Finally, in Kurgan IV she saw “continuous waves of expansion or raids[that] touched all of northern Europe, the Aegean area, and the east Mediterranean areas possibly as far south as Egypt”. This was the period of the Catacomb Graves, but also the Early Bronze Age rock-cut tombs of the Mediterranean, Vučedol, Bell Beakers in Hungary, the Single Grave culture of the Nordic region. The Kurgan Culture reached Ireland, she remarked in a paper of 1978 “as early as 3500 B.C.” – by which she presumably referred to megalithic mounds covering passage tombs.
(…)
According to Gimbutas, the “Kurgan people” are evidenced by single graves in deep shafts, often in wooden chests (coffins) or stone cists marked by low earth or stone barrows; the dead lay on their backs with legs contracted; they were buried with flint points or arrowheads, figurines depicting horses’ heads, boars tusk ornaments and animal tooth pendants. Human sacrifice was allegedly performed during the funeral ceremonies,and sometimes ritual graves of cattle and other animals were added. This is said to contrast with what Gimbutas called the culture of Old Europe (i.e. the earlier Neolithic of the Balkans), who “betray a concern for the deification of the dead and the construction of monumental works of architecture visible in mortuary houses,grave markings, tumuli, stone rings or stone stelae, and in the large quantity of weapons found in the graves”.
(…)
The varying burial traditions of the Early Bronze Age in Central and Eastern Europe (Häusler 1977, fig. 1). Circles: tumuli with the “mound edge principle”. Semicircles: tumuli. Stippling: cremation; other symbols represent inhumation graves, divided according to orientation and sex
Can we really associate the practice of mound-building with a specific people, and assume that the spread of the practice indicates the spread of the people? That is one of the “big questions” of European archaeology, and one which a number of papers in the volume address. My own position is that the practice of tumulus building seems so widespread in time and space that it seems hard to associate it with one particular ethnic group – though I can understand how, in the melting pot that was Early Europe, people could believe this to be the case. There are, however, major arguments against the idea, on archaeological grounds alone – which Häusler’s map indicates very clearly. Burial mode and grave form in Copper and Bronze Age Europe was far too variable for any such simplistic correlation. In any case, what are we to make of the appearance of tumuli in such far-flung places as Japan or North America, where tumuli are very common? It was always unlikely that the megalithic tombs of western Europe were to be associated with movements from the steppe 1000 or 2000 years earlier, and nothing that has happened since Gimbutas was writing has changed that situation
Research has corrected Gimbutas’ opinion on the time of spread of Indo-Europeans, on the role of the horse (see e.g. Anthony 2007) in their expansion, and the unrelatedness of the two main central European Chalcolithic archaeological packages: the Corded Ware package that expanded from the Balkans into north-eastern Europe, and the Yamna package (together with the proto-Beaker package) that evolved into the East Bell Beaker culture.
Extent of migration of the “Yamna package“, from Heyd 2007
However, the shadow of the “Kurgan people” remains in the outdated body of innumerable writings. It was revived with the first attempts at disentangling Europe’s genetic past (based on the role of R1a in expanding Proto-Indo-European).
Particularly strong in that sense is the model set forth by Kristiansen, who was nevertheless aware since his first proposal of the differences between the ‘Kurgan people’ of the steppe and those of the Corded Ware culture, selecting thus an alternative framework of long-lasting human and economic interactions between the “Kurgan people”, the Globular Amphora and Baden cultures with an origin of the culture in the natural region formed between the Upper Dnieper and Vistula rivers.
This idea is continued today, and has been recently linked with the Agricultural Substrate Hypothesis. Originally proposed by Kroonen and linked to the spread of Middle Eastern “R1b1b2” with agriculture, it is now (in Kristiansen et al. 2017 and more recently in Iversen and Kroonen 2017) linked with the expansion of the Corded Ware culture, thus proposing that Pre-Germanic is a branch separated some 6,000 years ago from other branches…
Kristiansen’s (1989) schematic presentation of basic principles of burial positions in the Late Neolithic / EBA cultures in northern Eurasia, following to some extent Häusler (1983)
The linguistic proposal is obviously compatible with mainstream archaeological models – which suggest the introduction of Pre-Germanic in Scandinavia with Bell Beaker peoples -, but since the linguistic proposal alone would probably not make such a fuss without the accompanying genetics, I guess this is the right way to publicise it. I doubt linguists really care about genetics, and I really doubt amateur geneticists will read the linguistic proposal, but who cares.
I doubt that Gimbutas, who was not very fond of tradition, would be proud of this kind of legacy, though…
Featured image: “European dialect” expansion of Proto-Indo-European according to The Indo-Europeans: Archeological Problems, Gimbutas (1963). Observe the similarities of the western European expansion to the recently proposed expansion of R1b lineages with western Yamna and Bell Beaker.
Michiel de Vaan, from the University of Lausanne, has recently uploaded three of his papers published in recent years in the JIES on the works of Dutch linguist C.C. Uhlenbeck:
Christianus Cornelius Uhlenbeck (1866–1951) was one of the leading Dutch linguists between the 1880s and the 1940s. He made his mark on a number of disciplines in descriptive and comparative linguistics, such as Basque, the indigenous languages of North America, Old Germanic and Sanskrit. In 2008, a special issue of the Canadian Journal of Netherlandic Studies (Genee & Hinrichs 2008) was devoted to his memory, the contents of which can be read online.
Uhlenbeck’s work and thinking on the Indo-European language family, and, in particular, on the original habitat of its speakers, have been discussed by Kortlandt 2010, who concluded that Uhlenbeck had remarkably advanced views for his time. The first two journal articles in which Uhlenbeck (1895, 1897) sets forth his views were published in Dutch. During the academic year 2013/14, I had the opportunity to read a number of articles on the question of the Indo-European homeland problem with my students at Leiden University. I provided Uhlenbeck’s Dutch articles from 1895 and 1897 with an English translation which I hereby submit to all colleagues
On Anthony and Haarman:
Anthony focuses on the socioeconomic changes that took place in the fifth and fourth millennium BC, when the Indo-European steppe peoples entered into contact with the sedentary, agricultural population of Southeast-Europe, also termed Old European or Palaeo-European. Importantly, Anthony dismantles the monolithic view of a single “steppe pastoralism”, and instead stresses that the steppe economy itself went through various developmental phases, which might be linked to different periods of expansion of Indo-European into Europe. Haarmann zooms in on the sociocultural effects of the Indo-European expansion(s). Since language contact will often heavily influence the languages which are in contact, he sets out to look for traces of the language of the Old Europeans in the surviving Indo-European languages, first of all, in Ancient Greek. As many scholars before him have also realized, there is a thick layer of non-Indo-European words in Greek in fields such as agriculture, wine production, weaving, metallurgy, religion and mythology, building techniques, and local flora and fauna. Even the Greeks themselves acknowledged the presence of a “Pelasgian” substratum in their own language. Haarmann concludes (2012: 119): “Despite the fact that Indo-Europeans exercised political power and promoted their language as the common vehicle, they were nevertheless impressed by the achievements of the Old Europeans to the extent that the dominant language of the élite absorbed manifold influences from the local language(s).”
It cannot be objected that the eastern and the western Iranians differed much in their dialects, for the PIE language itself must have been split in a number of fairly different dialects. There has never been in the world a language without dialect differences, larger or smaller, depending on the geographic distance. That is why, in the beginning of this piece, I spoke not of one original language, but of a group of closely cognate dialects. Since the linguistic area of PIE was probably very large, it is certainly possible that part of it lay in the steppes, another part in the mountains, and yet another part in the fertile plains. If so, the fauna and the flora of the homeland cannot have been the same in different areas. And this is an argument, which the linguistic prehistorician must not lose sight of!
On the necessary natural (geographic and stage) division of PIE, he made apparently a dialectal division into a European group (including Greek?), a Balkan-Balto-Slavic group, and Indo-Iranian.
The following excerpt is probably not the most interesting one (check out the different aspect of prehistoric life described through linguistics), but it is fun to be able to support the same arguments today:
Does linguistics provide us with the means to indicate a smaller region as the center of expansion of the Indo-European languages and peoples? Hardly. After all, it is far from certain that the people who speak Indo-European languages are also ethnologically more closely related to each other than to peoples with languages very different from ours. If the homeland of the Indo-European languages does not coincide with that of the Indo-European peoples, it becomes impossible to determine either one. In reality, if the Indo-European speaking peoples do not form an ethnological unity, we have not the slightest reason to suppose that they all hail from a single region. The use of a common language can just as well be explained by a powerful, prehistoric cultural influence, as by common ancestry. The unknown, unknowable origin of that cultural force is then, in a certain sense, the homeland of our language family. Searching a homeland of the Indo-Europeans or of the Indo-European dialects is like taking a wild stab, something which all who understand history must abhor. If Schrader regards as the homeland the Pontic steppes, if Hirt regards the coasts of Lithuania as such, this is based on insufficient and partially judged data. Still, the large agreement in vocabulary between Indo-European and Egypto-Semitic remains a remarkable fact, which Friedrich Delitzsch first illustrated in a truly scientific way.
(…)
If we stick to the facts, and refrain from bottomless speculations, we will find no other homeland than the area indicated above, which encompasses half of Europe and a part of Asia.
Observable patterns of cultural variation are consistently intertwined with demic movements, cultural diffusion, and adaptation to different ecological contexts [Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman (1981) Cultural Transmission and Evolution: A Quantitative Approach; Boyd and Richerson (1985) Culture and the Evolutionary Process]. The quantitative study of gene–culture coevolution has focused in particular on the mechanisms responsible for change in frequency and attributes of cultural traits, the spread of cultural information through demic and cultural diffusion, and detecting relationships between genetic and cultural lineages. Here, we make use of worldwide whole-genome sequences [Pagani et al. (2016) Nature 538:238–242] to assess the impact of processes involving population movement and replacement on cultural diversity, focusing on the variability observed in folktale traditions (n = 596) [Uther (2004) The Types of International Folktales: A Classification and Bibliography. Based on the System of Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson] in Eurasia. We find that a model of cultural diffusion predicted by isolation-by-distance alone is not sufficient to explain the observed patterns, especially at small spatial scales (up to ~4,000 km). We also provide an empirical approach to infer presence and impact of ethnolinguistic barriers preventing the unbiased transmission of both genetic and cultural information. After correcting for the effect of ethnolinguistic boundaries, we show that, of the alternative models that we propose, the one entailing cultural diffusion biased by linguistic differences is the most plausible. Additionally, we identify 15 tales that are more likely to be predominantly transmitted through population movement and replacement and locate putative focal areas for a set of tales that are spread worldwide.
I am very interested in folktales and their origins within Proto-Indo-European culture, so the title alone was an immediate click-bait for me. It did, as always, disappoint in its methods and conclusions, but just the idea it proposes is of great interest for future studies.
There are gross limitations in assessing folktales using simply the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Classification without further analysis or explanation, apart from a summary of tales in the supplementary materials.
But their maps and simplistic hypothesized waves of diffusion (‘African origin’, ‘northern Eurasian’, ‘Eastern European’, or ‘Middle-Eastern/Caucasian’) seem to me as if they try to swim with the tide of the current literature regarding the identification of Proto-Indo-European demic diffusion with “steppe admixture” distribution (and ancient language family diffusion in general through admixture), and as such it can only be wrong.
If you just look at actual folktale distribution (black dots) and compare them with prehistoric cultures and ancient Y-DNA distribution, you realize their maps don’t make much sense, and more complex methods (and a clearer idea of what admixture represents) are needed.
If their intention was to get published in a journal of high impact factor, they succeeded, so good for them. I am glad this subject gets more attention. Of course, their conclusions are kept formally in line with the many limitations of their methods, and are the most interesting aspect of the article:
By correcting for the presence of ethnolinguistic barriers, we find that the null model of cultural diffusion predicted by IBD alone cannot explain the observed distribution of folktales across Eurasia. Instead, beyond ~4,000 km, cultural diffusion biased by linguistic barriers exhibits the highest correlation at all geographic bins. At small geographic bins (<4,000 km), population movements and linguistic barriers may be more relevant than geographic proximity, pointing once again at the possible importance of small-scale processes of cultural transmission for testing more specific hypotheses when using genetic evidence. In addition, processes other than simple cultural diffusion may be more relevant for a smaller group of tales shared by pairs of populations that are genetically closer than populations not exhibiting those tales. Looking for smaller packages of tales or individual tales and their variants can be useful to shed light on the formation process of this vast body of popular knowledge. The long-range patterns detected by our analyses may complement this picture by suggesting a more ancient origin of some of these folktales (SI Appendix). On a broader level, these results can be used in the future to infer directional trends of cultural dispersal as well as to test for the emergence of systematic social biases [such as prestige bias, conformism/anticonformism, heterophily, and content-dependent biases] or cultural barriers different from linguistic ones, which have a chronology that may be independently ascertained.
If you are interested in studies about folktales, and especially those related to Indo-European traditions, you can check out the following articles I found interesting in the past:
Featured image (featured also in the article): Possible focal area and dispersion pattern for tale ATU313 “The Magic Flight,” one the most popular folktales in this dataset, which may have been additionally spread through population movement and replacement. It is interesting to note how this tale reached locations that are far from its putative origin (such as Japan and southeastern Africa), whereas it was not retained by many populations located in between (gray dots).
The origins of the Bronze Age Minoan and Mycenaean cultures have puzzled archaeologists for more than a century. We have assembled genome-wide data from 19 ancient individuals, including Minoans from Crete, Mycenaeans from mainland Greece, and their eastern neighbours from southwestern Anatolia. Here we show that Minoans and Mycenaeans were genetically similar, having at least three-quarters of their ancestry from the first Neolithic farmers of western Anatolia and the Aegean, and most of the remainder from ancient populations related to those of the Caucasus3 and Iran. However, the Mycenaeans differed from Minoans in deriving additional ancestry from an ultimate source related to the hunter–gatherers of eastern Europe and Siberia, introduced via a proximal source related to the inhabitants of either the Eurasian steppe or Armenia. Modern Greeks resemble the Mycenaeans, but with some additional dilution of the Early Neolithic ancestry. Our results support the idea of continuity but not isolation in the history of populations of the Aegean, before and after the time of its earliest civilizations.
Samples are scarce, and there is only one Y-DNA haplogroup of Mycenaeans, J2a1 (in Galatas Apatheia, ca. 1700-1200), which shows continuity of haplogroups from Minoan samples, so it does not clarify the potential demic diffusion of Proto-Greeks marked by R1b subclades.
Regarding admixture analyses, it is explicitly or implicitly (according to the press release) stated that:
There is continuity between Mycenaeans and living people, so that the major components of the Greeks’ ancestry was in place already in the Bronze Age, after the migration of the earliest farmers from Anatolia.
Anatolians may have been the source of “eastern” Caucasian ancestry in Mycenaeans, and maybe of early Indo-European languages (i.e. earlier than Proto-Greek) in the region.
The “northern” steppe population (speaking a Late Indo-European dialect, then) had arrived only in mainland Greece, with a 13-18% admixture, by the time studied.
Samples before the Final Neolithic (ca. 4100 BC) do not possess either type of ancestry, suggesting that the admixture detected occurred during the fourth to second millennium BC.
Admixture from Levantine or African influence (i.e. Egyptian or Phoenician colonists) cannot be supported with admixture.
All in all, there is some new interesting information, and among them the possibility of obtaining ancient DNA from arid regions, which is promising for future developments in the field.
EDIT (20/8/2017): The article received widespread media attention, and two blog posts were linked to by the main author in his Twitter account: Who are you calling Mycenaean?, and On genetics and the Aegean Bronze Age. Apart from the obviously wrong reductio ad Hitlerum that pops up in any discussion on Indo-Europeans or genetics (even I do it regarding fans of admixture analysis), I don’t know why these created so much fuss (and hate) among geneticists. There seems to be a war brewing between Archaeology and Genetics.
Razib Khan writes The Revolution Which Came To Archaeology Without Archaeologists?, and I guess this is how many people feel in the field, but if they had studied some minimal archaeology of the samples they are studying they would know that their conclusions would come as no surprise, in any case. They can solve old archaeological questions, and they can help create new hypothesis. That’s it. Regarding the study Mr. Khan believes did come as a surprise to archaeologists, that on Bell Beakers, I would like to remind him of the predictions Volker Heyd did about genetics already in 2007, based only on Archaeology.
I will not post details of Klejn’s model of North-South Proto-Indo-European expansion – which is explained in the article, and relies on the north-south cline of ‘steppe admixture’ in the modern European population -, since it is based on marginal anthropological methods and theories, including glottochronological dates, and archaeological theories from the Russian school (mainly Zalyzniak), which are obviously not mainstream in the field of Indo-European Studies, and (paradoxically) on the modern distribution of ‘steppe admixture’…
The most interesting aspects of the article are the reactions to the criticism, some of which can be used from the point of view of the Indo-European demic diffusion model, too. It is sad, however, that they didn’t choose to answer earlier to Heyd’s criticism (or to Heyd’s model, which is essentially also that of Mallory and Anthony), instead of just waiting for proponents of the least interesting models to react…
The answer by Haak et al.:
Klejn mischaracterizes our paper as claiming that practitioners of the Corded Ware culture spoke a language ancestral to all European Indo-European languages, including Greek and Celtic. This is incorrect: we never claim that the ancestor of Greek is the language spoken by people of the Corded Ware culture. In fact, we explicitly state that the expansion of steppe ancestry might account for only a subset of Indo-European languages in Europe. Klejn asserts that ‘a source in the north’ is a better candidate for the new ancestry manifested in the Corded Ware than the Yamnaya. While it is indeed the case that the present-day people with the greatest affinity to the Corded Ware are distributed in north-eastern Europe, a major part of the new ancestry of the Corded Ware derives from a population most closely related to Armenians (Haak et al., 2015) and hunter-gatherers from the Caucasus (Jones et al., 2015). This ancestry has not been detected in any European huntergatherers analysed to date (Lazaridis et al., 2014; Skoglund et al., 2014; Haak et al., 2015; Fu et al., 2016), but made up some fifty per cent of the ancestry of the Yamnaya. The fact that the Corded Ware traced some of its ancestry to the southern Caucasus makes a source in the north less parsimonious.
In our study, we did not speculate about the date of Proto-Indo-European and the locations of its speakers, as these questions are unresolved by our data, although we do think the genetic data impose constraints on what occurred. We are enthusiastic about the potential of genetics to contribute to a resolution of this longstanding issue, but this is likely to require DNA from multiple, as yet unsampled, ancient populations.
Klejn response to that:
Allegedly, I had accused the authors of tracing all Indo-European languages back to Yamnaya, whereas they did not trace all of them but only a portion! Well, I shall not reproach the authors for their ambiguous language: it remains the case that (beginning with the title of the first article) their qualifications are lost and their readers have understood them as presenting the solution to the whole question of the origins of Indo-European languages.
(…) they had in view not the Proto-Indo-European before the separation of the Hittites, but the language that was left after the separation. Yet, this was still the language ancestral to all the remaining Indo-European languages, and the followers of Sturtevan and Kluckhorst call only this language Proto-Indo-European (while they call the initial one Indo-Hittite). The majority of linguists (specialists in Indo-European languages) is now inclined to this view. True, the breakup of this younger language is several hundred years more recent (nearly a thousand years later according to some glottochronologies) than the separation of Anatolian languages, but it is still around a thousand years earlier than the birth of cultures derived from Yamnaya.
More than that, I analysed in my criticism both possibilities — the case for all Indo-European languages spreading from Yamnaya and the case for only some of them spreading from Yamnaya. In the latter case, it is argued that only the languages of the steppes, the Aryan (Indo- Iranian) are descended from Yamnaya, not the languages of northern Europe. Together with many scholars, I am in agreement with the last possibility. But, then, what sense can the proposed migration of the Yamnaya culture to the Baltic region have? It would bring the Indo-Iranian proto-language to that region! Yet, there are no traces of this language on the coasts of the Baltic!
My main concern is that, to my mind, one should not directly apply conclusions from genetics to events in the development of language because there is no direct and inevitable dependence between events in the life of languages, culture, and physical structure (both anthropological and genetic). They can coincide, but often they all follow divergent paths. In each case the supposed coincidence should be proved separately.
The authors’ third objection concerns the increase of the genetic similarity of European population with that of the Yamnaya culture. This increases in the north of Europe and is weak in the south, in the places adjacent to the Yamnaya area, i.e. in Hungary. This gradient is clearly expressed in the modern population, but was present already in the Bronze Age, and hence cannot be explained by shifts that occurred in the Early Iron Age and in medieval times. However, the supposed migration of the Yamnaya culture to the west and north should imply a gradient in just the opposite direction!
Regarding the arguments of Kristiansen and colleagues:
[They argue that] in two early burials of the Corded Ware culture (one in Germany, the other in Poland) some single attributes of Yamnaya origin have been found.
(…) if this is the full extent of Yamnaya infiltration into central Europe—two burials (one for each country) from several thousands (and from several hundreds of early burials)—then it hardly amounts to large-scale migration.
Quite recently we have witnessed the success of a group of geneticists from Stanford University and elsewhere (Poznik et al., 2016). They succeeded in revealing varieties of Y-chromosome connected with demographic expansions in the Bronze Age. Such expansion can give rise to migration. Among the variants connected with this expansion is R1b, and this haplogroup is typical for the Yamnaya culture. But what bad luck! This haplogroup connected with expansion is indicated by the clade L11, while the Yamnaya burials are associated with a different clade, Z2103, that is not marked by expansion. It is now time to think about how else the remarkable results reached by both teams of experienced and bright geneticists may be interpreted.
Regarding the work of Heyd,
(…) with regard to the barrow burials of the third millennium BC in the basin of the Danube, although they have been assigned to the Yamnaya culture, I would consider them as also belonging to
another, separate culture, perhaps a mixed culture: its burial custom is typical of the Yamnaya, but its pottery is absolutely not Yamnaya, but local Balkan with imports of distinctive corded beakers (Schnurbecher). I would not be surprised if
Y-chromosome haplogroups of this population were somewhat similar to those of the Yamnaya, while mitochondrial groups were indigenous. As yet, geneticists deal with great blocks of populations and prefer to match them to very large and generalized cultural blocks, while archaeology now analyses more concrete and smaller cultures, each of which had its own fate.
Iosif Lazaridis shares more thoughts on the discussion in his Twitter account:
As we mentioned in Haak, Lazaridis et al. (2015), the Yamnaya are the best proximate source for the new ancestry that first appears with the Corded Ware in central Europe, as it has the right mix of both ANE (related to Native Americans, MA1, and EHG), but also Armenian/Caucasus/Iran-like southern component of ancestry. The Yamnaya is a westward expansive culture that bears exactly the two new ancestral components (EHG + Caucasus/Iran/Armenian-like).
As for the Y-chromosome, it was already noted in Haak, Lazaridis et al. (2015) that the Yamnaya from Samara had Y-chromosomes which belonged to R-M269 but did not belong to the clade common in Western Europe (p. 46 of supplement). Also, not a single R1a in Yamnaya unlike Corded Ware (R1a-dominated). But Yamnaya samples = elite burials from eastern part of the Yamnaya range. Both R1a/R1b found in Eneolithic Samara and EHG, so in conclusion Yamnaya expansion still the best proximate source for the post-3,000 BCE population change in central Europe. And since 2015 steppe expansion detected elsewhere (Cassidy et al. 16, Martiniano et al. 17, Mittnik et al. 17, Mathieson et al. 17, Lazaridis et al. 2016 (South Asia) and …?…
I love the smell of new wording in the morning… viz. Yamnaya best proximate source for Corded Ware, Corded Ware might account for only a subset of Indo-European languages, Corded Ware representing Aryan languages (probably Klejn misinterprets what the authors mean, i.e. some kind of Indo-Slavonic or Germano-Balto-Slavic group)…
We shall expect more and more ambiguous rewording and more adjustments of previous conclusions as new papers and new criticisms appear.
Featured image from the article: Distribution of the ‘Yamnaya’ genetic component in the populations of Europe (data taken from Haak et al., 2015). The intensity of the colour corresponds to the contribution of this component in various modern populations
I published an essay (or “dissertation”) some weeks ago, about what seems to me one of the most likely models of expansion of Indo-European-speaking peoples, based on Y-DNA haplogroups. Recently J.P. Mallory had proposed* (although he was not the first) that North-West Indo-European (the ancestor of Italo-Celtic and Germanic, and Balto-Slavic**) expanded with the Bell Beaker culture, a hypothesis that is supported by the most recent radiocarbon data (and subsequent proposal of an eastern origin of the pre-Bell Beaker culture, linked to the Yamna expansion, by Volker and Heyd). As I outline in the paper, ancient DNA samples and genetic data from modern populations seem to support this new model.
The still most prevalent model followed by archaeologists, based on Gimbutas’ theory, links the Corded Ware culture expansion to an expansion of the Yamna culture. Gimbutas linked the expansion of Bell Beaker to the expansion of certain Indo-European dialects through Vucedol, and Corded Ware was associated with the expansion of Germano-Balto-Slavic. Even though linguistics has changed its mainstream view of the dialectalization of Late Indo-European in the past half century, the archaeological community (those who supported the steppe expansion, at least) has remained strongly linked to Gimbutas, and more recently David Anthony has supported a similar model (with a phylogenetic model of Proto-Indo-European dialects by Don Ringe), by explaining a dual expansion into Corded Ware by Pre-Germanic (through a mixed Old European / IE Usatovo culture) and Pre-Balto-Slavic (through the Middle Dnieper culture), while eastern Bell Beakers expanded with Italo-Celtic dialects. While a strong cultural connection between Yamna and Corded Ware is currently undeniable, and admixture analyses show a connection between steppe and both Bell Beaker and Corded Ware samples, the actual relationship is today far less clear than it was 10 years ago (when we would simply connect Yamna with a R1a-dominated Corded Ware), and far more ancient samples from the steppe, steppe-forest, and forest zone are needed to extract any strong conclusions.
During this time I have received some comments on the paper, and have discovered some interesting sources for more information, like BioRxiv (for the newest pre-print papers on Genetics), and Academia.edu (for papers on Archaeology), both of which I can’t hardly recommend enough for anyone interested in these topics. From what I have experienced, Linguistics – which seemed to me a quite closed, strongly conservative community, due to my proposal of speaking a reconstructed Proto-Indo-European dialect as a common language today – has been more open with my model than some archaeological/genetic tandems, and linguists have shown a clearer grasp of all anthropological disciplines involved in Indo-European studies than others… My model remains a theory that I expect to develop further with more details and more genetic data, as they are published.
There are some interesting upcoming samples (mainly from Bell Beaker) by the Reich Lab – and today its publication seems nearer. While the interpretation seems to be in line with what has been said in previous similar publications, the most interesting data will most likely be the actual samples, apparently already showing a lack of steppe ancestry in Iberian Bell Beaker, and a clear invasion of Bell Beaker peoples (hence R1b?) in Great Britain. Hopefully some new samples of Yamna and Corded Ware might give us interesting information.
It is always to be remembered that, when talking about Indo-European peoples, what matters is linguistics: after, all, the peoples whose place and time we want to find are defined by their language, Indo-European. Archaeology might be able to date some cultural developments potentially linked with Indo-European-speaking peoples, and genetics might give support to the expansion of peoples (and thus maybe languages) accompanying such cultural expansions. Recent genetic developments are quite interesting, in that we might be able to place Late Indo-European and North-West Indo-European speakers in place and time, but it seems to me that some people are trying to answer the Urheimat problem the other way around.
* J.P. Mallory, ‘The Indo-Europeanization of Atlantic Europe’, in Celtic From the West 2: Rethinking the Bronze Age and the Arrival of Indo-European in Atlantic Europe, eds J. T. Koch and B. Cunliffe (Oxford, 2013), p.17-40
** It has been proposed that Balto-Slavic derived partially from North-West Indo-European, and partially from a different Late Indo-European language, although there are different models to explain the pidginization of this dialect
