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Hey everybody, this is Razib with the Unsupervised Learning podcast. And I am here with a very special guest, as we always say, but you know, I do feel like it's very special. This is my second Indo European episode with Dr. David Anthony, who a lot of you know and love, read his work, have read his book about the horse, wheel, and you know, the Indo Europeans and all that stuff. And he's got a new book coming out and he's got all these papers he's on with David Reich. There's just a lot to get through. So let's just like start, although, David, if you want to introduce your affiliations, where you are right now we can do that, and then we can go.
Okay, so I’m David Anthony, the book you were talking about is “The Horse, The Wheel, and the Language:” I just have to plug that once. And I'm retired from teaching at Hartwick College in the Oneonta New York, but I'm also a research associate with David Reich's lab in human evolutionary biology at Harvard. So those are my affiliations.
Yeah, and so we got to talk, first of all, you know, I think first let's talk about a couple of things in terms of how you feel in terms of the high level changes over the last two years. Our last conversation was about two years ago. I also want to make sure and like hit the issue with the horses, because there's a lot of horse stuff that's happened. And obviously, it's important in the horse, wheel, and language to get that right, I don't think it’s totally resolved. But we've made some progress as the last time we talk. So can we get can we get to that stuff right now?
Sure. I'd be glad to talk about horses first. Yeah, so there was a big paper,
Horse before the cart,
Yes, the horse before the cart. Actually, literally, that's the way this conversation will go. So yeah, so that there was this definitive study of horse DNA, Librado et al. two years ago. A project run by Ludovic Orlando. And I was a co author on that. And that definitively determined that the kind of horses we have today called DOM2 came together genetically and have the modern genetic profile around 2200-2300 BCE, in the steppes north of the Caspian Sea, the Volga Ural steppes, in what's today, Russia. But he treated that as an event, the appearance of DOM2 at about 2200 BC and the data they presented. So I disagree with the way they presented it. The data they presented actually suggests there's a long phased evolution of domesticated horses in that region. Starting in 5500 BC with wild horses, and 4500 BC, you can see a couple of samples that are found with domesticated cattle and sheep 4500 BC, 1000 years after the initial wild horses and they're shifted in the DOM2 direction. And then you have the Yamnaya and Maykop horses that are the direct ancestors of DOM2 have almost all of the genetic traits of DOM2 and then finally, DOM2 itself at around 2200 BC. But so there's this long history before that, and people were riding horses before DOM2 appeared. And that's of course, the important aspect of how horses affected human culture. And so then, recently, just last year, there was a study by Troutman et al. that I was a co author on, organized out of University of Helsinki, by Volker Heyd and that showed for the first time, pathologies in the human skeleton that are related to writing that affect mainly the lower back the pelvis and the upper legs, and some of them are pathologies like the articulation between the femur and the pelvis. Some of them are just muscle changes. But there are muscle changes that are typical of horseback riders. So you begin to see that we had five cases in Yamnaya. And there were two cases that were pre Yamnaya. One the sun god individual in Hungary 4200 BC, with all of the lower trunk muscular traits of a habitual rider. I was not surprised by that. Because the samples in Ludovic Orlando's Librato et al. paper that were dated to 4500 BC showed a substantial shift in the direction of DOM2 and you put that together with a rider dated to about the same period. It's not so surprising. So I think riding goes way back in the steppes and of course, that allowed people to move around a lot more, I don't think that they were using horses in warfare though, because genetically these horses were more skittish. The traits that are defined by DOM2 relate to back architecture, making it easier to carry a rider and to mood, making it easier for the horse to tolerate the sudden movements and noises that are associated with humans. And the yamnaya, horses were probably more skittish, they didn't have the full suite of genetic traits. So I think they probably were harder to ride, probably you didn't ride them, if you were faced with an aggressive individual coming towards you. On those horses, you probably dismounted to deal with that individual. But the horse could still get you there much, much faster than anybody expected. And that's a huge advantage in tribal warfare. So I,
yeah, no, I mean, you know, you've obviously, you know, I like some of this, you hinted that at the previous in the previous podcast two years ago, because obviously the it was in preparation, you got some of the data. So let me review or summarize and see if I'm getting this correctly in terms of your own perspective. So let's say about 4000 years ago, we have a big bang of these light war chariots, the Sintashta light war chariots in the Volga Ural region, with particular types of horses that are very, very adapted to being hooked up on these chariots. They're larger, they're a little bit more coordinated, their docility or the ability to be directed, is more domesticated, more human. And this is the star phylogeny of the modern horses, right? Yet we see this especially the Y chromosome with the stallions. But earlier, there were other horse lineages. And obviously we know the Mongolian wild horse which is related to the Botai, horse, there were European horses up there were horses in the new world at the at the beginning of the Holocene, they went extinct, they're probably eaten, but in any case. So the horse lineage equids are all over the place. And what you're suggesting is, it was actually earlier than the Sintashta Cultural explosion. There were also halting earlier events that made a difference, a marginal I mean, actually more than a marginal difference in terms of, you know, social technology in terms of their mobility that gave the Yamnaya peoples, the steppe peoples and advantage, even if they didn't have the light War Horse chariot that the Sintashta spread about 4000 years ago.
Yeah, exactly, exactly. So the Sintashta horses were clearly modern in the sense that they could tolerate - There's every evidence that the earliest chariots around 2000 BCE at Sintashta were used in warfare. There’s weapons buried with them. And so to get a horse and the animal who's evolution is based on the skittishness you know, they, they startle very fast. And then once they startle there the fastest things in the Eurasian continent, in terms of getting away from a threat, and that was their survival mechanism. So, so to get an animal like that, to go forward into a threat into warfare took a lot of genetic manipulation. And so it happened gradually. You don't - we shouldn't think of domesticated horses as being a single thing. So I think it's fairly clear that Yamnaya People were riding horses, they certainly had the pathologies associated with horseback riding and, and even earlier people probably were riding horses, but I think it was probably a trick at the time. You know , it didn't spread quickly, because it was thought of, we might think of this the way we today think of camel riding. We think of it as associated with a particular area, maybe a particular ethnic groups, and it's not something that everybody is going to copy and pick up and do. It's thought of something that's difficult. And you know, maybe elephant riding might be the same kind of thing. It's seen as a skills that's that you find in a particular part of the world primarily. And you don't expect to find it in North America or in Italy, although you do with Hannibal. But horseback riding in the beginning, I think was in that category. That wasn't the way we think of horseback riding, it was more difficult. And so on those people who had really spent a lot of time around horses, were very good at it.
Well, okay, so let me I'm going to stick out horses just a little bit more horses are super important, obviously. So let me pause on something probably from reading you, Kristian Kristiansen, you know, watching people like Dan Davies podcasts and stuff like that, on the Kóryos, these young men. So I'm imagining two modalities and tell me if this is totally wrong, one modality would be kind of young Braves. Maybe they get on some ponies, and they use the ponies to move rapidly across the landscape to do their raids. And you know, they're not cavalry. They're not fighting from the ponies. They use the ponies to move. And then there's another modality where you have these ponies. Maybe dragging carts, maybe more domestic usage. I don't know. I know they have oxes. So they don't need ponies necessarily.
Yeah, so I think you're essentially right the there's a modality where you can use horses in warfare, even if you're not cavalry, just to get to the place. And actually, when you look at Plains Indian warfare, very often, you know, they brought boys who held on to the horses while the men went and conducted the raid. And they came back and they rode away. The other though, I think the more important usage of horses early on, was that they greatly increase the efficiency of animal herding. So if you're herding cattle and sheep on foot, there's a limited number, even if - if you use a dog, you can expand it. But there's a limited number of sheep that the herder can handle. And if you get on horseback, the estimates like for Mongolian herders are that they can handle two to three times more animals. So without an increased input in labor, horses allow you to increase your herd sizes by two or three times. And then you have a surplus of animals that you can use for political relationships, gift giving, and feasting. And that's just as important as the warfare aspect of early riding. The fact that it made it possible to be rich, to have a surplus counted in animals as a nomad. And so the very invention, the earliest stage in the invention of steppe nomadism, which I think the Yamnaya people were the first people to really fully commit to a nomadic lifestyle. That was made possible partly by horses, and then partly by wheeled vehicles, wheeled vehicles are for your heavy residential needs, essentially moving home, food and water, fuel. And the horses are for scouting, and for making the herds bigger, and for warfare. And you put those two forms of transportation together. And it looks like they came together for the first time, right around 3300 BC, just at the beginning of Yamnaya. And that's one of the major reasons that Yamnaya took off the way it did, they had invented a way of exploiting grasslands that nobody had ever had before.
Yeah, so you know, just to recap, I think the way that I like to think of what you're just saying right now is, obviously for example, in England, there were fossil fuels, there was coal, and it wasn't a major resource until the 18th century, like sometimes people would use it to fire but it wasn't industrial, that energy was not unlocked. Once the energy was unlocked, then all of a sudden Britain became this world superpower. And so what you're positing right now is the Horse is basically triggering an economic revolution, and economic revolution that has all these knock on effects that might be able to explain why the Yamnaya Why, you know, like, I've done some back of the envelope math, how much like Yamnaya ancestries in the world based on there, and it's orders of magnitude of all of the peoples that were alive 5000 years ago, you know, we have hundreds and hundreds of millions of people that are Yamnaya Like, if you just like, do the multiplication of the map, right? So obviously, you know, economic history is driving demography here. It's a little less, maybe a little less sexy than Kóryos, you know, Pony riders, but it's just as important, right? And so let's talk about the wheel, horse wheel and language. Let's just go in sequence right now, because we got this thing going right now. So what's going on with the wheel with the cart since you wrote your book back like 15 years ago?
Okay, so there's a there There's been a lot more legal vehicle finds in the steps yamnaya culture was not only the the culture that had the direct ancestors of DOM two horses, they also had the first wheel vehicles and missteps. And we had vehicles were invented after about 3500 BCE, there's no evidence for them before that. And after that, they become fairly widespread between say 3400 BC and 3100 BC, you find wheeled vehicles from Mesopotamia to Denmark, and one of them in the in the steps north of the Caspian in the black scenes to the present day, Russia and Ukraine. So we'll nickels spread across the the steps with yamnaya. And that were central to yattalunga ritual ideas, because they're about 300 400 wagon burials in yamnaya graves, where they put either the whole wagon or parts of the wagon in the grave with them. And that just shows how central the wagon was to young identity. Now these wagons were solid wheeled, you know, they were heavy, they weren't they weren't racing vehicles. But they were meant to carry food, water supplies, and maybe provide a place for people to get out of the rain and to actually sleep inside. So they weren't meant to be racing vehicles, they were probably pulled by oxen and not by horses. We didn't have the proper kind of collar to put on a horse, so it could carry really heavy loads, without choking off the bottom of its windpipe. An ox yoke, if you put it on a horse, it hits on the bottom of the horse's neck and chugs the horse, if you put really heavy weight on it with the horse collar, the round horse collar was a medieval invention. So before the run of the medieval period, horses were mainly used for riding or very light traction, not for pulling things like these yamnaya wagons. So you have to imagine the Omnia people kind of moving from one campsite to another with all of their domestic needs in the wagon, and with the people mounted on horses, and that would allow them to spread their herds out and really efficiently manage very large herds. So if you manage large herds, though, if your herd to grow in size, so that you can have a surplus, you have to keep them moving unless you're going to foster them. And there's no evidence that step people follow their herd animals. Even up to Genghis Khan, he's described as as letting the herds out in the wintertime on the steppe. And so the, the yamnaya people had these horses that that made the herds larger. And in order to feed the herds, you had to keep them moving, because they ate up the grass in any one area. So just the fact that they became rich and animals sort of impelled them towards a way of life that kept the animals moving. So they would need everything up in a local area. I don't think it was a form of geographic determinism by the way, I'd see it's just the way there's, in the steps before yamnaya came, everybody lived in the river valleys, and it's sort of like in the United States, the Missouri River Valley going through the plains. All of the agricultural towns were in the Missouri River Valley, not out on the High Plains, because that was the only place you could grow corn. The same way in the Eurasian steppes, there were these large river valleys, the Volga that Yepper, the dawn that cut down through the steps from north to south and flow into the Black and Caspian Seas. And it's in those river valleys that the whole Neolithic population before yamnaya. Everybody lived in the river valleys. That was the place where you had shelter from winter winds. There were deer, there was fish, there was firewood, there was there was a resources in the river valleys, but they're very narrow. And so the population gets to a certain size. And you have to start looking at the grasslands in between. And nobody was exploiting that, until yamnaya. And then yamnaya figured out a way just to keep moving, move the animals across those pastures and so that what had been wild OpenStep became a pasture that belonged to somebody. And you had to invent the entire economic and political system for managing resources that previously hadn't belonged to anybody. But now, a lot of different emerging yamnaya People are beginning to claim these places. So I think that's part of the emergence of Yamnaya too. The ability to manage group migrations through each other's territories without breaking out into warfare.
I'm gonna, I'm gonna I'm gonna move to now I'm gonna move to linguistics, language. And, you know, so I want to talk about the Heggarty paper. And I'm just gonna give a little context here. So, over the last 20 years, there's been 20 years, I don't know, more than 20 years. So there have been a group of linguists and evolutionary biologists that have come together, they've used, you know, let me just say Bayesian phylogenetic methods, like, I've used these methods for genetics, myself, it's part of my training, these are very, very tried and true tested methods. So basically, the way that these things work, as you have a bunch of models, you have a bunch of parameters, you run a bunch of simulations, they can't be exhaustive, because you don't have billions of years. But they have ways to sample the parameter space, try to, you know, get the best highest probability distributions. And so it's kind of like a formal way of testing your hypotheses, and figuring out what is the most probable given your data. And so they've been doing this with Indo European languages. In particular, going back, you know, the first papers that made the media, the New York Times date back 20 years. And they showed, for example, that the Indo European languages are from Anatolia, and the date to 10,000 years. I mean, this is like the earlier ones, which, okay, it probably turned out to be wrong. So there's a new one out and they've used some new methods. The paper isn't Science called “Language trees with samples, ancestors support a hybrid model for the origin of new European languages’. first author's Paul Heggarty, there are some DNA type people, a lot of people that are on DNA papers, like Wolfgang Haak, Johannes Krause, that are on it. So you know, they have some legit people there that are outside of the computational linguistics. People have been asking me what I think of the paper. Like, I just wanted to preface the BEAST, the methods that they use, I've used these methods with genetic data. They're great for genetic data. But I have some, the results always seem really weird for linguistic data. That's what I'm gonna say. And now I'm gonna let David comment on it.
Well, I think that's I think that's a legitimate comment. They seem weird for linguistic data. I was at a Indo European Conference at UCLA last November, UCLA has an annual Indo European conference, and I was a speaker there last November, and Russell Gray was a speaker there. And so I heard an hour long presentation of this New Science paper last November and, and I got to also spend two days listening to the discussions of the linguist who were there, quite a variety of indo European linguists came to the conference, I didn't hear anybody who was convinced by the dating, they were all impressed by the methodology. But they thought that it yielded really strange dates for the origins of the Indo European languages and for the splits between the different branches, the daughter branches, in Indo European, I thought the same thing. One of the things that you have to do in order to accept their chronology is to discard what's called linguistic paleontology, which they do explicitly in their supplementary materials. And they say that you can't attach, you can't find the meaning of any reconstructed word in any proto Indo European. Now, since I was a graduate student, one of the things that attracted me to this subject and I'm an archaeologist, I'm not a geneticists, I'm not a linguist. But one of the things that attracted me to this subject matter is the reconstruction of proto Indo European with its meanings, which give you a window, a veritable window, into the minds, conceptions and beliefs of an entirely prehistoric society, otherwise known only through archaeology because they had no writing. And so their language has been reconstructed through the comparative method. And I thought, wow, here's here's this word list. It's mainly the words that I'm interested in. That tells me what these people were talking about, and then included things like wheeled vehicles, which didn't exist before 3500 BCE. So proto indo European had to be dated after 3500 BCE, because they had a rich vocabulary for wheeled vehicles, at least a semantic field of at least five terms probably more like eight and most linguist accept that you can take the proto Indo European, root kʷékʷlos, and and say that meant wheel vehicle it means it's daughters, the daughters of that word, mean wheel or wheel vehicle in the daughter language. It’s the same with axle and a list of other words referring to wheeled vehicles. But in the Heggarty paper, they say you can't do that, that that you will never know what the meaning of a reconstructed Indo European word was, other than something very vague, like ‘the thing that turns’ But most linguists don't buy that. And all of the references they gave to critics of linguistic paleontology, all of the references were from articles that are more than 25 years old. They didn't, I think there was one reference to somebody who was in this century. And, and, for instance, the word kʷékʷlos has a Reduplicated part, the K is duplicated, in kʷékʷlos, is duplicated. And it's sort of like it for you took the verb, turn, the turning thing, and you wanted to make a word for wheel out of it. And instead of saying the turner, or you said, the ‘turnter’ and you duplicated that T, that's a very specific thing. All of the roots that are in daughter languages have that little trick in them and that's not going to be independently invented by the daughters after they've broken up without any contact with each other. And that's what he's proposing happened with kʷékʷlos. It's, it's I just don't see how such a rich body of evidence can be discarded. And if you use the wheel vehicle vocabulary in the Indo European it dates at least the late phase of proto indo European to after 3500 BCE, the Anatolian languages which split off in the earliest split, that split might have happened before wheel vehicles were invented because the Anatolian languages don't have that vocabulary. There's a recent paper by Don Ringe, also that's talking about computational phylogenetic linguistics, and he was one of the first people to try to do that. And he pointed out that the results, particularly the ages, the numbers are not robust. They have very large uncertainty margins on and with a very small change in methodology, you can produce dramatic changes in the ages. And consequently, the results are not, you can't set them in stone. So I have a hard time accepting the new paper. There's a there's a new response that is just coming out on the internet now by Alexei Kassian, who's also a computational phylogenetic linguist. And he he's already written a response to it. And he's quite critical. So I don't see it as a as a definitive statement by any means.
Yeah, let me let me say a couple of things about it. First of all, I want to mention, I don't know what you think about this book, but “The Indo-European Controversy: Facts and Fallacies in Historical Linguistics” by Asya Pereltsvaig and Martin Lewis, they wrote, me basically it's a book length. I don't want to say jeremiad but a little bit against computational linguistics. And basically the use of lexicon. So when you put certain types of data in your output in these sorts of methods, which are very great, depends on the data. And so let me just make an explicit for the listener, the viewer out there, genetics, is constrained by Mendel's laws to evolve with mutation and drift, and all these other things, and also the inheritance in very, very specific ways. And so when you use discrete genetic data, you can make phylogenetic inferences that are pretty good, I think, partly because it's a very constrained system, obviously, with lexicon and cultural evolution is not quite like that. And so I think you're naturally going to get bigger intervals because it's a much more plastic malleable system. Okay, that's one thing that I'm going to put out there. And I'm not saying garbage in, garbage out. But I'm kind of saying that I don't want to say garbage because lexicons not garbage. That's real data. But you know, there are limitations there. The second thing is, I want to just like, I'm not a linguist, like you, obviously, but there's certain things that in their tree, if you look at the divergence just to be explicit. The median estimate for the start of Indo European divergence is more than 5000 BC, which is rather on the early side. But another thing is one of the deepest divergences is with Tocharian. And this jumps out at me, because I don't know what you think. But with the Afanasievo culture, we know when they arrived in the Altai, they are probably the most likely candidate for the ancestors with the Tocharians. And they arrived not you know, 5000 BC. So what's going on with that, right like just little things like that jump out.
Yeah, so I agree completely on the subject of Tocharian. Yeah, they have Tocharian splitting off at 5000 BCE. And there's nothing happening in the Altai or anywhere out there at 5000 BC they're all hunters and gatherers. And nothing new is introduced at that at that point. So there was no archaeology to go along with that date. And generally throughout the paper, they ignore archaeology. They just ignore it, there's no archaeological explanation for how and when the splits happened. And conversely, the biggest demographic event in the last 5000 years in a Eurasian genetic and demographic history was the expansion of steppe ancestry around 3000 BC between 3000-2000 BC and that's just a fact. And, according to their version of things, the Indo European languages were already completely diversified by them, I mean, Baltic. Balto Slavic had split off from the ancestor of Germanic, Celtic, and Italic by 4500 BC 1000 years before the expansion of steppe ancestry. So in their system, although they call it a hybrid hypothesis, it doesn't really include the Yamnaya expansion at all everything happens before the Yamnaya expansion and therefore, the Yamnaya expansion which had this big demographic event had no effect linguistically. So, the linguistic changes that they do have are not correlated with any archaeological phenomenon. And the archaeological and genetic phenomena that we do have indicating a big change are supposedly happened without any linguistic effect and that disassociation is really difficult for me to accept.
All right, so let's move to Southern Arc paper “The genetic history of the Southern Arc: A bridge between West Asia and Europe” This came out last summer the summer before this summer. So you have a I know you went through supplements you got a lot of thoughts on this, but I'm gonna read the conclusion. For the for the listener. This is by Iosif Lazaridis our friend Iosif Lazaridis, he’s a friend of mine, I know he's a friend of yours. And, uh, you know, obviously out of the Reich lab, “all ancient Indo European speakers can be traced back to the Yamnaya culture” you probably kind of agree with that. “Whose southward expansions into the southern arc left a trace in the DNA of the Bronze Age people of the region. However, the link connecting the proto Indo European speaking Yamnaya with the speakers of Anatolian languages, was in the highlands of West Asia, the ancestral region shared by both’”Well, let me describe really quickly the figure for the listener. So there's a figure it was basically shows the whole Black Sea region, you see the Caucasus, and the Kuban steppes off to the north of the Caucasus. And you see Armenia, proto indo Anatolians. And there is a movement north, into the pontic steppe between the Dnieper and the Volga and the Don region. And then there's reflux are like a migration out. So it's like multiple waves. And there's a really complicated way that they look at different streams of ancestry to figure out what came were in sequence. And I'm not going to try to verbally recapitulate it because it's like juggling a lot of things. I'm not gonna lie, I've read this paper multiple times. And it's really hard to like, remember, a lot of the earlier aspects of it. So can you talk a little bit about it, your take?
Yeah, so first, let's just pick up on that point you just made. You're by no means a unskilled or amateur reader. And you had a hard time comprehending what was in this paper. And I think that, you know, the big papers that have like 700 samples, or, or even 500 samples, or maybe even 300 samples are just too big for even sophisticated readers to comprehend everything that's being said, there's too many points being made over too many regions and too many time periods, with too many small exceptions to each one. And, and so I've found myself to be embarrassed, that papers that I'm a co author on made small points that I'd totally forgotten. And, you know, I read these papers, and but I had forgotten that the paper said that, and that's kind of what you're referring to this. There's just so much said in the southern arc papers, that I think it's too much, it's too much to consume. But one of the things that - you're pulling out the origin of the Indo European languages. There was a, there was a certain amount of conflation going on there there is there is movements of Caucasus ancestry into the steppe very early. But it doesn't account for much very early. So it's like, you know, 5%, of ancestry of a variety of hunter gatherers in the Dnieper valley in the Volga Valley. There's a little bit of Caucasus ancestry out there by you know, 6000 BC. And that's a different kind of that's probably Caucasus real hunter gatherers, and they're poorly documented, whoever it was, who if they're not sampled, genetically, whoever it was, who imparted that little bit of ancestry and then around when, when the first time we have a real population of southern farmers when I say Southern, I mean, south of the North Caucasus Ridge, which is this glaciated, permanently glaciated Ridge very difficult to get across. That goes between the Middle East essentially and the Eurasian steppes, and the first time farmers went over that ridge and settled to the North Caucasus slopes, facing the steppes was about 4500-4700 BC, and we have DNA from those people. And it's very much southern DNA, Caucasus DNA and not steppe DNA. And from then on, starting about 4500 BCE, that kind of ancestry leaks up into the steppes at a much higher rate. So that's, that's what you have to start looking at is that is that does that have something to do with the origins of proto indo European, that mixture of ancestries of the first Caucasus, farmers, there is a culture called Maykop that starts around 3800 BC, and they're different. I'm talking about the first farmers who are much simpler than Maykop. And during that period, there's a lot of evidence that there was a lot of back and forth - archaeological evidence, that there's a lot of back and forth movement and trade there. So it's conceivable that they shared a common language, you could put a, a homeland in a region that would include both, the steppes north of the Caucasus and these early farmers coming in into the steppes. And you can't really say whether it would be a Caucasus language that would be adopted by the steppe people or the steppe language that would be adopted by the Caucasus people based on DNA, or archeology, even it's it's difficult to say, my only guidance is that the languages that we know today and have known since ancient history in the Caucasus are not indo European languages, with the exception of Armenian. There, they're quite different Hurrian, Hattic, the Northwest Caucasian northeast Caucasian, Kartvelian these are distinctly non indo European languages. And so I would guess that the first farmers who went over the North Caucasus in 4500 BC, probably spoke a language that wasn't an ancestor of indo-european, it might have been a substrate of proto indo European and affected the form of proto indo European but, but not the actual ancestor of proto indo European. And I think that Iosif Lazaridis thinks that it might have been proto indo European, that's where we differ it's not a huge difference. And it's going to have to be solved by much, much better genetic sampling and archaeology. In theory. Yeah.
Well, I mean, so let me I want to, I want to, you mentioned the Maykop, I want to give a little context for the, for the listener, you know, this period before 3000 BC, 3100 BC, you know, we talk about history, history exists, then we have pre history, obviously, it overlaps depending on where you're talking about. The Maykop people were part of this trade network that was really, really humming, pre historically, between 3100 and like, let's say 4000. And they were the northern end of this network that included the Urak civilization, which was actually a pretty big deal. We don't have any writing from the periods. Well, we don't know, politically, socially what was going on. But it clearly expanded into what we call today, Mesopotamia. And they're, the towns in places like in Syria, in parts of Anatolia are replica copies of the Urak civilization. And then there was a massive, massive collapse, and that eventually out of that, over time, evolved, what we call the Sumerian civilization or the Sumerians might have been intrusive, we don't know we don't know. But all of a sudden writing shows up. But writing that we can decrypt it we can read and like the names there Urak, the city itself, Epic of Gilgamesh is from this period. But this is actually in the wake of this massive collapse. The massive collapse also tends to correlate with what happened in Europe during the end of the Neolithic, around 3000 BC. So there was there was a massive, massive disruption around 3000 BCE in large parts of western Eurasia. And I'm not saying that this is like, you know, the flood or the collapse of like the end of paradise or whatever we want to say. But I do think some of the myths because we have myths from the Bronze Age that are not that much further on, and they're talking about, you know, great empires and cities. I suspect that they are recollections of something real during the Urak civilization. And so there was a whole world before the Indo Europeans and in my conversation with JP Mallory, actually a couple of years ago, around the same time I talked to you. One thing that he said to me being an archaeologist is, you know, one of the reasons we talked about graves with the Indo Europeans all the time, is there wasn't much going on in the early period of their expansion. You know, we had these massive megaliths civilizations, we had you know, the Cucuteni–Trypillia, the big villages in Romania and Moldova. And, you know, these, these nomads battleaxe people show up, and you know, they're kind of like reappropriating these megaliths in some way. So, you know, people like to talk about how all these great indo Europeans came and they came and they conquered and all that stuff. But there was a lot that happened before. That kind of set, I think, the terms for the world that they're expanding into, and I think we need to keep that in mind. So speaking of that world, I want to talk about Corded Ware I want to talk about Globular Amphora there's a new paper, I don't think it actually it's a preprint the Stone Age Eurasia preprint. I'll put a link to it. Kristian Kristiansen on it, along with 2700 other people No, sorry. I don't - I don't know what to say about some of these preprints. Because, you know, there's like one author, there's like three authors I know. And then like a village, you know, I don't know if the modern samples are from the authors themselves. There's enough individuals. But this preprint talks about Globular Amphora and Corded Ware and how that's the Neolithic ancestry. So there is as part of the Southern Arc paper, but also it seems to be expanding this idea that the Indo European expansion, the Yamnaya expansion, had some internal structure where perhaps the Armenians, I saw a recent ancient DNA paper about the Illyrians, the Albanian region, and maybe the Greeks that do not have and also the Afanasievo, obviously, in the Altai, so maybe the proto Tocharians do not have the Neolithic farmer ancestry of the globular amphora, whereas almost all the other indo Europeans like in Europe, and then obviously, Indo Iranians have the globular amphora ancestry. So the corded ware is like one branch, and then the other branch are other other offshoots of the yamnaya. What do you think about this model?
Yeah, I think that yamnaya is, is clearly the ancestor of almost everything with the exception of the Anatolian languages, which we're still not sure how they ended up in Anatolia. And there's a debate about that. So if we just set those aside, and we talk about the origin of what's commonly called core proto indo European or nuclear proto indo European, or I call it late proto indo European, that's yamnaya is the root of all other all existing indo European languages. And I think what the DNA shows, which models onto what you would expect from linguistics, is that there's an initial fairly massive migration into southeastern Europe as far west as the Tisza River, which seems to solidify and stop and that's a that's a, that's an ecological boundary. On the west side of the on the east side of the Tisza River is the Alföld the big plain, a very steppe like region. And on the west side is broken uplands, it's it's a really different topography. So they stop at the Tisza River. On the west, they go as far as the Altai Mountains in Mongolia, where they appear as the Afanasievo culture. And all of this happens that 5000 kilometers across the heart of Eurasia, huge migration, changing the demography within all of those regions. Between about 3100-2900 BC it's a very rapid move. And then a mixed population becomes Corded Ware that has 70% Yamnaya ancestry and then has globular amphora ancestry and maybe a few others and corded ware actually did besides covering most of central and northern Europe. A corded ware off shoot Fatyanovo actually did a counter movement. They were started in the Baltic and went back through the Russian forrest back towards the east, introducing a cattle pastoralism to what had been hunter gatherers in the Russian forests. That movement went back into the steppes, carrying corded ware ancestry with it. And then that mixed Corded Ware ancestry ultimately became - showed up in in South Asia. And now the population that stayed behind in the steppes when the migration to the west happened, turned into late yamnaya and Catacomb. They did not have the Corded Ware ancestry. And a group of them according to the southern arc paper, this is one of the discoveries I think in the southern arc paper, a group of them moved south into what is today Armenia, and it's probably the origin of the Armenians around 2500 BC, which is just when archaeologically, you see the introduction of large kurgans with wheeled vehicles and horses underneath them. And people have always archeologists have always wondered, if this represented an intrusion of steppe people, we were not able to determine that before because we didn't have the DNA. Now we do have DNA, and it was an intrusion of steppe people. So it's very likely and given the relationship with twistedly, between Armenian, Greek and indo Iranian, it's very easy to put movement south into the Caucasus around 2500 BCE, connected to Sintashta, just up to the northeast, and to proto Greek off to the west. All of them sharing common ancestry, with sintashta, having more corded ware ancestry. And, and when the steppe people moved into what is today, Armenia, they carried with them the yamnaya Y chromosome, the Y haplogroup, z2103, which is typical of yamnaya. The only place that survives in any appreciable frequency today is Armenia, where it's very widespread and it's died out everywhere else. And that's a that's a tracer of this very ancient movement of people off the steppes into Armenia. And I think that it also tends to support what linguists had previously determined that was that there is a branching relationship between Armenian Greek and probably Indo-Iranian, that puts them all right there in that same stretch of the steppes around say 2500 BCE. It also solves some other problems. You know, there's the relationship between Balto Slavic and indo Iranian. And it's always seemed odd that linguists found this very close relationship in terms of linguistic structure between Balto Slavic and Indo Iranian given that they're so far apart in the modern world. But when this Fatyanovo late corded wear migration was happening from the Baltic back into the steppes to become Sintashta at around 2000 BC sintashta and the Fatyanovo people who came from the Baltic were at two ends of a dialect chain. And it totally explains the relationship between emerging into Iranian and emerging Balto Slavic. So there's a number of things about this steppe hypothesis that fit really well with little problems in linguistic relationships. And, and they're also supported by archaeology. I mean, the the movement south into Armenia around 2500 BC has been recognized for decades by archeologists is a really important change in the cultures of the Caucasus. But whether it was a migration, or just a local emulation of some step customs by local people was impossible to determine without DNA and the southern arc paper is the first paper that really supplied that DNA, but it's such a big paper that that discoveries kind of muffled in the rest of all of the other things that were discovered there.
So so just just to be clear, Do you think that the Greeks, the proto Greeks, were not part of the corded ware expansion? Because I know there were Yamnaya that were in, you know, the Hungarian steppe area and also in like, the lower Danube and stuff like that. Do you think that the proto Greeks and the proto Illyrians might have been this earlier wave?
You know, proto Greek is hard to figure out. Greek itself, It's beginning to be clear when that arrived in the Aegean and in Greece relatively late, there's not a lot of steppe ancestry, if any in the Aegean area before the Middle Bronze Age, there's not in the early Bronze Age. And so it doesn't look like people have steppe ancestry got into the Aegean before about 2100-2200 BC, which is the same time that the DOM2 horses spread everywhere. And with chariotry perhaps. So they might have been introducing chariots from the steppes through the Carpathians. There are tell sites that have a lot of horse bones in western Romania, Eastern Hungary. and they have cheekpieces likes Sintashta cheekpieces. So, there may have been proto Greeks involved in the transfer of chariot technology from the steppes down into the Balkans. But by 2000 BC, they were they were in Greece, I do think there was a, you know, there was a really interesting border, we talk about expansion from the steppes, but it really had limits. You know, the initial expansion stopped in the west at the Tisza river. And beyond that, you had this much more admixed population that became corded ware and it's a much more variable population genetically. And south of that to you have to think about South of that. There was also a border south of that, that sort of ran through Albania and North Macedonia, Bulgaria, and south of that, you don't see steppe ancestry for another 1000 years, it just stayed stuck from 3000 to 2000 BCE. And somewhere along in there is where I think proto Greek was emerging. I think the medium problem helps to solve the proto-Greek problem, because it pulls it towards the steppes. Because it looks like the Armenian entered the Caucasus from the north, around 2500 BCE. It's closely related to Greek and so Greek must have been out there to the west of it somewhere
Alright, so I, I haven't just in my notes, so I do want to ask this question. Neither of us are linguists, but you know, you've collaborated with and been around linguists forever. I have talked to Classicist and other people who have told me Look, when you look at ancient Greek, when you look at Sanskrit, when you look at these languages, they just look way more diverged, then languages that have been separated for a couple of 1000 years. So for example, you know, the Romance languages have been separated for I don't know, like they've been evolving for like, 1000-1500 years, they're quite recognizable to each other. And, you know, I don't know if Sanskrit, Greek, we have them pretty early. We have Hittite, obviously, you know, some of these languages are pretty ancient. We have a little bit of the Mitanni, you know, some of those like gods and stuff like that. So what's what's going on here? What do you say to them? Because they want to, they want to say like, look, this is just like too much difference to be explained by some expansion. 3300-3500 years ago?
Yeah, it wasn't 3500… though I mean, it depends on which expansion you're talking about. I
Sorry I meant BC So yeah, that makes -
Yeah so the expansion. Yeah. So that's 5000 years ago. And I agree that, you know, the Romance languages have had 1000 1500 years to differentiate. And they're, they're very recognizably part of the same clade, given another 1500 or 1000 years, and then give it another 1500 or 1000 years, and let's see what happens. And that's, that's really the time depth that that we're dealing with, I think we have enough time for these changes to happen. The one that's really not calibrated? Well, because we don't really know when it happened, or how is the separation of Anatolian which was- it appears to retain archaisms that were lost in all of the other Indo European languages.
Well so let me ask you about Anatolian. Because I saw I saw a map of distribution of these Anatolian languages like Luwian , and and Palaic, and all these things, they're more shifted to the West in Anatolia, is that correct? Because the Hattian language is more to the center East which is not indo European, perhaps it's related to Hurrian, I don't know, but it's definitely not a European. And so this to me suggests there's an old model of the Anatolian languages coming in through the Balkans. I don't know. But in any case, Can you just speak to that a little bit?
You're talking about the geographic distribution of the Anatolian languages, it's really hard to know what the geographic distribution was in the very beginning. And you know, say, going back to 1900 BCE, when you begin to see Hittite names mentioned in that Assyrian merchants colony at Kültepe, on the Halys River and that's in Central Anatolia. But most of the linguists, I've talked to, for instance, at the UCLA conference last November, were of the opinion that the Anatolian indo European speakers were intrusive in Anatolia that they did. They didn't belong there that they're surrounded by people who were autochthonous and spoke Hattic. They spoke. This is another language we don't really know, except by a few names Kaska, which was north of the Hattic speakers on the on the south coast of the Black Sea. And they were the arch enemies of the Hatti speakers. And they don't seem to have been indo European either. They may have ultimately knocked off the Hittite Empire later on. You have the Hurrian speakers who, who are distributed in the same geographic area as the Kura–Araxes culture archaeologically around 3000 BC. And then you have all of these Caucasian languages Northwest northeast and Kartvelian in South Caucasian. There's not a lot of room there except in western Anatolia for indo European languages to be spoken. But I'm not sure they were originally spoken there either, you know, when you could- Palaic was spoken in the north on the Black Sea. And what's it doing up there? You know, maybe they came in from the Balkans, I don't know. Hittite is spoken in central Anatolian Luwian seems to have been originally spoken south of Hittite. So there might be a sort of a North South Line of indo European languages extending maybe from the south coast up to the north coast of the Anatolian Peninsula. I'm not sure it's it's difficult to map that.
There are still mysteries in the world, I guess. I mean, we still haven't we still haven't found steppe ancestry in these indo European Anatolians yet, correct?
No, we have not. Yeah.
Okay. So I mean, that's, I mean, that's, like, there's things that can, there's more than can be dropped in our philosophy at this point. Well, someday, maybe we'll figure it out. I want to ask you, and I know we've been talking for a while. But I just did a couple other things I want to ask you about because all right, in your notes to me, as we were talking, you have some strong opinions about the origin of Corded Ware and Yamnaya. And the arguments that are happening online. Look, I'm gonna be honest with you, I don't really understand how some people get so exorcised by some of these. Look, I'm super interested. But some of the stuff online is out of control. I don't really - I don't really get it. So I'm just gonna be honest about that. But I know that there's a lot of passions. So you both you and Kristian Kristiansen seem to be of the opinion that look, we should just say that these earliest steppe people in Northern Europe, they're basically Yamnaya or very recent. And there are other people that have a model. I think like Eurogenes, David at Eurogenes, for example. But there's others. That may be the corded ware are a sister group that has some admixture from some Eastern European hunter gatherers, genetically. We also know that Y chromosome and corded ware these early corded ware just for listeners out there, you know, Eastern Poland, Belarus, that area, South Baltic. Let's say about 5000 years ago, these people have R1a where as the Yamnaya had an exotic branch of R1b that's mostly in Armenia now. Okay, so you know, in your notes, you have a lot of comments about this. Just talk to me about the thing what your opinion is?
Yeah, so I'm one of them. I am interested in, as you are, in the passion that attaches to this argument, and I'm not sure what the source of it is. It seems to me like there is a strong resistance to having indo European origins be in the steppes and having and particularly having it be steppe nomads. And this may be because steppe nomads have been used throughout history as a representation of cruel and brutal barbarians like the Dothraki in the Game of Thrones, you know, and who are an absurd imitation of nomads, but I'm not - maybe that's it that you don't want to trace your linguistic ancestry to to nomads, but that would be a really kind of ridiculous reason to to make these very. I think they're the arguments about this don't have much validity. That number one Corded Ware is has 60 70% depending on the individual, you look at the steppe ancestry, and the suggestion was that maybe part some minority of Corded Ware individuals - a minority have a another form of ancestry that's maybe from the Baltic, but it could also be from Ukraine Neolithic, and what they're looking at is an excess of EHG in a few samples in a minority of corded ware individuals. And then there they use that minority to say, well, all of Corded Ware is maybe not inherited from Yamnaya doesn't have direct Yamnaya ancestry, maybe there was no Yamnaya migration into Central Europe. It was just parallel processes and siblings, as you say. I think the evidence shows that Yamnaya is earlier than Corded Ware number one, there's very good radiocarbon data that show the earliest yamnaya dates are late fourth millennium. The earliest corded are dates are early fourth millennium and late Yamnay ones are late forth millennia. 3300 BC opposed to 2900 BC. And so first Yamnaya is earliest it could have been the parent of Corded Ware. Corded Ware has 60-70% yamnaya ancestry. There's IBD, that hasn't been published yet. That shows that yamnaya People were the direct ancestors of corded ware people, and also the finally the excess of EHG that's talked about this is discussed in another lost section of two or three paragraphs in the southern arc paper, where Iosif Lazaridis talks about this specifically and says this excess of EHG ancestry is easily within the variation of yamnaya and could easily have been delivered from directly from yamnaya ancestry, there's no reason to invoke a ghost population from the forest steppe, which has been picked up in the Haggerty paper. He has completely bought the idea that there was a ghost population in the forest steppe that delivered much of this ancestry to corded ware and I'm with Kristian Kristiansen that we should just admit that corded ware has primarily young nya ancestry gets variable across corded ware. But there are some almost pure yamnaya individuals all the way up in Latvia, they almost pure Yamnaya individuals, all over the range of corded ware except for Switzerland. So I think it's if you just look at the data, it's pretty clear that accorded were derives genetically, largely from yamnaya. There's one there's one other argument in the horse domestication paper by Librado. They said that the Corded Ware horses are local North European horses, and if Yamnaya had rode into central and northern Europe, they should have wrote down on steppe horses. So you should see step horse DNA in corded ware horses and you don't see that. Well all of their Corded Ware horses were from one site up in the mountains of Germany, not a very good place for horses, and reanalysis of their data, in a paper Meyer at all out of the Riech lab, has shown it's published in the Cell has shown that they get much better fits to Libradro et al.’s data, than Librado et al. did themselves using a different algorithm. In the best fitting model shows about 20% steppe ancestry in these same corded ware horses from the mountainside in Germany. So a few put that together with the evidence for riding pathologies in yamnaya individuals, then I think you can make a case that horseback riding was involved in the spread of yamnaya ancestry from the steppes up into Corded Ware in Central and Northern Europe.
Yeah, I mean, the whole domestic animal, you know, inheritance and admixture patterns are kind of strange. I'm gonna get to that. I wanted to talk about that real quick. But I want to say You said something about IBD - identity by descent. And I know, I know about this from from, I think Nick Patterson told me about this work a while ago. And so that basically means there are near relatives that you guys are finding across these archaeological cultures. So one thing that we do is we look at admixture percentages. And we create these population graphs, et cetera, et cetera. What you guys are finding with ancient DNA and the low coverage IBD analyses on relatives, relatives across the steppe relatives across cultures, you're finding kinship networks, right?
Yes, exactly. Yeah, I'd be the, those. The DNA itself analyses of the autosomal DNA can give you can show if you're a first degree a second degree or a third degree relative and that goes out to grandparents or maybe Great, great. then parents and cousins, and then beyond that - first cousins, and then beyond that range of relationships, you can't really see it using standard genetic methods. But using IBD, you can. And then then you can say these people are relatives. They share an ancestor that's not a father or a grandfather, but they share an ancestor that's three or four generations farther back. And, but they're still relatives. And that's an important thing to be able to say. And we've, we've seen now shared IBD segments between individuals that are buried in and can you believe this individuals that are buried in Slovakia, a Yamnaya individual in Slovakia, and a Yamnaya individual and almost in Mongolia, and the Altai share a common ancestor that's about five generations back. And they've separated by 5000 kilometers, it's this huge distance, and yet they share IBD. So they definitely had a common ancestor and theyre relatives.
Yeah so on the domestication part. One thing I want to bring out, I think we've talked about this before, but if we haven't, I'll bring it up. Again, Anders Bergström’s paper from a couple of years ago about dogs. They had they had some of the dogs from your sample. And I want to close up this conversation with ‘the dogs of war’ and all that stuff. So they have some examples from your dogs. And they didn't find very much steppe - I mean, The dogs in Europe, the modern dogs, in general, are disproportionately European, these European Anatolian dogs, and also a little bit of Baltic. So they're a synthesis of Baltic and Anatolian. It was also a steppe dog. Steppe dogs are distinct those are your samples that you and your wife got, and the one place in the world that they find an appreciable amount of steppe dog ancestry now, though, outside of the steppe, is in China. And so that to me is suggesting. I mean, what was going on with indo Europeans of China? We haven't talked about this. You probably know Christopher Beckwith’s work. There are weird things in the Ordos that for the listeners, like there's a loop the Ornos plane, you know, early Chinese civilization, we know what comes out of Henan we know the Shang Dynasty and all this stuff. They have these light war chariots, those light war chests, we know where they got it from, they got it from my forefathers, like, let's be, let's be real about it, you know, I was like, what did they have? Did they like, was it through the internet? No, they were like, there were people there that were, you know, probably teaching them or mercenaries or what? And so do you have any opinions of contacts between? We have genes from Mongolia, there were indo Iranians there Iranians, you know, that those fractions decreased later, with a resurgence of, you know, Mongolic Tungusic ancestry. So there was a lot of stuff going on in the in the east with indo Europeans - I mean, Tolcharians are pretty famous because they're so exotic. But do you have anything to say about that? Like any thoughts?
Well, there's right at the beginning in the initial expansion that brought a yamnaya people out to the Altai were the Afanasievo culture. There is an Afanasievo grave that we have DNA from that's in central Mongolia, that's has IBD relationships with a Afanasievo individual back in the Altai and this guy is way out there to the east. From regular Afanasievo - he's well beyond the Afanasievo culture area, but it's an isolated migration. It's, it probably didn't result in any demographic change in the area where he went, but if there's one, there's more, and there's a lot of DNA coming out of later graves in the Tarim Basin, showing steppe ancestry mixtures. So yeah, I think that people with steppe ancestry and steppe dogs, probably came right up to the borders of Chinese civilization. And maybe steppe dogs were more useful there. I can see how in Europe were after the Corded Ware period and Bell Beaker and later, everybody settled down even with people with steppe ancestry became sedentary. They didn't, they were not able to maintain a mobile lifestyle in forested Europe, it's just better suited to agriculture. So this very mobile economy that was introduced with corded ware settled down pretty rapidly and that's when they switched back to local European dogs who maybe were better suited to being on a farm. Then the steppe dogs were. And the steppe dogs were maybe better, more useful out on the northwestern frontiers of China. And so they were maintained there.
Yeah, yeah, no, there's there's so many so many paths, we can go down. So I, you know, I've had you for a while. So like, let's let's talk about a couple of years ago, you know, you have this book tentatively titled ‘dogs of war.’ I know that, you know, you're working on it. And you know, there's no like, end date, I guess. But you know, like, tell us about what's going on with that. Because like people want to know inquiring minds.
Yeah, So I'm still working on it, I've got a couple of chapters written that I can write without knowing - there's a big Yamnaya DNA paper pending from the Riech lab. And obviously, I couldn't write that book until I knew what that paper was going to say. And, and it's taken a while, but it's, it's coming along. So there there is a major progress has been done. And I think that we might see a paper, you know, sometime maybe before Christmas, I'm hopeful. I've said that before, but um,
can you? Can you tell me if the paper is shorter? Is it more digestible than the southern arc paper?
Yes, yes, I don't think it will have to be broken into three parts. So, yeah, we're trying to do that. I think there is enough self awareness among this group of authors that, that the really big ones are hard to digest. And consequently, people don't really refer to them, you know - I mean, there's, obviously they refer to them to a certain extent, but it's easier to refer to them if the individual discoveries are separated from each other. So I think this one there's going to be there is going to be two papers. But the biggest one is still not going to be as big as the southern arc.
Thank you, because that'll be easier. So - I want to ask you this, because like, I thought about this for a while, and I don't know what to think about it. You know, I talked to Alice Evans. She's a economic historian, about patriarchy, patrilineal societies, and you know, obviously, Eurasian nomads are generally patrilineal. We got all these Y chromosomes. So, you know, you talked about R1b - there's the exotic branch. I mean, I will say it's not really exotic. It's just the Old Branch associated with Yamnaya. There's another R1b, that's really common in Western Europe. There's R1a there's the Western type of R1a that's, you know, common in Slavs and has a branch in Scandinavia, with the Battlaxepeople. And then there's my you know, my family's branch R1a z93 we have all these Y chromosomes that are just exploding as star phylogenys . Just demographic expansion. What do you think about why you see this with indo Europeans and nomads? Like do you have a hypothesis? I know you're, you know, empirical scientists, archaeologists, but theoretically, like what's going on here? Because you don't see this in the Middle East. You don't see this in China until relatively recently, historically, you know, but on the steppe, you see these like, and then replacement that you also see it in even Germany with I1, I1 shows up 1800 BC, and now it's the dominant one in Scandinavia.
Okay, so I think the important thing is the is this up this series of replacements, it's not just the expansion, it's the replacement that attracts people's attention. So there was a particular kind of R1b that spread with Yamnaya z2103. And that spread up to the Tisza river. And then when corded ware was formed, beyond that boundary, there were a variety of different Y- haplogroups in the beginning, according to paper by Papac et al. and and there's a new one by Hawk et al. And a book edited by Thomas Oleander. And in the beginning of corded ware there's actually quite a lot of variety in Y haplogroups, but they settle in late corded ware on R1a and I think that that represents this is why and then when Bell beaker expands out of corded ware the corded ware haplogroups are replaced by yet another L51. A different haplogroup, and so as Steppe ancestry expanded into Europe, it did so under the guise of a series of replacement Y haplogroups, and I think that what was happening, and this is my own theory. I haven't convinced everybody of this by a longshot. But I think that what was happening is that in the in the steppes when yamnaya was formed being buried under a Kurgan was reserved for an elite and the people who are building the Kurgans had different y groups. They were there but they're not documented because they weren't allowed to be buried under a Kurgan when they got to the edge of the expansion. They escaped from the hegemony of these R1bs. And the R1as did the same thing. They recreated the same system of hegemony for one male patrilineage. These are competing male patrilineages which is quite common among nomads. And then when the further expansion happened West, that was done by yet another competing male patrilineage that established the same thing. And it wasn't until you get to Únětice and the beginning of the classical Bronze Age in Central Europe that you really begin to get some diversity in Y haplogroups again, and that system finally falls apart. But during the initial expansion of the steppe ancestry, I think there were these competing male lineages who got buried under the kurgans or under the corded ware graves and the people who weren't the right people. I didn't get buried there. They were just excluded socially.
I see. I that's almost like, you're you're basically suggested there's just like an ascertainment bias in the Y chromosomes that we see.
Yes, exactly. I think that they were more diverse than what we see archaeologically. Yeah.
All right. Okay, so I've had you for a while. Closing thoughts. It's been a couple of years. It's got to be a couple of more years. I know. You know, David, you know, reading your book all those years ago, and you've been involved in this for so long now. All these papers are coming. It's an embarrassment of riches, right? It's like too much. It must be weird.
Who knew this was going to happen, when I started looking at Indo European language connections with archaeology when I was a graduate student in the 70s, it was not a popular thing to do. And I was sort of a fringe. I do think I was operating on the fringes there. I have the central concerns of archaeology. And now it's become a central concern. And so I'm kind of lucky that, that the advances in methodology have swung the whole field around to incorporate what I was doing. But it's amazing to me to see the sudden attention on a subject that was really avoided by archaeologists for a generation.
Yeah, I mean, I think I told you the story aboutmy former boss, Spencer Wells, I think it was the late 1990s, when he first started doing M 17 mutation an R1a. And I think he was doing a job talk at Oxford, I think it was at Oxford, or Cambridge, one of the two. And they asked like about, well, you know, how this spread, and he was like, oh, probably steppe nomads. And a bunch of archaeologists, I think got up. And we're like, you know, we don't believe in any of that anymore. Like, that's, that's very outmoded. And so, timing matters. That's all I gotta say.
It does. It's fairly interesting to be here now isn’t it? I mean, it's a it's just a fascinating field. It's hard to keep up with anymore.
Yeah, well, I really appreciate you just taking time out to talk and helping us keep up. And you know, I'll be reading the papers, and, you know, getting your wisdom and experience, I mean, all I can say is, I think, you know, the list of my listeners that myself, you know, we share your infectious enthusiasm. We're very excited. You know, science is hard. And a lot of times you're searching in the dark for data. And now the data is coming to us. And I think the thing that I would say is, it's on us now to interpret it and understand it, and figure out like, what our ancestors did, how it happened. We have the technology, we have this ancient DNA technology, we have the computation. Hopefully, we have time you have time now. And you know, I think one thing I would ask people is like, let's take the temperature down. There's a little harsh words that go back and forth sometimes. And it really is a little difficult for me to understand where that's coming from. Because ultimately, we're all in it for the same thing. We're heading for the truth. Right? And right, we're getting there. We're getting there. So just like, just be cool people, be cool. Read the papers, and let's have our disagreements civilly, you know, because ultimately, we have the same goal, even if we have different possible paths to get to that goal. That's what I would say.
That's absolutely true Razib I agree with everything you just said. Yeah, just be cool. And keep working. Yeah.
All right, guys. It was it was great conversation. I hope you guys enjoyed it. And I will see the rest of you online. And David same with you,
Okay. Thank you very much, Razib it was a great pleasure.
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