http://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2018/08/indo-european-crackpottery.html
Now, to be fair, he's mischaracterizing Quiles proposal significantly. The Demic Diffusion theory does say that the r1a clade that made up a large portion of the Corded Ware Culture does indeed come from the steppes; but he makes a point of distinguishing between the Eastern and Western steppes. It came from the Western steppes, and was displaced by the largely r1b bearing Yamnaya culture, which comes from the East. In this scenario, the fact that the r1a and r1b clades of the steppes are so closely related to each other is in fact predicted on the proposal that Indo-European and Uralic were sister languages who grew up adjacent to each other, and the latter was particularly influenced by the former.
However, the biggest problem with the demic diffusion theory, or at least with the integral Uralic substrate hypothesis, is that Uralic speakers today all share a portion of Siberian admixture, and the best candidate for the spread of Uralic languages is the later arriving Seimo-Turbino cultures with its N1c genetics. Related to this, the R1a found today in Uralic speakers is not the right clade to be a direct descendant of the R1a of the CWC, Sintashta, Srubnaya, etc. So, what does that mean?
It doesn't mean necessarily that the demic diffusion model is kaput, although the Uralic substrate portion of it almost certainly is. But if the rest of it has something salvageable, then what languages did the Sredni Stog, and later the Corded Ware cultures speak?
Who knows? Probably another sister language of PIE that isn't Uralic. (Linguistically, Uralic as a sister language to PIE is a hard sell to most anyway.) It's not like one Indo-European language hasn't superimposed itself over another plenty of times in recorded history, so why not in prehistory as well? In fact, we can track at least a few purported times that's happened due to archaeology and now also archaeogenetics; the imposition of Gaelic over Brittonic in Western Britain and eventually all of Scotland, the imposition of Anglo-Saxon over the remainder of the islands, the imposition of Latin over Celtic in Gaul, the imposition of Slavic over Latin (and maybe any lingering Thracian or Dacian or Celtic) in the Balkans, the imposition of Germanic and Slavic over Baltic, etc. There are even some theories of Indo-European groups that we can almost but not quite sense, like Nordwestblock. So, what if the Sredni Stog and other western steppes spoke something more like the Anatolian languages that split off from PIE before it became late stage PIE? They were then displaced by the spread of Yamnaya to become the Corded Ware culture, which were then linguistically transformed (slightly) by elite diffusion and further population movement from the eastern Bell Beaker cultures and EBA Unetice, who spoke a language more directly ancestral to today's Indo-European languages, while the original Corded Ware language become a related substrate that was a linguistic dead end. Is that a workable model? I don't see why not.
Anyway, here's some info on the genetics.
https://www.eupedia.com/genetics/haplogroups_of_bronze_age_proto-indo-europeans.shtml
There's some vague talk about a correlation between the satem languages and the R1a Y-DNA haplogroup and the centum languages and the R1b. However, Germanic is usually supposed to have come from the R1a dominant Corded Ware culture and it is a centum language. Plus the biological split between R1a and R1b dates back something like 25,000 years and is therefore meaningless in the context of Indo-European linguistics.
All in all a I'm not sure what to make of that. Davidski, the author of that critique, frequently talks about the close generic relationship between Yamnaya and Corded Ware, but at least in terms of of Y-DNA that simply isn't really true.
No comments:
Post a Comment