Proto-Uralic Homeland (VI): Mythology & Metallurgy

This post is part of a draft on palaeolinguistics and the Proto-Uralic homeland. See below for the color code of protoforms.

10. Metallurgy

PU (Saa., Fi., Md., Ma., P, Ms.?, Kh., Smy.?) *wäśkä (*waśki?) ‘copper; ore, brass’ (UEW Nº 1123; Kallio 2006: 6). Irregular cognates suggest it might have been borrowed during the split-up of Proto-Uralic (cf. Aikio 2015: 42). However, compare potentially regular cognates from *wäskä in PFi. *vaski ‘ore, copper, bronze; brass’ (Kallio 2012: 167; Zhivlov 2014: 115), PSaa. *weśkä ‘copper; brass’, Md. Kazhlodka viśkä ‘chain’ (Häkkinen 2012: 18), and possibly Hu. … Read the rest “Proto-Uralic Homeland (VI): Mythology & Metallurgy”

Proto-Indo-European kinship system and patrilineality

Within months, it will be finally confirmed that both Late Repin offshoots – Early Yamnaya and Afanasievo – spread with clans that were dominated by R1b-L23 patrilineages. Succeeding migration events, likely coupled with internal founder effects under the most successful clans, left Indo-Tocharian-speaking clans as an almost uniform community in terms of Y-chromosome haplogroups, with their most recent common ancestor traceable to the 5^th millennium BC.

Before that, it seems that the Indo-Anatolian-speaking Early Khvalynsk community was slightly more diverse. In particular, the success of R1b-V1636 lineages is apparent in the Khvalynsk-Novodanilovka expansion, since it is … Read the rest “Proto-Indo-European kinship system and patrilineality”

East Slovakia Yamnaya settlers and links with Niche-Graves

Prehistoric populations did not set stable regional boundaries, but rather dynamic local ones in constant flow and change of interaction strategies. Semi-nomadic groups like the Yamnaya and early mobile Corded Ware communities had an even more variable control of pasture lands – at least until they settled down and became “locals” in certain territories. Nevertheless, the Carpathians – like the Caucasus Mountains – might be a priori regarded as a more stable natural border, that could help populations of the same language keep strong cultural and kinship ties.

The upcoming samples from the Carpathian Basin, announced in Szécsényi-Nagy’s oral communication, … Read the rest “East Slovakia Yamnaya settlers and links with Niche-Graves”

West Yamnaya settlers like Early Bell Beakers: R1b-P310 and R1b-Z2103

Informal report by Bulgarian archaeologist Svetoslav Stamov in 7/8 TV, from data collected by the Reich Lab for their future paper on South-Eastern Europe.

As can be seen from the TV captions below, this is the earliest R1b-P310 from Yamnaya or Yamnaya-related individuals in Early Bronze Age contexts from Bulgaria. In fact, its appearance together with a R1b-Z2103 lineage (and another undefined R1b-M269) shows once again that the earliest R1b-L23 bottlenecks were associated with Proto-Indo-Europeans.

Lacking a precise periodization, location, or proper cultural context in the spreadsheet, it is impossible to know whether they belong to Khvalynsk-related cultures … Read the rest “West Yamnaya settlers like Early Bell Beakers: R1b-P310 and R1b-Z2103”

Tug of war between Balto-Slavic and West Uralic (II)

It is firmly established since (at least) the 1980s that Balto-Slavic, Baltic and Slavic show a strong Uralic substrate, even though many details are still the subject of ongoing controversies. Here is how the Baltic linguistic area was described in Thomason’s Language Contact (2001):

Overall, the Baltic area has the same characteristics as the Balkan area: areal linguistic features are distributed differentially among the languages, and the features themselves vary in details of their structure. As for the sources of the Baltic features, some can be traced to Uralic and some to Indo-European, especially Germanic. The Indo-European languages most

… Read the rest

Afanasievo ancestry reached Lake Baikal; Nganasan ancestry origins still at large

New paper (behind paywall) Paleolithic to Bronze Age Siberians Reveal Connections with First Americans and across Eurasia, by Yu et al. Cell (2020)

Interesting excerpts (emphasis mine, paragraphs subdivided for clarity):

Population Structure (PCA)

Most of the Lake Baikal individuals occupied the space on a “ANE-NEA” cline running between “Northeast Asian” (NEA) ancestry represented by Neolithic hunter-gathers from the Devil’s Gate in the Russian Far East (Sikora et al., 2019, Siska et al., 2017), and the ANE ancestry represented by Upper Paleolithic Siberian individuals MA1, AfontovaGora 2 (AG2), and AfontovaGora 3 (AG3) (Fu et al., 2016, Raghavan et al.,

… Read the rest

Maros shows Yamnaya-derived East BBC ancestry and local admixture

New preprint Kinship, acquired and inherited status, and population structure at the Early Bronze Age Mokrin necropolis in northern Serbia, by Zegarac et al. bioRxiv (2020).

Intersesting excerpts about this 2100-1800 BC cemetery (emphasis mine):

Ancestry

The individual Mokrin genomes are best modelled as a mixture of Central European hunter-gatherers, Aegean Neolithic farmers and influences from the Eastern European steppes (mean qpAdm tail probability individually 0.46, pooled 0.08).

We observed no significant variation in the eastern European steppe-like component between individuals. Pooling individuals, admixture proportions are estimated to be around 8% (± 1.2% SE) western hunter gatherers, 55% (±

… Read the rest

Indo-Iranian influence on West Uralic through the Catacomb culture

In the recent Linderholm et al. (2020), I preferred to interpret the finding of R1b-P310* among late niche (catacomb) grave groups of Lesser Poland as derived from Late PIE – Late Uralic contacts, through a much earlier intrusion of late Repin/early Yamnaya chieftains among Late Trypillians.

This is one of the few aspects of the books where I tried to offer my own contribution to the field, by combining the Indo-Uralic concept (which supports a distinct evolution of laryngeals for PIE and PU) with a modified, ‘layered’ use of Koivulehto’s controversial and irregular PIE laryngeal borrowing as PU … Read the rest “Indo-Iranian influence on West Uralic through the Catacomb culture”

Early arrival of Steppe ancestry in Switzerland

Open access paper Ancient genomes reveal social and genetic structure of Late Neolithic Switzerland by Furtwängler et al. Nat. Commun. (2020).

Interesting excerpts (emphasis mine):

The ancient individuals from this study originate from 13 Neolithic and Early Bronze Age sites in Switzerland, Southern Germany, and the Alsace region in France. All samples taken from the individuals were radiocarbon dated.

The arrival of Steppe ancestry

Two distinct clusters can be identified and were also confirmed by ADMIXTURE analysis, one consisting of individuals dating to 4770–2500 calBCE, and one comprising individuals dating to 2900–1750 calBCE. The oldest individuals from the sites of

… Read the rest