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.