Tree

I almost forgot that I created this blog! I don't post enough on this subject to really justify it. I'll see how it goes. Probably I'll end up folding it back into my main blog, unless I start posting a lot more on this topic. But I haven't seen a lot of new information that's interesting enough to justify commenting on it. So, nothing has happened, and there's nothing new to say that I haven't said plenty of times before. Quiet, quiet, quiet.

I did, however, stumble across his paper. It's not new, but I'm not really in the loop with everything that's new, and much of what I am in the loop on is genetic relative, not linguistic. But, of course, since Indo-European studies is fundamentally the study of a cultural and linguistic group, genetics is a useful tool, but linguistics constantly is part of the conversation too. What we want to discover, of course, is that historical, archaeological, linguistic, and genetic fields of inquiry all point to the same or at least similar conclusions. Which I think it mostly does, at at least a high level. But many of the details will vary and flex over time.

https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/ling-2020-0060/html?lang=en

Here's the abstract:

In this article we present a new reconstruction of Indo-European phylogeny based on 13 110-item basic wordlists for protolanguages of IE subgroups (Proto-Germanic, Proto-Slavic, etc.) or ancient languages of the corresponding subgroups (Hittite, Ancient Greek, etc.). We apply reasonably formal techniques of linguistic data collection and post-processing (onomasiological reconstruction, derivational drift elimination, homoplastic optimization) that have been recently proposed or specially developed for the present study. We use sequential phylogenetic workflow and obtain a consensus tree based on several algorithms (Bayesian inference, maximum parsimony, neighbor joining; without topological constraints applied). The resulting tree topology and datings are entirely compatible with established expert views. Our main finding is the multifurcation of the Inner IE clade into four branches ca. 3357–2162 bc: (1) Greek-Armenian, (2) Albanian, (3) Italic-Germanic-Celtic, (4) Balto-Slavic–Indo-Iranian. The proposed radiation scenario may be reconciled with diverse opinions on Inner IE branchings previously expressed by Indo-Europeanists.

And here's the tree.

Just based on comparing that with historical and archaeological known data, it would strongly suggest that the reddish branch in the middle is the one strongly influenced by the Bell Beakers, or at least linguistically derived primarily from the Bell Beakers.

What is also glaringly missing, but I don't know what else to do about it other than manually speculate where they might belong, are the languages that didn't survive in full enough form to be statistically analyzed, like Dacian, Thracian, Illyrian, and phantom languages like Nordwestblock, or whatever was in the British Isles before the arrival of Celtic, etc. The Ukrainian/Russian steppes is also confusing, because numerous archaeological cultures spread over the area that were derived variously from Yamnaya or eastern Corded Ware. It wasn't until considerably later, Sintashta at the earliest, that we get to the point where a linguistic branch and an archaeological culture can be linked with some confidence on the eastern front. 

Of course, Thracian, Dacian and who know what other paleo-Balkan languages may well have moved westward from the steppe at a much later date than the initial Corded Ware incursions into Central and Western Europe. Quite probably there are who knows how many branches that "should" be showing on the tree, but we literally know nothing about them because they were replaced by some other linguistic branch long before we had a chance to even hear of them much less actually learn any details about the language itself. Maybe we should just be glad that we even know about Thracian, Dacian, Illyrian, Phrygian, etc. at all rather than being frustrated that we don't know more about them. What language branch were the Lusitanians on? or the Bronze Age Po valley, or the Nuragic civilization, etc? Quite probably branches that we only barely suspect existed, like "para-Celtic" or something like that. Or equally likely some branch that we don't even suspect, that was a lingerer from the early Corded Ware expansion, or Bell Beaker expansion, etc. but which didn't stick around long enough to be identified by us. Looking at the vast territory formerly in the orbit of Thracian, Dacian or Celtic compared to what we have today, we can confidently presume that waves of linguistic (and to a considerable degree) Demic replacement was normal, even before some of our ancestors started writing down about it in Greece and Rome.

A similar thing has happened, of course, in North America, although the guilt-tripped, hand-wringing liberals who run our society remain stubbornly ignorant of it. The Crow tribe, for instance, was well-known to have been in Ohio near Lake Erie in the 1700s, before moving up to Manitoba and from there back into the US where they are found today, in Wyoming, the Dakotas, Montana, etc. They don't have a long history on the Great Plains; they were barely there a couple of generations before the white man was. Shoshone and Kiowa Apache were there before the Crow were, but the latter went further southwards, and the former went further westwards. Prior to that, the Shoshone were believed to have been a Great Basin tribe who wandered northward and eastward to be in the Crow's way; part of the Shoshone went southwards, became the Comanche, and then displaced vast numbers of other tribes again in return.

Prior to that... who knows? That's the problem with nonliterate societies that are highly mobile and warlike. We develop this idea that they must have been in the place where we first know of them since time immemorial, only to then move around all over the place once we have written records of them. It seems fundamentally unlikely that their behavior prior to being documented by literate neighbors was different than it was after being documented by literate neighbors, so the more likely scenario is that there was movement, displacement, syncretism and the formation of new confederacies all over the place, and we just have a record of a portion of that. It's unlikely that the proto-Celts were in the same place as the later Celts for thousands of years before spreading across much of Europe; Asia Minor and even north Africa. More likely, they didn't exist at all in a meaningful sense, and they grew up as a subset that developed unique characteristics out of a larger population that was frequently on the move and frequently at war with and overlapping/replacing other neighboring peoples all along.

So when you go to Wyoming, for example, and hear idiots talking about how sacred Devil's Tower, or the Bighorn Medicine Wheel are to these people—who, let's remember, only arrived in the area a few generations before our own people did, it comes across more as a shakedown racket then a meaningful thing to claim.

Who am I?

Although the data is a bit old now, my sister did the ancestry.com genetic profile, which should be identical to my own. (I'm not interested in paying for it, because I already know what to expect, even before looking at my sister's data. And she only did it because there was a flash sale where it was crazy cheap.)

While this isn't Stone Age or even Bronze Age genetics, it goes back pretty far in terms of delineating who I am.

The biggest chunk came up as 56% "English and Northwestern European." This is primarily Anglo-Saxon, and I know that we're mostly Anglo-Saxon already. It may not be entirely Anglo-Saxon, however; the oldest person with our last name that we can draw an unbroken line to was a Norman who crossed the channel with William the Conqueror. The Normans were, as well documented, originally a bunch of Vikings who had raided the Frankish coast of what became Normandy, going so far as to sack Paris even. When Charles the Simple made the deal that created the Duchy of Normandy, the Vikings settled there and probably significantly mingled with local Frankish and even Gaulish peoples who were already there. In any case, the Anglo-Saxon genetics from the original Anglo-Saxon settlement of England is almost indistinguishable from Scandinavians at the same time. The "English and Northwestern European" should mostly represent Anglo-Saxon, but some of the Frankish and Norman admixture could be rolled up in there too.

As an aside, it also shows 3% Scandinavian, specifically 2% Sweden and Denmark, and 1% Finland. I don't really trust this tail data, especially because of the low resolution available at the time this test was run, and I have never found any Scandinavian ancestry in my family tree. However, like I said, the original Anglo-Saxon DNA was identical to Scandinavian DNA of the late Roman period, and the Normans were an admixed Viking/Frankish/Gaulish people. If there is any reality to that tail percentage, then that's probably where it comes from; the ethnogenesis of the English does include some detectable Scandinavian influence, even with genetic drift separating the Anglo-Saxons from the Saxons and other North Sea coastal Germanic people. 

The remainder of my genetics comes from basically two sources; 28% Scottish comes from a number of ancestors that I know of who were Celtic, including from the Galloway, Stuart, and Campbell clans at least, as well as others.

The remaining 13% is from Spain/Portugal, and we know a fair bit about it. My great-grandfather was 100% ethnic Portuguese; although born in the US, his immediate forebears came from Madeira, where they had lived for centuries. Madeira was mostly settled from the northwestern part of the Iberian peninsula, which had been the Celtic nation of Gaelicia before being conquered by, in succession, the Romans, the Suebians, the Moors (although they didn't penetrate much that far north) and the Visigoths. Exactly who these northwestern Portuguese people really are, in relation to these more ancient population, is unclear. Although he died long before I was born, I've seen pictures of him from early in his marriage. He looked pretty Portuguese, with thick, dark hair, brown eyes and bronzed skin. Curiously, however, for a while we didn't know he was Portuguese. For whatever reason, when he moved from the town he grew up in, he told everyone that his name was French, which I guess sounded less foreign, and allowed him to fit in better to the American tapestry at the time (I mean, today, being foreign, fake American or even hostile to Americans is very fashionable in America. That wasn't true when he was young a hundred years ago.) In any case, the Portuguese phenotype was still pretty strong in my dad's generation; both he and his younger sister (and to a lesser extent his older brother and older sister) still have a Portuguese "look" to them. However, pretty much nobody of my generation has that; we're all 1/8 Portuguese and in all of the cousin-families, we're all 7/8 more typical American genetics; Anglo-Saxon mostly, but with a bit of Scandinavian and other DNA mixed in. My mom is almost entirely regular-old Anglo-Saxon for example, having had a family that came to the Massachusetts Bay colony and moved west to rural Utah with the Mormon pioneers. My dad is 1/4 Portuguese, and is the source of my 1/8 (13%) Portuguese ancestry, as well as all of the Scottish ancestry. Between those two, is 41% of my ancestry, and it all comes from my dad. The rest of my dad is probably Anglo-American, as well as the Norman name, so maybe the Scandinavian comes from him as well. I get surprisingly little genetic diversity from my mom. 

Up through the 1990s, that's about the idea of what an American was. There really wasn't all that much diversity in America until the vast Replacement Migration started. We were all pretty much Anglo-Saxons with a fair bit of northern European admixture sprinkled in (more German than my own ancestry; I have essentially none, having Scandinavian instead). And there's there's a bit of other admixture too, which my Portuguese ancestry represents; American always welcomed some diversity as long as that diversity didn't threaten to overwhelm the majority. Now, it's constantly rubbed in our face that there are projections of minority-majority status for Americans in America in a generation or two. That, however, is based on trends not changing, which seems unlikely to me.

Anyway, I didn't mean to take a socio-political turn, but its inevitable when talking about heritage, since mine is pretty iconically American, including a niche strain of something slightly more exotic than British genetics.

Corded Ware, not Yamnaya

Genos Historia kind of takes credit for this theory. It's really Davidski's theory, and he's been posting the evidence for it on his blog Eurogenes for a long time; a blog in which I know that Genos Historia reads and comments on. Forgive the kind of hoaky and long-winded delivery. I actually think Genos Historia is doing some good work with his own PCA analysis, but for the most part, he's just repeating theories from more academically serious men.

He's also making slightly too strong of a statement. While at an autosomal (i.e. whole genome) level Yamnaya and Corded Ware are very similar, they are not completely the same, and they are also not just differentiated by some excess EEF admixture. Corded Ware also have some excess WHG admixture, which admittedly might have come via EEF peoples such as the Vinca or Cucuteni-Tripilia cultures. Many of the later Corded Ware populations also absorbed SHG population groups as they entered Northern Europe, especially the Fennoscandia area, and daughter cultures of the Corded Ware, like the Nordic Bronze Age, show significant levels of admixture from this group.

In any case the proto-Corded Ware peoples had a slightly different economic system, and lived in a different ecological zone, and did so from the beginning. Yamnaya became, over time, so obligatorily steppe-based and transhumance focused that they could not and did not have any sedentary domesticated animals with them, especially pigs.

Scandinavian Hunter-Gatherers

https://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2022/05/population-genomics-of-stone-age.html

I'll probably usually preface most posts here with a link, often to the Eurogenes blog. I've taught myself to read the scientific literature, when I can find it, on dinosaurs and be able to understand it. I'm not there yet on archaeogenetics, so I usually need someone to interpret some of what I'm looking at for me in order to make sense of it. And this is an early discussion of a pre-print, so more may yet come out of this before all is said and done, but the paper promises to have lots of data that can be interpreted over time, even if it's not necessarily the interpretation that the paper itself proposes initially. 

In any case, this paper promise to offer lots of structure and detail about population movements (and replacements) over a period where in the not very distant past, it was assumed that there was general continuity. It almost seems to promise to us that the WHG group isn't really a natural group, or if it is, its shared ancestry is far enough back that it doesn't necessarily make sense to talk about them as being very related to each other. The WHG instead would be seen as geographically somewhat proximate groups plural that at most share a distant haplogroup, but otherwise have more genetic distinctiveness between them than previously suspected. It also promises more information on Scandinavia of the Neolithic and beyond; I'd believed that the Nordic Bronze Age, which almost certainly spoke an early/archaic version of Germanic, possibly prior to the specific sound-shifts that really defined Germanic as a separate language stock, were a mixture of early Corded Ware (Battle-axe variety) steppe peoples (heavy in R1a haplogroup) who spoke one dialect of Indo-European with local Scandinavian Hunter-Gatherers (I1 haplogroup cluster), which had their own culture, language and economy, and which represented to some degree the last hurrah of a WHG/EHG lifestyle in Europe, with a slightly later arriving set of elites that arrived from the Bell-Beaker territory and had an R1b haplogroup cluster.  This model explained the high level structure and linguistic picture; the relatively high numbers of I1 haplogroups, the relatively mixed r1a vs r1b, whereas most other European clusters had one or the other depending on whether they were from an older Corded Ware derivation (i.e., more eastern) or had been subject to the Bell Beaker expansion (more western.) Of course, this model makes little reference to the EEF Funnelbeaker peoples, but they were assumed to have been an admixture that had little impact on the male haplogroup and probably grew in prominence because of their background structure in the Bell Beaker population rather than through direct admixture too much into the SHG and Battle-axe populations. This model may prove to be wrong, however. Certainly it seems to be wrong for the southern portion of Scandinavia, and I'm not sure that the Nordic Bronze Age represents a transgression from the north. We'll see.

Anyway, it's about time that I made an update here, but as I had little new material to lean on over the last few months, it's no surprise that I've had little reason to talk about anything on this blog. It was merely an unfortunate coincidence that I'd literally just started it and branched it off from my other mixed topic blog where these discussions had happened in the past. I'm sure as I get more information about what this paper means, I'll refer to it again.

Coming soon...

I found that posts about history, prehistory, archaeology, linguistics and genetics--especially archaeogenetics--related to my interest in the origins and dispersals of the Indo-European people were frequent enough on my more Journal-like blog to merit their own blog. This is just the placeholder for now, but new posts will be forthcoming shortly.