvalynsk (or “the Volga Cline”) and that weirdly early Steppe Barbarian on the Pannonian Plain.

     Yes, they state clearly that the common source of “Indo-European” and “Anatolian” ought to be east of the Dniepr because of the lack of European Farmer ancestry in the CLV element in Anatolia.
695. Dmitry Pruss says

     April 21, 2024 at 4:13 am

     My belated mini-summary of the new IE/Anatolian genetics papers:

     Volga cline (Caucasus – Lower Volga, CLV) forms between 5000..4500 BCE.
     One Pannonian specimen, from 4100-4300 BCE, also belong to this cline. Samples from Moldova and from Mayaki (Odessa) from the same period are also close. Note that Balkan copper appears in Khvalynsk (trade path!). Relatively small admixture of CLV DNA reach the gene pool of Trypilla, and much larger CLV fractions, into Usatove (closer to the Black Sea shore) by 4400-4500 BCE, and continue to mix with Kartal in the same NW Pontic Area by 4100 BCE

     In the South: Areni-1 in Armenia ~4000 BC already carries Steppe ancestry >= 1/4 CLV
     From Early to Middle Bronze age in the Hittite areas (after ~2750 BCE): ~10% CLV (if it came by the way of Areni, then it may be ~40% Areni). They estimate that CLV ancestry seeped South by 4400 BC already (so much earlier than the Yamnaya formation!)

     Kizilirmak river is mentioned as the original Anatolian / Hattic boundary

     IBD links: Berezhnovka -Areni and even Vonyuchka – early Bronze Age Anatolian from Ovaören

     Mesopotamian rather local Anatolian Neolithic ancestry in the Hittites is an additional hint in favor of the “Easterly route”. However Usatovo/Mayaki samples (lower Dniester) are not completely implausible as the source of the CLV ancestry in Bronze Age Anatolia (“Balkan”/ “Westerly” route), if we can hypothesize that there were some genetically Mesopotamian peoples to mix with in Anatolia as well, and that somehow the Steppe and the Mesopotamian streams avoided any mixing with the local Anatolian and Balkan hunters-gatherers on their way to merging together.

     Kura-Araxes culture expansion would have obliterated CLV traces in Armenia and separated Anatolian languages from their Easterly bases.

     Finally the future Yamnaya emerged from a surprisingly small (and fairly admixture-resistant) subpopulation of Srednii Stih (genetically composed of CLV and local hunters-gatherers, combined around 4000 BCE in the 2nd wave of CLV-related Westward expansions) and coalesced around 3500 BCE. What prompted or enabled its dramatic spread (technology, famine, plague?) remains to be resolved.
696. Trond Engen says

     April 21, 2024 at 4:41 pm

     Now we have to try to understand what really went on in the Southern Steppe. It’s more than just a new form of nomadic pastoralism (though it might be that, too). We see different but related groups (patrilineal clans?) competing for dominance in long distance travel, and it seems obvious that it had to do with trade in metals between the early civilizations.

     This will eventually help explain how the Yamna group formed and why it spread almost explosively from its home between Don and Dnieper.
697. Dmitry Pruss says

     April 22, 2024 at 1:15 am

     Don’t forget domestication of the horse, too.

     In terms of the early cultural and population dynamics, the term “cline” and especially the current hypothesis that the genetic components spread both up and down the CLV land, may conjure up a wrong idea of a population continuum with some sort of uniformity or gradual transitions of culture and power. But of course clinality doesn’t imply it. It may have been a tug of war between very distinct, perhaps nomadic vs. sedentary, populations, or bride-raiding, or other possible scenarios not looking like a gradual bidirectional flow of the genes between near-equals…
698. Hans says

     April 22, 2024 at 7:14 am

     Please keep in mind that pure nomadic pastoralism like we know it from the Mongols or Turkic steppe people is a later development; IIRC, at the time we’re talking about there was at most a combination of sedentary agriculture (with year-round fixed settlements) with mobile animal husbandry revolving around those settlements.
699. Dmitry Pruss says

     April 22, 2024 at 8:49 am

     Yes, I also kind of bit my tongue with the word “nomad” for 5th-6th millennia BC animal husbandry-based economies on the Steppe. Yes, also a higher mobility society, but almost definitely not nearly as mobile
700. David Marjanović says

     April 22, 2024 at 2:58 pm

     Taken together, there is EHG and Central Asian ancestry in CABA, so a migration from the north must have happened, and the Indo-Anatolian homeland is more likely to have been north than south of the Caucasus after all.

     This is stated more cautiously on pp. 28–29:

     Indo-Anatolian languages must have been spread widely by people carrying CLV [Caucasus—Lower Volga] cline ancestry (Fig. 2) >4000BCE. However, only two descendant groups transmitted their languages to later groups: the Yamnaya in the Dnipro-Don area, aided by the mobility of their horse-wagon technology, and the Proto-Anatolians in the south, surviving in the diverse linguistic landscape of ancient Western Asia long enough for their languages to be recorded in writing after 2000BCE. Whatever their deeper origins in time out of the diverse constituents of CLV cline populations, the Indo-Anatolians must have been part of that cline. Genetics has little to say whether within this cline the IA languages were first spoken in the Caucasus end of the cline and spread into the steppe along with the spread of Caucasus ancestry, or vice versa, or even if a linguistic unity uncoupled with ancestry existed within the CLV continuum. DNA has traced back the ancestors of both Anatolian and IE speakers to the part of the CLV Cline that was north of the Caucasus mountains, bringing them into proximity with each other and uncovering their common CLV ancestry. However, it cannot adjudicate, on its own, who among the proximate and diverse distal ancestors of the CLV people were Pre-IA speaking. Future studies of the dynamics and temporality of intra-CLV contacts (to which genetics may add its information) and of the cultures of CLV people (as reconstructed by archaeology and linguistics) may decide who among them were most likely to have been the “original” Indo-Anatolians.

     However, that migration is very unlikely to have taken the detour all around the Black Sea and across the Bosporus; if it had, there should be Dnipro-Don in CABA, and there isn’t.

     This is elaborated on pp. 19–20:

     Moreover, when we consider pairs of steppe sources (and can thus place the steppe ancestry at varying points along the [Middle] Volga, Dnipro, and CLV clines), we observe a negative hunter-gatherer contribution (-3.4±2.6% EHG) on the Volga cline, and also on the Dnipro cline (-2.3±2.7% UNHG or -3.9±3.5% GK2); thus, there is no evidence that the admixing population had more EHG/UNHG/GK2 ancestry than the BPgroup/Core Yamnaya endpoints of these two clines (Supplementary Information 2). The admixing population in this analysis contributed a significant amount of BPgroup ancestry (8.8±2.7%) from the CLV cline and was consistent with being on that cline (p=0.129). Thus, a model in which the steppe ancestry is derived from the Caucasus-Lower Volga Eneolithic is not only geographically and chronologically plausible but also genetically so.

     After all, if there are three people on a streetcar and five get out, two have to get back in so there’s nobody inside.

     We thus propose the following hypothesis: that CLV cline people migrated southwards ca. 4400BCE, or about a millennium before the appearance of the Yamnaya, (admixing with different substratum populations along the way) and then westwards before finally reaching Central Anatolia.

     We in fact find Y-chromosome evidence that is consistent with the autosomal evidence. Sporadic instances of the steppe-associated Y-chromosome haplogroup R-V1636 in West Asia occurred at Arslantepe in Eastern Anatolia and Kalavan in Armenia in the Early Bronze Age (~3300-2500 BCE) among individuals without detectible steppe ancestry and these could be remnants of the dilution process. This haplogroup was found in the male individual from Remontnoye, both individuals from Progress-25 and two of three males from Berezhnovka, in addition to its occurrence in eleven individuals of the Volga Cline and thus was a prominent lineage of the pre-Yamnaya steppe. Isolated instances have also been found beyond the steppe in Corded Ware individuals from Esperstedt in Germany and Gjerrild in Denmark. The expansive distribution of R-V1636 on the steppe and beyond contrasts with its disappearance on the steppe after the Yamnaya arrived on the scene: a single individual (SA6010; 2886-2671 BCE) from Sharakhalsun has it, with a genetic profile consistent with CLV ancestry (Fig. 2), the last detected holdout of this once pervasive population (Fig. 3).

     More interesting stuff on the next pages, including phylogeography and who got to be buried in the same kurgan. Also, there are “Core Yamnaya” burials from Hungary to China quite some distance east of the Junggar basin, almost south of the western end of Lake Baikal (Fig. 6b). Then, on pp. 29–30:

     Second, the fact that Anatolian languages are attested largely in western Anatolia has been interpreted as evidence for entry into Anatolia from the west (via the Balkans), and thus we need compelling genetic evidence to provide a strong synthetic case for an eastern route. In fact, however, our genetic data does provide such a strong case, greatly increasing the plausibility of scenarios of an eastern entry of Proto-Anatolian speaking ancestors into Anatolia. This is because we find that Central Anatolian Early Bronze Age people who were plausibly speakers of Anatolian languages based on their archaeological contexts, were striking genetic outliers from their neighbors due to having a minority component of their ancestry from the CLV (plausibly from the people who brought the ancestral form of Anatolian languages to Anatolia), the majority of their ancestry from Mesopotamian Neolithic farmers, and little or no ancestry from the Neolithic and Chalcolithic Anatolians who were overwhelming the source populations of other Early Bronze Age Anatolians. Mesopotamian Neolithic ancestry almost certainly had an eastern geographic distribution, while the Central Anatolian Bronze Age people had no evidence of the European farmer or European hunter-gatherer ancestry that CLV [would] have encountered if they had migrated to Anatolia from the west, so the genetic data favor an eastern route. How then could it be that there is no linguistic evidence of Anatolian speakers in eastern Anatolia? We propose that the archaeologically momentous expansion of the Kura-Araxes archaeological culture in the Caucasus and eastern Anatolia after around 3000BCE may have driven a wedge between steppe and West Asian speakers of IA languages, isolating them from each other and perhaps explaining their survival in western Anatolia into recorded history. That the expansion of the Kura-Araxes archaeological culture could have had a profound enough demographic impact to have pushed out Anatolian-speakers, is attested by genetic evidence showing that in Armenia, the spread of the Kura-Araxes culture was accompanied by the complete disappearance of CLV ancestry that had appeared there in the Chalcolithic (Fig. 2f).

     The Kura-Araxes culture may not be the only reason for the IA split. The ancestors of the Yamnaya did not only become separated from their Anatolian linguistic relatives but from other steppe populations as well. The homogenization of the Yamnaya ancestral population during the 4th millennium BCE, both in terms of its autosomal ancestry, and in terms of its Y-chromosome lineage, attest to a period of relative isolation and the cessation of admixture. Such isolation would foster linguistic divergence of the languages spoken in the pre-Yamnaya community with those of their linguistic relatives on the steppe. This isolation must have persisted even after the sudden appearance of the Yamnaya archaeological horizon. Mobility and geographical dispersal provided ample opportunities for the resumption of admixture, yet the genetic homogeneity of the “Core Yamnaya” across much of the steppe leaves little room for the absorption of any pre-existing steppe communities: they all seem to disappear in the face of the Yamnaya juggernaut. Did mixing occur between the segment of the Yamnaya population not buried in kurgans and locals they encountered while the kurgan-buried elite largely avoided it with some exceptions?15 The rise of the Yamnaya in the Steppe at the expense of their predecessors was followed by their demise after a thousand years (Fig. 3), displaced by descendants of people of the Corded Ware culture. Was this the demise of the kurgan elites of the Yamnaya or of the population as a whole?

     As the saying goes, it would be irresponsible not to speculate.

     On extant languages, p. 31:

     Terminology for archaeological cultures and geographic locations: For archaeological cultures and geographic locations that span more than one modern country, we used the prevalent term in the archaeological and genetic literature, for example using “Yamnaya” which is the common term used in Russia and most of Eastern Europe instead of the Ukrainian “Yamna”. For archaeological cultures and locations that are confined to a single country, we generally use the local terminology, for example we refer to the archaeological cultures of “Usatove” and “Trypillia” and “Serednii Stih” and the river “Dnipro” with the Ukrainian terms rather than the corresponding Russian terms “Usatovo”, “Tripolye,” “Sredni Stog” and “Dniepr”.

     Also interesting, perhaps, on p. 36:

     Ethics Statement
     The individuals studied here were all analyzed with the goal of minimizing damage to their skeletal remains, with permission from local authorities in each location from which they came. Every sample is represented by stewards such as archaeologists or museum curators, who are either authors or thanked in the Acknowledgments. Open science principles require making all data used to support the conclusions of a study maximally available, and we support these principles here by making fully publicly available not only the digital copies of molecules (the uploaded sequences) but also the molecular copies (the ancient DNA libraries themselves, which constitute molecular data storage). Those researchers who wish to carry out deeper sequencing of libraries published in this study should make a request to corresponding author D.R. We committo granting reasonable requests as long as the libraries remain preserved in our laboratories, with no requirement that we be included as collaborators or co-authors on any resulting publications.
701. languagehat says

     April 22, 2024 at 3:07 pm

     Thanks as always; I really appreciate all the quotes and summaries, because there’s no way I’m going to read the actual papers, and what I learn here is fascinating.
702. drasvi says

     April 22, 2024 at 3:35 pm

     “After all, if there are three people on a streetcar and five get out, two have to get back in so there’s nobody inside.”

     I did not know. It is beautiful.
703. Ryan says

     April 22, 2024 at 4:11 pm

     >there are “Core Yamnaya” burials from Hungary to China

     Are they identifying core Yamnaya sites genetically or archaeologically when they say this?
      
     >the majority of their ancestry from Mesopotamian Neolithic farmers,

     I happened into the Natufian thread today and noticed that you (DM) had some enthusiasm for an IE substrate in Sumerian at that time. (Indo Anatolian as named in the paper you’ve just excerpted.) That was 7 years ago, and I know it’s been discussed since but I don’t remember anyone’s judgments. Do you still think an I-A substrate is plausible or even convincing?

     If so, would it be irresponsible not to speculate that there could have been some lasting 4th millennium connection between the population spreading I-A southwards and the expanding Mesopotamian farmers? It seems early for “conquest”, since it’s not clear to me that the organizational scale of such cultures would allow it. One way of speculating here might be Dmitry’s “tug-of-war” from above. Another might be a lasting trade or symbiotic relationship. Trying to understand how I-A would have infiltrated far enough south to become a Sumerian substrate. Or what do we know of the antecedents of Sumerians? Might they have come from up-river after interacting with an I-A population?

     Is there any interesting shared terminology between I-A and I-E that might help suggest a technological reason why speakers of these dialects became prominent on not one but two frontiers of agriculture? Given that the equine/wagon stuff seems to come too late (and IIRC, isn’t shared?)

     I see that Kura-Araxes is believed to have expanded across the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates during the period 3600-2800. Not sure of the boundaries at different times, though. Would we need to assume an I-A population spread south before 3600? Or could infiltration through Kura-Araxes make sense in this era with these cultures? Not that we have any real idea what type of material culture an I-A population would have carried at that point.
704. Hans says

     April 22, 2024 at 5:14 pm

     Kura-Araxes would then be the (ancestors of the) Hurrians?
705. David Marjanović says

     April 22, 2024 at 5:18 pm

     The second paper finds that the Ukraine/Dnipro-Don Neolithic* Hunter-Gatherers resulted from a mixture of local Mesolithic EHG with incoming Balkan Hunter-Gatherers who already had some Early European Farmer ancestry. Two individuals had Caucasus Hunter-Gatherer ancestry instead of EEF ancestry somehow. “This sporadic and isolated CHG admixture in UNHG reflects a qualitatively different phenomenon from the generalized shift of ancestry towards the CLV cline of all Serednii Stih and Yamna individuals of the Dnipro Cline”…

     Also, Trypillia people are largely EEF, but the rest of their ancestry is hard to model; in 23 of the 28 sequenced individuals, it’s apparently 4–5% B2P2 already.

     * I don’t know if “Neolithic” is defined here by the presence of pottery or just by the presence of neighbors who were farmers.

     Further, behold the Urheimat of Indo-Tocharian (…or the closest approximation yet found), pp. 10–11:

     The chronologically earliest individuals in our sample set who are cladal with Core Yamna are I32534 (3635-3383 calBCE) from Ukraine […] For individual I32534, from the second (proto-Yamna) layer of the Mykhailivka site in the lower Dnipro Valley, only the Core Yamna model remains feasible when either BPgroup or PVgroup is placed on the right set in qpAdm analysis (Supplementary Information, section 2). As a further test, when we force either EEF or UNHG as a second ancestry source (on top of the Core Yamna ancestry), neither one is significantly different from zero (|Z|<1) and both are, in fact, nominally slightly negative. Thus, there is no evidence for the presence of either the EEF or UNHG-related ancestries of the NPR region [North Pontic Region… region] on top of the Core Yamna ancestry and I32534 is consistent with being simply a member of the Core Yamna group. Beyond qpAdm modeling, the Mykhailivka individual clusters with Core Yamna in PCA [principal-components analysis] (Fig. 2a) and in unsupervised ADMIXTURE analysis (Fig. 2b). All these lines of evidence converge in showing that I32534 is indeed an early Core Yamna individual who bridges the temporal gap between the geographically proximate Late Serednii Stih populations and those of the main Yamna expansion that are sampled from south Siberia to eastern Europe and in which any associations with the locale of Yamna formation have been wiped out by thousands of kilometers of distance.

     The red lozenge in Fig. 1.

     (I’ve never seen “cladal” before. Why not “forms a clade”?)

     Again on p. 17:

     The chronologically earliest (3635-3383 calBCE) individual with the Core Yamna ancestry comes from the Mykhailivka settlement displaying a succession of uninterrupted cultural layers from the late Eneolithic to the EBA [Early Bronze Age], without the evidence of site depopulation moving into the Yamna period seen at almost all other Eneolithic sites. In the context of the archaeological evidence, the presented results increase the plausibility of arguments that the lower Dnipro, specifically the area around the Mykhailivka site at a crossroads of ancient steppe “highway” network across the Pontic-Caspian steppe (Supplementary Information, section 1), is a place where Yamna first emerged.

     Meanwhile on p. 12:

     More evidence for this link [to the Caucasus – Maykop or even farther south] comes from the Early Bronze Age population from Mayaky, which is discontinuous with the Usatove from the same region but represented a unique combination of 1/5 Maykop ancestry with the remainder best represented by the Yamna of the Lower Don, a population which was itself a mix of Core Yamna and NPR hunter-gatherers.

     I won’t try to summarize Table 1 (pp. 13–15); “A compendium of the ancestral landscape of the North Pontic Region in the Eneolithic and Early Bronze Age (ca. 4500-2500 BCE) showing two waves of Caucasus-Lower Volga (CLV) cline ancestry migration in the NPR” followed by the “Yamna expansion” – but also a few complications and interesting outliers. It’s explained on pp. 17–18, too long to quote. However:

     It is remarkable that the three genetic waves of CLV ancestry expansion align, spatially and temporally, with the three waves of Kurgan People proposed by Marija Gimbutas in the 1950s to explain the spread of Indo-European influences and the fall of “Old Europe” […]. In Gimbutas’ theory and in our genetic analysis, the three waves originated in the Lower Volga-North Caucasus area and acted as constituent elements of a single process that unfolded in time and space throughout the Eneolithic and into the Bronze Age, transforming the cultural landscape of Western Eurasia. We must note, however, that Gimbutas envisioned the spread of Kurgan ancestry as a military conquest and emphasized cultural transformation of the conquered people encountered by the Kurgan culture bearers. Our results present evidence of massive genetic transformations effected by the spread of CLV ancestry during Waves 1 and 2, and especially, with the spread of the Yamna during Wave 3. Such genetic changes must have involved complex cultural dynamics, in which both conflict and peaceful synthesis may have played a role. Future studies can further explore the cultural impact these three expansion waves brought about, informed by the new understanding of the immense genetic impacts that accompanied them.

     Finally (p. 20): “The authors thank David Anthony for a critical review of a manuscript draft”.

     …and (p. 21): “All samples originating from Ukraine were excavated or sampled from museum or archival collections in Ukraine prior to 2022. […] Geographic boundaries of political entities were respected following international law.”

     there’s no way I’m going to read the actual papers

     I do recommend them both. The second in particular is quite readable; just make sure not to skip anything, because the abbreviations are explained only at their first occurrence. Both preprints put the Materials and Methods section at the end, so the Introduction is immediately followed by the Results, then the Discussion, and then by all the stuff that’s only interesting for experts (Materials & Methods, acknowledgments, references, extra tables & figures presenting data, and at the very end a repetition of all figures as an artifact of the submission process) – so don’t be intimidated by the total number of pages.
706. David Marjanović says

     April 22, 2024 at 5:26 pm

     Are they identifying core Yamnaya sites genetically or archaeologically when they say this?

     I think both.

     Do you still think an I-A substrate is plausible or even convincing?

     My opinion of the linguistic arguments hasn’t changed because I’ve learned nothing new about them since then. Fitting them into the new genetic picture is less easy because there’s no evidence so far for two separate spreads of CLV ancestry southwards, but who knows.

     Would we need to assume an I-A population spread south before 3600?

     Steppe (CLV) ancestry was present in Armenia by 4000, says the first paper.

     Kura-Araxes would then be the (ancestors of the) Hurrians?

     Why not.
707. Trond Engen says

     April 22, 2024 at 5:29 pm

     [Upfront edit: A lot has happened while I was writing. Still:]

     The groups that have been called “Western Steppe Herders” probably didn’t do much farming themselves. Their complex and presumably shifting relationship(s) with settled groups is one of the aspects that should be explored further. There’s a recentish archaeological paper on how the trade routes of Eurasia developed in tandem with mobile herding during roughly the 5th millennium BCE in what has been dubbed “the First Globalization” (Unfortunately I can’t find it now). Increased mobility brought people in contact with different cultures and economic zones and made it possible to create a surplus from moving goods between them, which in turn made mobility more profitable.

     But this could still be local groups doing annual cycles with the livestock, meeting other local groups at annual gatherings, and together making an accidental transcontinental relay chain. If anything, these two papers have made it clearer to me that what we see may be that, but it’s also something else. The 4th millennium Western Steppe Herders were too mobile to have been limited by the grazing of their livestock — or at least some of them were. Individuals from the Steppe traveled far beyond the Steppe. Local groups in one corner of the Steppe seem to have had allies or partners far away, and this wasn’t limited to the mobile herders. Maikop contributed genes to the settled communities of Tripolye, and one may ask how that was possible without being mediated by their neighbours and trading partners on the Steppe — who instead married into groups on the Lower Volga, Don, and Dnieper, or even Dniester and Danube. It seems to me that partnerships with river peoples was a strategy for the mobile herders.

     The Steppe Herders must have hit on something that made them important. Maybe their animals could pull or carry loads. Maybe the Steppe was a bypass corridor — a cheaper or safer trade route than the densely populated regions further south. So what made the Western Steppe Herders, the amalgamation of mobile groups that would eventually become Pre-Yamnaya, more successful than others? Maybe just that they happened to be located in the junction between the “Western” route north of the Black Sea, the “Eastern” route north of the Caspian Sea, and the “Southern” route between the seas and through the Caucacus. The incredible wealth generated in the Maikop Culture as keepers of the gate to the Steppe seems to tell the same story.

     There were a number of different Steppe groups, of very similar culture but with slightly different genetic profiles. So what eventually made that strangely homogenous Yamna group more successful than all the others? Could their position between the Dnieper and the Don have been a huge strategic advantage? I was going to suggest that it was a position for effective collection of tolls, but I’m not sure how that advantage could have been used to conquer the Steppe without buying support through alliances and marriage. Some archaeologists want to see the Yamnaya expansion as one of a cult-like following, attracting new supporters along the way. Could the ideas be combined? Could the Yamna group have been the guardians of some important site, and/or the keepers of important rituals, and/or the hosts of huge feasts based on the collected “tolls”: Could this have made them the warrior-priestly caste in a new amalgamated herder state? Could the rapid expansion have been actual empire building? We’re talking about an Genghis- or Alexander-like event, with (examples of) Genghis- or Alexander-like brutality, so why not a Mongol- or Macedonian-like military-political elite — only with sheep and cows?

     I’ll stop before my speculations get even wilder. We need to understand the economy of the Steppe.
708. Ryan says

     April 22, 2024 at 5:59 pm

     >>Would we need to assume an I-A population spread south before 3600?

     >Steppe (CLV) ancestry was present in Armenia by 4000, says the first paper.

     Sure, but I should have been more specific. I didn’t just mean south of the Caucasus, but far enough south to plausibly influence Sumerian? Is that Armenia? I’d think it would need to be somewhere closer to Sumer. But that’s a pretty massive expansion through a variety of habitats and cultures, if they spread both west and south of the later Kura-Araxes area. Even if it involves serial leaps that slowly dissipate the genetic footprint, that seems massive. I’m wondering about the processes or technologies that would enable that, whether it was symbiotic or antagonistic to the farmers.

     Were they traders? If merely raiders, with no horses and wagons yet, it’s surprising to me (maybe it shouldn’t be) that they could have been so prolific that they’d expand hundreds of miles in several directions through densely populated areas and even impose their language in the early towns of the fertile crescent. By early enough that their phase had passed and they’d already been absorbed by the Sumerians by 2900 BCE, if not earlier.

     I’m still trying to digest more of what both David and Trond have written.
709. Trond Engen says

     April 22, 2024 at 6:03 pm

     (I wrote my comment as a reply to Dmitry’s summary. My initial plan was to write up my speculations from the last couple of days and connect them to specific finds in the papers, but I ended up making it easier for myself and leaving the papers unreread and unquoted. Thanks to David for doing the work of seeking out and explaining the interesting parts.)
710. Ryan says

     April 22, 2024 at 6:30 pm

     > NPR hunter-gatherers

     🙂
711. rozele says

     April 23, 2024 at 2:05 am

     to me, what Trond wrote rhymes very strongly, and equally unsurprisingly, with james scott’s writing. the connections visible in the genetic research between different specific river polities and specific steppe polities (taking localities / burial geographies as a proxy for polities) seem like they could be very much the kinds of long-term relationships scott describes between particular valley states and particular upland non-state polities, or (if the river settlements weren’t structured as states) a similar version between non-state polities with different economies.

     those kinds of 1:1 relationships could also mark linguistic or cultural connections or exchanges more closely than the genetic groupings that lump populations together as “steppe”. but, being a bit skeptical about the correlation between difference and sharing of material culture and of other cultural elements (in either direction), i’m not sure how much we’ll ever be able to know about that.
712. David Marjanović says

     April 23, 2024 at 6:33 am

     Some archaeologists want to see the Yamnaya expansion as one of a cult-like following, attracting new supporters along the way.

     That completely fails to fit the extreme genetic homogeneity unless maybe if all the burials represent a strictly, and successfully, endogamous elite. And they’re not outright inbred; the studies would have noticed that and said so. Instead, people buried in the same kurgan are not closely related more often than they are.

     I didn’t just mean south of the Caucasus, but far enough south to plausibly influence Sumerian? Is that Armenia?

     There are no samples from south of Çayönü in this study, and Çayönü is at the very northern edge of the Mesopotamian plain. There are very few samples between there and Armenia…
713. Dmitry Pruss says

     April 23, 2024 at 6:39 am

     On the other hand soon after the first expansions of the Core Yamnaya, the mixing restarts. Moreover, new waves of expansion are dominated by patrilineal lineages not even seen within the old core
714. David Marjanović says

     April 23, 2024 at 6:52 am

     Yes; first the enormous expansion, then the cult(ure) you can join, apparently.

     Interesting that the plague isn’t mentioned in either paper.
715. Dmitry Pruss says

     April 23, 2024 at 9:06 am

     Lazaridis’s longtime favorite idea is different, that the Y-chromosomes of the future post-Yamnaya expansions were already a part of the original Yamnaya population but just not in the upper classes of the Yamnaya and therefore not visible in the kurgan burials. Count me a skeptic…a small, mobile population just doesn’t come across as an environment where chiefly patrilineal elites can be separated from the commoners’ for tens of generations.
716. Ryan says

     April 23, 2024 at 10:37 am

     >There are no samples from south of Çayönü in this study, and Çayönü is at the very northern edge of the Mesopotamian plain. There are very few samples between there and Armenia…

     Thanks. No new evidence of what was going on southward. But it’s interesting to see Mesopotamian and CLV cline populations having mixed by the time they reach central Anatolia and a Kura-Araxes wave that swept over presumable source populations in eastern Anatolia, in light of the idea of I-A influence on Sumerian.

     That all has me intrigued. The actual evidence of Mesopotomian/CLV mixing seems to make the Euphratic hypothesis more plausible. But the Euphratic hypothesis now implies an extraordinary Chalcolithic expansion culturally at minimum, of the CLV cline people, or an admixed people with enough CLV that they carry the language. It encompasses much of Anatolia and either much of Mesopotamia or at least a small, very lucky expansion down the river.

     It makes me want to read the Whitaker paper. He opens with the question of whether the Sumerians were “the original inhabitants of Southern Mesopotamia” or entered an “already populated land,” seeming to imply that an I-A language might be aboriginal. I can already see difficulties for integrating these theories. CLV-derived populations can only have arrived in southern Mesopotamia so early. I might have thought the question was whether Sumerian was overlaid on an I-A speaking group somewhere further north, and then the Sumerians conquered southward.
717. Ryan says

     April 23, 2024 at 11:21 am

     A first impression – it’s interesting that the logograms with phonetic values unmotivated in Sumerian but seeming to match potential I-A words are wild animals — fish, wolf, fox, bird (with a very duck-like appearance), while the later list of animal words that seem similar in Sumerian and I-E, where the loan could conceivably have gone the other direction, include ram and sow (and also snake, eagle and deer/ibex).

     He suggests (d)kMtom-g(u)W-ah2 — ‘sacrifice of a hundred oxen’ as the source of a phonetic value (gidim / gudma / gadma) for an ox sign. Is this term attested elsewhere than in Greek (and the Latin borrowing)? Wiktionary doesn’t know of it.
718. Trond Engen says

     April 23, 2024 at 11:36 am

     I agree that Whittaker’s Euphratic is somewhat more plausible now, but there are still problems. If it’s correctly described, it’s just not from the Anatolian side of town. That would mean that it either came south much later or that Non-Anatolian IE started developing within CLV as a sister language to Anatolian.

     I didn’t venture south of the Caucasus in my speculations since the region is still poorly sampled and the mechanism of expansion could be quite different. But maybe it’s key to it all. Whatever happened when the Anatolians took Anatolia, the Steppe society they came from had made them ready for it.
719. Ryan says

     April 23, 2024 at 4:30 pm

     Hmm. Yeah, in Whitaker’s The Case for Euphratic the word Anatolian only appears once, in reference to a form not attested in Anatolian. Not as promising as it seemed.
720. Trond Engen says

     April 23, 2024 at 6:21 pm

     It strikes me that in spite of its reputation as a prototypical residual zone, no archaic Para-indo-EuAnatolian language has been preserved in the valleys of the Caucasus. -1 to the Caucasus.
721. Trond Engen says

     April 24, 2024 at 3:57 pm

     I really think much of it comes down to the horse. The horse must have been used by steppe groups from at least 4500 BCE or so. The dynamics and the long distance travel and mating networks we see in the steppe all develop because of it. I don’t know what the Yamna group did, first to form and then to start the expansion, but I think the two are closely related. I’ll suggest that they developed the first organized use of the horse for military purposes, and they managed to keep that organization together for generations by the happy coincidence of a pre-existing culture of internal egality, solidarity and endogamy.

     I say “military purposes”, but that should be interpreted widely. It might mean operating larger herds and let them overrun fields and settlements, or it might be more like the armed merchant expeditions of the European powers in the age of exploration, forcing oneself into existing organized societies and monopolizing trade.
722. David Marjanović says

     April 24, 2024 at 4:19 pm

     The latest paper on Euphratic seems to be this from 2012.
723. David Eddyshaw says

     April 24, 2024 at 4:22 pm

     prototypical residual zone

     Residual zone, bah!

     Nigeria has about twice the total area of the Caucasus, but something like eight times as many languages (admittedly they may be from only three completely unrelated language families instead of five, but some of the lumping involved to make it only three is of the same order as North Caucasian.)

     Ghana, with not much over half the total area of the Caucasus, has somewhat more in the way of distinct languages altogether than the Caucasus (by my count.) Sadly, all from the same language family, though (even in my splittery opinion), unless you count English and Hausa.
724. David Eddyshaw says

     April 24, 2024 at 6:24 pm

     In fact, the whole thing may be an artefact induced by Greenbergian lumpery.

     Burkina Faso is about 60% of the area of the Caucasus, but certainly has more individual languages: Greenbergly, they are all Afroasiatic, Nilo-Saharan or Niger-Congo (what isn’t?), but there is zero evidence that Mande is really part of any “Niger-Congo”, and the ascription of Fulfulde and, especially Dogon, to the same group as Volta-Congo is as solid (or not) as North Caucasian. So (at least) six families, in reality, if you are working at the level that counts the Caucasus as having five.

     Nichols’ “Residual Zone” thing, to be fair, is not so much about total numbers of languages or even about genetic diversity, but about typological diversity; but you can really get pretty much any result you please on that score by judicious selection of the typological features you count.

     And I do not believe that the Caucasus is more typologically diverse in any objective way than Burkina Faso is. In Burkina there are VSO, SOV and SVO languages; and everything from abundantly agglutinative to isolating languages. There are tonal languages, and non-tonal. Languages with elaborate gender systems, and with none at all. There is at least as much diversity as in the Caucasus.

     [Mind you, the Caucasus does have one language (Udi) with endoclitics. Respect! On the other hand, Burkina has a vastly greater range of tone systems. Counting all those together as just one typologically undifferentiated blob is just plain Eurocentric.]
725. drasvi says

     April 24, 2024 at 8:51 pm

     @DE, you are right about Africa.
     But I think relative (rather than absolute) diversity of the Caucasus makes it a worthy phenomenon.

     (Not sure if instead of expeditions by linguists from РГГУ to the Caucasus we’re now going to have expeditions by very same linguists from HSE to Burkina Faso. I think no.*)

     * The two centers of linguistics (if we count universitis for there are purely research organistations like the institute of linguistics) in Moscow are a dedicated department of MSU and also РГГУ (a department of РГГУ to be precise, for РГГУ is an university for “humanities”). And then HSE, formerly a school of economics choose to become a university. And they…
     …just bought everyone. That simple.
     Especially funny with the math faculty: they bought a whole pre-existing university (the best one for pure math even though it does not have entrance exams or anthing – anyone can come and study math) or rather the loose crowd of people around it.
726. David Eddyshaw says

     April 24, 2024 at 10:15 pm

     Unfortunately Burkina Faso is getting distinctly more hazardous these days.

     I’d be the last to say the the Caucasus isn’t wonderful from the linguistic point of view. It plainly is, very much so.

     My beef is really with Joanna Nichols. I really do want to have a better opinion of her work, I really do. It’s just that it’s such a mixture of the profound and insightful with … the not so profound or insightful. So many unexamined assumptions … so much claiming that you really can get something for nothing in historical linguistics … the information she wants is just not there any more … (That’s entropy, man!)

     Wrong thread for all this, really, though. It had its own thread just the other day.
727. drasvi says

     April 24, 2024 at 10:34 pm

     Well, generally I value a book based on the amount of insights it contains rather than the proportion of insights it contains.

     That’s also why we argue about some publications – like what Y recently quoted.

     But yes, you totally can demand responsibility from someone like Nichols. I don’t think Greenbergian classification is “bad” for example, I think it is excellent. He generated a tree close to the reality in many ways and did it fast. For a preliminary classification or a draft (it can’t be more than that!) it is excellent. But then people keep reproducing it:/

     Nichols too can make someone believe in what for her is just a speculation – and must be careful.
728. David Eddyshaw says

     April 24, 2024 at 11:16 pm

     Greenberg’s classification was a great improvement over the most commonly accepted view preceding that.

     However, the parts that are certainly close to reality were not original to him (though he deserves credit for popularising them and making them the mainstream.) For the rest, the jury is very much out. Essentially, he came up with a lot of bad reasons for believing things that had already been conjectured on better grounds, and leveraged the bad reasons to make some highly speculative jumps: because the bad methods retroactively appeared to “work” on the parts that were already known, this conferred an entirely unwarranted plausibility on the whole construction.

     It may, as you suggest, not be Greenberg’s fault that so many subsequent scholars misinterpreted his conjectures as settled conclusions; I’m not so sure about that though. He does muddy the waters quite a bit himself. Nichols too. The problem is not so much coming to wrong conclusions, which is all part of how science progresses: it’s in making fundamentally flawed research procedures respectable. From that, you don’t need just to correct errors: you need to backtrack and undo a lot of illusory “progress.” That ties up a lot of scholar-years that would have been better spent researching the actual problems. A limited resource, wasted …
729. Ryan says

     April 24, 2024 at 11:17 pm

     The Caucasus has been in or near a system of coercive states for five millennia, yet retains the diversity it has. I’d say that makes it a hell of a residual zone.

     Thanks for the more recent Euphratic link, David. It’s beyond me to judge, but does look like Whitaker made some advances after the paper I linked.
730. David Eddyshaw says

     April 24, 2024 at 11:25 pm

     Don’t know about “millennia” (and neither does anyone else) but the various parts of what is now Burkina Faso has been part of various major empires for over one millennium, anyhow.

     But it’s not a competition. I have no desire to detract from the reputation of the Caucasus for orneriness. I’m just dubious about the Spread Zone/Residual Zone thing as a linguistic matter. (There’s obviously something to it. But I think the concept has been made to do a lot more work than it really can.)
731. Hippophlebotomist says

     April 25, 2024 at 6:01 pm

     All the talks for the Transformation of Europe conference will be streamed and posted here
     https://www.youtube.com/@hunrenbolcseszettudomany/streams
732. David Marjanović says

     April 25, 2024 at 6:01 pm

     In Burkina there are VSO, SOV and SVO languages; and everything from abundantly agglutinative to isolating languages. There are tonal languages, and non-tonal. Languages with elaborate gender systems, and with none at all. There is at least as much diversity as in the Caucasus.

     I can’t disagree with the last sentence, but I should say that the West Caucasian languages combine polysynthetic verbs (with long prefix chains) and isolating nouns, while in East Caucasian you get extremes like Chechen with inflecting (suffixing) nouns and isolating verbs, and Kartvelian seems to put affix chains (somewhat fusional in Svan) on both sides of everything; while I’m not aware of a language in the Caucasus with more than two tones (and plenty of toneless ones), tone systems in the Caucasus are notably underresearched, and also there are stress-positioning systems (probably descended from two-tone systems) around the upper end of IE complexity in some East Caucasian languages; and genders range from four to zero ( = one…) in East Caucasian alone.

     will be streamed and posted here

     Oh wow.
733. Trond Engen says

     April 28, 2024 at 10:52 am

     26 hours of presentations streamed and posted. I wonder if I’ll ever get around to watch them.
734. David Marjanović says

     April 28, 2024 at 3:05 pm

     …as a single nine-hour video for each day, without chapters. At least the preview works when you mouse over the progress bar…
735. Hippophlebotomist says

     April 29, 2024 at 11:35 am

     Another recent paper, not touching on aDNA

     https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1467-968X.12289

     ADDRESSING POLYMORPHISM IN LINGUISTIC PHYLOGENETICS
     Canby, Evans, Ringe, and Warnow

     Abstract: “Understanding how languages change is important not only for the reconstruction of
     protolanguages and for estimating diversification dates (i.e. the dates when languages split),
     but also for the inference of evolutionary trees (or phylogenetic networks) of language families.
     We propose a parametric model of language change that addresses lexical polymorphism (two
     or more words for a given basic meaning) based on what is known about how languages
     change. Under our model, changes of state in lexical characters occur only due to semantic shift
     or borrowing, leading to (potentially brief) periods in which polymorphism is present. Across a
     wide range of model conditions, we find that a simple and natural modification to the
     maximum parsimony (MP) criterion (which seeks the tree with the fewest number of changes)
     to allow it to handle polymorphic characters has the best accuracy, substantially improving on
     well-known Bayesian methods based on appearances and disappearances of words. We also
     provide a new analysis of Indo–European that takes polymorphism into account, finding
     support for a previous tree (Nakhleh et al., 2006) and a new tree that differs from the previous
     tree in the relationship between Italo-Celtic and Tocharian”

     The Italo-Celto-Tocharian (Italocharian?) clade in one of their trees seems interesting. Their new results don’t seem too different from previous trees by the same authors elsewhere. I keep hoping to see a new paper that uses the new IE-CoR database from the Heggarty et al (2023) paper with different methods to see if others find the same old dates and near-basal position for Indo-Iranian.
736. David Marjanović says

     April 29, 2024 at 12:16 pm

     That sounds promising for phylogenetics in general, not just of languages!

     The Italo-Celto-Tocharian (Italocharian?) clade in one of their trees seems interesting.

     And very old-fashioned, but not surprising for Ringe, who has long believed that the passive ending changed from *-r (at first approximation: Anatolian, Tocharian, Italo-Celtic, Phrygian) to *-i (at first approximation: the entire rest of IE) only once.

     I keep hoping to see a new paper that uses the new IE-CoR database from the Heggarty et al (2023) paper with different methods to see if others find the same old dates and near-basal position for Indo-Iranian.

     I bet the position of Indo-Iranian is inevitable as long as a purely lexical database like this one is used. The old dates are simply due to the lack of maximum ages on the calibration dates – a well-known problem that I’ve even published on –; a fundamentally wrong-headed coding decision (shared, alas, with most preceding papers) that doubles the relative length of any branch may not even have mattered.

     There’s a long discussion about that paper starting here in this very thread. 🙂
737. Trond Engen says

     April 29, 2024 at 1:48 pm

     That prompted me to reread (well, reskim) the thread. Way back in the bygone days of 2023 i speculated that the Volga and Sredny Stog populations were “joint ventures” formed around metal production and distribution. If so, Yamna might have developed as a caste within Sredny Stog.
738. David Marjanović says

     April 29, 2024 at 2:09 pm

     From the new paper:

     We also provide a new phylogenetic analysis for Indo–European, using a corrected and expanded version of an early dataset from Ringe and Taylor (described in Ringe et al. (2002) and used in several studies (Nakhleh et al. 2005a, 2005b)). The original dataset includes 376 lexical, phonological, and morphological characters, of which 40 (one morphological and 39 lexical) exhibit polymorphism; these were not used in prior phylogenetic estimations due to the inability of software at that time to handle polymorphism. For this study, we make a few corrections to the coding (see our Github site (Canby et al. 2024)) and include the polymorphic characters that had been previously removed.

     So… that sounds good.

     Also, I still haven’t visited the Facebook discussion to post a link to the discussion of the 2023 paper. 🙁
739. David Marjanović says

     April 29, 2024 at 3:48 pm

     I’ve now read the whole paper and am quite disappointed.

     The explanation of what Bayesian methods are doesn’t mention what’s Bayesian about them and repeats the strange assertion by Heggarty et al. (2023) that Bayesian inference can’t deal with polymorphism at all; maybe the IID model can’t, but why not use the good old (2001) model for nonmolecular data… I’m also getting the impression that the authors don’t quite understand what the problem with ascertainment bias is: the software expects invariant and other parsimony-informative characters unless and until a correction for ascertainment bias has been performed, regardless – of course! – of whether there are any in the simulated dataset.

     Worse, the paper asserts a few times that parsimony “isn’t naturally suited” to polymorphism, without explaining or citing anything. This is just baffling. Polymorphism is computationally the same as partial uncertainty, something parsimony has no problem with; polymorphic scores are routine in matrices intended for parsimony analysis, and indeed there’s literature – not cited – on the fact that not scoring enough polymorphism leads to wrong trees.

     The IE tree search was heavily constrained; Ringe simply believes that some characters are immune to homoplasy and ran the search accordingly instead of testing these hypotheses.

     The silver lining on this failure of peer review is the modified birth-death model for simulating the evolution of languages. Although it should have been a modification of the “fossilized birth-death” model (which isn’t cited), it’s a step in a useful direction.
740. Trond Engen says

     April 29, 2024 at 4:00 pm

     The IE tree search was heavily constrained;

     So, a proof of concept that failed at putting the concept to proof?
741. Y says

     April 29, 2024 at 4:09 pm

     In favor of Canby et al., they are not satisfied with the computer spitting out a phylogeny, but aim to extract the etymons responsible for creating noteworthy nodes. In this case, one character (‘here’) supports T-IC when Albanian is excluded from the tree, plus two more (‘tie’ and ‘we’) when it is included. It’s proper and honest of them to present this, but it looks underwhelming.
742. David Marjanović says

     April 29, 2024 at 5:10 pm

     So, a proof of concept that failed at putting the concept to proof?

     No; they calculated their IE trees from real data, not simulated ones.

     they are not satisfied with the computer spitting out a phylogeny, but aim to extract the etymons responsible for creating noteworthy nodes

     The computer does spit them out if you use parsimony. In PAUP*, which they used (though miscited),

     describe 1 /apolist=yes chglist=yes;

     will plot tree number 1 from the results along with the list of apomorphies (innovations) of each node and the list of nodes where each character changes states – with ways to account for missing data or, yes, polymorphism.
743. Y says

     April 29, 2024 at 8:46 pm

     Now I am confused. The details of the coding of Warnow et al.’s lexica are here; the raw data are here. As far as I can tell, none of the three etymons looks like a T-IC shared innovation.
744. Ryan says

     April 30, 2024 at 12:27 pm

     Did you all already see and discuss this paper on evidence for the genetic background of the development of Yeniseian and Uralic languages:
     Postglacial genomes from foragers across Northern Eurasia reveal prehistoric mobility associated with the spread of the Uralic and Yeniseian languages

     I can’t remember, but these aren’t areas I’ve internalized very well, so I might have forgotten.

     If this is new, hat tip to Dispatches from Turtle Island blog for the link.
745. David Marjanović says

     April 30, 2024 at 3:50 pm

     That preprint hasn’t been posted here before, and it’s amazing.

     You linked to the first version, from October 2nd; the second version dates from two days later and has corrected “where” to “were” in the abstract… I’m a bit surprised Google Scholar can’t find a peer-reviewed version; the reviewers must have requested major revisions, or they had to be prodded for months to submit their reviews. Anyway, I’m going to read the second preprint version till I fall asleep.
746. Ryan says

     April 30, 2024 at 6:13 pm

     >and it’s amazing

     [wags tail like praised puppy]

     [also adds Seima-Turbino to list of newly important archaeological terms he can’t quite pinpoint]
747. Trond Engen says

     April 30, 2024 at 6:33 pm

     Ehem. Dmitry upthread.

     But then again, everything is somewhere upthread. The paper really deserves reading.
748. David Marjanović says

     April 30, 2024 at 6:50 pm

     Oh. I guess I didn’t read it when it was fresh because the summary omitted some very interesting parts. :-] I’ve now read the whole thing except the Methods and the suppl. data:

     – Seima-Turbino is featured, and so is everyone’s favorite Ymyyakhtakh, usually spelled this way.
     – It’s looking very Uralo-Siberian. Dene-Yeniseian is explicitly not excluded, but either of its components could be closer to Sino-Tibetan (not mentioned) as perhaps spoken by the sampled East Asians. There is, however, no genetic reason to associate Yeniseian specifically with Burushaski (not mentioned either).
     – There’s no agriculture in most of the region, so “Neolithic” is defined by the presence of pottery, which began some 8000–9000 years ago.
     – The “WHG” in the preprint are actually Balkan Hunter-Gatherers.
     – The “West Siberian Hunter-Gatherers” identified as a source of “Core Yamnaya” and such in last week’s paper are simply unadmixed Ancient North Eurasians, like the Early/Middle Bronze Age people from the Tarim basin.
     – There was a smooth gradient along thousands of km between EHG and outright East Asians (as found in northern China) until migrations from the west (Sintashta & such, i.e. Indo-Iranian) and the east (basically Ymyyakhtakh) destroyed it and created a new gradient with a much smaller ANE component.
     – Read the preprint, it’s quite readable. Too bad, though, that the figures (including the Extended Data Figures, which show the manuscript is intended for Nature) don’t line up at all with their legends.
     – I’m amazed how many of the river names I recognize from paleontology.
     – Bedtime.
749. Trond Engen says

     April 30, 2024 at 7:00 pm

     Too bad, though, that the figures (including the Extended Data Figures, which show the manuscript is intended for Nature) don’t line up at all with their legends.

     Yes, I remember being confused by that too. But there has to be some drawbacks to reading free preprints.
750. Ryan says

     April 30, 2024 at 11:30 pm

     >>>and it’s amazing

     >>[wags tail like praised puppy]

     >Ehem, Dmitry upthread

     All glory is fleeting.

     In the meantime, looking up Seima Turbino and related issues, I realized that Mongolia is to Kazakhstan as God is to Adam, tantalizingly close but just out of reach..
751. Trond Engen says

     May 1, 2024 at 6:03 am

     Ryan: All glory is fleeting.

     I didn’t mean to sound ungrateful. It’s well nigh impossible to remember or find every link to every paper ever made on this site, and especially when the (main) author(s) and the title aren’t mentioned with the link.

     It’s great that this paper came up again now. It’s becoming clearer by the day that this was an era of globalization, and upheavals in one end of the continent may have been closely connected to or ultimately caused by events in the other end. The trade societies of the steppe arose in parallel with the first civilizations. So did metallurgy across the continent. The Ymyyakhtakh Pre-Proto-Uralic expansion could have been triggered by increasing demands for metals or specialized metalwork after the taming of the horse and the IE expansion. The formation of Sintashta is intertwined with that of Seima-Turbino. And that’s just the steppe.
752. David Marjanović says

     May 1, 2024 at 11:48 am

     Funnily enough, I did remember participating in the next day of discussion, when bronze production on the coast of the Arctic Ocean came up… I just hadn’t actually read the two preprints – perhaps because the original links went straight to the PDF files.

     Here’s the first one again, which I’ll try to read later today: “Bronze Age Northern Eurasian Genetics in the Context of Development of Metallurgy and Siberian Ancestry” by Ainash Childebayeva, Fabian Fricke, Adam Benjamin Rohrlach, Lei Huang, Stephan Schiffels, Outi Vesakoski, Lena Semerau, Franziska Aron, Vyacheslav Moiseyev, Valery Khartanovich, Igor Kovtun, Johannes Krause, Sergey Kuzminykh & Wolfgang Haak.
753. Trond Engen says

     May 1, 2024 at 5:54 pm

     Yes, we hardly even discussed that upthread. It’s more limited in scope, comparing the genetics of the Seima-Turbino-affiliated Rostovka graveyard on the middle Irtysh and the archaologically surprisingly East-Siberian-looking Bolshoy Oleni Ostrov near Murmansk. Its findings support the multicultural, transcontinental nature suggested for Seima-Turbino, and a different route out of Yakutia for BOO. The Ymyyakhtakh culture spread widely in the northernmost regions of Siberia. It’s what makes me think the tundra was a transport corridor.
754. Trond Engen says

     May 2, 2024 at 3:46 am

     I forgot: Archaeologically speaking, Seima-Turbino is not a “culture” but a “phenomenon”. The reason is that there’s not a complete package of associated cultural features. Strikingly, there’s no diagnostic Seima-Turbino style of pottery. S-T sites instead feature the pottery style of the local “background” culture. This would normally mean that S-T women were local, but I can’t remember seeing genetic evidence for that.

     This suggests that S-T communities were so specialized that they relied on trade with local cultures for pottery and presumably a number of other commodities.
755. David Marjanović says

     May 2, 2024 at 4:46 am

     This would normally mean that S-T women were local

     Is there evidence that pottery was women’s work?
756. Trond Engen says

     May 2, 2024 at 1:19 pm

     I thought so, but maybe I’m just full of shit. I’m pretty sure that in some unsymmetric population turnovers, I’ve seen pottery style pattern with female decent, but that may reflect tastes rather than production.
757. Dmitry Pruss says

     June 12, 2024 at 9:09 am

     Two ancient DNA preprints on the genesis of Uralic (and Yeniseian) languages, and my and Trond’s long-time favorites, the itinerant bronze-makers of Seima-Turbino and Ymyyakhkakh cultures (the latter simplified in spelling as Ymyakhtakh, and then simplified even further as Yakutia Late Neolithic / Bronze Age aka Yakutia_LNBA)
     https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.10.01.560195v1.full.pdf
     https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.10.01.560332v1.full.pdf

     The first one has been published:
     https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-024-06343-x
758. David Marjanović says

     June 12, 2024 at 10:32 am

     I missed this from 2020 and only have access to the abstract:

     The spread of steppe and Iranian-related ancestry in the islands of the western Mediterranean

     Steppe-pastoralist-related ancestry reached Central Europe by at least 2500 BC, whereas Iranian[-]farmer-related ancestry was present in Aegean Europe by at least 1900 BC. However, the spread of these ancestries into the western Mediterranean, where they have contributed to many populations that live today, remains poorly understood. Here, we generated genome-wide ancient-DNA data from the Balearic Islands, Sicily and Sardinia, increasing the number of individuals with reported data from 5 to 66. The oldest individual from the Balearic Islands (~2400 BC) carried ancestry from steppe pastoralists that probably derived from west-to-east migration from Iberia, although two later Balearic individuals had less ancestry from steppe pastoralists. In Sicily, steppe pastoralist ancestry arrived by ~2200 BC, in part from Iberia; Iranian-related ancestry arrived by the mid-second millennium bc, contemporary to its previously documented spread to the Aegean; and there was large-scale population replacement after the Bronze Age. In Sardinia, nearly all ancestry derived from the island’s early farmers until the first millennium BC, with the exception of an outlier from the third millennium BC, who had primarily North African ancestry and who—along with an approximately contemporary Iberian—documents widespread Africa-to-Europe gene flow in the Chalcolithic. Major immigration into Sardinia began in the first millennium BC and, at present, no more than 56–62% of Sardinian ancestry is from its first farmers. This value is lower than previous estimates, highlighting that Sardinia, similar to every other region in Europe, has been a stage for major movement and mixtures of people.
759. Ryan says

     June 12, 2024 at 12:34 pm

     >In Sicily, steppe pastoralist ancestry arrived by ~2200 BC, in part from Iberia; Iranian-related ancestry arrived by the mid-second millennium bc, contemporary to its previously documented spread to the Aegean;

     What does Iranian-related ancestry mean here? Would this have come via the Levant, Anatolia, or the Black Sea?

     Does this suggest the Aegean also had two waves of new populations in the early/middle Bronze Age – with an initial steppe influx followed by a flow of Iranian-related ancestry? Or was the Iranian ancestry that flowed into the Aegean “by the mid-second century” already intermixed with steppe people?
760. David Marjanović says

     June 12, 2024 at 1:46 pm

     Open access:

     2020:

     Ancient genomes from northern China suggest links between subsistence changes and human migration

     Northern China harbored the world’s earliest complex societies based on millet farming, in two major centers in the Yellow (YR) and West Liao (WLR) River basins. Until now, their genetic histories have remained largely unknown. Here we present 55 ancient genomes dating to 7500-1700 BP from the YR, WLR, and Amur River (AR) regions. Contrary to the genetic stability in the AR, the YR and WLR genetic profiles substantially changed over time. The YR populations show a monotonic increase over time in their genetic affinity with present-day southern Chinese and Southeast Asians. In the WLR, intensification of farming in the Late Neolithic is correlated with increased YR affinity while the inclusion of a pastoral economy in the Bronze Age was correlated with increased AR affinity. Our results suggest a link between changes in subsistence strategy and human migration, and fuel the debate about archaeolinguistic signatures of past human migration.

     I only skimmed it and didn’t find any surprises; millet and rice are mentioned separately.

     2022:

     South-to-north migration preceded the advent of intensive farming in the Maya region

     The genetic prehistory of human populations in Central America is largely unexplored leaving an important gap in our knowledge of the global expansion of humans. We report genome-wide ancient DNA data for a transect of twenty individuals from two Belize rock-shelters dating between 9,600-3,700 calibrated radiocarbon years before present (cal. BP). The oldest individuals (9,600-7,300 cal. BP) descend from an Early Holocene Native American lineage with only distant relatedness to present-day Mesoamericans, including Mayan-speaking populations. After ~5,600 cal. BP a previously unknown human dispersal from the south made a major demographic impact on the region, contributing more than 50% of the ancestry of all later individuals. This new ancestry derived from a source related to present-day Chibchan speakers living from Costa Rica to Colombia. Its arrival corresponds to the first clear evidence for forest clearing and maize horticulture in what later became the Maya region.

     Features: “Fig. 1: Extent of Mayan and Chibchan languages, paleobotanical records showing early horticulture, and present-day populations with genome-wide data analyzed in this study. […] Paleo-botanical records from the southeastern Yucatan and adjacent areas with evidence of maize, manioc, and chili pepper between 6500 and 4000 cal. BP are shown […]”

     I recommend the introduction as a nice compact presentation of the early history of, mostly, maize in Central and South America, which is more complex than I had known.

     In the Discussion: “Our analysis of ancient genomes from southern Belize indicates that there were multiple phases of human migration into what became the Maya region. We confirm that the earliest sampled individuals from the region (9600–7300 cal. BP) constitute an early-splitting branch of ancestry², plausibly linked directly to the first southward human disper[s]als through the Americas during the Late Pleistocene.”

     …and (references omitted): “The distribution and history of languages in Central America provides an independent line of evidence for our proposed historical interpretation. Chibchan is a family of 16 extant (7–8 extinct) languages spoken from northern Venezuela and Colombia to eastern Honduras (Fig. 1; Supplementary Note 3). The highest linguistic diversity of the Chibchan family occurs today in Costa Rica and Panama near the Isthmian land bridge to South America, and this is hypothesized to be the original homeland from which the languages diversified, starting roughly 5500 years ago. We undertook a preliminary analysis of 25 phonologically and semantically comparable basic vocabulary items to study the linguistic evidence for interaction between early Chibchan and Mayan languages (Supplementary Tables 7, 8), of which a subset of 9 display minimally recurring and interlocking sound correspondences. We also focused on possible borrowings: crucially, one of the terms for maize, #ʔayma (Supplementary Tables 9, 10), diffused among several languages of northern Central America (Misumalpan, Lenkan, Xinkan), as well as the branch of Mayan that broke off earlier than any other (Huastecan). This term is much more phonologically diverse and much more widely distributed (both across linguistic branches and geographically) in Chibchan (Supplementary Table 10) than in any other non-Chibchan language of Central America or Mexico, and it is morphologically analyzable in several Chibchan languages, including a final suffix. Together, these traits support a Chibchan origin of this etymon, which could correspond to a variety of maize introduced from the south. Formal linguistic analysis over a much larger dataset will be necessary to understand the early sharing patterns (of both inheritance and diffusion) between these two language groups, which may provide further clues about the movements of material culture and people we discuss here.”

     Also 2022:

     Ancient genomes from the last three millennia support multiple human dispersals into Wallacea

     Previous research indicates that human genetic diversity in Wallacea—islands in present-day Eastern Indonesia and Timor-Leste that were never part of the Sunda or Sahul continental shelves—has been shaped by complex interactions between migrating Austronesian farmers and indigenous hunter–gatherer communities. Yet, inferences based on present-day groups proved insufficient to disentangle this region’s demographic movements and admixture timings. Here, we investigate the spatio-temporal patterns of variation in Wallacea based on genome-wide data from 16 ancient individuals (2600–250 years BP) from the North Moluccas, Sulawesi and East Nusa Tenggara. While ancestry in the northern islands primarily reflects contact between Austronesian- and Papuan-related groups, ancestry in the southern islands reveals additional contributions from Mainland Southeast Asia that seem to predate the arrival of Austronesians. Admixture time estimates further support multiple and/or continuous admixture involving Papuan- and Asian-related groups throughout Wallacea. Our results clarify previously debated times of admixture and suggest that the Neolithic dispersals into Island Southeast Asia are associated with the spread of multiple genetic ancestries.

     Roger Blench’s Austroasiatic agricultural expansion throughout Indonesia comes to mind.

     As in the new paper on some other thread (Muskogean and lamb’s quarters?) – references omitted:

     The mtDNA and Y-chromosome haplogroups show that both Asian- and Papuan-related ancestries were already present in the North Moluccas approximately 2,150 BP (Table 1). Furthermore, 2 North Moluccas individuals dating to approximately 2,150–2,100 BP carried mtDNA and Y-chromosome haplogroups associated with different ancestries, indicating that admixture started before then. In comparison to the individuals from N[usa ]T[enggara ]T[imur] and Sulawesi, those from the North Moluccas showed a higher proportion of mtDNA lineages connecting them to Near Oceania, as attested by the Q haplogroups characteristic of Northern Sahul and by the so-called ‘Polynesian pre-motif’ (B4a1a/B4a1a1). None of the individuals from Sulawesi or NTT carry Papuan-related mtDNA haplogroups, even though they are found there today.

     […]

     Further support for this scenario comes from genetic analyses of the commensal black rat—often a good indicator of human migration—which suggests that this species was also first introduced in NTT from MSEA.

     The broad geographical distribution of groups best matching the MSEA ancestry of southern Wallaceans raises questions about the actual origin(s) of peoples who reached those islands. The best present-day proxies, the Mlabri from Thailand/Laos and the Nicobarese from the Nicobar islands, speak Austroasiatic languages and have been relatively isolated compared to other MSEA groups that recently experienced extensive admixture. Their isolation might explain why they appear as best proxies without being necessarily connected to the inferred migration event. Moreover, there is no clear link between any specific ancient group from MSEA and the actual source that contributed ancestry to NTT since we identified several equivalent ancient proxies for this ancestry.

     Other evidence for this migration is equivocal. NTT languages are either Austronesian or Papuan-related and no influences from MSEA language families have been reported. Similarly, there is no archaeological evidence for pre-Austronesian contact between MSEA and southern Wallacea; the earliest evidence is the appearance of the Đông Sơn bronze drums, which spread to southern but not northern Wallacea around the early centuries AD, following maritime trade routes. These drums probably originated in northern Vietnam or adjacent provinces of southern China. Although we cannot rule out some MSEA ancestry contributions from the Đông Sơn period (or even later) for the younger NTT individuals, the high amount of MSEA ancestry in the Liang Bua individual (2,600 BP) and our AHG inferences support an earlier presence in southern Wallacea. This has important implications for our understanding of the Neolithic expansion into ISEA since it brings to light a previously undescribed human dispersal from MSEA.

     2023 (references omitted):

     Northwest African Neolithic initiated by migrants from Iberia and Levant

     In northwestern Africa, lifestyle transitioned from foraging to food production around 7,400 years ago but what sparked that change remains unclear. Archaeological data support conflicting views: (1) that migrant European Neolithic farmers brought the new way of life to North Africa or (2) that local hunter-gatherers adopted technological innovations. The latter view is also supported by archaeogenetic data6. Here we fill key chronological and archaeogenetic gaps for the Maghreb, from Epipalaeolithic to Middle Neolithic, by sequencing the genomes of nine individuals (to between 45.8- and 0.2-fold genome coverage). Notably, we trace 8,000 years of population continuity and isolation from the Upper Palaeolithic, via the Epipaleolithic, to some Maghrebi Neolithic farming groups. However, remains from the earliest Neolithic contexts showed mostly European Neolithic ancestry. We suggest that farming was introduced by European migrants and was then rapidly adopted by local groups. During the Middle Neolithic a new ancestry from the Levant appears in the Maghreb, coinciding with the arrival of pastoralism in the region, and all three ancestries blend together during the Late Neolithic. Our results show ancestry shifts in the Neolithization of northwestern Africa that probably mirrored a heterogeneous economic and cultural landscape, in a more multifaceted process than observed in other regions.

     That would seem to explain a few things…!

     A population history model for the KTG people with 72 ± 4.4% Anatolian Neolithic ancestry, 10 ± 2.6% WHG ancestry and 18 ± 3.3% Maghrebi ancestry is consistent with the data (qpAdm, P = 0.193). Taken together, these results suggest a European Neolithic origin of KTG farmers whose ancestors dispersed from Anatolia throughout Europe, admixing with European hunter-gatherers on their path to southwestern Europe before crossing the Mediterranean to North Africa. The presence of European hunter-gatherer ancestry excludes the possibility that Early Neolithic migrants exclusively followed North African Mediterranean shores from Anatolia or the Levant.

     Iberian Early Neolithic (both as a whole and regionally) was found to be the best source population for the European ancestry in KTG, followed by Sicily Stentinello Early Neolithic (Supplementary Data 9). This is consistent with low levels of genetic differentiation in Cardial Ware-associated groups along the European shores of the Mediterranean Sea, confirmed by direct radiocarbon dates showing that Impressed Ware farmers expanded rapidly across the western Mediterranean.

     KTG is Kaf Taht el-Ghar, just south of Gibraltar, from 7,350 cal BP.

     However, the northwestern Africa Neolithization process involved the notable survival of genetically unadmixed local populations (represented by IAM), despite coexisting for at least 300 years with foreign farming communities (KTG), and still adopted several elements of the Neolithic ways of living from them. Whereas the archaeological findings in IAM and KTG point to the exchange of ideas between groups and support an acculturation process of foraging communities, our genetic data show that the exchange of genes was unidirectional.

     In the Middle Neolithic, Levantine ancestry arrived. “In parallel, cattle pastoralism was expanding in the current Sahara territory and Afro-Asiatic language groups spread throughout the whole of North Africa.”

     …and finally, a paywalled manuscript that was accepted six days ago and hasn’t been edited yet (references omitted):

     Widespread horse-based mobility arose around 2,200 BCE in Eurasia

     Horses revolutionized human history with fast mobility. However, the timeline between their domestication and widespread integration as a means of transportation remains contentious. Here we assemble a large collection of 475 ancient horse genomes to assess the period when these animals were first reshaped by human agency in Eurasia. We find that reproductive control of the modern domestic lineage emerged ~2,200 BCE (Before Common Era), through close kin mating and shortened generation times. Reproductive control emerged following a severe domestication bottleneck starting no earlier than ~2,700 BCE, and coincided with a sudden expansion across Eurasia that ultimately resulted in the replacement of nearly every local horse lineage. This expansion marked the rise of widespread horse-based mobility in human history, which refutes the commonly-held narrative of large horse herds accompanying the massive migration of steppe peoples across Europe ~3,000 BCE and earlier. Finally, we detect significantly shortened generation times at Botai ~3,500 BCE, a settlement from Central Asia associated with corrals and a subsistence economy centered on horses. This supports local horse husbandry before the rise of modern domestic bloodlines.
761. David Marjanović says

     June 12, 2024 at 1:53 pm

     What does Iranian-related ancestry mean here?

     A failure of peer review. 🙂 Context makes clear enough that it’s ancestry related to Iranian Neolithic Farmers and thereby to Caucasus Hunter-Gatherers. It’s been known for a few years that the originally sharp north-south line between Anatolian Neolithic Farmers and Iranian ones broke down early and thoroughly enough that Minoans and Myceneans had a large proportion of CHG-related ancestry.

     (A long comment presenting more papers is currently in moderation.)
762. Lameen says

     June 12, 2024 at 3:57 pm

     That “Northwest African Neolithic initiated by migrants from Iberia and Levant” paper was very interesting – thanks for the tip! Though I wish people would choose a term a bit narrower than NW Africa when they actually mean northern Morocco. So Afroasiatic reached the Atlantic about 4000 BC…
763. languagehat says

     June 12, 2024 at 4:25 pm

     Fascinating stuff, DM! But I have to bitch and moan about this:

     Wallacea—islands in present-day Eastern Indonesia and Timor-Leste that were never part of the Sunda or Sahul continental shelves

     In the first place, it seems gauche to continue to name entities in far-off parts of the world after Europeans, however admirable (as Alfred Russel Wallace certainly was, and not just for being Welsh). But never mind that: why create a geographical term so easily confused with Wallachia?! C’est méchant, quoi!
764. J.W. Brewer says

     June 12, 2024 at 5:06 pm

     I vote we respectfully borrow as a loanword the Bahasa Indonesia word for “Wallacea,” which appears to be “Wallacea.” https://id.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallacea
765. David Marjanović says

     June 12, 2024 at 7:39 pm

     a geographical term so easily confused with Wallachia

     …Never occured to me they’re similar at all. But I’m generally bad at noticing even complete homonyms (…that helped with learning Chinese, actually, though I didn’t get far for other reasons).
766. Ryan says

     June 12, 2024 at 10:29 pm

     This one is crazy, a just released paper linked at the Moroccan paper, showing degrees of relationship of Celtic elites buried in Hallstadt mounds in Baden-Wurttemberg, including second-degree relatives sharing maternal DNA, deemed likely to be uncle-nephew, and a 3rd-degree relationship separated by 100 years, as well as a great grandmother—great grandson relationship In each case, the related individuals are from different mounds at significant distance, including “two of the richest burial mounds of the Hallstatt culture.”

     Evidence for dynastic succession among early Celtic elites in Central Europe.
767. Ryan says

     June 12, 2024 at 10:47 pm

     One of the kin groups shares a higher proportion of Early European Farmer ancestry than the others.

     “This might indicate a non-local, southern European origin of the ancestors of the Magdalenenberg elite.”

     This seems to have been female- biased ancestry, suggesting this group had taken wives from northern Italy. Decide for yourself whether “to take” a wife has the idiomatic meaning or the more aggressive one

     And describing a broad Iron Age genetic continuum from Iberia to the Czech Republic which fits best with modern French populations and is distinct from modern Germans, “we demonstrate an increase of EEF ancestry and a decrease of Yamnaya and Poltavka pastoralists (OldSteppe) ancestry from the Late Neolithic Bell Beaker period onwards, peaking during the Middle Bronze Age and Iron Age.”

     Celitic from the South?
768. Ryan says

     June 12, 2024 at 11:10 pm

     They suggest that kingship followed “Matrilinear avunculate organization (which) is shown to emerge in populations in which extramarital mating is common and/or paternity confidence is low, so that men are more likely genetically closer related to their sisters’ children than to those of their own wives.”
769. Ryan says

     June 12, 2024 at 11:18 pm

     Writing of a chilf unrelated to the adult woman with whom he was buried, “a fosterage model would also be supported by his 87Sr/86Sr values, indicating that he originated from the periphery of the Magdalenenberg site, agreeing with written records of non-kinship fostering among the continental and insular Celtic elites70,71.”

     I’ve wondered about Caesar and Octavian. Now I’m curious whether Caesar was taking a custom he learned from Celtic tribes, with no living Roman model of kingship to follow.
770. Ryan says

     June 12, 2024 at 11:22 pm

     And, “In general, the isotopic profiles of the Magdalenenberg population indicate high, continent-wide mobility during their lifetime and may represent the signature of marital alliance structures and patronal fosterage that connected the distant elite centres and formed the far-reaching social and economic Hallstatt networks.”

     Maybe Celtic was an elite language maintaining more continuity and similarity across time and space via these mobile aristocrats?

     Given the southern European links postulated here, it may be difficult to separate evidence of a linguistic relationship between Italic and Celtic from instances of convergence between the languages of admixing elites.
771. Ryan says

     June 13, 2024 at 12:54 am

     The Hallstadt paper taken in combination with this paper on an influx of Continental ancestry into Britain in the period 1,000-850 bce seems to offer some ways to understand the Celtic expansion, the timing and mechanisms that led to the degree of similarity in early attested versions across a large land area.
772. drasvi says

     June 13, 2024 at 6:13 am

     “the Moroccan paper,”
     @Ryan, do you mean The genomic history of the indigenous people of the Canary Islands or there is another Moroccan paper?
773. Lameen says

     June 13, 2024 at 7:00 am

     Maybe Celtic was an elite language maintaining more continuity and similarity across time and space via these mobile aristocrats?

     Reminds me of a paper I came across a few weeks ago, The Conversion of Ireland and the Emergence of the Old Irish Language, AD 367–637, arguing that the incredible apparent rapidity of change from Primitive to Old Irish is actually an illusion: the conservatism of Primitive Irish, he claims, is because it was “a far more conservative and less localised learned language , which stood closer from the point of view of linguistic evolution to the fragmentarily attested Old Celtic of Iron Age and Roman mainland Europe and Britain than to Old Irish” – a sort of Druid Sanskrit to the Prakrit of the wider population, basically.
774. Ryan says

     June 13, 2024 at 8:09 am

     By Moroccan paper I just meant the North African paper David M linked, which Lameen said was limited in scope to northern Morocco.
775. languagehat says

     June 13, 2024 at 8:39 am

     the conservatism of Primitive Irish, he claims, is because it was “a far more conservative and less localised learned language , which stood closer from the point of view of linguistic evolution to the fragmentarily attested Old Celtic of Iron Age and Roman mainland Europe and Britain than to Old Irish” – a sort of Druid Sanskrit to the Prakrit of the wider population, basically.

     Extremely interesting, and at first glance plausible. Too bad they didn’t write Vedas in it!
776. Ryan says

     June 13, 2024 at 9:10 am

     It’s interesting to think of the linguistic diversity that may have been in substrate relationship to an elite Celtic. I’m thinking of the Scandinavian author someone pointed to recently who explained that over several centuries, somewhat mutually intelligible dialects should have sprung up every 50 miles or so along the North Sea coast.

     That this may explain some of what lays behind the idea of Belgic or the Northwest bloc is the least of it. Celtic may have been overlain on vast dialect continuums of IE descendants and non-IE languages. The paper I linked describes Hallstadt as the first culture based on regional hierarchies in northern Europe, which might make it the first able to impose a language at geographic scale without population change.

     Of course some idea like this may always have been accessible to most of you. For me, it’s only the idea of known ancient Celtic as an elite superstrate that gives the thought life.

     Weirdly, when I open Lameen’s Koch paper on Primitive and Old Irish on my phone, it opens everything but the critical p. 47. I still get the gist of it but I’m wondering what I missed.
777. Ryan says

     June 13, 2024 at 10:14 am

     In other words, a situation in which the uncertainty of how to interpret classical sources on the Belgae is because those peoples spoke some sort of intermediate dialect approaching Germanic, but their elites spoke Celtic. Whereas much of what Caesar conquered was in or near the old Celtic heartland, so popular dialects started out close, and were kept close by the pull of the elite and religious language.
778. David Eddyshaw says

     June 13, 2024 at 11:39 am

     the conservatism of Primitive Irish, he claims, is because it was “a far more conservative and less localised learned language

     There is an analogy to this in Rotuman. Rotuman shows final vowel apocope with umlaut of the preceding vowel (or metathesis, if you prefer) of full words unless they are phrase-final in a definite noun phrase, but in songs and hifalutin style the forms without apocope/metathesis are used throughout.
779. languagehat says

     June 13, 2024 at 1:07 pm

     I’ve given the Celtic paper its own post.
780. drasvi says

     June 13, 2024 at 1:16 pm

     “…apocope… but in songs…”

     French:)
781. David Eddyshaw says

     June 13, 2024 at 2:15 pm

     Indeed: same principle, but much more so.

     There are a few traces of something similar in Kusaal. I heard a Christian Kusaal song in which the chorus goes

     M ba’ Wina’am sʋŋima daar wʋʋ
     my father God help.me day all
     “My father God has helped me every day.”

     where “has helped me” would normally be sʋŋim. I don’t have the data to know how widespread this sort of thing is, unfortunately.

     Historically, the Kusaal loss of word-final short vowels within phrases is due to a different process from the loss of final short vowels phrase-finally and in citation forms, and there actually are also some traditional greetings which unexpectedly preserve the underlying final vowels phrase-finally, like

     [Bareka] nɛ sɔnsiga!
     blessing with conversation

     where “conversation” is normally just sɔnsig.
782. Y says

     June 13, 2024 at 3:01 pm

     Evidence for dynastic succession among early Celtic elites in Central Europe

     Along similar lines and similarly old, but in different circumstances and a world away:

     R. Barquera et al., Ancient genomes reveal insights into ritual life at Chichén Itzá (Nature, 12 June 2024; OA):

     Here we present genome-wide data obtained from 64 subadult individuals dating to around AD 500–900 that were found in a subterranean mass burial near the Sacred Cenote (sinkhole) in the ceremonial centre of Chichén Itzá. Genetic analyses showed that all analysed individuals were male and several individuals were closely related, including two pairs of monozygotic twins. Twins feature prominently in Mayan and broader Mesoamerican mythology, where they embody qualities of duality among deities and heroes, but until now they had not been identified in ancient Mayan mortuary contexts.
783. David Marjanović says

     June 13, 2024 at 5:19 pm

     Is Hallstatt even Celtic…?

     Matrilinear avunculate organization

     Disney figures!!!

     “Are you the uncle of this nephew who is the uncle of these nephews?”
     – question posed to Scrooge McDuck

     Maybe Celtic was an elite language maintaining more continuity and similarity across time and space via these mobile aristocrats?

     Across space, definitely. Time – any change that took root at all must have spread immediately from sea to shining sea, so maybe not, but it’s a good question.
784. Ryan says

     June 13, 2024 at 5:20 pm

     The flood of papers is a sign that the revolution in understanding historical processes through archaeogenetics that Trond expected in a comment a few months ago is underway.

     It really is crazy the new insights that are available to us already.
785. languagehat says

     June 13, 2024 at 5:30 pm

     Yes, I can’t get over that!
786. Dmitry Pruss says

     June 13, 2024 at 6:01 pm

     The one which surprised me most recently was a paper on the origins of malaria (spoiler – it didn’t enter the Americas with some pre-Columbian trans-Pacific travelers, but rather, its two subtypes were brought by the European ships from Europe and from Africa) with its stunning details about other long-distance travel kinks of the prehistoric past (detectable because people died with malaria in their bloodstream very far from the areas where the pathogen-spreading mosquitos can live).
     A Neolithic settlement in Germany (already suspected of being a hub of far-flung trade).
     An early Bronze Age site in Russia’s steppes, belonging to hunters-gatherers (they must have traveled really far South!)
     A high-altitude site in Mustang from the era right before malaria was first described in the Vedic texts
     Another high-altitude site on the Eastern slopes of the Andes from right around the time of Spanish subjugation (diseases which came with the Europeans must have been spreading ahead of their forces … but also, there must have been travel from the distant lowlands where the mosquitos thrive)
     https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07546-2
787. Ryan says

     June 13, 2024 at 6:45 pm

     >[As to the coherence of Celtic across] Time – any change that took root at all must have spread immediately from sea to shining sea

     A mobile elite can’t eliminate the occurrence of local innovation, but it can diminish the prestige of that which undercuts mutual intelligibility, and transmit those innovations it likes.

     Maybe I’ve misunderstood, but I thought a major question was how Celtic managed to expand and maintain itself across such an area without more rapid fracture.

     You ask whether Hallstadt was even Celtic. I can’t answer. But that’s where the third paper, becomes interesting. My understanding is that it had been unclear how Celtic came to Britain. And that earlier genetic studies didn’t have the ability to distinguish population turnover between closely related groups like the insular and northern continental descendants of Corded Ware / Beaker.

     The 50% turnover in British ancestry that this study locates between 1000 and 875 bce seems like a plausible vector for Celtic in Britain. If you accept that, it begins to shape the map and calendar for other Celtic expansion.
788. Ryan says

     June 13, 2024 at 7:00 pm

     The last post was truncated and rewritten for reasons related to a hyperactive young goldendoodle. The rewrite left out the name of the third paper. I linked it last night as “Continental Influx” but it’s actually Large Scale Migration Into Britain.
789. Hippophlebotomist says

     June 13, 2024 at 7:55 pm

     The Genetic History of the South Caucasus from the Bronze to the Early Middle Ages: 5000 years of genetic continuity despite high mobility – Skourtanioti et al (Pre-print)
     https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.06.11.597880v1

     Abstract: “Archaeological and archaeogenetic studies have highlighted the pivotal role of the Caucasus region throughout prehistory, serving as a central hub for cultural, technological, and linguistic innovations. However, despite its dynamic history, the critical area between the Greater and Lesser Caucasus mountain ranges, mainly corresponding to modern-day Georgia, has received limited attention. Here, we generated an ancient DNA time transect consisting of 219 individuals with genome-wide data from 47 sites in this region, supplemented by 97 new radiocarbon dates. Spanning from the Early Bronze Age 5000 years ago to the so-called “Migration Period” that followed the fall of the Western Roman Empire, we document a largely persisting local gene pool that continuously assimilated migrants from Anatolia/Levant and the populations of the adjacent Eurasian steppe. More specifically, we observe these admixture events as early as the Middle Bronze Age. Starting with Late Antiquity (late first century AD), we also detect an increasing number of individuals with more southern ancestry, more frequently associated with urban centers – landmarks of the early Christianization in eastern Georgia. Finally, in the Early Medieval Period starting 400 AD, we observe genetic outlier individuals with ancestry from the Central Eurasian steppe, with artificial cranial deformations (ACD) in several cases. At the same time, we reveal that many individuals with ACD descended from native South Caucasus groups, indicating that the local population likely adopted this cultural practice.”

     Fascinating new genetic data, but the few attempts to integrate linguistics are awkward and underwhelming, like uncritically using Pagel et al’s (2013) 13kya date for Kartvelian splitting from some hypothesized proto-Eurasiatic macrofamily.

     There’s also more recent work on contacts between Kartvelian and Indo-European e.g. “A new look at Old Armenisms in Kartvelian” by Rasmus Thorsø (2022) and his recent dissertation or “On the Armenian – Kartvelian Loan Contacts: Words with Initial *γw-” by Zsolt Simon (2023) that I wish geneticists and archaeologists would engage with instead limiting their discussion to the perfunctory references to Gamkrelidze and Ivanov.

     No idea what Kartvelologists have made of the very old date in Gavashelishvili’s paper from last year.

     I’m curious how the drafting of this paper went given its mixed Harvard/Max Planck parentage. The tiptoeing over the disagreement on the age and location of Proto-Indo-European is clear:
     “It has also been suggested that steppe mobility into the South Caucasus played a role in language innovation in Indo-European-speaking Armenia. However, recent linguistic evidence also supports a northward expansion of Indo-European languages from a region south of Caucasus postdating the divergence of the Armenian language”
790. David Marjanović says

     June 15, 2024 at 2:45 pm

     The 50% turnover in British ancestry that this study locates between 1000 and 875 bce seems like a plausible vector for Celtic in Britain. If you accept that, it begins to shape the map and calendar for other Celtic expansion.

     Thanks!

     It really is Hallstatt with tt, BTW, not with the Dutchoid dt that somehow made it into Standard German.
791. Ryan says

     June 16, 2024 at 8:27 am

     Sigh. At some point I did google Hallstadt and see my mistake, but it didn’t stick.
792. Trond Engen says

     June 16, 2024 at 1:48 pm

     Finally working my way through the recent load of papers…

     Dmitry: The first one has been published:

     Thanks. On a glance there’s very little difference between the versions.

     [Removing to discuss one paper at the time.]
793. Trond Engen says

     June 16, 2024 at 2:03 pm

     David M.: I missed this from 2020 and only have access to the abstract:

     Fernandes et al.: The Arrival of Steppe and Iranian Related Ancestry in the Islands of the Western Mediterranean, BioRxiv Preview (2019).

     The abstract says what there is to say. The final version of the paper contains 15 more genomes than the preview, but the extra genomes didn’t dramatically alter the conclusions.
794. Trond Engen says

     June 16, 2024 at 2:04 pm

     David M.: [Ning et al (2020):] Ancient genomes from northern China suggest links between subsistence changes and human migration

     I only skimmed it and didn’t find any surprises; millet and rice are mentioned separately.

     No big surprises. There was a long-lasting stream of rice farmers from the south. The southern source population(s) can’t be identified with the current scarcity of samples from South China, but wherever they came from they probably didn’t impose their language on the Yellow River locals. The paper comes out in mild support of a Tibeto-Burman homeland on the Upper Yelllow River It also takes Martine Robbeets’ “Transeurasian” pretty much for granted, but you can just read that as a Sprachbund or whatever.
795. Trond Engen says

     June 16, 2024 at 4:35 pm

     David M.: [Kennett et al (2022):] South-to-north migration preceded the advent of intensive farming in the Maya region

     I read this paper when it came out and was sure I had discussed it here, maybe in the Muskogean and Lambs Quarters thread, but I can’t find any trace of that. I think it’s where I first encountered evidence of old back-and-forth movements of maize cultivars.

     The association of Chibchan languages with slash-and-burn maize horticulture seems fairly solid, the suggested homeland in Costa Rica or thereabouts less so. I also wonder if the spread was based on land travel or Caribbean sea travel.
796. Ryan says

     June 20, 2024 at 3:19 pm

     From an Anthony / Ringe paper (2015, Annual Review of Linguistics), I found this interesting.

     They describe one aspect of the Secondary Producta and Drinking Revolution” as “settlement mobility”. And they write:

     >late PIE dialects spread westward during this period of change partly because the steppe societies of the early Bronze Age had developed, before other European cultures did, a political and ritual adaptation to high mobility, to the maintenance of social life at a distance. Early IE societies developed a set of customs that were adapted to maintaining social relations through reputation and occasional meetings rather than through continuous face-to-face relationships in nucleated population centers. The evidence for this new set of institutions is in PIE vocabulary (presented in the paper.)
797. Dmitry Pruss says

     July 10, 2024 at 3:36 pm

     @Trond re: the plague and the demise of the Neolithic in or around Scandinavia. The new study shows that plague persisted for 6 generations and 17% of the remains tested positive for it
     https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07651-2
798. Trond Engen says

     July 11, 2024 at 3:39 am

     @Dmitry: Thanks! I’m on travel and haven’t had the chance to read it yet, but one immediate thought is that 17% shouldn’t be enough to cause a population collapse. Maybe the bodies of plague victims were treated differently, or maybe those 17% were people dying regular deaths after surviving the plague, or maybe the plague hit much harder in sub-populations that are sparsely represented in the archaological record.
799. Dmitry Pruss says

     July 11, 2024 at 4:15 pm

     The authors are reasonably confident that they identified most of the infections, and that the early two substrains of Yersinia didn’t have a strong impact. The final wave of the plague, strain C, may have been much more severe, because it sickened a larger proportion of the population, and because use of the passage grave ceased after it, and lastly because it contained a suspicious recombination in the gene responsible for pathogenicity. But even strain C wasn’t a total killer at the time period when it was detected; in fact there were enough survivors at that point to continuing burying the dead.

     “The distribution of plague-positive individuals in the pedigree presented in Fig. 3 does not readily support a swift and deadly plague epidemic, because plague is detected in all generations except two and six. However, when information on the different plague strains is taken into account, it becomes apparent that plague infections are stratified both chronologically and phylogenetically into two separate clusters. The most ancestral form of the plague (strain A) is also detected in the oldest individual from this study (FRA102), who was buried in the northern part of the chamber with individuals from generations one and two despite being unrelated to everyone in the pedigree. Based on placements of lower-coverage genomes, we also identify a plague form similar to strain A in FRA021, the progenitor of the right-side subfamily. This finding suggests spread of an early form of the disease in the first generation of the pedigree. The mortality rate of this form of the plague is unknown, but the pedigree clearly illustrates that both the family as a whole and the line of FRA021 survived the disease.

     The second cluster of plague infections occurs in generations three to five and is caused by strains B and C. Strain C is found in generation four of the left-side family, in which all individuals appear to have been infected by the plague. Strain B on the other hand, is found in a single individual from the right-side subfamily, most probably from generation three. Given the genetic distance between strains B and C and their different distribution across the pedigree, it is possible that the two strains represent separate infection events: one in the right-side subfamily (strain B) and another in the left-side subfamily (strain C). Yet, even though both strains appear to be contemporaneous in Fig. 3, they could be temporally distinct because the error margins of the chronological modelling allow for considerable variation in the modelled dates (Extended Data Fig. 5). Unfortunately, it is not possible to further assess this hypothesis because we are unable to distinguish strains B and C in most of the lower-coverage genomes (Extended Data Fig. 9).

     We can only speculate on the impact of the disease on the local population, but we note that all of the hallmarks expected in a swift and deadly epidemic are present for the spread of strain C in the left-hand subfamily: (1) the frequency of plague-positive individuals is exceptionally high, (2) the disease is restricted to the last two generations and (3) all higher-coverage genomes from this subfamily are identical. Taken together, these observations suggest that an outbreak of strain C could have led to the demise of the left-side subfamily, perhaps driven by increased pathogenicity due to recombination around the ypm locus in this strain”
800. Trond Engen says

     July 11, 2024 at 6:31 pm

     Oh, that’s different. We may soon be able to set a date for the first pandemic plague. It will be interesting to see how that compares across the continent.
801. Trond Engen says

     July 16, 2024 at 9:07 am

     I have read the paper. The main site of Frälsegården is the same as the Gökhem site that was studied by Rascovan et al (2018) (discussed here, and the female labeled GOK2, who was reported to have been infected with a basal strain of Y. pestis, is part of both studies. The present study is not so much a cross section of late Late Neolithic Scandinavia as an extended investigation of the district of Falbygden at 5000-4900 BP, with a couple of external and extemporal sites added for comparison — and that makes it extremely interesting.

     Just a couple of points in addition to Dmitry’s:

     The two main pedigrees at Frälsegården are related since their founding members are uncle/nephew (in unknown direction). Both are attested only with a few selected bones, so they may have been reburied after being brought from an ancestral home elsewhere.

     The society was patrilocal. No females with offspring were buried at their birthplace. One female with offspring had two brothers buried at a neighbouring site, providing additional evidence that female moved out before starting families and also indicating a local mating network.

     A couple of non-local females show admixed HG ancestry, probably from Pitted Ware. The one at Frälsegården is a first generation descendant of a mixed union, and she belongs to the later generations, maybe even after the founding families had died or abandoned the site..The other on is from the site of Rössberga a few kilometers northeast and a second or third generation descendant of a mixed union. The dates at this site are less certain, but she too appears to be late in the record.

     Much later the site is used for burials of two groups of newcomers with Corded Ware ancestry. These are used to calculate a date of admixture with WHG at ~4750 BP for both groups, confirming previous dating of the arrival of Yamnaya ancestry in Central/Western Europe at ~4800 BP.

     The individual who carried the most basal strain of Y. pestis, FRA102, is genetically outside the pedigrees and also the one with the oldest carbon date at the site, well before the founding members of both main pedigrees. This might mean that she was an earlier inhabitant of the site. One of the founding fathers had a plague infection with too low coverage to be classified, but it was similar to hers.

     The proportion of genetically determinable plague infections is apparently high when compared to known plague victims, so the epidemic could have hit very hard, especially the waves that hit around 4960 and 4900 BP. Still, they can’t say how it played out and how it infected its victims, except that it was not a bubonic plague and it was not spread by fleas. The two transmission mechanisms offered are through human lice and faecal-to-oral. The latter probably implies an ebola-like scenario.

     The fact that the final epidemics seem to have hit the two pedigrees at Frälsegården differently and at different times might also say something about the mechanism of infection. The calculated dates are such that the “left” pedigree may have been wiped out in one stroke by stain C in ~4960 BP and the “right” pedigree by either B or C in ~4900 BP. That’s probably too neat, since the unadjusted dates show much more variation, but all later individuals buried at Frälsegården are unrelated and in one case admixed with PWC,
802. Trond Engen says

     July 17, 2024 at 3:15 pm

     These strains didn’t prevail into the LNBA (which is represented by a different but close branch in the diagram). I’ve tried to get up to pace on the field of paleo-pathology, with little effect, so I’ll just have to fake it…

     How the various strains died out would have depended on infectiousness and fatality rate. That gives four ways for that to happen:

     (1) The disease is a slow killer, but the transmission is very inefficient, and it fizzles out after a few local victims. This must have happened with new strains at different times through the LNBA, when the plague seems to have been endemic in the population.

     (2) The disease kills so fast that victims rarely have time to pass it on before dying. This is different from (1) in the number of local victims. It could kill practically everybody in a household or a villlage or a district, but dies out when the neighbours are out of reach.

     (3) The disease is a fast killer and the transmission is so efficient that it kills everybody but a lucky few. This is the continental pandemic disaster. It’s different from (2) in geographic reach. As an evolutionary event it should be clearly visible in the genes of the survivors.

     (4) The disease is a slow or inefficient killer, but the transmission is efficient, and those who don’t die have developed immunity. This is the manageable pandemic. It’s different from (3) in that the victims are demographically skewed and that the genetic selection is weaker.

     Selection for beneficial mutations has been found after the Black Death and has been used to infer a ~25 000 year old corona pandemic in East Asia. A disastrous plague in ~4900 BP should also be visible in the genes of the survivors.

     It should even be feasible to discover other (pre-)historic pandemic events by searching for population level genomic changes, be it sudden falls in diversity on certain positions in the genome or sudden rise to prominence of previous minority alleles, and to determine the type of infection by the function of the genes under selection. I don’t think any such wide-net studies have been made yet.
803. Dmitry Pruss says

     September 12, 2024 at 2:24 pm

     Probably more than once on these pages I criticized labs which use ancient DNA to run contemporary forensic kits (which are designed to help guessing appearances of people from their crime scene DNA). So a news release goes, “such-and-such ancient skeleton belonged to a blue-eyed or dark-haired or olive-skinned individual”, and I cringe.
     Not only such tests waste inordinate amounts of precious and irreplaceable ancient DNA for very lightweight, superficial kinds of results (and they waste a lot of DNA because they are not geared to highly degraded, fragmented DNA of the ancient samples, and only use a very small fraction of DNA molecules which survived the ravages of time far better than typically, with the rest of ancient DNA simply going down the drain). But it’s also clear that their conclusions about eyes, hair, or skin aren’t even scientifically sound. Indeed, their DNA can tell which of the SNPs affecting today’s humans’ appearances were there, but there may have been many other SNPs which used to play similar roles back then, but which simply haven’t been studied in today’s people.
     The phenotypical effects of the variants typically become known only when they are common in the study populations. There just isn’t enough statistical power to tell much about most of the rare variants. And most of the ancient peoples represented streams of genetic ancestry which have become very much diluted over time, or simply gone extinct, meaning that many SNPs used to be substantially more common in those ancients than they are in any well-studied today’s populations. In a sense, we don’t even know what we don’t know about the genetics of the phenotypical traits in the ancient people. Case in point, height is very heritable genetically, and easy to study, so we already know thousands of SNPs affecting height. We can make very good predictions of how tall a person might be from their genetic data. But when one applies such a prediction to the ancient bones, it turns that the known genes explain only a few percent of variation in their height!

     Now a new paper shows that once-important SNPs disappear not only because the ancient peoples which once carried these genetic variants disappear almost without genetic traces, without leaving many descendants, but even in the populations whose descendants are still around today. The culprit is … evolution. Most prominently, it is stabilizing selection, when the phenotypical trait doesn’t change much on average, but the “goldilocks” values win, and anything too far in excess or too short is losing out. Stabilizing selection is very common in our species, and one of the traits it works on is height. The paper shows that over time, stabilizing selection purges SNPs with the strongest effects, and as a result, the predictions made with today’s genes lose validity in the past over mere millennia…
     https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.09.10.612181v1.full.pdf
804. Dmitry Pruss says

     September 13, 2024 at 4:20 pm

     We discussed Leonid Vyazov’s poster on the II-III c. CE “para-Slavs” in Viminacium,Tanais, and especially among the Imenkovo culture peoples of Middle Volga, last year
     https://languagehat.com/son-of-yamnaya/#comment-4557933 and the comments which followed

     Last month, Vyazov gave an online presentation to the Russian amateur historians, and added a few important details
     https://vk.com/wall-98395516_36878?reply=36985&thread=36934&t2fs=2310a6d8ce61615283_3

     The work in the 2023 poster since appeared in print in the “Encyclopedia of archaeology”
     https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/B9780323907996001749 (paywalled)
     Vyazov said that a follow-up publication will be up soon. It shows Trzciniec culture of Poland / Belarus/ Ukraine of ~2300-1300 BCE couldn’t be convincingly connected by the IBD to the earliest proto- or para-Slavs, but possibly simply because too much time separated them. It’s also hypothesized that the para-Slavs of the early centuries of the CE are somewhat more closely connected by IBD than the geographic and temporal distances might suggest, because they descended from a relatively small / bottlenecked population group which enriched common DNA fragments in the descendants.

     Vyazov points out that the dearth of ancient DNA in the “cremation belt” of East-Central Europe is being slowly overcome with the archaeologists’ attention refocusing on the human remains such as teeth or loose digits, stuff which until recently interested no one. For example, they got DNA from a tooth from Milograd near Upper Dnieper (its eponymic culture was spread between Minsk and Kiev in VII c. BCE – early CE), and confirmed that it was inhabited by Baltic rather than Slavic population, as already hypothesized by the archaeologists. Not only is it a cool breakthrough into areas where cremations left no complete sets of human remains, but also a good hint that the proto-Slavs didn’t come from the Upper Dnieper, but from some localities further West / South.

     On the question of the start of radiation of the Slavic languages, Vyazov cites Kassian that it may have started centuries before the VIth c. appearance of the Slavs in the historical record. But the concept of “Slavdom” may indeed be connected with the Byzantium’s efforts to forge a border force from disparate Slavic tribes which might not have had such a unifying identity until then.

     One more new finding to be published is about the origins of Medieval Serbs who turn out to descend, in part, from the Banat Sarmatians. He also mentions, without elaborating, something about Holzer’s views about the Cimmerians and suggests that the latter were a separate branch of the linguistic tree between Celtic and Balto-Slavic languages. It will be exciting to see when it all comes out in a publication!
805. languagehat says

     September 13, 2024 at 4:38 pm

     I know I sound like a broken record, but it continues to excite and amaze me that all this groundbreaking stuff is coming out so quickly!
806. Trond Engen says

     September 13, 2024 at 6:20 pm

     Dmitry: [Vyazov] also mentions, without elaborating, something about Holzer’s views about the Cimmerians and suggests that the latter were a separate branch of the linguistic tree between Celtic and Balto-Slavic languages. It will be exciting to see when it all comes out in a publication!

     Also what that would mean for the Celtic homeland. And the tree, for that matter.
807. Dmitry Pruss says

     September 13, 2024 at 10:49 pm

     what that would mean for the Celtic homeland. And the tree, for that matter

     Thinking of it… I probably misinterpreted a small, but important part of what he said. He probably didn’t mean that the Cimmerians – or perhaps even a Cimmerian with now-available DNA data – was linguistically between Celtic and Baltic languages (the only guesses about a possibly unusual origin of the Cimmerian language came from Holzer and they weren’t anything of the sort! If Holzer’s very unusual phonology was true, then I would imagine that it was a language from the far fringes of the Indo-European tree, perhaps from the Altai-Mongolia region from where the Cimmerians got a huge layer of their otherwise syncretic culture). No, it is the DNA, rather than the language, which must have been connected to both Celts and Balts.

     I wouldn’t be surprised if the Cimmerians, like later Scythians in the same parts of the :Pontic Steppe, were a composite society with the ruling class from the East and the agricultural class from the numbers of more local peoples. Without knowing the archaeological details of the origins of DNA in the study, it’s impossible to know who they sampled, but perhaps it was the subjugated rather than the elites? And the Cimmerian – Hallstadt contacts were beyond any doubt anyway…
808. Trond Engen says

     September 14, 2024 at 7:07 am

     Well, duh. I should have understood that myself. It’s Holzers hypothetical substrate “Temematic” and his second-order-hypothetical identification of that with the language of the Cimmerians. I don’t know how far north they reached, but they may have been geographically between the Balto-Slavs and the Celts. Maybe more so after the demise of Cimmerian power, now that I think of it. It’s quite possible that a subgroup of the Cimmerians chose to stay outside the reach of the Scythians or flee north instead of to Anatolia. Time for another look at the Early Iron Age cultures of Poland and Western Ukraine.
809. languagehat says

     September 14, 2024 at 7:13 am

     It’s Holzers hypothetical substrate “Temematic”

     In case anyone was wondering (as I was):

     The name Temematic is an abbreviation of “tenuis, media, media aspirata, tenuis”, referencing a sound shift presumed common to the group.

     A stupid coinage, but I guess if it catches on it’s as good a name as any.
810. David Marjanović says

     September 14, 2024 at 8:29 am

     Holzer’s proposal (which I can’t find right now) is an intriguing part of his “Temematic” proposal, which in turn seems to be ending up as part of Garnier & Sagot’s “Crotonian” proposal.

     an abbreviation of “tenuis, media, media aspirata, tenuis”

     An abbreviation of “tenues → mediae, mediae aspiratae → tenues”, rather.
811. drasvi says

     September 14, 2024 at 10:55 am

     “were a composite society with the ruling class from […] and the agricultural class from […]”

     Ah, so the modern example of such a society would be, say, Tuaregs.
     Or India? I did not occur to me to connect Indian castes to such societies (or to think of them as arising from such systems in the steppe).
812. Ryan says

     September 14, 2024 at 10:55 am

     >a stupid coinage

     Perhaps a bit awkward. But the naming of hypothetical languages for people or regions they may not have any association with is problematic, as with Tocharian. I like the principle of inventing a name de novo for your hypothetical language.

     David, the idea of a possible PIE substrate in Greek and Latin is wild to me, suggesting a whole nother round of conquest or vast population movement in the Bronze Age.
813. Ryan says

     September 14, 2024 at 11:24 am

     My favorite thing from that paper is that they support their ground-breaking, ambitious new theory for the development of what are surely the most studied and analyzed languages in the world with a proposed etymology for the word hubris.

     The idea from that paper that proto-Romance included survivals not attested in our Latin canon is also pretty interesting, though perhaps more commonplace for those you who studied linguistics. Perhaps I haven’t gotten far enough, but I’m not clear whether the suggestion is that they were likely a part of classical Latin that isn’t visible to us, that the substrate (Crotonian) lasted long enough in some areas to influence provincial Latin in ways different from its direct effects on pre-Imperial Latin; or that other substrate languages in provincial areas may have carried some borrowings from the Crotonian substrate.
814. Dmitry Pruss says

     September 14, 2024 at 11:46 am

     It’s quite possible that a subgroup of the Cimmerians chose to stay outside the reach of the Scythians or flee north instead of to Anatolia. Time for another look at the Early Iron Age cultures of Poland and Western Ukraine.

     As I understand, Frederik Kortlandt went as far as to hypothesize that the historical Veneds were a Temematic rather than a conventional Slavic-speaking people, in “The Expansion of Indo-European Languages” (The Journal of Indo-European
     Studies (2018) 46, 219-231)

     I also understand that Holzer’s conclusions about the Cimmerians are primarily based on just two words, on Don river -> Tanais and on a reconstructed etymology of the ethnonym “Cimmerian” itself
815. Ryan says

     September 14, 2024 at 11:55 am

     They offer one final etymon after the core treatments, in their conclusion, “*gʰórdʰ-o- ‘fence, enclosure’, which later acquired the meaning ‘town’ in several IE daughter languages”.

     Has anyone else ever pondered the similarity to Semitic gadir – walled town?

     Maybe throw that into the unexplained cluster of potential wanderworts related to late Chalcolithic/early Bronze age trade that we discussed recently in another thread.
816. Jerry Friedman says

     September 14, 2024 at 12:19 pm

     My favorite thing from that paper is that they support their ground-breaking, ambitious new theory for the development of what are surely the most studied and analyzed languages in the world with a proposed etymology for the word hubris.

     LOL!
817. languagehat says

     September 14, 2024 at 12:25 pm

     My favorite thing from that paper is that they support their ground-breaking, ambitious new theory for the development of what are surely the most studied and analyzed languages in the world with a proposed etymology for the word hubris.

     Which paper is this (I can’t keep up), and what is the etymology? I’ve been thinking of doing a post on hubris anyway, and that would be a good hook.
818. PlasticPaddy says

     September 14, 2024 at 12:49 pm

     5.1.2 Gr. ὕβρις ‘arrogance, haughtiness, etc.’
     Gr. ὕβρις [f.] ‘arrogance, haughtiness, exorbitance, violence, offence, abuse’, at-
     tested from Homer on, is mentioned by Chantraine et al. (2009: 1110) as being
     without etymology and by Beekes (2010: 1524–1525) as having “no certain explanation”. Yet Chantraine indicates that “some Hellenists have probably thought
     of comparing this word with ὑπέρ, which would be semantically satisfactory but remains impossible.”
     We believe this comparison actually holds. We start from the PIE adverb *(h₁)upér-i ‘above’ (cf. Ved. upári ‘id.’ and Ger. über < Com. Germ. *uβeri ‘id.’).
     Applying the Verner-like lenition followed by the systematic barytonesis, such an adverb would yield Substr. *úβeri. Once borrowed as Com. Gr. *húberi, this adverb could have served as the basis for the Hom. Gr. present participle ὑβρίζων, -οντος ‘who exhibits an overbearing spirit or demeanour’ after dactylisation, whence Classical Gr. ὑβρίζω ‘to outrage, insult, maltreat’. In turn, this participle could have yielded a derived noun ὑβριστής ‘arrogant person’. Gr. ὑβρίζων, -οντος would
     also have served as the basis for the back-formed noun ὕβρις.
     https://inria.hal.science/hal-01621467/document
819. drasvi says

     September 14, 2024 at 12:55 pm

     “that we discussed recently in another thread.”

     Ryan, what thread?

     (I never compared Russian gorod to Agadir or Punic gadir:())
820. David Eddyshaw says

     September 14, 2024 at 1:37 pm

     Ah. Garnier and Sagot have made an elementary error, arising (as, alas, so very often) from ignorance of KONGO. My work here is not yet done.

     The voiced stops are original. Latin and Greek have devoiced them everywhere except in a few words (often, as here, preserved by relgious conservativism), because at the critical point in their evolution, they were part of the Atakora Sprachbund, which previously extended over vast tracts of Africa and Europe, though now confined to northwestern Benin.
821. drasvi says

     September 14, 2024 at 1:58 pm

     “… which previously extended over vast tracts of Africa and Europe, ”

     This contradicts my theory that such things are stable. And all my present theories are considered* true.

     (As Pullu’sm supporters inform me, such constructions are not harmful, but conversely are very useful, because they help to avoid naming the agent*. E.g. telling considered by whom).

     *or what do you call the doer here**
     ** “doer” does not imply that considering is what workers do.
822. drasvi says

     September 14, 2024 at 2:02 pm

     “border force” – Cossacks prefer the theory that Cossacks are more ancient than merely early Middle Ages:)
823. David Eddyshaw says

     September 14, 2024 at 2:15 pm

     The Cossacks are quite right. Their ethnonym derives from Central Alaskan Yup’ik Kassaq “white person”, and must thus antedate the migration of the speakers of the Eskimo-Aleut languages from Siberia to North America.

     [I see that Hat has kindly restored my comment about KONGO, but my explanation of the true origin of gorod and gadir has been lost. Perhaps it is as well. The world is not yet ready.]
824. drasvi says

     September 14, 2024 at 3:03 pm

     @Dmitry, in comments he mentions that PCA and ADMIXTURE emphasise the difference between Avar Slavs and some other “Slavs”. Waht does this mean historically?
825. Hans says

     September 14, 2024 at 3:32 pm

     I also understand that Holzer’s conclusions about the Cimmerians are primarily based on just two words, on Don river -> Tanais and on a reconstructed etymology of the ethnonym “Cimmerian” itself
     Alexis Manaster-Ramer has recently argued that MA -> T is actually a Scythian sound law. (PDF on academia.edu, for those who are wary of that site.) Now, AMR is not everybody’s cup of tea, but maybe the Temematics are actually Scythian? At least any influence by them on Slavic wouldn’t be a surprise.
826. Ryan says

     September 14, 2024 at 3:40 pm

     >>discussed recently in another thread.”

     >Ryan, what thread?

     I forget where. It was the sixes and sevens discussion. Started with someone’s reference to a paper proposing 6 words that looked ver similar in several language families of Mesopotamia, Anatolia and environs.
827. drasvi says

     September 14, 2024 at 3:51 pm

     Ryan, thanks! Must be this one….
828. David Eddyshaw says

     September 14, 2024 at 3:59 pm

     Manaster Ramer has got very odd lately. The feed on academia.edu was lately presenting me with a frankly bizarre (and remarkably bitter) argument he was engaging in with various other linguists (at least one of them definitely no flake.)

     Seemed to see himself as Athanasius* contra mundum. It was too incoherent (or required too much insider knowledge) for me to work out what the actual issue was.

     * Athanasius was, of course, actually right, and the mundus was wrong. Still …
829. drasvi says

     September 14, 2024 at 7:13 pm

     I’m still surprised that the Russian conference (unnamed) could not accomodate him and his talk in their schedule.
830. Dmitry Pruss says

     September 14, 2024 at 7:27 pm

     Re: the difference between “Avar Slavs” and what people think proto-Slavs should look like genetically is that the Pannonian Avar burials which turned up close blood ties with other Slavs are part-Southerners by their genetic makeup.
831. Hans says

     September 15, 2024 at 4:17 am

     Seemed to see himself as Athanasius* contra mundum. It was too incoherent (or required too much insider knowledge) for me to work out what the actual issue was.
     It would be nice if he kept the complaining about how everybody wilfully ignores him and how academia is a racket suppressing his proposals to discussion threads. But he does that in his papers as well, which means you have to wade through his complaints in order to find his often good ideas.
832. David Marjanović says

     September 15, 2024 at 7:39 am

     David, the idea of a possible PIE substrate in Greek and Latin is wild to me, suggesting a whole nother round of conquest or vast population movement in the Bronze Age.

     That’s needed anyway, at least for Italy. What very little is known about the languages of southern Italy before Greek, Oscan and Latin covered it all – place names and words on coins mostly – looks IE, but not as we know it; and evidence that the Italic family moved in from the north not too long before history comes from its great similarity to Celtic and to a lesser degree Germanic, and from loanwords in… Slavic: 1, 2 (with following discussion).

     a Scythian sound law

     Nice!

     Has anyone else ever pondered the similarity to Semitic gadir – walled town?

     I’m sure people have, but as long as there’s no context that makes the metathesis stand out less, it’s not likely to go anywhere.

     I’m still surprised that the Russian conference (unnamed) could not accomodate him and his talk in their schedule.

     An American trying to go to Russia in 2023, for a purpose other than being lectured at by Putin? How was that ever supposed to work?

     how everybody wilfully ignores him and how academia is a racket suppressing his proposals to discussion threads

     I don’t doubt that some people don’t like him personally and act unscientifically for that reason, but… even though we’re supposed to be living in the Shiny Digital Future, the IEist literature remains unbelievably splintered. It remains normal for people who work on the same topic to not cite each other and show no awareness of each other’s ideas, while also citing equally obscure literature going back a century and a half; I bet in the vast majority of cases the explanation is they simply don’t know any better. Every little university seems to have its own tiny journal that may not even have an online presence, and many works in this field are too long for journal articles anyway and are published as super-expensive books with a tiny print run and again no online presence.* Much of what is online is on academia.edu, but while the “related articles” function there does sometimes turn up very useful papers that you didn’t suspect existed, it also floods you with completely unrelated stuff and the occasional crackpot.

     * Elsewhere, even books are published online now and get a DOI. I’ve cited a few that I’ve never seen a paper copy of.
833. Stu Clayton says

     September 15, 2024 at 8:42 am

     even though we’re supposed to be living in the Shiny Digital Future, the IEist literature remains unbelievably splintered. It remains normal for people who work on the same topic to not cite each other and show no awareness of each other’s ideas, while also citing equally obscure literature going back a century and a half; I bet in the vast majority of cases the explanation is they simply don’t know any better.

     This is true of IT as well. It wouldn’t surprise me if that were the case in most scientific fields. Of course not all writers on IT are “scientists”, but they do argue as well as they can on the basis of what they know. Trouble is, what anyone knows at a given time is far from what can be known at that time, that is, additional stuff that some other people know.

     I am currently embroiled in several “discussions” about the legitimate use of certain constructs in Java, with people who initially just can’t process the fact that things have changed since Java first came into the world. They cling to exegesis of decades-old documentation (Javadoc), as a cat clings to a tree in high wind. [for enquiring minds: Comparable, Comparator and SecureRandom]
834. AntC says

     September 15, 2024 at 10:04 am

     This is true of IT as well.

     Are you sure? Of IT-in-general or only of the Java world? Are these alleged backsliders ignorant of recent language changes, or perfectly well aware of them and simply hostile to the language becoming even more ugly and convoluted than it was already?

     In my case (with Haskell) ‘innovations’ over the past ~8 years have made the language far ‘bigger’ but no more expressive IMO. Indeed my beef with it is that it’s rapidly becoming as ugly as Java, yew lot can bugger off and use that if it’s what you think a language should be. Today’s Haskell is not what I signed up for; I refuse to use it.
835. Stu Clayton says

     September 15, 2024 at 11:13 am

     Pity, that. I have toyed with the notion of learning me a Haskell for great good. At least in order to shine at cocktail parties. Or Erlang etc. I think of them as “algorithm languages”. Your average Joe can’t handle that kind of stuff. I prefer to stay in the banking application world with normal people, where the fancy stuff is hidden in the servants’ quarters (Prolog used in Java bytecode verification, say, or the now default TimSort).

     Anyway, one of the reasons Java is still slightly ugly and convoluted is the reason it is widely used in banks, insurance companies etc – it never broke backwards compatibility in a big way, only in small ways as stuff gets deprecated for removal, or is removed …) Kotlin fucked up in this regard, as did even Rust. Much of the ugliness vanished with Java 8. You can still use the ugly if you don’t know no better, but there is better that you can learn.

     BTW, I happened across the user manual for Rust recently. It is SO well-written, at least for a former laborer in the vineyards of C 35 years back (you have to start somewhere). I read several chapters of it at one go, with perfect comprehension. Even the ownership bit.

     Although I’ve never read a Rosamunde Pilcher novel, I imagine it would be equally plain sailing.
836. Dmitry Pruss says

     September 15, 2024 at 12:39 pm

     Most prominently, it is stabilizing selection, when the phenotypical trait doesn’t change much on average, but the “goldilocks” values win, and anything too far in excess or too short is losing out. Stabilizing selection is very common in our species, and one of the traits it works on is height. The paper shows that over time, stabilizing selection purges SNPs with the strongest effects, and as a result, the predictions made with today’s genes lose validity in the past over mere millennia…
     Back to ancient DNA. Just after a study extolling the strength of stabilizing selection in our species, comes another one on the more conventional directional selection, which was already known to have affected traits including pigmentation, but now its footprint are detected in hundreds more genes. Many of them are exactly where the fast selection pressures were expected – in responding to pathogen threats. But also excess weight genes appear to have been selected against with the onset of agriculture, as the previous benefits of fat storage in lean times must have been checked by a more steady supply of food. And the genetic factors involved in educational attainment today were being selected for a long time, obviously long before modern type education systems emerged…
     https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.09.14.613021v1
837. drasvi says

     September 15, 2024 at 4:53 pm

     @Dmitry, thanks.

     I’m still somewhat confused because the comment can be understood to mean that ADMIXTURE somehow “underestimates” the connection.
838. Dmitry Pruss says

     September 16, 2024 at 11:37 pm

     More from Dan Tabin on the Tele / Turk dualism of the ancestral Turkic groups. Last November I summarized it in this thread as follows:

     At the ASHG today: the ancient Turks in their Altai craddle were largely composed of the local Bulan-Koby horsemen and blacksmiths, while the legendary Ashina clan, exiled to Altai after losing a fight with the Rouran in 460 CE, contributed only marginally to the early Turk genomes (which include the Avars). Many contemporary Taiga Turkic groups (such as the Tubalar, the Shor, and the Zabolotye Tatars) still carry overwhelming fractions of Bulan-Koby DNA, while Steppe Turkic peoples picked a variety of other components over time.
     The Bulan-Koby culture seem to be that of the legendary Tele people (who, together with the first Turks, finally had their revenge on the Rouran in 551 CE), but much of Tele’s homeland was further South-East in today’s Mongolia and the question remains somewhat open.

     Bulan-Koby (II-V c. CE) immediately postdate the Pazyryk “Scythians” after the defeat of the latter by the Huns and/or their auxilliaries, and fall into the spectrum of “Sarmato-Hunnic” cultures, but their material culture has a huge imprint of Northern Xiongnu (and a little bit, of Iranic Kushan-Yuezhi) and relatively little continuity with the Pazyryk, making some archaeologists conclude that Bulan-Koby were merely a branch of Xiongnu. But now, their DNA is predominantly Pazyryk, with an added Cisbaikalian Late Neolithic / Bronze Age layer. So the defeated Pazyryk may have surrendered much of its culture but contributed a lot of DNA to Bulan-Koby, and, in turn, to the Turks.

     Now an EMBL poster of Dan Tabin
     https://x.com/DanTabin/status/1835783908589256956/photo/1
     drills deeper into proto-Turkic DNA. The story becomes more interesting. It looks like Common Turkic, aka Shaz Turkic, peoples inherited both Saka-related Bulan-Koby DNA and Xiongnu-related Kok Pash DNA. But the most disparate Turkic group, the Oghur aka Lir Turcs, are by and large Kok Pash without Saka additions. Possibly either from those original Turkic tribes which avoided intermingling with the allied Tele when they vanquished Rouran, or from distantly related Rouran elements absorbed by the victors. Indeed, although only Bulgars are considered a definitely Oghuric people, it is extremely probable that Khazars and Avars belonged to Oghuric group too.

     ( I didn’t know the terms Shaz vs. Lir Turkic languages before, but it appears to be a way to subdivide the group based on phonology, with the sh / z sounds of the former corresponding to l / r sounds of the latter; other linguists didn’t like such a crude way of splitting the Turkic languages into two, but now it seems to be receiving a good deal of genetic support).
839. languagehat says

     September 17, 2024 at 8:46 am

     Interesting, and I’m glad the Shaz/Lir terms turn out to be useful as well as memorable.

     I always have to look up Rouran to be reminded that it’s what we used to call Juan-juan (Ruanruan).
840. Dmitry Pruss says

     September 17, 2024 at 10:49 am

     Yes, the name Rouran always strains my mental association system because in Russian it’s … Жужань (of course until the age of paleogenetics we didn’t know if we should believe the Avars who claimed to be heirs to the Rouran khaganate or the Turcoi / Khazars who insisted that the Avars were impostors and no Kagans, but just the Khazar’s scheming, lowly slaves, but the Rouran-Avar connection now looks very reasonable in light of DNA)

     If we further believe that it means that the Avars and the Rouran spoke and Oghuric language, then I guess “R” begins to make even better sense than Russian Ж…
841. Trond Engen says

     September 17, 2024 at 3:55 pm

     Dmitry: It looks like Common Turkic, aka Shaz Turkic, peoples inherited both Saka-related Bulan-Koby DNA and Xiongnu-related Kok Pash DNA. But the most disparate Turkic group, the Oghur aka Lir Turcs, are by and large Kok Pash without Saka additions.

     I think this would mean that even the (core) Hunns were Oghur/Lir. (Since this is the first I ever hear of either Bulan-Koby or Kok Pash, I’m naturally ready to pronounce on the subject.)
842. languagehat says

     September 17, 2024 at 4:08 pm

     Since this is the first I ever hear of either Bulan-Koby or Kok Pash, I’m naturally ready to pronounce on the subject.

     That’s how we roll here at LH!
843. Dmitry Pruss says

     September 17, 2024 at 4:35 pm

     Bulan-Koby were relatively well publicized even before first ancient DNA studies (which prompted me to write about them here) because their skeletons appeared European and so people already assumed that they descended from the famous Pazyryk Scythians. But it’s also clear that many earliest Turkic cultural motifs emerged from Bulan-Koby.
     Were even the Hunns an Oghuric people? Or maybe a distant, fully extinct branch? I suspect the latter
844. Trond Engen says

     September 17, 2024 at 5:39 pm

     I don’t know, but I think there’s growing genetic evidence for the long suggested continuity between Xiongnu and the Hunns that invaded Europe in the 5th C. If so, it’s natural to assume also a linguistic continuity.

     (I was a little facetious about the cultures. I has heard about Bulan-Koby, but not dived into it. Kok Pash was new to me.)
845. Dmitry Pruss says

     September 17, 2024 at 6:34 pm

     Kok-Pash is just an Altai hamlet on lower Chulyshman river, some ways downstream from the more famous Pazyryk valley and its burial mounds. This is the area where Altai transitions into Tuva to the East and highland steppes of Mongolia to the South-East, all the areas which were settled with the genetic and cultural brethren of the Kok-Pash, and I am not so sure if they were distinct enough to merit their own name of the culture. But of course it was the Kok-Pash who were the immediate neighbors (and rulers) of the Bulan-Koby.

     Of course I don’t doubt the continuity of Xiongnu and the Huns. It makes perfect sense. What I doubt is the thought that Ogurhic already existed several centuries before the cultural and demographic melting pot of Altai produced the new linguistic group, the future Common Turkic. That is, I wouldn’t be surprised that in the Xiongnu times, there existed a much wider variety of para-Turkic languages than the extant “Shaz” and “Lir”…
846. Trond Engen says

     September 18, 2024 at 4:44 pm

     Para-Turkic or Early Turkic? Proto-Turkic as usually defined is probably early 1st millennium BCE. Proto-Common Turkic (= Proto-Shaz, I think) may be a millennium younger and could well have formed in the Altai melting pot, with a significant ex-Pazaryk element. All the other groups, “Para-Shaz”, quite likely spoke Oghur Turkic languages. I’m now confident to count Xiongnu/Hunnic among them. They were the first to be driven westwards to the Volga and beyond, but the Bulghars and Khazars and Avars weren’t far behind.

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

     September 19, 2024 at 5:12 am

     “If we further believe that it means that the Avars and the Rouran spoke and Oghuric language, then I guess “R” begins to make even better sense than Russian Ж…”

     English /r/, Russian /zh/ are retroflex sounds.
     The modern Chinese sound in numerous (Chinese, I’m not speaking of romanisations here) variations of “Juan-juan” is also some retroflex (presumably from a nasal*).

     “work out how the defining soundlaws of Common Turkic ”
     So I wonder what was the Turkic sound at the time of the split.

     * say,
     柔然; Róurán. for the 1st character 柔 Wiktionary has Middle Chinese: nyuw” and two reconstructions of Old Chinese: “/*nu/” and “(Zhengzhang): /*mlju/”. Not sure what’s the point of adding asterisks to OCh but not MCh.
     For the second character 然 it has “Middle Chinese: nyen” and OCh “/*[n]a[n]/” and “(Zhengzhang): /*njen/”

     蠕蠕; Ruǎnruǎn, Ruanruan, Juan-juan. 蠕, two modern pronunciations (Mandarin: rú, ruǎn) and one reconstruction: (Zhengzhang): /*njo/
848. Dmitry Pruss says

     September 19, 2024 at 11:40 am

     Para-Turkic or Early Turkic?

     The phonology of the Xiongnu language or languages is a very muddled issue because it in itself relies on understanding the sounds of Old Chinese and our level of such understanding changed substantially in recent decades. And because among the ~150 known glosses, too many words correspond to military / government / cultural practices of the types which are frequently borrowed. But as I understand, the sound system which emerges from these scarce data may be compatible with *some* type of Altaic or even a Yenisean language, but is too different from what we would think of specifically Proto-Turkic. That’s why I wondered if Xiongnu was substantially more distantly related to both Lir/Shaz than the two extant branches of Turkic are related between themselves.

     But most of what I know comes from one publication and I wouldn’t vouch for its being the ultimate truth…
     https://www.jstor.org/stable/41928223

     how the defining soundlaws of Common Turkic are due to a Scythian substrate

     Of course genetically speaking, Xiongnu also had a sizeable Scythian substrate or adstrate…
849. Trond Engen says

     September 19, 2024 at 3:09 pm

     Me: I’m now confident […]

     I’ll admit that I don’t know enough to be confident about anything when it comes to ancient Turkic. Of course there were movements and regroupings and language shifts on the Eastern Steppe, and both Scythian, Tocharian, Yeniseian, and (with what we know think we know) Samoyedic would quite likely have been involved. But it seems to me that a combination of historical, linguistic and genetic evidence now suggests that the Xiongnu empire was a Turkic or turkifying enterprise, and I don’t think that could have happened without the Xiongnu proper being (or becoming) Turkic as well.
850. January First-of-May says

     September 19, 2024 at 5:51 pm

     Not sure what’s the point of adding asterisks to OCh but not MCh.

     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.

     I’m pretty sure it was discussed on LH at some point, actually…

     [after some googling] …looks like I was probably thinking of this comment from 2018.
851. drasvi says

     September 19, 2024 at 10:32 pm

     @J1M, that makes sense. I understand “asterisk – no asterisk” as “as reconstructed – as written” [in inscriptions/manuscripts], which will put any claim about the pronunciation of an old word into “reconstructed” category. But for Chinese “as written” makes no sense (unless we choose to transliterate it with some sort of Western logograms). while there still are senses in which sounds are “attested”.
852. Dmitry Pruss says

     September 20, 2024 at 10:55 pm

     Two Bronze Age animal husbandry papers.
     One is a critical review of the studies of horse domestication through their effects on the skeletal remains of both horses and humans
     https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ado9774
     The other one claims that the Bronze Age pastoralists introduced pig-grazing into the forests of Central Europe and irrevocably changed the forest ecosystem (while the Neolithic farmers grazed sheep there). It’s based on the analysis of ancient sedimentary DNA
     https://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(24)01162-X
853. Trond Engen says

     September 21, 2024 at 6:29 am

     Dmitry; One is a critical review of the studies of horse domestication through their effects on the skeletal remains of both horses and humans

     Oh, that’s an important review. I waver back and forth in my beliefs in mechanisms for the Yamnaya expansion and Pre-Yamnaya mobility. Apparently I should now waver towards wagons, but for that too, there ought to be more early archaeological evidence across the steppe.

     The other one claims that the Bronze Age pastoralists introduced pig-grazing into the forests of Central Europe and irrevocably changed the forest ecosystem (while the Neolithic farmers grazed sheep there). It’s based on the analysis of ancient sedimentary DNA

     I can’t read the paper, but that’s interesting! It’s turning everything upside down. Or maybe the European Farmers kept there swine in sties, and when the Yamnaya came with their herds of cattle and sheep, pigs escaped into the wild like Colombian hippos. Except that that should be visible in the DNA of European boars.
854. languagehat says

     September 21, 2024 at 9:32 am

     Hey guys, I noticed that this thread has gotten longer than the original Yamnaya thread. If you’re not having any problems and are fine keeping this going, great, but if you want a new one, let me know and I’ll start Grandson of Yamnaya.
855. Ryan says

     September 21, 2024 at 9:45 am

     Maybe we should focus the mtDNA discussion in Daughter of Yamnaya?
856. drasvi says

     September 21, 2024 at 9:59 am

     Perhaps our female readers will appreciate if in that thread we will be discussing romantic stories insteand of warfare?

     (if they won’t, I will anyway:)))))))

     P.S. just remembered the site for selling self-published fiction which I’ve been exploring and where due its competetiveness all popular novels have hypertrophied sexual characteristics.
857. Dmitry Pruss says

     September 22, 2024 at 4:06 pm

     Or maybe the European Farmers kept there swine in sties, and when the Yamnaya came with their herds of cattle and sheep, pigs escaped into the wild like Colombian hippos. Except that that should be visible in the DNA of European boars.

     Reading the paper in more detail now … it looks like feral domestic pigs were a big issue in Europe, and contributed to degradation of the forest habitats as much as the wild boars. And domestic breeds vary by mtDNA, suggestions additional domestication events or introgressions (but even in the Middle East, the mtDNA variety of the domestic pigs was very broad). But in all likelihood, the pigs were domestic, just as the more precisely studied cattle and sheep, because wheat DNA appears alongside, probably from straw from the farms.

     The studied site, a rock shelter in the Bohemian Paradise (Cesky Raj) forested rocky uplands of Czechia, may or may not be representative of the wider Europe, but one can clearly see the habitat destruction not just by the disappearance of tree species other than beech, but also by sedges and heathers beginning to dominate the ground vegetation variety, consistent with soil turnover by rooting pigs.
858. Trond Engen says

     September 22, 2024 at 6:22 pm

     I’ve read the paper too. Thanks!

     The shift to only pigs happened in the Late Bronze Age, so not a direct result of the Yamnaya expansion. I wouldn’t be surprised if this turned out to be a local specialization rather than a general tendency.

     I also find it interesting that the rock shelter was used by both humans and animals together in the Early Bronze Age. That’s the single sampled period with sediments of human DNA, and the proportion was significant. Unfortunately the human DNA is too degraded to classify, but we could imagine that this DNA is from a part of the highly unequal Early Bronze Age society that was not preserved in elaborate mounds.
859. Dmitry Pruss says

     September 22, 2024 at 7:59 pm

     The shift to only pigs happened in the Late Bronze Age, so not a direct result of the Yamnaya expansion. I wouldn’t be surprised if this turned out to be a local specialization rather than a general tendency.
     On the other hand, Fatyanovo (a relatively early and apparently dead-ended Corded Ware offshoot expanding along the woodland rivers of Central Russia) did rely heavily on raising pigs, but didn’t grow much grain / clear the woods for agriculture until a very late stage in their history, and didn’t have much cattle either. So in the Fatyanovo homeland somewhere South of the Baltics, by about 2900 BCE, a pig-based wooded-country economy may have already become the rule.

     PS. @LH about the outsize number of comments here. I try posting here and not in some more specific threads when the specific topic was already discussed here, and therefore, continuing growth of the thread is almost inevitable, but when a new cool archaeology / genetics comes out and there is no better place for it, then maybe a new catch-all thread is just right. So starting a new everything-paleogenetic thread may be a reasonable idea … but the title suggestions make me cringe a little. Son of Yamnaya may have been funny, too many descendants of the same may be too old a joke. I vote for just More old bones (of contention?) 🙂
860. languagehat says

     September 22, 2024 at 9:43 pm

     Done!
861. Dmitry Pruss says

     October 16, 2024 at 7:21 pm

     Volga cline (Caucasus – Lower Volga, CLV) forms between 5000..4500 BCE

     A few months later, another ancient DNA paper dissects the Caucasus-Volga ~5000 BCE genetic cline. It adds one Eneolithic specimen from a 100+ burials of the Nalchik site, in the Northern foothills of West-Central Caucasus, which straddles the “Caucasus end” of the cline together with previously discussed specimens of the same era from Progress 2 and Vonyuchka.

     The larger necropolis of Nalchik has been thoroughly characterized by archaeologists before, and belongs to Darkveti-Meshoko culture which spanned both sides of the Western Caucasus (Darkveti-Meshoko pottery is related to Georgian ceramics, but it’s also got fairly unique stone bracelets). Darkveti-Meshoko was the first agricultural society North of the Caucasus, hitherto very sparsely populated. It shouldn’t be conflated with the better known Maykop culture which emerged in the same areas over 500 years later, and harbored distinct DNA composition which couldn’t have been ancestral to the PIE groups. Other known Darkveti-Meshoko remains with ancient DNA (from Unakozovo cave deep in the heart of the Caucasus) are typically Caucasian in composition, but Nalchik packs a substantial additional layer of Steppe hunter-gatherer DNA, exemplified by Khvalynsk culture of Middle Volga. By the middle of 5th millennium BCE, Khvalynsk people get increasing DNA contributions from the Caucasus, blurring the cline. One of the Khvalynsk samples is actually close in composition to the Nalchik / Progress / Vonyuchka group, and IBD reveals that this Khvalynsk male had ~5th degree relation to both Nalchik man from the new paper and to one of Unakozovo cave specimens (although Nalchik and Unakozovo are virtually unrelated between themselves).

     So the new study’s authors hypothesize that, as Darkveti-Meshoko culture spread North and East, they both intermarried with the Steppe peoples and transferred animal husbandry technologies to them, sowing the seeds of the future Yamnaya / PIE expansion more than a millennium later.

     Interestingly, Nalchik is genetically closer related to the pre-pottery early agriculturalists of North Mesopotamia which existed about 2000 years earlier, then to the classic early Anatolian farmers (while the third contributor to Nalchik DNA are the pre-pottery peoples of Iran). This archaic Northern Mesopotamian ancestry got largely erased later across much of the Southern Caucasus, but may have survived in the Western highlands of Darkveti. Hmm, considering these supposed migration patterns, Gamkrelidze and Ivanov must have been onto something…

     The last curious tidbit concerns the authors of the paper. All but one of them are Russians, supported by a Russian government grant, but supplying just a personal gmail of one of them for communications. The one remaining author, Armin Mey, runs an event management business from a living room of a tiny German village at the base of the Harz Mountains, has no obvious biology credentials, and isn’t credited with making any specific contributions to the paper. Strange are the things with Russian science and its international links now…
     https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589004224021886
862. Ryan says

     October 17, 2024 at 8:59 am

     > Mey runs an event management business from a living room of a tiny German village at the base of the Harz Mountains

     Indy Jones was an archaeologist in a spy thriller. Now we get a Le Carre character in an archaeology story.
863. Dmitry Pruss says

     October 17, 2024 at 11:11 am

     (there is another fascinating detail in Zhur et al 2024 – a late Eneolithic migration from the Darkveti-Meshoko areas to the South which might potentially have something to do with Anatolian languages??)
864. drasvi says

     October 17, 2024 at 1:11 pm

     Who are the “Steppe hunter-gatherers”?
865. drasvi says

     October 17, 2024 at 2:07 pm

     “Gamkrelidze and Ivanov”

     I think in some sense connection to South Caucasus and lands to the south of it is just truistic.

     Because even if it is the steppe or lands to the north of Caucasus, the next questions are going to be “where they came to the North Caucasus from” and “where their technology came from”.

     I think I’m more interested in language than in what everyone discusses here. Perhaps it repels me for the same reason why it attracts types similar to Hitler. But PIE as reconstructed does sound absolutely Caucasian to my ear and there are isoglosses uniting it with, say, Semitic.

     Apart of that, agriculture came from the south and agriculturalists are simply very numerous, so one expects northward migration.
     Unfortunately I don’t understand chronology of spread of agriculture well.

     “Darkveti-Meshoko was the first agricultural society North of the Caucasus”

     I did not know.
866. Dmitry Pruss says

     October 17, 2024 at 3:02 pm

     Who should be called “Eastern” or, perhaps, “Steppe” hunters-gatherers? Lazaridis et al 2024 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11042377/, which we extensively discussed this spring in this very thread, showed that in the forest belt of Upper Volga and Kama river basins, there was a continuum of genetically related but not identical populations. Some of the more Easterly located groups from this spectrum ventured further South to the Steppes of Middle Volga, and started mixing with peoples from the Caucasus (mostly women from the Caucasus). The earliest migrants from the Kama belt forests to the steppes around Samara probably deserve the most to be labeled Eastern Hunters-Gatherers (EHG, a major ancestral group of the future Yamnaya), but the new publication, Zhur 2024, prefers the words “Steppe HG” and uses it for the Khvalynsk culture peoples, especially those among them who have less Caucasus ancestry. The Khvalynsk were pre-agricultural but well acquainted with copper, a kind of a hunter-gatherer Eneolithic group.

     The concept of Darkveti-Meshoko culture is relatively new and may still be lacking universal acceptance in the West. Russian archaeologists too generally considered it to be an early phase of the more spectacular Maykop culture. In recent decades the opinions shifted due to two kinds of observations:

     1) apparently there was a centuries-long gap between the fall of Darkveti-Meshoko and the rise of Maykop
     2) unlike Maykop, Darkveti-Meshoko spans the Southern slopes of Western Caucasus (the eponymous Darkveti site is all the way down in Imeretia!)

     But some palaeogenetics studies used the Darkveti-Meshoko label already, say, this 5 years old study:
     https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6360191/
867. Dmitry Pruss says

     October 17, 2024 at 3:22 pm

     and, OK, I figured out some connections between Armin Mey, his event management business in rural Salzatal, and the Russians. But nothing specifically about archaeology or genetics.
     Armin Mey grew up in the GDR and trained as an architect in Moscow. In the 2000s he started renovating the GDR’s dilapidated once-state-owned rural estates. The 1895 Schloss Beesenstedt in Salzatal (a trade union retreat center in the GDR times) has become his property in 2009, with the help of a Euro 700K government loan. The schloss is rented out for weddings and events and brings enough income to be worth it now. It also brings Mey’s Russian friends from the Bohemian circles of Berlin…
     https://srcflo.world/blogbeesenstedt/one
868. drasvi says

     October 17, 2024 at 5:57 pm

     “According to official documents, it was a place where lectures, seminars, and workshops were held. But in reality, the union officials were throwing massive orgies here,”

     “An orgy of East German trade union officials at Schloss Beesenstedt in Saxony-Anhalt”.
     A wonderful subject for a French or (West) German Orientalist painting….
869. drasvi says

     October 17, 2024 at 5:59 pm

     @DP, thanks!
     ___
     One interesting question is how and when steppe cultures as we know them did arise.
     I mean, from Indo-Europeans to Moghuls the steppe is where “hordes” of conquerors come from.
     (And some lands they conquer have many more people – agriculturalists – and are expected to be the source of expansion:/)
     So when and how did the steppe become like this?

     And in the context of the contact between peoples of Caucasus and the steppe it is of course important to know what are those people who came in contact.
870. Ryan says

     October 17, 2024 at 7:28 pm

     > A wonderful subject for a French or (West) German Orientalist painting….

     I’m thinking more along the lines of Goya’s Caprichos.
871. drasvi says

     October 17, 2024 at 7:35 pm

     Sciencedirect does not like my browser so much that it refuses to even tell the title of the paper.
     Not a problem for this particular paper, I found it elsewhere. And maybe I’m the only one who has such a problem (my browser is so big already, that some women would consider stopping breastfeeding it).

     As for international links of Russian science, I’m not sure how this man could contribute into the research… but there are ways, and I also have no idea he could contribute otherwise, e.g. as a German. If it is the latter (his Germanness matters) then it must be an artefact of the boycott of Russia because fo the war.
872. David Marjanović says

     October 19, 2024 at 10:53 am

     So when and how did the steppe become like this?

     When the horse was tamed, the wheel was invented, and even more so when riding was invented / horses were tamed to the point they could be ridden in combat.
873. Dmitry Pruss says

     October 19, 2024 at 11:41 am

     Although the original Yamnaya pastoralist expansion over Dnieper and up the Danube happened before horses. It was more limited than the subsequent waves but still unprecedented by the Neolithic standards. Perhaps pastoralist societies had significant advantage on the grasslands even before horses. Or it’s also possible that the Yamnaya migrations were a one-off event triggered by sudden weakness of the Neolithic societies, say, due to climate, internal warfare, or epidemics…
874. David Marjanović says

     October 19, 2024 at 12:03 pm

     Perhaps pastoralist societies had significant advantage on the grasslands even before horses.

     Oh! Sure.

     Or it’s also possible that the Yamnaya migrations were a one-off event triggered by sudden weakness of the Neolithic societies, say, due to climate, internal warfare, or epidemics…

     The plague specifically has been suggested, and we’ve discussed it somewhere – not in the three threads I looked in, though.
875. Dmitry Pruss says

     October 19, 2024 at 12:51 pm

     for the prehistoric plague discussions on LH you can Google
     site:languagehat.com “Yersinia”
     (some notable hits are in this very thread). But it was more frequently suggested as one of the causes of the (considerably later) Bell Beaker expansion (basically Yersinia pestis was significantly evolving in the Bronze Age, and the original Yamnaya-era strains weren’t yet as infectious as the later versions, so there are doubts about epidemic impacts of the earlier strains)
     Other pathogens have come with the Steppe migrations too, like herpesvirus.
876. Dmitry Pruss says

     October 30, 2024 at 3:00 pm

     Just days after the first Eneolithic Nalchik necropolis study, a new paper adds two more Nalchik genomes from the same era ~4000 BCE, and many more Caucasus region ancient genomes.
     https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08113-5

     The new study confirms that Nalchik was a transitional community on the fringes of Darkveti-Meshoko culture, with all DNA sets showing an interaction with Steppe peoples. But it underscores that the population flows between Caucasus and Volga already started even before Darkveti-Meshoko spread agriculture to the Northern Caucasus. Because Darkveti-Meshoko wasn’t purely Caucasus Hunter-Gatherer in its ancestral composition, but contained a significant imprint of migrations of Anatolian Pre-Pottery Neolithic / Çatalhöyük peoples to Lesser Caucasus, typical for all early South Caucasus agriculturalists. This Anatolian trace is inherited by Nalchik but importantly, the earliest Volga basin hunters-gatherers with the evidence of mixing with Caucasus peoples don’t yet contain Anatolian DNA, indicating that such mixing was already in place even before agriculture emerged in Northern Caucasus (and continued later, yielding pre-Yamnaya Steppe peoples).

     The new study also confirms that Maykop couldn’t have been the source of the Caucasus DNA in the genomes of the PIE peoples, because Maykop, while genetically close to its predecessor, Darkveti-Meshoko culture, had an additional layer of DNA from Neolithic Persia. Kura-Araxes peoples to the South of Caucasus had the same DNA composition as Maykop.

     Before 4000 BCE, Steppe PIE peoples already mixed with Tripolye Neolithic populations of Ukraine as well, as evidenced from a lone genome from Khutor Belyy near the Sea of Azov.

     After 4000 BCE, a substantial wave of migration from Western Siberia, similar to the first horse-herders, the Botai people, swept the steppes North of the Caucasus and mixed with both Maykop and Steppe PIE peoples. Although present-day horses don’t descend from Botai herds, but rather originated from the areas between Volga and Ural Mountains, the authors can’t help wondering if the origins of the modern horses are linked to these migrations…
877. languagehat says

     October 30, 2024 at 3:29 pm

     Wow. Once again I’m astonished about how much we’re learning about periods that we used to think were on the very edge of recoverable history…
878. Trond Engen says

     October 30, 2024 at 4:40 pm

     .. that we last month or so thought were beyond recoverable. Darkveti-Meshoko used to be a small and obscure culture in the Caucasus – if it was a separate culture at all – and suddenly it’s a key to understanding the Chalcolithic transformation of the steppe. And now the Botai rise again!
879. Y says

     October 30, 2024 at 5:43 pm

     (Didn’t we start a new son-of-son-of thread?)

     This paper, “Reconstructing the invention of the wheel using computational structural analysis and design”, is peripheral, but it calls attention to earlier ideas, by Bulliet (one of the authors) and by Bondár, that the axle-and-wheel assembly (aka ‘the wheel’) was invented by Carpathian copper miners, for easier transport of heavy ore, “as early as 3900 BC”. Does that fit well with *kʷékʷlos in PIE-minus-Anatolian?
880. Dmitry Pruss says

     October 30, 2024 at 6:21 pm

     The new catch-all thread is at
     https://languagehat.com/more-old-bones/#comment-4614287
     And of course it partly overlaps with this older one. But when the discussion directly continues an older comment here, I am usually tempted to continue it here. Generally for everything Early Bronze Age Steppe…

     And for most ancient Pannonia and Early Slavs topics, the Avar thread….
881. Trond Engen says

     October 30, 2024 at 7:01 pm

     @Y: Thank you. That should be right up my alley. Very clever use of computational tools for analysis and design, but beyond proving the potential of these tools, it strikes me that the paper doesn’t really add much. A certain path of development of the wheel is suggested by starting from roller logs and optimizing incremental improvements in energy consumption, but why should we suppose that that was the only concern? We could add ease of assembly, availability of materials, maintenance cost, safety, stability, steering, flexibility on varying surfaces, esthetics. Most or all of these (and more) could have been important for innovations along the actual path of development.
882. Trond Engen says

     October 30, 2024 at 7:06 pm

     @Dmitry: I agree. But threads inevitably touch and intertwine, so we’ll just have to link between threads when we notice.
883. David Marjanović says

     November 9, 2024 at 3:45 pm

     that the axle-and-wheel assembly (aka ‘the wheel’) was invented by Carpathian copper miners, for easier transport of heavy ore, “as early as 3900 BC”. Does that fit well with *kʷékʷlos in PIE-minus-Anatolian?

     It fits with the wheel being invented outside the IE-speaking area of the time, spreading separately to Anatolia and the steppe, and then receiving separate new native names in Pre-Anatolian and Pre-Indo-Tocharian.
884. Hippophlebotomist says

     December 3, 2024 at 6:03 pm

     “Ancient genomics support deep divergence between Eastern and Western Mediterranean Indo-European languages” (preprint)

     Abstract: The Indo-European languages are among the most widely spoken in the world, yet their early diversification remains contentious1–5. It is widely accepted that the spread of this language family across Europe from the 5th millennium BP correlates with the expansion and diversification of steppe-related genetic ancestry from the onset of the Bronze Age6,7. However, multiple steppe-derived populations co-existed in Europe during this period, and it remains unclear how these populations diverged and which provided the demographic channels for the ancestral forms of the Italic, Celtic, Greek, and Armenian languages8,9. To investigate the ancestral histories of Indo-European-speaking groups in Southern Europe, we sequenced genomes from 314 ancient individuals from the Mediterranean and surrounding regions, spanning from 5,200 BP to 2,100 BP, and co-analysed these with published genome data. We additionally conducted strontium isotope analyses on 224 of these individuals. We find a deep east-west divide of steppe ancestry in Southern Europe during the Bronze Age. Specifically, we show that the arrival of steppe ancestry in Spain, France, and Italy was mediated by Bell Beaker (BB) populations of Western Europe, likely contributing to the emergence of the Italic and Celtic languages. In contrast, Armenian and Greek populations acquired steppe ancestry directly from Yamnaya groups of Eastern Europe. These results are consistent with the linguistic Italo-Celtic10,11 and Graeco-Armenian1,12,13 hypotheses accounting for the origins of most Mediterranean Indo-European languages of Classical Antiquity. Our findings thus align with specific linguistic divergence models for the Indo-European language family while contradicting others. This underlines the power of ancient DNA in uncovering prehistoric diversifications of human populations and language communities.

     https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.12.02.626332v1
885. languagehat says

     December 3, 2024 at 6:30 pm

     It was just linked here and is being discussed in that thread.
886. David Eddyshaw says

     December 3, 2024 at 6:44 pm

     You cannot decide questions of how closely languages are related by looking at the genetics of the speakers. The only valid criteria for doing this are linguistic.

     The English are more closely related genetically to the Welsh than to Bavarians. This does not mean that the English language is more closely related to Welsh than to German.
887. Dmitry Pruss says

     December 3, 2024 at 7:03 pm

     David Eddyshaw that’s exactly what the papers like this one are trying to sort out with a combination of genetics of blood ties ( not merely overall similarities), archeology and linguistics: which of the migrating people from where contributed the core parts of the emerging language, even when its contribution to the genome content may have been trivial

     The fallacy of overall genetic similarities is full in play in the Armenia paper which I briefly discuss in the Bones thread. There, too, later Armenians are genetically closer to the locals of the earlier era, but they turned out to have a distinct Yamnaya gene flow and it’s clearly important
888. David Eddyshaw says

     December 3, 2024 at 7:21 pm

     I don’t deny that this sort of thing has its value; what set me off was specifically this:

     Our findings thus align with specific linguistic divergence models for the Indo-European language family while contradicting others.

     (C’est moi qui souligne.) It is not possible for genetic data of this kind to contradict a linguistic hypothesis. This is pretty much a category error: I think its perpetration reflects the same mindset that has led to junk historical linguistics turning up in Nature.

     I’m not at all saying that this kind of study is irrelevant to historical linguistics. Far from it. The fact (for example) that most Hausa speakers seem to have a somewhat different genetic heritage from most Maltese speakers despite their languages being related cries out for explanation, and looking for such explanations could easily have fascinating consequences for the historical linguistics. But it can never “contradict” the hypothesis that Maltese is more closely related to Hausa than to Italian, even in principle. The issue just cannot be decided by analysis of genomes at all.

     In fact the covert assumption that biological genetics correlates with language history is surely liable to lead to missing the fact that there are mysteries needing further study (like why the English don’t speak Welsh.) Treating these two sources of information about prehistory as essentially the same by default is to cover one eye and deny oneself stereopsis.
889. David Marjanović says

     December 3, 2024 at 7:29 pm

     Contradict, yes. Disprove, no. It’s outweighed by (any amount of) linguistic evidence.
890. Dmitry Pruss says

     December 3, 2024 at 7:38 pm

     Oh, the “contradict” part. I take it somewhat differently. It isn’t about genes trying to override good linguistics AFAICT. More like, when there are mutually contradicting linguistic hypotheses, then genetics may add credence to one of them, while contradicting the others…
891. David Eddyshaw says

     December 3, 2024 at 7:56 pm

     Yes, I suspect that “contradict” was simply ill-chosen. (Most of the many authors seem not to be L1 English speakers.*) If the authors had simply said that they thought the genetics was more consistent with one of the linguistic hypotheses than another, I’d have no great quarrel with it. (Though I’d be unimpressed: it’s easy enough to cherry-pick linguistic papers to agree with you on such an uncertain point. And it doesn’t actually support your thesis to do so in such circumstances, unless there is some superior linguistic merit about the papers you’ve picked.)

     * To me “contradict” does in fact have a pretty strong implicature of “deny the truth of.” If I say “I contradict your claim”, I don’t just mean that I don’t agree with you, or that I dispute it. I’m saying that you’re wrong. The reply would not be “well, let’s agree to differ”; it would be “OK, prove it!” (Or possibly: “Sir, you forget yourself! Name your weapon!”)

     Conceivably, it’s just me …
892. Y says

     December 3, 2024 at 8:41 pm

     The contradiction depends on the idea that direct language transmission is the norm and the default, and that language shift is odd and exceptional. More often than not, language shift results in little or no trace of the older language. Linguistic trees do not distinguish between the two scenarios, and out of convenience are assumed to represent a history of direct transmission throughout. A mismatch of linguistic trees and genetic ones is no contradiction: it merely indicates language shifts.
893. David Marjanović says

     December 3, 2024 at 8:43 pm

     I’d rather say of course it’s a contradiction in the data, and language shift explains this contradiction. Contradictory evidence is normal.
894. Y says

     December 3, 2024 at 9:22 pm

     If you don’t equate linguistic descent with direct transmission, then it’s not even a contradiction, just more data.
895. Dmitry Pruss says

     December 3, 2024 at 11:42 pm

     The relationship between direct descent and language transmission is rather asymmetric though. Transmission happens through contact between peoples, and contact between people also transmits genetic material. But genetic material transmission may lag far behind cultural transmission, and in the past it was often impossible to pinpoint. Genomic techniques has become much more powerful in detecting minor streams of genetic ancestry, but of course occasionally they are so minor, and the samples are so scarce, that nothing becomes visible. Case in point, the Hittites.
     Yet in the other direction … if one does see a genetic footprint of the people who carried the language being transmitted … then it’s a whole lot harder to argue that something else was going on and that the transmission might have gone through a different path.
     Got a vector of the language shift identified in the genomes? Then it’s pretty much “it”.
896. Brett says

     December 4, 2024 at 4:36 am

     For what it’s worth, I definitely agree with David Eddyshaw, that contradict is very much the wrong word.
897. Hippophlebotomist says

     December 4, 2024 at 12:53 pm

     “Genomic techniques has become much more powerful in detecting minor streams of genetic ancestry, but of course occasionally they are so minor, and the samples are so scarce, that nothing becomes visible. Case in point, the Hittites.”

     But this is no longer the case:
     “Two individuals from the Bronze Age found in Hittite contexts, however, were I-L699 (I2a1b1a2a2a~), one of which can be confidently placed in I-Y5669 (I2a1b1a2a2a2), the same subhaplogroup as one Yamnaya individual from Kalmykia. One sample from Küllüoba CGG_2_022159 also carries the same haplogroup as published Western Anatolian I5737.”
     – “Ancient genomics support deep divergence between Eastern and Western Mediterranean Indo-European languages” Genetics Supplement p.57

     The significance of this finding is clearer when compared to the results of the recent Genetic Origins preprint:

     “Haplogroup I-L699 was an important lineage in the Dnipro area since the Neolithic hunter-gatherer period, continued to be prevalent among the Serdenii Stih, and in the Don Yamnaya was dominant (17/20 instances).”
     – The Genetic Origins of the Indo-Europeans p.23

     “The exact source of the steppe ancestry in Anatolia cannot be precisely determined, but it is
     noted that all fitting models involve some of it” – ibid p.20

     “The steppe+Mesopotamian class of models fit the Central Anatolian Bronze Age but do not fit any of the Chalcolithic/Bronze Age Anatolian regional subsets (p<0.001; the BPgroup+Çayönü model is shown in Extended Data Fig. 1c), indicating that their success is not due to their general applicability. Moreover, the steppe ancestry in the Central Anatolian Bronze Age is observed in all individuals of the three periods (Extended Data Fig. 2d) and is thus not driven by any outlier individuals within the population. Its presence in both Early Bronze Age individuals from Ovaören south of the Kızılırmak river and in Middle Late Bronze Age individuals from Kalehöyük just within the bend of the river is consistent with the idea that the Kızılırmak formed an Anatolian-Hattic linguistic boundary that was crossed some time before the ca. 1730 BCE conquest of Hattusa by the Hittites."
     ibid p.20

     "The individual from Vonyucka-1 in the North Caucasus, in fact, has an IBD link (15.2cM) with an early Bronze Age Anatolian from Ovaören."
     ibid p.28

     As of this year, we now have an steppe ancestry as a required component of the best-fitting models for the autosomal ancestry of Bronze Age Anatolia, IBD links showing recent shared ancestry between the Eneolithic steppe and the Anatolian Bronze Age, and Anatolian Bronze Age occurrences of one of the predominant patrilines of the early/pre-Yamnaya steppe.

     As excited as I am about each of these papers, they were largely written written without reference to one another, and I'm excited to see the synthesis that results from new analysis of the combined dataset.
898. Dmitry Pruss says

     December 8, 2024 at 1:20 pm

     The signature Abashevo burial of men killed in a battle at Pepkino Mound in today’s Mari-El (Middle Volga) is united by burial customs but turns out to be a bipartite amalgamated society, with relatives buried near each other.

     A new paper compares the coppersmith from the Pepkino Mound to a sacrificed ~1900 BCE male from Maloyuldashevo (about halfway between Middle Volga and Ural, and some 300 miles West from Sintashta). Mednikova 2024

     The newly sequenced Maloyuldashevo man was killed by two ax blows on the head and dismembered, with all long bones broken, heart torn out, and brain spilled. He was put at the feet of a women killed by an ax blow (but not dismembered) and they were surrounded by sacrificed sheep.

     It’s pretty clear that both the Pepkino coppersmith (skeleton #8) and the Moloyuldashevo male shared Y-chromosome R1b (subgroup Z2103), which is mostly represented by modern Armenian / Caucasus / Asia Minor / Middle East genomes, but is also present in the Volga-Ural region, in the East, and occasionally across Europe. In the post-Abashevo times, R1b-Z2103 was found in the “genetic outliers” of Sintashta area, who were genetically mixed with the Siberian tribes…

     The new paper makes much of the similarity between the two in UMAP, but I strongly suspect that this merely reflects the similarity between sequencing technologies used for these specimens in Russia. But in addition, the paper says that the two are “90% likely to have a common IBD segment” (and are also likely to IBD-match a Fatyanovo individual and a Bronze Age genome from Bavaria). This is intriguing, but alas, the Methods section says absolutely nothing about their IBD approach, including the estimated sizes of the putative IBD matches. If they are very small, then the relation between these samples may become irrelevantly distant…
899. David Marjanović says

     December 8, 2024 at 4:53 pm

     …what did the Maloyuldashevo man do, play Gaddafi…? I mean, what was done to him is, uh, overkill even compared to a Celtic triple death.
900. Trond Engen says

     January 4, 2025 at 9:58 pm

     I add this here, but it obviously connects to a handful of threads:

     Parazayan et al: Late Neolithic collective burial reveals admixture dynamics during the third millennium BCE and the shaping of the European genome, Science Advances 19 Jun 2024:

     Abstract
     The third millennium BCE was a pivotal period of profound cultural and genomic transformations in Europe associated with migrations from the Pontic-Caspian steppe, which shaped the ancestry patterns in the present-day European genome. We performed a high-resolution whole-genome analysis including haplotype phasing of seven individuals of a collective burial from ~2500 cal BCE and of a Bell Beaker individual from ~2300 cal BCE in the Paris Basin in France. The collective burial revealed the arrival in real time of steppe ancestry in France. We reconstructed the genome of an unsampled individual through its relatives’ genomes, enabling us to shed light on the early-stage admixture patterns, dynamics, and propagation of steppe ancestry in Late Neolithic Europe. We identified two major Neolithic/steppe-related ancestry admixture pulses around 3000/2900 BCE and 2600 BCE. These pulses suggest different population expansion dynamics with striking links to the Corded Ware and Bell Beaker cultural complexes.

     INTRODUCTION

     [Long and very good overview of current status in the field omitted.]

     From these various lines of evidence arises a picture of third millennium BCE European societies with diverse genetic origins facing each other, with regionally different outcomes. The CWC seems to have emerged after the encounter between Neolithic populations in Central Europe, mainly GAC-associated, and various migrating steppe people from eastern Europe. In contrast, it is not clear whether the BBC resulted from the encounter between local people with Neo-ancestry and migrants with steppe ancestry, or if it developed before the arrival of steppe ancestry. Most of the early Iberian MBB-associated individuals were found to be unadmixed descendants of the previous Neolithic populations. The propagation of the MBBs from the southwest/west to Europe’s north and east, such as southern Poland, apparently involved carriers of both Neo-ancestry and steppe ancestry of the R1b M269 and its derivative P312. Little is known, however, about the speed and fine-scale processes that led to these profound genomic transformations accompanying the cultural transformations at the individual level. Genetic data from archaeologically contextualized individuals involved in these processes are necessary to compensate for this limitation and fill in the information gap, in particular in areas with a dearth of genomic data, such as in northern France.

     It is with this aim that we present here the paleogenomic study of seven individuals of a Late Neolithic collective burial dated to ~2500 BCE from the Paris Basin in northern France, Bréviandes les Pointes. We produced whole genome sequences for these individuals, including mitogenome and Y-chromosome sequences, as well as radiocarbon dates and 87Sr/86Sr data. We report a “real-time” observation of steppe ancestry introduction into the Neolithic gene pool in northern France. Moreover, we model the origins of the different ancestral components, shedding light on the admixture dynamics and the origins, directions, timing, and mechanisms of the expansion of steppe ancestry at the end of the fourth to the first half of the third millennium BCE in western Europe, i.e., at the beginning of a cultural transition period between the Stone Age and the Metal Ages that coincides with the BBC. We correlate movements of populations and individuals with archaeological evidence to address questions about the evolution of the CWC and the BBC. Finally, we analyze an individual BBC burial from Saint-Martin-la-Garenne dated to ~2300 BCE, representing the first genomic analysis of a proper BBC burial in the Île-de-France, in the middle of the Paris Basin where BBC burials are rare. The results of these analyses uncover important features of the admixture processes associated with the CWC and the BBC.

     This is another impressive paper. Sequencing five individuals from a family grave, they capture the moment of the formation (or yamnafication) of Bell Beaker live in Northern France.

     The founding father wasni’t sampled, but since they have his wife and their son, and since the spouses were completely unrelated, they can produce a sufficient chunk of his genome by subtracting the mother’s genes from the son’s. This father came from the north, probably from the CW-adjacent “All Over Ornamented”/”All Over Corded” area in Northern France and the Netherlands. His share of Neolithic Farmer ancestry is the same as for the original Corded Ware individuals.

     The founding mother came from a Neolithic Farmer family in Southern France, where she also grew up.

     Their son married another woman of Southern French family, but she grew up locally.

     They had a son. This son has a mixture of Neolithic Farmer and Yamnaya-derived genes that will persist for a long time.

     The study calculates three clearly separate admixture events: One is the first contact of Yamnaya with more Neolithic Farmer-like peoples somewhere in Eastern Europe 3300 BCE. The second is the formation of Corded Ware by Globular Amphora at 2950 BCE. (This moment was captured in the Bohemian paper from 2021 that we looked at yesterday in the Eneolithic thread). The third is the formation of Bell Beaker at 2600 BCE – the very same date as the formation of this family. I’ll add that both the two latter events seem to have been very fast and have happened over a large region. It seems like coordinated actions.

     From the proportions of Neolithic Farmer X-chromosomes vs, autosomal DNA, they find support for the hypothesis that Yamnaya women married internally, while Yamnaya men (also) married Farmer women.

     There’s more, but it’s late. I’ll actually try to be brief tonight.
901. Trond Engen says

     January 5, 2025 at 7:42 am

     Me: From the proportions of Neolithic Farmer X-chromosomes vs, autosomal DNA,

     That didn’t stand daylight. Mentally substitute “From the proportions of Neolithic Farmer and Steppe ancestry on the X-chromosomes vs. in the full autosomal DNA,”.
902. Trond Engen says

     January 5, 2025 at 7:55 pm

     Me in 2022: I don’t think I ever got around to reading this last year. I have now. I don’t have much more to say about the Tarim mummies except that it was unexpected and interesting. The Dzungarian EMBA genomes show beyond doubt that there was movement of Afanasievo pastoralists into Dzungaria, strengthening the Afanasievo origin hypothesis for Tocharian. Also interesting is the somewhat later Kanai MBA individual, from just over on the Kazakh side. It’s shown in this paper as a three way mix of Dzungaria EBA1 with Tarim EMBA1 and Baikal, but it plots as pure Okinevo.

     I had the paper up again now, and I was struck not just by Kanai MBA, but by Kumsay EBA, in the middle of the Kazakh steppe, and especially Mereke MBA, north of the Caspian Sea. Both look like close relatives of the Dzungaria Afanasievans. Mereke is even color-coded as that in the map, which means that it can be modeled as a straight descendant of Dzungaria EBA1. Kumsay is more like a close but more western branch of Afanasievo descendants, shifted towards BMAC rather than Baikal. I haven’t found any more on either of them.
903. Hippophlebotomist says

     January 7, 2025 at 7:04 pm

     @Trond You might enjoy this blog entry, A look at Kumsay: The graveyard of giants
     https://musaeumscythia.blogspot.com/2021/11/a-look-at-kumsay-graveyard-of-giants.html
904. Trond Engen says

     January 7, 2025 at 7:46 pm

     Thanks! Yes, interesting. That blogpost is from Nov 2021, so it may have been prompted by Fan Zhang et al.

     Mereke is found to be practically identical to Steppe Maikop, and Kumsay almost as close, and clearly not descendants of Afanasievans, while Fan Zhang et al can model Mereke as a lightly Tarim admixed Dzungarian. I have really no idea what it means, but it’s certainly interesting.

     We have recently learned that in a formative period of Yamnaya, several similar but separate peoples roamed the southern steppe and the northern Caucasus piedmont. It shouldn’t be surprising to find descendants of some of them in the steppe for some time. The surprise is that one of those can be mistaken for an Afanasievo descendant or vice versa.
905. Dmitry Pruss says

     January 31, 2025 at 6:14 pm

     An interesting look into IE migrations pf peoples from migrations of sheep
     https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adn2094

     Basically, Iran lagged behind with sheep domestication. First domesticated sheep spread East from Anatolia after a millennium-long pause when people of Zagros mountains already herded goats, but still hunted mouflon sheep. Starting from 7th millennium BCE, Eastern sheep begin to diverge more and more from the Western ones (an earlier paper suggested that the ancestors of today’s Eastern and African breeds partly interbred with some extinct local species or subspecies https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-021-02794-8 , and the new paper doesn’t have any success with identifying the source of this admixture either)

     But later in the Chalcolitic, some Anatolian and Balkan sheep suddenly get a good portion of Eastern DNA – and after ~2900-2700 BCE, pretty much *all* European sheep become half-Eastern in their genetic makeup.

     The Late Neolithic and Chalcolitic mixed genomes are from Yenikapı in the European part of Turkey, 6000-5800 BCE, and Güvercinkaya in Cappadocia, ~5000 BCE,

     The authors get two Srubnaya-era sheep genomes from the foothills of South Ural mountains, Chishma ~1500 BCE and Ivanovka on Tok river ~1800 BCE, and both of them belong to the Eastern branch.

     From these data, they jump to a bold conclusion that Yamnaya sheep were fully Eastern and that the Bronze Age genomic turnover in Europe, and the Chalcolitic mixed breeds in Turkey, all come from the Indo-European migrations. From archaeological data, it’s actually assumed that Güvercinkaya were migrants, but from the East, from Mesopotamia of Ubaid culture, so I wouldn’t bravely associated its sheep with the later Hittites, but make your own mind.
906. Dmitry Pruss says

     February 5, 2025 at 1:21 pm

     The twin papers of Lazaridis et al and Nikitin et al, discussed here since they appeared as preprints in April 2024, are finally out in Nature
     https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08531-5
     https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08372-2

     but now it comes with a summary of what they think their discoveries mean for the PIE linguistics:
     https://communities.springernature.com/posts/indo-european-origins-a-new-solution-to-an-old-puzzle
907. Dmitry Pruss says

     February 5, 2025 at 3:00 pm

     there is also a discussion piece accompanying Nikitin 2025 paper on North Pontic Eneolithic and Early Bronze Age which concludes that Yamnaya emerged on Lower Dnieper

     https://communities.springernature.com/posts/eneolithic-communities-of-the-north-pontic-and-the-birthplace-of-yamna-culture

     The two research papers, and the two discussion papers, are largely split by the countries origin of the ancient bones and modern collaborators, Russian and Ukrainian, resp., and even terminology in the papers reflects it. Both discussions lament the war but also in understandably different terms.

     At least collaborators in Russia were able to work together internationally, and to avoid being forced to parrot all the ideological and political talking points of their government.
908. Y says

     February 5, 2025 at 4:51 pm

     Is there any indication as to whether the ancestors of the CLV folks ultimately came from further east? For example, is there any Denisovan in them?
909. Trond Engen says

     February 5, 2025 at 5:58 pm

     @Dmitry: Thanks. Both summaries are a joy to read.
910. Y says

     February 10, 2025 at 8:38 am

     Heggarty’s critique of Lazaridis et al., here.
911. David Marjanović says

     February 10, 2025 at 6:04 pm

     Is there any indication as to whether the ancestors of the CLV folks ultimately came from further east? For example, is there any Denisovan in them?

     No, just a trace of supposed West Siberian Hunter-Gatherers, but the sample used to model those is actually from Tajikistan.
912. David Marjanović says

     February 10, 2025 at 7:38 pm

     Heggarty’s critique of Lazaridis et al., here.

     Meh. Doesn’t actually present contradicting evidence and doesn’t seem to have studied the paper even just as closely as I did in this thread (link in the preceding comment), never mind as closely as a team including IEists and geneticists could. Most of the lament is about matters of mere presentation – which node in the tree to call “IE” (with some useless obfuscation about the existence of the non-Anatolian branch) and where to put the stippled lines in fig. 1 (they weren’t part of the input into any analyses, they’re really just stippled lines).

     OK, there’s a chariot and soma/haoma in the BMAC before any Steppe ancestry shows up; but the chariot was invented in Sintashta, on the other side of the Central Asian desert, and soma/haoma is a prime candidate for an Indo-Iranian loan from the BMAC simply because there’s no trace of it (the word or the plant or the ritual) anywhere else in IE.
913. Ryan says

     February 10, 2025 at 8:01 pm

     Also, Heggarty describes the Narahimsan paper as “seeking out samples from BMAC but drawing a blank.”

     Narasimhan actually points out that the main BMAC population “did not contribute substantially to later South Asians.” Somehow, someway, Yamnaya did. Whether through the “outliers of BMAC” that Narasimhan identified, who did carry Steppe ancestry, or in some other way, Steppe genetics penetrated that part of the subcontinent that speaks an I-E language, and not the other part. Heggarty, with no way of explaining this, pretends it doesn’t exist.
914. Dmitry Pruss says

     February 11, 2025 at 4:52 pm

     Further up this thread, we discussed various issues with Heggarty 2023 ( https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abg0818 ) and its wildly unbelievable dates, mostly related to the problems with accounting for synonyms and with the sensitivity of their approach to the arbitrary maximum date allowed in the model.

     Lazaridis posted a reply to this recent Heggarty critique too, mostly dealing with fine genomic aspects, like how to properly define a “cline”, or what minor ancestry sources do in various models, but also touches on the origins of Iranian and Indic from the earlier papers, which seem to be misunderstood by Heggarty
     https://x.com/iosif_lazaridis/status/1889399531361673376
915. Trond Engen says

     February 11, 2025 at 6:02 pm

     Me: I’ll maintain that what’s going on now is development of methods with IE as a test case. It’s just too bad that it has to be framed as solutions to IE problems.

     It’s harder to maintain a charitable view when Heggarty doubles down on the results.
916. Dmitry Pruss says

     February 11, 2025 at 6:09 pm

     It’s harder to maintain a charitable view when Heggarty doubles down on the results

     with quite a few criticisms which sound aggrieved, but not in the least justified, too.
917. David Marjanović says

     February 11, 2025 at 8:55 pm

     Oh, that’s why the name Heggarty rang a bell… :-]

     Lazaridis posted a reply

     @threadreaderapp unroll please?
918. Dmitry Pruss says

     March 20, 2025 at 3:01 pm

     Two ancient DNA preprints on the genesis of Uralic (and Yeniseian) languages, and my and Trond’s long-time favorites, the itinerant bronze-makers of Seima-Turbino and Ymyyakhkakh cultures (the latter simplified in spelling as Ymyakhtakh, and then simplified even further as Yakutia Late Neolithic / Bronze Age aka Yakutia_LNBA)
     https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.10.01.560195v1.full.pdf
     https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.10.01.560332v1.full.pdf

     The first one has been published

     A follow-up preprint unravels the origins of pre-proto-Uralic and Yenisean peoples, and adds more ancient samples, including Seima-Turbino, into the analysis.
     https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.10.01.560332v2.full.pdf

     The shared roots of these peoples are in now-submerged Beringia, from where humans spread not just into the Americas but also back into Asia in several waves. The earliest of these known genomes is Khaiyrgas_16.7kya (Yakutia), a completely unadmixed Beringian origin genome. There was at least one more wave of back migration from Beringia, because Ust_Kyakhta_14kya (South of Baikal) and Kolyma_M_10.1kya, while admixed with local sources, have their Beringian components which are even closer to the Native Americans that Khaiyrgas. Collectively, these Beringian-derived populations are known as Ancient Paleo-Siberians (APS).

     Local DNA flowed into the APS groups from the South from two principal sources, one exemplified by Yumin in Inner Mongolia (8.4 kya), another by older samples from Amur area.

     By about 3200 BCE, Neolithic peoples of Kitoi culture in the area West of Lake Baikal were completely replaced by an APS + Inland East Asian (Yumin) mix (whose Beringian ancestry came from the first of the two known back-migrations from Beringia into Asia). In Late Bronze Age these Cis-Baikalian groups migrated to Yenisei and today their ancestry is maxed out among the Kets, but is also strong in the neighboring Samoyedic and Siberian Turkic peoples, so there is no doubt that the Yenisean languages spread that way (but were partly assimilated, especially during the Yenisei Kyrgyz conquests).

     Meanwhile by about 2500 BCE, the areas North of Lake Baikal are overtaken by Ymyyakhtakh-associated Yakutia_LNBA population (the Ymyyakhtakh belong to this broader group, but so do other cultural traditions). They were a ~50:50 mix of Trans-Baikalian Kitoi peoples (fairly heavy on Amur ancestry) and Syalakh-Belkachi Neolithic peoples of Yakutia (who were a slightly Asian-admixed group of predominantly Beringian ancestry, but of the second back-migration, the one with a sources more closely related to the Native Americans) . The admixture was sex-biased (predominantly Kitoi men and Syalakh-Belkachi women).

     By 2200 BCE, Ymyyakhtakh-realated Yakutia_LNBA ancestry is already on the Yenisei (the previously published Kra001 sample which we already discussed in the context of the genesis of Seima-Turbino and Uralic. Uralic people today share a characteristic strong ancestral link to Yakutia_LNBA, and carry Y-chromosomes originally inherited from the Trans-Baikalian Kitoi.

     The already well-established genetic and cultural heterogeneity of the Seima-Turbino gets even wilder with the added new samples in this paper. Some carry proto-Yeniseian ancestry and one – Western Hunter-Gatherer ancestry, probably from the Baltics!

     Another part of Syalakh-Belkachi migrated East and across to America, here Saqqaq Paleo-Eskimos were ~70% genetically Syalyakh-Belkachi. This ancestry persists in Eskimo-Aleuts, Chukotko-Kamchatkans and Yukaghirs today. But the authors couldn’t find any DNA support for the Dene-Yeniseian hypothesis.
919. David Marjanović says

     March 20, 2025 at 3:20 pm

     i am amaze

     (I think that’s what Young People Today said 10 years ago.)
920. Dmitry Pruss says

     March 20, 2025 at 3:29 pm

     Arrgh, I just unwittingly re-reviewed the 2023 paper which was already discussed above. Maybe I got a slightly better review this time, but it is the same paper. Apologies
921. languagehat says

     March 20, 2025 at 3:57 pm

     Don’t apologize, I was riveted by your summary! Beringians everywhere!
922. Trond Engen says

     March 20, 2025 at 5:42 pm

     “Oh, wow, all that new detail,” I thought, “but I’m sure that Baltic long-distance traveler was there in the previous paper as well.”

     Thanks for the new summary, Dmitry! A lot of stuff I didn’t catch the first time.
923. languagehat says

     March 20, 2025 at 5:45 pm

     Repetition is useful.
924. languagehat says

     March 20, 2025 at 5:46 pm

     As a wise man once said: Repetition is useful.
925. Trond Engen says

     March 20, 2025 at 5:51 pm

     You can say that again.
926. Dmitry Pruss says

     March 20, 2025 at 6:38 pm

     Yeah, I was totally focusing on our favorite Ymyyakhtakh and Seima-Turbino back then, but more focused on all the Beringians now. Probably because just before reading the preprint, I was remembering the story about a rare Icelandic mtDNA haplogroup C1e, which was initially described as a genetic evidence of Eric Rauða’s Vikings brining back a Native American bride from Vinland. But eventually it turned out that the Icelandic branch was a little too different from the Native American ones, but a good deal closer to a 7,500 years old mtDNA from Yuzhny Oleny Ostrov (and therefore likely derived from the back-migration of Beringians across the tundra belt)
     https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3913659/

     This piece of DNA might have been thoroughly mixed in Scandinavia even before the Viking age, but it’s also nice to speculate that it may have come to Iceland with the notable family of Geirmund Hjørson Heljarskinn (“The Swarty” ? ) (mentioned once before on LH: https://languagehat.com/urchin/#comment-2595582 ) whose mother was supposed to have been a daughter of a Biarmian chieftain

     Similar Beringian-origin Y-chromosomes, distantly related to the Y-chromosomes of Native Americans, also made it all the way to Scandinavian countries and England (but they are very rare there)
     https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982218314957
927. Trond Engen says

     March 21, 2025 at 8:59 pm

     It’s conspicuous how the Scandinavian/Yorkshire branch Q-L804 is a lone outlier within a Native American bundle, and that the closest branch outside of that is restricted to Ket. I note that the age of the last common ancestor of Q-L804 is estimated to 4400 years, about 1000 years before Bolshoy Oleniy Ostrov.
928. January First-of-May says

     March 24, 2025 at 7:17 am

     but it’s also nice to speculate that it may have come to Iceland with the notable family of Geirmund Hjørson Heljarskinn

     The timing and geography fits the (currently-)attested data well enough that it feels like the main reason this isn’t the accepted explanation is that the sagas don’t seem to mention him having any sisters.
929. Trond Engen says

     March 24, 2025 at 2:49 pm

     As contrasted with the description of a peaceful encounter and marriage alliances with the inhabitants of Vinland.