Prehistoric Human Migrations

[lpetrich]

The article then went into the issue of the homeland of the ancestral Indo-European speakers. That has been much debated since the recognition of the Indo-European family in the early 19th cy., with numerous hypotheses proposed.

A little over a century ago, German scholar Gustav Kossinna proposed northern Germany was the IE homeland. German nationalists loved that idea, and the Nazis were extreme German nationalists. "Aryan" is an old Indo-Iranian self-designation, roughly meaning "noble", and that used to be a common synonym for "early Indo-European". With the curious consequence that some of the Nazis' targets, the Roma, had better claim on "Aryan" than they did.

A recent proposal has been Colin Renfrew's proposal that it was Neolithic farmers who brought the IE languages with them. Since they did not mix very much as they spread outward, they would have brought their languages with them as they went. But there are linguistic difficulties with CR's hypothesis, like vocabulary mismatch and a poor match between Neolithic spread and Indo-European dialect relationships.

But the most successful so far has been the Kurgan hypothesis, named after the kurgans or burial mounds associated with Yamnaya and related cultures. It is that the PIE speakers were the Yamnaya people or predecessors of them. It agrees with the linguistic evidence: words for horses and wheels and axles and the like. It also fits in well with the spread of Yamnaya people into Europe.

It's another slap in the face to Nazi ideology, because it's south Russians who are the original "Aryans" in this scenario. The Nazis considered Slavs "untermenschen", subhuman people, and they wanted to conquer territories where Slavs lived, turn them into German colonies complete with German settlers, and pretty much enslave the Slavic inhabitants. Those territories were to become Lebensraum (habitat, living space) for the German people. To quote Adolf Hitler himself, in a speech to his generals just before invading the Soviet Union, "As for the ridiculous hundred million Slavs, we will mould the best of them to the shape that suits us, and we will isolate the rest of them in their own pig-styes; and anyone who talks about cherishing the local inhabitant and civilising him, goes straight off into a concentration camp !" (The Holocaust-Denial Debate)

 

[Rhea]

Very interesting reading, Loren, Thanks!

 

[lpetrich]

Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe -- the professional-journal paper for the three-migration model.

Northern and eastern Europeans have the most steppe-herder ancestry, while southern Europeans have the most Neolithic-farmer ancestry.

 

[C_Mucius_Scaevola]

(You'll also want a good book on the Indo-European languages, but I'm so cheap I've never replaced Mallory's 1989 book.

I read this one recently, and can recommend it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Horse,_the_Wheel,_and_Language

 

[aupmanyav]

And where did those people come from: Sub-Arctic regions. Arctic Home in Vedas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Arctic_Home_in_the_Vedas)

Many people might remember my rants on the subject.

5 Reasons: 1. Mention of the dawn extending for one month 2. Mention of a long night extending from 2 months to up to 100 days 3. Mention of seven months of continuous day-light 4. Mention of priests who completed their annual sacrificial cycle in 7 months (Saptagu - Avesta), Nine or ten months (Navagwahas, Dashagwahas - Vedas) 5. Old roman calendar before the correction by Emperor Numa in 7th Century BC had only 304 days. January and February were added later.

 

[Bomb#20]

(You'll also want a good book on the Indo-European languages, but I'm so cheap I've never replaced Mallory's 1989 book.

I read this one recently, and can recommend it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Horse,_the_Wheel,_and_Language

Seconded.

A few years ago a friend of mine died and left me a cat and that book. She was kind of skittish and I wanted to get her used to the sound of my voice, so I read her the book. She is now the world's greatest cat expert on Ukrainian archaeology.

 

[lpetrich]

The "Arctic Home" is likely the  Sintashta culture in the steppe zone to the northeast of the Caspian Sea. With its latitude, it would have had long summar days and long winter nights, and that could have been remembered in the Vedas.

 

[lpetrich]

This looks like publication of some earlier work on South Asian ancestry that I'd reported on.
Largest-ever ancient-DNA study illuminates millennia of South and Central Asian prehistory -- ScienceDaily

Researchers analyzed the genomes of 524 never before-studied ancient people, including the first genome of an individual from the ancient Indus Valley Civilization. Insights answer longstanding questions about the origins of farming and the source of Indo-European languages in South and Central Asia. The study increases the worldwide total of published ancient genomes by some 25 percent.

Colin Renfrew's Anatolian hypothesis for the Indo-European homeland? Marija Gimbutas's south-Russian steppe-zone hypothesis?

"We can rule out a large-scale spread of farmers with Anatolian roots into South Asia, the centerpiece of the 'Anatolian hypothesis' that such movement brought farming and Indo-European languages into the region," said Reich, who is also an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Broad Institute. "Since no substantial movements of people occurred, this is checkmate for the Anatolian hypothesis."

Then the similarities between the Indo-Iranian and the Balto-Slavic branches of Indo-European, despite their speakers being very separated. After moving into Europe, their ancestors moved back into Asia, going into central and southern Asia.

"The finding that Brahmins often have more steppe ancestry than other groups in South Asia, controlling for other factors, provides a fascinating new argument in favor of a steppe origin for Indo-European languages in South Asia," said Reich.

Brahmins = Hindu priestly caste.

The researchers concluded that farming in South Asia was not due to the movement of people from the earlier farming cultures of the west; instead, local foragers adopted it.

"Prior to the arrival of steppe pastoralists bringing their Indo-European languages about 4,000 years ago, we find no evidence of large-scale movements of people into South Asia," said Reich.

From Anatolia, some early farmers spread into nearby Iran, and then some local people learned how to farm and then spread into the Indian subcontinent.

 

[lpetrich]

• Treasure Trove | Harvard Medical School - "Largest-ever ancient-DNA study illuminates millennia of South and Central Asian prehistory"
• The formation of human populations in South and Central Asia | Science
• An Ancient Harappan Genome Lacks Ancestry from Steppe Pastoralists or Iranian Farmers: Cell

Ancient DNA suggests that some Northern Europeans got their languages from Siberia -- ScienceDaily

Most Europeans descend from a combination of European hunter-gatherers, Anatolian early farmers, and Steppe herders. But only European speakers of Uralic languages like Estonian and Finnish also have DNA from ancient Siberians. Now, with the help of ancient DNA samples, researchers suggest that these languages may have arrived from Siberia by the beginning of the Iron Age, about 2,500 years ago, rather than evolving in Northern Europe.

...
"Since the transition from Bronze to Iron Age coincides with the diversification and arrival time of Finnic languages in the Eastern Baltic proposed by linguists, it is plausible that the people who brought Siberian ancestry to the region also brought Uralic languages with them," says Lehti Saag of University of Tartu, Estonia.

...
The Bronze Age individuals from the Eastern Baltic show an increase in hunter-gatherer ancestry compared to Late Neolithic people and also in the frequency of light eyes, hair, and skin and lactose tolerance," Tambets says, noting that those characteristics continue amongst present-day Northern Europeans.

Another Uralic language, Hungarian, was brought to Central Europe from the Ural Mountains in the Middle Ages.

The Arrival of Siberian Ancestry Connecting the Eastern Baltic to Uralic Speakers further East: Current Biology

 

[lpetrich]

Ancient DNA reveals the Biblical-era Philistines originated in Europe | Science News

Hard-won genetic clues from the bones of Philistines, a people known from the Old Testament for their battles with Israelites, have taken some of the mystery out of their hazy origins.

DNA extracted from the remains of 10 individuals buried at Ashkelon, an ancient Philistine port city in Israel, displays molecular links to ancient and modern populations in the eastern Mediterranean, archaeogeneticist Michal Feldman and her colleagues report. Ashkelon residents carried that southern European genetic signature between around 3,400 and 3,150 years ago, but it disappeared rapidly as mating increased with locals, the researchers conclude in a paper published online July 3 in Science Advances.

noting Ancient DNA sheds light on the genetic origins of early Iron Age Philistines | Science Advances

Around 1200 - 1150 BCE was the  Late Bronze Age collapse. This was a period of great strife in the Eastern Mediterranean.

The Mycenaean Greek kingdoms were destroyed, their palaces burned down. But their burning baked some clay tablets with accounting records, and those tablets were rediscovered over the last century. The writing on them, Linear B, is the first written record of the Greek language. But Linear B disappeared with the palaces, and Greeks had to learn to write a second time. But that second time has survived to this day as the Greek alphabet.

The Hittite kingdom of central Anatolia was also destroyed, and rediscovered only in the last century.

There was also a lot of strife in the Levant, the land on the east end of the Mediterranean, and Egypt fought off invaders in the Nile Delta. Though they bragged about their success in doing so, they did not mention that they lost their New-Kingdom Levantine empire. Giving their brags a Baghdad-Bob quality.


This most recent work shows that east-coast cities like Ashkelon were invaded by southern Europeans, but it is hard to go much further than that. But it seems like those Greeks who destroyed the Mycenaean palaces.

 

[skepticalbip]

^ ^ ^
Is this a conflation of events or are you intentionally covering two different things? My understanding is that the Philistines and their battles are fairly well understood. However, the Late Bronze Age Collapse is blamed on some peoples who are largely unknown, only referred to as the "Sea Peoples". You could do a search for, "Bronze Age Sea Peoples" and see how little is known of this assumed group or movement or whatever it was.

ETA:
As usual, Wiki would offer only poor, surface only, information but a great deal of research into these peoples have been done by historians and archaeologists that can be found with a bit deeper search.

 

[4321lynx]

^ ^ ^
Is this a conflation of events or are you intentionally covering two different things? My understanding is that the Philistines and their battles are fairly well understood. However, the Late Bronze Age Collapse is blamed on some peoples who are largely unknown, only referred to as the "Sea Peoples". You could do a search for, "Bronze Age Sea Peoples" and see how little is known of this assumed group or movement or whatever it was.

ETA:
As usual, Wiki would offer only poor, surface only, information but a great deal of research into these peoples have been done by historians and archaeologists that can be found with a bit deeper search.

Have you any links to this "great deal of research"?

 

[skepticalbip]

^ ^ ^
Is this a conflation of events or are you intentionally covering two different things? My understanding is that the Philistines and their battles are fairly well understood. However, the Late Bronze Age Collapse is blamed on some peoples who are largely unknown, only referred to as the "Sea Peoples". You could do a search for, "Bronze Age Sea Peoples" and see how little is known of this assumed group or movement or whatever it was.

ETA:
As usual, Wiki would offer only poor, surface only, information but a great deal of research into these peoples have been done by historians and archaeologists that can be found with a bit deeper search.

Have you any links to this "great deal of research"?

I have read several research articles and papers but I don't keep bookmarks of such things. You could do a search yourself and google scholar will give you several papers. As a starting point, here's what one search of papers came up with that you can read through, you can try different search terms:

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C11&q=bronze+age+collapse+sea+people&btnG=

Of course, all the papers linked will not be about the Sea Peoples but you can cull out the ones that don't address the topic you want.

 

[aupmanyav]

lpetrich, delayed reply. I somehow do not visit TFT very frequently. Potapovka, Abashevo, Fatyanovo and Afanasevo cultures lie much north of Sintashta, but they all, including Sintashta, were returning northward movements of IE people after the ice-age was over. Perhaps IE came to Yamanaya region during the ice-age from Siberia.

 

[lpetrich]

lpetrich, delayed reply. I somehow do not visit TFT very frequently. Potapovka, Abashevo, Fatyanovo and Afanasevo cultures lie much north of Sintashta, but they all, including Sintashta, were returning northward movements of IE people after the ice-age was over. Perhaps IE came to Yamanaya region during the ice-age from Siberia.

Be careful about chronology. The last Ice Age ended at around 12,000 years ago, and that's how the beginning of the Holocene epoch, our one, is defined. Sintashta and similar are about halfway into the Holocene relative to the present.

The Yamnaya culture did have predecessors, like Sredny Stog, in eastern Ukraine and nearby south Russia.

 

[aupmanyav]

Be careful about chronology. The last Ice Age ended at around 12,000 years ago, and that's how the beginning of the Holocene epoch, our one, is defined. Sintashta and similar are about halfway into the Holocene relative to the present.

The Yamnaya culture did have predecessors, like Sredny Stog, in eastern Ukraine and nearby south Russia.

Seroglazovka culture near Astrakhan is 7,000 BCE and is considered IE. Where from did these people come?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seroglazovka_culture

 

[Jokodo]

Be careful about chronology. The last Ice Age ended at around 12,000 years ago, and that's how the beginning of the Holocene epoch, our one, is defined. Sintashta and similar are about halfway into the Holocene relative to the present.

The Yamnaya culture did have predecessors, like Sredny Stog, in eastern Ukraine and nearby south Russia.

Seroglazovka culture near Astrakhan is 7,000 BCE and is considered IE. Where from did these people come?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seroglazovka_culture

On what basis does anyone take the confidence to consider a culture of 9000 years ago either IE or not IE? What possible evidence, even incidental, could there be either way?

 

[aupmanyav]

I suppose that it is followed by more distinctly IE culture without an apparent break. More information will only be with the experts.

 

[lpetrich]

Be careful about chronology. The last Ice Age ended at around 12,000 years ago, and that's how the beginning of the Holocene epoch, our one, is defined. Sintashta and similar are about halfway into the Holocene relative to the present.

The Yamnaya culture did have predecessors, like Sredny Stog, in eastern Ukraine and nearby south Russia.

Seroglazovka culture near Astrakhan is 7,000 BCE and is considered IE. Where from did these people come?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seroglazovka_culture

On what basis does anyone take the confidence to consider a culture of 9000 years ago either IE or not IE? What possible evidence, even incidental, could there be either way?

I'm sure that the  Seroglazovka culture is pre-Indo-European. That is because of the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European vocabulary.

One can reconstruct a sizable amount of PIE phonology (speech sounds) and grammar, though there are plenty of differences of opinion about them, and there was likely some dialect variation. One can also reconstruct a sizable amount of vocabulary, though the most successfully-recovered vocabulary is not very culturally informative. Having words for the Sun and the Moon and fire and water doesn't tell us very much.

But one can make some cultural inferences. For instance, PIE had words for 1 to 10, and also 100, though I'm not sure about 1000. That means that the PIE speakers had a sizable amount of stuff that they had to count.

They had several domestic animals: dog, cow, sheep, pig, horse. Dogs are late Paleolithic, cows, sheep, and pigs early Neolithic Middle East, and horses around 4000 BCE in the Eurasian steppe zone: eastern Ukraine - southern European Russia - Kazakhstan

They also had wheels, axles, yokes, yoke poles, and a word for carry or transport, especially by vehicle, *wegh- It has descendants like English "wagon" and "way", Latin "via" (road, way) and "vehere" (to carry, transport), etc.

Wheeled vehicles were invented somewhere around the eastern Mediterranean around 3500 BCE, and this technology spread rapidly, so we don't know for sure where this technology was invented.

 

[lpetrich]

Joey Siraata Yracheta, MS Pharmaceutics on Twitter: "PC Plot of Europeans, Africans and Native Americans, with admixed Latino Groups https://t.co/rHr9Qnlqzs" / Twitter
[PDF] Colloquium paper: genome-wide patterns of population structure and admixture among Hispanic/Latino populations. | Semantic Scholar
8 Genome-wide Patterns of Population Structure and Admixture Among Hispanic/Latino Populations--Katarzyna Bryc, Christopher Velez, Tatiana Karafet, Andres Moreno-Estrada, Andy Reynolds, Adam Auton, Michael Hammer, Carlos D. Bustamante, and Harry Ostrer | In the Light of Evolution: Volume IV: The Human Condition | The National Academies Press

These populations have three source populations: European, African, and Native American. The European one is mostly southwest Europe - the Iberian Peninsula - and the African one mostly West African. Reading off the diagrams,

• American blacks are African / European with 40% - 100% African.
• Mexicans are 20% - 80% NA, with only a little bit African
• Dominican-Republic people are 20% - 80% African, with only a little bit NA
• Puerto Ricans are 0% - 40% African and 20% NA
• Colombians are 0% - 40% Africa and 0% - 20% NA
• Ecuadorians are 20% - 80% NA with only a little bit African