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

[Iversen]

The Yamnaya steppe people had wheeled vehicles and horses(..)

Granted, but there is more to the story than that: at the time of the big conquest the wagons of the Yamnaya were heavy carts with solid diskshaped wheels - maybe useful for transporting goods, but absolutely unsuitable for battle. As for the horses - well, the Yamnaya didn't invent riding and taming procedures - they got them from a socalled Botai culture in their neighbourhood. But they did have horses, and maybe they could scare people in Europe with them. But the stirrup had definitely not been invented yet, and probably not a functionable saddle either, so it's slightly mysterious how those primitive warriors could quash the bearers of the mighty megalith culture in no time. It has been suggested that they brought the plague to Europe, but not in its modern version. So we have a real problem there...

[jeff_lindqvist]

Since you're already talking about horses, wheels and languages, could I perhaps recommend The Horse, the Wheel, and Language (by David W. Anthony)?

[Kraut]

path to a free download of the Heggarty paper

https://iecor.clld.org/

Welcome to IE-CoR …

Please click to download free our paper in Science. (Permitted link provided by Science.)

Language trees with sampled ancestors support a hybrid model for the origin of Indo-European languages.

Heggarty et al. (2023

[Kraut]

Lithuanian and Sanskrit are both part of the Indo-European language family: Lithuania's FM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Tj3ES9RLEA


If Heggarty (and the presenter of this video) was right, then would be completely wrong what the Lithuanian foreign minister tells us here: that a group of proto-Europeans migrated north preserving their archaic language "like an insect in a piece of amber" which at one point gave birth to Sanskrit in India.
So under Heggarty's scenario the words in the minister's gift book must have travelled from India/Iran to cross the Caucasus mountain, then via Ukraine to central Europe, up north until they reached the Baltic Sea.

[Kraut]

Heggarty et al. did not even include Lithuanian - a big blunder - , only Old Prussian, which at that time (16th century)was almost dead, and the rudimentary texts we have don't represent all of the Baltic territory.

https://www.science.org/action/download ... 818_sm.pdf

4.6 BALTIC AND SLAVIC
Old Prussian, Old Church Slavonic, Slovenian: Early Modern, Old Polish, Polabian, Old Czech, Old Novgorod
IE-CoR includes one historical Baltic language, Old Prussian, based on texts from the early 15th century CE (118) upto 1561, hence the IE-CoR date calibration of a standard deviation of 50 years around a mean of 500 BP. Lexemedeterminations were by Tijmen Pronk.
There are six historical Slavic languages in IE-CoR: Old Church Slavonic, Slovenian: Early Modern, OldPolish,
Polabian, Old Czech, and Old Novgorod. For all of these languages, lexeme determinations were by Lechosłav Jocz.Texts in Old Church Slavonic date from the end of the 10th to the mid-11th century CE (119). The IE-CoR datecalibration is set to reflect this, with a standard deviation of 50 years around a mean of 1000 BP.Early Modern Slovenian data for IE-CoR were drawn from a dictionary compiled between 1680 and 1710 CE (120),
hence the IE-CoR date calibration of a standard deviation of 15 years around a mean of 305 BP.
The Polabian data in IE-CoR are based on the main source for the language, the dictionary compiled byChristianHennig von Jessen. This was begun c. 1680 and completed c. 1705 CE (121), when the language was already spokenmostly only by the older generation, hence the IE-CoR date calibration of a standard deviation of 20 years around amean of 320 BP.
The IE-CoR date calibration for Old Polish is set to a standard deviation of 50 years around a mean of 600 BP, thetimeframe of the language represented in the sources from which the IE-CoR were compiled, the Old Polishdictionary (https://pjs.ijp.pan.pl/sstp.html).
The Old Czech data for IE-CoR are based on the dictionary of the RIDICS database (Research Infrastructure forDiachronic Czech Studies, https://vokabular.ujc.cas.cz), and the date calibration set to reflect the range ofcorresponding texts: a standard deviation of 31 years around a mean of 656 BP.
The IE-CoR date calibration for Old Novgorod was set to correspond to the dating given in the sources from whichthe list was drawn up (122, 123): a standard deviation of 107 years around a mean of 795 BP.

[Kraut]

An informal review of: Heggarty et al., 2023. Language trees with sampled ancestors support a hybrid model for the origin of Indo-European languages. Also available as html: https://starlingdb.org/Texts/Review_Heggarty2023.html
Alexei S . Kassian
George Starostin
A long time ago in a high, high ranked journal...
INDO-EUROPEAN PHYLOGENY

https://www.academia.edu/105839899
file:///C:/Users/ls/Downloads/Informal_review_of_Heggarty_et_al_2023_I.pdf

[Kraut]

an example of older, traditional scholarship

Iranian Migration
Michael Witzel
in: Daniel Potts (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Iran. 2013. 422-441.

Traces the origin, migration and final outcome of the languages and populations of the Iranian branch of Indo-Iranian, from the southern Ural steppes to the areas of Greater Iran: current Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, as well as Kurdistan, Ossetia, etc. In: Daniel Potts (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Iran. 2013.

[Kraut]

David Anthony: when we were Yamnaya
Indo-European origins in 2023

https://www.razibkhan.com/p/david-antho ... xa#details

only part of the podcast is free

Today, Razib revisits The Horse, the Wheel, and Language with David Anthony, emeritus professor at Hartwick College and collaborator with David Reich’s ancient DNA research group at Harvard University. Anthony and Razib survey the last two years in terms of questions regarding the domestication of the horse, the spread of the wheel, and Yamnaya steppe herders' language; subjects of his 2007 book. They also discuss the exponential growth in our understanding of the paleodemography of Bronze Age Eurasian nomads since 2015’s publication of Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe, a study for which Anthony provided many of the samples.

Razib asks Anthony how his understanding of the rise of Indo-Europeans has or has not changed, in the wake of new data and novel interpretations over the last two years. Anthony reiterates the broad outlines he has been proposing for decades: the Yamnaya nomads of the Bronze-Age Eurasian steppe were the proto-Indo-Europeans, full stop. He also addresses those who argue for the Corded Ware culture of East-Central Europe being considered a sister, as opposed to a daughter, culture of the Yamnaya. Anthony points out that analysts in Reich’s group have discovered individuals who are apparent relatives between the Yamnaya and Corded Ware, indicative of a close and tight bond. Like the Danish archaeologist Kristian Kristiansen, Anthony believes that the pastoralist people who invaded Northern Europe 5,000 years ago should be thought of as fundamentally Yamnaya. He also addresses those skeptical of Yamnaya origins, positing perhaps some discomfort with the idea that modern people descend from warlike nomadic groups.

Finally, Razib presses Anthony about new theories regarding more detailed structure of early Indo-European migrations. Does he accept the contention that most Indo-European groups descend from the Corded Ware, while Armenians, Greeks, Tocharians and Illyrians descend from the Yamnaya directly? What more elements to the narrative are going to be added beyond the broad assertion that the Yamnaya were the proto-Indo-Europeans?

------------------------------

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=60225
The origins and affinities of Tocharian

[Iversen]

I have not listened to even the free part of the podcast yet, but if you look at the genetics then it's towards the West that the percentage of Yamnaya R1B1 is highest, so there there would only be the culture of the women to represent a heritage to take into account - whatever happened to the men is still somewhat mysterious, but maybe they were sent out in the fields to work as slaves. The corded ware culture is more center-North, but even there the percentage of R1B1 carriers is still so high that it MUST be a seen as a modified Yamnaya culture, just with more local heritage and local developments in the mix.

The really baffling thing is that Eastern Europe(including the area of the former DDR) is basically R1A1, so the invasion there must be separate from the one that pushed R1B1 into the rest of Europe. The Balto-Slavic languages spoken there now could have come with much later invasions or cultural influences from the R1A1 homelands, or their predecessors could have been brought along already with the first wave of R1A1 carriers - ah dunno, and I haven't seen any real discussions about that question, but it is a moot point whether those languages spread slowly much later, having developed elsewhere, namely in the area now known as Russia. The corded ware culture encompassed both the later Germanic and the later Balto-Slavic territories, so it's puzzling that that area now has been divided into two parts speaking languages from different families, roughly corresponding to the areas dominated by R1B1 and R1A1. How can that be explained?

As for the Balkans, the genetic composition there is much more diverse than in for instance Ireland. It's likely that there was an invasion before the Yamanaya one, and that invasion killed off the blossoming Chalcolitic culture there and left a void in its place. But there is nothing in the languages there now that suggests that their predecessors were spoken in the area before the spread of the Yamnayas - except maybe that Albanian allegedly has traits both from both sides of the Centum and Satem dividíng line.

[Kraut]

https://www.facebook.com/indo.european.connection
Indo-European Connection
28. Juli ·

Heggarty thinks that Albanian, Armenian and Greek originated in Anatolia and not in Yamna/Eastern Europe. What a surprise that Albanian in my dataset shares only 70 words in common with 1000 Hittite words (7%), Armenian 117 (11.7%), while Greek shares 149 words (14.9%). Would not those amounts be much higher if all 4 languages came from Anatolia, would not they be at least similar?

---------------------------------------
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101 ... 790v1.full
Ancient DNA reveals the origins of the Albanians

Abstract

The origins of the Albanian people have vexed linguists and historians for centuries, as Albanians first appear in the historical record in the 11th century CE, while their language is one of the most enigmatic branches of the Indo-European family. To identify the populations that contributed to the ancestry of Albanians, we undertake a genomic transect of the Balkans over the last 8000 years, where we analyse more than 6000 previously published ancient genomes using state-of-the-art bioinformatics tools and algorithms that quantify spatiotemporal human mobility. We find that modern Albanians descend from Roman era western Balkan populations, with additional admixture from Slavic-related groups. Remarkably, Albanian paternal ancestry shows continuity from Bronze Age Balkan populations, including those known as Illyrians. Our results provide an unprecedented understanding of the historical and demographic processes that led to the formation of modern Albanians and help locate the area where the Albanian language developed.

Unlike the genetic continuity observed during the Neolithic-Chalcolithic transition, the PCA indicates remarkable ancestry shifts in the Balkans during the Early Bronze Age (EBA) (ca. 2600-1800 BCE). Most EBA Balkan samples show a significant change in their PC position and plot towards the Yamnaya (Fig. 2), suggesting the arrival of the steppe cultural package in the region, including Indo-European speech (4, 11, 43, 47, 49, 51–53). The Albania Çinamak EBA sample, dated to 2663-2472 BCE (Fig. 1B; Table S1), together with two samples from Bulgaria Boyanovo EBA (2500-2000 BCE), cluster closest to Yamnaya (Fig. 2), and qpAdm tests model them as having roughly 70% and 80-85% steppe ancestry, respectively, with the remainder of their genome deriving from local farming populations