Salmoneus wrote: ↑Mon Jan 21, 2019 5:39 pm
WeepingElf wrote: ↑Mon Jan 21, 2019 3:16 pmFirst of all, Y-DNA haplogroups are not the be-all, end-all of human genetics. They of course only trace the male lines, and are just one thing out of many; but they are the easiest for non-specialists like me to get a handle on, while the picture of the mtDNA haplogroups, which trace the female lines, is so blurry that hardly anything can be made out, and autosomal DNA with all its cross-overs is very difficult.
This is very true, and very important. Where people used to see a great chasm, for example, between R1a and R1b in Europe, it turns out that actually the R1b Beaker Folk who expanded from central europe somewhere and who make up most of that R1b continuum are pretty much identical genetically to the R1a Corded Ware people they left behind.
Sure. And Corded Ware is genetically very close to Yamnaya, apart from the seeming Y-DNA hapologroup discrepancy which probably was a quirk of the ruling classes anyway - see below.
In particular, I think it's important to note that in an expansive, warrior-caste patrilineal society, probably with some sort of concubinage, like the early IE societies, Y-DNA clades can expand very quickly. High-status men can have a LOT more kids and grandkids than low-status men. And Y-DNA is subject to founder effects in small societies.
Yep.
It should also be said that 'R1b' and 'R1a' were/are not monolithic blocks. Already at the time of the Yamnaya, their society would have been home to a whole bunch of related but distinct patrilineages. Basically, there were a lot of patrilineages, and most of them were either R1b or R1a - but they weren't all exactly the same R1a or R1b.
Certainly!
Also, we've only tested a tiny fraction of the population. There were thousands or tens of thousands of Yamnaya, and we've tested... half a dozen? The fact that Haak tested 7 Yamnaya and found all of them were R1b, and five of them exactly the same clade of R1b, tells us something - but it doesn't tell us everything. That was probably the royal lineage, or at least a noble lineage, but there were surely other lineages among the people as a whole. In some ways it actually makes sense that those who left to migrate to other areas might not have been the rulers back home...
Are these 7 Yamnaya specimens from kurgan graves? If yes, they were
chieftains - the Khvalynsk-descendant "royal lineage", as you call it, that had taken over Dniepr-Donets. Most likely, the common men were predominantly R1a, as Dniepr-Donets had been and their modern descendants in Ukraine and southern Russia still are. This would make the seeming Y-DNA haplogroup discrepancy between "R1b-dominant" Yamnaya and R1a-dominant Corded Ware a non-issue.
It may be that Bell Beaker was founded by Yamnaya nobles (perhaps younger sons of chieftains) who sought new lands to rule over in the west, while Corded Ware was founded by Yamnaya commoners who sought freedom from their old lords and ascension to nobility by conquering new lands in the north. The result would in such a scenario have been that Bell Beaker was R1b and Corded Ware R1a, which is what we observe.
I even came up with the irreverend idea last night that Late PIE wasn't spoken by Yamnaya but by Corded Ware, and Yamnaya spoke Pre-Proto-Anatolian, but I think this doesn't really make sense.
What regards Maykop (which I did not discuss at all so far), which one is tempted to see as Proto-Abkhaz-Adyghe, Eupedia has it as R1b, but that haplogroup apparently is not frequent in the northern Caucasus today, at least not according to the tables I found on Wikipedia. Were they ousted by newcomers later (in which case Proto-Abkhaz-Adyghe was the language of the newcomers rather than of Maykop)? Or is Eupedia just wrong there (they managed to place Khvalynsk in the wrong location after all, so anything is possible)?
As I understand it, and as far as I recall, Maykop have no clear descendents today.
Then, NWC (and also NEC) would have moved in later from somewhere else, probably from the south, and Maykop wouldn't have spoken Proto-NWC. The Maykop people may thus have spoken
anything, maybe a sister language of Late PIE, maybe a language related to that of Dniepr-Donets. What seeming lexical resemblances are there between IE and NWC may be substratum loanwords from this lost Maykop language into NWC. The realization that the Maykop language probably wasn't related to any of the known Caucasian families of course throws up the question whether the hypothetical Paleo-Pontic substratum language of the Dniepr-Donets people was typologically anything like the modern Caucasian languages. It could have been of a completely different structure, thus knocking the bottom out of the old "IE=Indo-Uralic on Caucasian substratum" theory. (Of course, the NWC languages could have acquired the relevant parts of their typological profile - ejectives, palatalized and labialalized consonants, reduced vowel systems - from the Maykop substratum, but this is a very adventurous speculation.)
I have found
this map of Mesolithic Y-DNA haplogroups, which, however, is not very accurate, I think. But I guess it is not sheer fancy. So WHG ("Paleo-Atlantic" in my paleolinguistic model) would be I1 and I2, EHG ("Paleo-Pontic") R1a (the boundary zone between these two, I think, was a good deal farther west than what that map shows - I'd draw it roughly from Riga to Odessa or something like that), Siberians N1c and Central Asians R1b. Fair.
In the late Mesolithic, N1c and R1b advanced into eastern Europe, bringing in languages unrelated to each other and to the "Paleo-Pontic" languages. The European R1b population would then, in my model, have shifted, for whichever reason, to the language of their northern N1c neighbours, altering it under the influence of their substratum (we may nickname their old language "Arwanbi" - guess how I arrived at that name). This would be the point, if IE and Uralic are indeed related to each other (which remains to be shown by means of the comparative method), where Indo-Uralic, originally the language of the N1c people of the Volga region, broke up into what were to become PIE and Proto-Uralic. So the Khvalynsk people would have spoken an Arwanbi-influenced Indo-Uralic; when they took over the Paleo-Pontic-speaking Dniepr-Donets culture, forming Sredny Stog which would later become Yamnaya, their Arwanbi-influenced Indo-Uralic would in turn be altered by a Paleo-Pontic substratum and become PIE. Meanwhile, the language of the N1c people in the north developed undisturbedly into Proto-Uralic.
This, together with the fact that Uralic shows greater resemblance than IE to such Siberian and Central Asian languages like Turkic or Yukaghir, and also to Eskimo-Aleut, is my main reason to guess that Uralic is more conservative than IE, though this of course requires independent proof by means of reconstructing Indo-Uralic, which would constitute
a major research programme probably too vast for us amateurs to work out (even if historical linguistics is a field, as cases like de Saussure and Ventris show, where amateurs and students
can achieve major breakthroughs). Language shifts often result in substantial restructurings of the language that takes over, as
seems to have been the case, for instance, in Insular Celtic, whose radial restructuring, apparently within less than 1000 years, has for long been ascribed to the structure of the pre-Celtic substratum languages, whatever their affiliation.
ADDENDUM: I wonder whether the identification of R1b as the dominant Y-DNA haplogroup in the Maykop culture, as shown on the (notoriously imprecise) Eupedia maps, is due to the same mistake as in the case of the Yamnaya culture, where there is good reason to assume that the common men were R1a rather than R1b: samples taken from kurgan graves which only show the genetic composition of the ruling class while the common men had different haplogroups. And maybe the language replacement failed in Maykop, and the original language survived as NWC. I don't know whether this is plausible, though.
SECOND ADDENDUM: It may have been that the Yamnaya nobles spoke a more conservative PIE dialect than the commoners. If the social stratification was tight enough, the nobles may have spoken a form of PIE that was only slightly influenced by the Paleo-Pontic substratum, while the speech of the commoners was profoundly altered by it. In the scenario laid out above, in which Yamnaya (or Sredny Stog; the earliest "kurgan invasions" into Central Europe were at the time of Sredny Stog already) nobles founded Bell Beaker but Yamnaya commoners founded Corded Ware, the PIE dialects of the Bell Beaker culture would then have been more archaic than those of the Corded Ware culture. This, however, is of course sheer speculation and may be utter bullfrogs.
