Zeng et al: Postglacial genomes from foragers across Northern Eurasia...

[PopGenist82]

This claim always comes from people who know nothing about the methods of historical linguistics. There is no method in genetics or archaeology to study language and locate linguistic homeland, as we all know. All those disciplines can do is to try to find matches for linguistic results (if they want to concern language at all).

Nobody said you ''learn language from genetics'' ! We are saying that genetics informs us about the affinities that cultural and ethnic groups share.

It seems is is you who needs to brush up on historical linguistics & anthropology ?  

Good luck for trying to prove your method reliable. Real geneticists understand that language cannot be seen from DNA.

There it is again, "you can't learn language from genetics". It's always good for a chuckle. 

Is arrogance your way of coping with the problematic nature of your theory ? 
Because, behind your pomp, your disussion is amateurish- a mixture of strawman comments and general ignorance. 

Anyhow, given that there are already existing theories by renowned Uralic linguists about an eastern origin of Uralic, the only thing to discuss is the details and mechanisms.

[bolek]

Indo-Iranian developed in Europe

It is not true. There is no evidence for it. CWC was not Indo-Iranian. Indo-Iranian developed in Asia from Andronovo tribes.

[Pribislav]

Jaska, when do you, and other linguists, if there are differing oppinions, date Late Proto-Uralic?

[Jaska]

Andar:
“It is not jut the frequency but that this component and associated uniparental markers are the only shared ancestry between all modern+ancient Uralics, which cant be easily linked with a non-Uralic ethno-linguistic group like CWC/Steppe_MLBA. Sure some specific migrations and groups might have spread with more complex ancestry but that would be Post-Proto-Uralic and doesnt make it Proto-Uralic.“

1. Also Yakutia_LNBA can be linked to non-Uralic populations, because it is widespread in the eastern half of Siberia, where Uralic languages have never been spoken. When its initial expansion from Yakutia to the west cannot be connected to the Uralic languages, why should it everywhere else at every other time be connected to the Uralic languages?

2. Yamnaya/Corded Ware ancestry is also widespread in the Uralic populations. Why should it matter that it is connected to the spread of Indo-European languages? There is no rule that one ancestry must only be connected to one language family – just the opposite, probably none of them is connected to only one language family.

3. Most linguistic expansions have occurred in several successive steps, oftentimes separated by long periods of time. Such static phases usually see admixture with neighboring populations, which leads to change in the genetic composition. Therefore, in the next step of linguistic expansion, the genetic composition is usually somewhat different. It is not realistic to explain the known width of Uralic languages by only one expansion, because we know that in reality the situation was much more complex. Consequently, the simplest solution is often the wrong one, when we consider old language families with several successive stages of expansion, like Uralic and Indo-European language families.

Take North Saami, for example: the steps are
(1) Late Proto-Uralic >2000 BCE,
(2) West Uralic in the Upper Volga Region ca. 1500 BCE,
(3) Early Proto-Saami south from Lake Onega ca. 1000 BCE,
(4) Middle Proto-Saami in Karelia and South Finland ca. 500 BCE,
(5) Late Proto-Saami in Southwest Finland ca. 100 CE,
(6) Northwest Proto-Saami in Northern Scandinavia ca. 400 CE,
(7) North Saami in northernmost Fennoscandia up to the present.

Ancient DNA samples can show changes in the genetic compositions in the populations in relevant regions at relevant times. However, although change in the genetic composition probably carried also linguistic material, there is no way to see from the DNA whether it was only loanwords or totally new language, and if it was the latter, whether the language represented the Saami lineage or some other language lineage. Linguistic results are the starting point, and genetics can only offer for them a match or a non-match. It is impossible to claim based only on DNA that certain genetic influence was connected to the spread of Saami or any other language.

[Jaska]

PopGenist82:
“Nobody said you ''learn language from genetics'' ! We are saying that genetics informs us about the affinities that cultural and ethnic groups share.”

I apologize if I misinterpreted your comment; it was based on my knowledge about opinions of many Anthrogenica members. Could you tell me what you mean by these affinities in practice?

PopGenist82:
“Anyhow, given that there are already existing theories by renowned Uralic linguists about an eastern origin of Uralic, the only thing to discuss is the details and mechanisms.”

It is irrelevant if somebody is a renowned linguist – that status cannot make their arguments any more plausible. Unfortunately, these renowned linguists have confused different temporal stages, making claims on Late Proto-Uralic when their evidence actually concerns very distant Pre-Proto-Uralic (read my earlier comments).

Bolek:
“Indo-Iranian developed in Asia from Andronovo tribes.”

This is not true. Andronovo complex is already Post-Late Proto-Indo-Iranian. Late Proto-Indo-Iranian is located in the Sintashta Culture based on archaeological remains of chariots and certain ritualistic practices found in Rigveda and Avesta.
https://www.academia.edu/106979217/Fire_...Epimakhov_

Middle and Early Proto-Indo-Iranian (sometimes bundled as Pre-Proto-Indo-Iranian) developed in the European side of the Urals; this is universally accepted. It is irrelevant whether the language went via route Fatyanovo > Abashevo > Sintashta or Poltavka > (Abashevo >) Sintashta or some other route, it was in any case in Europe, in the Volga-Ural Region.

[Jaska]

Pribislav:
“Jaska, when do you, and other linguists, if there are differing oppinions, date Late Proto-Uralic?”

In my forthcoming article I improve the resolution of disintegrating Uralic, so there are different stages: regional disintegration began few centuries before 2000 BCE; different sound substitutions in loanwords occur considerably later; and differentiating sound changes occur yet later. Absolute chronology is based on early Indo-Iranian loanword layers. This dating is in line with Grünthal et al. 2022, because also their chronology is based on Indo-Iranian loanword layers. More reliable dating arguments for Late Proto-Uralic are not available. For words for technological innovations we can get the earliest possible dating from the results of archaeology, but the words could also be much later than the first occurrences of such innovations.

[bolek]

Middle and Early Proto-Indo-Iranian (sometimes bundled as Pre-Proto-Indo-Iranian) developed in the European side of the Urals; this is universally accepted.

This is not true. There are various opinions about it. See Paul Heggarty et al. 2023 for example. This is not that I agree with Heggarty but it shows that your opinion about Indo-Iranians is not universally accepted. Genetically Sintashta was identical to CWC and post-CWC groups and it is impossible that CWC spoke Proto-Indo-Iranian. Languages change when people mix. Without mixing change is unlikely. Indo-Iranian languages originated in Asia when Andronovo tribes started to mix with locals.

[Jaska]

Bolek:
“This is not true. There are various opinions about it. See Paul Heggarty et al. 2023 for example. This is not that I agree with Heggarty but it shows that your opinion about Indo-Iranians is not universally accepted.”

Their dating for Indo-Iranian is far too early, and their method is much weaker than the method behind the mainstream dating (see David Anthony, Alexander Lubotsky and many others on that topic). There are more possible reasons why two languages share small number of inherited words – it cannot be automatically interpreted as a sign of early divergence as Heggarty et al. do. The rate of lexical replacement is not constant, but it alters and changes through times even in the same language lineage. The rate of lexical replacement is usually greater when a language spreads a long way through region where it encounters several other languages – just like the Indo-Iranian languages have done.

Bolek:
“Genetically Sintashta was identical to CWC and post-CWC groups and it is impossible that CWC spoke Proto-Indo-Iranian.”

Wrong – of course it is possible. There is no law dictating that one ancestry could only be related to one language family/branch. Just the opposite: usually one ancestry is related to several branches or families. Fatyanovo Culture had at least four regional cultures, and one of these may well have been related to Indo-Iranian (most likely Abashevo Culture, because it was an important root for Sintashta Culture).

There are also areally spread sound changes shared by Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic (satemization and ruki-rule), which requires their development adjacent to each other.

Bolek:
“Languages change when people mix. Without mixing change is unlikely. Indo-Iranian languages originated in Asia when Andronovo tribes started to mix with locals.”

I already replied to these – please read my earlier comments with thought.

[Psynome]

I think it might be helpful for this discussion to remember that the linguistic definition of an Urheimat is the region in which a proto-language was last spoken before breaking into divergent dialects. It says nothing about the earlier location or locations of the language community in question.

For example, English diverged in Great Britain making it the proto English homeland, but of course the earlier origin of those first English speakers was in southern Scandinavia and the North Sea coast.

Likewise, linguistic evidence from all surviving Uralic languages can point to a homeland west of the Urals, but this says nothing about the earlier and in my opinion likely ancestral Pre-Proto-Uralic language community originating farther east in Siberia. The older community may simply have left no linguistic descendants behind in that area, making an Eastern European expansion point the origin of all known Uralic languages and thus the Proto-Uralic linguistic homeland .

[Jaska]

Psynome:
"Likewise, linguistic evidence from all surviving Uralic languages can point to a homeland west of the Urals, but this says nothing about the earlier and in my opinion likely ancestral Pre-Proto-Uralic language community originating farther east in Siberia. The older community may simply have left no linguistic descendants behind in that area, making an Eastern European expansion point the origin of all known Uralic languages and thus the Proto-Uralic linguistic homeland."

Exactly right. Unfortunately even all linguists have not been able to distinguish these different temporal stages, which leads to crosswise speaking and wrong conclusions.

[Jerome]

Bolek:
“This is not true. There are various opinions about it. See Paul Heggarty et al. 2023 for example. This is not that I agree with Heggarty but it shows that your opinion about Indo-Iranians is not universally accepted.”

Their dating for Indo-Iranian is far too early, and their method is much weaker than the method behind the mainstream dating (see David Anthony, Alexander Lubotsky and many others on that topic). There are more possible reasons why two languages share small number of inherited words – it cannot be automatically interpreted as a sign of early divergence as Heggarty et al. do. The rate of lexical replacement is not constant, but it alters and changes through times even in the same language lineage. The rate of lexical replacement is usually greater when a language spreads a long way through region where it encounters several other languages – just like the Indo-Iranian languages have done.

Bolek:
“Genetically Sintashta was identical to CWC and post-CWC groups and it is impossible that CWC spoke Proto-Indo-Iranian.”

Wrong – of course it is possible. There is no law dictating that one ancestry could only be related to one language family/branch. Just the opposite: usually one ancestry is related to several branches or families. Fatyanovo Culture had at least four regional cultures, and one of these may well have been related to Indo-Iranian (most likely Abashevo Culture, because it was an important root for Sintashta Culture).

There are also areally spread sound changes shared by Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic (satemization and ruki-rule), which requires their development adjacent to each other.

Bolek:
“Languages change when people mix. Without mixing change is unlikely. Indo-Iranian languages originated in Asia when Andronovo tribes started to mix with locals.”

I already replied to these – please read my earlier comments with thought.

Well this isn't true.
There's nothing wrong with their dating, people misinterpret it.
Their date mans the initial start of divergence between two language families,so even if a 5% difference appears betwee langauge families,they consider it the start of divergence/formation of new dialect.

And there's no solid consensus as of now.
Eric hamp,bouckart,ponk all consider indo-iranian to undergo an 'Asiatic split' and isn't associated with the european IE complex.

Kroonen et al 2022 mentioned that indo-iranian lacks many terms for agricultural innovation which seem to have affected European IE due to interactions with trypilia culture(both yamnaya languages-armenian,Greek, Albanian and CWC languages-Germanic,Celtic,etc).

Kummel 2023 also reasserted that indo iranian has an Asiatic split and dosent form a clade with balto slavic or CWC languages.


And then there's the recent issue,parthian genomes are coming out soon,and there's leaks that these people had minimal to none sintashta/steppe_mlba Ancestry.
These were west Iranic speakers.


And the indo iranian connection with uralic could be very well explained by the connection of seima turbino formative cultures like krotovo,elunin,Odinovo with BMAC/SC asia(considered indo iranian by heggarty).

Dali_eba from 2500 BC east Kazakhstan which is basically the origin of seima turbino had 20% BMAC Ancestry.

Proto uralics would have interacted with these people which could explain the indo-iranian loanwords into uralic bit not vice versa. 



And then there's the issue of tocharian substratum and borrowing in Uralic,read peyrot.
It's present in almost all stages and for very basic words.
This could only be from Sintashta/mlba since uralics had no interaction with afanasievo and there was a large andronovo impact in tarim basin in late bronze age(50% of Ydna samples from iron age are r1a with 30-50% autosomal Ancestry from andronovo).

[Jerome]

What is there from perceived loan word strata which can alter the Siberian origins of speakers of Uralic languages ?

The problem is that there is zero positive evidence for LATE Proto-Uralic in Siberia. All the proposed evidence for that homeland concerns several millennia earlier stages (Ural-Altaic, Ural-Eskimo etc. connections), and moreover, they contradict with west-pulling evidence (Indo-Uralic connection [connection being here either relatedness or contact]). Therefore, we do not know whether such ancient evidence is even real or due to chance. In any case, so early processes are equally irrelevant for Late Proto-Uralic as the location of LPU is for Proto-Finnic (in Estonia) or Proto-Samoyedic (in South Siberia).

The loanword evidence (especially early Indo-Iranian reconstruction stages) and paleolinguistic evidence allow no LPU homeland east of the Urals, and they require Samoyedic being for a long time adjacent to other Uralic branches. But we can go through the evidence after my article is published.

Well,the yakutia_lnba connection,the krasnoyarsk_ba connection near Baikal,the yukahigiric issue all can't be ignored.
On the other hand,the direction of borrowing of IR into uralic matters too.
It's all from indo iranian int uralic at various stages,none from uralic to indo iranian.
And this only affects indo iranian,not indo Aryan/Indic.

If proto uralics at various stages were in the west,near urals,Then we would see significant borrowing from uralic into various stages of indo iranian/Aryan too.
And sintashta is considered by most to be proto-indo-iranian+Aryan stage so people would have to explain why no borrowings from Indo-Aryan into uralic, but only indo iranian.

[Andar]

Well this isn't true.
There's nothing wrong with their dating, people misinterpret it.
Their date mans the initial start of divergence between two language families,so even if a 5% difference appears betwee langauge families,they consider it the start of divergence/formation of new dialect.

And there's no solid consensus as of now.
Eric hamp,bouckart,ponk all consider indo-iranian to undergo an 'Asiatic split' and isn't associated with the european IE complex.

Kroonen et al 2022 mentioned that indo-iranian lacks many terms for agricultural innovation which seem to have affected European IE due to interactions with trypilia culture(both yamnaya languages-armenian,Greek, Albanian and CWC languages-Germanic,Celtic,etc).

Kummel 2023 also reasserted that indo iranian has an Asiatic split and dosent form a clade with balto slavic or CWC languages.


And then there's the recent issue,parthian genomes are coming out soon,and there's leaks that these people had minimal to none sintashta/steppe_mlba Ancestry.
These were west Iranic speakers.


And the indo iranian connection with uralic could be very well explained by the connection of seima turbino formative cultures like krotovo,elunin,Odinovo with BMAC/SC asia(considered indo iranian by heggarty).

Dali_eba from 2500 BC east Kazakhstan which is basically the origin of seima turbino had 20% BMAC Ancestry.

Proto uralics would have interacted with these people which could explain the indo-iranian loanwords into uralic bit not vice versa. 



And then there's the issue of tocharian substratum and borrowing in Uralic,read peyrot.
It's present in almost all stages and for very basic words.
This could only be from Sintashta/mlba since uralics had no interaction with afanasievo and there was a large andronovo impact in tarim basin in late bronze age(50% of Ydna samples from iron age are r1a with 30-50% autosomal Ancestry from andronovo).

None of the Seima-Turbino or Steppe_MLBA samples north of South Kazakhstan  has BMAC ancestry and dont see the relevance of BMAC here. There might be some IAMC ancestry here and there, which includes Eneolithic South Central Asian admix, like in these Srubnaya outliners from Nepluyevsky  but again this is not BMAC. 

Proto-Uralics seemingly not even interacted that much with Sintashta or core Andronovo what also explain why we dont see much Uralic type ancestry in the steppe and Central Asia later but with these Indo-Iranian pioneer groups in Seima-Turbino, who spoke a variation of late Proto-Indo-Iranian.

Something similar to Tocharian is present as loanword layer because there were IEs long before Indo-Iranians in Siberia (Afanasievo). Dont see what this has to do with Steppe_MLBA and R1a. The association between R1a-Z93, Steppe_MLBA and Proto-Indo-Iranians if anything is one of the strongest and most obvious one in archaeogenetics. There are a lot of mental gymnastics needed to conclude they are not linked with each other.

[rmstevens2]

A little off the linguistics track, but one thing that caught my eye was the ancient Corded Ware sample from Estonia, Kunila1 (2850-2050 BC). Unless I am misreading something, it's supposed to be R1b-L51. That's new for a Baltic Corded Ware sample.

Is that right, an R1b-L51 in Estonian Corded Ware? Keep in mind that we already know that the very earliest Corded Ware samples thus far known (per Papac et al, 2021) were R1b-L51.

[Jaska]

Jerome:

“Well this isn't true. There's nothing wrong with their dating, people misinterpret it.
Their date mans the initial start of divergence between two language families,so even if a 5% difference appears betwee langauge families,they consider it the start of divergence/formation of new dialect.”

Heggarty et al. 2023 write:

“The inference of an Indo-Iranic split at ~5520 yr B.P.(4540 to 6800 yr B.P.) may, at first glance, seem surprising. Established expectations are for a more recent date, based on the perceived level of similarity between Vedic Sanskrit and Avestan—the earliest known ancient languages in the Indic and Iranic branches, respectively. However, these judgments of linguistic similarity have been largely impressionistic rather than quantified. In the precisely defined IE-CoR meanings, Early Vedic and Younger Avestan share only 58.7% cognacy. This matches the level of cognacy that survives between the most divergent sublineages within the Romance clade, for instance, after roughly two millennia since the spread of the Roman Empire. Early Vedic and Younger Avestan themselves date back to at least the mid-fourth and mid-third millennia before present, respective-ly. A time depth two millennia earlier (~5520 yrB.P.) for the split between their lineages (Indic versus Iranic) is thus consistent with the 58.7% cognacy overlap between them.”

1. Quality is more important than quantity. One undeniable argument is stronger than hundred vague arguments which are open to contradicting interpretations.

2. Most of these computational phylolinguists presuppose that the rate of shared words can automatically be transformed into time-depth from the proto-language, but this is not true: there are also other possible processes involved, as I wrote.

3. The rate of lexical replacement is not constant, but it varies over time and situation and can be different in different branches. According to these kind of rate calculations, Icelandic should have diverged only recently, but we know this is not true – it just has preserved much more of its vocabulary than is the average rate.

4. There is nothing impressionistic in the fact that the first chariot appeared ca. 2000 BCE, or in the fact that chariot vocabulary is shared by Indic and Iranian as regular cognates, showing that at that time they were still the same language: Late Proto-Indo-Iranian.
1) Lubotsky, Alexander 2023: Indo-European and Indo-Iranian Wagon Terminology and the Date of the Indo-Iranian Split. https://www.academia.edu/106978888/Indo_...nian_Split
2) Epimakhov, Andrey & Lubotsky, Alexander 2023: Fire and Water : The Bronze Age of the Southern Urals and the Rigveda https://www.academia.edu/106979217/Fire_...Epimakhov_

5. Early Vedic is dated to ca. 1200–1000 BCE, because it is less archaic than Mitanni Indo-Aryan which was attested ca. 1400 BCE.

6. Again, cognacy rate of 58.7 % cannot be interpreted as a certain constant time-depth. There are several possible reasons why one branch has replaced its vocabulary much faster than another.

Jerome:

“And there's no solid consensus as of now. Eric hamp,bouckart,ponk all consider indo-iranian to undergo an 'Asiatic split' and isn't associated with the european IE complex.”

The Asian split is true: it split after the expansion of Late Proto-Indo-Iranian from the Sintashta Culture ca. 2000 BC. This culture was located in Southern Trans-Urals. This is the best-argued mainstream view, see the links above.

Jerome:

“Kroonen et al 2022 mentioned that indo-iranian lacks many terms for agricultural innovation which seem to have affected European IE due to interactions with trypilia culture(both yamnaya languages-armenian,Greek, Albanian and CWC languages-Germanic,Celtic,etc).”

No problem there. Of course European farmer cultures affected the nearby IE people. But words tend to become lost when they are not needed, and the Indo-Iranian lineage has spread through vast regions where agriculture was not yet beneficial or possible, until later when Indic and Iranian entered Central-South Asia.

Jerome:

“Kummel 2023 also reasserted that indo iranian has an Asiatic split and dosent form a clade with balto slavic or CWC languages.”

No problem there. Instead of a clade, Indo-Iranian shares areal features with Balto-Slavic (satemization and the ruki-rule), which requires their development in adjacent regions: in easternmost Europe. Also, Sintashta population was genetically among the Corded Ware populations, and the Indo-Iranian-related R1a-Z93 seems to originate within the Fatyanovo Corded Ware culture.

Jerome:

“And then there's the recent issue,parthian genomes are coming out soon,and there's leaks that these people had minimal to none sintashta/steppe_mlba Ancestry. These were west Iranic speakers.”

So? Steppe ancestry has still spread even further to the south. And language is not inherited in DNA.

Jerome:

“And the indo iranian connection with uralic could be very well explained by the connection of seima turbino formative cultures like krotovo,elunin,Odinovo with BMAC/SC asia(considered indo iranian by heggarty).”

View of Heggarty et al. 2023 is based on weaker evidence and methodology than the mainstream view, as I explained above.

Jerome:

“Dali_eba from 2500 BC east Kazakhstan which is basically the origin of seima turbino had 20% BMAC Ancestry.”

So?

Jerome:

“Proto uralics would have interacted with these people which could explain the indo-iranian loanwords into uralic bit not vice versa.”

Late Proto-Uralic could not have been spoken in South Siberia, although Pre-Proto-Uralic might have been.

Jerome:

“And then there's the issue of tocharian substratum and borrowing in Uralic,read peyrot.
It's present in almost all stages and for very basic words.”

Peyrot suggests Uralic substrate influence in Tocharian. As Pre-Proto-Tocharian apparently arrived there already ca. 3300 BCE (the Afanasyevo Culture), this substrate – if it can be considered plausible – would involve Pre-Proto-Uralic. Therefore, it still had nothing to do with the homeland of Late Proto-Uralic roughly a millennium later. 
EDIT: Actually Peyrot proposes much later influence: "As I will try to show, all these requirements are met in the case of very early forms of Proto-Tocharian and Proto-Samoyedic, that is, Pre-Proto Tocharian and Pre-Proto-Samoyedic." Neither Pre-Proto-Uralic nor this later process has any role in locating Late Proto-Uralic.

Jerome:

“This could only be from Sintashta/mlba since uralics had no interaction with afanasievo and there was a large andronovo impact in tarim basin in late bronze age(50% of Ydna samples from iron age are r1a with 30-50% autosomal Ancestry from andronovo).”

How can you say that Pre-Proto-Uralic speakers had no interaction with the Afanasyevo Culture? What is your method and evidence?