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Patterson said that linguistic evidence has tracked the ancestral language, called “late proto-Indo-European” to about 3,500 years ago in the Caucasus, among a people who had wheeled vehicles at a time when they were just being put into use.
Genetic evidence ruled out one likely related group in the region, the Yamnaya, because their DNA showed the group had hunter-gatherer ancestry, which is inconsistent with the fact that two Indo-European groups, Armenians and Indians, don’t share it, Patterson said. That made Patterson look south, to the Maikop civilization, which likely had significant contact with the Yamnaya, as a plausible culture where Indo-European languages originated. Samples have been obtained from Maikop burial sites, but the DNA work to test that proposal is pending, Patterson said.http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2014/12/the-surprising-origins-of-europeans/
Could there be a typo : shouldn't it say 3500 BC instead of 3500 years ago?
By that time, the wheel was invented.
Yes, interesting isn't it? I'm assuming, if the work on the Dna from Maikop itself is still ongoing, that the people at the Reich Lab are leaning in that direction because of their analysis of the data from Yamnaya (not yet published), and their modeling indicates this is probably the region from which "late proto-Indo-European" spread. Or, they may have preliminary results which confirm their original suspicions.
That would mean, I think, that "Indo-Europeans" or "Indo-European culture", by their definition, originated from an area between the Black and the Caspian Seas, and radiated out from there, with the Indo-Iranians, for example, having their origin very near there. Wouldn't this also place it temporally at 1500 BC?
I wonder how this sits with David Anthony, who is supposedly a co-author or consultant on their Yamnaya paper?
Certainly, there are specific quotes in Anthony's work where he places the culture and language of the Indo-Europeans on the Pontic Caspian Steppe from 4000 t0 3000 BC. Granted, I had, and have, a problem with that, because that probably excludes horse riding, and certainly excludes chariots, which are much younger and further east. (2000 BC), and also because of the well known problems with "Armenian" and with the fact that there's no sign of agriculture east of the Volga until you get to Siberia. (There are also problems with the other theories, as we know.)
However, isn't that a very late date for even "late proto-Indo-European"? Patterson says linguists support that date. Does anyone know the linguists to whom he's referring?
If this should turn out to be true, would this mean that western Europeans, for example, adopted Indo-European languages at a very late date indeed? That would certainly take care of the Basque language/genetics problem.
Even apart from the date, nothing in that article makes sense to me. The information that's leaked out so far about the upcoming paper had to do with people in the Yamnaya culture being seen as IE and being a mix of "Armenian" and "Karelian". And I don't think anyone can deny the link between R1a and IE, or between IE and the European Bronze Age, even though many parts of Europe didn't become IE speaking until the Iron Age.
A lot of your post is coming out bold because you're taking a bold stance on the subject, Angela, and I can agree with it all except for the India part. One of the mysteries about IE is why it's a fairly structured and formal language, according to the linguists, when one would expect a nomadic culture that's probably racially mixed to speak a simplified language. Another mystery is where a group of pastoralists got some of the technology, such as bronze smelting. That's probably why some of the older threads that I've looked at here mention the probability of Yamnaya having been influenced by Maykop, with the specifical cultural traits that made the IE expansion possible being the combination of bronze working with a nomadic warrior culture. In other words, the Maycop contributed the bronze smelters and the Yamnaya contributed the aggressiveness and love of expansion. However, I do think that haplotypes did relate more to specific cultural groups back then than at present, and the association of R1a with Vedic invaders in India suggests to me that they were Yamnaya and not just "Armenian". Plus, if we still want to see Corded Ware as an early IE horizon in Europe, I can't see them as Maykop.
A lot of your post is coming out bold because you're taking a bold stance on the subject, Angela, and I can agree with it all except for the India part. One of the mysteries about IE is why it's a fairly structured and formal language, according to the linguists, when one would expect a nomadic culture that's probably racially mixed to speak a simplified language. Another mystery is where a group of pastoralists got some of the technology, such as bronze smelting. That's probably why some of the older threads that I've looked at here mention the probability of Yamnaya having been influenced by Maykop, with the specifical cultural traits that made the IE expansion possible being the combination of bronze working with a nomadic warrior culture. In other words, the Maycop contributed the bronze smelters and the Yamnaya contributed the aggressiveness and love of expansion. However, I do think that haplotypes did relate more to specific cultural groups back then than at present, and the association of R1a with Vedic invaders in India suggests to me that they were Yamnaya and not just "Armenian". Plus, if we still want to see Corded Ware as an early IE horizon in Europe, I can't see them as Maykop.
HAYZOO
then R1a came in from Central Asia the Indo Europeans into Eastern Europe assimlating R1bs who moved West and the the ones in and around Germany also moved West making R1b today most common in Western Europe. Please respond with commonents or anything you disagree with
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