Oof. Yesterday's post reads like a stream of thought, rambling, incoherent mess. Hopefully you got something out of it, namely what the basic prehistoric stocks are, and the fact that they obviously had languages prior to the arrival of Indo-European, and a bit of discussion about what those might have been, and what traces of them might yet remain. This is especially notable with the actual living language, Basque, as well as the historically well-attested Etruscan, and the historically mentioned or known but with no agreed affinities, Minoan, Pelasgian, Iberian, etc. as well as the languages in and around Anatolia that are non-Indo-European and non-Semitic which may have contributed in some way to the languages of prehistoric Europe. I didn't really talk too much about substrate languages, because although everyone agrees that their impact was probably significant, most people also agree that trying to divine the nature of a substrate language from out of a language that replaced it thousands of years ago is a pretty fruitless task, and at best a few correspondences of endings or sounds or grammar can be implied or hinted at.
I also made mention—although maybe I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself, because I haven't talked about the biggest thing to happen to Europe since the retreat of the glaciers up to this point—of a theory linking a number of Caucasian, Anatolian and Aegean languages, and suggested that they had something to do with the EEF population. This isn't entirely correct, or rather, the situation is at least a bit more complicated than that. Let me show you on another map in the same series I posted yesterday. Like that one, the data it shows is a bit out of date, but I'll note where corrections should be made.
This shows Europe and Anatolia after the spread of the EEF population. The EEFs did not get into the Levant and certainly not Egypt, as it seems to show here; that is flat out incorrect, and is probably based on old, outdated assumptions that the Anatolian farmers were descended in some way from the Natufian Levantine agriculturalists. Genetics has proven that they are not. I'm also not sure what is meant exactly by Iran/EHG hybrid; that's probably meant to be CHG/EHG hybrid. There is a lot of churn in what people have believed about that region, and there was a popular theory, especially among Indians, that had an element that had to be integral to Indo-European coming from that general direction. This has not born out and is clearly a case of nationalistic jingoism getting in the way of good science. The gene flow into the steppes north of the Black and Caspian Seas certainly did include CHG and EHG hybridization, but not mediated through gene flow from east or south of the Caspian. Rather, the CHG elements that mingled with EHG elements in the steppe was already there in the steppes when the EHG population pushed southward, and we can determine clearly that it is a population that shows clear evidence of an older separation from those of the south and east. However, that Iran Chalcolithic is important, and as you can see the merging of the yellow and the pale blue in Anatolia; well, that was a real thing that happened and was significant and can be rather easily picked up from DNA analysis of the Bronze Age populations, like the Hurrians, Minoans, etc. of the region. At this point, it was already something that happened a long time ago in the past, but not so long ago that it would have influenced the wave of EEF that populated Europe.
So what we can propose, based on genetic evidence, and then try to extrapolate what that might have meant for linguistics, is that the first wave of settlement in Europe by the EEF population was by a "pure" EEF population. But some time later, a second, smaller wave came out of Anatolia, and at this point, the population had picked up some Iran Chalcolithic DNA and would have better been described not as EEF but as an EEF/CHG hybrid. I think this second wave is the one best described by the proposal at the end of yesterday's post. If there truly is a circum-Anatolian language family consisting of Hattic, Pelasgian, Minoan, Hurrian and North Caucasian, its spread would have coincided with this second wave, not with the first wave.
This also means that it's more and more likely that Basque and Etruscan weren't lingering WHG languages after all, but rather remnants of the first wave of expansion of EEF languages. Some people even find ways to link Basque with some of the languages of that circum-Anatolian family, although not convincingly. But the fact that correspondences exist could hint at very ancient connections that are heavily eroded by time and contact with other groups—and especially long separation from each other. Ultimately, I don't think we'll ever be able to know where Basque and Etruscan came from and what (if anything) they're related to. I do like the notion that Basque, nestled as it is even today in the stronghold of the El Mirón Ice Age refugia, might be a lingering language all the way back from that time period, but I do suspect that it's more likely that it's an EEF language, and that the EEF languages swept all away before them, with the exception of places like up on the eastern Baltic (contrary to what is shown on the map above, it was a refuge of WHG genetics, and was never replaced by EEF genetics, but rather eventually by EHG genetics. The only time EEF genetics came is when they came in the already mixed form of the Corded Ware. More on that in part 3.) and parts of the SHG territory.
The first Neolithic settlements in Europe appear to be those of the Sesklo culture in Thessaly, from about 7500 BC. It's not clear if this Greek Neolithic is where two branches of Neolithicization of Europe started from, or if the Mediterranean branch had a separate origin. In any case, cultures related to these early Aegean sites with strikingly similar DNA as well as cultural artifacts moved northwards into the Balkans, becoming eventually the quite large and complex Balkan-Danubian complex of Neolithic cultures; Starcevo, Kris, Vinca, Varna, Karanovo, etc. which make up what is sometimes called simply Old Europe, after the terminology invented by Marija Gimbutas, a Lithuanian Soviet archeologist who did much of the early work here. This Danubian Complex is quite interesting. It lasted the entirety of the Neolithic era for the region—thousands of years—with notable continuity in genetics and culture, although obviously adapting and changing over time. It probably developed the very first writing; the Vinca script is a thousand years older than the next oldest example Sumerian proto-writing (the Jiahu script from the Peligang culture of Neolithic northern China is of about the same vintage, however.) Not that we can read it, of course. We're not even sure if it is writing or "proto-writing". They are also the homes of the worlds largest cities in the Neolithic in their later phases. As an Indo-European speaker with a predominantly Indo-European phenotype, I often look at the EEF peoples and see them as a kind of alien loser that my ancestors replaced when their culture collapsed, but really that's neither fair nor accurate. EEF ancestry is pretty prevalent in all Europeans. It makes up by far the majority of southern Europeans' DNA even today. My Portuguese great grandfather was probably extremely heavily on the EEF genetics, and as recently as my own father, the EEF phenotype still was showing pretty strongly from that source, even though he was 3/4 northern European in ancestry. But my British and Scottish ancestry isn't exactly lacking in EEF genetics too from a different source in Central Europe. All Europeans have some EEF ancestry and should celebrate them as a crucial component in their own genesis with the possible exception of some of the Baltic and Scandinavian peoples where the EEF component was already a low percentage mixed in to later cultures and is almost incidental to their own ethnogenesis.
EEF ancestry and cultures spread steadily through Europe, going northwards into Central and even northern Europe. It seems to have mixed very little with the WHG peoples. This big horizon is called LBK, or Linear Ware culture (from the German Linearbandkeramik, a reference to their specific pottery.) They brought with them specific haplogroups that were common to Anatolia, such as G2 and H2. Both are relatively more rare in Europe today, but were paternal DNA markers for EEF populations for thousands of years. One of the things that eventually happened across the entire EEF European sphere is that as their cultures were in collapse and the end Neolithic, Chalcolithic and early Bronze Age, the men were less successful at passing on their genes and their haplogroups were largely replaced by ones associated with the expanding Indo-European cultures instead. Some have interpreted this in a romantically dangerous fantasy as early Indo-Europeans kidnapping or even raping local EEF women while killing off their male kinfolk, but most likely it was at least as frequent if not in fact a good deal moreso that these were voluntary unions, and the Indo-European cultural package was more successful in the post-EEF cultural environment, allowing them to command better access to land, animals, wealth... and women. But lets not get too ahead of ourselves—that's mostly a story for part 3 of this series.
These LBK people weren't the peaceful, egalitarian, and even feminist cultures that Marija Gimbutas imagined; it now appears that they had a great deal of social stratification, they spread because of intergroup conflict, mostly along riverbanks and wetlands, and as the Atlantic Warm Period ended, they collapsed in infighting, inter-tribal murder and worse. There's even evidence of widescale mass murder and cannibalism from sites like the Talheim and Herxheim death pits. Although the LBK people lived alongside and next to hunter gatherer groups, especially in the northern territories where SHG groups like Ertebolle-Ellerbek were pretty well established and the LBK penetration was relatively weak, they don't seem to have mixed genetically with them to any notable degree. At least not yet. When LBK collapsed, their growing numbers shrank again to a much earlier level.
The southern counterpart to the LBK expansion into Central and northern Europe was the Cardial Ware expansion across the eastern Adriatic Coast, the Italian peninsula, and the Italian, French and Spanish rivieras, eventually reaching as far as Portugal and the Atlantic Coast, from whence they made their way to the British Isles. These far western EEF people seem to have picked up more hunter-gatherer ancestry here and there than the LBK people, although some reports suggest that it was actually EHG rather than WHG DNA (!) The Neolithic Britons, on the other hand, had a notable (albeit small) WHG ancestry, and this WHG ancestry appears to have been especially concentrated in those who had prestige burials; i.e., cultural god-kings with concentrated (relatively speaking) WHG ancestry and probably a few phenotypical markers like blue eyes, and they seem to have made an inbred ruling caste. Otherwise, these Cardial Ware descended EEF peoples largely replaced the WHG population of the British Isles among the normal, common people, however. It's a little difficult to imagine an expanding agricultural culture overwhelming a numerically smaller hunter-gatherer culture, yet somehow enshrining some of those same hunter-gatherers as their god-kings, but that seems to have been exactly what happened.
The LBK collapse did not usher in the advance of another people with different genetics, but the big horizon fragmented into a number of other cultures that still seem to have maintained genetic continuity with the LBK. Things did change—probably as a result of climate deterioration from the Atlantic warm period, and the culture had to adjust (probably painfully) into a new normal. Along the Black Sea coast, the Danubian complex spun out Cucuteni-Tripillye culture on its eastern territory; with the proto-writing and the big cities. They expanded eastwards in river valleys, mostly, to the very borders of the steppe zone and had some interaction—both genetic and otherwise—with westernmost steppe peoples. But more about that later. The LBK broke up into the Stroke Ware, Lengyel and Rossen cultures as well as a few others, before the TRB, or Funnelbeaker culture, expanded over a vast area of north Central Europe, and the Globular Amphora culture, a seemingly more warlike culture with elevated hunter-gatherer percentages of ancestry (about 30%, as well as an increased percentage of I2 WHG haplogroups) expanded from the west. Farther in the west, the EEF peoples developed the megalith cultures who built all of the dolmens, burial mounds and barrows and stone circles, peaking at nearly the end of this period with Stonehenge itself; although Continental counterparts are commonplace if not quite as spectacular. The TRBs moved much further north than previous EEFs had done, into Denmark and southern Sweden, which was the farthest north that the EEF's made it, and the Globular Amphora went quite a bit eastwards, right up to the borders of the steppe.
It appears, for whatever it's worth, that the TRB people in particular is where the genes for lactose tolerance first started really gaming traction. The early Indo-Europeans had relatively low lactose tolerance, in spite of being a nomadic pastoralist society, but admixture with the outgoing EEF cultures may have boosted the signal for lactose tolerance among their descendants, including us, the modern day Europeans and Diaspora Europeans of America and other places. From a phenotype perspective there's some hints that they may have been blond and blue-eyed, and I expect that this wasn't completely unknown among them, but given that their genetic profile is still very similar to that of the Sardinians and other southern Europeans of today, I personally find that unlikely to be worthy of being considered the null hypothesis. It is possible that such traits had already spread through the WHG population earlier and got picked up by these later EEF populations that were relatively rich in WHG DNA compared to their predecessors, but again, I doubt that can be considered the null hypothesis, and to accept that, some pretty conclusive evidence needs to be presented which has not been (in fact, the more recent and most trustworthy evidence suggests the opposite; darker, "Mediterranean" phenotypes from the GAC and TRB peoples.)
There are a few other late EEF cultures of note, like Baden culture. In general, they seem to have become more aggressive and warlike than they had been; fortifications are associated with their settlements (which are more sparse than they used to be, perhaps indicating elevated mobility), rites like suttee are evident, and everywhere signs of warfare, violence and murder seem to pop up with much more regularity (although this may well have been perception bias; we now know that the LBK people themselves were pretty contentious with each other, for instance, and may well have caused their own collapse by growing beyond their ability to support their population and turning on each other.) This supposed increase in violence and conflict is often seen as "Indo-Europeanization" by people like Marija Gimbutas who had created a romanticized fantasy world of her own imagining in the culture of Old Europe, but genetics in more recent years has proven pretty conclusively that Baden, GAC and TRB were themselves Old European cultures, although with an unexpectedly elevated level of WHG ancestry making some kind of resurgence among them, but had no steppe (Indo-European) ancestry at all. In general, rather, these were the last hurrahs of EEF specific cultures; this is the very eve of the Indo-European expansion. While it's not fair to say that the EEFs disappeared, as they became a significant genetic component of the subsequent cultures of Europe, especially southern Europe, but their cultures did certainly disappear. While some lingering languages from their era of dominance, like probably Basque and Etruscan hung on for a time, by and large, Europe today owes much more culturally to the Indo-Europeans than to anyone else, and Europe is an Indo-European continent. And even the Basque and Etruscans had notable levels of steppe ancestry; Indo-European culture dominated even where their genetics may not have been as prevalent as they were in areas further north or east, for instance.
So let's go backwards again now and talk about what was happening in Eastern Europe, specifically on the steppes, while all of these EEF cultures were enjoying their dominance over the Balkans and central and western Europe. During the earlier years of the Balkan-Danubian Old Europe complex, the easternmost extension of this was the Bug-Dniester (later the Cucuteni-Tripillye). Immediately to the east of this was the Dnieper-Donets culture. Made up of large and robust people compared to the Old Europeans, the Dnieper Donets culture is considered a lingering Mesolithic Cro-Magnon Eastern Hunter-Gatherer culture that had picked up some Western Hunter Gatherer DNA as well... but not EEF ancestry. As time went on, they obviously had some contacts with the Bug-Dniester people, although genetic interchange does not seem to (yet) have been a component here. The Dnieper-Donets people did pick up some animal husbandry, however, although their diet seems to be particularly oriented towards meat, fish and nuts.
To the northeast of Dnieper-Donets was the Samara culture, which seems to have been genetically similar that it was based on an EHG base. It did not, however, have any WHG admixture, and it seems to have fairly early picked some some CHG admixture that the D-D guys did not, making the two of them (and their subsequent descendants) fairly easy to distinguish from each other once good DNA samples are obtained. Both culturally and genetically there is broad similarity between the two, however, and presumably they were in some kind of contact, and split from a reasonably similar common ancestor culture. The Samara guys also developed the proto-version of one of the most recognizable early Indo-European cultural artifacts, the kurgan burial.
Over time, the D-D and Samara people both picked up probably female mediated CHG gene flow, while retaining paternal haplogroups associated with EHG and WHG populations. They became what is called the Western Steppe Herders genetic cluster, which was a pretty fair mixture of EHG and CHG genetics at a broad level. But the CHG admixture seems to have been particularly strong in the Samara region, while the western group had more WHG admixture, and over time picked up a not completely insignificant EEF admixture (up to 20% in at least one individual sampled, although it's not known that that's a good average for the population overall.) Probably from EEF wives taken to the steppes on occasion—although by and large both a cultural and genetic frontier was still discernable between the later EEF populations and the developing WSH populations. Later Neolithic cultures include the western Sredni Stog which is a bit more mixed than Dnieper-Donets and seems to have geographically absorbed and replaced it, probably growing out of it in the first place. Further east we have the Khvalynsk culture which replaced the Samara culture. By this time, horse domestication had been undertaken by the SS culture, including cheek pieces, which indicate that they were ridden, the classic kurgan replaced the proto-kurgan amongst the Khvalynsk side, and both (but especially the eastern culture, where the environment more favored it) started becoming more pastoral nomadic rather than settled agriculturalists in their economy. This is perhaps important later, but the Sredni Stog also developed round or pointed bottom corded pottery. Stay tuned.
From an archaeological perspective, it was assumed that the last phase of this WSH population before it exploded outwards—called the Yamnaya culture—developed in the East. New CHG enriching from Iran or even further east is often proposed, and the easternmost variant of Khvalynsk called Repin is suggested as the most similar to Yamnaya. However, genetics has given us a slightly different picture. The Iran Chalcolithic does not seem to have been the source of the CHG admixture, but rather much older CHG pops that were already on the steppes way back in the Mesolithic. People have also been mesmerized by some superficially similar cultural artifacts in the Caucasus, like the Maykop burials that appear to have very similar kurgans to those of the eastern steppe; but it's now clear that there is no Maykop gene flow into the steppes or vice versa; in fact a buffer population of sorts with elevated Siberian or Botai-like ancestry was briefly interspersed between them before completely disappearing without a trace (called by the name of its prime genetic sample, Steppe_Maykop, although they were not actually related to the classic steppe population or the Maykop culture either one. The original hunter-gatherer peoples of Central Asia seem to have the rather ignominious distinction of being one of the major regional hunter-gatherer population clusters that disappeared completely without a trace, without leaving any notable impact on any subsequent population.) However, this idea dies hard, and people still talk about Near Eastern origins or influences on Indo-European. From a genetic perspective, at least, there isn't any at all. In fact, we see the slight WHG and EEF ancestry starting to move eastward, which suggests that contrary to the archaeological theories, the Yamnaya horizon spread from west to east, not the other way around. No doubt much of the Khvalynsk DNA remains in the very similar Yamnaya horizon, but it's not really an exact match; it can only be modeled by suggesting strong Sredni Stog influence.
Sredni Stog spread not only eastwards to form the Yamnaya horizon by combining with the Khvalynsk people, but they also went into the northwestern forest steppe zone, forming the Middle Dnieper culture, which is the source of the Corded Ware culture; in fact, considered the earliest expression of it. The Corded Ware was a vast culture that spread all over northern Europe from the North Sea shores on the west to the Urals in the East, before bridging that even in subsequent phases and ending all the way on nearly the Pacific coast if some lines of evidence are to be believed; but certainly going at least as far as deep into China with the Ordos culture. But that's a discussion for a later date, and deals with post-Corded Ware cultures considerably later than the formation of the Eneolithic or Chalcolithic Corded Ware. Corded Ware is named, as you can probably guess, for the cord-impressed pottery that was it's hallmark, which seems to be a direct descendent of the Sredni Stog corded pottery. The Balkans was not unaffected here, although whether the flow of WSH peoples into the Balkans comes from the Yamnaya, or the Corded Ware, or both is unclear. The Corded Ware is clearly very similar genetically to the Yamnaya, although having picked up a notable although still small percentage of local DNA as it moved into this new territory, probably mediated by GAC (and other) women taken as wives or concubines.
I'll talk more about Corded Ware and subsequent Indo-European expansion from it and Yamnaya in part 3, but let me at least say now that a lot of people have been very mesmerized by the paternal haplogroups. This, however, is not indicative of the population overall, but rather the successes of particular narrow lineages within the population; the fact that Yamnaya and Corded Ware are genetically so similar should not confuse anyone into making too much of the paternal haplogroups. It is true that Yamnaya is heavily represented by an R1b haplogroup, but not the subclade that later is common in western Europe. Corded Ware is also heavily represented by R1a, which is almost if not completely absent from Yamnaya. Corded Ware had some more variety though, and a rare clade of R1b lurking in its interior later spread with the subsequent Bell Beaker culture, which is derived from the Single Grave culture, the westernmost variant of the Corded Ware. Again; these should be seen as the traveling along with, and then sudden success and rabid proliferation of a paternal haplogroup from some big man individual or some closely related tribe, group or family within the greater population that just kind of overwhelms the population overall. This isn't too unusual of a happenstance, but because it is so marked in the Yamnaya and Corded Ware, there are theories as wild as the idea that Corded Ware can't even be an Indo-European language at all, or there being an "R1a language" vs an "R1b language". This is especially backward, as we will see in the next part that most likely the Corded Ware is the ancestor of almost all of the Indo-European languages, and Yamnaya was directly ancestral to only a few, like maybe the Tocharian branch far out east, and maybe some of the early Balkan languages. Don't be too mesmerized by the paternal haplogroup; breeding bias can have a very notable impact in a very short time; over just a few generations, and it doesn't take away at all from the extremely high genetic similarity between Corded Ware, Bell Beaker and Yamnaya cultures, who all come from the same source, ultimately.
In any case, the next two maps in the series are accurate enough, more or less, and since they cover this latest Yamnaya and Corded Ware formation and expansion, I'll go ahead and post them now. I'll talk about the specific linkages, as best as we can make them, between these cultures and the emerging Indo-European languages in part 3.
