Brexit forces relocation of one of today’s main Yamna research projects to Finland

Archaeologist Volker Heyd is bringing his ERC Advanced Grant to Helsinki. So has proudly reported the University of Helskinki.

Some interesting excerpts (emphasis mine):

With his research group, Heyd wants to map out how the Yamnaya culture, also known as the Pit Grave culture, migrated from the Eurasian steppes to prehistoric south-eastern Europe approximately 3,000 years BCE. Most of the burial mounds typical of the Yamnaya culture have already been destroyed, but new techniques enable their identification and study.

The project is using multidisciplinary methods to solve the mystery. Archaeologists are collaborating with scholars of biological and environmental

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Lazaridis’ evolutionary history of human populations in Europe

Preprint of a review by Iosif Lazaridis, The evolutionary history of human populations in Europe.

Interesting excerpts:

Steppe populations during the Eneolithic to Bronze Age were a mix of at least two elements[28], the EHG who lived in eastern Europe ~8kya and a southern population element related to present-day Armenians[28], and ancient Caucasus hunter-gatherers[22], and farmers from Iran[24]. Steppe migrants made a massive impact in Central and Northern Europe post- 5kya[28,43]. Some of them expanded eastward, founding the Afanasievo culture[43] and also eventually reached India[24]. These expansions are probable vectors for the spread of Late Proto-Indo-European[44] languages

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The Proto-Indo-European – Euskarian hypothesis

Another short communication by Juliette Blevins has just been posted, A single sibilant in Proto-Basque: *s, *Rs, *sT and the phonetic basis of the sibilant split:

Blevins (to appear) presents a new reconstruction of Proto-Basque, the mother of Basque and Aquitanian, based on standard methods in historical linguistics: the comparative method and the method of internal reconstruction. Where all previous reconstructions of Proto-Basque assume a contrast between two sibilants, *s, a voiceless apical sibilant, and *z a voiceless laminal sibilant (Martinet 1955; Michelena 1977; Lakarra 1995; Trask 1997), this proposal is unique in positing only a single sibilant *s.

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The Lower Danube during the Eneolithic, and the potential Proto-Anatolian community

Local cultural settings and transregional phenomena: on the impact of a funerary ritual in the Lower Danube in the 4th millennium BC, by Frinculeasa & Mirea, In: Buletinul Muzeului Judetean Teleorman, Seria Arheologie, 9, 2017, p. 75-116.

Interesting excerpts (emphasis mine):

1. In the area under discussion, around 4300-4200 BC – a chronological segment marking the evolutionary peak of ‘Old Europe’ (Anthony 2007: 225), represented by the Cucuteni A/ Tripolie BI, Aldeni-Bolgrad, Gumelniţa-Karanovo VI cultures – the first tumular burials appeared (Govedarica 2016: 85). However, flat burials, marked by the existence of some allogeneous elements in the local

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Population size potentially affecting rates of language change

Open access Population Size and the Rate of Language Evolution: A Test Across Indo-European, Austronesian, and Bantu Languages, by Greenhill et al. Front. Psychol (2018) 9:576.

Summary (emphasis mine):

What role does speaker population size play in shaping rates of language evolution? There has been little consensus on the expected relationship between rates and patterns of language change and speaker population size, with some predicting faster rates of change in smaller populations, and others expecting greater change in larger populations. The growth of comparative databases has allowed population size effects to be investigated across a wide range of language

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Rakhigarhi samples from the Indus Valley Civilisation will support the conclusions of Narasimhan et al. (2018)

New article on The Caravan, Indus Valley People Did Not Have Genetic Contribution From The Steppes: Head Of Ancient DNA Lab Testing Rakhigarhi Samples, by Hartosh Singh Val.

Niraj Rai, head of the DNA Laboratory where the samples from the Harappan site of Rakhigarhi in Haryana are being analysed, has this to say:

It will show that there is no steppe contribution to the Indus Valley DNA.

The Indus Valley people were indigenous, but in the sense that their DNA had contributions from near eastern Iranian farmers mixed with the Indian hunter-gatherer DNA, that is still reflected in the

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Ancient nomadic tribes of the Mongolian steppe dominated by a single paternal lineage

The genome of an ancient Rouran individual reveals an important paternal lineage in the Donghu population, by Li et al. Am J Phys Anthropol (2018), 1–11.

Abstract (emphasis mine):

Objectives
Following the Xiongnu and Xianbei, the Rouran Khaganate (Rouran) was the third great nomadic tribe on the Mongolian Steppe. However, few human remains from this tribe are available for archaeologists and geneticists to study, as traces of the tombs of these nomadic people have rarely been found. In 2014, the IA‐M1 remains (TL1) at the Khermen Tal site from the Rouran period were found by a Sino‐Mongolian joint

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Fast life history as adaptive regional response to less hospitable and unstable Early Indo-Iranian territory

Another interesting paper, Life in the fast lane: Settled pastoralism in the Central Eurasian Steppe during the Middle Bronze Age, by Judd et al. (2017).

Abstract (emphasis mine):

We tested the hypothesis that the purported unstable climate in the South Urals region during the Middle Bronze Age (MBA) resulted in health instability and social stress as evidenced by skeletal response.The skeletal sample (n = 99) derived from Kamennyi Ambar 5 (KA-5), a MBA kurgan cemetery (2040-1730 cal. BCE, 2 sigma) associated with the Sintashta culture. Skeletal stress indicators assessed included cribra orbitalia, porotic hyperostosis, dental enamel hypoplasia, and tibia

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On Proto-Finnic language guesstimates, and its western homeland

Recent chapter The Indo-Europeans and the Non-Indo-Europeans in Prehistoric Northern Europe, by Petri Kallio, In: Language and Prehistory of the Indo- European Peoples: A Cross-Disciplinary Perspective, Copenhagen (2017).

Interesting excerpts (emphasis mine), especially when read in combination with the most recent papers on Early Indo-Iranian, Corded Ware, and Fennoscandian genomes:

Like the Indo-Europeanists, also the Uralicists suffer from their “school who wants it large and wants it early”. This time, however, the desired homeland is even larger and earlier, covering the whole northern half of Europe already at the end of the

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