Redefining Pre-Indo-European Language Families of Bronze Age Western Europe

[Iversen]

Things are developing qute fast in this research area, and I had not seen the information that 50% of the population in some areas carry Neanderthal genes, but even if it is true then it still could be only those 2% in each person - although locally I have seen up to 5% Neanderthalian genes for some individuals. On the other hand there are also sapientes with Denisovan genes (mostly in Asia and Oceania), and I have recently seen an article where it is claimed that Neanderthal genes are found in certain limited locations in Africa. As for the Neanderthal genes the encounters between them and us may have taken place in the Middle East, where both species or reaces or whatever they are lived simultaneously - whereas the sapientes only arrived in Western Europe at a time where the already sparse Neanderthal population was receding to Gibraltar, where the last Neanderthal apparently died lonely and sad in a cave. There may have been meetings also in Europe (one skeleton from Spain looks like a hybrid between the two populations), but probably fewer and maybe not friendly. By the way there must be some limitation on the genes considered - otherwise it would be nonsense at the same time to state that we only differ by 2% from chimps and bonobos (see this article for a down-to-Earth explanation).

I did actually mention the relationships between Neanderthals and Sapientes for a specific reason, namely that if Homo Heidelbergensis - a seemingly capable species who seemingly lived in all the likely locations - wasn't the common ancestor for Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens, then we simply don't have a plan B for who else could it be. And that has consequences for when we estimate that true language first occurred. It has always bothered me that the estimates of the height of the heidelbergenses differ so much (cfr the numbers given in Wikipedia), so maybe the name just covers a loose variety of lineages. The prevailing theory is summarized this way by one of the Smithsonian magazines:

Comparison of Neanderthal and modern human DNA suggests that the two lineages diverged from a common ancestor, most likely Homo heidelbergensis, sometime between 350,000 and 400,000 years ago – with the European branch leading to H. neanderthalensis and the African branch (sometimes called Homo rhodesiensis) to H. sapiens.

So what could a neanderthal do (and say)? From the recent Neanderthal exposition of the MOMU here in Århus I would like to show an example of presumed Neanderthal art embellished by sapientes, and if that interpretation holds water then the two teams of artists didn't think in quite the same way (although it has to be said that some recent artwork looks deceptively like that of the Neanderthal who - maybe - made the red markings in the middle).

F6146b06_Neanderthal(the-abstract-center)-plus-sapiens(the animals).jpg

Long ago (in the late 70s or early 80s) I read an article in the magazine Lingua which stated that the mouth and throat shape of Neanderthals didn't exclude that they could speak, but if they did then their voices would have had a rather highpitched tone - and some videos on Youtube follow in that trail. It seems that they had a FoxP2 gene similar to the one we have got, and they did have a thyroid bone, but maybe not attached to the rest of their vocal apparatus. So far my conclusion as an informed layman is that the Neanderthalians probably did speak, but that their imaginative fantasy apparently didn't match that of their sapiens successors - and a discussion would have sounded as a modern kindergarten. As for the Heidelbergs ... well, I still presume that they had developed some kind of language (beyond what modern apes can produce), but I have become more sceptical about their linguistical prowess.

And as sort of an appendix: if the brain structure of socalled Homo erectus specimens really moved during its long existence to the extent that their thinking abilities must have changed fundamentally, then it may be wrong to lump early and late representatives together in one single species. I remember that the 1 mio year old fossils from the Dmanisi site in Georgia first were ascribed to Homo ergaster, which later has been submerged under the common label erectus (together with 'Peking man' and 'Java man' and others). Maybe the older name should be revived...

F1914a04_dmanisi-jaw_Janashia-museum_Tbilisi.jpg

And all this happened long before the bronze age ...

[Kraut]

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6ttsi2
Neanderthals Meet Your Ancestors Series

About the 2 - 5 per cent of Neanderthal genes we carry: I have read that when looking at the overall impact on organs, human traits, psyche, diseases etc that are affected by their genes we find a per centage much higher, 30 per cent?

[sirgregory]

Here is a bit more on this point about "adaptive introgression" from Neanderthals.

Most Neanderthal variants exist in only around 2 percent of modern people of Eurasian descent. But some archaic DNA is much more common, an indication that it was beneficial to ancient humans as they moved from Africa into Eurasia, which Neanderthals had called home for more than 300,000 years. In their 2014 study, Vernot and Akey found several sequences of Neanderthal origin that were present in more than half of the genomes from living humans they studied. The regions that contained high frequencies of Neanderthal sequences included genes that could yield clues to their functional effect. Base-pair differences between Neanderthal and human variants rarely fall in protein-coding sequences, but rather in regulatory ones, suggesting the archaic sequences affect gene expression. (See “Denisovans in the Mix” below.)

A number of segments harbor genes that relate to skin biology, such as a transcription factor that regulates the development of epidermal cells called keratinocytes. These variants may underlie traits that were adaptive in the different climatic conditions and lower levels of ultraviolet light exposure at more northern latitudes. Reich’s group similarly found genes involved in skin biology enriched in Neanderthal ancestry—that is, more than just a few percent of people carried Neanderthal DNA in these parts of the genome.

The effect that Neanderthal DNA might have on skin appearance and function is “fascinating,” says Akey. “Something that we’re still really interested in and starting to do some experimental work on is: Can we understand what these genes do and then maybe what the selective pressure was that favored the Neanderthal version?”

https://www.the-scientist.com/features/neanderthal-dna-in-modern-human-genomes-is-not-silent-66299

Here is a quote from the paper mentioned.

The collection of surviving Neandertal lineages that we identified that we identified allows us to search for signatures of adaptive introgression (15, 16). First, we used introgressed variants that exhibit large allele frequency differences between Europeans and East Asians (FST > 0.40; p-value < 0.001 by simulation) (10), to identify four significantly differentiated regions (Fig. 4 and table S10) (10). Introgressed haplotypes in two of these regions span genes that play important roles in the integumentary system: BNC2 on chromosome 9 and POU2F3 on chromosome 11. BNC2 encodes a zinc finger protein expressed in keratinocytes and other tissues (17), and has been associated with skin pigmentation levels in Europeans (18). The adaptive haplotype has a frequency of ~70% in Europeans and is completely absent in East Asians (Fig. 2B). POU2F3 is a homeobox transcription factor expressed in the epidermis and mediates keratinocyte proliferation and differentiation (19, 20). The adaptive haplotype in East Asians has a frequency of ~66% and is found at less than 1% frequency in Europeans (Fig. 2B).

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24476670/

[sirgregory]

In addition to Basque and Etruscan, there has been some work done in Sardinia where they were speaking a pre-IE language until fairly late. It seems they try to look at place names and things like that which are often retained even through shifts in language (sort of like how there are still numerous Amerindian place names in the Americas).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleo-Sardinian_language

The theories put forth sound very interesting, but they are also highly varied and necessarily conjectural.

Another thing to look at is particular vocabulary. The Yamnaya steppe people had wheeled vehicles and horses, so logically you might expect words related to those things to come from them. Meanwhile the invaded populations were farmers and so you might expect to see pre-IE vocabulary surviving in the agricultural vocabulary. Also, there was a strong sex bias in the invasion from the steppe. It was predominantly male. But some of the maternal pre-IE language should have survived.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Horse,_the_Wheel,_and_Language

[lichtrausch]

Neue Theorie zum Ursprung der indogermanischen Sprachen

Hybridhypothese für den Ursprung und die Verbreitung der indogermanischen Sprachen: Die Sprachfamilie begann sich vor etwa 8100 Jahren von ihrer Urheimat unmittelbar südlich des Kaukasus ausgehend zu verzweigen. Eine Migrationswelle erreichte vor etwa 7000 Jahren die pontisch-kaspische sowie die Waldsteppe, von wo ausgehend vor etwa 5000 Jahren weitere Migrationen in weitreichende Teile Europas erfolgten.

Early contact between late farming and pastoralist societies in southeastern Europe

[Kraut]

This paper is already very controversial. Just one point: look at the map where Greek, Armenian ... are arriving from Anatolia ..

and read this post

https://eurogenes.blogspot.com/


DragonHermit said...

There are hundreds of books written about Greek, Albanian, Armenian, etc... These are clearly NOT archaic PIE languages. In fact, they are probably LATE Yamnaya languages. Even ignoring something like Anatolian, we can even spot that something like Tocharian is archaic. Out of the current PIE branches, Italo-Celtic has a near-total consensus of being the 3rd most archaic. Apart from Greece, Albania itself was filled with countless of kurgans, and there is a clear ~35% steppe ancestry component surviving since the Middle Bronze Age. Saying this language is from Anatolia is bizarre nonsense.

Lazaridis himself has come out against this paper saying it makes no sense, and I suspect linguists as well will soon follow suit.

[Iversen]

When I last delved deeply into this topic some 4-5 years ago, it was already wellknown that there were at least 5 Y-based haplogroups represented in the Balkan area, while the R1A1 and R1Ba more or less dominated the rest of Europe (apart from Northern Scandinavia). It was also well know that there was a blossoming copper age culture some 4000 years ago in the Balkan region, and that it abruptly disappeared - and then nothing much happened before the bronze age than a thousand years later. The inference could be that somebody entered the Balkan area and wreaked havoc, but without spreading further than that.

Then from around 3300 BC (or 2800 BC if we look at the really decisive invasion) a new surge of R1B1 Yamnaya washed across Europe, in some cases in conjunction with existing cultures, in other cases seemingly replacing almost the entire male population (as in Ireland, but against expectation also in Viscaya). Eastern Europe must have been the target of a separate invasion since R1A1 is dominant there. And then the question remains whether a supposed early invasion of the Balkan area lead to the establishment of separate language families there. And here I have to agree with DragonHermit: languages like Albanian or Greek are NOT so different from other Indoeuropean languages that they could have been established as families one thousand years before for instance Italo-Celtic or Germanic. And yes, I'm aware of some problems about the status of Albanian between centum and satem, but nothing that would pull its descendance from (maybe) the Illyrians back to the end of the Chalcolithic era. Whatever the language of those who stayed in the Balkans from the wawe that obliterated the copper age culture, those languages MUST have disappeared and been replaced by something developed from the languages of the second wawe, just leaving some genetic material.

The picture can be more complicated than this since there may have been several minor invasions between the two big ones, but on a linguistical level we can say that they haven't had any lasting effect - although there can of course have been populations whose non-Indoeuropean languages have disappeared without a trace. The Minoans could have spoken a non-Indoeuropean language, the Etruscans definitely did and the Basques and Fins and Sami still do, but since we don't have definite evidence about non-Indoeuropean languages spoken in the Balkans before around 3000 BC we can't say whether these came with the first big wawe of invaders or were remnants of some archaic language. Anyway, there is little reason to believe that any of these languages came through Anatolia. Whether the language spoken by the Yamnays originally was imported from the Caucasus region (as the article from Nature suggests) is possible, but just one hypothesis among others, and it must be said that for instance Hittite most likely came to Anatolia through the Caucasus, but what happened between Caucasus and the Pontic steppes before that is anyone's guess.

[Kraut]

https://a-genetics.blogspot.com/2023/07 ... model.html

The Hybrid Model for Indo-European languages

Brief Overview of the Method

The authors aver that this method used Bayesian phylogenetic inference which is not similar to either Lexicostatistics or Glottochronology, both of which they consider deeply flawed.

This paper's Bayesian phylogenetic inference analysis is based on a new improved database (IE - CoR 1.0). The IE‑CoR 1.0 database contains data on relationships of cognacy (shared word origin) between 161 Indo-European languages in a reference set of 170 basic meanings. The new languages include the Nuristani branch, extinct Iranic languages from central Asia and a representative of sub-branches of Celtic which was missing from previous databases (Gaulish). The coverage prioritizes non-modern languages which provides a deeper phylogenetic signal and better chronological estimation than before. This database was contributed by 80 experts of different language sub-families to maximize data accuracy.

The authors state they improved the cognate encoding (keeping 1 lexeme for each cognate set rather than many synonyms used in previous databases which created lots of cognate sets per lexeme. This, for example, artificially elongated the branch length of modern Greek and the age of old Greek). The IE-CoR data set has highly consistent counts of cognate sets across all languages, very close to the target of 1 cognate set per meaning, per language. They also removed the constraints previously placed on ancient languages to be directly ancestral to modern languages which need not be the case. This previously forced 0 branch length (and therefore no divergence), simply forced the changes onto the next branch and elongated branch lengths artificially.

The database also solves the loanword problem in computational cladistics. "IE-CoR introduced the concept of loanword event, through which it has become possible to encode correctly both non-cognacy to the source lexeme, and subsequent cognacy between vertical descendants of that lexeme, once borrowed and fully integrated into the borrower language."

Important Discussion and Conclusions from the Paper

Heggarty et al reaffirm the position of the earliest Indo-European speakers in the south of the Caucasus around ~6100 BCE. They support a hybrid model in which the steppe was a secondary staging ground for European languages. Importantly, the beginning of the split from Indo-Iranian into Indo-Aryan and Iranic is dated to ~3500 BCE, a finding wholly incompatible with the Andronovo hypothesis.

The authors make clear that Proto-Indo-European should include the stage before the Anatolian and Tocharian split, ie. they reject the nomenclature which places PIE in the steppe (which excludes at least the Anatolian branch) used, for e.g in Lazaridis et al 2022 (Southern Arc paper).

[Carmody]

Iversen

I can't understand everything you write but I do like your garden!

[Kraut]

Here are maps of the opposing models. Obviously, there must be overwhelming archeological, linguistic and genetic evidence for rejecting or confirming claims,
Sintashta culture, for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sintashta_culture.