Invasion from the steppe (Indo-European expansion)

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kulaputra
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Re: Invasion from the steppe (Indo-European expansion)

Postby kulaputra » Tue Jun 19, 2018 5:21 pm

I can't read the German but the current linguistic consensus is that "invasion" is a sensationalist misnomer. It wasn't an invasion. It was mostly a slow scale diffusion of people across the Eurasian landmass over the course of millennia.

There were neither chariots nor advanced weaponry amongst the Proto Indo Europeans. There isn't even evidence the PIEs used horses in war at all.
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Re: Invasion from the steppe (Indo-European expansion)

Postby Kraut » Fri Jun 22, 2018 11:52 pm

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/scie ... 22341.html

The builders of Stonehenge disappeared. It is suggested that their disappearance might have also be due to the bubonic plague. I doubt it. The arriving Bell Beakers who replaced them would have been equally affected.

Britain's prehistoric catastrophe revealed: How 90% of the neolithic population vanished in just 300 years

But some 300 to 500 years after the main phase of Stonehenge was built, that mainly Mediterranean-looking British Neolithic-originating element of the population had declined from almost 100 percent to just 10 per cent of the population.

The new genetic research reveals that the other 90 per cent were a newly-arrived central-European- originating population (known to archaeologists as the Beaker People) who appear to have settled in Britain between 2500 BC and 2000 BC via the Netherlands.
Last edited by Kraut on Sat Jun 23, 2018 11:06 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Invasion from the steppe (Indo-European expansion)

Postby Kraut » Sat Jun 23, 2018 9:27 am

Kortlandt, Frederik
The Expansion of the Indo-European Languages
http://jies.org/DOCS/jies_index/Vol46.html

Abstract:

When considering the way the Indo-Europeans took to the west, it is important to realize that mountains, forests and marshlands were prohibitive impediments. Moreover, people need fresh water, all the more so when traveling with horses. The natural way from the Russian steppe to the west is therefore along the northern bank of the river Danube. This leads to the hypothesis that the western Indo-Europeans represent successive waves of migration along the Danube and its tributaries. The Celts evidently followed the Danube all the way to southern Germany. The ancestors of the Italic tribes, including the Veneti, may have followed the river Sava towards northern Italy. The ancestors of Germanic speakers apparently moved into Moravia and Bohemia and followed the Elbe into Saxony. A part of the Veneti may have followed them into Moravia and moved along the Oder through the Moravian Gate into Silesia. The hypothetical speakers of Temematic probably moved through Slovakia along the river Orava into western Galicia. The ancestors of speakers of Balkan languages crossed the lower Danube and moved to the south. This scenario is in agreement with the generally accepted view of the earliest relations between these branches of Indo-European.

The western Indo-European vocabulary in Baltic and Slavic is the result of an Indo-European substratum which contained an older non-Indo-European layer and was part of the Corded Ware horizon. The numbers show that a considerable part of the vocabulary was borrowed after the split between Baltic and Slavic, which came about when their speakers moved westwards north and south of the Pripet marshes. These events are older than the westward movement of the Slavs which brought them into contact with Temematic speakers. One may conjecture that the Venedi occupied the Oder basin and then expanded eastwards over the larger part of present-day Poland before the western Balts came down the river Niemen and moved onwards to the lower Vistula. We may then identify the Venedic expansion with the spread of the Corded Ware horizon and the westward migration of the Balts and the Slavs with their integration into the larger cultural complex. The theory that the Venedi separated from the Veneti in the upper Sava region and moved through Moravia and Silesia to the Baltic Sea explains the “im Namenmaterial auffällige Übereinstimmung zwischen dem Baltikum und den Gebieten um den Nordteil der Adria” (Udolph 1981: 61). The Balts probably moved in two stages because the differences between West and East Baltic are considerable.


It is reviewed here negatively because the author Quilles thinks that Corded Ware people were Uralic speakers - very likely wrong.
https://indo-european.eu/tag/kortlandt/
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Re: Invasion from the steppe (Indo-European expansion)

Postby Iversen » Sat Jun 23, 2018 11:14 am

As I see it the bubonic plague would have decimated the population of Central Europe, and the Bell Beaker culture developed AFTER that in a population that contained both the survivors and a superstratum of people from the steppes - so the circumstances surrounding the demise of the Stongehenge builders were probably not different from those that marked the end of other megalith cultures. The only difference would be in the proportion of R1-genes, and here it seems that the british Isles fit nicely into the general pattern in Western Europe - and the lingering question why the Megalith culture of Sardinia also crumbled in spite of its inhabitants having largely retained their Preindoeuropean genetic composition:

R1B1_Eupedia.jpg

kulaputra wrote:I can't read the German but the current linguistic consensus is that "invasion" is a sensationalist misnomer. It wasn't an invasion. It was mostly a slow scale diffusion of people across the Eurasian landmass over the course of millennia.
There were neither chariots nor advanced weaponry amongst the Proto Indo Europeans. There isn't even evidence the PIEs used horses in war at all.


The hard facts from recent genetic studies show that the invasion (or whatever you choose to call it) wasn't a slow process. The corded ware culture in Eastern Europe popped up almost out of nowhere more or less coincident with the first R1 genes, and the Bell Beaker culture in central Europe also came into being more or less coincident with the oldest attested finds of R1 genes there. Well, it then took a few hundred years to continue the journey into Britain and Northern Europe, but in the large perspective it is difficult not to see the fall of the Megalith cultures as closely tied to this major genetic shift (most pronounced in the Y-chromosome haplogroups).

It all points to an invasion, but the problem is to explain why the steppe people were so succcesful. They did have horses, but neither chariots nor bronze, which both came later, maybe through a route from Asia Minor ... and both inventions penetrated rather slowly through Europe. So why was the genetic change happen so much faster than the cultural shift from stone age to bronze age weapons? To me it looks like a true military invasion (albeit with mediocre weaponry) versus slow cultural penetration.

Chariot (Wikipedia).jpg
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kulaputra
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Re: Invasion from the steppe (Indo-European expansion)

Postby kulaputra » Sat Jun 23, 2018 5:07 pm

Iversen wrote:The hard facts from recent genetic studies show that the invasion (or whatever you choose to call it) wasn't a slow process. The corded ware culture in Eastern Europe popped up almost out of nowhere more or less coincident with the first R1 genes, and the Bell Beaker culture in central Europe also came into being more or less coincident with the oldest attested finds of R1 genes there. Well, it then took a few hundred years to continue the journey into Britain and Northern Europe, but in the large perspective it is difficult not to see the fall of the Megalith cultures as closely tied to this major genetic shift (most pronounced in the Y-chromosome haplogroups).

It all points to an invasion, but the problem is to explain why the steppe people were so succcesful. They did have horses, but neither chariots nor bronze, which both came later, maybe through a route from Asia Minor ... and both inventions penetrated rather slowly through Europe. So why was the genetic change happen so much faster than the cultural shift from stone age to bronze age weapons? To me it looks like a true military invasion (albeit with mediocre weaponry) versus slow cultural penetration.


This makes no sense at you are explicitly contradicting yourself. Proto Indo Europeans lacked both the military technology and the sociopolitical infrastructure to engage in military invasion across the span of continents.

Exactly how do you define slow v. fast here? It took over three and a half millennia for the PIE expansion to reach its initial zenith- Ireland to Tocharia, Scandinavia to the Ganges. It would take even longer and the rise of complex, militarily advanced empires (the Romans, Scythians, Persians) to truly displace many pre-PIE languages.

As for the genetic change, I'm not sure it supports your point. There was no wholesale genetic replacement. Some new genes were added to the gene pool, which is unsurprising, but not inherently indicative of conquest.

The collapse of a culture is also not indicative of warfare or extermination, it's only indicative of cultural change. That PIE culture did replace local cultures is certain, but that's not being disputed.

The success of PIEs can pretty much wholly be attributed to agriculture (and possibly lactase genes, as has been suggested) in combination with a fairly sparsely populated Eurasia.

Your comment reflects an outdated view that if language or culture change, it must be indicative of wholesale demographic replacement. That's not true. Given some kind of social or environmental advantage, people will marry into and adopt the language and culture of another group.
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Iha śāriputra: rūpaṃ śūnyatā śūnyataiva rūpaṃ; rūpān na pṛthak śūnyatā śunyatāyā na pṛthag rūpaṃ; yad rūpaṃ sā śūnyatā; ya śūnyatā tad rūpaṃ.

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Re: Invasion from the steppe (Indo-European expansion)

Postby Kraut » Sat Jun 23, 2018 9:01 pm

The Tollense battle was fought by pre?proto?Germanics long before any Romans appeared on the scene.
In the texts I have seen they talk about some kind of standing army.

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/03/ ... age-battle

About 3200 years ago, two armies clashed at a river crossing near the Baltic Sea. The confrontation can’t be found in any history books—the written word didn’t become common in these parts for another 2000 years—but this was no skirmish between local clans. Thousands of warriors came together in a brutal struggle, perhaps fought on a single day, using weapons crafted from wood, flint, and bronze, a metal that was then the height of military technology.

Struggling to find solid footing on the banks of the Tollense River, a narrow ribbon of water that flows through the marshes of northern Germany toward the Baltic Sea, the armies fought hand-to-hand, maiming and killing with war clubs, spears, swords, and knives. Bronze- and flint-tipped arrows were loosed at close range, piercing skulls and lodging deep into the bones of young men. Horses belonging to high-ranking warriors crumpled into the muck, fatally speared. Not everyone stood their ground in the melee: Some warriors broke and ran, and were struck down from behind.
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Re: Invasion from the steppe (Indo-European expansion)

Postby Iversen » Sat Jun 23, 2018 9:19 pm

Kulaputra is right in one thing, namely that the steppe people didn't really have the advanced military equipment they would need to conquer the populations in Europe - so there must have been other factors at play.

He is wrong in denying a wholesale genetic replacement took place. Actually the previous male haplogroups in Europe were largely replaced by haplogroups coming from the steppes within a timespan of just a few hundred years. In some areas about a third remained from the previous male haplogroups, in others (like some parts of the British isles) only a tenth or so survived. It is not likely that the indigenous men of the own free will decided not to breed - they must have been forced to accept this. The picture is less clear when it comes to female haplogroups, partly because there are very few genes in mitochondria and therefore also few genes that can mutate. But the sudden changes in male haplogroups cannot be explained away.

"It took over three and a half millennia for the PIE expansion to reach its initial zenith- Ireland to Tocharia, Scandinavia to the Ganges. It would take even longer and the rise of complex, militarily advanced empires (the Romans, Scythians, Persians) to truly displace many pre-PIE languages"

This doesn't refute the thesis about an invasion by steppe people, but there is some truth in it, namely that some non-Indoeuropean languages and cultures lingered on well into the Iron age and in some cases longer (most notable the Finno-Ugrian cultures in Northwestern Europe). And I also pointed to the slow spread of spoke-wheel chariots as one example of a cultural development that took place long after the shift in male haplogroups. An image showing the slow spread of bronze would have shown the same thing. But it remains a fact that the corded ware cultures arose in Eastern Europe at the same time as haplogroup R1A1, and within the same short period the Bell Beaker culture popped up in central Europe and spread to a vaste swath of land between Spain and Scandinavia. The slow gradual diffusion of cultural ideas is in this case a myth, an outdated mythology.

"The success of PIEs can pretty much wholly be attributed to agriculture (and possibly lactase genes, as has been suggested) in combination with a fairly sparsely populated Eurasia.

Only if you assume that the Indoeuropean languages were introduced with agriculture, a shift which in Europe took quite a long time. Agriculture was introduced in the 'fertile crescent' in the Middle east somewhere between 10.000 and 8.000 BC and it took until around 4.000 before the neolitic 'revolution' had reached Northern Europe, probably through Asia Minor. We do have to consider the hypothesis that the agricultural cultural wawe actually was the one that brought the Indoeuropean languages to Europe. And since there aren't any relevant written sources yet that yet that could elucidate the problem there is some room for speculation, but for a number of reasons the prevailing opinion now is that it was the steppe people who introduced the Indoeuropean language group to Europe ... and even if this weren't the case the genetic evidence would still prove that Europe was invaded by the steppe people around 3000-2800 BC. Theories that deny this are no longer relevant.

Lactase tolerance: this was curiously enough NOT a trait carried by the immigrant steppe hordes. Some sources claim that it was present in poopulations in Asia minor already around 10.000 BC, and if this is the case then It is actually more likely to have been a characteristic of the agrarian pre-steppe population of Europe, which survived due to its obvious positive consequences.

And the Tollense battle took place around 1200 BC, i.e. well into the Bronze age and several centuries after the appearance of the Bell Beaker and the Corded ware cultures. Was it a battle between peoples representing the descendants of these two cultures? The article suggests that at least some of the warriors had come from far away, but it also states that their origin hasn't been found yet. Whatever it was, it was not a battle between steppe people and an old indigenous population. By 1200 BC the indigenous populations in the area were already the descendants of steppe warriors.
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Re: Invasion from the steppe (Indo-European expansion)

Postby Kraut » Tue Jun 26, 2018 4:22 pm

https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01667476/file/ ... t_milk.pdf
Milk and the Indo-Europeans
Milk and the Indo-Europeans
Romain Garnier, Laurent Sagart and Benoît Sagot

Recent evidence from archaeology and ancient DNA converge to indicate that
the Yamnaya culture, often regarded as the bearer of the Proto-Indo-European
language, underwent a strong population expansion in the late 4th and early 3rd
millennia BCE. It suggests that the underlying reason for that expansion might
be the then unique capacity to digest animal milk in adulthood. We examine the
early Indo-European milk-related vocabulary to confirm the special role of animal
milk in Indo-European expansions. We show that Proto-Indo-European did
not have a specialized root for ‘to milk’ and argue that the IE root *h2melg!- ‘to
milk’ is secondary and post-Anatolian. We take this innovation as an indication
of the novelty of animal milking in early Indo-European society. Together with
a detailed study of language-specific innovations in this semantic field, we conclude
that the ability to digest milk played an important role in boosting Proto-
Indo-European demography.
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Re: Invasion from the steppe (Indo-European expansion)

Postby Iversen » Fri Jun 29, 2018 3:42 pm

When I wrote that the ability to digest milk didn't come with the Yamnaya invasion I did so on the basis of remarks based on genetic research. Therefore I'm not surprised that there isn't a word root for milk in Proto-Indo-European, but see it as one more sign that it wasn't the Yamnaya that brought the necessary genes to Europe, and also that it therefore can't have been a factor behind their success in their European venture.

The age of the relevant mutation seems still to be under debate among the scholars, but it probably happened before the Yamnaya invasion (which started around 5000 years ago). I found the folllowing quote in an article from Nature.com:

Most people who retain the ability to digest milk can trace their ancestry to Europe, where the trait seems to be linked to a single nucleotide in which the DNA base cytosine changed to thymine in a genomic region not far from the lactase gene. There are other pockets of lactase persistence in West Africa (see Nature 444, 994–996; 2006), the Middle East and south Asia that seem to be linked to separate mutations (see 'Lactase hotspots').

The single-nucleotide switch in Europe happened relatively recently. Thomas and his colleagues estimated the timing by looking at genetic variations in modern populations and running computer simulations of how the related genetic mutation might have spread through ancient populations. They proposed that the trait of lactase persistence, dubbed the LP allele, emerged about 7,500 years ago in the broad, fertile plains of Hungary.


I'm quite happy to be among those who has thymine at the right location - otherwise my daily dairy consumption would kill me.
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Re: Invasion from the steppe (Indo-European expansion)

Postby Kraut » Fri Jun 29, 2018 4:33 pm

The first horse herders and the impact of early Bronze Age steppe expansions into Asia

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6396/eaar7711
Abstract

The Yamnaya expansions from the western steppe into Europe and Asia during the Early Bronze Age (~3000 BCE) are believed to have brought with them Indo-European languages and possibly horse husbandry. We analyzed 74 ancient whole-genome sequences from across Inner Asia and Anatolia and show that the Botai people associated with the earliest horse husbandry derived from a hunter-gatherer population deeply diverged from the Yamnaya. Our results also suggest distinct migrations bringing West Eurasian ancestry into South Asia before and after, but not at the time of, Yamnaya culture. We find no evidence of steppe ancestry in Bronze Age Anatolia from when Indo-European languages are attested there. Thus, in contrast to Europe, Early Bronze Age Yamnaya-related migrations had limited direct genetic impact in Asia.
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