Most interesting video-conference on Luwians, Troy and the Sea Peoples

All archaeogenetics and no archaeology makes people go mad. So let's spice this a bit with this absolutely enticing video of a conference by Dr. Eberhard Zangger, which I have watched thrice already, twice tonight alone.

I love the general outline of the exposition even if I know some details, like the outline of Lower Troy are controversial. 

I also did pose the following questions as commentary to the video:

1. How can the professor be so sure that all ancient Western Anatolian nations were Luwian and not from other diverse ethnicities? How that they were the only ones in the last Sea Peoples' wave? Just the same we see some non-Greeks in the Greek side of the Trojan war, I would expect some non-Luwians in the Trojan side as well, assuming the Trojans were Luwians and not Tyrsenians or something else. 
2. What about the Phrygians who show up in Anatolia, West and East (Armenians) after the Bronze Age collapse, out of nothing (they seem to originate in an obscure Paeonian tribe, the Bryges)? Not a single mention of them: I guess they would blurr the nice "Luwian" homogeneity. 
3. What about the Greeks (Danaoi, Denesh) and their Pelasgian (Peleset, Philistine) neighbors and often allies (Achilles himself and his Myrmidons were that)? They seem also involved in that late Sea Peoples wave and there is coincidence of cultural Hellenization (and not Luwianization) of Cyprus precisely in that period of the late Sea Peoples' attacks against Syria, Egypt and whatever else. Let's not forget that the Egyptians speak of the foreign peoples making a COALITION in their "islands", and I would say that this coalition involved peoples from all the Aegean, and not just the Asian side of it (although very good point about Evans' racism and his horrible influence on Aegean studies). 

But please don't let my nit-pickiness wrong what I think is a great conference dealing with a topic that has been way too neglected and even purposely ignored. There is a lot of good stuff in the video.

By the way, this is the Wikipedia map of Luwian inscriptions (unsure of what exactly the German legend says, "early" and "late" maybe?, but it's definitely about Luwian inscriptions):

Credit: Hendrik Tammen (CC-license)

Tarim Basin mtDNA

Quantity over quality series.

Chuxian Li et al. Analysis of ancient human mitochondrial DNA from the Xiaohe cemetery: insights into prehistoric population movements in the Tarim Basin, China. BMC Genetics 2015. Open access → LINK. [doi:10.1186/s12863-015-0237-5]

Abstract

Background

The Tarim Basin in western China, known for its amazingly well-preserved mummies, has been for thousands of years an important crossroad between the eastern and western parts of Eurasia. Despite its key position in communications and migration, and highly diverse peoples, languages and cultures, its prehistory is poorly understood. To shed light on the origin of the populations of the Tarim Basin, we analysed mitochondrial DNA polymorphisms in human skeletal remains excavated from the Xiaohe cemetery, used by the local community between 4000 and 3500 years before present, and possibly representing some of the earliest settlers.

Results

Xiaohe people carried a wide variety of maternal lineages, including West Eurasian lineages H, K, U5, U7, U2e, T, R*, East Eurasian lineages B, C4, C5, D, G2a and Indian lineage M5.

Conclusion

Our results indicate that the people of the Tarim Basin had a diverse maternal ancestry, with origins in Europe, central/eastern Siberia and southern/western Asia. These findings, together with information on the cultural context of the Xiaohe cemetery, can be used to test contrasting hypotheses of route of settlement into the Tarim Basin.

Note: R* is not "Western" but undefined and quite possibly Eastern.

Kurgan ancient DNA suggests major impact in North-Central Europe

After many rumors and pointless discussions based on them, finally the Haak et al. study on ancient Kurgan DNA is available only (pre-pub format):

W. Haak et al., Massive migration from the steppe is a source for Indo-European languages in Europe. bioRxiv 2015 (freely available pre-pub) → LINK [doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/013433]

[Update: LINK to the June 2015 final publication, Nature]


The study expands on previous work by Lazaridis 2014 by including a much larger array of ancient DNA from Germany and Hungary, as well as some key ancient DNA from Russia and also some complementary samples from Northern Iberia.

Autosomal DNA

Even if the authors admit it is difficult to properly quantify, there are clear tendencies that are outlined in fig. 2:

Figure 2: Population transformations in Europe. (a) PCA analysis, (b) ADMIXTURE
analysis. The full ADMIXTURE analysis including present-day humans is shown in
Extended Data Fig. 1.
Annotations in red by me.

The main inferred processes of demographic formation of the modern European genetic pool are outlined:

1. A baseline of Epipaleolithic hunter-gatherers that pulls in the PC 1 towards the left (geographically would be the Atlantic). I call this layer Paleo-European (PE).
2. A first replacement by Neolithic farmers of Thessalian origin (already discussed in depth in Lazaridis 2014), who were similar to modern Sardinians. I call this layer Neo-European (NE).
3. A reflux of Paleo-European genetics that alters the Neo-European layer somewhat. This can be associated to Atlantic Neolithic flows (i.e. Megalithism, Funnelbeaker, etc.) We can call this stage Neo-European-2 (NE2).
4. A second replacement wave by Steppe tribals, certainly bringing the Indoeuropean languages (IE).

Modern European populations align well along a IE-NE2 axis, whose midpoint seems to fall on North France, depending of course on which references you choose. I drew that axis as dotted red line. It is not substantively different from the Dimension 2 axis, although it is slightly slanted because the IE invaders obviously carried more PE than the NE layer. This new PE is not WHG (Magdalenian) but EHG (Eastern Epi-Gravettian) however - and hence its tendency towards Paleo-Siberian genetics (Ma1 or "ANE").

So Dimension 1 quite apparently contrasts the Paleo-European vs the West Asian components. What does Dimension 2 express? A quite apparent element is the Paleo-Siberian tendency. Alternatively it can also be considered to express the distinction between Lowland and Highland West Asians. Finally it can also be expressed as IE vs NE. All three are surely just variants of the same continental vs peripheral opposition, which is weaker than the PE vs West Asia one.

I must mention that fig. S5.2 offers a slightly different view:

Figure S5.2: PCA analysis with ancient individuals projected onto the variation of the
present-day ones.

Notable is that the NE-IE axis (not drawn) appears more slanted, with most modern populations showing greater excess of PE tendency and less "obviously" resolved by the late Chalcolithic populations (LNE/EBA in the authors terminology). 

As I said above, it seems very difficult to objectively measure the exact fractions of admixture (the tendencies are clear but the quantification not so much) and something that is becoming more and more painfully obvious is that Atlantic European ancient genomes are needed to explain the changes that happened prior to the arrival of Kurgans. Particularly it'd be most interesting to get ancient samples from: Portugal (Neolithic, Megalithic and Bronze Age), Basque Country and Gascony (Neolithic and Megalithic at the very least, preferably from the coastal regions), Brittany and West France (Neolithic, Megalithic 1 and Artenacian), Belgium (non-LBK Neolithic), Britain (several regions preferably, as the British Neolithic seems to have strong regional differences), West Germany (Michelsberg culture). This array or at least a sensible part of it could shed light on key processes taking place before and after the Kurgan migration. Bell Beaker samples from outside Central Europe would also be very interesting. 

I would also be interesting to see a PCA without West Asians, whose presence quite apparently does not add much to the analysis. It is known that when the PCA is European-only (or mostly), Basques and Sardinians display clearly different polarities (typically Sardinians vs Russians in PC1 and Basques vs Caucasians in PC2). It would be very interesting to observe how these ancient samples behave in a Europe-only PCA.

Y-DNA

A lot of the upheaval was around the fact of the finding of some R1b in Samara Valley. This is very interesting indeed but it is not the kind R1b that can be considered ancestral to modern European mainline R1b-M412. It is mostly of a different haplogroup whose modern distribution is unknown to me: R1b-Z2103.

*Update: some people have commented that R1b-Z2103 is found in West Asia and some Volga peoples.

Schematically (following YSOGG), R1b-M343 and its sole relevant subclade R1b1-M415 are structured as follows:

• R1b1a (L320)
• R1b1a2a1 (L51/M412)
• R1b1a2a1a (P311) 
• R1b1a2a1a1 (U106) → NW Europe
• R1b1a2a1a2 (P312/S116) → SW Europe with scatter elsewhere in the continent, including Ireland, Britain, Italy... Found in Kromsdorf (late Chalcolithic)
• R1b1a2a2 (CTS1078/Z2103) → found in Samara culture
• R1b1b (M335) → minor, West Asia
• R1b1c (V88) → Mediterranean and Africa, particularly important in Sardinia and Central-East Africa.

Note: for further information on European R1b see HERE and HERE.

Otherwise all the spotted R1b in this study is R1b1*: in Samara culture and in Neolithic Aragon (NE Iberia), both of which are hard to relate to anything of modern relevance.  

Corded Ware is associated to R1a only at this time. So at least in Europe it makes good sense to associate Kurgan expansion with R1a expansion. 

Mitochondrial DNA

There is plenty of mtDNA data but most is recycled from previous studies so not really novel. An interesting detail is that there is no or nearly no mtDNA H within the Kurgan (IE) samples, strongly suggesting that their migration was largely male-biased, at least initially. As happens with Y-DNA R1b, Kurgan immigrants cannot be associated to any increase of mtDNA H, whose origins must therefore be sought in some other origin (namely: Atlantic Neolithic).

Note: my apologies for being so extremely passive in my blogging activity. I don't really know how to explain other than feeling OLD AND TIRED and needing LOTS of "me time". It's time for others to pick up the torch, I guess.

Sino-Basque is not for real

Unmistakable evidence: beret-wearing Chinese!
(humorously borrowed from Zubia-Qiao blog,
which is about real Basque-China relations)

Linguistic speculation haunts us and today I stumbled on this paper, which has an interesting introduction but ends up claiming the extremely unlikely Sino-Caucasian family (including Basque and what-not):

Murray Gell-Mann, Ilia Peiros & George Starostin, Distant Language Relationships: The Current Perspective. Available at academia.edu → LINK

I admit I have been skeptic of the Sino-Caucasian hypothesis since I tried once to learn some Chinese and was surprised of how little this language actually resembles Basque. Probably a random African or Australian language is not more different than Chinese is to Basque, or so I thought without having performed until now any formal test of the hypothesis.

There are a lot of reasons: the general skepticism of most linguists but also the lack of any apparent archaeological or meaningful genetic relationship since maybe 60 Ka ago (or, if Sino-Tibetan is related to Amerind and other Native American languages, since c. 45 Ka ago at the latest).

But the hypothesis continues to have some currency and today I finally decided to test it following the Swadesh-100 method suggested in the paper. The result:

→ Sino-Tibetan/Basque/English Swadesh-100 comparison (open office ODT format, similar to Excel - if anyone has a problem, please ask and I will upload an Excel version of it). 

Conclusion: Basque is not more related to Sino-Tibetan (either Mandarin or Burmese) than English is. If anything, the opposite is true, although the low level of plausible cognates for both languages (5-7%) seems merely stochastic noise, or maybe in some case wanderworts. Of course, the exact number of similar words (possible cognates) depends on one's permisivity but the pattern is so similar for the three possible pairings that, if there is any relationship at all, it must include English and therefore Indoeuropean.

Check it yourself, of course.

West-East admixture in Mongolian Altai in the Bronze Age

This new study found West-East Eurasian admixture in Mongolian Altai before the Iron Age. This finding partly contradicts previous data by González-Ruiz 2012 that suggested a strict genetic divide until the Iron Age.

Clemence Hollard et al., Strong genetic admixture in the Altai at the Middle Bronze Age revealed by uniparental and ancestry informative markers. FSI Genetics 2014. Pay per view → LINK [doi:10.1016/j.fsigen.2014.05.012]

The new data comes from two kurgan burial sites in Westernmost Mongolia: Tsagaan Asga and Takhilgat Uzuur-5 (abbreviated as TA and TU respectively).

In both sites mtDNA lineages have dual origins, although in TU (close to the Russian and Khazakh border) there is some prevalence of Western matrilineages (3/5), while in TA (somewhat farther East) the opposite is true instead (3/7 Western matrilineages), suggesting some clinality. 

On the other hand Y-DNA is totally dominated by Western lineages with a single exception (C), although these Western lineages (Q and R1a) are of Central Asian/Siberian type without exception. Of course, Q variants have been lingering in Central Asia, Siberia and some parts of East Asia almost certainly since Aurignacian, being part of the early genesis of Native Americans (see here for a more in-depth discussion and here for China's Neolithic Y-DNA, which includes some Q), while R1a-Z93 seems a more recent arrival, maybe Epipaleolithic or Neolithic (see here), but both seem to have their origins in or near Iran, judging on basal diversity. 

There is no trace of European-specific inflows on the Y-DNA side, even if some of the mtDNA lineages may be thought as having this origin (H1, H7, U4).

The Eastern ancestry is all typical of NE Asia. I would pay particular attention to mtDNA D, which seems to have spread in the Taiga with the Seima-Turbino phenomenon, which inaugurated the Bronze Age in that area and is believed to originate in Altai.

So, as conclusions, we can say that:

1. There was incipient East-West admixture in parts of Altai already in the Bronze Age, the main actor of this admixture were females.
2. Patrilineal ancestry was essentially "Western" of the kind that must have been in Altai since the Neolithic or earlier (i.e. not European but Central Asian of West Asian affinities/origins)
3. The cultural context is Kurgan, strongly suggesting Indoeuropean language (of the Tocharian branch probably).
4. The Seima-Turbino link however suggests some sort of affinity with carriers of the mtDNA D lineage in the Taiga in that same period, lineage not found further West in Altai. These Siberian Bronze Age vector people were very likely of Tungusic ethnicity. Although early Turkic connections cannot be totally ruled out, in general Turkic peoples seem more associated to the steppe instead and the roots of their expansion were probably forged some centuries later, already in the Iron Age. 
5. Both in the expansion of Indoeuropean eastwards and later in that of Altaic languages and ethnic affiliation westwards, the Altai region seems to have played a key pivotal role. However modern Altaians, even if Turkic by language, retain almost integrally the same Y-DNA genetic signature as the Bronze Age peoples mentioned here, what underlines their capacity to cross ethno-linguistic lines once and again while keeping their patrilineal ancestry nearly unaffected. They are therefore a good example of how populations can change ethno-linguistic ascription without significant genetic flow in such a key factor as the patrilineages. Surely many other peoples did the same in many other geographies. Ancestry and language need not to be linked, even if they sometimes are.

I just found my very old first Prehistory site as a Samoa hack

Yesterday I happened to run a simple quick test about how well this blog performs in Google ratings, so I made a search on "Chalcolithic Europe" (the kind of thing that I know brings up images from FWTWWA) with the result that this blog gave one hit among the top 10 in regular text search, and more than 30 hits in image search in the first page (including the first two ones, which come from the European aDNA page). 

This is the map that surprised me to find still around: Middle Bronze Age Europe/West Asia, c. 1500 BCE (not too exact in some details maybe? - well, still good enough).

 

Also many maps I did in the past for Wikipedia still rank high as well. 

That was cool to find out. But what really surprised me was to find my long gone GeoCities (former Yahoo! free hosting service) website online (→ LINK) and also ranking rather high in image search (for those words) because of one of my old maps. The site has not been available for many years because Yahoo! suspended its free hosting service but someone is making money out of my work with that site that is exactly how I left it, except for flashing publicity ads (oddly enough when Yahoo! managed the ads, which only they gained revenue from, not me, they were always empty boxes, very tellingly about this company's poor skill at marketing). 

The site can be found under its original GeoCities address except that it has the .ws extension instead of the .com one it used to have. Looking at this extension in Wikipedia, I learned that it means Samoa (West Samoa) and that:

The .ws country code has been marketed as a domain hack, with the .ws purportedly standing for "World Site" or "Web site", providing a "global" Internet presence to registrants, as it supports all internationalized domain names.

So some smart guy has hacked my old site (and probably many others) and is making money of its discrete appeal. 

At least in the "European Chalcolithic" search, the star is obviously the article about Atlantis, which attempted to interpret this legend, as well as the quite comparable Heraklean ones, in the context of the Bronze Mediterranean (in terms that I still consider perfectly valid). But there are also other interesting pages: a series of maps on Indoeuropean expansion, an incomplete Neolithic Europe map series (some of which were uploaded to Wikipedia back in the day but followed random fates afterwards), and an old self-made double map of European mtDNA haplogroups based on Simoni 2000 (yeah, that's quite old, but in those times, say 2007, info on mtDNA was scarce and scattered).

So what I'm going to do? Copy much of that in my PC and probably repost the best of it here in dedicated pages. It'd be totally hopeless to try to get the hacker to pay me a commission for his/her publicity earnings, more so when most of the material is explicitly donated to the public domain, and, in a sense, I feel even grateful for the chaotic effects of this hacking that has brought my old work back to the Web, although I lament I cannot edit the site anymore. 

For whoever reads the site, please notice that most of that stuff is from around 2007. Although paid GeoCities still exists, the free hosting service was discontinued in 2009, and that was the time when all my work went down the toilet (I made a backup but it got eventually lost in an irreparable computer crash), until now. Long live Chaos!

New page: Early Kurgan expansion maps

Triggered by a mail discussion on linguistic prehistory, I finally did something that was in my agenda since long ago: create and share some Kurgan expansion maps → dedicated page in this blog.

The maps do not cover all the Indoeuropean expansion (which still continues to this very day for all I know) but just the core one of the Chalcolithic period, which provides the skeleton for the understanding of later periods. For ad-hoc reasons all maps are of Europe and nearby parts of West Asia only, although admittedly that leaves the proto-Tocharian Afanasevo culture off map. As I did not go into the Bronze and Iron ages' periods, which would have to include Indo-Iranian expansion, this works alright.

Some eye candy to entice you (map #2 out of 4, arguably the most central one, outlining at least five different branches of Indoeuropean very early on, early 4th millennium BCE):

'Eurasian' language macro-family or just another bluff?

Andrew (at his blog) leads me to this interesting criticism by Sally Thomason of the much fabled study about a supposed new language macro-family including the most unlikely Eurasian languages such as Dravidian, Indoeuropean and "Eskimo" (sic). 

The original paper by Mark Pagel et al. proposes that a reduced core of 23 words are "ultraconserved", allowing them to formulate their hypothesis only on them (totally substandard even for the more generous mass-comparison approach). 

When Thomason looks at the raw data she finds that of the 23 words, only 2 have consensual proto-words in Altaic, for example, all the rest having several alternatives, of which Pagel and co. cherry-picked this or that one with the sole criterion of the convenience for their speculation. 

Never mind that Altaic, as defined in that database of Starostian inspiration, includes Japonic and Koreanic, something nowadays essentially discarded. 

Also the attribute of ultraconservation, foundation for the Pagel hypothesis, is challenged by Thomason, who finds that only 6 or 7 words of the 23 are conserved from Proto-Indoeuropean into English, a very low rate considering that English vocabulary is overwhelmingly of Indoeuropean origins (be them Germanic, Old French or some other variant).

In other words and in French: rien de rien; nothing at all worth the media hype that the Pagel paper has achieved... in the short run.

Linguistic musings: Basque and Proto-Indoeuropean

I'm going through the Swadesh lists for the Western and South Eurasian languages, in order to see if a shared origin (what makes sense from the viewpoint of Prehistory) can be supported with linguistic data of some sort.

By the moment I have gone through the Basque and Proto-Indoeuropean Swadesh lists (with some small sections taken off because they only seem to generate confusion, at least to me). And I notice that  there are at least some rather clear cognates between Basque and PIE:

I compared 111 words, of which 20 look rather likely cognates and some other 13 or 14 are possible remote cognates. That makes c. 30% of possible cognates, what is surely well above my expectations (I had spotted some likely cognates earlier but did not expect so many).

The clear cognates are (eu-PIE):

(2) zu - *túh [you - sing.]

(4) gu - *wéy [we]

(5) zu(ek) - *yū [you - pl.] [notice that 2 and 5 are messed up in both Basque and IE]

(24) hiru - *tréyes (??) [three]

(49) suge - *h₂engwi [snake]

(65) hezur - *h₃ost-, *kost- [bone]

(76) aho - *h₁oh₁s- [mouth]

(77) hortz - *h₃dónts [tooth]

(86) heste - *eh₁ter- [gut]

(103) jaki(-n) - *ǵneh₃-[to know]

(149) izar - *h₂stḗr [star]

(168) hauts - *h₃és-no-, *h₃és-i- [ash]

(170) bide - *pent- [way, road]

(178) egu, egun - *h₂eǵh- [day]

(180) bero - *gʷʰer- [warm]

(184) zahar - *senh₁ó- [old]

(202) -n - (h₁?)en [in, on]

(207) izen - *h₁nḗh₃mn̥ [name]

Add to these at least the verb to be (not in the list): iza(-n) - *es(t)-

And add also two special cases from the list, yet quite clear:

(92) edan (to drink) - (93) *h₁ed- (to eat)

The change of meaning is quite acceptable, specially if we imagine the common ancestor to mean "to ingest" without liquid or solid connotations.

The other case is PIE (171) *gʷerh₃- (mountain), which I am almost persuaded it has something to do with Basque gora (up, upwards), which has a clear Basque etymology (goi-ra). It may be a coincidence or a strange case of lending but this has been haunting me for more than 20 years now since I learned some Serbocroat words, including gora (mountain) and gore (up, upwards). And now comes back in form of PIE reconstruction.

The less clear, potential, cognates would be as follow:

(28) luze - *dluh₂gʰós [long]. This I have generally suspected as a loanword from some IE language to Basque, but the main reason for this suspicion is that it begins like the usual IE words for long (long, largo, etc.) with an L-. There's nothing else, however the connection seems more real when you go to PIE.

(33) labur, motz - *mreǵʰú- [short]

(50) har - *wrmi [worm]

(57) erro - *wréh₂ds [root]

(62) azal - *pel- [skin]

(68) adar - *keg-, *ḱer- [horn]

(71) ile - *pulh₂- [hair] [this one seems to be related to 62, maybe *Vl(e) meant once skin and hair alike (or as conceptually highly related words) - we can still discern an open vowel (a/e) in 62 and a closed one (i/u) in 71]

(72) buru - *gʰebʰelo- [head] [where *gʰeb- corresponds with the other proposed root *kaput, and -bʰelo- would correspond with Basque buru]

(78) mihi - *dn̥ǵʰwéh₂s [tongue] [probably not but still I do see some similitude]

(104) gogo(tu) - *tong- [to think] [here the Basque list reads pentsatu but this is no any genuine Basque word: gogo as noun means psyche, mind, soul, desire, and gogotu means to wish but also any other mental function, however it's been partly replaced by Spanish loan pentsatu for rationalist uses mostly]

(172) gorri - *h₁rewdʰós [red] [I have before mentioned the importance of the sound R in West Eurasia to describe the color red: it's not universal but it's much more common than in East Eurasia or anywhere else I could check]

(179) urte - *yeHr-, *wet- [year]. Check also (194) PIE *wed [wet]. In Basque urte is clearly related to the water (ur) cycle and watery (not wet but close enough) would be urti.

(180) lehor - *ters- [dry]

Now the disclaimer: this are nothing but a bunch of notes for my (and potentially also your) interest. No theory is proposed, no systematics is being used, it is just a free exploration.

However I was drawn to this exercise, which is just the first two rows of  many others, because I suspect that West and South Eurasian languages (excluding Uralic and Afroasiatic, which are of different origins) may share a common origing c. 50 Ka ago. Specially if both IE and Dravidian infiltrated South Asia after the Neolithic.

On the contrary I dislike quite strongly pan-north-Asian conjectural superfamilies, specially Sino-Caucasian, which makes no sense whatsoever on light of all I know about Prehistory.

In any case, something to chew on.


Update: Octavià mentions a couple of references of other (presumably more knowledgeable) people who have in the past suggested a Basque-IE connection:

Arnaud Fournet, Comparing Basque and Proto-Indo-European: a preliminary phonetic survey. He finds some of the same connections I mention here but he goes further into terrains that are too obscure for me to assess properly.

Arnaud Etchamendy has a whole site dedicated to "demonstrate" that Basque is Indoeuropean (a bit too far in my opinion but anyhow).

I must say that, against my own expectations, a preliminary survey  I made of Basque, IE, Dravidian and NE Caucasian, seems to reinforce the idea that Basque and IE are related, more than to the other considered languages. See comments section for some more details (all this is very raw and tentative admittedly).