Close genetic relationship of Neolithic Anatolians to early European farmers
Iosif Lazaridis 1,2 , Songül Alpaslan 3 , Daniel Fernandes 4 , Mario Nowak 4 , Kendra Sirak 4 , Nadin Rohland 1,2 , Swapan Mallick 1,2,5 , Kristin Stewardson 1,5 , Fokke Gerritsen 6 , Nick Patterson 2 , Ron Pinhasi 4, *, David Reich 1,2,5, *
We study 1.2 million genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphisms on a sample of 26 Neolithic individuals (~6,300 years BCE) from northwestern Anatolia. Our analysis reveals a homogeneous population that was genetically similar to early farmers from Europe (F ST =0.004±0.0003 and frequency of 60% of Y-chromosome haplogroup G2a). We model Early Neolithic farmers from central Europe and Iberia as a genetic mixture of ~90% Anatolians and ~10% European hunter-gatherers, suggesting little influence by Mesolithic Europeans prior to the dispersal of European farmers into the interior of the continent. Neolithic Anatolians differ from all present-day populations of western Asia, suggesting genetic changes have occurred in parts of this region since the Neolithic period. We suggest that the language spoken by the homogeneous Anatolian-European Neolithic farmers is unlikely to have been the same as that spoken by the Yamnaya steppe pastoralists whose ancestry was derived from eastern Europe and a different population from the Caucasus/Near East [Haak et al. 2015], and discuss implications for alternative models of Indo-European dispersals.
The Genetic History and Structure of Britain
Nick Patterson, Broad Institute, Boston and David Reich, Harvard Medical School and Broad Institute, Boston
The recently published paper on the genetic structure of Britain (Leslie et al. Nature 2015) has shown subtle genetic variation correlating with geography. Here we reexamine the evidence in the light of our understanding of the genetics of Ancient Europe and comment on some implications for how Indo-Europeans spread into Europe.
In search for initial Indo-European gene pool from genome-wide data on IE popula- tions as compared with their non-IE neighbors
Oleg Balanovsky, Vavilow Institue of General Genetics, Russian Academy of Sci- ences, Moscow
From Yamnaya to Bell Beakers: Mechanisms of Transmission in an Interconnected Europe, 3500–2000 BC
Volker Heyd, Universtiy Bristol, Bistol and University of Helsinki, Helsinki
Yamnaya Peoples in the East and Bell Beakers Users in the West are rightly seen as the apogees in a long-term process of individualisation, gender differentiation, warrior display and internationalisation/unification that fundamentally change the face of the European Continent from the mid fourth and throughout the third millennium BC. We can only approach the reasons why prehistoric peoples and cultures from regions across Europe, which were no more than marginally in touch before, join in the same emblematic pottery, new drinking habits, similar burial customs, anthropomorphic stelae, ostentatious display of weapons and other paraphernalia, and thus common values. However rather than seeing this development as an internal European progress I want to point to the importance of the Pontic-Caspian steppes, and a 2000 years lasting interaction scenario of infiltrating Suvorovo-Novodanilovka, Nizhnemikhailovka-Kvityana and Yamnaya peoples and populations with their more sedentary contemporaries in southeast Europe, the Carpathian basin and northeast of the Carpathian bow. A crucial part of this interaction –besides migrations and the exchange of genes and goods as recently highlighted in several publications not only in Nature and Science– is the forwarding of innovations in the sphere of subsistence economy. We see this archaeologically in a further importance of animal husbandry, with larger herds, specialised breeding and new forms of herding management in particular for cattle. This obviously sets in motion a substantial shift in general mobility patterns and of communication networks.
It is easily conceivable that this interaction must also have had a profound impact on the whole settlement organisation and people’s way-of-life, in consequence probably fundamentally affecting the basics of societies and thus challenging the whole system of ideas, imaginations, morale, symbols and terms – a new world-view and ultimately the base for a new language.
Pre-Indo-European speech carrying a Neolithic signature emanating from the Aegean
Guus Kroonen, Institute for Nordic Studies and Linguistics, Copenhagen University, Copenhagen
When different Indo-European speaking groups settled Europe, they did not arrive in terra nullius. Both from the perspective of the Anatolian hypothesis 1,2,3 and the Steppe hypothesis, 4,5,6 the carriers of Indo-European speech likely encountered existing populations that spoke dissimilar, unrelated languages. Relatively little is known about the Pre-Indo-European linguistic landscape of Europe, as the Indo-Europeanization of the continent caused a largely unrecorded, massive linguistic extinction event. However, when the different Indo-European groups entered Europe, they incorporated lexical material from Europe’s original languages into their own vocabularies. 7 By integrating these “natural samples” of Pre-Indo-European speech, the original European linguistic and cultural landscape can partly be reconstructed and matched against the Anatolia and the Steppe hypotheses. My results reveal that Pre-Indo-European speech contains a clear Neolithic signature emanating from the Aegean, 8 and thus patterns with the prehistoric migration of Europe’s first farming populations. 9,10,11 These results also imply that Indo-European speech came to Europe following a later migration wave, and therefore favor the Steppe Hypothesis as a likely scenario for the spread of the Proto-Indo-Europeans. 12
Linguistics, Archaeology & Genetics conference abstracts
Mismodeling Indo-European Origins: The Assault On Historical Linguistics
Reply to some self-important dork whining about this talk at Dienekes':
"You simply cannot criticize a new, rapidly-evolving and improving model just based on its trivial, known shortcomings. Such a thing is ludicrous and paints a truly bad picture of the talk presenters."
I'm afraid your effeminate idea of proper protocol has no bearing on actual science. Gray and Atkinson's "innovation" is insisting that Bayesian phylogenetics with limited and sometimes questionable inputs of data can produce highly accurate and precise readouts of linguistic history that supercede all previous linguistic and archaeological knowledge. Their results may dazzle twits like you and appeal to those who find their results politically or ethnically congenial. But the first question a serious person would ask is how closely Gray and Atkinson's attempts at reconstruction recapitulate recent/known linguistic history. That they frequently fail to do so is extremely germane to the question of how much faith one should put in their deeper reconstructions.
Statistical models are not magic. Bayesian tree building is not magic. Even with large corpuses of genetic data, the "most likely" tree is often overwhelmingly likely to be wrong. For genetics, where there's an explosion of data with comparatively few human analysts and little or no historical context, such results are useful, being often the best we have until additional data and further refinements of models appear. On the other hand, in linguistics, where on the PIE question relatively many human analysts have been poring over a comparatively limited corpus for many decades, it's up to Gray and Atkinson to demonstrate they have something useful to contribute. Every indication says they do not.
War of words: The language paradox explained
This highlights an intriguing paradox at the heart of human communication. If language evolved to allow us to exchange information, how come most people cannot understand what most other people are saying? This perennial question was famously addressed in the Old Testament story of the Tower of Babel, which tells of how humans developed the conceit that they could use their shared language to cooperate in the building of a tower that would take them to heaven. God, angered at this attempt to usurp his power, destroyed the tower and to ensure it would not be rebuilt he scattered the people and confused them by giving them different languages. The myth leads to the amusing irony that our separate languages exist to prevent us from communicating. The surprise is that this might not be far from the truth. [. . .]Of course that still leaves the question of why people would want to form into so many distinct groups. For the myriad biological species in the tropics, there are advantages to being different because it allows each to adapt to its own ecological niche. But humans all occupy the same niche, and splitting into distinct cultural and linguistic groups actually brings disadvantages, such as slowing the movement of ideas, technologies and people. It also makes societies more vulnerable to risks and plain bad luck. So why not have one large group with a shared language?
An answer to this question is emerging with the realisation that human history has been characterised by continual battles. Ever since our ancestors walked out of Africa, beginning around 60,000 years ago, people have been in conflict over territory and resources. In my book Wired for Culture (Norton/Penguin, 2012) I describe how, as a consequence, we have acquired a suite of traits that help our own particular group to outcompete the others. Two traits that stand out are "groupishness" - affiliating with people with whom you share a distinct identity - and xenophobia, demonising those outside your group and holding parochial views towards them. In this context, languages act as powerful social anchors of our tribal identity. How we speak is a continual auditory reminder of who we are and, equally as important, who we are not. Anyone who can speak your particular dialect is a walking, talking advertisement for the values and cultural history you share. What's more, where different groups live in close proximity, distinct languages are an effective way to prevent eavesdropping or the loss of important information to a competitor.
In support of this idea, I have found anthropological accounts of tribes deciding to change their language, with immediate effect, for no other reason than to distinguish themselves from neighbouring groups. For example, a group of Selepet speakers in Papua New Guinea changed its word for "no" from bia to bune to be distinct from other Selepet speakers in a nearby village. Another group reversed all its masculine and feminine nouns - the word for he became she, man became woman, mother became father, and so on. One can only sympathise with anyone who had been away hunting for a few days when the changes occurred.
The use of language as identity is not confined to Papua New Guinea. People everywhere use language to monitor who is a member of their "tribe". We have an acute, and sometimes obsessive, awareness of how those around us speak, and we continually adapt language to mark out our particular group from others. In a striking parallel to the Selepet examples, many of the peculiar spellings that differentiate American English from British - such as the tendency to drop the "u" in words like colour - arose almost overnight when Noah Webster produced the first American Dictionary of the English Language at the start of the 19th century. He insisted that: "As an independent nation, our honor [sic] requires us to have a system of our own, in language as well as government."
Trask's takedown of Forster's foray into historical linguistics
Back in 2003, geneticist Peter Forster came out with some outlandish claims about Celtic languages. This work was later incorporated into Stephen Oppenheimer's equally outlandish Origins of the British.
If you were ever tempted to take Forster seriously, you should probably read this very thorough dismantling by linguist Larry Trask. Trask demonstrates to my satisfaction the paper is a "disaster" that is not worth paying attention to. Small sample:
The authors claim to be able to assign moderately reliable absoluteHow did the paper get published?
dates to branching events in their tree, and they do this, producing the astoundingly early dates given earlier.
But it is clear that they have merely re-invented glottochronology They claim that the rate of replacements is approximately constant -- a position known to be false.
. . . interestingly, PNAS is not peer-reviewed. Hmmm. This is not the first time that PNAS has published some extremely dubious work in historical linguistics.