Genetic history

So... I have a blog that I usually forget about all about archaeology, history and archaeogenetics. Sadly, my own genetic profile didn't give me my haplogroup, and I'd have to have paid quite a bit extra to get my ancient genetic contribution, so I have to guess. But here's some graphs.

This first one is a simplified Mesolithic Europe. The yellow part is where Scandinavian Hunter Gatherers were found, the green hatching is the spread of farming... which in Europe came later when the EEF ancestry, or Anatolian Neolithic farmers, as they are labeled here, started to spread through Europe. There aren't any yet, except some small contributions in the Balkans and north of the Black Sea.

The classic WHG ancestry is here called the Oberkassel cluster, or also the Villabruna cluster. This is the source of "native" Mesolithic people, and their ancestors come from further East, it is believed, in the Paleolithic. There were actually other Paoleolithic peoples here earlier, in two clusters, the Fournal and Věstonice clusters, who were themselves distantly related. The last lingering impact of that population is shown in the map below as the Goyet Q2 ancestry (the orange), also known as El Mirón, or the Fournal Cluster. Ancient paleolithic populations like the Solutreans or Aurignacian Cro-Magnon populations, but they are essentially gone now, with only trace amounts in the DNA of modern Europeans. Even in the Mesolithic, nobody has more than half of this ancestry of those plotted here.

The blue, then, is the WHG Mesolithic population, which as the Paleolithic turned into the Mesolithic, they kind of took over. Much hay is made by diversitarians of the apparent lack of light-skinned alelles in the WHG population; they appear to have been relatively dark-skinned and blue-eyed, unlike any population today. The modern populations that have the highest concentration of their ancestry, however, are the whitest people in the world; from Scandinavia and the Baltic shore. I kind of like the idea of a population of blue-eyed, but slightly brown-skinned people with brown hair that look like a long lost ancestor of modern white people without being really white people themselves, but I'm a little skeptical of the narrative. Some bad faith actors have seized upon the flimsiest of evidence to suggest that they were as dark as Africans, in an attempt to delegitimize the claims of Europeans to their own ancestral lands. 

The red is the Eastern Hunter Gatherer ancestry, which probably shouldn't be seen so much as a separate ancestry, but as a cline of sorts, separated by distance, but ultimate from the same origin. T EHG ancestry came to central and western Europe early in mixed form in the Scandinavian Hunter-gatherers, and later as a large component of the Western Steppe Herder ancestry, i.e. with the Indo-Europeanization of Europe. Of course, prior to that, the Neolithic Revolution saw the spread of a vast population of farmers out of Anatolia through the Balkans in two trajectories; one that went northwards and one that went westwards and then much later, came back east bringing WHG genetics with it that were otherwise mostly missing from the Balkans and Central/Eastern Europe. 

This later map is the end of the Mesolithic and start of the Neolithic. The Green Cross-hatching is, again, where EEF populations essentially took over. Most of the population is considerably more mixed, as you can see, and the Goyet Q2 cluster is mostly bred out. Samples from within the green cross-hatch would be mostly green, with a relatively small sliver of blue. But, as you can see, the more western portion of the Neolithic area always had a fair bit of blue, and there was a resurgence of sorts of "blue" ancestry which moved eastwards. We tend to see the Neolithic as a big wave, but in reality, there were always much smaller waves as a closely related people mostly replaced another; we now have high enough resolution to recognize the waves that came with the Funnelbeaker culture, for instance which replaced the Linear Pottery Culture before it, or the next wave that came with the Globular Amphora in the eve of the Indo-Europeanization of western and Central Europe as the earliest Corded Ware burst out of the eastern forest steppes across the entire continent. 

I strongly suspect that the history of Europe... and probably everywhere else too... has much more population replacement and waves of migration than we suspect. It does take high enough resolution to see it, though; not every wave of new population is genetically super distinct from the one that it's primarily replacing. This is why the Celtic and Anglo-Saxon migrations into Britain were both invisible to genetics until higher resolution sampling became available; they were simply too similar to the earlier Bell Beaker migration to show up. Now we can tell that they were a significant population movement, but from a low resolution genetic profile, the invaders were very similar to the people already there, so the movement wasn't transparent. 

Of course, when the Bell Beakers showed up, that was easier to see. They were more significantly different than the Neolithic megalith builders that they mostly replaced, so the population movement was easier to see. 

This PCA also shows the clusters of the older groups, and how far apart they are. Interesting stuff.

Its discouraging to think of all of these genetic clusters that, as far as we can tell, just completely disappeared. Whomever the original Paleolithic people of Europe would have been, it looks like their genetics were completely swamped or replaced; at most there is a small percentage of El Mirón ancestry in the Basques, for instance. Heck, even the WHG Villabruna and Oberkassel clusters are pretty dilute in modern Europeans. I think it'd be fascinating if there were a population that resembled them and were closely genetically affiliated with them still, like the Sardinians are to the original EEF people, for instance. Especially as they appear to have likely been visually fairly distinct. 

As a purely cosmetic aside, my original SWTOR character, Graggory is deliberately designed on similar principles; fairly dark skin, brown (but not dark/black hair) and blue eyes. At the time, my thought was more along the old sci-fi chestnut of the "spacer's tan" but more and more I was drawn to the idea of him being an example of the alleged WHF phenotype. 

Who are the Dacians?

I said earlier that along with the Cossacks, my new interpretation of the Drylander ethnicity would be influenced also by the Dacians. That begs a question, since they obviously don't exist as a discrete people anymore; who were the Dacians? And that question is more difficult to answer than on might think. The Dacians don't appear to have written very much down on their own, other than a few glosses here and there in Greek or Roman texts, and one single possible text. While the Dacians, also sometimes called the Getae by Greek and Roman writers (although others made a distinction between them) were clearly up there north of Greece centered on what is now Romania and Moldova, and spilling across modern borders into Bulgaria, Serbia, the Ukraine and other bordering modern countries, it's not clear that they'd always been there, since the region has been washed over by invasions over and over again in recorded history, and if they weren't, it's not clear where they came from or who they were most closely related to.

Because it's simpler to assume so, many researchers believe that Dacian formed in situ after the Kurganization of the Old European farmers in the Chalcolithic and early Bronze Age. I suspect that this may not be true; what we have seen in the recent archaeogenetic data is that people were coming and going and superimposing or replacing each other all through this period. Lacking any better detail, its probably a better null hypothesis that the original Kurganized Balkan people were either replaced or admixed with someone else from the Bell Beaker or Tumulus or Unetice (or all three, perhaps) or even someone else leading up to the formation of historically recognizable ethnic groups in the latest Bronze Age and more particularly in the Greek historical Iron Age and Roman periods. This, unfortunately, leaves us pretty wide open to all kinds of interpretations on who the Dacians were, who they were related to, and who they were influenced by.

We do know from the historical record that they were at least influenced by the Celts, since the Boii tried to invade that territory, and there was a lot of interaction between them. Two Dacian plant names that are known from glosses are also, according to at least one linguist, clearly Celtic in origin. I don't think it likely that the Dacians were Celtic or para-Celtic, but they may have absorbed and been influenced relatively late by Celtic people on the move during the Golden Age of Celtic Europe. But probably no moreso than the Germanic people were. We also know that the Dacians were influenced by steppe peoples to the east; Scythians and Sarmatians, and Sarmatian allies fought with them against Rome in the first centuries AD. This may have been an even deeper relationship, though—a number of people have talked about tantalizing links between "Iranian" nomads of the Iron Age and the Thracians for years, and the Thracians have often been considered close kindred to the Dacians, if not the same people.

However, although that's kind of the null hypothesis—that Thracian and Dacian are either closely related languages and peoples, or even two different dialects of the same language—there are reasons to doubt or at least challenge that assumption, and it's not clear that it's true. They've also been linked at various times to many other paleo-Balkan ethno-linguistic entities; the Phrygians, the Moesians, the Illyrians—but lacking convincing evidence, these ideas all have to remain possible, maybe even probable, but tantalizingly speculative.

There was even a theory a while ago that equated the Getae with the Goths, who during the Migration Period, before the Huns chased them further westward, lived in the steppes to their immediate east. But any connections with any Germanic peoples seem to be relatively late and not part of any Dacian ethnogenesis.

Because the territory of the Dacians is centered on modern day Romania and Moldova, naturally there's been a strong push to identify a Dacian substrate in the Romanian language, along with the assumption that many Romanized Dacians would have been part of the genesis of the Romanian people. However, this entirely reasonable assumption has been stubbornly resistant to proof, and attempts to wring Dacian etymologies out of Romanian words have been challenging. (Not surprisingly, Slavic has an easily identified influence on Romanian, probably dating back to the Migration Era too. 10-15% of the vocabulary, numerous grammatical features, the majority of the place-names and many of the personal names are clearly Slavic in origin.) Curiously, there is pretty decent evidence for some kind of either long-term contact link or possibly an earlier genetic link between Dacian and Baltic languages, which now exist in a small area, but which earlier extended further east, west and south. A number of linguists believe that this evidence is strong enough to call Dacian (and Thracian, if the two were closely related) a southern Baltic branch, or at least para-Baltic.

This of course, touches on another significant hypothesis; the Baltic and Slavic were united at some point between Proto-Indo-European and the development of the various Baltic and Slavic languages. While this theory has broad agreement amongst many, there are plenty of detractors who point out conflicting or contradicting evidence. Some even suggest that Baltic had closer (or at least earlier) ties linguistically with the Nordic Bronze Age and the Germanic languages than with the Slavic languages, and only adjacency of the two groups has led to their apparent close connections now. Others, of course, suggest that Slavic was a specific branch coeval with Eastern and Western Baltic, and it's just an accident of history that Baltic is nearly extinct except for the relatively geographically confined Lithuanian and Latvian today, while Slavic is widespread. Keep in mind that Slavic is supposed to have existed as a single mutually intelligible Common Slavonic into the early Middle Ages, and only started really breaking up around the 6th century AD.

Anyway, when I suggest that the Drylanders could be seen as similar to Cossacks and Dacians, I don't mean that I'd be borrowing very many specific details of culture or language, since the Dacians are relatively unknown to us in ways that matter. Rather, I'm suggesting that some of the material culture and look of the Dacians could be important. The Romans, talking about the Dacian Wars, mentioned that the Dacian gentry wore corselets of mail or scale, the unique forward curving Dacian variation on the Phrygian cap style helmet (which I could exactly replicate in Hero Forge, but I did my best to find a good analog) but that the more common infantry was unarmored. The Dacians were also well known for their successful and effective guerilla style warfare, which made the conquest of Dacia only ever half completed (the Roman province of Dacia was established, but truculent "Free Dacians" continued to exist beyond its borders.) Other than the helmet, the most iconic element of Dacian warfare was the falx, a huge curved blade, sharp on the inside of the curve, that had a relatively long handle and was often used two-handed. This weapon was so devastating that it actually prompted the Romans to alter their armor, something that happened very infrequently, especially as the result of a single war against a singular people with a singular weapon.

Like the Celts, and frankly like many Indo-European peoples, plaid twill woolen cloth seems to have been in use amongst the Dacians at times, and my Hero Forge Dacian has them as well. The Dacians were also described by both Greeks and Romans as being physically alike the other "northern barbarians"; tall, light skinned, with straight hair, and "ruddy or tawny" coloration and light colored eyes, meaning brown or reddish or blondish hair. This was probably the ancestral condition of the steppe people, and is today still common to modern Celtic, Germanic, Baltic and Slavic peoples. The Germanic peoples seem to have the most common occurrence of blondism, but that may be a boosted signal from the Scandinavian Hunter-Gatherers that the earliest pre-proto-Germanic Corded Ware peoples absorbed. Another alternative is that while blondism was inherently possible within the genetic matrix of the European peoples (including the EEFs from Anatolia that preceded the steppe migration) it wasn't very common until a Bronze Age selective breeding bias event caused it to spread rapidly amongst the northern Corded War derivative cultures. This may be true, although I think it unusual that Homer's description of the Mycenean Greeks is typically Nordic in nature, and the Mycenean Greeks are among the Indo-Europeans that probably are not derived from the Corded Ware, but rather from the closely related Pannonian Yamnaya. In reality, it's neither here nor there, but I personally believe that the WSH genetic cluster already had a pretty high incidence of tallness, light eyes and light hair, and if anything, it's probably become more diluted over time because of intermingling with the darker EEF peoples.

Here's my Hero Forge Dacian, which could represent a Drylander too. Like I said, I had to use an older Bronze Age Mycenean-like helmet as the closest I could find to the distinct Dacian helmet, and I had to use a katana to model a falx. In reality, the handles of the falces should have been longer and the blade more curved, as well as sharp on the inside of the curve rather than the outside. But I didn't have a lot of luck finding anything that looked any better in the Hero Forge library. There's a big chonky sickle in the library that looks OK. If they release a slimmer, updated version of it, it might do the job better.

Archaeolinguistic discussion

I tried to make this  post in the comments section of the Eurogenes blog, but it was too long and the system rejected it.  Even though the person I'm responding to will never see it here, I thought  "what the heck" and I'll post it anyway.

@Andrzejewski "I would love to know what language Tripolye spoke and its linguistic affiliation- is it related to Etruscan, LBK or whatever it was that Ötzi spoke."

Wouldn't we all love to know that! Get to work on interpreting that Vinca script!

Here's a few things we do know: the only languages that we have full agreement on that have ancestry that probably predates the Indo-Europeanization of Europe are Etruscan and Basque. There are other southeastern languages that MAY be related to some of these that we know existed, although we know almost nothing else about them other than that: Aegean/Pelasgian, Minoan, and Hattic. There are some other languages of dubious provenance from ancient Iberia, Italy and Anatolia/Aegean like Tartessian or North and South Picene, etc. Almost nothing is known about any of these, even if they are Indo-European or not. The best "theories" still don't manage to rise above the level of handwavey speculative hypotheses, such as the "Tyrsenian family" or the "Vasconic family" and there is little agreement among linguists about the basis for any of them.

Basque does seem to at least have been geographically consistent as far back as we can trace it, but we can't trace it much further back than to just prior to the Roman conquest of Gaul, many millennia after it was presumably already in place.  It is probably related to or even descended from the geographically larger Aquitanian language, but even that supposition is pretty handwavey. Etruscan "claims" by Roman historians to have come from the north, and may be related to other Alpine languages  like Rhaetic. The Etruscans themselves present a genetic profile that is pretty close to what we'd expect from early Italic-speaking Indo-Europeans, who also presumably came from north of the Alps or at least the Po valley from the Bronze Age, and the exact same material cultures have been proposed for the ancestors of the Italics as for the ancestors of the Etruscans. How a steppe-appearing population that looks on paper like a good candidate for the spread of early Italic languages came to speak a non-Indo-European language is a total mystery. While it seems possible that Etruscan is descended from a language similar to what Otzi's people may have spoken, that's simply based on geographical dead reckoning, and is abductive reasoning that may well have no basis in reality.

I wish for more information on it too, but the reality is that we have no idea what language(s) the EEF population spoke, nor do we have any idea what the WHG language(s) may have looked like, although it seems possible that Etruscan and/or Basque is descended from one such lingering linguistic stock. Quite probably, the linguistic picture was more complex than we expect; if we paint brush in broad strokes, that makes it easier for us to theorize, but in the areas where we actually have SOME information from neighboring early historians among the Greeks, Hittites, Egyptians or Romans, such as the paleo-Balkan linguistic situation, the Bronze Age and early Iron Age Anatolian, Italic and Iberian situation, we see the precise opposite; a patchwork of languages who's relationship to each other is confusing and uncertain at best.  We can probably deduce that that same situation was common across most of Europe, and that the "settling in" of Indo-European languages was a much longer and more involved process that involved multiple waves of differing "grades" of I-E development before Europe was well and truly Indo-Europeanized. By the time we have, for instance, records of the expansion of Celtic in the Iron Age across much of Central Europe, we can presume that it superimposed itself over a number of completely unrelated and anonymous previous Indo-European languages that existed in the area already, as well as who knows how many lingering stumps of pre-Indo-European that was fading away to be lost forever to the mists of time.

One of the best proposals I've seen, although it is precisely the type of broad-stroke paint job that I am making the case against, is Peter Schrijver's broader Anatolian theory where he makes a vague case that Hurrian, Hattic, Minoan, possibly at least some of the modern Caucasian languagess, and even Sumerian all have an ancient genetic link, and that that language family is most likely the starting point for EEF languages. That leaves Basque a little out in the cold, but again based on geographical dead reckoning, I like the idea—speculative though it clearly is—that it might be a lingering descendant of the old El Miron genetic cluster's original language, transmitted through WHG to more modern populations, and against all odds surviving as a hinterlands language isolate in the mountains for millennia. But I wouldn't bet money on that idea, as catchy as it sounds.

Ötzi the Iceman

Ötzi the iceman (herein spelled as Otzi so I don't have to try and figure out the diacritics every time I type it) is one of the oldest naturally occurring human mummies, and curiously, is from Europe in the Alps, so presumably he has some connection to modern Europeans and diaspora Europeans like ourselves here in America and elsewhere. He dates to the Chalcolithic, about 3300 BC. Otzi was a reasonably elderly man for the Chalcolithic, about 45, and appears to have been killed; an arrow wound in his shoulder, as well as other wounds, look to have been inflicted shortly before his death. Because he was high in what are today the Italian/Austrian border in the Alps, his body froze shortly after his death, and stayed there in a glacier for five thousand years, to be discovered by hiking tourists, of all people.

Other hints from his body suggest that he may have been involved in copper smelting; relatively high levels of copper and arsenic (to make arsenical bronze?) were found on and around his body. He predates the intrusion of the Western Steppe Herder ancestry, so is unlikely to have anything to do with the Indo-Europeanization of Europe at all. In fact, his Y-DNA haplogroup is uncommon in Europe today, but was common among the Early European Farmers, and probably arrived with them earlier in the Neolithic. His specific clade is especially uncommon, but is found in isolated places to the south like Corsica and Sardinia in better numbers than it can be found elsewhere, so he probably was a descendant of the early Cardial Ware spread of Neolithic peoples into Europe. Other lingering clades of related G2a lineages can also be found in the mountains of the Italic peninsula, and presumably it was very common across southern Europe at the time. His maternal haplogroup is also extremely rare; in fact, it was named after him, because it was a unique expression. 

In that limited sense, no—Otzi is not an ancestor of anyone in Europe; only somewhat more distantly related clades to him are even present in Europe at all, and they are found in extremely low numbers and extremely isolated geographies. Of course, it's not quite that simple, as as fair bit of EEF DNA is present in all Europeans, but most of it comes from female, rather than male lines. What likely happened is that men from other cultures took EEF girls as wives (or concubines, or slaves even) and that's how their ancestry came into our lineages. Because of this transmission process, it's unlikely that you can draw a lineal line to any cultures or languages of Europe today from the Neolithic EEF people. Their cultures and languages probably completely disappeared (with the possible exception of Basque) and even their genetics and physical type were somewhat marginalized across most of Europe, including the Tyrolean region where Otzi was found, except along the actual Mediterranean coastline. 

In fact, while I said earlier that the steppe peoples had yet to come to Europe, a mirror image process to this appears to have already been happening with old Mesolithic Western Hunter Gatherer lineages. In the years prior to the Chalcolithic, there was a resurgence of WHG Y-DNA haplogroups across Central Europe. The recent Papac et al. paper on Bohemian genetics over time strongly suggests that what happened was waves of new people from the west, who were a different sect of EEF people, but who had incorporated more WHG DNA, and whom especially had had male DNA resurgences, came into the area and largely replaced the other EEF peoples who were already living there. Now, granted, the Tyrolean Alps are not Bohemia, but Bohemia shouldn't be seen as somehow different than the rest of what was going on in Europe. New cultures, likely speaking new languages (although possibly related to Otzi's) and with male lines that came from the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers had probably already marginalized Otzi's people by the time Otzi came along. The Indo-Europeans when they came, did so again, although even more thoroughly. He seems to have led a pretty hard life. He had tons of tattoos. Possibly somewhat romanticized accounts by scientists who have examined him and his gear suggest that he had killed several different people recently and still had their blood in and around his stuff (on one of his arrows, even) and that he may have carried a wounded and bleeding comrade over his shoulder for some time. He was probably killed by the arrow, but other injuries suggest that it didn't put him down right away, or that he had already been involved in fighting before being shot, and was pretty beat up other than the arrow wound, including a relatively serious head wound and a deep cut on his hand. In fact, one scientific team presented evidence that he was on the run, and had been fleeing up and down the mountains for days before being killed, bringing mossy plant remains from lower elevations with him as he desperately scrambled for an escape in the higher altitudes. To prove this, they say pollen embedded (from the air) in the food in his stomach suggests that he had eaten a meal at least 4,000 feet lower just a day or so before fleeing to the heights, where he ate a final meal just an hour or so before being killed right near the tree-line. Take this romanticized narrative with a grain of salt, however. The pollen could well have gotten on his food in any number of other settings, and before this narrative came out, the idea of him being a high altitude shepherd was common—and still quite plausible. As is the idea of him being a copper smelter of some kind, going into the mountains in search of ore.

So who were Otzi's people, then? We're not actually sure. Pinning him to a material culture is difficult. The museum where he is displayed claims he belongs to the Tamins-Carasso-Isera 5 group. I have no idea what this cultural group is; and searching it is circular; it appears to be referenced only with regards to Otzi. Their cultural artefacts seem to be similar to those of the Remedello culture of the Po Valley, however. This is further to the south, but loads of studies suggest that Otzi had been moving northwards in the weeks prior to his death, and probably grew up in the southern area of the Alps, nearer to Remedello. Whether or not that means he was from that culture, or simply traded with and was familiar with them we don't know, but likely if he wasn't from the Remedello culture, then he was from a neighboring and closely related one. Who these people were is unclear, but there is at least some evidence, although it's disputed, that the Etruscans and neighboring Rhaetic people may have been autochthonous (the other proposal is that they crossed the Alps from the north prior to the historical period.) If the former proposal turns out to be true, the Remedello people might be distant ancestors of the Etruscans. It is worth pointing out, however, that the Etruscans, when they emerge, have a fair amount of steppe ancestry, and are often associated with the Villanova culture, which was itself an offshoot (so it's supposed) of the northern Urnfield culture. This is confusing, as both Villanova and Urnfield are also often associated with Indo-European languages, but it's just a reminder that language, genetics, archaeological cultures and historically attested peoples may not all line up as nicely as we'd wish them to. Perhaps the language was associated with autochthonous peoples, but other aspects of the culture and genetics come from the north, making the Etruscans a hybrid of Indo-Europeanized Neolithic holdovers speaking an old Neolithic language still. Sadly, one can only speculate.

Physically, Otzi appears to be a typical Neolithic EEF type guy. He's fairly small and slight; about 5'5" and estimated to have weighed about 110 lbs. Even if he'd been on the run and eating lean for several weeks, that's really thin. My wife (sometimes) weighs 110-120 lbs. at 5'4" and from the perspective of an American, she's a small, thin woman. (Even if she's now older than Otzi was when he died.) Otzi must have looked like a runt. But that's not unusual for the EEF people; it was only the addition of hunter-gatherer genetics that Europeans started getting taller and more robust again after the EEF settlement of the continent. The WSH admixture brought more tallness and robustness. The hunter-gatherers, whether lingering western ones coming from the Atlantic, or Scandinavian ones coming down south during the Chalcolithic, or as a principle component of the western steppe herders coming from the Pontic-Caspian would have all been pretty manly, good-looking chads compared to the spindly EEF men. It's not necessarily necessary to propose all kinds of massacre and rapine scenarios to see EEF women falling into the arms of the various newcomers who's paternal DNA replaced the EEF men's during the late Neolithic, Chalcolithic and early Bronze Age.

There's a lot of confusing and contradictory information about the physical appearance of the various population groups of Neolithic, Chalcolithic and Bronze Age Europe. Some people propose that the EEF peoples were early carriers of the alleles for blond hair, blue eyes and light skin. However, other studies contradict that, and certainly every population that today has elevated levels of EEF genetics is dark-haired, brown-eyed and dark-skinned (from a European context, of course. Those who suggest that any ancestral European population were as dark as sub-Saharan Africans have some kind of ideological ax to grind, and the science does not actually support that, as has been pointed out repeatedly by the actual authors of the papers who are sometimes mortified to find their conclusions misrepresented.) It appears Otzi had brown hair (probably with plenty of gray by this point in his life) and brown eyes. I'm personally of the opinion that the modern Sardinians are the best phenotypal analogs to what the EEF population of the Neolithic looked like, by virtue of parsimony. It's possible, of course, that "whiteness" is a relatively recent genetic innovation that spread rapidly at some time after the arrival of the current genotypes that make up modern Europe, but it appears more likely that the hunter-gatherer and western steppe-herder DNA (the latter very heavy in Eastern Hunter-Gatherer already) is the better source of brown/reddish hair, blond hair and light colored eyes. That's a more parsimonious interpretation of the data, at any rate. Otzi was probably rather dark, thin and short, and would have looked like a somewhat malnourished yet physically lean and tough mountain man version of an Italian.

Of course, all of this discussion about whether or not you can draw a lineal straight arrow between modern Europeans and Otzi's people is kind of moot. Even if you could, although it looks like we cannot, it's fair to say that if he were a pre-Corded Ware individual closely related to the formation of the Nordic Bronze Age and the Germanic peoples, of whom the Anglo-Saxons (and eventually the Americans) are an off-shoot of, that his life would still be completely alien and foreign to us. Regardless of the fact that his culture, language and genetics would have been directly ancestral to ours. He probably would have even looked kind of foreign, and he certainly would have acted it and dressed it. If he'd practiced skull deformation, he might have really looked alien. It's hard to imagine how alien it would have been, and we'd be tempted to try and fit the familiar into it when it doesn't really fit. The excellent work by Dan Davis, for example, takes this Chalcolithic setting where the Pitted Ware culture (the last lingering Scandinavian Hunter-Gatherer culture), the Battle Axe Culture (a Scandinavian Corded Ware variant) and the Funnelbeaker culture (a northern variant of the EEF horizon, with elevated WHG ancestry, as was common in northern and central Europe of the twilight of the EEF cultures) are all coexistent—it's a great setting idea for a fantasy novel, but without any frame of reference to how these people might have thought, believed or acted, he has been adopting Greek mythology into this setting, with analogs to Perseus and Heracles specifically. 

Anyway, I'll end there on a plug for Davis' work. Go check it out. It's pretty interesting stuff, and he's a great guy. I've interacted with him a bit in the comments section of various YouTube channels related to Indo-European archaeology, like Genos Historia, Survive the Jive and his own channel as well. I like him.

https://dandavisauthor.com/

More on Celtic from the Middle

A few days ago, I posted this on the concept of "Celtic from the Centre", a linguistic hypothesis by Peter Schrijver. Coincidentally, I've seen a number of people referring to ancient material cultures, like Unetice as "Celtic" or at least "proto-Celtic" which is, in my opinion and the opinion of most linguists, quite absurd. As part of some of this discussion, I had pointed out to me in the Eurogenes comments by user "Romulus" that 

1) The earliest Celtiberians might lack material culture ties to the Urnfield/Hallstatt area, as Schrijver points out, but they do have obvious genetic ties to that culture, and seem to come from them in a genetic sense.

2) There's a genetic discontinuity in the British Isles ~1200 BC or so that's not as marked as the Bell Beaker transition, but still represents a significant population turnover of ~40-50%. The newcomers look like early Urnfield/Hallstatt people genetically, and seem to have the same general time depth as well.

Of course, none of this means that Celtic from the Centre is unworkable. Even Celtic from the Centre proposes that Celtic arises out of the Urnfield/Hallstatt group, just not out of the whole group, and not out of the eastern group either. The rest of the Urnfield peoples who didn't specifically give rise to Celtic may well have spoken some kind of para-Celtic language; an eastwards equivalent to Lusitanian. Ligurian is already proposed by some to be just such a para-Celtic language, for instance.

The latest Papac paper, which is making all kinds of buzz in the archaeogenetics community lately, suggests something similar by inference. Without major autosomal changes to the DNA of a population, there was still wave after wave of ascendant haplogroups over-riding previously ascendant haplogroups, etc. Not only did this happen after the Indo-Europeanization of Europe, but it was happening before it too, in the later Neolithic farmer cultures of Central Europe. This is also inferred from what we do know of regions for which written records exist, or written accounts by their neighbors, at least. I.e., the Iberian peninsula, the Balkans, the Italic peninsula, Anatolia, etc.--all show a higher level of linguistic diversity in the Bronze Age than expected. Rather than big, broad, ethnolinguistically united cultural horizons, we have a patchwork of related, unrelated and lesser related in a region, that only later acquires a common linguistic approach.

To be honest, the same state of affairs existed to a great degree right up until the advent of mass communication and the modern age. I mean, only a hundred and fifty years ago, French wasn't even spoken by the majority of the inhabitants of France still. Occitan represented by itself nearly 39% of what "Frenchmen" spoke, and "Franco-Provencal" dialects made up another significant portion of the eastern part of the country, etc. 

There's a tendency where if we know of a modern language, we want to push its immediate antecedents back to unrealistic time depths and assign very broad material cultures to these purported proto-languages.

Much more likely is that the linguistic situation of the Bronze Age and even Iron Age of Europe was much more diverse than we'd like to think, and the languages that we know of spread much more recently and from a smaller nucleus than we're previously proposed.

So, yeah. Celtic came from Urnfield, probably. But that doesn't mean that Urnfield was totally Celtic. Heck, even the Hallstatt = Celtic theory proposes that Hallstatt may well also have been Illyric in the east. And that's the default, overly broad model.

Celtic from the Middle

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-archaeological-journal/article/an-alternative-to-celtic-from-the-east-and-celtic-from-the-west/4F186F087DD3BE66D535102484F8E8C3

That article is a good read. While I like the Celtic from the West hypothesis, I don't think it's as good a theory as the null hypothesis. Although I admit that the null hypothesis; the Hallstatt theory of Celtic origins, leaves a lot to be desired. (The paper itself points out some of the particulars.) One that it only mentions off-hand, but which I've come to see as pretty important independently is that while our models have large, broad areas of developing language blocks, in every case where we have actual early written records, we have a much more patchwork and confusing scene. The Italian peninsula, for instance, is not just the area where the Italic language family developed; the written records include several non-Italic Indo-European languages (Greek being the most notable, from the Magna Grecia colonies), non-Indo-European languages altogether (Etruscan being the most prominent) and a strange patchwork of very early Italic languages, and languages who's affinity is highly suspect and nobody knows what they are. Messapic and Venetic and Ligurian (and Liburnian, although technically that's outside what is today Italy) are Indo-European, but otherwise have mysterious affinities. Lepontic appears to be an early Celtic. South Picene "appears" to be related to Osco-Umbrian, but neighboring North Picene is not. The old Sicel language, which gave the island of Sicily it's name, is also Indo-European, but what it's related to is unknown. Rhaetic may have been related to Etruscan and thereby been non-Indo-European.

Anyway, the point of all that is that imagining an early proto-Celtic that stretches back thousands of years and makes up the majority language of big material cultures like the Tumulus culture or the Urnfield culture is not consistent with the spread of Italic, and then again specifically Latin over what later became known as Italy; why would we expect Celtic to have been much more monolithic than what Italic was?

We have similar reasons to believe that the Iberian peninsula on the eve of historical records was similarly linguistically diverse, and we know that Anatolia in the Bronze Age was linguistically quite diverse. The spread of Greek over Greece is also fraught with concepts like Pelasgian, the Dorian invasion, and other things that hint at more linguistic diversity than which later emerged. The Balkans is also a big fat mess of languages, who aren't well enough known to be classified, but which seem to show more linguistic diversity than we'd have thought if Dacian or Thracian were similar to the theories of Celtic development. It's quite likely that the Bronze Age of Europe was much more linguistically diverse than we give it credit for, and that the origin of the languages that we know of (as opposed to those which disappeared anonymously without ever being written down) come from smaller and more recent sources than we expect. As the article linked above says in the introduction:

This explains the endless debates about the "homelands" and dates of Balto-Slavic, Indo-Iranian, Indo-European and other postulated proto-languages—debates further complicated when simplistic assumptions are made about prehistoric populations' archaeological, linguistic, ethnic and biological homogeneity. All too often, philologists have leant on outdated archaeological models, which in turn depended on outdated philological speculations—and vice versa. Such circularity is particularly evident in the study of Celtic ethnogenesis, a topic which can hardly be approached without understanding the chequered development of "Celtic philology", "Celtic archaeology" and their respective terminologies.

The term "Celtic" has been used in many conflicting senses. In this paper, "Celtic" refers both to the peoples whom Greek and Latin writers called variously Celts, Galatians, Gauls and Celtiberians and to their related languages, as known from inscriptions or inferred from place- and personal names. Applying a single term both to a population and to a language should never be done lightly, but in the case of the Celts they do seem, at least from the middle of the first millennium BC onwards, to constitute a valid "ethno-linguistic group". No single material "culture" can be associated with them, and there is no prima facie reason why we should expect one to do so. The relevant material "cultures" are so varied as to cast doubt on the coherence of ‘Celtic archaeology’ and "Celtic art". Old attempts at archaeological definition such as "The term 'Celt' designates with certainty the La Tène cultural complex from 400 BC on" now appear arbitrary; "Celtic" is rightly regarded as a misleading label for the central European Hallstatt and La Tène material "cultures" of the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age. The peoples of the first millennium BC who spoke the attested languages which meet the philological criteria for Celticity—certain unique divergences from reconstructed Proto-Indo-European—corresponded encouragingly well in their distribution to the historically attested Celts, Galatians, Celtiberians, and so on, while corresponding poorly to the "archaeological Celts" deduced from Hallstatt and La Tène archaeology.

Anyway, this means little other than that we should be careful of overly simplistic and pat models that rely on assumptions more than they do on actual evidence. Yes, this means that instead of having answers, we may well have questions that cannot be answered in this lifetime. But sometimes that's better than an answer that's wrong. And sometimes, as with this elegant Celtic from the Middle hypothesis, we can eliminate what evidence tells us is very unlikely or even impossible to be true, and therefore have more likely solutions left over to pick from.

Anyway, I now present a picture of "Hallstatt peoples" from superstar artist Angus McBride. In the past, and even in the present to most people, these would be considered Bronze Age Celts. I think we now we need to more cautiously call them Hallstatt Indo-European peoples who may or may not have been Celtic, or speakers some other Indo-European language altogether. 

UPDATE: As a minor aside, if this theory is valid, then it offers up a fifth alternative to the discussion of Pictish to those listed on Infogalactic or Wikipedia. And to be fair, even the Celtic from the East default mainstream theory, allows for this proposal, since it also proposes an early Indo-Europeanization of the British Isles that is separate from the much later Celticization of the British Isles; i.e., the theory of Pictish as non-Indo-European is inferior in every way to the idea of Pictish as "anonymous pre-Celtic Indo-European" that is a local descendent of whatever Indo-European language stock the Bell Beaker invaders spoke. That doesn't mean that it rises to rival the prevailing view that Pictish was probably related to the Brythonic Celtic languages, but given that that theory is not super solid to begin with, the spectre of Pictish as non-Celtic remains viable. If it is non-Celtic, or if a hinterlands, backwater non-Celtic language still lingered, at least, then it was probably Indo-European rather than non-Indo-European. As an aside, the Rodway (2020) source from the paper linked above clarifies, the Pictish ogham script's assignment to Celtic is refuted, and it is now considered to be likely non-Celtic. It's not clear to me why non-Celtic seems to revert in most people's minds to non-Indo-European, when we also suppose that the Bell Beakers Indo-Europeanized the British Isles thousands of years before the first attestation of any Celtic languages.

The future of Indo-European research

From Davidski's blog, here's some stuff that he's "in the know" about in the publishing pipeline. It's consistent with what he's been predicting for some time, but he expects the data that's the source of his confidence in those predictions to drop shortly. In fact, he expected most of it to drop in 2020, and blames the scamdemic for it's delay. Scamdemic being my label, not his. I don't know what he thinks about the Chinese coronavirus. Anyway, his specific predictions—paraphrased—with a little bit of commentary from me:

• The proto-Indo-European homeland will move westward. Rather than the Pontic-Caspian steppes, it will be the North Pontic steppes. The correllary here is that the Yamnaya culture will be seen as a probable close relative but linguistic (and ultimately, demic) dead-end. The origins of "classic" proto-Indo-European will be focused on the today somewhat nebulous transition from the Sredni Stog culture to the Corded Ware. What roles the more easterly earlier steppe cultures, like Khvalynsk and Samara, or even Repin for that matter, which is the immediate source of Yamnaya and probably Afanasievo, are not clear to me in this model, and will probably need to be rethought.
• In contrast, the search for the proto-Uralic homeland will migrate deeper north and east into Siberia. Because from a linguistic angle it's often been proposed that the proto-Uralic and proto-Indo-European may have been neighbors and may have influenced each other (or even been sister-languages deeper in time at the Eastern-Hunter-Gatherer time frame) this may also need to be rethought, or perhaps it will influence the models coming out. One must keep in mind that one line of evidence alone isn't sufficient to establish this stuff. Genetics and linguistics usually match; i.e., new language attestation usually accompanies a demic movement as well. But genes don't speak languages, and if genetic, archaeological and linguistic evidence aren't all aligned in any given model, that given model probably needs a little more work before it's ready for prime time.
• The key role of the Single Grave Culture, the westernmost variant of the Corded Ware, in the population of Western Europe will finally get the attention that it deserves. In addition, the R1b-L51 Y-DNA haplogroup, associated clearly with the Bell Beaker expansion across Western Europe will be seen as a key Single Grave marker; a minority haplogroup across the Corded Ware overall that benefited from a breeding bias in the westernmost area and therefore allowed it to magnify and spread across a vast area, even including other places where Corded Ware had otherwise already been established. L51 rich earlier Corded Ware populations are already starting to turn up in southern Poland and Germany, hinting at the arrival route from the steppes to the Dutch/Rhenish Single Grave area. The spread of L51 a little later with the Bell Beakers is more clearly known, although mapping this to linguistic families within Indo-European is still messy.
• The persistent idea that the Mediterranean fed the Pontic Caspian steppes in the Bronze Age will be overturned, and we will instead discover that gene flow went the other way from the Bronze Age on.

And unrelated to Proto-Indo-European, it will be revealed that Old Kingdoms Egypt will have less sub-Saharan African than present day "Egyptians." In other words, no, you wasn't kangz.

Still to be determined, in my mind, are what exactly was going on in the eastern region of the Proto-Indo-European sphere. The Tocharians came from somewhere and deriving them from the Corded Ware as opposed to Yamnaya seems to be a bit problematic. Or at least the research that would cement that hasn't yet been done. And the immediate post Yamnaya populations of the steppes; like the Catacombs. Where they a back expansion of a Corded Ware variant over a Yamnaya base? That's at least one possibility, while development from the Yamnaya is another. In the past, demic diffusion the other way; from the steppes into the Balkans, in the early Bronze Age has usually been the norm, and has been associated with the supposed founding of the paleo-Balkan Indo-European languages like Illyrian, Thracian, Dacian, Phrygian, and even Greek and Armenian, which all are believed to have entered their more historic homes (in Greece and Armenia respectively, and Anatolia in the case of Phrygian) from the Balkans. But if a case can be made for a Corded Ware rather than Yamnaya origin of the Catacomb culture, then—again, the Corded Ware becomes the Late Proto-Indo-European homeland after all, the revival of a very old theory, which due to genetic research will likely become the leading contender, although it will have become a revision/update of the Kurgan theory model in this scenario. 

Other than Tocharian and the Balkan languages, where the connection to Corded Ware isn't quite as clear, (although especially in the case of the Balkan languages, it looks like it's starting to come together) the rest of the Indo-European languages can already comfortably and in fact obligatorily be sourced to the Corded Ware rather than to any other steppe culture. 

UPDATE: Well, Davidski has changed his tune somewhat from a year ago, so the context in which I said the first point is no longer what he's saying. As he's my go-to expert, I'll take his word for it. He cautions against making too big a deal about Y-DNA markers, given that the earliest Corded Ware and Yamnaya is nearly identical at an autosomal level. While the differences between R1b-L51, Z2103 and R1a-M417 may seem dramatic, especially as one or the other of them exploded in big waves, in reality, he expects all three to be present in the entire pre-Corded Ware and pre-Yamnaya population. In fact, he suggests that upcoming papers will demonstrate that rather the Yamnaya starting as a cultural package in the farthest east of the range, that it actually started on the western edge and moved eastward, including bringing EEF admixture from the west to the east that early Khvalysnk and Progress aDNA samples did not have. So, he's the one who questioned "Is Yamnaya over-rated" about a year ago, saying that neither the Bell Beaker R1b marker nor the Corded Ware R1a marker had been present in Yamnaya, or if there were such samples, he was calling for them to come out, but he seems to have changed his tune and agreed after all that Corded Ware and Yamnaya were the same thing. Albeit with different breeding bias on Y-DNA markers that led to very wide proliferation of certain haplogroups at various times. 

Our long-lost Eastern cousins

While the spread of Indo-European languages into Europe (especially northern Europe) was the spread of Indo-European people with significant, but relatively little admixture of indigenous peoples, meaning that Europeans can be seen as the descendants of the Indo-Europeans with some hybridization, but broad continuity and connections still to the original Proto-Indo-Europeans of the Corded Ware culture and its antecedents.

In the east, the case was similar for a time, but the Indo-Europeans eventually became genetically swamped. In India, some Y-DNA haplogroups can be traced to post-Corded Ware cultures (like Andronovo), they speak Indo-European languages (in the north, anyway), and they have some cultural traits that are obviously still rooted in the post Corded Ware traditions. But they have also been sufficiently genetically and culturally swamped that nobody looks at them and thinks that they seem to be similar peoples to, say, the Slavs or Balts. But they would have been, in the Bronze Age and even to some degree the Iron Age.

The other huge expansion of European Indo-Europeans in the east was that of the Iranian language families, represented in Classical history by the Medes, Parthians, and Persians, but also the vast nations of "barbarians" known to many literate societies of the age, like the Scythians and the rest of the related peoples; the Saka, the Sarmatians, etc. This was a vast confederation of closely related peoples of clearly European extraction in both physical features, genetic roots, archaeological roots, etc. that follows and is descended from the Andronovo horizon, which was an outgrowth of the Sintashta tradition, which was a descendant of easterly Corded Ware variants, like Abashevo. In other words, the Indo-Iranian peoples were originally closely related in most respects to the Balto-Slavic peoples. And that was still true during the time of the Scythians and their related splinter cultures.  The Scythians were eventually swamped. Their far eastern branches were overwhelmed genetically and culturally by the Han Chinese, and other Asian populations, as wave after wave of Hun, Mongol, Turk, etc. populations surged westward at their expense. Quite probably as the Slavic peoples expanded eastward they assimilated what was left of the Scythians; I suspect, for instance (although I don't know that there's any genetic evidence to back this up) that the Cossacks still maintained some Scythian genetics. The Cossacks were an interesting example of how the Scythian lifestyle paralleled the original Balto-Slavic lifestyle, which paralleled the original Indo-European lifestyle, for that matter.

I miss these guys. Iranians are the fairly heavily admixed remnants of some of them, but after centuries of heavy exposure and admixture with Middle-Eastern populations as well as the yoke of bondage that is the Moslem conquest, they've lost most of their connection to western peoples, or even Slavic peoples—although I also suspect that without the tyranny of the Ayatollah and his folks, and the meddling that our foolhardy government did with the government of the Shah, we'd actually find that we had more in common with the Iranians than we thought. The more "barbarian" Iranians, on the other hand, we'd have had as much in common with as we do the Russians, at least, and it'd be easier to recognize our common ancestors if they had been able to maintain some version of their culture since the Iron Age.

Let's talk about some of the very far eastern expansions of "our people" deep into what is today the territory of China, but which was not populated by any Han Chinese at the time. This map of the Qin Empire shows some of the groups I want to talk about:

Ordos: The Ordos were a very definitely Scythian people, based on their material culture. While today a desert, in the first millennium BC, it would have been very productive grassland and pasturage, very attractive to the horse-culture centric Scythians. They came under cultural influence from a variety of neighbors, including both the Han and the Dong-Hu, and their relationship with the Xiongnu and the Yuezhi is unknown, but archaeologically (and from a physical anthropology perspective) they are almost identical with the Scythians/Saka from much further West, and it clearly seems that this is where they came from. There are numerous hints in Chinese texts and culture that suggest that they may have employed Scythian magi as oracles or as some other type of expert advisors of sorts, who may well have come from this culture as well.  They appear on the territory formerly occupied by the hunter-gatherers of the Zhukaigou culture, who are perhaps related to some paleo-Siberian and/or Mongolian peoples that still linger, like the Evenks or the Daurs, and presumably acquired a genetic and cultural substrate as they did.

Dong-hu: Generally assumed to be proto-Mongols, along with the Xianbei and Wu-huan. There is some influence found in the Ordos culture, although the proto-Mongolians also adopted, largely, the way of life of the Scythians and became a horse-centered pastoralism and raiding culture. Curiously, the Mongols may have absorbed more than just the economic system of the Scythians; Genghis Khan himself was reported at various times to have had red hair and green eyes, the only credible source of which would have been European ancestry. Even if he'd also clearly shed his European language by then. Of course, if the Dong-hu had Scythian admixture, then that puts the Scythians' range even further to the east; almost all the way to the coast, in fact. That may be the real legacy of the Eastern Indo-Europeans that eventually got assimilated, though—their lifestyle was adopted by Turks, Mongols and many others, and while those groups may not have all that much (if any) linguistic or genetic ties to them anymore, they did, essentially, adopt their culture. Even the chariots that the early Chinese used almost certainly came from the proto-Scythian Andronovo peoples.

Xiong-nu: The Xiong-nu, or Huns as they are often called (in spite of the fact that their connection to the Huns as known to the Romans is debatable), were probably a multi-ethnic confederation of horse-nomads. However, almost certainly Scythians were a component, and maybe even the founding component. Some historians point out that the earliest names that appear of Xoing-nu kings seem to be Iranian in character and that the majority of the founding Xiong-nu would have been Scythian. However, there are other theories that favor a primacy of Turkic, Mongolic, Yenesian or other Uralic or paleo-Siberian group. Some genetic research suggest that a significant minority of mtDNA (i.e., women) were of European origin, and at least one elite Xiong-nu burial has the classical European R1a Y-DNA haplogroup that would indicate a Scythian origin. But the majority of genetic evidence, to the extent that it can even be confidently pinned to the Xiong-nu, seems to be more easterly and paleo-Siberian in origin.  While it's clear that Scythians were a component of its genetics, and it appears of its culture, and possibly of its linguistics, if they were, they did not maintain that level of dominance in any axis.

Yuezhi: The Yuezhi are relatively well known from Chinese historical texts, but their affinities are less well known. They, or at least a subset of them, are credited with founding the Kushan Empire in Bactria after losing wars with some of their barbarian neighbors. While their affinities are unknown, the most popular are that they are either a Tocharian-speaking group related to some of the earliest Tarim basin mummies, or they are a Scythian people related to the Pazyryk culture. The modern day Uighurs, while of course speaking a Turkic language, do share a great deal of genetic relatedness to these ancient cultures, so it's possible that they were culturally swamped but still remain.

Wusun: A barbarian tribe that were, at one time, vassals of the Yuezhi, later of the Xoing-nu, hammer of the Sai (Scythians) and possible ancestors of the Hephthalites. Described by at least one Chinese observer as having red hair, green eyes, and looking like monkeys, their generally European character is not in doubt, and it is assumed by almost all that they spoke an Indo-European language, although Tocharian and some form of Scythian are both equally in play.

Qiang: While generally assumed to be a Tibetan ethnic group by most, there are lingering hypotheses that suggest that there was a strong Scythian influence among the Qiang, and some have wrested Eastern Iranian etymologies out of the name Qiang. Much of this is based on their reputation as horsemen and charioteers, though.

Historical and prehistorical site-seeing

As I told my youngest son the other day while we were sitting and eating some reasonably good Texas style barbecue brisket (as good as we're likely to find up here in the northern Midwest, anyway), while I have a real fascination for history, and I love reading history—especially ancient, classical and Medieval history—what really gets me excited is parahistory; the stuff that we can almost but not quite see because either it happened outside of the areas where literate peoples recorded their history, or before they did. And it's not just history; it's also the cultural anthropology, the linguistics—I wish I knew a good deal more about my "deep ancestry" not only cultural, linguistic and genetic (of course, there's a very large degree of overlap there) than we ever will know in this lifetime, because the data simply doesn't exist, and it can't be found, it's been lost forever, and the fact that such data once existed can only be inferred from other data that we do have, like archaeogenetics and archaeology.

I wish there was some way to spend some time; a good year or two, living with and observing some of these older populations, learning their language as well as that of their neighbors, and seeing how they lived, what they looked like, what their economy and culture was all about, etc. Of course, I also had to pick when and where I'd like to go see, and he asked me what I'd do if I could do that. He was curious, but not really, because quickly I got into esoteric archaeological cultures that didn't mean anything to him. I hadn't really tried to spell that out in my mind before, but I thought it a fun thought exercise, so here I'll talk about it. I think a decent gap between observation sessions is important, so I can see really significantly different changes in society as I go from one to another, so I decided that 1,000 years (roughly) would be the way to go. Of course, in order to do this, I'd miss some stuff, and I couldn't really go back much further than half a dozen or so of these before we eclipsed our knowledge and I didn't even know what to look for or why anymore. Anyway, to get a survey of my cultural, genetic and linguistic ancestry and how it developed, here's the stops I'd make:

—c. 1,000 years back. More exact date; let's go back to 1065 and stay for two years. I'd like to see the last of the years of Edward the Confessor, the last Anglo-Saxon King of England (and, ironically, the first since the years of Viking rule under Cnut before his reign.) After his death, both Viking contenders (Harald Hardrada) from the line of Cnut, Anglo-Saxon contenders (Harold Godwinson, from a rival house than that of Wessex, Alfred the Great and Edward's group) and of course a Norman claimant, William the Conqueror all fought for the throne.  During this time, the various Kings were starting to get quite intermarried, and a King and or his consort may well have been a non-native. Edward the Confessor, for example, was the son of an Anglo-Saxon, but his mother was a Norman, who as well as being married to his father, later married Cnut himself, the Danish king of England (and Scandinavia). The Vikings, Normans and English, at least within the Royal Houses, were substantially intermarried and interbred with each other, and would have been at least culturally indistinguishable, if not indistinguishable by personality. Not only seeing such important events as the Battle of Hastings and the establishment of the Norman aristocracy over an Anglo-Saxon England, which eventually evolved into the actual English nation as we know it, would be fascinating enough, but I could also learn late Old Enlish, Old Normal French, late Old Norse, and go wander about the border country learning an older version of Scottish Gaelic

—c. 2,000 years back. More exact date; I'd actually like to go just a tad farther, to about 60 BC, which is right on the eve of the Gallic Wars (58-52 BC.) I'd get to see Gaul before it collapsed, I'd get to see the Roman Republic kind of on the eve of it becoming the Roman Empire, and I'd get to do my first exploration of some stuff that we know about only tangentially, from the commentary of Caesar himself, most of the time. Were the Belgae linguistically and culturally significantly different from the Gauls? Were the Aquitanians linguistically and culturally related to the Basques? What was really the relationship like along the Gallic/Germanic border? Which tribes were Germanic and which were Gallic, and how did they interact? While I'm at it, maybe I can check out the kingdom of the Dacians, which allegedly Caesar considered attacking instead of Gaul, if events hadn't given him the opportunity that it did.  I mean, I can learn languages here that people don't know much, if anything about, even, as well as see cultures that are more well known. Classic Latin, Gallic Celtic, early Germanic, Dacian, and if Gaul truly was a multilingual affair with significant ethno-linguistic boundaries between Gaul Celtica, Gaul Aquitania and Gaul Belgica, maybe even more. And, of course, I'd prefer to have a guide who could take me deeper into the Nordic Iron Age cultures, where I could explore stuff that Caesar only guessed at among many of my more immediate ancestors. The Gauls aren't really my ancestors at all, except to the extent that the Belgae of Gaul and the Belgae of Britain were the same people, but they were the Golden Age of the Celtic peoples, whereas as an Anglo-American, my ancestors among the Celts were the more fringe peoples rather than the center of Celtic gravity that was represented by Gaul.

—c. 3,000 years back. I'd round this even further to the tune of being a bit older, and go to about 1250 BC or so and see the immediate aftermath of the Trojan War. I'd love to see Bronze Age Achaean Greece, the Hittites in their glory, the Assuwa confederation, and the rest of what was happening prior to the great Bronze Age Collapse.  I'd also be super curious about what's happening to the immediate north of this area, in the Balkans, and see what the story is with the Thracians, Macedonians, Dorian Greeks (whoever exactly they were, and if they came from outside Mycenaean civilization, or just from the hinterlands within Greece itself), the Illyrians, etc. So much to discover that we don't know very much about yet. If I could actually learn the languages of some of these groups that are mentioned by the Greeks but who we don't really understand very well, like the Thracians, Luwians, Illyrians, etc. this could go a long way towards untangling the origin of the Balkans prior to the arrival of the Slavs and Turks. Not to mention seeing Bronze Age Empires in their prime; the Mitanni, the Hittites, the New Kingdon Egyptians, the Assyrians/Babylonians, etc. And lacking any historical anchors, I'd also very much like to get up north and see what the Urnfield and Nordic Bronze Age was like. The Tollense battle took place at about the same time as the Trojan War, although it may be magnified in apparent importance just based on the fact that we know about it, rather than because it truly was important. While this stuff, except up north, is less genetically crucial to the formation of someone like me, it was an important part of our developing culture, and Western Civilization can't exist without not only the Germanic nations (and the Hajnal Line that corresponded with them), Christianity, and the Classical Graeco-Roman tradition. Which is why I'd like to see both Rome and Greece, but I'd also really like to see Urnfield and Nordic Bronze Age. Although I don't know specifically what to look for there other than "conditions generally."

—c. 4,000 years back. If the last stop is fraught with only vaguely dated historical anchors, we now have moved into territory where there are no historical anchors at all, just archaeology. Given this, the destinations have to be more vague, and the trips would have to be more exploratory; we don't know what questions to ask to know what to see yet. Much of Europe during this phase belongs to the Unetice culture, which right at 2,000 BC went from it's Older to its Younger phase. The Unetice culture is the heir to the Bell Beaker phenomenon, and likely represents a culture at a stage of Indo-European where the Italic, Celtic and Germanic branches were still united. As the Unetice spread and splintered, it eventually led to the founding of the Nordic Bronze Age (probably represented by a super-imposition of some Unetice elites over a local substrate) and southward to eventually form the Italic group, while the Celtic and some probable para-Celtic languages developed in situ. In any case, this posits a period where there's still a general unity between these groups. We think.

—c 5,000 years back. Here we round again, but this time we round younger rather than older, and go back to about 2,800 BC. Here we'll see a fundamental transformation of Europe, especially Northern Europe, as the Bell Beakers and the Corded Ware cultures are still at their early stages (with the probable origin of the Bell Beakers as we know them among the Single Grave variant of the Corded Ware. At this point, we're early enough that Indo-European hasn't yet shed most of its branches to begin with, and we can still talk about a very late stage of near-unity between the various Indo-European branches. With the possible exception of Tocharian, some paleo-Balkan languages, and of course the Anatolian languages, all of Indo-European was still wrapped up in the Corded Ware culture. This the very beginning of Europe becoming Europe as we know it, and everybody in Europe today (except for recent immigrants, of course, and the Sardinians and some of the other fringe, southern populations) have at least a third of their ancestry from Corded Ware derived steppe groups. And that's just by genetics; linguistically and culturally, that's where Europe as we know it really comes from. My own ancestry from Great Britain, for example, had a tremendous population turnover as the Bell Beakers arrived; about 95% of the total population is new. In places like Iberia (where I also have a junior lineage from my great grandfather) 95% or so of the male lineages were replaced, although it seems like the invading bad boys took local girls so the total genetic turnover is really only remarkable on the male lineages, not the total population. In any case, the Yamnaya is the eastern neighbor, and while in the past it was assumed that the Yamnaya guys were ancestral to Corded Ware, it now appears almost certain that they were cousins rather than direct ancestors to the Corded Ware, and the expansion of the Yamnaya may well have either sparked the migration of the ancestors of the Corded Ware into northern and central Europe in the first place (or maybe the pre-Corded Ware moved first, opening up the territory for Yamnaya expansion. I'd also see the end of the Globular Amphora and TRB cultures, for whatever that's worth, since it appears they were not Indo-European groups after all. But no doubt they made up an important substrate population who's genetics still run through my DNA today.

—c. 6,000 years back. 4,000 BC would be smack dab in the middle of the Sredni Stog and Khvalynsk cultures on the steppe, where my ancestors are from. Although if I rounded two or three centuries younger, I'd like to see some of their neighbors, like early Maykop and Kura-Araxes in the Caucasus, and the TRB/Funnelbeakers to the North, Tripolye in the Balkans, etc. I'm very curious about the interactions between Khvalynsk and Sredni Stog in particular, as well as the interactions of both with their immediate neighbors, and how that stew of interactions and whatnot contributed to early or archaic Proto-Indo-European, which presumably at least the Sredni Stog guys spoke and maybe the Khvalynsk spoke something closely related as well.  If I get further east, I might see the early Botai people; either the domestication of the horse was happening here somewhere during this time period, which is also another landmark (if vaguely dated) achievement of my ancestors. Also to the east is the late phase Kelteminar culture, and I'm curious is learning their language as well as that of the steppes would highlight any potential relationships between them, as well as refute or confirm the somewhat surprising, yet popular, notion that the Keltiminar spoke some kind of archaic proto-Uralic language.

—c. 7,000 years back. c. 5,000 years ago is the start of the Dnieper-Donets material culture, and the earliest one for which any kind of very early/archaic proto-Indo-European roots can confidently be ascribed. It seems to have been a different physical type than the later Sredni Stog guys; and they are interpreted as a largely EHG (with some WHG admixture) population that had not yet acquired the CHG admixture that later defined the area and which was an important component of some sort in the development of Indo-European, to say nothing of the EEF admixture (which was a product of the Indo-European expansion out of the steppes, mostly, anyway). However, the Dnieper-Donets male lineages seem to be what you'd expect from archaic proto-Indo-European, so probably the later admixture of CHG and EEF ancestry came through women taken through exogamous marriages. This would also predate, presumably, the Caucasian substrate, if the Caucasian substrate hypothesis is an accurate hypothesis on how Indo-European formed. The Dnieper-Donets is also the first Neolithic culture in the area (it's predecessor is the Mesolithic hunter-foragers of the largely EHG group like the Pit-Comb culture from further north—although not the Kunda and Narva cultures, in spite of the geographic proximity.) Going much farther back than this, and we have only very vague genetic and archaeological material to work with. That's not to say that the Dnieper-Donets people jump up out of the earth fully formed, of course—like I said, they probably represent a migration of some near relatives of the Pit Comb Ware culture, but exactly what relationship they, or anyone else, has with Indo-European when you go back farther than this, is impossible to say. In any case, it's also not clear the extent to which the neighboring Samara culture; presumably ancestral to the Khvalynsk and later Yamnaya cultures, had on the development of Indo-European either. While Indo-European seems mostly to have been a development of the Western steppe languages; the pre-Corded Ware rather than Yamanya horizons, in reality, of course, the two courses of cultural evolution appear very similar, probably had intense contacts with each other, were probably culturally, genetically and linguistically closely related, and if Yamnaya isn't really the best candidate for Proto-Indo-European anymore, it almost certainly was para-Proto-Indo-European; a closely related sister group. And, of course, the relationship and contacts between Dnieper-Donets and the Bug-Dniester and even further west Cris cultures of EEF peoples is something I'd like to understand better; although genetic flow seems to mostly post-date this phase and these specific cultures. And, assuming it's reasonable to do, I'd like to also wander a bit and see what the Ertebolle culture, for instance, were like, since they probably were an important component (well, their distant descendants were, anyway) as a substrate to the Corded Ware that developed eventually into the Nordic Bronze Age. There's even a theory that the Nordic Bronze Age is a fusion of a SHG/Ertebolle-derived population with a Corded Ware super-strate that later acquired a second superstrate from Unetice; which explains the high proportion of pre-Corded Ware hunter-gather Y-DNA lineages, as well as the curious apparent similarities between Germanic and Balto-Slavic; if it had a substrate that was an archaic Balto-Slavic relative, that would make some sense. Because of the nature of the Scandinavian population and its density, the substrates lingered as more important components than in some other areas, meaning that my ancestry, while culturally and linguistically very closely tied to the steppes, no doubt has some important Scandinavian Hunter Gatherer elements too.

But as I said, we're now getting so speculative that I couldn't possibly look at any earlier culture or time period than this, like the Pit Comb Ware, or Swiderian, or whatever, and make any claims with confidence that they contributed much of anything—if anything—to me. In other words, other than geographic overlap with people who later were unequivocally my cultural, linguistic or genetic ancestors, or their close relatives, I have no idea who these people were. So, I think it's probably foolish at this point to try and go any further back, if I could in fact do this. Although, I should point out, that making these trips, if it were something I could do, would teach me things about the immediate predecessors; just because I don't know much about where the Dnieper-Donets people came from, for instance, doesn't mean that I wouldn't after having lived among them. And maybe after living among their descendants, like the Sredni Stog would teach me that other groups were just as important as the Dnieper-Donets in terms of what I'd want to check out.

Latest on Proto-Indo-European discussions

In looking at the archaeological history of prehistoric Europe, it's interesting to see material cultures grow from small origins to spread over other cultures.  This is true even when the cultures that are losing out are obviously closely related to the cultures that are winning; i.e., the new spread may even happen from within a localized variant of the broader culture.   There have been some marked instances of a radically new population coming into an area; the Corded Ware's first spread seems to correspond to a mass migration/invasion, for example, but within the Corded Ware horizon, the Bell Beakers seem to have come from within a variant of the Corded Ware, and later spread not only over former other Corded Ware variants, but also to new areas that were not related to the Corded Ware at all.

In the earliest historical record, we get evidence of this as well.  It seems clear that on the very eve of records being kept by the Greeks and Romans that would give us the detail we'd like to see on this particular question, the Celts had expanded explosively across much of Central, Western, and even much of Eastern Europe from a more localized center of development within the Hallstatt material culture somewhere.  Reading Caesar, Ptolemy and others, one comes to the conclusion, as said on Infogalactic, that the Volcae, for instance, were "[d]riven by highly mobile groups operating outside the tribal system and comprising diverse elements, the Volcae were one of the new ethnic entities formed during the Celtic military expansion at the beginning of the 3rd century BC. Collecting in the famous excursion into the Balkans, ostensibly, from the Hellene point of view, to raid Delphi, a branch of the Volcae split from the main group on the way into the Balkans and joined two other tribes, the Tolistobogii and the Trocmi, to settle in central Asia Minor and establish a new Gaulish identity as the Galatians."  The history of the jostling and replacement of various ethno-linguistic identities (even if the genetics didn't necessarily see turnover; although often they did) across Europe continues apace; the Roman expansion over various Celtic territories, only to in turn have Dacians, Germanic peoples, and Slavic peoples spread over the same areas to gradually form the modern face of Europe as we know it  The example above is telling; it was outside of the formal tribal system, probably gobbled up numerous people from other Celtic identities as well as non-Celtic identities as well.  The archaeology is interesting; Hallstatt is usually pointed at as a Celtic archaeological identity, but Hallstatt was an interesting elite dominance kind of culture that was broad and seemed to be heavily focused on luxury Mediterranean goods too.  The Illyrians may well be associated with the Hallstatt culture in the east, so Hallstatt = Celtic is probably too simplistic.  Archaeologists who look at the broad cultural similarities between Hallstatt and the previous Urnfield culture seem confident in assigning a proto or archaic Celtic identity to the Urnfield culture too, but given the broad cultural Urnfield system, and its many regional cultures which can just as confidently be assigned to other linguistic identies (Lusatian to Balto-Slavic, for example, Golasecca as early Italic, etc.)  The situation is probably way too fluid to confidently assign proto linguistic identities to very many archaeological cultures from before the historical period; it's only after the historical period that we can have much hope of doing that, and even then for only limited areas; i.e, La Tene as Iron Age Gauls/Celts is pretty secure, but as mentioned above, even the preceding Hallstatt culture is not quite as simple as one would hope, and more than one ethno-linguistic identity known to the Greeks and Romans may have had its genesis within that sphere.

For that reason, as we go back further in time, we have to be a bit more handwavy and less insistent that sharp lines and one to one correspondences between archaeological, genetic and linguistic groupings can be observed.  If one looks at, for example, the Bell Beaker culture of 2,800-1,800 BC; several material cultures previous to the Urnfield, not only can we never hope to assign a very specific ethnolinguistic identity to them within the Indo-European sphere (there are even some calls that associating them with Indo-Europeans is iffy, although I don't believe that at all) one must keep in mind that the Beaker phenomena clearly represents a rather cosmopolitan group of people who moved around throughout much of Europe; British Beaker burials show signs of having originated in various locations including what is today France, Spain, Austria, the Netherlands, and elsewhere, and goods people seem to have been very mobile and transient.  In fact, many people believe that the entire Beaker phenomena was an elite subset that had access, for whatever reason, to trade networks throughout Europe.  One must also keep in mind that post-Corded Ware Europe still shows lots of signs of there having been contacts and interaction between post Corded ware material cultures; Sintashta to Nordic Bronze Age, otherwise separated by vast gulfs of space, apparently were either recently split from each other, or remained in contact with each other, given the high degree of specific cultural details that they shared.

In any case, the point is that much of Bronze Age Europe must remain historically somewhat anonymous unless we discover that someone we don't know about was keeping records somewhere that will eventually turn up, but we should be very wary of thinking that the steppe population that invaded, conquered and colonized Central, Northern and Western Europe was already dividing into groups that we'd recognize today; they must remain a still somewhat amorphous and fluid mass of just being "steppe peoples", and finer degrees of ethnic and linguistic identities probably rose and fell many times across the Bronze Age to be assimilated into subsequent waves.  The more interesting question is where did all of these steppe peoples come from?  I mean, the steppes, obviously, but more specifically, how did they get into the rest of Europe?

For quite some time, going back to Marija Gimbutas at least, although she was largely refining the ideas of predecessors like Childe and others, the "final" stage of unified proto-Indo-European has been considered to be the Yamnaya culture of the Pontic-Caspian Sea area, which spread a very unified material culture originating far to the eastern portion of the steppes in the Repin culture and introducing a leveling effect over previously broadly similar and connected, yet also obviously distinct steppe cultures that ranged from the eastern end of the Carpathian Basin to the Samara river bend and possibly a bit beyond.  The Afanasievo culture farther east was found to be genetically identical to the Yamnaya and was therefore seen as a likely vector for the spread of the earlier separating Tocharian languages, and the Usatovo culture, earlier than Yamnaya, but obviously coming out of the same broad origins as Yamnaya itself, (like Sredni Stog) was seen as the antecessor of the Anatolian language family; separating so early that it predates the unity achieved under Yamnaya.  Haak's 2005 ancient DNA paper, which bridged one of the remaining archaeological problems; the connection between Yamnaya and the Corded Ware were always archaeologically fuzzy, and many workers didn't recognize them; but Haak's analysis showed that the Corded Ware was 75% identical autosomally to the Yamnaya.  So now, it was clear that the Corded Ware came from the steppe, but exactly how was still unclear.

However, similar genetically to Yamnaya and derived from the Yamnaya genetically are not the same thing, and as more and finer detail became available, it became clear that it was impossible to derive the y-DNA haplogroups in particular associated with the Corded Ware and later expansions into Central, Western and Northern Europe out of the Eastern European steppe directly from the Yamnaya; it had to have come from a very similar yet distinct population.  Since the Yamnaya horizon can be derived specifically from an eastern variant of the pre-Yamnaya steppe, the expansion of the Corded Ware was looked for in a western variant.  The Usatovo and Middle Dnieper cultures, which integrated late Sredni Stog with Old European cultures like Cernavodă or others; again speaking very broadly.  While there was some obvious hybridization, and the Old European cultures were clearly EEF in origin, genetically the Corded Ware picked up relatively little from this hybridization; enough to be notable, but not enough to fundamentally change its clear relationship with Yamnaya.

It's from this complex that the R1a-Z93 and related claims spreads, and now there's at least one R1b-L51, and Davidski is telling us that he's aware of many more soon to hit print that will pop up from among this para-Yamnaya proto-Corded Ware complex.  Meanwhile, the R1b-Z2103 haplogroup of the Yamnaya and its related clades is not actually associated with any later appearing Indo-European group.  So, we have the following situation, based on the known language families of Indo-European:

• Anatolian - from Usatovo or similar culture that extended westward from the western steppes through the Balkans.
• Tocharian - unknown; appears to be a branch isolate, often associated with the Afanasevo culture, but genetic evidence is spotty, and finding clear connections with Afanasevo remains elusive.  One of the only ones that might not derive from a Corded Ware or proto-Corded Ware population.
• Italo-Celtic - derived most likely from the Tumulus culture, or other post-Unetice cultures, which are in turn derived from the Bell Beaker complex, which are in turn derived (mostly) from the Single Grave variant of the Corded Ware culture.
• Germanic - Derived from the Nordic Bronze Age, which in turn owes its likely genesis to the Unetice culture too.
• Balto-Slavic - derived from (probably) the Lusatian culture or earlier Trziniec-Komarov culture, which also ultimately derives from the Tumulus culture; a post Bell Beaker phenomena.
• Indo-Iranian - derived from Andronovo, which is in turn derived from Sintashta, which is in turn derived from the Abashevo variant of the Corded Ware culture.  It's curious that most post-Yamnaya steppe cultures that followed in the same territory show both genetic and archaeological links with Sintashta and Corded Ware than they do with Yamnaya; it looks like a reflux migration of western steppe peoples admixed with European central European farmers and northern European hunter gatherers in turn replaced the Yamnaya, which had earlier replaced them across the western steppe.
• Paleo-Balkan Indo-European languages - which include the current languages Greek, Armenian and Albanian, as well as several extinct languages like Illyrian, Phrygian, Thracian and Dacian.  The relationships between most of these are unclear, although if not somewhat genetically related, they are clearly benefiting from long contact relationships with each other (and in some cases with Indo-Iranian too.) This is another one that may possibly have a linguistic connection to Yamnaya instead of Corded Ware, although there are plenty of candidates for Corded Ware derived (or even proto-Corded Ware derived) Central European antecedents to give rise to them without needing to call for late steppe Yamnaya people.

Almost every Indo-European language, even ones that belong to branches nobody still speaks, is almost certainly derived from a Corded Ware or proto-Corded Ware population, not a Yamnaya population  The only possible exceptions are Tocharian and the paleo-Balkan languages, but even in those cases, a Corded Ware derivation is just about as attractive a null hypothesis as a Yamnaya derivation.  Now, of course, the Yamnaya people were genetically and culturally and almost certainly linguistically closely related to the Corded Ware people, even if they weren't ancestral to them.  They were more like brothers or cousins instead of fathers and grandfathers, and there were obviously lots of interactions between the Yamnaya and the Corded Ware on the steppes; it's difficult to imagine a situation in which Yamnaya women, at least, weren't incorporated into expanding Andronovo peoples, for instance.  Just as much, the proto-Yamnaya and proto-Corded Ware populations while on the steppe clearly interacted with each other a great deal, and probably saw each other as broadly culturally and linguistically similar; when the Yamnaya expanded out of a Repin origin in the eastern corner to incorporate the entire steppe, it may well have forced out proto-Corded Ware people, but probably assimilated a great deal of them as well, just as later Srubnaya or Andronovo peoples derived from Corded Ware probably did the same thing with lingering Yamnaya peoples

Anyway, this may seem like a small thing, but I find it very fascinating.  As I said at the beginning of the post, just because this stuff predates written history doesn't mean that there wasn't a lot more complexity and fluidity going on than we are able to perceive.  Simplistic one to one correspondences are proving time and again to be too simplistic, and the idea that the Indo-European languages may have developed out of only a subset of a related group of populations is hardly revolutionary; but having the ability to see it is.

More on Corded Ware vs Yamnaya

More on this topic, which I find fascinating.  From the commentary at Davidski's blog, let me quote just a bit of the discussion:

Michal said, first:

There is simply no way neither for Corded Ware alone nor for Yamnaya alone to have been PIE-speaking. All data indicate that these were closely related populations speaking different Post-Late PIE dialects, so when looking for a hypothetical Late PIE source, we should direct our attention towards the pre-Yamnaya populations on the steppe, with Khvalynsk and Sredny Stog being the two best candidates for the moment. 

Both Anatolian and Tocharian are lacking the wheeled wagon vocabulary. The Tocharian and Anatolian words for "wheel" derive from a PIE lexeme (*h2werg-), which is different from the corresponding words attested in languages descending from Late PIE (where the word for wheel is derived from either *kwel- or *Hrotós). Also, Tocharian does not share the Late PIE-derived words for wagon, axle and thill, so the only Tocharian word indicating the shared vocabulary for wheeled vehicles is kokale/kukäl (chariot), showing analogy to a Greek word for wheel (kúklos), which, however, doesn't seem to be enough to claim that Tocharian and Late PIE diverged only after 4000 BC. Thus, it seems almost certain that not only Archaic PIE (Proto-Indo-Hittite) but also Early PIE (ancestral to Tocharian and Late PIE) were spoken before 4000 BC, and most likely before 4500 BC. 

Corded Ware was associated mostly with R1a-M417 and likely ancestral to both the Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian speaking populations, while the Post-Late PIE dialect spoken in Yamnaya was associated with R1b-Z2103 and most likely ancestral to populations speaking Greek, Armenian and Albanian (plus Daco-Thracian, Mycenaean and Phrygian, when counting the extinct languages that are currently known to us). 

Another group of Post-Late PIE languages, including Italo-Celtic and possibly Germanic, seems to descend from a Post-Late PIE dialect spoken by the R1b-L51 people. As for now, it is hard to say how this group was related to Corded Ware and Yamnaya and when exactly their ancestors moved from Eastern to Central Europe. Also, it is not clear how and where that ancestral R1b-L51-rich population contributed to the emergence of the Bell Beaker culture and whether the R1b-U106 folks were still part of that group at that very time.

Followed by this response from Davidski:

I appreciate your insights, but things move quickly in this area, and you're saying things that I would've said a year or two ago, but no longer. 

One of the problems with your assumptions is that Z2103 is found in steppe populations other than Yamnaya, and you'll be seeing it pop up in many more pre- and post-Yamnaya samples. So how do you know that the language spoken by Yamnaya was ancestral to Greek or Albanian, when the Z2103 in Greeks and Albanians might be from other steppe or steppe-derived populations? 

And, of course, there's no reason why Z2103 should be tied to the same language family in Yamnaya, Catacomb, Dereivka, Babino, Vucedol etc. 

As for the question of the origins of L51, P312 and U106, I'm guessing you're aware of my view that they were somehow involved or caught up in the Corded Ware expansions, so if that pans out, then it will seriously leave Yamnaya out in the cold.

And Archi's response to the last paragraph by Michal:

These peoples are associated with the Babino culture (and its derivatives) which took the place of Yamnaya-Catacomb cultures. The Babino (Multi-Cordoned Ware) culture comes from Corded Ware which captured the substrate Catacomb culture.

Synome's response to that idea:

Working just from the Chang linguistic tree and our current genomic evidence, I would agree with Davidski that there are very few existing languages that are likely to be derived from Yamnaya itself, maybe Tocharian and Albanian. 

Greco-Armeno-Phrygian would be more likely to descend from a post Yamnaya culture on the PC steppe, like KMK.

Note that KMK, Babino and Multi-cordoned Ware Culture are all alternative names for the same archaeological material culture.

Michal's response to all of this:

@Synome
When knowing the commonly accepted positions of both Albanian and Tocharian in the IE tree, it is simply impossible to believe that these two langauges descend from one ancestral Proto-Albanian-Tocharian language spoken in Yamnaya. 

@Archi
By 2000-1500 BC every population in the Near East knew the wheel, yet it doesn't mean that they all spoke a language descending from a Proto-Indo-Hettite dialect. Also, the Anatolians and Tocharians used a very different word for wheel when comparing them with populations speaking the remaining IE langauges that all descended from Late PIE, thus from a language spoken only after the Anatalion and Tocharian languages diverged from the branch ancestral to all remaining IE languages. 

You mean the Armenians descend from the Babino culture? I strongly doubt this. There is no doubt that the Late Yamnaya people who stayed on the steppe were very strongly influenced by the Corded Ware-derived populations moving in the NPC steppe, and this could have been the major reason why ancient Greek and Sanskrit share so many similarities, so some linguists were confused by this and classified Indo-Iranian and Graeco-Phrygian as more closely related to each other than to Balto-Slavic, while in fact this only seems to reflect the relatively late interactions between the not-so-distantly related Post-Late PIE dialects spoken on the steppe in the Post-Yamnaya period. A very similar mechanism was likely engaged in modifying the Yamnaya-derived languages (Dacian and Thracian?) by the Iranian-speaking people from the North Pontic steppe. 

@Davidski
I must admit I don't understand your objections. First, if Z2103 is found in a Pre-Yamnaya population on the steppe, how will it discredit my assumption that the Yamnaya folks spoke a Late IE dialect (let's call it Greaco-Armeno-Daco-Thracian)? Also, if Z2103 is found in some neighbors of Yamnaya after this culture expanded west and east, how will it make my scenario implausible? There were of course some Yamnaya-descending populations rather than Yamnaya itself that were repsonsible for spreading both Z2103 and IE languages to such destinations like Albania or Greece, yet this doesn't make their Yamnaya origin less important. 

Additionally, I find it almost impossible to believe that it was exclusively some Corded Ware-derived waves of people that were initially responsible for spreading very different IE branches (including Tocharian, Anatolian and some Late PIE-derived branches, like Albanian, Greek and Armenian) in different directions, as this does not fit neither the IE tree nor the Y-DNA data we have. In other words, there is absolutely no correlation between the genetics and linguistics when assuming that only Corded Ware was associated with PIE. 

What are the Corded Ware-derived Y-DNA lineages that are supposed to be associated with the Anatolians, Tocharians, Greeks, Albanians and Armenians in your scenario? Do your choices make any sense from the phylogenetic and linguistic point of view? When exactly those ancestral populations are supposed to have left your hypothetical Corded Ware-relatd PIE homeland? 

Finally, I am not sure if this is what you propose, but are you suggesting that there were some non-Yamnaya Corded Ware-derived Z2103 lineages that were responsible for spreading the IE languages south of the Corded Ware territory? If so, what specific Z2103 lineages would you have in mind?

And Davidski's response to that response:

My point was that you can't link Yamnaya linguistically to any Indo-European speaking groups via Z2103, because Z2103 wasn't exclusively a Yamnaya lineage. And even if the Z2103 in some Indo-European groups ultimately came from Yamnaya, this doesn't mean that their languages did also. 

Indeed, it's generally agreed that Armenian spread into the south Caucasus from the Balkans well after Yamnaya was gone. So even if many of these hypothetical Proto-Armenians carried Z2103 lineages ultimately derived from Yamnaya, they may have got their language from somewhere entirely different. But anyway, ancient DNA tells us that they may have carried I2c. 

And I never claimed that Corded Ware spoke archaic PIE, nor that it spread Anatolian languages to Anatolia. 

But I suspect that a kurgan group from the western edge of the steppe closely related to Corded Ware was somehow involved in this process.

So there you have it.  The notion is out there that none of the branches of Indo-European that we know of are descended from the Yamnaya culture, even Anatolian and Tocharian.

Of course, even if that were true, that doesn't mean that they didn't speak a closely related language, merely that it left no descendants.  At best, you could call it a para-PIE language, most likely it's merely a dead-end dialect.  There is still a lot of confusion about the following, for example:

• where exactly did the Anatolian branch, the first to split off, come from and who spoke it?  What was their route into Anatolia, and did they originate on the boundary between the western steppe and Old Europe, say, in the Usatovo culture or some similar horizon, as Anthony proposed in the past?   (This is probably still assumed; either way, Anatolian probably breaks off from the western steppe prior to the formation of Yamnaya proper, which is an eastern development which spread westward to encompass the entire steppe.  Anatolian is not presumed to be a Yamnaya descendant even in the prior model.)
• For that matter, what exactly is the genesis of other paleo Balkan Indo-European languages, including the ancestors of Armenian, Greek, Phrygian, Albananian, and of course, languages that are poorly known but only from the Balkans such as Thracian, Dacian and Illyrian?  We see both Yamnaya derived and later post-Corded Ware derived proposals in the discussion above.
• What was the genesis of the Tocharian languages and does the Afanasievo culture have anything to do with them or not?  The recent spate of DNA from the Tarim basin was not helpful in resolving this, because of a lot of issues: Tocharian isn't attested until quite late, for instance, but it is presumed by linguistic means to have split off from PIE very early; the first, in fact, other than Anatolian, to do so.  The Anatolian area was also swept over by Andronovo variants (as well as other populations from the east) prior to the attestation of the languages, so what would be needed is some kind of direct link discovered between Afanasievo and later Tarim populations, but not so late that they are confused with Andronovo variants.  And as Davidski himself point out a month or two ago, the so-called Tocharian samples that were published are almost certainly actually Huns, not Tocharians anyway.
• There's a six hundred year gap between the end of the Sredni Stog and the beginning of the Corded Ware horizon.  Much of the territory where the transition from Sredni Stog to Corded Ware could putatively have happened is occupied by other culture that seem to be either non-steppe, or at best, mixed steppe and Old Europe, like Globular Amphora, Baden, Ezero, etc.  The actual origins of the Corded Ware, with 75%+ steppe DNA but not Yamnaya DNA are a major missing link still.  Granted, the state of Ukrainian archaeology is pretty bad, which is a major source of the uncertainty.  Better field work should probably help develop some clues to the direction of Sredni Stog expansion into becoming Corded Ware, if that is indeed what happened.

Another interesting aside is that my objections to the parsimony of the physical appearance of the Yamnaya people, as reported, vs their alleged descendants across the board is not really an issue anymore if they aren't actually descendants of Yamnaya, but rather of Corded Ware.  Not that I don't still think the Yamnaya descriptions are probably subject to sampling bias (and other bias, for that matter) that makes the reports somewhat suspect when applied to the population overall, but it actually doesn't really matter either.

I still suspect that the Yamnaya people are the genesis of the Tocharians through Afanasievo, and I suspect that they are a substrate of later appearing steppe cultures, like Srubnaya, Catacomb, etc., if not the direct ancestors of some of them, although given the inherent violence of the time and the rabid extinctions and blossoming of y-DNA lineages, they may have contributed many more women than men to the populations that followed them.  Certainly by the time Sintashta and Andronovo appeared, the directly Yamnaya descended cultures were gone, replaced by some who's primary ancestry (on the male lines, at least) were Corded Ware.