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Hey, everybody, welcome to this episode of Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning podcast. And today I'm going to be talking about the genetic and genetic history really of Anatolia between 10,000 BC and basically 1500 AD we're gonna go to the Turks. So start with the Neolithic. And go to the Turks actually start a little bit before the Neolithic. And it's going to be a lot of history, some archaeology, I don't know, too much archaeology of stuff I have I know some and, you know, genetics, thanks to a bunch of recent papers that came out of the Reich lab and also other stuff that's been published on Turkey and Anatolia over the last 10 years or so. There's a lot we know a lot I can say. So that's, I'm gonna try to do here. So, first, you know, we're gonna go with a periodization and a chronology. So I'm not going to really deviate too much from the chronology. So we'll start at the Neolithic - we’ll actually start at the end of the Paleolithic, I think they call it up the Epi Paleolithic or Mesolithic, depending on where you are, right after the Ice Age. So the last ice age ends 11,700 years ago. And so people are still hunter gatherers for a thousand years, maybe a little less. The earliest agriculture might be 11,000 BC might be 11,000 BC, you know, maybe a little after So there's this period after the ice age. It’s s the Holocene it’s warmed up. It's nice and fertile, and verdant. And it is. It is still hunter gatherer time - forger time, right. And still, some weird stuff is happening in the world that we just know about now. So the standard model for the emergence of agriculture was that, you know, people settled down, because they had agriculture, they discovered agriculture, it was such a superior, you know, way of life, et cetera, et cetera. And they had experimented with semi agricultural, semi domestication earlier. What has happened in the last couple of decades is things are in flux. The short of it is, it may be that agriculture emerged as a response to settled and sedentary lifestyle. So that means that there were hunter gatherer groups have started settling down into proto villages before they had agriculture and agriculture was a way that they could support their populations without being nomadic all the time. And larger populations. Agriculture is about, you know, rule of thumb, it was about like 10 times more productive per unit acre, for calorie, calorie wise event foraging. And so you can support a much larger population. But even before agriculture, there are things that are out there that look like they're by sedentary people's large numbers of people. So the Near East, especially southern Anatolia, northern Syria, the foothills, you know, of northern Mesopotamia, northern Iraq, you know, the Levant, the Fertile Crescent, all these areas, a lot of them were actually like, pretty warm and moist for a little while, right after the end of the ice age. So really, really high primary productivity maybe higher than today, probably higher than today, definitely higher than the Ice Age. And so, you know, these foragers, these hunter gatherers in the area had a bonanza temporarily and there was a site called Göbekli Tepe, if I'm not pronouncing it correctly, because it’s in Turkish, it's in the South. It's on the southeastern edge of Turkey on the edge of the plateau kind of overlooking, you know, Mesopotamia, but not in Mesopotamia. It's in Anatolia. And so this site is pretty cool. If you Google it, you will see that it's got these monumental pillars, limestone pillars, I think they're like 16 enclosures and like eight pillars per enclosure, and the pillars themselves and a lot of the stonework. They have very, very detailed depictions of animals. And they have some depictions of humans, but often they're headless. So that's weird. There's a lot of vultures being depicted, and also a lot of the animals that they hunted. So this work on the site started 11,500 BCE. This is before agriculture, okay. As we understand it, there is no agriculture at this time. So these people are foragers, they're hunter gatherers. Turns out they're Gazelle hunters, and they're creating this monumental megalithic - megalithic architecture. These are the first real megaliths that we have any evidence of. And so megaliths is like Stonehenge, Stonehenge is megalithic. This is serious stuff. And it's - Gobekli Tepe. He's not the only one. There's there's some other sites nearby and also further east. So it seems like a part of the cultural tradition of this region. And
when in the 60s archeologists first stumbled onto the site, they assumed it was Byzantine. So they assumed like 500 AD, right. So they assumed it was 12,000 years later then it was, and the reason they assumed that is it just looks too well done. It's too complicated its too fine. It's to quote unquote, civilized. So I'm bringing this up, for two reasons. One, we are reconsidering some of, you know, the truths that we've held about kind of like the progress of civilization, and kind of the arc of ascending up the ladder of complexity, right? It looks like some of these hunter gatherers were doing really, really complex things probably because they were not small, isolated, scattered tribes like the… like the Khoisan Bushman, but there were large groups of people that were living off extremely productive territory. Now, that territory in the historical epic, has always been occupied by farmers because they like productive territory, right? But their ancestors, who were there potentially, were benefiting from it as foragers as hunter gatherers. So who are these people? So I haven't said anything about Anatolia yet. And I should probably define it because these were on the southeastern edge of Anatolia, they were Anatolians, in all likelihood, and that's going to mean a lot more genetically and in a little while, but let's talk about the geography. Most of you know what Anatolia is also called Asia Minor. Western most Peninsula in Asia, the continent of Asia, the term Asia actually comes from Arzawa, I think, or Assuwa, the western most area of Anatolia during the Bronze Age, it’s in the Hittite record, right. And so that became all of Asia, eventually, just an etymological detail. So Anatolia, obviously Black Sea north, Mediterranean, well Aegean on the west, and then on the south, there's the Mediterranean going towards Cyprus, but the southeastern Southern, and southeastern edge of Anatolia is a little bit more difficult to pin, right. If you look at modern Turkey, that is basically the expansive definition of Anatolia. It's basically the highlands, north of the Fertile Crescent, and somewhere to the west of what is now western Iran. Definitely west of the Zagros Mountains. But this is a an expanded definition. Some people exclude much of what used to be the old Armenian Highlands, in eastern Turkey, and parts of Kurdistan from Anatolia. So you can say Anatolia is the North, the center, the West, the Southwest, and maybe part of the Center East, but the Far East and the southeast of Turkey, is not Anatolia, possibly, I don't go with that definition. Because it seems a little arbitrary to me. I think I'm gonna go with, I am gonna go with basically all of Turkey, the whole plateau area, and kind of arbitrarily just cut it off in the middle of the Armenian Highlands, because the Armenian Highlands really push a little east into Iran, they push north and then they like a lot of them aren't what is today, Eastern Turkey, obviously, because the Armenian Genocide in early 20th century, there are no Armenians that live there anymore. But there used to be Armenians that live there. Right. So there are the Eastern Armenian Highlands. So Mount Ararat in the east of Turkey on the border with Iran, or maybe Armenia, check the geography there. But that like let's define that as kind of eastern most. And then everything. Most of southern Turkey I'm counting as Anatolia, there's a little region that pushes southward along the Mediterranean coast. So that's pretty much Syria. But all the other stuff I'm counting is Anatolia, right geographically. So these people are Göbekli Tepe in is a site in southern Turkey. It's about a week's walk, I actually checked it - a week's walk east of Cilicia. For those who know what that is, it's week, a week's walk east of the city of Tarsus where Saul of Tarsus was born later to be called St. Paul. So who are these people? Why are they important? I
mean, I think they're a big deal, just because it's the first monumental architecture, which would recur, actually, you know, in human societies across the world, and especially in Europe during the Neolithic, and I'm gonna get into that. But they were not the first farmers. Probably the first farmers were probably descendants of people called the Natufians. The natufian culture extends from the Negev, north into, say, the border with the upper Euphrates River. So it's basically, you know, into what used to be the Islamic State in eastern Syria. And it looks like the Natufians are the first agriculturalists the first grain cultivator so wheat, barley, these sorts of things, probably in the foothills of the eastern Mediterranean, what is really greater Syria, and they probably started doing this, let's say like 11,000 BC, or maybe a little bit later, you know, 10,000 BC that area, right? You know, 1000 or two years after the Ice Age ended, and like the people in Göbekli Tepe the Anatolian farmers, you know, they were foragers before they were hunting Gazelle and other wild game like that. But soon after this, you know, development of agriculture, the practice spread north and spread east. It really, really kind of took over the Middle East, the Near East really quickly. And you have something called a pre pottery Neolithic, there's no pottery but you know, there's for several 1000 years, there's agriculture. So you know what, I'm not an expert in this. When I looked at the literature, it wasn't clear, actually, from the perspective of archaeologists. Whether this was the spread of natufian, or whether there were independent cultural adaptations or adoptions, I would say. And, you know, the people, the Zagros Mountains and modern day Kurdistan, basically, in western Iran, it looks like they actually might have domesticated sheep first, earlier than Natufians, and that practice spread westward, obviously. And it could be that in the Taurus Mountains and in southeastern Anatolia, that might be the first area that actually domesticated cattle occur. So I mean, obviously, cattle are more of a woodland forest creature, I think, you know, open pastures. And so, you know, there's much more of that in Anatolia at the time than there is in Syria or modern day Israel, that area or Mesopotamia. So even though the first farmers are natufian almost certainly, there were other things happening elsewhere. Now we're these descendants of people that have spread out of the Natufians zone and brought agriculture? Well, we now know that's not true. So ancient DNA - Iosif Lazaridis has a paper from 2016. Three major groups of farmers. Basically what ancient DNA is showing is the farmers of Anatolia were very genetically distinct from the farmers of Syria. Farmers of Syria descend from the natufians. The farmers of Anatolia descend from Anatolian foragers, so probably the type of people that you know constructed Göbekli Tepe, the farmers of the Zagros Mountains, western Iran are quite different. And genetically, they're very similar to the people in the caucuses. Perhaps they are part of a cline with the Caucasus hunter gatherers, or perhaps they're descended from caucuses, hunter gatherers, or perhaps caucuses, hunter gatherers are descended from people in western Iran in the Zagros whatever it is, often their genetic component is similar to caucuses, hunter gatherers, CHG is called CHG often, but you know, sometimes I call them Eastern farmers. And I think that's what I'm gonna do. Those people are genetically very distinct from Anatolians, and Syrians who themselves are distinct from each other. But if you look at a phylogenetic tree, these eastern farmers are quite different, much more different from the Westerners than the Westerners are from each other. In fact, if you look at pairwise FST, which is the proportion of variance that is between the groups not within the groups, Eastern farmers to western farmers is about point one, it's about the same as between Han Chinese and Northern Europeans today. So the people that were shifting to agriculture were very, very genetically distinct from each other during this early phase right after the end of the Ice Age, very early in the Holocene during the early Neolithic. So, okay.
That's basically saying that the spread of agriculture in the Near East was a function of cultural diffusion. It wasn't the movement of people. And there was no movement of pots at the time because of pre pottery Neolithic, but it was a movement of ideas, I think that the spread of agriculture was easy. And the Natufians didn't overwhelm everybody else. For two reasons. One, Natufians were still getting the hang, getting a hang of agriculture. So the comparative advantage that they had over their foraging neighbors was probably not that high. But the other issue is that all of the other foragers of the area had access to the same sort of cultural toolkit as the Natufians. This is the Near East, they have the same domestic animals, the same wild or potential domestic animals, that same wild animals in the area, many of the same grains in the area, etc, etc. So they probably did engage in some sort of semi domestication, in my opinion, earlier, probably during the late ice age. And so it was really easy to pick up the agricultural lifestyle, because they had already gone part of the way they're just like the Natufians. This is different elsewhere, where the cultural toolkit, the crops, everything, they're totally alien, they're imported. And they've been really perfected. Like, for example, the development of pots is a big deal, but presumably, the varieties of wheat and barley are getting better, etc, etc. So it was different elsewhere. And that's the second thing I'm going to get get to now. So in the early 2000s, there was a lot of argument whether the people in Europe who started farming, whether they were indigenous hunter gatherers, or, you know, descendants of Pleistocene Ice Age people, or whether they were from the Middle East, and the earliest genetic data indicated that most of the ancestry in Europe was probably not for the Middle East, and it was indigenous. So the argument was like, Well, you know, these are hunter gatherers and they learned agriculture and agricultural spread. So let's start spreading out like, like, like 7000 BC a little earlier, probably into Greece, last I remember. And, you know, it gets to Scandinavia by about like, you know, 4500, no not 4500 - 5500. So like 3500 BC, maybe 4000 at the earliest. So it takes like, you know, 3000 years to get across Europe. And these people make it all the way also to Eastern Europe. So, for example, the last Neolithic culture in Poland, before the arrival of indo Europeans corded ware are globular amphora. And they descend from these, you know, this like diaspora of sorts, right? But like, is it genetic? Or is it cultural? At the time comparing modern populations, it looked like modern Europeans were just two distinct from people in modern Anatolia for it to have been genetic. That was wrong. It turns out, there's a lot of migration. And so you can't use modern populations, ignorantly that's what I'm gonna say it I'm not saying pejoratively, but you can't use it ignorantly, with, with, you know, modern populations, you got to use ancient DNA, but ancient DNA found is like two things, two primary things. The people in ancient Anatolia were genetically quite different, although not totally different from modern Anatolia. So your reference population in Anatolia has shifted, right? The second issue is the people in Europe themselves have transformed. Okay, so, ancient farming, Europeans were totally overwhelmed in Northern Europe and somewhat overwhelmed in southern Europe, by indo Europeans from the steppe. And so when you're comparing modern Europeans to modern Middle Easterns, Middle Easterners, these are two populations that have both undergone radical transformations since the time period that you're actually trying to explore, okay, because you're trying to explore the Neolithic, as early as 10,000 years ago, but, you know, as late as 5000 years ago, but everything has changed since then. So obviously, the inference was made with modern populations didn't work. What do we know? Now, what we know now is that the early European farmers were Anatolians, okay? They're Anatolian farmers. The Anatolian farmers are directly descended from Anatolian - Anatolian foragers in Late Pleistocene. So early European farmers descend from Anatolian foragers, okay. And they're very distinct, the genetically distinct from the indigenous hunter gatherers.
Who just, it's like night and day, okay, so again, the genetic difference between the Anatolian farmers and the indigenous European hunter gatherers, is similar to again, Han Chinese to Northern European, right, it's point one around there, it's actually a little higher, because the comparisons that are being used often are Anatolian descendants of Anatolian farmers in Germany, with the local people. And they're already about 20%, Western hunter gatherer, which is the population in Europe that they're looking at. So as the Anatolian farmers expanded, they obviously did mix with the local people.
So even as early in the Balkans they’re mixing with Balkan people, so one push goes into Central Europe, they become the linear beaker or LBK. So they're not I don't think they're linear beaker, but they're LBK. The German is like Linearbandkeramische or something. I don't know what it is but so they become the LBK and the first farmers of Germany. And off the top of my head, they're about 75% or so. Anatolian farmer, okay. In the Mediterranean, you have a different group that eventually became the Cardium pottery culture. Cardium ware culture, and they moved from Anatolia to Greece, then it seems like they hop to Italy and from Italy, they have to southern France and southern Spain, Andalucia, Valencia, that area. So this looks like mostly a seaborne migration. I think that they were probably scouting ahead for fertile coastal areas. And so they're expanding across the Mediterranean takes about 1000 years max, I think to get from Anatolia to Spain. In Northern Europe, it's a little bit more difficult. And this is because you know, Jared Diamondest insight, you're going across latitudes, not just longitudes. So the climate is changing. So wheat and barley don't do nearly as well in the moist Northern European climates, as they do with the Mediterranean because Mediterranean climate is much more similar to the eastern Mediterranean, which is their crop, right. So southern Spain has a climate much more like Syria than Germany, or, you know, at the extreme case, Scandinavia. And so I think one reason that these these farmers demographically swept over the native people is that they had a very well adapted cultural toolkit that's not easy to just learn from. You don't just you know, you try to go be a farmer in a month and it's going to be hard. There's all sorts of things. Even if you don't want to do mechanization you want To just do subsistence, it's not that easy, right? You're going to end up supplementing by going to the supermarket and stuff because you're not going to be able to do at all. There's a lot of learning, there's a lot of wisdom, there's a lot of culturally embedded information. So I think that's what was happening. Now they do mix with the Native people, but the majority of the ancestry of these populations remains Anatolian farmer. So let's say about 3000 BCE, 5000 years ago, the population in Poland was mostly Anatolian farmer. The population in Sweden was mostly Anatolian farmer, the people that were building Stonehedge mostly Anatolian farmer, people in Spain Anatolian farmer everywhere Anatolian farmer, Sardinia Anatolian farmer, the whole European continent, really to the west of modern day Ukraine and Belarus was Anatolian farmer. So this was the empire of Anatolian farmers, and they were very genetically distinct from the Levantine farmers and the eastern farmers. Now in Anatolia, something different was going on. By the time we have Çatalhöyük, which is the world's biggest city for about 1000 years in South Central Turkey. You guys can Google it. I think most of you know what Çatalhöyük is. I mean, I'm probably gonna call it the first mega city in the history of the world. Jericho was the first city in modern day Israel-Palestine right. Jericho is the first city and it's the oldest continuous city, but it's probably the first city there might have been other first cities that, you know, we haven't discovered but, you know, probably Jericho is one of the first Çatalhöyük is a little later, but it's the biggest for 1000 years. Like it was about like 10,000 people maybe a little bit more. That's London's population in the year 1000 AD You know, obviously, London was bigger during the Roman period. And, you know, later on in the late medieval period, the point was, Çatalhöyük was a pretty big city over the course of human history, even though 10,000 Doesn't seem like that much to us. Okay. But 10,000 people, you're starting to get anonymity and probably a lot of the problems that you have with regular cities. Now, if you read about Çatalhöyük you'll see it's very anarchic. It doesn't even seem like they're really streets, all sorts of weird things. They're really trying to figure stuff out. It rose and it fell, and it collapsed. In 1000 years, I think this prefigures the rise and fall of civilizations, polities, a lot of new stuff is happening right in south central Turkey, South Central Anatolia at this time, but these people already at the beginning of Çatalhöyük so that's about like 9000 BCE, they're starting to be genetically distinct from the early European farmers from the early Anatolian farmers. And the way they're being genetically distinct is there is a lot of Eastern farmer migration, perhaps from the Caucasus as well, that's coming into this area. And reciprocally, Anatolian farmer ancestry is also going eastward, you know, into western Iran and whatnot. So the genetic distance that was point one is declining really fast. There's also some Levantine farmer ancestry that is going into Anatolia at this time from the south, and vice versa. So all these three Middle Eastern populations of you know, days of your of the early Neolithic are mixing, and they're creating a new kind of middle eastern population that's genetically distinct, and there's variation, but now it's more clinal. It's more gradual, and all the distances are smaller. By about 3000 BC you have a situation in Anatolia, what it's about roughly 40%, early Anatolian farmer, let's just call it Anatolian farmer, but 40%, Eastern Farmer. So this is from the Zagros , you know, western Iran Caucasus area, and then about 20% Levantine Farmer. And if you go to the Levant, you'll see other you'll see like the same sort of thing. In fact, the Levantine proportion crashes linearly from really long time. That's outside the purview of this talk. But you know, just want to mention that and of course, in Iran, you also see the increase of Anatolian and Levantine but in all of these areas, actually outside the Levant, because, you know, in the northern Levant is majority not Levantine, actually - But in Anatolia, and Iran, the local ancestry does still hold parity, is still substantial. So 40% of the ancestry in Anatolia, 3000 BC, is the same ancestry that's descended from the original foragers and the 60% are newcomers from other parts of the Middle East, right? And so what you see by the time you have Sumur, by the time you have writing is the Middle East has been reconfigured, people have mixed together and you have kind of this gradation and variation within the same sort of types in Europe. There's far less Eastern farmer or levant farmer there, okay. Some of the Levant people some of the natufian this post natufian did actually make it to Greece. There's a site a cave in southern Greece, where the 100% natufian type farmer very early on, but it looks like that didn't really take and they were overwhelmed by Anatolian farmers. Okay. And so when you go to Sardinia, where you have a lot of this Anatolian farmer ancestry, they look very different than Middle Easterners because they don't have very much Eastern farmer or levant ancestry. They look to a great extent except for later indo European and you know lesser extent Roman era stuff. They look a lot like the early European farmers and that population and like you know, 100%, whatever, does not exist anywhere else in the world in Anatolia, Anatolian farmer does not exist 100% That whole world is gone, right? The world of 3000 BC in Europe is gone. It was long gone in Anatolia by Anatolia, it was by 3000 BCE. Most of Europe had more of this, you know, pre pottery Neolithic Anatolian farmer, actually almost all of Europe, as I said, all of Europe, west of Russia, or west of Belarus, Russia, and the Ukraine had much more Anatolian farmer than Anatolia did itself, because Anatolia was at 40%. And most of Europe was between 60 and 80%. I think, going off the top of my head 60% in the north, because there was a resurgence of Western hunter gatherer and the South, I think it was 80%. Um, there are some areas of the South places like Sardinia, parts of Spain and Greece, where the fraction of Anatolian farmer was like really close to 100%. Early on anyway. So we have a situation 3000 BC, where the genetic characteristics of Anatolia are this way. They're 40/40/20. Anatolian farmer, Eastern farmer, and finally, Levantine farmer. Okay.
What happens afterwards? Well, it turns out that one of the things that the Reich lab in particular has discovered is that Anatolian was genetically very, very stable. Between about 1000 AD and 3000 BC 1000 ad is kind of like when the Turks start showing up. There's the Battle of Manzikert in 1071. I think it was like Romanos the fourth going off the top my head, but Emperor Romanos the fourth, I think that was when he was defeated, you know, someone can direct message me and correct me. I mean, Google it, I just not going to like, touch my keyboard right now. And so the interior of Anatolia has opened up to the Seljuk Turks, I think, specifically, Oghuz tribal Turks. But you know, for 4000 years - Yeah, 4000 years, there was actually like a lot of genetic stability. This 40/40/20 mix, was very, it was very, it was very, like dominant in the area. Now, there are other people. So if you read the Bible, you know, Saul of Tarsus, he's Jewish, so maybe he's more Levantine, I don't know. And you know, Greek language is spreading throughout Anatolia, but it looks like to be mostly a matter of cultural diffusion. That will not demographic diffusion. Those of you who will want to read about the Greeks read my Greek posts on substack. And I think I've discovered there that Anatolian Greeks in particular from certain areas are very, very distinct. From, quote, “Greek Greeks”, okay? But aside from that, there was Galatians, in the Bible, there Celts, there's all sorts of other random people that are coming into Anatolia, right. But it doesn't seem like they left a big impact. They left some but not a big impact, right. And we know that there are periods, there are some Slavic tribes that were settled in Anatolia. But again, they didn't seem to leave a big impact. So Anatolia is really, really stable genetically for these 3000 years. Another interesting fact is, you know, there's a lot of work on Roman Empire. And it turns out the cities in the western Mediterranean and particular Rome were genetically very different during the imperial period. So Juvenal, the poet Juvenal, you know, like to say that the waters of the Tiber have, like, you know, mixed in and been over overwhelmed by the Orontes, which is basically you know, it's in Syria. And even though there are a lot of a lot of Greek speakers in in Rome, most of those were probably, according to Juvenal, not Greece Greeks, but like Assyrians and other eastern Mediterranean, well, recent work with the Anatolian with the Anatolian data sets, it shows really clearly that a lot of these eastern Mediterranean Romans were Anatolian, right. So they're very different from Republican Romans, Republican era Roman. So you know, before Augustus Caesar before about zero AD, they're more like both people are like Italians. And then after the city of after the Empire Falls for 76 ad. Really, during the Gothic wars of the sixth century, when the East Romans The Byzantines showed up, the city seems to have like collapsed in population going from say 500,000 to like 50,000 or less. So modern Rome, at least before you know, whatever recent stuff, it was actually repopulated from the Italian hinterland. And all of these Eastern people from Anatolia to a great extent, but not all Anatolian seem to have just like disappeared. And I think that's because of the demographic collapse that usually happens in cities. Pre-modern cities were dirty, etc, etc, people died, and they were always replenished from other areas. And when the Western Empire collapsed, they were not replenished anymore. So those Anatolians are gone, right. But what happened in Anatolia itself over these 3000 years, okay, now we need to go to indo Europeans. I know some of you are super interested in the Indo European question, the southern arc paper or you did a podcast on it, you know, check it out, but I'm not gonna like recapitulate the whole southern arc paper. But obviously it matters for Anatolia. So the southern arc paper its dominant hypothesis, even though it's not very definitive, in my opinion, its dominant hypothesis, it suggests that basically, the Indo European languages, the Indo Anatolian languages, are probably from the far east of Anatolia, or the southern caucases, not totally sure, probably not the Central Anatolia, not Central Anatolia, but, you know, the east, and maybe north of the Caucases, maybe western Iran, and these people, these early indo Anatolians The reason that this hypothesis emerged is because, you know, starting in 2015, geneticists started finding all this evidence of steppe ancestry wherever indo Europeans went India, Europe, etc, etc. So, for example, Northern Europe went from 0% steppe to 75% steppe in 200 years, you know, you can, you can make a hypothesis for why people that archaeologists called the Battlax culture became so dominant so quickly, right, but
okay, so indo European steppe you know, pontic steppe hypothesis, this has been around by linguists looking at indo European words, and all the common words show, you know, these, pattern of cold climate, no agriculture, etc, etc. Okay, so it's all aligned. Everything makes sense? Well, it turns out that Anatolia is actually home to the earliest recorded Indo European language. So that's the Hittite language. Hittites call themselves Nešite. This is the Nessites language from the city of Neša. Hittite comes from Hatti, the Hatti or the non indo European people that lived in the land of Hatti Central Anatolia. And we know a lot about them from the third millennium BC because of Mesopotamia and Assyria and the trade colonies. So the Hittites seem to have conquered the Hatti. They took their name, they call their land, the land of Hatti, a lot of their culture was like that of the Hatti just like you know, the Mycenaeans took a lot from the Minoans. But they were definitely indo European. You know, you can see it in the words, the word tree is like Taru the word we as Wes, so definitely an indo European language. And, you know, the first the first Cuneiform because I think they were using modified cuneiform from from Syria is dated to 1950 BCE. This is the early 20th century, it pushes the earliest indo European like more than 1000 years earlier than we have. So Greece had indo European phonetic script, like A little after 800 BC, and then we have Sanskrit and Latin a little after that, right. But, you know, they had not, you know, Michael Ventris, the 1950s deciphered Linear B Mycenaean. Greek is actually Greek. So they didn't have that at the time. But even Mycenaean Greek really doesn't go much earlier than 1500 BCE. So Hittite is still the oldest and also, the Mycenaean Greek stuff we have is not very rich, in terms of a lot of its accounting, a lot of its stuff about like sacrifices, like, oh, we sacrifice two boys and five cattle, blah, blah, blah. He doesn't tell you much about Mycenaean. Greek doesn't tell you much about these indo Europeans. The Hittite texts, though not all of them are deciphered, most of them are not deciphered, found in the Royal. The Royal cities like Hattusa are very, very rich. They include diplomatic correspondence, so we have references to Wilusa, which is probably the city of Troy. And the problems caused by the king of Ahhiya are here, probably the king of the Achaeans for the Hittites, because Troy is part of the Hittite zone. So there are some Hittite samples. A couple of years ago, some Hittie
examples came came up, right two of them, I think they didn't have any steppe ancestry. So that's super weird, because we know they're indo European, and not just the Hittites, not just the nest sites. They're the LU wagons, the Palais, Ian's and the Lydians I think the Lydians might be a little later, but there's other indo European languages in Anatolia. Okay, that's weird, because unless they all came from outside relatively recently, usually when you have linguistic diversity like that, that indicates long term residents, okay. So maybe they've been around for a long time. So when the two Hittite samples came, without steppe ancestry, I talked to some ancient genetics, people hated DNA, Paleo genetics, whatever, like people from a lab that you would recognize, and you know, they were speculating that this was a sample mix up, right? Their expectation was, they'll be steppe ancestry. Definitely. ancestry is everywhere. That indo European show up. Sometimes it declines later, but you know, it's there at the beginning. So what's going on here? So the southern art paper that came out has a lot of samples, a lot of samples, and there's really not any steppe ancestry by 3000 BC, but or 2000, BC, whatever by the time of the Hittites. Stuff comes in later and I think that's how The Turks but let's not talk about contemporary stuff yet. So the steppe ancestry is not there, but they're definitely indo European. So this presents a conundrum, right? There were hypotheses from earlier late 20th century, that indo European languages came from Anatolia, Colin Renfrew, that started with agriculture. We don't think that anymore. Because probably these, these were the early Anatolian farmers. These early European farmers, probably not indo European, speaking of Basque language is probably descended from one of those farmer languages. That's not that's the best hypothesis. In my opinion, they're probably not indo European. Okay. But you still got to figure this out, like how they don't have step by step in century. One thing you can imagine is there was dilution, as they moved across the Balkans and across the Hellespont - Turkish straits, the Dardanelles and Bosphorus right,
that they just diluted and lost it. I think it's a little implausible, it's not that much. You know, I mean, even the Mycenaean, Greeks had some, even though it was low, I think it would be detectable also, you probably should see in the Y chromosome of those male mediated so our example that I get my soon to be on substack piece the Hadza people of Northern Nigeria speaking Afro Asiatic language, it's part of the Chadic group. They're basically Sub Saharan African in appearance and most of their genetics, but their Y chromosomes, like they have a surprising number of r1. B lineages I think R1bV, whatever. That's Eurasian, probably. That's probably the the, you know, the Y haplo. That was brought by the afro Asiatic peoples, they pushed into the Sahara and mixed with the Native people, the fraction of Eurasian ancestry dropped to like, you know, a couple of percent, but it's there, okay. You need better powerful methods to detect it. But, you know, from Lazaridis et als paper like, there are no like, diagnostic indo European Y chromosomes are not many in these Hittite lands. So that's a knock against the dilution theory, in my opinion, because early indo Europeans tend to be male media and especially, and all these Pontic people, right. Okay, so what's the other hypothesis, I'll just cut to the chase, because this is not about indo Europeans. The other hypothesis is, you know, they spread from the Caucasus, eastern Anatolia westward, probably by like 3500 BCE, maybe a little bit earlier. There is evidence of an increase in caucases, and Levantine ancestry at that time in Central Anatolia. So it's subtle, but it seems like something has changed. Similarly, leathery does at all claim that they see the exact same pattern on the pontic steppe around 3000 BC. And so basically, it's a common source. And then from the pontic steppe, every single other indo European group have expanded. So I have a chart actually, that I created myself for the substack piece, but it is shows that, you know, a lot of groups come out of the corded ware complex. So Balto Slavic Indo-Iranian, italic, Celtic and Germanic come out of the corded ware complex whether, you know, through Eastern corded ware through the Western corded ware that became Bell Beaker right? It's not totally clear, but it looks like Greeks, Armenians, it looks like Armenians descended straight from the yamnaya of the pontic steppe, and possibly the Greeks as well and the Albanians, that they did not go to the corded ware complex, and definitely the Afanasievo slash Tocharians probably did not initially have corded ware contact that they're straight yamnaya. Right. But all of these are from the pontic steppe. So everything but Anatolian is from the Pontic steppe Okay. So we have a situation 3000 BCE, the genetic character of Anatolians is set for 4000 years. There are these early indo Europeans there are the Hittites, why are the Hittites important when talking about genetics, but a lot of people don't know Hitties were serious.
There were a serious political - there were basically there were two superpowers between about 1500 BCE and 1200 BC during the end of the Bronze Age, late bronze age late bronze age peak, one was the Hittites, one was Egypt. And really, for most of that period, arguably, Hittites were the most powerful. The Hittites were the USA of the late bronze age. You know, their hegemony extended deep into Syria. This is why they were Hittite states are called the Syro Hittite states that are mentioned in the Bible. These Hittite states were actually not Nešites, they were not Hittite speaking, they seem to be mostly Luwian speaking or Aramaic speaking, but they have the name Hittite because when the Hittite Empire collapsed, they persisted for many, many centuries, okay. Hittites were also dominant in northern Mesopotamia, the state Mitanni of , which was an Indo Aryan ruled state originally, although they adopted the Hurrian languages of the native people in this area, I think it was called Ḫabigalbat that was in the native language. But anyway, Mitanni I think, is what it's called in the literature usually. In any case, the Mitanni were kind of, you know, a border power between Egypt and the Hittites. It went back and forth multiple times. Most of the time, I think the Hittites had the better of it. We know a lot about the wars and battle Kadesh and whatnot, because the Egyptians wrote a lot of stuff about them. So we get an Egyptian view and the Egyptians make it seem like a stalemate. If the Egyptians are making it seem like a stalemate, probably the Hittites had, the better of it, in my opinion. So, you know, they sacked Babylon, in like 1600 BC the Hittite army of Mursili the second maybe. And that really ended the hegemony of Babylon in the ancient Near East, right. It gave Assyria some space to Assyria, because the big, the big power of Mesopotamia, but still, it was it was secondary to the Hittites. And, you know, the Hittites, they send princesses to intermarry with the Egyptian pharaohs. Now, usually they, you know, didn't marry the Pharaoh themselves, or their offspring with the Pharaoh did not, you know, ascend, but it was a it was a it was a diplomatic game, right? And there's some famous letters sent to the Hittites King, by the widow of Tutankhamun to get a prince. And that guy actually got he got poisoned on the way to Egypt. So that didn't work out. But it shows that, you know, the Hittites were a huge power. Now Egypt we know about because Egypt survived the Bronze Age collapse, somewhat intact. The Hittites didn't, the Hittites were basically blotted from the earth. One reason that some of these archaeological sites have, like, so much so much that, you know, archaeologists can analyze and all these textual records is they were burned, the cities were destroyed, and nothing was recreated on top of the cities, right? It's not like, Jericho. It's it's over like 1200 1150 BC it's over. And so it's just kind of preserved, like in amber and it's really easy to analyze, right? But the Greeks we know persisted. So the Mycenaean Greeks, their civilization collapsed into a dark age, they came back there were still Greeks Hittite disappears, right, the Nešite language disappears. They were totally destroyed. Their destroyers were some, you know, approximately where some group called the Kasca that probably lived in modern day Trebizond they were not indo European, they might have been related to the Hatti that the Hittites had conquered , so, you know, Anatolia at the time was very multi ethnic. There were like I said, Luwians, the Palaians, the Kasca, the Hittites, the Hatti, persisted for a long time, although they eventually seemed to have assimilated into the ruling dominant,
the dominant Nessites and in fact, you know, there's some kings with like straight up Hatti names, I think, in the early period. So it seems like elite Hatti people were being integrated into the Hittite really class. But all of that ends, all of that ends, like during the Bronze Age collapse. Trojan War probably happened around 1190 BC or so. According to classical, you know, Chronologists Well, I mean, that's, that's very close to the Bronze Age collapse. So I think that's reflecting something real. So after this, Anatolia, and just that, that region of the world, Asia Minor, it's a big deal, but it's not at the center, right. You know, there's, there's the Babylonian Empire under Nebuchadnezzar, you know, there's a Persian Empire later there’s Alexander the Great’s Empire. Later, the Romans conquered. What do you notice about all of these, all these people are conquering Anatolia, but Anatolia itself is not an agent. It's not a dominant agent. There was a pontic, pontic Empire under Mithridates and whatnot. This, the Armenians also had some period of of, of dominance, but really, they had aspirations, but they never broke out of being regional. You know, regional, regional states like Pergamum all of these states, they're all regional states, right? Anatolia was a big prize, but it was a prize, kinda like Egypt. So after the fall of the pharaohs, Egypt was never really an independent state, ruled by Egyptians until the 20th century, right. So even the Egyptian royal family under Muhammad Ali in the 19th century they’re Albanian and the Egyptian like, you know, Saladin was a Kurd . So, Egypt was ruled by foreigners, right. The Mamelukes were mostly Kipchak Turks with some Circassians. So Anatolia is not that extreme. But there was a period where Anatolia was ruled by outsiders. So, you know, I'm presenting this model where it's a big deal. It's at the center of history. I mean, I didn't even talk about the Neanderthal admixture that probably happened in eastern Anatolia, possibly western Iran, you know, but during this period, after the fall of the Hittites 1200 BCE, for a long time, it was not at the center of things. But that changed. So I got to talk about the Byzantines. Like what are the Byzantines Byzantines are east Romans we call the Byzantines. They didn't call themselves Byzantines. Byzantine is from Byzantium, which is the old name for Constantinople. They call themselves Romans, right? They called Imperium Romana. In Greek it was you know, like, it was also Roman. It was like Baciliaka Roman or something. I should try to do language stuff. But in any case, they call themselves Roman. I just read recently that actually the Greeks, they call their language, the Roman language until the 19th century, right? So this, this identity of the Roman Empire persisted in Byzantium. And the Roman Empire never really fell there until 1453. In their own head,
which is the period of when the Ottomans ruled, right? But the real real like primary period of the Byzantine Empire where it's like this is Byzantium. It's not like pretensed on being, you know, really West Roman in any way, starts at about like 610 ad when Heraclius, Armenian origin, but he was a ruler of the exarch of Carthage overthrows a usurper Phocas. But in any case, this is the period where the Byzantines is really start using Greek as their dominant language. Constantinople was still a partially Latin city, into the into the sixth century. So Greek becomes the dominant language all of a sudden. And so this is a Greek Roman Empire, right? It's a totally different thing. And then what happens, the 630 is a total disaster, they lose Egypt, they lose Syria, to the Muslims, right. So that's gone by the time Heraclius, dies and 637. He's lost all the stuff reconquered for the Persians because of the huge war with the Persians in the generation before. By 700 AD, the Byzantines also lost North Africa, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria today. And so, by 780, the Byzantine Empire was restricted to Anatolia, actually about like two thirds of Anatolia because the Cilicia and like parts of the south and southeast of the Armenian highlands are conquered by the Arab Muslims by the Umayyad caliphate. And it had Constantinople. It's it's a Thracian hinterlands, Thessaloniki The Peloponnese, maybe part of Boeotia, Attica, like the southern part of mainland Greece, not Thessaly. Not parts of northern Greece, definitely not the Balkans, those were gone to the Avars and other groups, a Turkic tribe, and also Slavic, Slavic clans. They obviously have the islands in the Aegean, Crete and Cyprus. Not much, right. Basically, the Byzantine Empire between 700 and 1071 When they last Anatolia, actually interior of Anatolia to the Turks was an Anatolian empire, it was an Anatolian autocracy. Like it's never called that but that's what it is literally. The Arabs under the Umayyad’s and the Abbasids had about 60 million people, the Byzantines have 10 million. Okay, so they were, I think behind the eight ball is what I would say. But, you know, they survived two major sieges, there was one in the 660s, I think, and then another in like 718. So there were literal sieges of Constantinople for many, many years, as Arab navies would show up, and Constantinople might have fallen. Why does that matter? Well, Constantinople falls, the Arabs would probably have pushed into the Balkans. The Balkans at that time, were not Christian, right. They were mostly pagan. They're almost all pagan. So if Constantinople fell you could do the alternate history. At a minimum, probably the whole of the Balkans would have been Islamicised. Italy, and Germany would have been the frontier of Christianity of Christendom. This is already at a time when in 700, ad, Iberia, the Visigothic kingdom fell, Spain falls. So you if Constantinople was conquered in 718, and the Emperor at the time was Leo the Isaurian and he was actually Syrian Syrian Christian background. If Constantinople and fall in what would have happened is probably Christian Europe would immediately have just been Italy, what we call Italy, Germany, France, England, and Ireland. Remember, Eastern Europe was not Christian. Remember, Scandinavia was not Christian. So I think you could do the math here. And I think you know, Gibbons, quip about if, you know, if so the Western battle at Pointers
Where Charles Martel defeated the Arabs, that's, that's actually like that was probably just a raid, it probably wasn't super important. Gibbon had said, Oh, if the Arabs had won, they would have conquered France, they probably wouldn't have I don't want to get into it out. It's in a sub stack. You can check out my argument there. But if if Constantinople had fallen, that would have been a big deal. Why didn't Constantinople fall fall? Because that Anatolian dictatorship this autocracy was highly militarized, highly efficient, and it held the line. It had a strategic advantage of Constantinople, these massive cities, the Theodocian walls. It really was the bulwark like it was a rock against which the world of Islam crashed for many centuries, and they couldn't move past it. And so that protected the interior of much of Europe from Muslim predation basically. So how'd they do it? Well, you know, some of you know, there's a theme system called themes like local localities in Anatolia, that raise soldiers and levees, and there were a lot of these Hardy frontier. You know, Armenians often, who who fought at the borders. Now the Arabs after the 718 siege the Abbasids actually raided the interior of Anatolia very, very regularly. So Anatolia was pretty war toured for about a century after 718 ad. It was raided regularly. They never made it to the Aegean but they came pretty close. So they pushed really far in the city of Armorium was sacked multiple times. And Arabs curvatures made it I think, like close to Nicaea. Okay. But after 880 or so, the Arabs started falling into civil wars, the Abbasid caliphate really went into decline after a 850 ad. And the Byzantines really expanded. They re conquered all the Armenian heartland, they conquered northern Syria, they conquered like parts of northern Mesopotamia. Also, in the nine hundreds, they re conquered the Balkans. So at its peak in the early 11th century, this, you know, Byzantine Empire is a real Empire. It, it covered like much, most of the Balkans, everything but everything but Romania, and pretty much all of modern Turkey, parts of Syria, northern Iraq. So it really was the most dominant power of Eastern Mediterranean around 1000 ad. They had turned, the tide survived, and now they flourish, right? What happened in 1071, was basically a catastrophe, because losing the Anatolian interior was losing really the manpower and tax base of the Byzantine Empire. So after 1071, the Empire became mostly a Balkan empire. And after the Latin sack of I think 1215. It's not really an empire. It's an empire name, but it's basically a bunch of personal principalities. It was reconstituted on the Palaiologos dynasty. But it was really a small principality in Thrace around Constantinople, and a few areas of Greece. Before the conquest of 453 or 1453. There wasn't much of an empire left in Byzantium, it had been a small minor power for centuries. Even if it was a continuous tradition back to Rome. It probably lasted another 40 years because Temür crashed into the Ottomans and woke them in the early 15th century. Okay. So that we get to the Turks. This is a whole different issue because I've said genetically up to 1000 AD there wasn't much that really perturbed Anatolia, right? It's like they absorbed some people, but really, the base was there. The Turks are different. Who are the Turks, so this is a different podcast, it's a different substack- But in short, the Turks are originally an East Asian people. Liminal Siberian, people from probably what you would call Western Mongolia, the Altai region. Most of their ancestry was East Asian, although early on they clearly had assimilated some indo Europeans, probably Scythians eastern Indian peoples, and some of the Y chromosomes are already r1a-z93, which is associated with the Eastern corded ware populations
and so you know, they already had that also, some of the motifs in Turkish early mythology seemed very, very similar, to some indo European ones, so they, it was probably central to both groups or one adopted from the other. So for example, the wolf, Turkish nationalists are gray wolves, because the wolf is a totemic animal for the Turks and wolves are extremely important in Indo European mythology, the idea of the werewolf comes out of the Indo Europeans. And, you know, I've talked about the Kóryos before all this stuff, that's a separate issue, right? But these people come into Anatolia, but they don't just come into Anatolia. Raw, as they would say, from Western Mongolia. They actually come to Anatolia after centuries in Central Asia, in what the Iranians called Turon between the Oxus and Jaxartes River and you know, the region around the Aral Sea they assimilated with Iranian people. So if you look at the ancestry, East Asian ancestry in modern day Turkey, it's about 10%. So you would say, oh, about 10% of the ancestry is Turkish Turkic. And so that language spread from that group to everybody else was mostly Armenian, Greek, you know, Anatolian whatever, Armenian Greek speakers right. But I think the thing that this forgets is by the time the Oghuz Turks show Up in Anatolia, they may have been only about half East Asian, because there are R1a lineages in modern day Turkey, a lot of them. And I think that that probably did arrive with the Turks because the Turks themselves were highly assimilated with Tajiks. So that's the Iranian people of Central Asia. And so, probably I would estimate, it's about 20%. Really, because 10% of the population of the ancestry is West Eurasian, but it's central west Eurasian, its central Asian. It's not really Anatolia. And so you have this transformation genetically. You know, 20%, a lot of people it's more in some areas than others. I've looked at some samples that Iosof Lazaridis collected from Trebizond in the northeast, those individuals look very, very similar to Armenians and Georgians, they have almost no Turkic East Asian ancestry. So what's going on there? Well, you know, that area, a lot of people were originally Greek, actually speaking, not genetically, but Greek speaking, and many of them through various persecutions and stuff converted to Islam. And for a while, and there are still some Greek speaking Muslims in that NorthEastern corner, corner of Turkey actually, you know, old Trebizond people, but many of them shifted to Turkish without assimilating any pastoralists as interior Anatolians would right? So you have a situation where there are pockets of Anatolian Muslims, who seems to have assimilated straight from the local Armenian or Greek speaking substrate, without any intermarriage with the incoming pastoralists. And they probably convert to Islam first and then adopted the Turkish language. Whereas in many other places, there was intermarriage between Turks and non Turks and Turkification and Islamization probably occurred simultaneously. Right. So, you know, been going on for 10,000 years now, you know, and today Turkey is still important, Anatolia is still important. Four or 500 years, actually, well, 1000 years if you count the the low period of the Byzantines, but I don't really for about like 450 years or so. Anatolia was the bulwark of Christendom against the world of Islam. Well, after the Ottomans took over, it kind of became the world headquarters of Islam. Right. So, you know, eventually the Ottoman assaulted the Shah took on the title Khalif this was a late thing. It was kind of fake, but whatever. You know, Sunni Islam really was centered around Turkey. The dominant Islamic school of jurisprudence in the Indian subcontinent is Hanafi, which is dominant in Turkey. And this is the Turkic connection because the Muslims that were dominant in the Indian subcontinent as rulers for many, many centuries, for most of the period, were Turkic themselves that, the Mughal native language was Chagatai Turkic which is not Turkish, it's a central Asian Turkic dialect. But Anatolia, becoming the heart of the Turkic world demographically
made it also kind of the locus of Islam for many, many centuries. And to some extent, still today, or to God has those ambitions. Right. So, you know, why is this as a coincidence? No, it's not. Obviously, just looking at a map. You see, Anatolia is not literally in the center of Eurasia. That's really kind of like, you know, east of the Caspian, I think if you do some sort of weighting, but really like, you know, all roads lead to Constantinople, all roads lead to right across the street from Anatolia, all roads lead to Anatolia, humans coming north, had to go through Anatolia to get to Central Asia. So, you know, in Georgia, right across the border of Turkey, at WEC, there are these hobo rectus that were there 2 million years ago. It's crazy, right? Obviously, to get to Europe probably had to go to Anatolia, it looks like the Mesolithic Western hunter gatherers actually are descended from Anatolian Caucasus, like hunter gatherers. And, you know, they overwhelmed the native magdalenian peoples that have come earlier. Right. You know, European powers, you know, like Alexander the Great, you know, they have to go through Anatolia to go eastward, right. So this is just geography is geopolitics, but it shaped our history. It's shaped our genetics, and I think it's fascinating, and it's important, and I hope you do too. And I hope you enjoyed this talk. And I will…
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