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Indo-European.eu
Indo-European languages & peoples
Maps of prehistoric migrations
Upper Palaeolithic
Epipalaeolithic
Early Mesolithic
Late Mesolithic
Early Eneolithic
Late Eneolithic
Early Copper Age
Yamnaya Hungary
Yamna – Bell Beaker migration
Yamnaya steppe ancestry
Late Copper Age
Early Bronze Age
Middle Bronze Age
Late Bronze Age
Early Iron Age
Late Iron Age
Y-DNA and mtDNA maps
Indo-European languages in Europe
ASoSaH
A Song of Sheep and Horses: eurafrasia nostratica, eurasia indouralica
I. A Game of Clans: collectores venatoresque, agricolae pastoresque
II. A Clash of Chiefs: rex militaris, rex sacrorum
III. A Storm of Words: vetera verba, priscae linguae
IV. A Feat of Crowds: hic sunt leones, hic sunt dracones
V. A Dance with Old Tongues: valar morghulis, valar dohaeris
Hg R1b-L23 / LPIE expansion
The "Indo-European Corded Ware theory" doesn't hold water
Haplogroup is not language, but R1b-L23 expansion was associated with Proto-Indo-Europeans
The history of the simplistic 'haplogroup R1a — Indo-European' association
Tips for dialogue with those supporting the 'haplogroup R1a — Indo-European' association
Human ancestry
PCA and ADMIXTURE of Eurasians
Linux virtual machine in Windows for genetic analysis
Use of Slurm Workload Management for job scheduling
Merge, remove, convert datasets using Plink and Eigensoft
ADMIXTURE – Ancestry components and R
AdmixTools: qpgraph, qp3Pop (f_3 test), etc.
Tag: proto-balto-slavic
Volosovo hunter-gatherers started to disappear earlier than previously believed
Recent paper (behind paywall) Marmot incisors and bear tooth pendants in Volosovo hunter-gatherer burials. New radiocarbon and stable isotope data from the Sakhtysh complex, Upper-Volga region, by Macānea, Nordqvist, and Kostyleva, J. Archaeol. Sci. (2019) 26:101908.
Interesting excerpts (emphasis mine):
The Sakhtysh micro-region is located in the Volga-Oka interfluve, along the headwaters of the Koyka River in the Ivanovo Region, central European Russia (Fig. 1). The area has evidence of human habitation from the Early Mesolithic to the Iron Age, and includes altogether 11 long-term and seasonal settlements (Sakhtysh I–II, IIa, III–IV, VII–XI, XIV) and four artefact scatters (sites V–VI, XII–XIII), in addition to which burials have been detected at five sites (I–II, IIa, VII, VIII) (Kostyleva and Utkin, 2010). The locations have been known since the 1930s and intensively studied since the 1960s under the leadership of D.A. Kraynov, M.G. Zhilin, E.L. Kostyleva, and A.V. Utkin.
Sakhtysh II and IIa are the most extensively studied sites of the complex, with ca. 1500m2 and around 800m2 excavated, respectively. The burial grounds at both sites are considered as fully investigated.
AMS datings from the sites Sakhtysh II and IIa. Sampled contexts are given in parentheses (burial/hoard), "crust" indicates samples of charred organic
residues on pottery from cultural layer. For data, see Tables 1–2.
Sakhtysh chronology
The AMS dates do not support the previously proposed phasing of the Sakhtysh burials to early (4750–4375 BP/3600–3000 cal BCE), late (or developed; 4375–4000 BP/3000–2500 cal BCE), and final (4000–3750 BP/2500–2200 cal BCE): the early and late burials at Sakhtysh IIa do not stand out as two separate groups, and also the burials and hoards from Sakhtysh II, connected to the final phase, are temporally overlapping with these. Neither the use sequence, where the settlement and burial phases are non-overlapping and also complementary between the sites (Kostyleva and Utkin, 2010, 2014), finds support in the present material.
The AMS datings indicate that the Volosovo people started to bury their dead at Sakhtysh IIa after 3700 cal BCE; dates earlier than this may be affected by FRE or suffer from mixed contexts and poor quality of dates. The present data questions the interpretation that the Sakhtysh IIa cemetery was used without interruptions between 4800 and 4080 BP (Kostyleva and Utkin, 2010), i.e. for a millennium between 3550 and 2600 cal BCE. The AMS dates rather suggest a use period of some centuries only around the mid-4th millennium cal BCE, tentatively 3650–3400 cal BCE. This would also be more realistic considering the number of burials at the site.
The core area of Volosovo culture (after Kraynov, 1987) and the sites of the Sakhtysh complex (after Kostyleva and Utkin, 2010). Eurasian map base made with Natural Earth. Illustration: K. Nordqvist.
Volosovo chronology
The absolute dating of Volosovo culture was for a long time hampered by the small number of radiocarbon dates (see Kraynov, 1987). Today,>100 datings connected with it can be found in literature (Korolev and Shalapinin, 2010; Chernykh et al., 2011; Nikitin, 2012; Mosin et al., 2014). Unfortunately, the available dates do not form solid grounds for dating the cultural phenomenon, as many of them have quality-related issues, large measurement errors, and ambiguous cultural or physical contexts. Consequently, particular datings may be connected to different cultural phases by different scholars. Finally, a large part of the newly-published datings are obtained through direct dating of potsherds (Kovaliukh and Skripkin, 2007; Zaitseva et al., 2009), and therefore, their cogency must be faced with reservation (see Van der Plicht et al., 2016; Dolbunova et al., 2017).
The datings connected with Volosovo cover a wide time range between ca. 5500 BP (4400 cal BCE) and ca. 3700 BP (2100 cal BCE). However, datings from secure contexts, with good quality (error ca. 50 years or below) and no probable FRE, place the beginning of Volosovo culture to the first half of the 4th millennium cal BCE, around 3700–3600 cal BCE. This is also supported by the roughly coeval terminal dates given for the preceding Lyalovo (Zaretskaya and Kostyleva, 2011) and Volga-Kama cultures (Lychagina, 2018), as well as the appearance of related neighbouring cultures, for example, in the Kama region (Nikitin, 2012; Lychagina, 2018), the southern forest steppe area (Korolev and Shalapinin, 2014), and north-western Russia and Finland (Nordqvist, 2018). Still, the dating of many of these cultural phases suffers from the same problems as of Volosovo.
A handful of contested datings place the end of Volosovo culture to the final centuries of the 3rd millennium cal BCE, or even later (Kostyleva and Utkin, 2010; Chernykh et al., 2011; Nikitin, 2012). On the other hand, the new AMS dates indicate that Volosovo activities at Sakhtysh II and IIa ceased before or towards the early 3rd millennium cal BCE; if this reflects the general decline of Volosovo culture must be still confirmed by more dates from Sakhtysh and elsewhere. In this context, the general cultural development must be accounted for. To what extent – if at all – the Volosovo people were present after the arrival of the Corded Ware culture-related Fatyanovo-Balanovo populations? Based on the current, albeit scant and inconclusive radiocarbon data this took place from ca. 2700 cal BCE onwards (Krenke et al., 2013).
Corded Ware and Comb Ware hunter-gatherer-related populations in north-eastern Europe from ca. 2600 BC. See full map.
One of the interesting genetic papers in the near future will be the one that finally includes samples from Corded Ware groups in the forest zone (i.e. Fatyanovo-Balanovo and Abashevo), which will most likely confirm that they are the origin of the known genetic profile of Central and East Uralic-speaking peoples, seeing how West Uralic peoples show genetic continuity in the East Baltic area, coinciding with the Battle Axe culture.
Uralicists have come a long way from the 1990s, when the picture of Uralic before Balto-Slavic in the Baltic was already evident, and Uralians were identified with Comb Ware peoples. The linguistic data and relative chronology are still valid, despite the now outdated interpretations of absolute archaeological chronology, as happens with interpretations of Krahe or Villar about Old European.
As an example, here are some relevant excerpts from Languages in the Prehistoric Baltic Sea Region, by Kallio (2003):
NOTE. Kallio's contribution appeared in the book Languages in Prehistoric Europe (2003), which I hold nostalgically close in my Indo-European library (now almost impossible to read fully). It is still one of my preferred books (from those made up of mostly unconnected chunks on European linguistic prehistory), because it contains Oettinger's essential update of North-West Indo-European common vocabulary, which led us indirectly to our Modern Indo-European project from 2005 on.
In any case, the Uralic arrival in the region east of the Baltic Sea preceded the Indo-European one (…).
This theory that the ancestors of Finno-Saamic speakers arrived in the Baltic Sea region earlier than those of Balto-Slavic speakers is still rejected by some scholars (e.g. Napolskikh 1993: 41-44), who claim, for instance, that Finno-Saamic speakers would not have known salmons before they met Balts because the Finno-Saamic word for 'salmon' (i.e. *losi) is a borrowing from Baltic. Similarly, one could claim that English speakers would not have known salmons before they met Frenchmen because English salmon is a borrowing from French. In other words, Worter und Sachen are not necessarily borrowed hand in hand. Otherwise, it would not be so easy to explain how many Finnish names of body parts are borrowings from Baltic (e.g. hammas 'tooth', kaula 'neck', reisi 'thigh') and from Germanic (e.g. hartia 'shoulder', lantio 'loin', maha 'stomach').
A more probative argument is the fact that Balto-Slavic features in Finno-Saamic are mostly lexical ones (i.e. typical superstrate features), where Finno-Saamic features in Balto-Slavic are mostly non-lexical ones (i.e. typical substrate features). Note that there are more Balto-Slavic features in Finnic than in Saamic and more Finno-Saamic features in Baltic than in Slavic. This fact could be explained by presuming that Pre-Saamic was spoken north of the Corded Ware area and Pre-Slavic was spoken south of the Typical Pit-Comb Ware area, whereas Pre-Finnic and Pre-Baltic alone were spoken in the area, where both the Typical Pit-Comb Ware culture (ca. 4000-3600 BC) and the Corded Ware culture (ca. 3200-2300 BC) were situated. This area was most probably bilingual, until Finnic and Baltic won in the north and in the south, respectively.
As is well-known, the idea of Uralic substrate features in Balto-Slavic is not new (cf. e.g. Pokorny 1936/1968: 181-185). As recent studies (e.g. Bednarczuk 1997) have shown, their density is the most remarkable in the four Balto-Slavic languages spoken in the earlier Pit-Comb Ware area (i.e. Latvian, Lithuanian, Belorussian, Russian). On the other hand, occasional Uralisms in the other Balto-Slavic languages spoken west of the Vistula and south of the Pripyat may rather be considered adstrate features spread from the northeast.
Our beliefs from the 2000s. A hypothetic Uralic Comb Ware distribution before the arrival of a hypothetic North-West Indo-European-speaking Corded Ware. "Generalized distribution of the Pit-Comb Ware cultural complex (Mallory & Adams 1997: 430, Carpelan 1999: 257) and the most probable homelands of Saamic, Finnic, Mordvin, Mari, and Permic."
The idea of Indo-European superstrate features in Finnic is not new either (cf. e.g. Posti 1953). As Jorma Koivulehto (1983) has recently shown, the earliest Indo-European loanword stratum in the westernmost Uralic branches alone can be considered Northwest Indo-European and connected with the Corded Ware culture (ca. 3200-2300 BC). Since this layer, there have been continuous contacts between Baltic and Finnic. According to Koivulehto (1990), the following stratum can be called Proto-Balt(o-Slav)ic and dated to the Late Neolithic period (ca. 2300-1500 BC). Note that this Proto-Balt(o-Slav)ic dating agrees with the established ones (cf. e.g. Shevelov 1964: 613-614, Kortlandt 1982: 181), when we remember the fact that archaeologists have also moved their datings back by centuries during the last decades.
Finally, there is also a Baltic loanword stratum which was not borrowed from the ancestral stage of Latvian, Lithuanian and/or Old Prussian but from some extinct Baltic language or dialect (Nieminen 1957). However, as these words still go back to the early Proto-Finnic stage, they can hardly be dated later than Bronze-Age ( ca. 1500-500 BC). Therefore, we may conclude that they were probably borrowed from a Baltic superstrate, which arrived in the Finnish Gulf area during the Corded Ware period and survived there until the Bronze Age, when it was no longer identical with other Baltic dialects. In any case, as later Baltic loanword strata concern southern Finnic languages alone, we may presume that this 'North Baltic'superstrate had become extinct.
The traditional association of Uralic with Volosovo hunter-gatherers doesn't make sense, since they neither miraculously survived for thousands of years nor mixed for hundreds of years with Corded Ware peoples, so we can now more confidently reject the recent assumption by Carpelan & Parpola that their language was adopted by incoming Fatyanovo, Balanovo and Abashevo groups, to develop into the known Uralic languages (more here). This includes one of the many models of the the Copenhagen group, who simplistically follow "Steppe ancestry" for Indo-Europeannes.
If one combines the known relative linguistic chronology with the North-West Indo-European hydrotoponymy layer, now more clearly identified as Old Europeans expanding with East Bell Beakers and derived Early Bronze Age groups, I think there is little space left for maneuvering out of the overwhelming evidence for a Uralic homeland in the forest-steppes, linked to the spread of late Sredni Stog/Corded Ware ancestry into north-eastern Europe and beyond the Urals.
Genetic continuity among Uralic-speaking cultures in north-eastern Europe
European hydrotoponymy (I): Old European substrate and its relative chronology
Uralic speakers formed clines of Corded Ware ancestry with WHG:ANE populations
The cradle of Russians, an obvious Finno-Volgaic genetic hotspot
Pre-Germanic and Pre-Balto-Finnic shared vocabulary from Pitted Ware seal hunters
Balto-Slavic accentual mobility: an innovation in contact with Balto-Finnic
Common Slavs from the Lower Danube, expanding with haplogroup E1b-V13?
"Dinaric I2a" and the expansion of Common Slavs from East-Central Europe
The significance of the Tollense Valley in Bronze Age North-East Germany
Aquitanians and Iberians of haplogroup R1b are exactly like Indo-Iranians and Balto-Slavs of haplogroup R1a
Pre-Germanic born out of a Proto-Finnic substrate in Scandinavia
On Proto-Finnic language guesstimates, and its western homeland
On the origin and spread of haplogroup R1a-Z645 from eastern Europe
Carlos Quiles	Anthropology, Archaeology, Finnic, Finno-Ugric, Linguistics, North-West Indo-European, Proto-Indo-European, Uralic	1 Comment July 9, 2019 July 10, 2019
Consequences of O&M 2018 (III): The Balto-Slavic conundrum in Linguistics, Archaeology, and Genetics
This is part of a series of posts analyzing the findings of the recent Nature papers Olalde et al.(2018) and Mathieson et al.(2018) (abbreviated O&M 2018).
The recent publication of Narasimhan et al. (2018) has outdated the draft of this post a bit, and it has made it at the same time still more interesting.
While we wait for the publication of the dataset (and the actual Y-DNA haplogroups and precise subclades with the revision of the paper), and as we watch the wrath of Hindu nationalists vented against the West (as if the steppe was in Western Europe) and science itself, we have already seen confirmation from the Reich Lab of their new approach to Late Proto-Indo-European migrations.
Yamna/Steppe EMBA, previously identified as the direct source of "steppe" ancestry (AKA 'Yamnaya' ancestry) and Late Indo-European migrations in Asia – through Corded Ware, it is to be understood – has been officially changed. In the case of Indo-Iranian migrations it is the "Steppe MLBA cloud", after a direct contribution to it of Yamna/Steppe EMBA, which expanded Indo-Iranian, as I predicted ancient DNA could support.
In Twitter, the main author responded the following when asked for this change regarding the origin of steppe ancestry in Asian migrants (emphasis mine):
Our reasons are:
The Turan samples show no elevated steppe ancestry till 2000BC.
MLBA is R1a
Indus periphery doesn't have steppe ancestry but Swat does, and EMBA doesn't work both in terms of time or genetic ancestry to explain the difference.
Image modified from Narasimhan et al. (2018), including the most likely proto-language identification of different groups. Original description "Modeling results including Admixture events, with clines or 2-way mixtures shown in rectangles, and clouds or 3-way mixtures shown in ellipses". Yes, this map is the latest official view on migrations from the Reich Lab now. See the original full image here.
I am glad to see finally recognized that Y-DNA haplogroups and time have to be taken into account, and happy also to see an end to the by now obsolete 'ADMIXTURE/PCA-only relevance' in Human Ancestry. The timing of archaeological migrations, the cultural attribution of each sample, and the role of Y-DNA variability reduction and expansion have been finally recognized as equally important to assess potential migrations, as I requested.
This change was already in the making some months ago, when David Anthony – who has worked with the group for this paper and others before it – already changed his official view on Corded Ware – from his previous support of the 2015 model. His latest theory, which linked Yamna settlements in Hungary with a potential mixed society of migrants (of R1b-L23 and R1a-Z645 lineages) from West Yamna, is most likely wrong, too, but it was clearly a brave step forward in the right direction.
The only reasonable model now is that Yamna expanded Late Proto-Indo-European languages with steppe ancestry + R1b-L23 subclades.
You can either accept this change, or you can deny it and wait until one sample of R1a-Z645 appears in West Yamna or central Europe, or one sample of R1b-L23 appears in Corded Ware (as it is obvious it could happen), to keep spreading the wrong ideas still some more years, while the rest of the world goes on: Mallory, Anthony, and other archaeologists co-authoring the latest paper (probably part of the stronger partnership with academics that we were going to see), who had formally put forward complex, detailed theories, investing their time and name in them, have rejected their previous migration models to develop new ones based on the most recent findings. If they can do that, I am sure any amateur geneticist out there can, too.
Modified image, from Narasimhan et al. (2018). Anthony's new model of a Yamna Hungary -> Corded Ware (Małopolska) migration arrow in red. Notice also how they keep the arrow from West Yamna to the north (in black), due probably to the Baltic Late Neolithic samples (see below).
The Balto-Slavic dialect and its homeland
An interesting question in Linguistics and Archaeology, now that Corded Ware cannot be identified as "Indo-Slavonic" or any other imaginary ancient group (like Indo-Slavo-Germanic), remains thus mostly unchanged since before the famous 2015 genetic papers:
Was Balto-Slavic a dialect of the expanding North-West Indo-European language, a Northern LPIE dialect, as we support, based on morphological and lexical isoglosses?
Or was it part of an Indo-Slavonic group in East Yamna, i.e. a Graeco-Aryan dialect, based mainly on the traditional Satem-Centum phonological division?
I am a strong supporter of Balto-Slavic being a member of a North-West Indo-European group. That's probably because I educated myself first with the main Spanish books* on Proto-Indo-European reconstruction, and its authors kept repeating this consistent idea, but I have found no relevant data to reject it in the past 15 years.
* Today two of the three volumes are available in English, although they are from the early 1990s, hence a bit outdated. They also maintain certain peculiarities from Adrados' own personal theories, such as multiple (coloured) laryngeals, 5 cases – with a common ancestral oblique case – for Middle PIE, etc. But it has lots of detailed discussions on the different aspects of the reconstruction. It is not an easy introductory manual to the field, though; for that you have already many famous short handbooks out there, like those of Fortson (N.American), Beekes (Leiden), or Meier-Brügger (Germany).
Fernando and I have always maintained that North-West Indo-European must have formed a very recent community, probably connected well into the early 2nd millennium BC for certain recent isoglosses to spread among its early dialects, based on our guesstimates*, and on our belief that it formed at some point not just a dialect continuum, but probably a common language, so we estimated that the expansion was associated with the pan-European influence of Únětice and close early Bronze Age European contacts.
NOTE. I know, you must be thinking "linguistic guesstimates? Bollocks, that's not Science". Right? Wrong. When you learn a dozen languages from different branches, half a dozen ancient ones, and then still study some reconstructed proto-languages from them, you begin to make your own assumptions about how the language changes you perceive could have developed according to your mental time frames. If you just learned a second language and some Latin in school, and try to make assumptions as to how language changes, or you believe you can judge it with this limited background, you have evidently the wrong idea of what a guesstimate is. I accept criticism to this concept from a scientist used only to statistical methods, since it comes from pure ignorance of what it means. And I accept alternative guesstimates from linguists whose language backgrounds may differ (and thus their perception of language change). However, I would not accept a glottochronological or otherwise (supposedly) statistical model instead (or a religious model, for that matter), so we have no alternatives to guesstimates for the moment.
In fact, guesstimates and dialectalization have paved the way to the steppe hypothesis, first with the kurgan hypothesis by Marija Gimbutas, then complemented further in the past 60 years by linguists and archaeologists into a detailed Khvalynsk -> Yamna -> Afanasevo/Bell Beaker/Sintashta-Andronovo expansion model, now confirmed with genomics. So either you trust us (or any other polyglot who deals with Indo-European matters, like Adrados, Lehmann, Beekes, Kloekhorst, Kortlandt, etc.), or you begin learning ancient languages and obtaining your own guesstimates, whichever way you prefer. The easy way of numbers + computer science does not exist yet, and is quite far from happening – until we can understand how our brains summarize and select important details involved in obtaining estimates – , no matter what you might be reading (even in Nature or Science) recently…
Proto-Indo-European dialectal expansion according to Adrados (1998).
Data from the 2015 papers changed my understanding of the original NWIE-speaking community, and I have since shifted my preffered anthropological model (from a Northern dialect in Yamna spreading into a loose NWIE-speaking Corded Ware -> Únětice) to a quite close group formed by late Yamna settlers in the Carpathian Basin, expanded as East Bell Beakers, and later continuing with close contacts through Central European EBA.
NOTE. As you can read, we initially rejected Gimbutas' and Anthony's (2007) notion of a Late PIE splitting suddenly into all known dialects (viz. Italo-Celtic with Vučedol/Bell Beaker), and looked thus for a common NWIE spread with Corded Ware migrants, with help from inferences of modern haplogroup distribution (as was common in the early 2000s). Language reconstruction was the foundation of that model, and it was right in its own way. It probably gave the wrong idea to geneticists and archaeologists, who quite easily accepted some results from the 2015 papers as supporting this model. But it also helped us develop a new model and predict what would happen in future papers, as demonstrated in O&M 2018. Any alternative linguistic and archaeological model could explain what is seen today in genomics, but our model of North-West Indo-European reconstruction is obviously at present the best fit for it.
Map of Chalcolithic migrations (A Grammar of Modern Indo-European, 2nd ed. 2008): Corded Ware as the vector of Indo-European languages.
Nevertheless, one of the most important Balticists and Slavicists alive, Frederik Kortlandt, posits that there was in fact an Indo-Slavonic group, so one has to take that possibility into account. Not that his ideas are flawless, of course: he defends the glottalic theory – which is still held today by just a handful of researchers – , and I strongly oppose his description of Balto-Slavic and Germanic oblique cases in *-m- (against other LPIE *-bh-) as an ancestral remnant related to Anatolian (an ending which few scholars would agree corresponds to what he claims), since that would probably represent an older split than warranted in our model. I believe genetics is proving that the dialectalization of Late PIE happened as Fernando López-Menchero and I described.
NOTE. The idea with these examples of how he has been wrong in LPIE and MPIE reconstruction is not to observe the common ad hominem arguments used by amateur geneticists to dismiss academic proposals ("he said that and was wrong, ergo he is wrong now"). It is to bring into attention that the argument from authority is important for the academic community insofar as it creates a common ground, i.e. especially when there are many relevant scholars agreeing on the same subject. But, indeed, any model can and should be challenged, and all authorities are capable of being wrong, and in fact they often are.
The most common explanation today for the dialectal development *-m- is an innovation (not an archaism), whether morphological (viz. Ita. and Gk. them. pl *-i) or phonological (as I defend); and the most commonly repeated model for the satemization trend (even for those supporting a three-dorsal theory for PIE) is areal contact, whether driven by a previous (most likely Uralic) substratum, or not. Hence, if Kortlandt's main different phonological and morphological assessments of the parent language are flawed, and they are the basis for his dialectal scheme, it should be revised.
The 'atomic bomb' that Indo-Slavonic proponents launched, in my opinion, was Holzer's Temematic (born roughly at the same time as the renewed Old European concept in North-West Indo-European model of Oettinger) – and indeed Kortlandt's acceptance of it. It seems to me like the linguistic equivalent of the archaeological "patron-client relationship" proposed by Anthony for a cultural diffusion of Late PIE into different Corded Ware regions: almost impossible to be fully rejected, if the Indo-Slavonic superstrate is proposed for a relatively early time.
In my opinion, the shared morphological layer with North-West Indo-European is obviously older than Iranian influence on Slavic, and I think this is communis opinio today. But how could we disentangle the dialectalization of Balto-Slavic, if there is (as it seems) an ancestral substrate layer (most likely Uralic) common to both Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian? It seems a very difficult task.
Diachronic map of migrations in Europe ca. 2250-1750 BC
The expansion of Balto-Slavic
In any case, there are two, and only two mainstream choices right now.
NOTE. Mainstream, as in representing trends current today among Indo-Europeanists, so that many programs around the world would explain these alternative models to their students, or they would easily appear in most handbooks. Not like the word "mainstream" you read in any comment out there by anyone who has never been interested in Indo-European studies, and uses any text from any author, written who knows how long ago, merely to justify their ethnic preconceptions coupled with certain genomic finds.
You can agree with:
A) The Spanish and German schools of thought, together with many American and British scholars, as well as archaeologists like Heyd, Mallory, or Prescott, and now Anthony, too: the language ancestral to Balto-Slavic, Germanic, and Italo-Celtic accompanied expanding West Yamna/East Bell Beakers into Europe, and then their speakers – like the rest of peoples everywhere in Europe – admixed later in the different regions.
B) Frederik Kortlandt and other Indo-Slavicists. The 'original' Balto-Slavic would have spread with Srubna (and likely Potapovka before it), as a product of the admixture of East Yamna's Indo-Slavonic with incoming Corded Ware migrants (this would correspond to my description of Indo-Iranian). 'True' Balto-Slavic speakers would have then absorbed the Temematic-speaking migrants (equivalent to early Balto-Slavic migrants as described in the demic diffusion model) spreading from the west, most likely in the steppe. Later developments from the steppe would have then brought Baltic to the north, and Slavic to the west.
Therefore, in both cases the language spoken by early R1a-Z645 lineages in Únětice or Mierzanowice/Nitra EBA cultures would have been an eastern North-West Indo-European dialect associated with expanding Bell Beakers, and closely related to Germanic and Italo-Celtic. In the second case, the ancient samples we see genetically closer to modern West Slavs could thus be identified with those speaking the Temematic substrate absorbed later by Balto-Slavic, or maybe by Balts migrating northward, and Slavs spreading west- and southward.
NOTE. In any case, we know that R1a-Z645 subclades resurged in Central-East Europe after the expansion of Bell Beakers, potentially showing an ancient link with the prevalent R1a subclades in the region today. We know that some ancient Central European populations cluster near modern West Slavs, but in other interesting regions (like the British Isles, Central Europe, Scandinavia, or Iberia) we also see close clusters, and nevertheless observe historically documented radical ethnolinguistic changes, as well as many different subsequent genetic inflows and founder effects, that have significantly altered the anthropological picture in these regions, so it could very well be that the lineages we find in ancient samples do not correspond to modern West Slavic lineages, or even similar ancient and modern lineages could show a radical cultural discontinuity (as is likely the case in this to-and-from-the-steppe migration scheme).
Diachronic map of migrations in Europe ca. 1250-750 BC.
Since we are going to see signs of both – west and east admixture – in early Slavic communities near the steppe, and the distribution from South, West, and East Slavs will include a wide "cloud" connecting Central, East, and South-East Europe, as it is evident already from early Germanic samples, it may be interesting to shift our attention to the Tollense valley and Lusatian samples, and their predominant Y-DNA haplogroups. Once again, tracking male-driven migrations from Central Europe to the Baltic region and the steppe, and back again to much of Central and South Europe, will determine which groups expanded this eastern NWIE dialect initially and in later times.
Since Baltic and Slavic languages are attested quite late, genetics is likely to help us select among the different available models for Balto-Slavic, although (it is worth repeating it) these lineages may not be the same that later expanded each dialect.
NOTE. Bronze and Iron Age samples might begin to depict the true Balto-Slavic migration map. Apart from the strong differences in the satemization processes seen among Baltic, Slavic, and Indo-Iranian, from an archaeological point of view the geographic location of the earliest attested Baltic languages and the prehistoric developments of the region seem to me almost incompatible with a homeland in the steppe. Anyway, in the worst-case scenario – for those of us who work with Balto-Slavic to reconstruct North-West Indo-European – there is consensus that there must an eastern North-West Indo-European language (which some would call Temematic), whose common traits with Germanic and Italo-Celtic we use to reconstruct their parent language. The question remains thus mostly theoretical, of limited pragmatic use for the reconstruction.
The third way: Baltic Late Neolithic
I have referred to Kristiansen and his group's position regarding Corded Ware as Indo-European as flawed before. While their latest interpretation (and language identification) was wrong, Kristiansen's original idea of long-lasting contacts in the Dnieper-Dniester region with the area occupied by late Trypillia developing a Proto-Corded Ware culture was probably right, as we are seeing now.
New data in Mittnik et al. 2018 show some interesting early Late Neolithic samples from the Baltic region – Zvejnieki, Gyvakarai1 (R1a-Z645) and Plinkaigalis242 – , proving what I predicted: that elevated steppe ancestry and R1a-Z645 subclades would be found in the Dnieper-Dniester region unrelated to the Yamna expansion, and, it seems, to migrants of the Corded Ware A-horizon.
Funnily enough, this shows that there were probably ancient interactions in the region, as originally asserted by Kristiansen, and probably following some of Victor Klochko's proposed exchange paths, but earlier than predicted by him.
Nevertheless, linguist Guus Kroonen (from Kristiansen's workgroup) issued a quick response to O&M 2018 in yet another twist of his agricultural substrate theory, changing Corded Ware from the vector to a vector of expansion of Late Proto-Indo-European languages (thus following again strictly Gimbutas' oudated model), which fails thus to tackle the main inconsistencies of their previous models, as shown now with the latest paper on South Asian migrations. As I said, they were always one step behind Anthony, and they still are.
Funny also how Anthony, too – like Kristiansen – , may have been right all along since 2007, in proposing that Corded Ware (the nuclear Corded Ware migrants) stemmed from the Dnieper-Dniester region roughly at the same time as Yamna migrants expanded west, and that they did not have any direct genetic connection (in terms of migrations) with each other.
Most likely Pre-Proto-Anatolian migration with Suvorovo-Novodanilovka chiefs in the North Pontic steppe and the Balkans.
Both researchers, who collaborated with the latest genomic research, remade their models, and have to revise now their most recent proposals with the new data, influencing each new paper published with their pressure to be right in their previous models, and with new genomic data compelling them to change their theories under the pressure not to be too wrong again, in this strange vicious circle. Had they remained silent and committed to their archaeological theories, they could have been right all along, each one in their own way.
NOTE. BTW, in case you see ad hominem here too, I feel compelled to say that only thanks to their commitment to disentangle the truth about ancient migrations, and their readiness to collaborate with genetic research – unlike many others in their field – we know today what we know. If they have been wrong many times, it is because they have tried to connect the genetic dots as they were told. Only because of their readiness to explore their science further they should be praised by all. But, again, that does not mean that they cannot be wrong in their models…
Thanks to Anthony's latest change of mind, we don't have to hear the "cultural diffusion" argument anymore, and I consider this a great advance for the field.
NOTE. Not that there could not be prehistoric cultural diffusion events of language (i.e. not accompanied by genetic admixture), of course, but such theories, almost impossible to disprove, probably need much more than a simple "patron-client relationship" proposal and anthropometry to justify them, in a time when we will be able to see almost every meaningful personal exchange in Genomics…
Today – since the finding of Ukraine_Eneolithic sample I6561, of haplogroup R1a-Z93, dated ca. 4200 BC, and likely from the Sredni Stog culture – it seems more likely than ever that the expansion of R1a-Z645 subclades was in fact associated with the spread of steppe admixture probably near the North Pontic forest-steppe region, most likely from the Dnieper-Dniester or Upper Dniester region.
The appearance of a 'late' Z93 subclade already at such an early date, with steppe admixture, makes it still more likely that the Proto-Corded Ware culture, from where Corded Ware migrants of R1a-Z645 lineages later spread, was probably associated with this wide region.
In a parallel but unrelated migration, as it is now clear, steppe admixture also expanded with Yamna settlers of R1b-L23 lineages into the North Pontic steppe – from the North Caspian steppe, where it had developed previously as the Khvalynsk and (likely) Repin cultures -, roughly at the same time as Proto-Corded Ware expanded to the north, ca. 3300-3000 BC, and then expanded to the west into the Balkans (contributing to the formation of Balkan EBA cultures, and to the East Bell Beaker group).
NOTE. A migration of Yamna settlers northward along the Prut dated ca. 3000 BC or later could have justified the appearance of steppe admixture in the Dnieper-Dniester region, as I proposed for the Zvejnieki sample, although dates from Baltic samples are likely too early for that. For this to be corroborated, migrants should be accompanied up to a certain region by R1b-L23 lineages, and this could mean in turn a revival of Anthony's original model of cultural diffusion of 2007. The most likely scenario, however, as predicted by Heyd, given the early appearance of steppe admixture and R1a-Z93 subclades in the forest-steppe during the 5th millennium, is that the admixture happened much earlier than that, fully unrelated to Late PIE migrations.
Diachronic map of Copper Age migrations in Europe ca. 3100-2600 BC
The modern Baltic and Slavic conundrum
As for some people of Northern European ancestry previously supporting a bulletproof Yamna (R1a/R1b) -> Corded Ware migration that was obviously wrong; now supporting different Sredni Stog -> Corded Ware groups representing Indo-Slavonic (and Germanic??) in a model that is clearly wrong: how are these attempts different from Western Europeans supporting the autochthonous continuity of R1b-P312 lineages against all recent data, from Indians supporting the autochthonous continuity of R1a-M417 lineages no matter what, and from the more recent trend of autochthonous continuity theories for N1c lineages and Uralic in Eastern Europe?
Modern Germanic-speaking peoples can trace their common language to Nordic Iron Age Proto-Germanic, Celts to La Tène's expansion of Proto-Celtic, and Romance speakers to the Roman expansion (and to an earlier Proto-Italic), all three dating approximately to the Iron Age. Proto-Slavic is dated much later than that, and probably Proto-Baltic too (or maybe earlier depending on the dialectal proposal), with Balto-Slavic being possibly coeval with Pre-Proto-Germanic and Italo-Celtic, but probably slightly later than that. Also, the language ancestral to Slavic may be (like a theoretical Proto-Romance language) impossible to reconstruct with precision, due to multiple substrate (or superstrate?) influences on the wide territory where Proto-Slavic formed and expanded from, in close alliance with steppe communities of different ethnolinguistic backgrounds.
We know that proto-historic Germanic, Celtic, and Italic peoples spread from relatively small regions, and had almost nothing to do with historic groups speaking their daughter languages, let alone modern speakers. Baltic and Slavic are not different.
NOTE. We have read that Weltzin samples clustered closely to Central Europeans (especially Austrians), and at a certain distance from modern Poles. That's the conclusion of Sell's PhD thesis, and it may be right, if you take only modern samples for comparison. However, if you have read or thought that they represented some kind of "ancestral Germanic vs. Slavic" battle, please imagine Trump's voice for my opinion: Wrroonng, wrroonng, wrroonng. They cluster closely with Bell Beaker migrants, Poland BA, and Únětice (in this order), which we now know thanks to the data from O&M 2018 and Mittnik et al. 2018. And we also know who they don't cluster close too: Corded Ware and Trzciniec samples. Therefore, people from the region near the most likely homelands of Pre-Proto-Germanic and Proto-Balto-Slavic are – as expected – likely descendants from Bell Beaker migrants in Central Europe. The genetic relationship of those ancient samples to modern inhabitants of Central-East Europe? Not obvious – at all.
PCA of samples from Tollense Valley battlefield and some ancient and modern samples.
We also know (and have known for a long time, well before these recent papers) that the oldest attested Indo-European languages – Mycenaean, early Anatolian languages, and Indo-Aryan (through certain words in Mitanni inscriptions) – do not show continuity from the places where they were first attested to the Late and Middle Proto-Indo-European (steppe) homeland either. There should be no problem then in accepting that there is no linguistic, archaeological, or common sense reason to support that Balto-Slavic is older or shows more regional continuity than other IE languages from Europe.
NOTE. Oh yes, Balts saying "Baltic is the most similar language to PIE" I hear you thinking? Uh-huh, sure. And according to some Greeks (supported e.g. by the conclusions from Lazaridis et al. 2017) Mycenaeans were 'autochthonous', and Proto-Greek the most similar to PIE. For many Hindus, Vedic Sanskrit is in fact PIE), and the latest paper by Narasimhan et al. (2018) only reinforces this idea (don't ask me why). Also, Caucasian scholar Gamkrelidze (with Ivanov) supported the origin of the language precisely in the Caucasus, with Armenian being thus the purest language. For Italians fans of Virgil and the Roman Empire, Latin (like Aeneas) comes from Anatolian linguistically and genetically, hence it must be the 'oldest' IE dialect alive… No, wait, Danish scholars Kroonen and Iversen quite recently asserted that Germanic is the oldest to branch off, then it should thus be nearest to PIE! I think you can see a pattern here…And don't forget about the new Vasconic-Uralic hypotheses going on now, with Vasconic fans of R1b changing from Palaeolithic to Mesolithic, and now to European Neolithic and whatnot, or Uralic fans of N1c changing now from Mesolithic EHG to Siberia (for ancestry) or Central Asia (for N1c subclades), or whatever is necessary to believe in 'continuity' of their people following the newest genetic papers… Just pick whatever theory you want, call it "mainstream", and that's it.
So, if there is no reliable archaeological model connecting Bronze or Iron Age cultures to Eastern European cultures which are supposed to represent the Proto-Slavic and Proto-Baltic homelands…why on earth would any reasonable amateur (not to speak about scholars) dare propose any sort of genetic or linguistic continuity for thousands of years from PIE to early Slavs, a people whose first blurry appearance in historical records happened during the Middle Ages in rather turbulent and genetically admixed regions? It does not make any sense, and it had all odds against it. Blond hair, blue eyes, lactase persistence? Sure, and ABO group, brachycephaly, anthropometry… All very scientifish.
Diachronic map of migrations during Classical Antiquity in Europe 250 BC – 250 AD.
Where's Proto-Slavic Wally?
Human ancestry can only help refine solid academic theories, it cannot create one. Every new pet theory used to satisfy modern cultural pre- and misconceptions has failed, and it will fail again, and again, and again…
To have an own anthropological model of prehistoric migration requires time and study. It is not enough to play with software and to misuse traditional academic disciplines just to 'prove' some completely irrelevant, meaningless, and false continuity.
Early Indo-Iranian formed mainly by R1b-Z2103 and R1a-Z93, Corded Ware out of Late PIE-speaking migrations
Y-DNA haplogroup R1b-Z2103 in Proto-Indo-Iranians?
Consequences of O&M 2018 (I): The latest West Yamna "outlier"
Olalde et al. and Mathieson et al. (Nature 2018): R1b-L23 dominates Bell Beaker and Yamna, R1a-M417 resurges in East-Central Europe during the Bronze Age
Reactionary views on new Yamna and Bell Beaker data, and the newest IECWT model
The Indo-European demic diffusion model, and the "R1b – Indo-European" association
The concept of "Outlier" in Human Ancestry (III): Late Neolithic samples from the Baltic region and origins of the Corded Ware culture
New Ukraine Eneolithic sample from late Sredni Stog, near homeland of the Corded Ware culture
Carlos Quiles	Anthropology, Archaeology, Culture, Demic diffusion, Genetics, Indo-European, Linguistics, North-West Indo-European, Proto-Indo-European, Science, Uralic	5 Comments April 9, 2018 April 22, 2018
The origins of the Tumulus culture: Proto-Lusatian and potential Proto-Balto-Slavic origins
Interesting chapter The birth of a new world. Barrows, warriors, and metallurgists, by Przemyslaw Makarowicz. In: Urbańczyk P. (Ed.) THE PAST SOCIETIES. Polish lands from the first evidence of human presence to the Early Middle Ages, Warszawa 2017, vol. 3, U. Bugaj (Ed.) (2000 – 500 BC), Warszawa, pp. 127-186.
Some interesting excerpts from the introduction (emphasis mine):
In the 17th century BC the northern reaches of the Únětice culture oecumene experienced a structural crisis and a settlement hiatus; no such interruption in development occurred in the southern or western regions, or further west in the circle of the Blechkreiskulturen (Innerhofer 2000; Müller 2012, 257f.). In light of the most recent research, the decline of Únětice structures in the north was associated with a growing social and ecological crisis that resulted e.g., in the well-documented regression in the development of the fortified settlement in Bruszczewo in Greater Poland/Wielkopolska, which occurred ca. 1650/1600 BC (Kneisel 2012; Kneisel 2013, 101f.; Müller 2012). The settlement structure in that region only stabilized after several decades, with the emergence of Tumulus culture (Schurbein 2009; Cwaliński 2012, 16). In some parts of Central Europe (e.g., Bohemia, Bavaria, Hesse, Thuringia) a relatively gradual and smooth transition in the form of bronze items and pottery was observed between the periods of BA2 and BB1, diagnostic for the Early and Middle Bronze Age respectively (Rittershofer 1984; Innerhofer 2000). The term 'pre-Tumulus' horizon (BA3) was introduced to denote the stage that followed the disappearance of Early Bronze Age cultural structures and preceded the formation of Tumulus culture at the foothills of the Alps (Innerhofer 2000, 241f.)
The processes behind the development of this new cultural phenomenon may become clearer if one considers the origins of the new ideology of warriorhood apparent in the most progressive formations of the late stages of the early Bronze Age in the Carpathian Basin (Vandkilde 2007, 129; 2014; the beginnings of the Middle Bronze Age in Hungarian chronology; Hänsel 1968; Bóna 1992; Harding 2000, Fig. 1.3).This factor is particularly relevant in the case of the centralized communities of the Otomani-Füzesabony culture. Its members built impressive fortified settlements, knew advanced methods of bronze casting, and maintained a vast network of contacts that connected the north of Europe with the eastern reaches of the Mediterranean world (e.g., Bouzek 1985; Furmánek, Veliačik, Vladár 1991; Kristiansen, Larrson 2005; David 2007)
The composition of some spectacular hoards and the presence of military items in some of the graves associated with such communities may suggest that a new type of individualized elite (military aristocracy) emerged in this very culture (Kristiansen 1998, 376f.; 1999; Kristiansen, Larrson 2005). The attractive ideology would then have spread to the west and north-west and be adapted by the 'post-Early-Bronze', de-centralized and mobile communities (most likely based on kinship) of animal farmers inhabiting the upper Danube basin and the upper Rhine basin, as well as by the peoples of the Nordic regions (Vandkilde 2014, Fig. 5). This process went hand in hand with the dissemination of the custom of tumulus-building and the associated religious concepts, funerary practices, and territorial behaviour. The mechanism behind the adoption of this custom remains unknown. It may have been the result of imitating the barrows of Corded Ware culture, already present in the landscape of Central Europe – a similar process took place in the communities of the Trzciniec circle (Makarowicz 2009; 2010; 2011). It is also possible that the tumuli were based on the few existing Únětice barrows, though in this case the similarities are more apparent in the stone elements beneath the barrows' mound. In both cases there was no direct contact between the earlier cultural formation and the emerging group.
Spatial range of the Silesian-Greater Polish Tumulus Culture ('Vorlauzitzer Kultur') after M. Gedl 1992, amended
The new lifestyle became a pan-European phenomenon, but involved a considerable degree of regional diversity that stemmed primarily from contact with local tradition (Bóna 1975; Gedl 1989; Jockenhövel, Kubach [eds.] 1994; David 2002; Jockenhövel 2013). But how did this model spread? It appears that analogies for this development may be found in the social processes and interactions that took place at the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC and led to the emergence of the Bell Beaker phenomenon (Burgess 1986; Nicolis 2001 [ed.]; Czebreszuk 2001; 2004 [ed.]; Heyd 2013; Van der Linden 2013, further literature therein). The most important elements of the 'Tumulus set of cultural patterns' included: warriorhood (conveyed through the presence of individual weaponry as grave goods), characteristic types of territorial behaviour (methods of familiarizing space that largely relied on constructing tumuli – monumental graves with a unique external form and internal architecture that was singular, spectacular, and immensely symbolic), and a specific array of valuables made of bronze or, less frequently, of amber or glass (such items indicated the status, gender, and sometimes also the social role of the deceased with whom they were buried). Local cultural milieux transmitted and adapted a set of ideological, social, and political principles that gave the emerging formation coherence and a new 'quality'. The symbolism of the stone barrow construction (rings, kerbs, cores, rays, etc.), the high value of bronze and amber, and the emergence of the custom of cremation suggests that 'Tumulus' communities had a large part to play in the dissemination of the solar cult during the Middle Bronze Age (cf. Kristiansen, Larsson 2005; Czebreszuk 2011, 164-171).
The decline of the Central European early Bronze Age civilization and the birth of a new, pan-European formation was a complex process that lasted at least several decades. It may be surmised that the downfall of Únětice structures and the Otomani-Füzesabony-Gyulavarsánd complex in the Carpathian Basin was brought about primarily by internal structural crises, yet the reasons for the emergence of Tumulus culture lay in the attractive, almost 'Dionysian' ideology of warriorhood. Its solidification coincided with the decline of the 'old' Early Bronze Age elites that ruled over centralized structures that were territorial in character (fortified settlements with proto-urban characteristics) and were buried in magnificent, richly furnished graves covered with mounds (Fürstengräber). It was also concurrent with the emergence of active kinship-based and de-centralized groups led by the 'new' elite class of warriors (the beginnings of military aristocracy?). The significance of such groups continued to grow during the pivotal period – and the decline of the Únětice world and the final turbulent phase of the development of centres in the Carpathian Basin may well be thus described. The process was facilitated by the escalation of military conflicts that occurred in the Bronze Age (Harding 1999; 2007; Kristiansen 1999; Osgood, Monks, with Thoms 2000; Kristiansen, Larsson 2005; Hårde 2006; Vandkilde 2011; 2014). War became an inherent part of social life, as indicated by the increasing presence of weaponry in male graves, rock carvings and steles depicting warriors and their equipment, as well as arrowheads and spearheads embedded in the bones (soft tissues) of the deceased, and plentiful evidence of injuries caused by melee weapons (e.g., Osgood 2006). New types of weaponry (swords, spears) started to be used in the first half of the 2nd millennium BC, leading to more efficient methods of combat (e.g., Harding 2006; Thrane 2006). This must have resulted in the emergence of new types of units, combat styles, and military strategies. It may also be surmised that 'Tumulus' communities adopted a hitherto unknown, institutionalized model of warriorhood based on groups of men who dealt with warfare professionally (cf. Sarauw 2007, 66).
The origin of the Tumulus culture meant therefore a pan-European ideological socio-political and ideological change, that may be associated with the last true North-West Indo-European dialect continuum in Europe, as evidenced in Archaeology by long-distance cultural contacts, in Linguistics potentially by late layers of shared vocabulary, and in Ancient Genomics by the different origins of combatants studied from the the Tollense valley.
Settlement points of the Silesian-Greater Polish Tumulus Culture in the Prosna-Odra interfluve ('close zone') superimposed on a hypsometric map. By Jakub Niebieszczański
The origins of Tumulus culture in what is now Polish territory most likely resulted from a combination of different factors. In the hitherto prevailing narrative its arrival in the Odra-middle Vistula interfluve was associated with an invasion (aggressive migration) of the Tumulus peoples from enclaves in the middle Danube basin, the destruction of Únětice centres and the Nowa Cerekwia Group, and the subsequent conquest of the western territories inhabited by members of the Trzciniec culture (Gedl 1975, 81; 1989; 1992; Gediga 1978). There is, however, much evidence to suggest that the provenance of this cultural group is more complex.
Recent archaeological research and environmental analyses indicate that the decline of the Únětice culture in the northern reaches of its scope (e.g., the economic and settlement crisis of the Kościan agglomeration with its centre in Bruszczewo and the princely barrow graves in Łęki Małe) was mainly the result of excessive human activity and overly intense exploitation of natural resources (Kneisel 2012; 2013; Müller 2012). Palynological data from the period of1700-1500 BC collected in this part of the North European Plain indicates a decline of human activity. It coincides with the devolution of settlement centres (hamlets and necropolises) dated to the end of the Early Bronze Age and the beginning of the Middle Bronze Age (depopulation?). The decline of Early Bronze Age settlements occurred between 1700 and 1600 BC, whereas the beginning of the Silesian-Greater Polish Tumulus culture may be dated to 1600-1500 BC. A renewed increase in human activity, indicated e.g., by the 'opening' of the landscape, did not occur until ca. 1500-1400 BC, in the classic period of the development of 'Tumulus' cultural structures (Kneisel 2012, 221).
The whole paper is interesting from the point of view of the potential formation of a Proto-Balto-Slavic community in the Proto-Lusatian or Silesian-Greater Polish Tumulus culture, before its expansion to the east.
After O&M 2018, the only plausible alternative to this model of Balto-Slavic homeland is that Proto-Lusatian represents a Temematic community instead, and an Indo-Slavonic community formed in East Yamna, whereby Balto-Slavic would have possibly expanded with Srubna, and only much later over Temematic territory, absorbing its language as a North-West Indo-European substratum.
The Tollense Valley battlefield: the North European 'Trojan war' that hints to western Balto-Slavic origins
Germanic tribes during the Barbarian migrations show mainly R1b, also I lineages
mtDNA suggest original East Germanic population linked to Jutland Iron Age and Bell Beaker
Admixture of Srubna and Huns in Hungarian conquerors
Genetic prehistory of the Baltic Sea region and Y-DNA: Corded Ware and R1a-Z645, Bronze Age and N1c
Bell Beaker/early Late Neolithic (NOT Corded Ware/Battle Axe) identified as forming the Pre-Germanic community in Scandinavia
Heyd, Mallory, and Prescott were right about Bell Beakers
Carlos Quiles	Anthropology, Archaeology, Culture, Indo-European languages, Linguistics, North-West Indo-European	4 Comments March 29, 2018 March 29, 2018
Germanic–Balto-Slavic and Satem ('Indo-Slavonic') dialect revisionism by amateur geneticists, or why R1a lineages *must* have spoken Proto-Indo-European
I feel there has recently been an increase in references to quite old – and generally outdated – terms, such as Germano-Balto-Slavic and "Indo-Slavonic" (i.e. Satem), described as Late Indo-European dialects. This is happening in forums and blogs that deal with "Indo-European genetics", and only marginally (if at all) with the main anthropological subjects that form Indo-European studies, that is Linguistics and Archaeology.
Firstly, let me go apparently against the very aim of this post, by supporting the common traits that these dialects actually share.
Satem Indo-European or Indo-Slavonic
Balto-Slavic is a complex dialect, whose known proto-history and history offers already a difficult picture. Contrary to the opinion of many, there is no single document that can identify the terms Antes, Sklavenes, and Venedi with the cultures that are usually identified as speaking languages ancestral to East Slavic, South Slavic, and West Slavic . These names were used interchangeably in the Byzantine Empire, which was obviously not involved in classifying Slavic peoples by their linguistic branches… For more on the historical identification of Slavic tribes, read Florin Curta's The Making of the Slavs: History and Archaeology of the Lower Danube Region, c. 500-700 A.D. On the identification of potential candidates for early Slavic and Baltic cultures, you can read the appropriate entries in the Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture, by Mallory & Adams.
Baltic and Slavic tribes seem to have a too recently recorded history to be able to confidently trace back their cultural predecessors. In its recent history, close to the formation of its community, Proto-Slavic must have had intense contacts with Iranian-speaking peoples. Also, previously, if R1a-M417 subclades are in fact the most common lineages expanded with the Corded Ware culture (as it seems now), they have no doubt shared a common language, most likely a non-Indo-European one. Not Indo-European in the strict sense, at least, since it formed part most likely of the Indo-Uralic continuum that must have been spoken during the Mesolithic in Eastern Europe, and a language probably nearer to Uralic than to classic Indo-European.
A strong connection between Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian in a common Satem branch, as supported by Kortlandt (see e.g. Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian 2016, or a reconstruction of Schleicher's Fable in PIE branches), would imply that a Corded Ware culture from the Dnieper-Donets – speaking a Graeco-Aryan dialect – interacted for centuries with Uralic and other Graeco-Aryan languages, only later influenced by North-West Indo-European (as late as its contact with East Germanic during the Barbarian migration). This model cannot justify the shared traits of Balto-Slavic with North-West Indo-European, unless a third, substrate language – like Holzer's (1989) Temematic proposal – is added to the equation. Such models are not impossible, but seem too complex.
On the other hand, linguistically Balto-Slavic seems to have split in its known branches quite early, and traits such as the satemization trend appear to have affected each main dialect (Baltic and Slavic) differently, as attested in the different ruki development, hence the assumption of its early but different influence of the trend to both Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic (or, more exactly, Indo-Iranian, Baltic, and Slavic). Also, the common North-West Indo-European vocabulary, as well as morphological trends shared by NW IE dialects, clearly affects the oldest layer of both languages (hence the parent Proto-Balto-Slavic too), which predates thus the satemization trend, and further contributes to the idea of a common root between West Indo-European (or Italo-Celtic), Northern Indo-European (the language ancestral to Pre-Germanic), and Proto-Balto-Slavic.
Germano-Balto-Slavic or North European
A common group between Germanic and Balto-Slavic is justified by the presence of certain common isoglosses, such as the famous shared oblique cases in *-m- instead of *-bh-, and support for such a group is found recently e.g. in Gramkelidze-Ivanov (1993-1994) – who nevertheless support a North-West Indo-European continuum -, or in Jasanoff, for whom both languages (regarding phonological traits) "began their post-IE history together".
Proto-Indo-European language tree, including early (Indo-Hittite) and late (European) stages by Trager & Smith (1950). From the paper On the Origin of North Indo-European, Gimbutas (1952)
On the other hand, such shared traits could have derived either from old contacts – supported traditionally because of their proximity -, or by a common substrate to both without a need for direct contacts, as supported by Kortlandt in Baltic, Slavic, Germanic (2016), among others).
The fact that there might have been a different, third language involved – the hypothetic Temematic substrate language to Balto-Slavic, potentially nearer to Baltic because of the stronger superstrate influence in Slavic – further complicates the dialectal identification of Baltic and Slavic – that is, if one supports a common Germanic and Balto-Slavic group.
This Northern group was supported by Gimbutas (1952) based on a previous linguistic paper by Trager & Smith (1950) – published in the infancy of dialectal PIE differentiation -, but this model is not mainstream nowadays. The linguistic model followed by Anthony (based on Ringe, Warnow, and Taylor 2002), did not link Germanic to Balto-Slavic (or to Italo-Celtic, for that sake) more than to any other dialect, but it seems that the three might have spread from the same western (Repin-derived) Yamna region, according to their maps. See for example their recent article The Indo-European Homeland from Linguistic and Archaeological Perspectives, which sums up and partly corrects Anthony's detailed account of steppe migrations in the already classic book The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World (2007). Dialectal groups and implications are unclear from their publications, with changing linguistic schemes since 2007, but with a quite stable archaeological framework.
Dialectal Late Indo-European
I am not implying that a common group of Balto-Slavic with Indo-Aryan (or of Germanic with Balto-Slavic) is fully discarded by linguistics: history and archaeology can indeed support a close interaction between these languages, and there has been historically some support to the inclusion of Balto-Slavic within a Graeco-Aryan group. However, Linguistics and Archaeology are each day more supportive of the association of Italo-Celtic with Germanic in a North-West Indo-European group, and Balto-Slavic with them (Oettinger 1997). See for example any recent article or book by Mallory, Adams, Beekes, Adrados, etc., or if you prefer, refer to the mainstream models followed by scholars in the German, Spanish, Leiden, or American schools. As you probably know, Clackson for the British school supports an abstract "constellation analogy" model for the language reconstruction, and the French school is dominated by archaeologist Jean Paul Demoule's rejection of a Proto-Indo-European community; both schools, as you can imagine, will have to revise their theories in light of recent genetic studies…
Regarding Archaeology, North-West Indo-European must have expanded with the westward Yamna expansion, i.e. associated with the Bell Beaker expansion. That was supported in mainstream Archaeology before the most recent genetic studies.
Even Anthony (2007), who has related the Corded Ware culture to the expansion of Indo-European languages through cultural diffusion, recognizing the expansion of Yamna migrants to the west (identifying them with Italo-Celtic and Proto-Greek speakers), has to offer two or three separate cultural diffusion events (!), whereby Pre-Germanic, Proto-Balto-Slavic, and Proto-Indo-Iranian had been learned by the influence of the Yamna culture on neighbouring (unrelated) peoples of Corded Ware cultures: in Central European – Single Grave culture (from Pre-Germanic Usatovo), Middle Dnieper culture (from Balto-Slavic in the Contact Zone), and Potapovka (from Poltavka) cultures, respectively. No actual spread or migration from Yamna into Corded Ware has been supported since Gimbutas.
Balto-Slavic is indeed a complex group of languages – with some supporting (since Toporov and Ivanov proposal in the 1960s) three dialectal groups, composed of East Baltic, West Baltic, and Slavic branches (thus implying an older split of Baltic). Because of the close interaction of eastern Europe with Eurasian invasions, the nature of their language won't probably ever be solved. Genetics is not the savior that overcomes these difficulties; so long it has only brought more (albeit no doubt interesting) questions, and even though their correct interpretation might offer some new light, we will be far from obtaining a clear picture of the cultural and linguistic development of Proto-Baltic and Proto-Slavic communities.
What I am criticizing here, therefore, is this recent revisionist trend whereby PIE must have been spoken by R1a-Z645 lineages, a trend found not only among amateur geneticists. I am beginning to think – judging from online comments, posts or tweets – that this trend is becoming stronger as a reaction to the fact that not a single R1a-Z645 sample has been found in Yamna or its expansion. These new revisionist models depict a common group of R1a-Z645 lineages hidden somewhere in the steppe, sharing some sort of Indo-Germanic (??) group, or argue for a shared Late PIE community without dialectal divisions, to justify its potential find somewhere marginal to the PIE territory, and then a later development of Corded Ware into Bell Beaker cultures (and, it is implied, peoples).
While not impossible, these are unlikely models, not based on knowledge but on wishes, since linguistic data strongly suggest a North-West Indo-European dialect including Italo-Celtic, Germanic, and (at the very least in its substrate and thus western R1a lineages) Balto-Slavic, and archaeological findings don't show any meaningful population exchange between Corded Ware and Yamna… That is, it hadn't until after the first famous papers on the so-called 'steppe admixture' of 2015, when (surprise!) Kristiansen has already jumped on the bandwagon (and Anthony seems to be beginning to suggest the same) of previously discarded Yamna -> Corded Ware, and Corded Ware -> Bell Beaker migrations.
Not a single serious researcher can deny that a hidden community of R1a-417 in Yamna is possible. But no one should support that it is the most likely explanation to the current genetic picture, whether based on Linguistic, Archaeology, Anthropology, or Genetics (be it phylogeography or admixture analyses).
I think this recent trend must therefore be the fruit of the influence of previous, deeply entrenched concepts regarding the Corded Ware culture and its link with Proto-Indo-European. These concepts are based on Gimbutas' Kurgan model, Anthony's revision of it – explaining the expansion as multiple cultural diffusions (thus renewing Gimbutas' claim) -, and early studies of modern populations' haplogroups. Apart from those trends, especially worrying for the future of the field (if it is to be taken seriously), is the interest of some pressure groups, including especially eastern Slavic peoples of R1a lineages, and Finnic speakers of N1c lineages, who are linking some fantastic ancient ethnolinguistic community to their modern national pride.
"European dialect" expansion of Proto-Indo-European according to The Indo-Europeans: Archeological Problems, Gimbutas (1963). Observe the similarities of the western European expansion to the recently proposed expansion of R1b lineages with western Yamna and Bell Beaker.
Adapting to reality
You can find support for anything you like in anthropology: there is certainly a paper out there that apparently supports your personal view on prehistoric ethnolinguistic Europe. You only have to do a quick search in Academia.edu, and you can justify whatever new genetic results you personally obtained playing with the freely available datasets and open source software – e.g. from Reich's lab, or the famous ADMIXTURE. If you are one of those few interested in the field who haven't tried it out yet, Razib Khan helps introduce you to DIY Genetics, so you can show off some graphics and proportions, like most popular bloggers and forum users are doing. Then you can also publish your results in BioRxiv, just to try it out.
So there is no merit at all in justifying these genetic results by supporting a potential anthropological scenario for it. Heck, you can invent it! Here, I said it. Anyone can do Anthropology. In fact, it seems that everyone does Human Evolutionary Genetics nowadays, no matter their background. Some lab knowledge and experience in doctoral research seems to be enough.
Admixture analyses are obtained using one or more algorithms, which have a limited potential to inform of possible migrations (its ultimate objective, at least regarding its complementary function to Archaeology within Indo-European studies). Such algorithms invariably have:
Intrinsic constraints: You have to understand each algorithm's intrinsic limitations to be able to apply them correctly, and to derive meaningful but cautious conclusions. Using software commands and obtaining graphics and percentages does not imply you understand the constraints at stake. If you have tried them out, you have seen their great limitations; if you don't see them, you certainly realize how little you understand of them.
Extrinsic constraints. Most are known, and often mentioned explicitly in research papers:
Few DNA samples, from limited sites.
Scarce and variable material recovered from these samples.
Quality of the retrieval, human errors, etc.
Lack of precise anthropological context.
Admixture results (whether by professionals or amateurs) are nevertheless often illustrated with tailored anthropological models: in case of the renown papers most likely because of ignorance of anthropological context, broad (philosophical or theoretic) and precise (historical), or lack of sufficient understanding of the different fields involved, and in case of many amateur geneticists also (often) to justify a desire for a prehistoric ethnolinguistic identification similar to their social or political agendas, in a new Kossinnian trend.
Admixture analyses are not wrong per se. It is wrong to trust them to inform you of something they can't; because they need context, and ancient samples need ancient context, which in prehistoric times is obviously quite limited. If you don't know as much as possible about the ancient context (i.e. Linguistics, Archaeology, Anthropology), you get the wrong conclusions. Period. If you look for papers on ancient context expecting to find whichever model fits your results (or worse, your wish), that is called bias. Don't expect to get the right conclusions doing that, either. If you find it, that's called confirmation bias. Such results are not useful. For anyone, not even you, you just deceive yourself and maybe others.
Some apparently think that a group of geneticists can achieve a meaningful interpretation of data just by adding one or more archaeologists to the research group – or as 'co-authors' of individual research papers. Wrong again. Ten people with IQ 20 don't make the reasoning of a person with IQ 200 (not that I believe in measuring intelligence, but you get the point). Similarly, twenty researchers, each one with knowledge exclusively (or almost exclusively) of their own field, can't achieve a meaningful explanation for the data obtained. Geneticists look for an anthropological model that coherently fits their results. Archaeologists will look for a model known to them that fits the genetic results (or more likely the interpretations thereof) they are given. That way, when working together, they can achieve a common ground. If neither of them understands the complexities and shortcomings of the others' materials and methods (and their whole background), the results will be formally correct, but still wrong. They need to know all aspects involved in the others' fields in great detail, to understand all potential implications of new data.
Since the advent of ancient DNA samples and especially PCA analyses, phylogeography (leaning predominantly on Y chromosomes) has been relegated to a (probably deserved) second place in assessing DNA samples. However, as Razib Khan states, "in the scaffold of the ancient DNA framework it can resolve some issues". I think this is one of those issues, an issue that is not trivial at all – in that it affects migration models from the steppe at a critical period of linguistic expansion -, and the shortcomings of not relying on it are becoming quite evident with each new publication.
Many amateur geneticists that support the mainstream genetic models of the past two years don't like the ad hoc explanations that others have been constantly giving to support their previous theories. After all, it seems unfair that some people would reject data that offers an obvious prehistoric picture of populations, because of the unwillingness to change one's own preconceptions, right? For example, against the mainstream steppe migration theory, we have those who support that R1b must have been western European (Palaeolithic or Mesolithic) hunter-gatherers expanded from Iberia; or those who want R1a to have expanded from India. No matter how strong the evidence is against those models, some groups harbour a desire to fit anything in one's previous image of reality.
However, some people who can't stand those absurd ad hoc explanations and rationalisations, are quite ready to embrace the idea that, somehow, during the Chalcolithic expansion of Yamna, an imaginary community was formed where communities of divergent lineages R1a-Z645 (found mostly north of the steppe and later in Corded Ware cultures) and R1b-M269 (found mostly in the steppe and later in the cultures known to have evolved from Yamna, like Afanasevo, Vučedol, and Bell Beaker) lived together and spoke the same language for centuries, or even millennia. And that community would have existed after a Late Neolithic westward expansion of the Khvalynsk culture, and another westward expansion of the Repin culture, both of which probably reduced the diversity of Y-DNA lineages within Yamna: the first to R1b-M269 lineages, the second to R1b-L23 subclades.
Both communities of R1a and R1b lineages, described then as united until the Yamna expansion (although no sample of R1a-Z645 subclade has been ascribed to any steppe expansion) would have expanded somehow separately, R1a-M417 exclusively to the north into Corded Ware – without any migratory connection found between Yamna and Corded Ware in mainstream Archaeology -, and forming thus dialectal groups (like "Germano-Balto-Slavic" or "Indo-Slavonic") that are not supported by mainstream linguistics.
On the other hand, R1b-Z2103 and R1b-L51 lineages, which were already separated within Yamna and probably forming different communities, are known to have spread to the west with the Yamna expansion, in some places and cultures they are found together (like Bell Beaker), which would be expected in a common migration of separate groups. No single R1b-L23 sample has been found in the Corded Ware expansion, no single R1a-M417 individual in the Yamna expansion.
These convoluted explanations of how R1a lineages must have spoken Indo-European are based on the assumption that admixture analyses (from the current limited data, with the current wrong interpretation of their context) necessarily means that Corded Ware peoples spread as Yamna migrants – hence R1a lineages must come from Yamna – and then spread into Bell Beaker.
It is possible, and in my opinion expected, that eventually some R1a-M417 subclade will be found in Yamna samples (east or west), and some haplogroup R1b-M269 (especially R1b-L23 and subclades) will be found in samples from Corded Ware cultures (west or east). Indeed, there must have been close contacts between both cultures (between Yamna–Southeast Europe–East Bell Beaker and Corded Ware), and not only through female exogamy. It would be quite strange not to find a single R1b-L23 sample in Corded Ware cultures, or an R1a-M417 sample in Late Proto-Indo-European-speaking territories. Those scattered samples, whenever they are found, will probably not change the data: but they might give a reason for some to keep supporting a model that is not the most likely one. It won't still be the most reasonable, the simplest model that explains all data.
What it means to be an 'ethnic' Balt or Slav
Older models – older even than Gimbutas' kurgan model of the 1950s, as you can see -, by presupposing an instant breakup of a unitary Proto-Indo-European language into different linguistic communities without previous dialectal relation with each other, cannot explain our common European linguistic heritage. More recent models based on recent genetic studies (and on outdated or newly invented linguistic and archaeological theories), by trying to connect genetically (directly) modern eastern Europeans with Proto-Indo-Europeans, are in fact disconnecting Balto-Slavic peoples from the rest of Europe for three thousand years, and connecting them either with Uralic or with Indo-Iranian speakers. Ethnolinguistic identification, however, is not about genetics – and it has never been, and I hope it will never be -; it is related to self-identification into groups, and more broadly to a common culture, and often specifically a common language.
In terms of language, it makes sense to support a situation where Balto-Slavic was a North-West Indo-European dialect (sharing a common language ancestral to Germanic and Italo-Celtic too), with certain ancient (Uralic?) innovative traits shared with Indo-Iranian and partly with Germanic (but with no direct contacts necessary between these branches). Its recent transition to a Baltic and Slavic proto-languages, already by eastern European groups, shows their strong external influence from Uralic and Iranian, respectively, so an identification of Balto-Slavic with the expansion of R1a lineages is probably to be found in a western group of R1a-Z282 subclades expanding eastwards between the Bronze Age and the Iron Age.
Eastern Europe's Indo-European heritage (Balto-Slavic) is therefore connected to the western European one (Italo-Celtic and Germanic), each with its own linguistic substrate and influences, but with a common, shared ancient language. North-West Indo-European derived in turn from Late Indo-European, a language ancestral to Indo-Iranian and Palaeo-Balkan languages, the latter showing continued contacts with western Europe for millennia.
In the minimum-case scenario – for supporters of a Satem proto-language like Kortlandt – the language substrate to Baltic and Slavic must be a North-West Indo-European language (to fit its shared traits with North-West Indo-European), like Holzer's Temematic (a hypothesis which Kortlandt seems to support) that would have then been recently absorbed by Satem speakers of Eastern Europe. In that context, central European R1a-Z282 lineages (which form the majority of West Slavic lineages) would have spoken that NWIE language for millennia , until proto-historic times, when a cultural diffusion of a Graeco-Aryan dialect (mainly spoken by R1a-Z93 or eastern European R1a-Z282 lineages, then) would have happened in eastern Europe, and then a cultural diffusion (or demic diffusion?) of Slavic-speaking peoples would have happened to the west, into central Europe.
In none of these scenarios is any sort of Proto-Indo-European -> Balto-Slavic ethnolinguistic, genetic, or territorial continuity to be seen. The former model is not only the simpler explanation for Slavic and Baltic, but it is also the communis opinio today by most Indo-Europeanists, it is supported by Archaeology, and Genetics is likely to keep supporting it with each new paper. I don't find anything shameful, or that could diminish modern Baltic and Slavic identities a bit, by accepting any of those models, so I don't understand the imperative need some people seem to have of identifying R1a lineages with the Yamna expansion and thus Proto-Indo-European.
For those who will still be vying for a more prominent role of haplogroup R1a in the Proto-Indo-European ethnogenesis, there are alternative older scenarios to the arrival of Proto-Indo-European to the steppe, as there are older models for an Anatolian origin of PIE. So, for example I already laid out the possibility that the invasion of R1a-M417 brought Indo-European (or, more precisely, Indo-Uralic) to eastern Europe – as part of a Uralo-Yukaghir or Paleo-Siberian group -, while R1b communities may have originally been speakers of Afroasiatic (cf. R1b-V88 and the potential Afroasiatic homeland in Lake Megachad), and R2 would have been associated with the spread of Dravidian (and maybe Kartvelian and Altaic), all of them departing from a common Nostratic associated with haplogroup R. This model could find support in genetics in the link found between Mesolithic Northeast Europeans and Neolithic Siberians, from an Ancient North Eurasian (ANE) population probably rich in Y-chromosome haplogroup R1a.
This is just one of many highly hypothetic ancient scenarios, and it requires more assumptions than a continuity of Indo-Uralic (or even Indo-Uralic and Afroasiatic) with R1b lineages – R1a potentially marking the spread of Paleo-Siberian languages -, and above all it is based on controversial linguistic macrofamilies, not (yet?) supported by mainstream anthropological disciplines. It is nevertheless one theory certain romantics can place their hopes in, as R1b communities of the steppe become accepted as those originally speaking (Middle and Late) Proto-Indo-European in the steppe.
I am not saying I am right. There is still too much to be said and corrected. In fact, I could be wrong, and we may lack a lot of interesting data: there might have been a late R1a-R1b North-West Indo-European-speaking community within western Yamna, and we might need to revise what we knew about Archaeology yet again (and maybe even Linguistics!) before admixture algorithms; then maybe geneticists have come to save the day after all. However, all anthropological evidence points strongly (and genetic studies more strongly with each new study) to the image we had previous to the first genetic data based on haplogroups.
I think it is preposterous of some researchers (no matter if professional or amateur geneticists, or archaeologists, or even linguists) to think algorithms can beat more than two hundred years and thousands of works on this matter. In Academia, mathematics rarely revolutionize a field; it could usually help, but it can just make you sound scientifish, and point in the wrong direction.
And no, I am not smarter than the rest, I can only judge from what I know, and that is always too little, far less than I would like to. But maybe I am in a more neutral position regarding the end result, given my renewed skepticism in revolutionary methods to solve academic problems, and my indifference as to a western European or eastern European origin of R1b or R1a lineages. And I am not alone in my lack of confidence in the interpretation of recent genetic admixture results – read Voker Heyd's papers, for example, if you want the view of a renown and experienced archaeologist who was in the field of Indo-European studies earlier than any of those now popular geneticists.
In fact, I also fell for the R1a-Corded Ware expansion of Late Indo-European, and before many in the Anthropological fields, and with even less proof, back when we only had haplogroups of modern populations and the promises of Cavalli-Sforza. When I decided to publish a grammar to learn Indo-European as a modern language, the aim was to offer a mainstream reconstruction of Late Proto-Indo-European without adding my own contributions; despite this, I added the newly, archaeogenetically-supported Corded Ware migration model (see A Grammar of Modern Indo-European, Third Edition, pp. 74 and ff.).
I guess I liked the picture of an old romantic Europe, divided in western Vasconic (R1b) and eastern Uralic (N1c) hunter-gatherers (and later farmers) being invaded by warring kurgan-makers from the steppe (R1a) … And I really liked the article of Haak et al. (2015) – the first one I read on this subject -, which I saw, like everyone else, as supporting what many of us already believed about a single, common expansion of North-West Indo-European into western Europe. It also made our life – regarding the linguistic unity of Balto-Slavic with the West Indo-European core – much easier…
Chalcolithic expansion from Yamna into Corded Ware (as early North-West Indo-European dialects), as interpreted in the second edition of A Grammar of Modern Indo-European.
Recent papers, when compared to what linguists and archaeologists had been saying for years – before even Y-DNA haplogroup was a thing for any of these now popular genetic labs (not to speak about internet geneticists) -, leave little space for doubt right now. I embraced the results of haplogroup analysis of modern populations, which seemed to support an expansion of Proto-Indo-European R1a-lineages with the Corded Ware culture, and dismissed thus Gimbutas' and Anthony's model (of a Yamna -> Bell Beaker expansion of Italo-Celtic). I also embraced the results of the publications on genetics of 2015 with open arms.
But, I was able to change my mind when the careful observation of individual samples of these recent studies began to contradict what we thought, and I did so publicly only recently (publishing the Indo-European demic diffusion model), and more strongly after the latest papers (publishing the updated second edition), without remorse. And I will reverse that decision again if needed, and change it again and again as I feel necessary, no matter how many times. In Science, to adapt to new data does not make you a brownnoser, it makes you a scientist. Not to adapt to new data does not make you a man of firm ideals, or any chivalrous concept you might have about that, it makes you look ignorant and biased. It's that simple.
Some of you may think that there is a third way: to keep an old, now unlikely idea you have supported in the past, but not bragging about it in the meantime until it is proven fully wrong, just in case it is demonstrated to be right in the end – because then you might claim you were right all along, like you had some magic understanding or hidden data the rest of us didn't. I don't think that's the correct way to behave in a scientific environment, either. That makes you a coward. And you wouldn't have been right all along: you would have been right, then wrong, then right again. Everybody can see that, and so do you.
Geneticists working on future publications should be planning ahead of what might happen. The overconfidence of Haak et al. (2015), Mathieson et al. (2015), and Allentoft et al. (2015), including Lazaridis et al. (2016), in supporting a Yamna -> Corded Ware migration, and a Corded Ware -> Bell Beaker migration are understandable in a rapidly growing field that didn't leave enough time to study complex anthropological questions. The recent errors of following that simplistic and wrong model in Mathieson et al. (2017), and Olalde et al. (2017), coupled with Kristiansen's (2017) and Anthony's (2017) new interpretations (to fit the conclusions of those genetic studies), can be forgiven, because of all the fuss created around the Steppe admixture concept, and the desire of journals to publish popular papers, and of researchers to go with the tide and gain some popularity along the way.
From now on, however, if the evidence keeps pointing in the same direction, a lack of attention to anthropological detail will be simple wishful ignorance, and that cannot be forgiven in any field that strives to ascertaining the truth. If continued, this trend will damage the field of Human Evolutionary Biology for years – at least in the view of anthropologists, who are the real filter of this field's conclusions -, when its current results prove wrong. Genetic studies will be banished from anthropological studies, dismissed as a pseudo-science, and avoided by any scientific or academic journal worthy of a minimum self-respect.
To regain trust in a field that purportedly uses "more scientific methods" but is nonetheless proven that wrong for years in its essential assumption (a Yamna -> Corded Ware migration model), and especially when it is associated with the traditionally despised 'Kossinnian trends', will be a hard task for those involved. So many postdoc offers in so many labs being created right now will vanish, as the interest in publishing papers of this discredited field will disappear. This could also threaten the recently renewed impulse by archaeologists and linguists of migration models, which had been rejected for a long time, giving impulse to those who deny them ( e.g. in the UK and in France), or who just don't want to see Archaeology or Linguistics get involved with such a controversial question, or even between each other.
High-impact factor journals like Nature, Science, PNAS, and those not so famous, as well as their reviewers and readers, are doing a disservice to the endeavour of ascertaining the historical truth, if they allow this to happen without protesting. But such consequences for the field will be their making, and not that of suspicious anthropologists, who do well in distrusting any revolutionary results published by overconfident researchers from newly developed and too broadly defined subfields.
The Aryan migration debate, the Out of India models, and the modern "indigenous Indo-Aryan" sectarianism
The over-simplistic "Kossinian Model": homogeneous peoples speaking a common language within clearly delimited cultures
(Note: featured image is licensed CC-by-sa 4.0 from crates at Wikipedia)
Carlos Quiles	Archaeology, Culture, Demic diffusion, Genetics, History, Indo-European, Indo-European languages, Linguistics	32 Comments July 23, 2017 December 30, 2017
Wiik's theory about the spread of Uralic into east and central Europe, and the Uralic substrate in Germanic and Balto-Slavic
I recently wrote about how Wiik's model was wrong in supporting a Mesolithic European Vasconic-Uralic harmony – genetically based on the modern distribution of R1b vs. N1c haplogroups -, and thus also the disruption of this harmony by Indo-Europeans (supposedly a population of R1a-lineages invading central Europe from a Balkan homeland).
Romanticism does this quite frequently: it makes us believe in some esoteric fantasy, like the ethnic continuity of our ancestors in the region we live (and a far, far greater original territory that has been unfairly diminished by invaders), providing us with strong links to support our artificial borders and their potential expansion.
Even though my article on the demic diffusion of Indo-European languages does only slightly comment on the origins (and potential language) of N1c-lineages and of Proto-Basque and Proto-Uralic languages, I have already received some angry emails by Basque and Finnish genetic amateurs. I don't get the point of fantasizing about one's own ethnicity and prehistoric territory, and then getting through the five stages of grief when one is confronted with different (usually sounder) theories, time and time again. It seems like a lot of time lost by generations in wholly stupid quests and self-negotiation.
However wrong Wiik's basic theses are, though, if you have read my paper you have seen that Corded Ware groups spread from north-western Ukraine might have spoken Uralic languages. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that Pre-Germanic, Pre-Balto-Slavic and Pre-Indo-Iranian might have been adopted by peoples who spoke Uralic languages, probably related with each other, possibly belonging to early Finno-Ugric dialects. In that sense, Wiik's work has a renewed linguistic interest, regarding the potential substrate words he investigated.
This is not a picture that certain Basque, Finnish, Russian, or Indian romantics would have hoped (or even hope today) for, in terms of ethnic, linguistic, and territorial identification, but that is not a real problem, anyway, just another building of imaginary origins that will fall as many others before them. In the same sense, Germanic ethnogenesis has become more complicated than what some would have wanted, with at least three main paternal lineages with completely different ethnolinguistic origins developing together since ca. 2500 BC to form a more homogeneous community only during the Bronze Age. Therefore, no homogeneous exclusive ethnic 'original' European regional community can be fantastically invented anymore.
This seems to me a real coup de grâce to genetic-based nationalism in Europe, and it is encouraging for the European Union that Germany, as the central European country, is not only a central territory, but also a central cultural and genetic bridge between west and east Europe, in terms of history, of North-West Indo-European languages, and paternal lineages and admixture analyses.
Wiik, Kalevi 2007: "Where Did European Men Come From?". Journal of Genetic Genealogy, 4:35-85, 2008
Wiik, Kalevi 1999: "Pohjois-Euroopan indoeurooppalaisten kielten suomalais-ugrilainen substraatti". Pohjan poluilla. Suomalaisten juuret nykytutkimuksen mukaan. Toim. Paul Fogelberg. Bidrag till kännedom av Finlands natur och folk, 153. Helsinki 1999.
Wiik, Kalevi 2002: Eurooppalaisten juuret. Atena, Jyväskylä 2002.
EDIT: You can read interesting recent posts on genetics of Finnic peoples in Razib Khan's blog: The origin of the Finnic peoples, and The Finnic Peoples Emerged In Baltic After The Bronze Age, the latter discussing results on a recent paper by Saag et al. (2017).
Carlos Quiles	Demic diffusion, European Union, Genetics, Indo-European languages, Linguistics	9 Comments June 17, 2017 September 8, 2017
Schleicher's fable recited
Corded Ware ancestry = Uralic
Yamna spread horse domesticates
Battle Axe = Finno-Samic
Yamna Hungary + EEF = BBC
Finno-Permic expansion
"Steppe ancestry" step by step
Magyar chiefs of R1a, I2a lineages
About Scepters, Horses, and War
Corded Ware = Indo-European?
The Greece Neolithic outlier
R1b-L23 in Khvalynsk
The origin of R1b-L51
"Siberian ancestry"
Vasconic R1b = Indo-European R1a
The origin of R1a-Z645
N1c-L392 a Baikalic expansion
R1b-L23 - Proto-Indo-European
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Re: Tamil vs. Sanskrit, or Indian 'official classical languages', and the first tongue in India (AKA. Indus Valley Civilization language) July 18, 2019
//The question here is easy, and is not worth more than a paragraph to solve: roughly, Tamil corresponds to Hindi, Old Tamil to Old Hindi, Proto-Tamil (or Proto-Southern Dravidian) to Late Sanskrit, Proto-Dravidian to Sanskrit, pre-Proto-Dravidian to Vedic Sanskrit, pre-pre-Proto-Dravidian to Proto-Indo-Iranian, pre-pre-pre-Proto-Dravidian to Proto-Indo-European, and so on. The conclusion is simple: language history, reconstructed […]
Murukaṉ Cevvēḷ
Re: European hydrotoponymy (VI): the British Isles and non-Indo-Europeans July 17, 2019
Just to be clear, I think it's evident that some of the "Afroasiatic"-like traits of the Insular Celtic substrate can be described as potentially Uralic (or Indo-European-over-Uralic) which would make much of the above explanation of the survival of pre-Corded Ware languages in the Netherlands mostly unnecessary, and the consequences much more interesting...However, I just […]
Carlos Quiles
Re: European hydrotoponymy (V): Etruscans and Rhaetians after Italic peoples July 15, 2019
Thank you very much 😊😊 you are the best😊☺
Pálfalvi László
If Corded Ware represents the Late Proto-Uralic expansion, then before them there were no (known) dialectal groups. Assuming a small homeland represented by (or close to) the late Sredni Stog population, I doubt there will be many regional differences before their expansion - just like Repin/Early Yamna-Afanasevo show little variation. I guess the three samples […]
vow :)I haver some question. :) what was the DNA of the Finnugric people before the corded ware... what is the differance between them?You said, that etruscs have doble axe, but I remember that knossoss has also double axe, or did I wrong? Is there any connections between etrusc, lemnos, knossoss and Asia Minor? Can […]