Proto-Indo-European and Indo-Anatolian

[Jaska]

Here I follow the present mainstream definition:
1. Early Proto-Indo-European = Indo-Anatolian
2. Late Proto-Indo-European = Indo-European without Anatolian

A new article draft from David Anthony sums up all the recent evidence, including ancient DNA: 
Ten Constraints that Limit the Late PIE Homeland to the Steppes
https://www.academia.edu/108547976/Ten_C...he_Steppes

[RCO]

Proto-Indo-European was strongly related to a biocultural habitat with trees and chestnuts



Indo-European 

Hellenic kástanon chestnut 
Greek kástano chestnut 

Albanian gështenjë chestnut 

Balto-Slavic *késten chestnut 
Latvian kastanis chestnut 
Lithuanian kaštonas chestnut 
Slovak gaštan chestnut 
Belarusian kaštán chestnut 
Bulgarian késten chestnut 
Croatian kesten chestnut 
Czech kaštan chestnut 
Macedonian kósten chestnut 
Polish kasztan chestnut 
Russian kaštán chestnut 
Serbian kesten chestnut 
Slovenian kostanj chestnut 

Germanic kastan(i)e chestnut 
Danish kastanje chestnut 
Dutch kastanje chestnut 
Old English chesten chestnut 
German kastanie chestnut 
Norwegian kastanje chestnut 
Swedish kastanj chestnut 

Celtic castan chestnut 
Welsh castan chestnut 
Old Irish castán chestnut 
Breton kistin chestnut 

Latin castanea chestnut 
Italian castagna chestnut 
French châtaigne chestnut 
Spanish castaña chestnut 
Romanian castană chestnut 
Portuguese castanha chestnut
Sardinian castànza chestnut
Catalan castanya chestnut 
Galician castaña chestnut 

Indo-Iranian

Sanskrit kashta tree 

Persian kastana tree  

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

Indo-European

Proto-Anatolian *tṓru- wood, tree 
Hittite taru tree 
Anatolian dōru chestnut 

Hellenic drũs oak
Greek drys oak 

Proto-Albanian dru wood, log 
Albanian drusk oak

Baltic *der̃w-ā̂ resinous wood 
Latvian darva tar 
Lithuanian derva tar 

Slavic *dervo tree 
Slovak drevo tree 
Belarusian dzjérava tree 
Bulgarian dǎrvó tree 
Croatian dȑvo tree 
Czech dřevo wood 
Macedonian drvo tree 
Polish drzewo tree 
Russian dérevo tree 
Serbian dȑvo tree 
Slovenian drevọ̑ tree 
Ukrainian kdérevo tree 

Germanic *tri(w)u tree 
Danish trä tree
Dutch teer tar 
Old English trēow tree 
German teer tar 
Norwegian tre tree 
Swedish träd tree 

Celtic *daru, *derwā oak 
Welsh derw-en oak 
Old Irish daur oak 
Breton dervenn oak 

Latin dūrus hard 
Italian duro hard 
French dur hard 
Spanish duro hard 
Romanian dur hard   
Portuguese duro hard 
Sardinian duru hard 
Catalan duro hard 
Galician duro hard  

Interesting how we can find similar roots for other related words in diverse Indo-European languages.
In Hittite taru tree and in Portuguese we have tora, as a part of the logged tree and árvore is tree - from the Latin arbor and Hittite arra, all related and similar from the forests. In Portuguese carvalho is oak.


ORIGINAL RESEARCH
Biocultural diversity of common walnut (Juglans regia L.) and sweet chestnut (Castanea sativa Mill.) across Eurasia
Paola Pollegioni1
DOI: 10.1002/ece3.6761
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7593191/

[Jaska]

Those words for chestnut seem to be borrowed later from language to language, because they look too similar and because there was no word for 'chestnut' in Proto-Indo-European:
https://smerdaleos.files.wordpress.com/2...-adams.pdf
(Mallory, J. P. & Adams, D. Q. 2006: The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World)

[KACHRASETH]

Those words for chestnut seem to be borrowed later from language to language, because they look too similar and because there was no word for 'chestnut' in Proto-Indo-European:
https://smerdaleos.files.wordpress.com/2...-adams.pdf
(Mallory, J. P. & Adams, D. Q. 2006: The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World)

    

David Anthony is the prime forebearers of the kurgan theory , he is has been involved in all the researches going around though in this paper he seems to have not covered a large chunk of the points that uptend the steppe theory , this is very obvious since he is the one you sprouted this theory to very mainstream media

[RCO]

Two other important Proto-Indo-European roots/words: Honey + Bee

Biocultural habitat of bees:



Honey (English)
Proto-Indo-European root/reconstruction: *mélit

Anatolian:
Hittite: militt/ malitt
Luwian: mallit
Palaic: mallitanna

Proto-Albanian: *melita

Armenian:
Old Armenian: մեղր (mełr)
Old Armenian: մեղու (mełu, “bee”)

Proto-Celtic: *meli
Proto-Germanic: *mili

Hellenic:
Ancient Greek: μέλι (méli)

Proto-Italic: *meli
Latin: mel
Italian: miele
Portuguese: mel

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstru...m%C3%A9lit

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

Bee (English)
Proto-Indo-European root/reconstruction: *bʰei̯/*bʰey-

Anatolian
Luwian: Apaša

Latin: apis,
Italian: ape
Spanish abeja
Portuguese: abelha
French: abeille

Proto-Iranian: *báynah (#Pashto waynə́ ‘termite’), *baynačíH (#Ossetian #Digor binʒæ ‘fly’, mudi-binʒæ ‘bee’, lit. ‘honey-fly’)

Greek: μέλιττα, μέλισσα /mélitta, mélissa/  from μέλι /méli

Armenian: mełu from mełr

Albanian: mjalcë/bletë

Proto-Germanic:*bijō, gen. *biniz (#OldEnglish bēo, #German dial. Beie, Old Norse bý, Danish bi)

Lithuanian: bìtė,

Church Slavonic: bĭčela,

Proto-Celtic: *bikos

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstru.../b%CA%B0ey-

The excavations on the Ayasuluk hill during the 1990s illuminated the Bronze Age past of the place at least partially. The Ayasuluk hill is now widely regarded as being the site of Apaša. After Stefan Karwiese Apaša in Luwian means bee. In fact, the bee has been the symbol of Ephesus in Archaic to Roman times and appears on coins minted there. https://luwianstudies.org/site/ephesos-artemision/

[Psynome]

It has been continuously disappointing and frustrating to see the leading ancient DNA research groups insist on placing the Indo-Anatolian homeland in West Asia.

Even the new term "Indo-Anatolian" implies some unique relationship between Anatolian and the other Indo European languages. Despite the persistent attempts by leading research groups to explain the Anatolian divergence as unrelated to expansions from the Pontic-Caspian steppe, their own presented genomic evidence and that from decades of linguistic and archaeological investigation are all perfectly consistent with an Anatolian origin on the steppe.

Given how entrenched this position has become in leading research groups, it may take many years before the field can steer its way out of this dead end and evaluate the available evidence in a less biased manner.

An opportunity awaits the first determined researcher or group of researchers to reconstruct the most common linguistic consensus scenario of an Anatolian entrance through the Balkans using the linguistic, archaeological, and genomic evidence that is now available.

[Isidro]

Proto-Indo-European was strongly related to a biocultural habitat with trees and chestnuts



Indo-European 

Hellenic kástanon chestnut 
Greek kástano chestnut ...


ORIGINAL RESEARCH
Biocultural diversity of common walnut (Juglans regia L.) and sweet chestnut (Castanea sativa Mill.) across Eurasia
Paola Pollegioni1
DOI: 10.1002/ece3.6761
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7593191/

Interesting word etymology and the perfect season.

I keep seing this map distribution and I can not help but recognizing the same pattern as the Neolithic Cardial movements of people toward the "European Peninsula". I would even suggest that it is the movement of an Indoeuropean branch, I can see a Centum-Satem clearly divided to this day.
 It seems to me the Indoeuropean related to the different steppes environments is more associated with the Satem spread towards Iran, India and Slavic languages, and the Centum, not necessarily a Neolithic movements per se but earlier than (Megalithic) the so called Beaker phenomena is what brought us the Centum grouping with Greek, Celtic, Latin, Germanic etc.

[Mythbuster General]

Way too many separate things correlate together so well, as eloquently presented by Anthony, for anybody still have major doubts in a Pontic-Caspian place of origin for PIE.

[VladMC]

My version of the arrival of the Hittites in Anatolia.
This is approximately the second generation of Hittites in Anatolia:
Target: TUR_Ikiztepe_EBA:IKI002
Distance: 4.7131% / 0.04713110 | R5P
36.4 RUS_Maykop_Novosvobodnaya_EBA
18.6 Bulgaria_C_Gumelniţa_Yunatsite
17.2 TUR_Catalhoyuk_Meso_Ceramic
16.4 ARM_Aknashen_N
11.4 DEU_LBK_HBS

Target: TUR_Ikiztepe_EBA:IKI009
Distance: 3.4490% / 0.03448955 | R5P
38.8 AZE_Mentesh_N
21.0 TUR_Catalhoyuk_Meso_Ceramic
16.6 RUS_Maykop_Novosvobodnaya_EBA
15.2 TUR_Tell_Kurdu_N
8.4 RUS_Maykop_En

Target: TUR_Ikiztepe_EBA:IKI012
Distance: 3.6291% / 0.03629104 | R5P
33.2 TUR_Tell_Kurdu_N
21.0 TUR_Kumtepe_En
20.8 RUS_Maykop_Novosvobodnaya_EBA
20.0 TKM_Tepe_Anau_En
5.0 HUN_EBA_Baden

Target: TUR_Ikiztepe_EBA:IKI016
Distance: 2.7782% / 0.02778155 | R5P
37.6 RUS_Maykop_Novosvobodnaya_EBA
34.8 TUR_Camlibel_Tarlasi_En
14.6 TUR_Catalhoyuk_Meso_Ceramic
6.8 IRN_Seh_Gabi_LN
6.2 BGR_Dzhulyunitsa_N

Target: TUR_Ikiztepe_EBA:IKI017
Distance: 3.2380% / 0.03237966 | R5P
33.4 RUS_Maykop_Novosvobodnaya_EBA
22.0 DEU_LBK_HBS
20.2 TUR_Camlibel_Tarlasi_En
14.0 ARM_Aknashen_N
10.4 Denmark_EBA

Target: TUR_Ikiztepe_EBA:IKI034
Distance: 3.0738% / 0.03073776 | R5P
41.0 TUR_Arslantepe_EBA
37.4 TUR_Camlibel_Tarlasi_En
16.2 RUS_Darkveti-Meshoko_LN
2.8 IDN_Leang_Panninge_7100BP
2.6 TUR_N

Target: TUR_Ikiztepe_EBA:IKI036
Distance: 3.2604% / 0.03260351 | R5P
46.4 TUR_Camlibel_Tarlasi_En
22.4 RUS_Maykop_Novosvobodnaya_EBA
15.8 DEU_LBK_HBS
8.8 TKM_Parkhai_En
6.6 HUN_Starcevo_N

Target: TUR_Ikiztepe_EBA:IKI037
Distance: 4.1610% / 0.04161049 | R5P
47.6 TUR_Arslantepe_EBA
20.6 RUS_Maykop_Novosvobodnaya_EBA
17.0 TUR_Tell_Kurdu_N
9.0 TUR_Catalhoyuk_Meso_Ceramic
5.8 TUR_SE_Sirnak_En

the same thing, but without samples of the Novosvobodnaya culture

Target: TUR_Ikiztepe_EBA:IKI002
Distance: 4.7861% / 0.04786055 | R5P
35.4 ARM_Aknashen_N
34.6 Bulgaria_C_Gumelniţa_Yunatsite
15.0 TUR_Catalhoyuk_Meso_Ceramic
11.6 RUS_Darkveti-Meshoko_LN
3.4 RUS_Afanasievo_EBA

Target: TUR_Ikiztepe_EBA:IKI009
Distance: 3.5047% / 0.03504654 | R5P
42.4 AZE_Mentesh_N
23.2 TUR_Catalhoyuk_Meso_Ceramic
21.2 TUR_Arslantepe_EBA
13.2 RUS_Maykop_En

Target: TUR_Ikiztepe_EBA:IKI012
Distance: 3.7029% / 0.03702897 | R5P
28.8 TUR_Kumtepe_En
27.8 TUR_Tell_Kurdu_N
17.0 RUS_Darkveti-Meshoko_LN
14.6 IRN_Seh_Gabi_En
11.8 TKM_Tepe_Anau_En

Target: TUR_Ikiztepe_EBA:IKI016
Distance: 2.8795% / 0.02879548 | R5P
50.0 TUR_Camlibel_Tarlasi_En
27.0 RUS_Darkveti-Meshoko_LN
12.6 TUR_Catalhoyuk_Meso_Ceramic
8.2 IRN_Seh_Gabi_LN
2.2 TUR_Kumtepe_LN_low_res

Target: TUR_Ikiztepe_EBA:IKI017
Distance: 3.3005% / 0.03300549 | R5P
30.2 TUR_Camlibel_Tarlasi_En
29.2 RUS_Darkveti-Meshoko_LN
17.2 DEU_LBK_HBS
12.0 Denmark_EBA
11.4 ARM_Aknashen_N

Target: TUR_Ikiztepe_EBA:IKI034
Distance: 3.0738% / 0.03073776 | R5P
41.0 TUR_Arslantepe_EBA
37.4 TUR_Camlibel_Tarlasi_En
16.2 RUS_Darkveti-Meshoko_LN
2.8 IDN_Leang_Panninge_7100BP
2.6 TUR_N

Target: TUR_Ikiztepe_EBA:IKI036
Distance: 3.2792% / 0.03279194 | R5P
41.0 TUR_Camlibel_Tarlasi_En
18.8 RUS_Darkveti-Meshoko_LN
17.6 DEU_LBK_HBS
12.0 TUR_Tepecik_Ciftlik_N
10.6 TKM_Parkhai_En

Target: TUR_Ikiztepe_EBA:IKI037
Distance: 4.2599% / 0.04259925 | R5P
44.4 TUR_Arslantepe_EBA
33.2 TUR_Camlibel_Tarlasi_En
10.2 TUR_Catalhoyuk_Meso_Ceramic
7.2 IRN_Tepe_Hissar_C
5.0 RUS_Darkveti-Meshoko_LN

I especially pay attention to sample IKI002, because it will continue to play a key role

Target: TUR_Ikiztepe_EBA:IKI002
Distance: 4.7131% / 0.04713110 | R5P
36.4 RUS_Maykop_Novosvobodnaya_EBA
18.6 Bulgaria_C_Gumelniţa_Yunatsite
17.2 TUR_Catalhoyuk_Meso_Ceramic
16.4 ARM_Aknashen_N
11.4 DEU_LBK_HBS

And this is after several generations of life in Anatolia:

Target: TUR_Med_Isparta_EMBA:I2495
Distance: 1.1595% / 0.01159544 | R5P
29.2 TUR_Arslantepe_EBA
26.6 ROU_Salcuta_N
25.8 TUR_Camlibel_Tarlasi_En
14.4 TUR_Ikiztepe_EBA
4.0 RUS_Afanasievo_EBA

Target: TUR_Med_Isparta_EMBA:I2499
Distance: 1.3487% / 0.01348732 | R5P
36.4 Romania_LN_Gumelniţa_Pietrele
27.6 ARM_Aknashen_N
16.0 ARM_Masis_Blur_N
11.4 TUR_Tell_Kurdu_N
8.6 TKM_Tepe_Anau_En

Target: TUR_Med_Isparta_EMBA:I2683
Distance: 1.0059% / 0.01005898 | R5P
58.4 TUR_Arslantepe_EBA
22.2 TUR_Ikiztepe_EBA
9.4 Switzerland_EBA
5.6 TUR_Tell_Kurdu_N
4.4 Ukraine_Eneolithic_CernavodăI_KartalB

And this is already the generation in the era of which the Hittite writing system existed

Target: TUR_Kaman-Kalehoyuk_MLBA:MA2208
Distance: 3.2474% / 0.03247416 | R5P
37.8 TUR_Ikiztepe_EBA
25.2 AUT_LBK_N
14.6 Levant_ISR_C
12.0 Yamnaya_SRB_EBA
10.4 IRN_Ganj_Dareh_Meso

Target: TUR_Kaman-Kalehoyuk_MLBA:MA2200
Distance: 0.8113% / 0.00811333 | R5P
54.6 TUR_Camlibel_Tarlasi_En
22.0 Serbia_Meso_Vlasac
11.4 RUS_Darkveti-Meshoko_LN
8.8 TJK_Sarazm_En
3.2 MAR_LN

Target: TUR_Kaman-Kalehoyuk_MLBA:MA2203
Distance: 1.2587% / 0.01258658 | R5P
25.4 TUR_Ulucak_En
22.6 TUR_SE_Sirnak_En
22.4 TUR_Catalhoyuk_Meso_Ceramic
22.2 Romania_LN_Gumelniţa_Pietrele
7.4 RUS_Afanasievo_EBA

Target: TUR_Kaman-Kalehoyuk_MLBA:MA2205
Distance: 1.4006% / 0.01400587 | R5P
37.2 TUR_Camlibel_Tarlasi_En
29.4 TUR_Ikiztepe_EBA
24.6 ARM_Masis_Blur_N
4.8 DEU_LBK_HBS
4.0 TUR_Kumtepe_LN_low_res

Target: TUR_Kaman-Kalehoyuk_MLBA:MA2206
Distance: 1.5966% / 0.01596620 | R5P
36.0 TUR_Arslantepe_EBA
30.8 TUR_Catalhoyuk_Meso_Ceramic
18.4 ARM_Aknashen_N
9.6 Romania_LN_Gumelniţa_Pietrele
5.2 IRN_Seh_Gabi_LN

TUR_Ikiztepe_EBA this is TUR_Ikiztepe_EBA:IKI002.

It turns out that the tribes of the Novosvobodnaya culture walked along the Black Sea coast from the Kuban to the mouth of the Danube practically without mixing with the steppe tribes, then mixed with the tribes of the Gumelnitsky culture and, already mixed, went to Anatolia. Therefore, they cannot be identified in any way in Anatolia. Their mixture of Novosvobodnenskaya + Gumelnitskaya is almost the same as if the Neolithic of Iran mixed with the Neolithic of Anatolia. These two mixtures are almost impossible to distinguish

[epoch]

It has been continuously disappointing and frustrating to see the leading ancient DNA research groups insist on placing the Indo-Anatolian homeland in West Asia.

Even the new term "Indo-Anatolian" implies some unique relationship between Anatolian and the other Indo European languages. Despite the persistent attempts by leading research groups to explain the Anatolian divergence as unrelated to expansions from the Pontic-Caspian steppe, their own presented genomic evidence and that from decades of linguistic and archaeological investigation are all perfectly consistent with an Anatolian origin on the steppe.

Given how entrenched this position has become in leading research groups, it may take many years before the field can steer its way out of this dead end and evaluate the available evidence in a less biased manner.

An opportunity awaits the first determined researcher or group of researchers to reconstruct the most common linguistic consensus scenario of an Anatolian entrance through the Balkans using the linguistic,  archaeological, and genomic evidence that is now available.

There is a recent summary of the latest knowledge of the Anatolian Early Bronze Age which stated the following:

"Until recently, even the presence of kurgan type of burials in Anatolia was met with considerable scepticism. However, with ongoing research and particularly due to rescue excavations, the number of burials that are considered to be of the so-called kurgan type, dateable to the beginning of the Early Bronze Age, has been gradually increasing (Altunkaynak 2019; Özfırat 2014, Başgelen & Çoşar 2022). Ongoing excavations in İstanbul at Beşiktaş2 have until now exposed over 40 kurgan type burials with C14 dates revealing a narrow range of 3300–3200 bc, yielding an assemblage that directly points to the northeast Balkans. Another cemetery of the kurgan type, though with a small number of burials, has also have been excavated recently near İstanbul at Cambaztepe (Polat 2016) (Fig. 16)"


https://www.researchgate.net/publication...n_Anatolia

And we know since Penske et al 2023 that the northeast Balkans saw an influx of steppe related ancestry since roughly 4k-3800 years BC. In my view this case is made because even if those samples would show no steppe ancestry at all we cannot deny cultural transfer - and language is very much part of culture - from an area that clearly does show that ancestry.

The dating also fits so very well. Roughly 4ky BC the split between Anatalion and LPIE in the Balkans. Roughly ~3.5ky BC the entry in Anatolia, just in time before the split between pre-proto-Hittite and the rest which is set roughly ~3ky BC.

[billh]

Those words for chestnut seem to be borrowed later from language to language, because they look too similar and because there was no word for 'chestnut' in Proto-Indo-European:
https://smerdaleos.files.wordpress.com/2...-adams.pdf
(Mallory, J. P. & Adams, D. Q. 2006: The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World)

Yep, also notice that Anatolian doesn't share the word for Chestnut. They just used a word unrelated to chestnuts in other IE languages

[parasar]

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-44430-5
Inferring language dispersal patterns with velocity field estimation
"Based on the estimated velocity field in geographic space, we further inferred the dispersal centre for each language case (Fig. 2b and Supplementary Fig. 6 and Supplementary Table 2; see details in Methods and Supplementary Notes section 1.3). Notably, the inferred dispersal centres of these four agricultural languages were adjacent to the known ancient agricultural or Neolithic homelands (Fig. 2b). Specifically, the inferred dispersal centre of Indo-European languages was located in the Fertile Crescent which is the earliest ancient agricultural homeland in the world (Fig. 2b)3,4. This observation favours the Anatolia origin hypothesis7 of Indo-European languages"

[Anglesqueville]

^^ Take it from a sane mathematician, mathematics can drive fragile minds crazy. This text is a good example.

[Jaska]

Lazaridis' group has now officially rejected their earlier "Southern Arc" hypothesis for the Indo-European languages. After all, it ignored all the linguistic evidence: e.g. Indo-Iranian was proposed to have spread from Anatolia to Southern Asia without ever visiting in Europe and Sintashta, which is of course absurd. One cannot just pick a random genetic trait shared by populations in different regions and believe that he can see which language they spoke.


"We thus propose the following hypothesis: that CLV cline people migrated southwards ca. 4400BCE, or about a millennium before the appearance of the Yamnaya, (admixing with different substratum populations along the way) and then westwards before finally reaching Central Anatolia.

We in fact find Y-chromosome evidence that is consistent with the autosomal evidence. Sporadic instances of the steppe-associated Y-chromosome haplogroup R-V1636 in West Asia occurred at Arslantepe in Eastern Anatolia and Kalavan in Armenia in the Early Bronze Age (~3300-2500 BCE) among individuals without detectible steppe ancestry and these could be remnants of the dilution process. This haplogroup was found in the male individual from Remontnoye, both individuals from Progress-2 and two of three males from Berezhnovka, in addition to its occurrence in eleven individuals of the Volga Cline and thus was a prominent lineage of the pre-Yamnaya steppe. Isolated instances have also been found beyond the steppe in Corded Ware individuals from Esperstedt in Germany and Gjerrild in Denmark."

The Genetic Origin of the Indo-Europeans
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/...7.589597v1

More at the end:
"In fact, however, our genetic data does provide such a strong case, greatly increasing the plausibility of scenarios of an eastern entry of Proto-Anatolian speaking ancestors into Anatolia. This is because we find that Central Anatolian Early Bronze Age people who were plausibly speakers of Anatolian languages based on their archaeological contexts, were striking genetic outliers from their neighbors due to having a minority component of their ancestry from the CLV (plausibly from the people who brought the ancestral form of Anatolian languages to Anatolia), the majority of their ancestry from Mesopotamian Neolithic farmers, and little or no ancestry from the Neolithic and Chalcolithic Anatolians who were overwhelming the source populations of other Early Bronze Age Anatolians. Mesopotamian Neolithic ancestry almost certainly had an eastern geographic distribution, while the Central Anatolian Bronze Age people had no evidence of the European farmer or European hunter-gatherer ancestry that CLV have encountered if they had migrated to Anatolia from the west, so the genetic data favor an eastern route."

-- As long as we have no conclusive linguistic evidence concerning the route of Anatolian languages from the steppe, this genetic evidence is a strong hint toward the Caucasus route.

[Moeca]

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/...89600v1?ct

A genomic history of the North Pontic Region from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age​ ...................18 April 2024

Abstract​
The north Black Sea (Pontic) Region was the nexus of the farmers of Old Europe and the foragers and pastoralists of the Eurasian steppe, and the source of waves of migrants that expanded deep into Europe. We report genome-wide data from 78 prehistoric North Pontic individuals to understand the genetic makeup of the people involved in these migrations and discover the reasons for their success. First, we show that native North Pontic foragers had ancestry not only from Balkan and Eastern hunter-gatherers but also from European farmers and, occasionally, Caucasus hunter-gatherers. More dramatic inflows ensued during the Eneolithic, when migrants from the Caucasus-Lower Volga area moved westward, bypassing the local foragers to mix with Trypillian farmers advancing eastward. People of the Usatove archaeological group in the Northwest Pontic were formed ca. 4500 BCE with an equal measure of ancestry from the two expanding groups. A different Caucasus-Lower Volga group, moving westward in a distinct but temporally overlapping wave, avoided the farmers altogether, and blended with the foragers instead to form the people of the Serednii Stih archaeological complex. A third wave of expansion occurred when Yamna descendants of the Serednii Stih forming ca. 4000 BCE expanded during the Early Bronze Age (3300 BCE). The temporal gap between Serednii Stih and the Yamna expansion is bridged by a genetically Yamna individual from Mykhailivka in Ukraine (3635-3383BCE), a site of uninterrupted archaeological continuity across the Eneolithic-Bronze Age transition, and the likely epicenter of Yamna formation. Each of these three waves propagated distinctive ancestries while also incorporating outsiders during its advance, a flexible strategy forged in the North Pontic region that may explain its peoples' outsized success in spreading their genes and culture across Eurasia.