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.

[Jaska]

Ph2ter:

Here, on this forum people are mainly because of history of migrations, language and ethnicity, not genealogy. For genealogy you have different services and forums.

Okay, if you only talk about the members on this forum, then you are correct.


Ph2ter:

Of course, but correlation is correlation and usually is founded. More often than not.

What does that even mean that correlation is “founded”?
And how can you claim that it is so more often than not?
Is there even reliable method to find out the truth behind a correlation?

Let us take the Uralic language and the Yakutia ancestry as an example. There is partial regional correlation between them: most Uralic populations have or at least have had that ancestry, but it is present in many non-Uralic populations, too, representing several other language families.

Now, you want to think that behind this pattern there must be a true connection: the Uralic language was carried by people having the Yakutia ancestry. However, it is equally possible that the ancestry spread either earlier or later than the Uralic language, so there are actually three temporal possibilities. How could you prove that your belief is correct? How could you exclude the options that the Yakutia ancestry spread either earlier or later than the Uralic language?

Moreover, the largest portion this ancestry possesses in the Tundra Yukaghirs (Zeng et al. 2023), which happen to live near the region where this ancestry was born. Also the more southern Forest Yukaghirs have it considerably. So, why do you not connect this ancestry to the Yukaghiric languages? Is not the correlation even better with them than with the Uralic languages? For some reason you just decide to totally ignore this option.

[jdean]

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.

Alwin Kloekhorst's thoughts on that paper

mismatch with evidence from linguistic data could have been avoided if this paper (with 100+ authors) would have had input from historical linguists as well. Clearly a missed opportunity, and in this way genetics, archaeology, and linguistics will not get any closer

I got this second hand but hope it's accurate.

[RCO]

Languages can be associated with different populations and genetic clusters, just like Portuguese, Castilian, Catalan, Basque. The same applies to Y-DNA and mtDNA, just observe the historical matchings and the genetic distances. I am a Brazilian Portuguese J1 related to Northern Portuguese Christian matches completely different from Arab J1 or Jewish J1 clusters from other clades in Iberia. I have J1-FGC6064 matches in the Iranosphere and I can assume my Y-DNA was part of the big CHG-IRAN population before the movements and admixtures. The big question is that I also assume my Y-DNA was related to Ancient Iranian and even Proto-Indo-European populations South of the Caucasus because we have the same native location in the Core Iranian Neolithic and Bronze Age. A long way to Brazil as one Ancient Iranian lineage that crossed all limits in Europe to arrive in the westernmost part of Eurasia in Portugal and expanded in the Portuguese Reconquista and Brazilian Colonial Conquista. The only way to know is to get more modern and archaeological samples to confirm everything, just like everybody here is waiting for new results, but I have been in genetic genealogy since 2006 and I already saw and confirmed a lot of presuppositions seeing my language from the DNA in war and peace.

[jdean]

Languages can be associated with different populations and genetic clusters, just like Portuguese, Castilian, Catalan, Basque. The same applies to Y-DNA and mtDNA, just observe the historical matchings and the genetic distances. I am a Brazilian Portuguese J1 related to Northern Portuguese Christian matches completely different from Arab J1 or Jewish J1 clusters from other clades in Iberia. I have J1-FGC6064 matches in the Iranosphere  and I can assume my Y-DNA was part of the big CHG-IRAN population before the movements and admixtures. The big question is that I also assume my Y-DNA was related to Ancient Iranian and even Proto-Indo-European populations South of the Caucasus because we have the same native location in the Core Iranian Neolithic and Bronze Age. A long way to Brazil as one Ancient Iranian lineage that crossed all limits in Europe to arrive in the westernmost part of Eurasia in Portugal and expanded in the Portuguese Reconquista and Brazilian Colonial Conquista. The only way to know is to get more modern and archaeological samples to confirm everything, just like everybody here is waiting for new results, but I have been in genetic genealogy since 2006 and I already saw and confirmed a lot of presuppositions seeing my language from the DNA in war and peace.

Always wondered why you were so invested in the Anatolian Hypothesis

[Jaska]

RCO:

Languages can be associated with different populations and genetic clusters, just like Portuguese, Castilian, Catalan, Basque.

Of course they can be associated together, but it must be done scientifically, because language is not inherited in the DNA. More about that in my earlier comments in this thread.

[RCO]

In the case of Iberian populations we can clearly observe the genetic clusters in the map.
Patterns of genetic differentiation and the footprints of historical migrations in the Iberian Peninsula
Clare Bycroft, et al
Nature Communications volume 10, Article number: 551 (2019)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-08272-w

Of course Brazil is far bigger in Portuguese Y-DNA and speakers as the new frontier of the language.

[ph2ter]

I think it is obvious that there exist a positive correlation between Y-DNA and a language.
If this were not the case, then nobody would be interested in DNA.
For example, R1a-CTS10221 is a marker which connects all people speaking Balto-Slavic languages, or I2a-Y3120 connects all people speaking Slavic languages.

Of course, sometimes some clades become extinct and language can spread with different clades which were in coexistence with the extinct clades.
These different clades become the new vectors of the language spread.

John Koch and Johan Ling recently argued in ‘From the Ends of the Earth: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach to Long-Distance Contact in Bronze Age Atlantic Europe’ that Celtic spread along the Atlantic Façade as a trade language.
 
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.
 
Not intended as some sort of devastating argument but food for thought.

A trade language is a possibility, but we know that such case we can apply only to a limited number of languages. And after such language at some point in history ceases to be a trade language, we can trace only a limited number of DNA markers acquired at that point which can spread that language further on.
Anatolian is also a special case. I don't think we have enough Hittite DNA samples.
A real possibility is that Steppe DNA was really diluted and Y-DNA went extinct, for example by a long stay in the area of Eastern Balkans, before even stepping into Anatolia.

[ph2ter]

Ph2ter:

Here, on this forum people are mainly because of history of migrations, language and ethnicity, not genealogy. For genealogy you have different services and forums.

Okay, if you only talk about the members on this forum, then you are correct.


Ph2ter:

Of course, but correlation is correlation and usually is founded. More often than not.

What does that even mean that correlation is “founded”?
And how can you claim that it is so more often than not?
Is there even reliable method to find out the truth behind a correlation?

Tell me your Y-DNA and I will with a great probabilty (or at least with more than 50%) tell you your possible mother languages and the ones which most certainly aren't yours.

Let us take the Uralic language and the Yakutia ancestry as an example. There is partial regional correlation between them: most Uralic populations have or at least have had that ancestry, but it is present in many non-Uralic populations, too, representing several other language families.

Now, you want to think that behind this pattern there must be a true connection: the Uralic language was carried by people having the Yakutia ancestry. However, it is equally possible that the ancestry spread either earlier or later than the Uralic language, so there are actually three temporal possibilities. How could you prove that your belief is correct? How could you exclude the options that the Yakutia ancestry spread either earlier or later than the Uralic language?

Moreover, the largest portion this ancestry possesses in the Tundra Yukaghirs (Zeng et al. 2023), which happen to live near the region where this ancestry was born. Also the more southern Forest Yukaghirs have it considerably. So, why do you not connect this ancestry to the Yukaghiric languages? Is not the correlation even better with them than with the Uralic languages? For some reason you just decide to totally ignore this option.

But we have the methods to calculate how old is any of the clades. Y-DNA continuously mutates and creates time markers. We can exclude the clades that are dated earlier than some point in time.
So, I don't understand your doubts. You can easily exclude the Yukaghir languages by looking the age of their clades or by looking the age of common TMRCA and then inspect if that fits with your theory of the age of the proto language in question.

[Jaska]

Ph2ter:

Tell me your Y-DNA and I will with a great probabilty (or at least with more than 50%) tell you your possible mother languages and the ones which most certainly aren't yours.

When I tell you my Y-DNA terminal mutation, you can even tell that my forefather N-BY22114 some 650 years ago was already Häkkinen by his family name and spoke a dialect of ancient Karelian, which later evolved to the Savonian dialect of Finnish language. But beyond the horizon of the genealogical research, it comes increasingly more uncertain to tell the language, the further in time we go.

There the only reliable method is to look at the results of historical linguistics and see if there is a match concerning time, place, and direction of expansion. With this scientific method we know that e.g. the N-men in the Bronze Age Kola BOO were not Uralic speakers: it took yet almost two more millennia before the first Uralic (Saami) speakers arrived there from the south. There the Saami languages replaced older Paleo-European languages.

Furthermore, there were not yet Uralic speakers anywhere near the region from where the North Siberian migration to Kola originated ca. 2000 BCE, because at that time the Uralic languages were still spoken in the narrow homeland around the Central Ural Region.

Now, there are people who ignore this scientific method and these results of historical linguistics, because they believe that they can predict language from the DNA. In their deep ignorance they honestly believe that because the BOO people had N-CTS3103, they must have spoken a Uralic language.

In which group do you belong? In the scientific group or in the cult of language-gene worshippers?


Ph2ter:

But we have the methods to calculate how old is any of the clades. Y-DNA continuously mutates and creates time markers. We can exclude the clades that are dated earlier than some point in time.
So, I don't understand your doubts. You can easily exclude the Yukaghir languages by looking the age of their clades or by looking the age of common TMRCA and then inspect if that fits with your theory of the age of the proto language in question.

Which doubts you do not understand and why?
Please go through the process by which you can easily exclude the Yukaghiric language family.

Any correlations of autosomal ancestry with uniparental haplogroups are coincidental, because there is no interdependency between the autosomal and uniparental levels.

[Kale]

What are the possible candidates for language of BOO people?

[Jaska]

What are the possible candidates for language of BOO people?

I would say that the first candidate is the Paleo-Laplandic language, which preceded Saami in the north.
https://www.academia.edu/4811770/An_Essa...n_of_Saami

However, it is also possible that this last language spread to the region less than 2000 years before Saami. In that case some other language was spoken in Kola during the first half of the 2nd millennium BCE. Because it looks like all the northernmost Europe was occupied by languages or dialects related to Paleo-Laplandic, then the second candidate for the BOO language would have come from Siberia with the carriers of the Yakutia ancestry.

In that case it was either some unknown, since extinct Paleo-Siberian language or related to the Yukaghiric or even the Eskimo-Aleut language family. So far probably nobody has ever compared these languages directly to Saami in order to find possible ancient loanwords from the assumed BOO language.

[ph2ter]

Ph2ter:

Tell me your Y-DNA and I will with a great probabilty (or at least with more than 50%) tell you your possible mother languages and the ones which most certainly aren't yours.

When I tell you my Y-DNA terminal mutation, you can even tell that my forefather N-BY22114 some 650 years ago was already Häkkinen by his family name and spoke a dialect of ancient Karelian, which later evolved to the Savonian dialect of Finnish language. But beyond the horizon of the genealogical research, it comes increasingly more uncertain to tell the language, the further in time we go.

There the only reliable method is to look at the results of historical linguistics and see if there is a match concerning time, place, and direction of expansion. With this scientific method we know that e.g. the N-men in the Bronze Age Kola BOO were not Uralic speakers: it took yet almost two more millennia before the first Uralic (Saami) speakers arrived there from the south. There the Saami languages replaced older Paleo-European languages.

Furthermore, there were not yet Uralic speakers anywhere near the region from where the North Siberian migration to Kola originated ca. 2000 BCE, because at that time the Uralic languages were still spoken in the narrow homeland around the Central Ural Region.

Now, there are people who ignore this scientific method and these results of historical linguistics, because they believe that they can predict language from the DNA. In their deep ignorance they honestly believe that because the BOO people had N-CTS3103, they must have spoken a Uralic language.

In which group do you belong? In the scientific group or in the cult of language-gene worshippers?


Ph2ter:

But we have the methods to calculate how old is any of the clades. Y-DNA continuously mutates and creates time markers. We can exclude the clades that are dated earlier than some point in time.
So, I don't understand your doubts. You can easily exclude the Yukaghir languages by looking the age of their clades or by looking the age of common TMRCA and then inspect if that fits with your theory of the age of the proto language in question.

Which doubts you do not understand and why?
Please go through the process by which you can easily exclude the Yukaghiric language family.

Any correlations of autosomal ancestry with uniparental haplogroups are coincidental, because there is no interdependency between the autosomal and uniparental levels.

N-BY22114 has links with Finns, next with ancient Minino in Russia, then common clades with Hungarian conquerors, then Krasnoyarsk ancient samples and then Zabaykalsky kray. Pretty neat direction, I would say.
BOO CTS3103 parted from your line according to yfull about 3000 BCE. Also, more detailed haplo of BOO people is not known (at least to me because I was never interested to go deeply into this Bolshoy thing). Obviously they have split before Proto-Uralic formed (if you know that they certainly didn't speak some related language).
I don't belong to any of the groups made in your head.
And I don't know the haplos of Yukaghir people. Never researched that.

[Jaska]

Ph2ter:

N-BY22114 has links with Finns, next with ancient Minino in Russia, then common clades with Hungarian conquerors, then Krasnoyarsk ancient samples and then Zabaykalsky kray. Pretty neat direction, I would say.

Direction, yes, of course. But language you cannot see from the DNA beyond the historical horizon (and not even then FROM the DNA but by comparing to other sources, as is the scientific procedure). The only scientific way is to look at the linguistic results and see if there appears a match concerning time, place, and direction of expansion. Every consecutive step of linguistic expansion should be searched independently, because the genetic composition of the language carriers can be different in different places or at different times.

Ph2ter:

I don't belong to any of the groups made in your head.

Any? Not even in the scientific group? What is your methodical view, then?

[ph2ter]

Ph2ter:

I don't belong to any of the groups made in your head.

Any? Not even in the scientific group? What is your methodical view, then?

I don't know what 'scientific' means to you.