Seeing language from the DNA

[Jaska]

jdean:

Iosif Lazaridis believes he has falsified Anatolian descended from a Steppe language because of a lack of Steppe DNA in ancient Anatolian samples but quite a lot of people disagree with him on this including Alwin Kloekorst, who apparently knows a thing or two on the subject. The counter argument is the Steppe DNA component could very easily have became so diluted by the time it reached Anatolia that it would be very hard to find.

It is interesting that even capable geneticists have difficulties to understand that genetic composition of language carriers can change through times, even though they must know that after just one millennium the changes in the ancestry are often clear and visible (the Hungarians, the Scandinavians, etc.), while language and ethnicity have remained the same.

Probably there operate some unconscious presuppositions which hinder the pieces of the puzzle to be connected. Geneticists would certainly profit from familiarizing themselves with topics like language shift. It would be illuminating for them to understand how many different options there can be when populations and languages meet, and that the language of the majority population does not automatically prevail.

Opinion of Lazaridis is clearly based on something like that: an erroneous assumption that to explain the spread of the Indo-European language we should search for an ancestry component which is large enough.