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Hey everybody, today I am going to be talking about a new preprint, a very important preprint with the title ‘The Genetic Origin of the Indo-Europeans’ It is from David Reich’s lab he’s the last author. Lazaridis, Iosif Lazaridis is the first author but in the supplements it says Lazaridis, Patterson, Anthony and I think Vyazov contributed pretty equally to it. And also Ron Pinhasi presumably helped provide some of the samples. You know, there's a lot of people on the paper, I don't want to leave anyone off. But obviously, it's a collective work and I want acknowledged that. So it's a pretty big deal, I will say that the paper should probably be titled The genetic origin of the Yamnaya and the Hittites and not Indo-Europeans. But, you know, it's close enough, close enough for government work. And so it's a pretty big deal. It's a preprint. It's not accepted yet. But knowing, knowing the track record of the Reich Lab Preprints, it will probably be published in Nature, within a year, probably six months. And there will be minor revisions, you know, figures will be redone, some analyses will be redone. But I think the results are pretty close to crystal clear. Doubt most people will contend with the results because the data of the results, the outputs of the analyses are just - They're not very disputable by opinion. But we'll get into that. So I guess like, first I want to talk about the origin of the Yamnaya because that's what this paper is centrally about. Who are the Yamnaya? If you have been sleeping under a rock and not listening to my podcasts, really bad, really my posts, you don't know. But most of you know, but like, just to review. Yamnaya basically is I think it's Russian, for pit grave. And it just refers to these people who would bury their probably elite noble dead, in these pit graves like pits in the ground. But on top of them, there would be a mound, a vast mound sometimes. So they're called Kurgans, and they are all over the Eurasian steppe, the spread of the Kurgans into Europe, smaller type Kurgans, about like 5000 years ago was hypothesized by Marija Gimbutas the Lithuanian American archaeologist who mentored people like David Anthony and JP Mallory. It was hypothesized by her that these were steppe pastoralists, nomads that brought the Indo European languages to Europe. She's pretty much right. I also want to emphasize is a big part of this paper. The Kurgans also spread eastward all the way as far as the Altai pasture lands, and Western Mongolia, Eastern Kazakhstan. And these Kurgans were obviously created by people that were somehow related to the Yamnaya of the Pontic Steppe on the other side of the steppe. Well genetics over the last decade or so has made it pretty clear that these people have the so called Afanasievo culture are probably the ancestry of Tolcharians, a sneak preview, were basically Yamnaya, pure Yamnaya. There's almost like no genetic imprint of anybody else in them. Some of them are found to be related by people on other side of the steppe. So it was basically one culture that just spread across the Eurasian steppe very, very quickly. That's when it was going on. So, genetic origin of the Indo-Europeans really is the genetic origins of the Yamnaya. The Yamnaya is not what they were called, by the way, or rather it’s what they called themselves, probably, they call themselves something similar to the word Aryan but not exactly Aryan, because Aryan only refers to Indo-Iranians to this day. Ossetians call themselves the people of iron or iron people. So you know, there's all sorts of words that like Éire in Ireland. Whatever. Indo-European roots, it basically means free people or the people. So I think it's like Kóryos or something in reconstructed proto Indo-European, which you do by looking at all the daughter languages and figure out some sort of consensus that it could have evolved out of the, you know, the descendant terms, but in any case, this is the origin of the Yamnaya. Yamnaya you know about because they are basically the foundation of later Indo-European populations. So, when we were talking about the Corded Ware they’re 75% Yamnaya. When we’re talking about Bell Beaker they’re 60% Yamnaya and so forth. Really, the Yamnaya are the foundational basis of the Indo European expansions. Kristian Kristiansen, who I recently did a podcast with, as you guys know, he is very, very clear as an archaeologist that people like the Single Grave Culture in places like Northern Germany or Denmark, they're Yamnaya. Yes, they might be engaging in some sort of mixed, non nomadic, non purely nomadic lifestyle, but there Yamnaya. You know, genetically, we know that the Corded Ware of Eastern Europe about like, you know, 2900 BC or so, are three fourths Yamnaya with the other 1/4 being Globular Amphora neolithic. Right. So to know the Yamnaya is to know the origins of the Indo Europeans. And prior to this, there wasn't really there wasn't really that much understanding of the details of where they came from. If you listen to my podcasts with David Anthony, he hinted at some of the possibilities with the Kyvalynsk people and whatnot. But there just weren't enough data, there weren't enough samples. So I think they got 299 new samples. And they re analyzed or like improved the marker quality, marker yield out of like another 61 or something. So they have a lot of data now. A lot of data, they could run statistical analysis to do all sorts of things that they couldn't before. So what they could do before was say like, Okay, you have five Yamnaya. These Yamnaya define the Yamnaya cluster. In your qpAdm or admixture, whatever you want to use. And you can estimate your Yamnaya percentage, right, which is fine. And it shows that the Yamnaya genetic legacy goes from, say, South India, all the way to Ireland, you know, goes to certain parts of the world like Mongolia, where, you know, we didn't like realize they were but it's because they're Iranian people, probably Scythian related people that were in Mongolia really early on. And so they contributed the Yamnaya ancestry. But you can't really say too much about the population history up and down, the breeding size, all these other things about the Yamnaya without more detailed genomic and genetic resources. Well, they have the more detailed genomic and genetic resources. So there are two things to think about here. They have really, really high quality samples with hundreds of 1000s of markers from a lot of Yamnaya. Okay, that's one thing. Yamnaya and also pre Yamnaya, various other populations. And they have a lot of samples from a lot of these populations. So you have the number, the n, of individuals, and you have the n as the marker set. And these are two things that you definitely need to answer a lot of the questions that we've had before. So I think one thing that you have to, when you read this preprint, understand is they're moving a little away from analyzing in terms of clusters, and these reified particular populations, and they talk more about clines. And what does that mean? Well, that basically means that there's genetic variation in the prehistoric steppe. And these populations are emerging out of this landscape of gradual graded continuous variation. So there are three clines that they talked about. And in order of importance, in my opinion, I'll just go there's the Dnieper Cline or Dnieperial cline which is around the Dnieper River, which is modern central Ukraine, the Volga cline, which obviously is the Volga river going northward into the Urals from the Caspian. There's the CLV cline, we call it CLV, but what it is is Caucasus Lower Volga, so it traces the population of the lower Volga all the way to the Caucasus Mountains. So the Caucas mountains of Georgia, Armenia etc, right? You know, that whole region, like part of northern half of it is something called the coupons step, which I'm going to talk about a little bit later. Okay, so these are the three clines and the populations that lead to the Yamnaya come out of these clines. So what are the clines The Volga cline. Is very simple-ish I would say. It's the compound of Eastern Hunter Gatherers at the northern cline, Easter hunter gatherers are mostly ancestral North Eurasian paleo Siberian, with a minority of Western Hunter Gatherer ancestry that just comes about through their interactions in Eastern Europe, with the Western hunter gatherers of Western Europe, okay. And so basically what it's showing is there these foragers that are interacted with other populations lower down towards the Caspian, those populations in the Lower Vol are important. What the What the What the authors find is those populations descend from Caucasus Hunter Gatherers and Caucasus hunter gatherers, obviously are from the Caucasus They’re from samples that were from late Pleistocene early Holocene and they’re a distinct hunter gatherer population that's different than EHG, Easter Hunter Gatherers and Western Hunter Gatherers, they’re distantly related but they're very distinct, and they are somewhat more similar to peoples like the Iranian farmers, etc. In West Asia, right. What this paper has showed is the Caucasus hunter gatherer ancestry was spread all along the steppe very early on before, you know, 5000 BCE, definitely like, you know, 7000 years ago or something. I mean, it's a long time ago. So, it might be the very term Caucasus Hunter Gatherer is actually a bit of a misnomer insofar as we have these samples from the Caucasus . But just because we have samples from somewhere doesn't mean that that's where they're really from or that's where most of their distributed distribution is. These could just be like the type of hunter gatherers that are just found between the Black Sea and the Caspian. And the Caucasus and West Asia is their southern range and the lower Volga of the Don River, which is between the Volga the Dnieper in eastern Ukraine, like the part of Russia is maybe their western boundary, okay. So Caucasus hunter gatherer at the south end of the Volga cline, Eastern Hunter Gatherer at the north end, and the two populations are Admixing. So there's some populations like the Khyvalynsk that they talked about, that are like variable admixtures, right? Okay, the Dnieper cline is pretty simple. It's basically defined with the amount of Ukrainian Neolithic forage or you have. Ukrainian Neolithic foragers are basically a population of Western Hunter Gatherers that expanded eastward during the Holocene. During the Neolithic, in particular, they absorbed some Eastern hunter gatherer ancestry. So they're more like Western hunter gatherers, but they have some Eastern hunter gatherer, they're not like pure Western hunter gatherers. But you know, their predominant ancestry is probably similar to Iron Gates, Balkan hunter gatherers, that sort of thing. Okay, so these are the indigenous people of the Dnieper river valley, let's say 7000 years ago. Well, what happens is at some point, populations from the CLV, the Caucasus Lower Volga populations show up in the Dnieper valley, almost certainly from the east. And the cline is defied at one end by these Ukrainian Neolithic foragers. And at the other end by the Yamnaya. And so Yamnaya are about 20% Dnieper forger, and about 80% CLV. So that's the Dnieper cline. And the Dnieper basically, is just reflecting
admixture that happened in the Dnieper River Valley with the expansion of the CLV. Okay, so it's even less about geography than the Volga one. Okay, the last one is the CLV. This is actually the most important, really, it's kind of like the cline of all clines in this paper, because it looks like the ancestors of Indo Europeans, pre Indo-Europeans, not proto but pre, came out of the CLV population. So CLV populations are defined by pretty much CHG, Caucasus Hunter Gatherer admixture, along with a Neolithic West Asian ancestry. So this is the ancestry that's like Anatolian Farmer, maybe Iranian farmer, Mesopotamian farmer, all of this stuff to the south, that expanded with the rise of agriculture. So that resulted in pulses of, you know, waves of people expanding outward in all directions, overwhelming foragers in all directions. So you have populations of the Caucasus that are mostly this new stuff, non Caucasus farmers, but you have some of it also north of the Volga. And in the Caucasus, you also have other populations that are predominately Caucasus, so it's very spotty. So the CLV, like the Volga, can be thought of as primarily a geographical cline, but it's not nearly as consistent as the Volga what the authors want to emphasize is that there's a lot of variation in the CLV. And it was a dynamic process of reciprocal gene flow. There are some populations that you know, about, like the Maykop population that look to be at the southern end of the CLV cline, other populations, so I think it's like Berezhnovka. So it's just called, you know, call it like, the B population that's at the north of the lower Volga and that has less of this Neolithic West Asian farmer. But these populations are interesting, because the author's note that they have some proto Kurgan features already in their culture. So yeah, so it looks like the CLV population has some traits that are already associated with later Indo-European, so probably the root of the Indo European populations in some ways, according to this paper, right. And so, I think the authors are talking about the clines here because if this like earlier, pre Yamnaya world there were a lot of different populations, and David Anthony has talked about this too, culturally, there are a lot of different distinct populations that are on the steppe doing a lot of different things, a lot of different cultural practices, the homogeneity that we see later just does not exist. And so there's all these populations with these different admixtures and different cultural practices. So for example, the Maykop people have something similar to the Kurgan, and the Maykop people or to the south like north of the Caucasus, something similar to the Kurgan in their burial styles, but the way they positioned the bodies is different than the later Yamnaya and the people from the northern part of the CLV. This is like a different demographic, cultural landscape in their basic dynamics, probably a lot of small tribes, a lot of small, localized cultures. And the way the genes are flowing is from intermarriages, between neighboring tribes, probably their patrilineal, that tends to be the human norm, from what we can see, like Neanderthals on down, so probably women being exchanged between different groups. So what happens is it creates this continuous cline. So you can't say that this is the line between this race and that race, something like that, right. Whereas, you know, if you have like Native Americans in Beringia they’re a very distinct cluster that was isolated for 1000s of years, that is not happening with with us at all. These are people that live in a contiguous landscape, interacted with each other in a dynamic way. The Yamnaya changed that dynamic. So they have they have like, a lot of Yamnaya samples. They're very homogenous, they're about 80%, CLV, 20% Dnieper forger. And they look to be related to each other, wherever they're sampled from, some of them are sampled very, very far away from the Pontic steppe. There are segments that are matching each other. And they're genetically extremely homogenous. So they collapsed this geographic isolation by distance dynamic, as you would say, in population genetics. So isolation by distance just means that the further you are apart on the map, the more likely you are to be genetically unrelated. The closer you are, the more related you are. And that's just because genes are flowing continuously and gradually, through just like work a day dynamics of this ancient landscape, with the expansion of the Yamnaya, it erased all of the clines, everything just disappeared, it collapsed everything, all the CLV people, all these other populations were basically swept aside, you know, some of them were probably simulated at some level, but I mean, a lot of it, I'm assuming was pretty violent. And probably, you know, I mean, people died. I mean by hook or by crook, whether there's violent conflict, or through starving them out through famine and whatnot. But the Yamnaya basically are going from Kazakhstan, to you know, towards Hungary occupied vast swaths of territory very quickly after 3300 BC, and, you know, probably through horse wagons, whatnot, their mobile lifestyle. David Anthony has written about this, we've talked about this, but they really, really transformed the world after 3300 BC, whereas before, you know, these clines described in this paper show a much more richly textured and detailed genetic landscape, that was to be erased, okay. And out of this, we have the situation with these clones and rise of this massive pulse of the Yamnaya. And so this is the origin of the Indo Europeans, the origin of the Yamnaya, they could go further back now, because they have the sources, some of the source populations. So they're very clear, they don't have the 80% CLV. That's contributing, they have no samples from that exact population, but they have related populations. So it looks like a population from the lower Volga. So therefore, probably from the east, my hypothesis is probably coming out of the Kuban steppes, past the Don, all the way to the Dnieper. Okay, so that's one of the major issues, right? We know that these are the two source populations now that we know that there are source populations, they can estimate when the admixture happened. It looks like the admixture happened to create the Yamnaya. Just like you know, the Corded Ware happened, we know after 3000 BC. Well, the Yamnaya themselves 80% CLV, 20% Dnieper, they were created between 4000-3500 BC, right. So they're relatively new. They’re a new population, ethnic configuration, prior to that they did not exist. And they're pretty homogenous. And so they know that they were pretty isolated for a bit because of this homogeneity. And also, you can look at their genomes now look at the patterns of genetic variation, and figure out when the population expanded when it was small and whatnot. It looks like it really started expanding around 3500 BC, which is right before, right before the big Yamnaya expansion. So if you look at the fingers of the paper, you can see a very, very, very, very sharp, kind of like, pitch around 3500 BC and a rapid explosion. So I estimated using qpAdm and stuff like that for worldwide populations that about like, like 9% of the world's genome can be attributed to the yamnaya. And that's turned out to be like 700 million people, I think, Okay. Here's the here's the interesting point here. Using these analyses from the genetics, they estimate that the number of Yamnaya, the breeding Yamnaya , was probably, you know, in the 1000s, it was probably a few tribes, maybe a single tribe, that somehow, you know, expanded all over the steppe really quickly. So it was kind of a demographic explosion. And these people, these few 1000 people. And like, remember, a breeding population is smaller than the total population. But in any case, these few 1000 People seem to have contributed really, really a lot to the modern world. So you know, I mean, orders of magnitude, many, many orders of magnitude, right? Because these in the ancient world, the prehistoric world, they were like a tiny fraction. And now they're a substantial fraction of the world's population from, you know, everywhere, like all over the world all over Eurasia, right. So another aspect of this paper that's super interesting is they seem to have explained, come pretty close to explaining the origin of the Hittites. So the Hittites, as most of you know, are indo European speakers in Anatolia, Central Anatolia, they call themselves you know, most of them were called Nešites . There are several cities their primary city was Nesha later they moved to Bogazköy, I think. Hattusas
But any case, they're Indo-European speaking, but their Indo-European was pretty weird, compared to other indo European and so there's always been a hypothesis that they diverged first. And probably like, seven, eight years ago, they got some Hittite samples, and they couldn't find any yamnaya steppe ancestry. So that was always a mystery. because prior to this, Indo European populations were always associated with Yamnaya steppe ancestry and the Hittites did not seem to be. Well, they got a lot more samples from Anatolia, Central Anatolia, etc, etc, with like big time transects. The mystery is pretty clear. In terms of why the mystery occurred, they don't have Yamnaya steppe ancestry because the yamnaya themselves were a population that emerged after 4000 BC. It looks like the ancestor of the Hittites of all the Anatolian languages show up in Central Anatolia before 4000 BC, between 4000 and 4500 and they are a CLV population. What I mean is they are part of the Caucasus Lower Volga cline, which contributed 80% to the yamnaya, but they were not yamnaya themselves. So this supports the idea of the Indo Anatolian language family as opposed to Indo European. So in this model, the Yamnaya are proto Indo European, and the CLV are proto Indo Anatolian, and, you know, the landscape, the ethnographic ethno linguistic landscape, you know, 6000 years ago might have been such that there were many, many different Indo Anatolia dialects and languages between say, the Dnieper, their western fringe, all the way south, around into Anatolia proper. So basically all the way around the Black Sea, you know, an Eastern arc as opposed to a southern arc. Okay. So what what happened in Anatolia, though, because the authors point out that you know, this has been noticed by many, all these Anatolian languages, particularly Palaic to the north of the Hittites, Luwian, various Luwian dialects to the south and the West, some of them actually, like, Lydian seem to have lasted almost into the Common Era. So, you know, into the time of, you know, after Jesus Christ was, right. But Hittite disappeared after, after about 1200 BC, after the Bronze Age collapse, which you know, Eric Cline has written about extensively. Luwian survive longer. These languages are probably the languages that were dominated by the Hittite states. The Neo Hittite states of Syria that are mentioned in the Bible, and various other like, you know, these languages that coastal Asia Minor down to the time of the Greeks were Anatolian. So these Anatolian languages probably arrived around 4000 BCE or a little earlier, just as the yamnaya were about to be created through this do ethnogenesis with the Dnieper, and they probably came through the Caucasus because there is no evidence of Balkan neolithic ancestry in them. So the most likely route as they come through the Caucasus, through modern day Armenia, that area. But why don't they exist in that region, in the historical period because not indo European people like the Kaška in North Northeastern Anatolia, Urartian’s all these other populations were dominant eastern Anatolia during the time of the Hittites. The authors propose that the Kura-Araxes civilization, which is, you know, kind of around Lake Van and whatnot arose during the Bronze Age. And split and created a wedge between the Indo Anatolian languages north of the Caucasus, and those in Anatolia. And so as you guys know probably, Caucasus has different language families. Armenian is Indo-European but Kartvelian, Georgian, is not. And there's other languages like, like Circassian and whatnot all these like weird diverse languages, in these mountains. So that's why it was always weird that Indo European could be from this area. But what these authors are proposing is Indo Anatolian had its ups and downs. And, you know, before the yamnaya, it was probably before the Yamnaya expansion, it might have been kind of on a downswing, perhaps, resulting in the fragmentation. The authors mentioned that Hittite and Yamnaya , proto indo European, are the two survivors of the CLV Indo-Anatolian family, there's probably a lot of other languages that disappeared, were absorbed by the yep Daya or some of these other Caucasian language speaking groups, you know, Kartvelian and whatnot, North Caucasus, etc. So the Western and Central Anatolia had the Anatolian languages preserved, because it was too, you know, it was outside of the range of expansion of Kura-Araxes. And they were preserved down to historical times because the earliest indo European languages Hittite, I think a tablet dated to 1750, I think, is the Anitta text at some treaty between two Hittite states, other Hittite their Anatolian personal names that look to be several centuries older, recorded in Assyrian and Eblaite texts. So these people were around, they possibly been around for 1000s of years. And this estimate is used doing admixture analysis which, I don't wanna go into the technical details, but you have to source populations that you can look what they started mixing with each other. And it looks like the Hittite Anatolian, because they're only about like 10% CLV, they're highly diluted, started well, before 4000 BC, also, there's Y chromosome that they found among the Anatolia that might have just a connection to the CLV people, it's just quite clear that there's some Volga connection to these Anatolians. And in eastern Anatolia, this, this ancestry actually decreased, historically, probably due to the Kura-Araxes and the later Indo European, Armenians, proto Armenians, probably descendants of Yamnaya Catacomb people show up and they bring back like classical steppe ancestry. So that's somewhat different. In any case, so the Hittites are a sister lineage to proto Indo-European, they are not Indo-European proper. They are a sister lineage. And this is an argument about linguists that has been happening for a while, and it looks like the genetics makes it pretty clear which side is right. You know, all the uniqueness of the Hittite languages is because they don't share the derived features from Yamnaya. All the other populations that we know that are Indo European or Indo Anatolian are Yamnaya. So first, like there's the Tocharians, like, let's go through each one. Tocharian they went extinct, like, you know, around 800-900 AD with the rise of the Uyghurs. They spoke really weird, like obscure Indo European language. And they looked like they split pretty deeply and we know that the Afanasievo show up 3300 BC, there's some genetics papers purporting to show the connection between the Afanasievo who are like north, considerably north and west of Xinjiang of Tocharistan. Tocharistan is really the eastern half of modern Uyghuristan okay, the western half was Indo Iranian speaking, you know, various Scythian languages and whatnot. In any case, so this is the first branch off, genetically it starts out 3300 BC, pure Yamnaya.
And then you have Albanian, Illyria, Greek and Armenian and it looks like those are from probably, you know, yamnaya daughter populations that came directly from the steppe, maybe for the Catacomb Culture. So there's arguments that the Mycenaean Greeks had some Catacomb influence , and some possible connection to Indo-Iranians, David Anthony has mentioned this and it might be because the Indo Iranians spread back onto the steppe from the west from Poland, Belarus, from the Corded Ware population and basically absorbed, assimilated, overwhelmed, the Yamnaya populations. So what you see is the Y chromosomes shift from you know, a really obscure branch of R1b, to R1a-Z93 is a branch for Indo-Iranians. It looks like these Indo- Europeans, proto Indo Europeans, these populations were  organized in patrilineal kinship groups, and you know, there are massive power turnovers very, very rapidly by cultural identity and affinity. So you have the situation where all the other Indo European groups look like they came out of Corded Ware. So just like Yamnaya erased everyone else, Corded Ware to great extent erased a lot of other populations. So of the Indo European populations that we have today that we have Armenians, Greeks and Albanians descended from groups that were not Corded Ware everybody else including Indo-Iranians, Balto-Slavic people are Baltic and Slavic, Germanic, Celtic, Italic. Those are all from the Corded Ware. So the Corded Ware are interesting because they are agro pastoralists not pure nomads. Now they settled in the forest zone of Northeast Europe, obviously, you know, modern day, Poland, Belarus, they absorbed some sort of Neolithic culture, who are the Globular Amphora culture, the last Neolithic culture, and then they pushed westward became Single Grave in Germany, etc, etc. Early on there like 75% yamnaya. Again, Kristian Kristiansen and others insist on calling them Yamnaya to some extent, because they weren't that transformed in the early centuries. One branch went eastward and it became Indo-Iranians. So basically, it started as the Fatyanovo culture. Like somewhere, you know, western Russia kept going east until it hit the southern Urals became the Sintashta culture that around 2000 BC, they invented, they invented the light war chariot, which expanded all across Eurasia. And it looks like a lot of the words relate to horsemanship and other things are Indo-Iranian in many languages, many indo European languages, and many of the horse related practices of Indo Iranians, including, like the solar cult, for example, seem to have spread across much of the Indo European world, the solar cult lasted in Scandinavia, down to about 600 AD and then it went extinct due to a massive cold snap. But any case, there's multiple events that happened that post dated would happen with the Yamnaya expansion that kind of created the structure of the different Indo European populations that we see. So, you know, I think one of the most interesting things is they looked at the relatedness of the Yamnaya, and all these other groups, and it really tells us that they were expanding very rapidly, they had massive, massive kinship socio political networks across the Eurasian steppe. So they're basically the first people that would anticipate what the Turks, and the Mongols, the Huns of all these other people that we know, Scythians, Sarmatians what they did. The Yamnaya were the first and that's probably why they have such a big genetic impact. Because they were the first to pioneer this lifestyle, they probably didn't have an ideology of subjugation, conquest and assimilation, they probably looked at it as pure animal competition probably exterminated their neighbors, or drove them off the land, because they were there to, you know, graze their herds and everything else was was not super relevant, you know. In terms of like, what happened, I think we need to think about, you know, Europeans with their guns, you know, the Mongols with their cavalry. Some populations, some groups, some cultural units explode just out of nowhere really rapidly. It seems like a couple of tribes on the Dnieper of Yamnaya of what became Yamnaya figured out something so that within a several centuries, they were all over the Eurasian steppe. They were running roughshod over all other populations. And basically they were going to determine the future of the world in some ways. And it was just through happenstance. You know Greg Cochrane and others talk about lactase persistence and whatnot. But it looks like a lot of these biological adaptations came later after the Cultural adaptations. So what it seems like to be as a culture is actually, culture actually has biology on a leash in this way. It's driving biology. Lactase persistence. We know some kinds of plagues have expanded along with the Yamnaya expansion. Kristian Kristiansen believes that that's really instrumental critical in explaining their dominance in Europe. We also know that multiple sclerosis and cystic fibrosis, both come out of the Yamnaya , probably it has to do with zoonotic diseases. COVID could have been zoonotic. And you know, there's all sorts of arguments about that. But the whole point is, there's a lot of genetic diseases that come from animals, they spread to humans, and they cause havoc, and Yamnaya probably experienced it first, but once you experience it, you do have some sort of immunity and also, like just biological adaptations, that gives you a superpower in relation to other people and you can ask Native American is all about that, right? Yamnaya might have done this first. And so, you know, they got lucky in some ways, but once you get lucky in a certain direction, certain things are determined are deterministic, it might have been inevitable after they figured out nomadism first, it could have been something you know, some sort of new religion or some cultural practice that was different We don't know all the details like that's more for cultural evolutionist to actually create a model to understand how these sorts of genetic patterns are coming about. So, basically, JP Mallory’s book “In Search of the Indo Europeans” we found them, proto indo Europeans, we found them, there's still more details to like, tease them apart. I will say that. I mean, I don't know how to say this. But you know, admixture is part and parcel of human existence of the you and I are definitely a part of that, like, all these different groups came together in the center of like West Center of Eurasia, to give rise to the yamnaya. And then they seem to have like, developed some cultural innovations that allowed them to go from a few 1000 to you know, today, like I said, if you line them up, there's like, 700 million segments from the Yamnaya in human populations, you know, almost everybody, the vast majority of people listening have a little bit of Yamnaya. Even northern Chinese have Yamnaya. African Americans obviously have Yamnaya you know. Even non Indo-European speaking peoples have a lot of Yamnaya nancestry. This is just due to kind of like a sort of like cultural coincidence, because there are other groups related to them all around them, that were erased, all the clines collapsed and disappeared, with the rise of the yamnaya, there had to be a new equilibrium. So anyway, read the preprint, it's pretty readable, there's a lot of good stuff in there, the figures are clear. I, this will be like, 99% Sure, this will be in Nature soon. So you won't have to wait that long to see the final version. The supplements are also pretty good. You know, they're long, as usual. And it shows you like kind of like the technical methods that they're using to estimate various things, you know, like admixture and also the different models of ancestry that they come up with. Because we have so much data now that you can't just kind of like ad hoc, go around, like manually testing things. You need to actually like, write loops that test all the different combinations. Sometimes, obviously, you know, those of you who have like, experience with phylogenetics know that you cannot exhaustively explore the whole sample space in models, right. So sometimes you have to figure out like shortcuts to figure out which models are potentially the best. I think they're converging all the truth, they're converging on reality. And it's really incredible where we are today, in terms of what we understand and what we can do. And I'm pretty excited about it. And I hope you guys are too. Yeah, ‘The Genetic Origin of the Indo Europeans’ I think the the jigsaw puzzle is like 90% Complete. I don't think there's that much left to do. I think we know a lot of it now. And this is so much further than we were 10 years ago, that was 2014. That was before the two big papers on Indo Europeans in the Steppe came out and now we're just dotting the eyes. So thank you for your time. And I will talk to you guys next week.
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