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All right, so we got another monolog episode of Unsupervised Learning with me just yapping at you. So this is gonna be another monolog about Indo-Europeans and I've done a couple of these over the last couple of years, and it's just, there's so much stuff coming out on this topic, right? But before I go on I do want to say please like and review my content on all the different platforms. I know a lot of you, because I see the data are listening on Spotify or Apple or YouTube, just you know, least you could do. So I really would appreciate that. Leave a good review. If you have good things to say, I guess you know, if you have bad things to say, don't say them. But you know you could if you want, that's all good. So I think there's certain things about my voice, or whatever I know that annoys people. That's fine. I can't make everyone happy. So today I'm gonna talk a lot, actually. About several things, but it's kind of prompted by a new paper that I kind of had a clue that was coming out. It's a pre print actually, it's not a paper. So it will not be published for a while, but the results will probably stay broadly the same, right? So this is basically a paper that Kristian Kristiansen, who is on this on this paper. So I’ll just call it the Danish group. But a lot of non Danes on it too. But Eske Willerslev is the last author Kristian Kristiansen is the second to last. Raspus Nielsen and Martin Sikora and Morton Allentoft are on it. So these are just the usual people you see in this group, I think they operate on the GeoGenetics lab in Copenhagen. And I think they might have the branch still in Cambridge. I mean, there's just a lot of affiliations here. Okay, so the first author is Fulya Eylem Yediay and Guus Kroonen, who does a lot of Indo European stuff is there's a second author, so just a lot of names that you would recognize here, and the paper is ‘Ancient genomics support deep divergence between Eastern and Western Mediterranean Indo-European lineages’ And this just alludes to something that Kristian Kristiansen actually told me in the podcast last spring, that he would be involved in a preprint or in a publication that does confirm that the Greeks, the Denyens, the Hellenes, the Mycenaeans, whatever you want to call them, that they were a distinct migration of people with steppe heritage and steppe culture frim the Pontic steppe, ultimately back to the Yamnaya from those of northern Europe who often came from the Corded Ware Complex. And this was important because over the last couple of years, or actually over the last decade, but really over the last couple of years, the details of the Indo European story are really getting fleshed in. And the whole superstructure is just getting filled in so that we have a framework to understand what happened. Scholars are still going to discover and explore local details. Like, for example, how did the Tarim basin at one point show evidence of Iranian languages on the southern part of the basin and Tocharian languages on the northern and the eastern part of the basin. Okay? Like, what's going on there? So that's a detail that these papers have not solved yet. But it's not a big picture issue that is being addressed right now. The big picture issue about Indo Europeans has pretty much been close to solved - ‘The Genetic Origin of the Indo-Europeans’ is a pre print that I talked about, and I'll talk about it again I talked about it in the spring, and it's out of the Reich lab. Reich and Pennisi. Iosif Lazaridis and Nick Patterson are the first and second authors. And you know, basically they're pretty close to solving the origin of the Indo Europeans. But these papers, these other papers, like this one, ‘Ancient genomics supports deep divergence between Eastern and Western Mediterranean Indo-European” lineages come close to solving a lot of details later in. So we kind of get the structure of what's happening. And there's also a paper that came out this spring about a Germanics. On the origin of Germanic peoples, maybe and the Eastern Baltic and I might allude to that a little bit. Yeah. So that was also Kristiansen paper, where he was on the paper with Eske Willerslev, Hugh McColl was the lead, Guus Kroonen was the second ‘Steppe Ancestry in western Eurasia and the spread of the Germanic Languages’ Okay, so I think one thing I have to set up here is, you know, until relatively recently, there was all sorts of speculative work about what the structure of the Indo-European languages is? Peter Bellwood, he wrote a book about 20 years ago called “First Farmers” which was arguing for the incredible theory that the Indo-European languages were the languages that were spread by farmers, the first agriculturalists in Anatolia. And, you know, they started expanding 10,000 years ago to Europe, and it was a demographic process. And this is a really, really deep time depth. And this time depth is actually not quite supported by - so I did talk about with David Anthony about this, and some people are very interested in this paper, but it's a the 2023 paper by Haggert et al. ‘Language trees with sample ancestors support a hybrid model for the origin of the Indo-European languages’ And it's a phylogenetic model that I think uses, like lexicon and stuff. And it's pretty some weird results, and like some deep time depth, right? So basically, multiple branches of Indo-European languages in their model, were diverged by five, 5000 BC, whereas the expansion is 3000 BC. So it's a - and they estimate that actually the Indo European divergence probably started over 6000 BC, which is pretty deep, actually, but Bellwood, he pushed it even further. And he argued that we could support this, because Indo European languages show a rake like phylogeny. And by that he means that you know that they're Indo-European, you know that they have a relationship, but you don't know what the structure of that relationship is because they diverge so early. So it's kind of like, maybe it'd be a little like a polytomy, a phylogenetic network. It's just like divergence out of an ancestral common ancestor, but there's no structure, there's no sequential bifurcation of the tree. They just kind of explode out of these ancestors. The only exception of the Indo European language family to this lack of structure, according to Bellwood, is the Indo-Iranian class, because Indian and Iranian languages clearly Indo Aryan languages and Iranian languages are clearly genealogically related, genetically related, in terms of theyshare recent common ancestor, you know, Avesta, the Zoroastrian holy books, Some of the older forms have an archaic form of Iranian, Avestan East Iranian, that is actually quite similar to Sanskrit and so, you know, that's partly because they date over 3000 years ago, and some of the oldest forms. So there are other people, often historical linguists, who say, well, that's not true. There is structure. And, you know, I can't evaluate these linguistics arguments myself. You know, it depends on whether you use core list of informative words, or you just sample the lexicon and you do an evolutionary model. I guess you could do, like, a years ago, I did a podcast with an Indo-Europeanist, and she said, looking at syntactical structure and encoding that is important, right? Okay, so there are people who believe that there are their structure and that there's cluster. So Balto Slavic is probably the second most common grouping that people make. And this could be because the two are very closely related. But it could also be that they're just in close proximity for so many 1000s of years that vocabulary and maybe grammar has flowed between these two groups, right? So I think that's one issue, right? Balto Slavic is another cluster that people have claimed is Italo Celtic, so Italic, Romance languages, Latin is really the only survivor of this, but it used to be much more common a bunch of Italy. And then Celtic. Celtic is like Welsh or Irish Gaelic, but historically at the time of, like, the beginning of the Roman Empire probably about like two thirds of the Iberian Peninsula was Celtic, speaking in terms of the land mass. Obviously almost all of Gaul, parts of Belgium, still parts, like a few parts of southern Germany. Obviously there's fragments of Celtics migrated eastward, like into Galatea and Anatolia. But the whole, to our knowledge, it seems like the whole of Britain and Ireland were also Celtic speaking.
I think they probably came through the Urnfield Culture around, like around 1000 BC during that spread. Maybe I'll get to that later. But the point is, Celtic was quite, quite extensive in the past. Today it's not very extensive. Whereas today, Italic is very extensive in the form of romance, which is descended from Latin the single survivor, but historically, they were somewhat different in terms of their distribution, with Celtic being much more expansive, okay, but people have seen similarities between these two branches. Also, Germanic has a very, very ambiguous position. From what I can tell, some people say that has some similarities to Slavic, Balto Slavic, and others say it's more like the Italo Celtic languages. And then you have the other ones that are like, kind of like, hard to place Greek, Armenian and Illyrian, which is really only Albanian today. So there's like, these paleo Balkan languages, and there could have been other Indo-European languages that, like we don't really, you know, have record of. Obviously, the Germanic languages are later up in the north. I'll talk a little bit about their expansion. But there have been some people who who've proposed a Greek Armenian affinity. Okay, so a Greco Armenian clade. So you have a Greco Armenian clade, you have an Italo Celtic clade, you have a Balto Islamic clade, you have Indo Iranian clade. Iranian is just clear, like, that's, that's the true thing. The secondary thing, though, I have to say, is some people have posited that Indo Iranian and Balto Slavic are actually closer together, and so that they have some sort of connection compared to the Western European languages. Now this is weird, because obviously Indian subcontinent and Iran are very far from Slavic world, but historically, it looks like the Indo-Iranians did come out of the Eastern fringe of the Corded Ware. And so they do have that connection there. I'm gonna get back to that later. Okay? Because I'll describe what's going on with each of these branches. You had Tocharian, which went extinct, it is only preserved in records in cities like Turfan and their ancient manuscripts and whatnot. Tocharian looks like it's very, very singular and independent in many ways right now, one thing that I have to say is there's something called the Satem/Centum distinction that people used to make a big deal about and don't make a big deal about now, I think. But and Satem and Centum are from certain consonants with, I think, like the number 100 if I remember correctly, and yeah. And so the the Satem languages are not as common. It’s Balto Slavic, Armenian, Iranian, Indo-Iranian. Satem is Greek, Albanian, Italic, Celtic, Germanic, yeah, and Tocharian, which is weird. And so the old idea was, this was like some deep divergence among the Indo Europeans. And somehow Tocharian got put on the on the the wrong side, you know. But in any case, I don't think that that's as big of a deal as as people used to make it. But, you know, there's internal structure within these languages. Okay, so that was my point, or there, you know, arguments about it. And so other people have seen an indo Greek affinity, which is weird, but there's certain things about Mycenaeans and Vedic culture that are similar. And David Anthony has talked about it. Like basically the tumulus tombs with the Indo Europeans, Indo-Iranian and the Mycenaeans and, yeah. And like, also the horse culture seems kind of similar. And I will talk about why that is, because I think some of you know from my previous podcast on the horse there is some connection there. Okay? And like, it has to be, you have to talk about the geography of the past, as opposed to the present, which is very different. And then there's Anatolian, which includes Luwian, Palaic and Hittite Neshite, also known as Nesite. And so when we're talking about structure, one of the arguments that people always used to make is, well Anatolian in particular, is very, very distinct. So is it even an Indo European language like. Could it be Indo Anatolian? And what the paper in the spring, ‘The Genetic Origin of the Indo-Europeans’ is it actually led strongly to the idea that Anatolian is actually a sister group. So the Indo Anatolian group, and it looks as if there was a migration of people from the Caucasus, Lower Volga Cline, which is to the east of the Yamnaya homeland in the lower Volga, north of Caspian Sea. This actually seems to be the point of origin of the pre Indo Europeans, not proto Indo Europeans, the pre Indo Europeans who give rise to the Anatolians, who seem to have gone south through the Kuban steppe and then across the caucuses and then come in through Trebizond to that area in the northeast and spread across the plateau, integrated with the Hattic natives, probably before 3000 BC, maybe as early as 4000 BC, like before the Indo European diversification, another group went west into the Dnieper River Valley, assimilated a minority of Ukrainian hunter gatherers who were - most of their ancestry is like the Western Hunter Gatherer ancestry, and this group became the yamnaya and this group then expanded outward and diversified. So one thing that the paper of the spring of the Reich lab did that was really great. They took a bunch of yamnaya genomes and they estimated effective population size. What they showed is there's a massive population explosion that started happening around 3500 BC that just continued after 3000 BC. This is what you're what you would expect from a yamnaya driven expansion. So this is a homogeneous, relatively new group, and then it just went into uplift in terms of demographics. What David Anthony would tell you is that they invented nomadism. They discovered nomadism. The whole steppe was their oyster. They expanded and filled up the steppe. And then after the steppe they started moving into Eastern Europe. Now Kristian Kristiansen has has started publishing things, and he's very straight up, straight up about it. They probably spread some form of the plague to continental Europe around 5000 years ago because of their zoonotic, you know, their interaction with animals. So they got it earlier, it inoculated them. But it probably collapsed the cultures of Old Europe, the Neolithic cultures. Okay, so we have the Yamnaya between 3500-3000 years ago. And we know this is a homogenous culture. They tend to be a particular branch of R1b you know, very patrilineal culture. They're north of the Pontic steppe Why do we think the Yamnaya are Indo Europeans? Are the Indo Europeans? Well, what you can do is like, there are these plots in these papers that show affinity by sample region. And you can see that the yamnaya genes are everywhere from the Atlantic to the Bay of Bengal. And we have enough ancient DNA to know that this spread started about 5000 years ago and arrived in different sequences, but it started about 5000 years ago. And if you look at a map of the Indo European language families today, it's pretty uncanny, right? So we don't know for sure, right? We don't know for sure that the yamnaya are the the ancestral Indo Europeans, but there's a lot of circumstantial evidence. I mean, it's, you know, we don't have the murder weapon, but there was a bullet wound in the forehead. Seems like there was a murder. You know, the person was seen at the scene of the crime had a motive, etc, etc, right? Okay, so we have the Yamnaya expanding. Now, initially we as researchers didn't stipulate too much about the sequence of expansion, the admixtures with other groups, how they might have they might have changed in some way. So if you an early paper, for example, from Eske Willerslev’s group uses Yamnaya as a potential donor to Indian populations. And that always seemed like a little off to a lot of people, because people were people were saying, even before later were confirmed this, that that the Indo European ancestry in in Indians looks a little too northeast European, and not necessarily just pure Yamnaya. And so the reason that it looks northeast European is because one of the daughter populations of the Yamnaya is the Corded Ware, which is named after the pots that this population have. So where the Yamnaya are pure pastoralists, pure nomads. The Corded Ware started doing some agro pastoralism. They flourished between about 3000 BC to 2350 BC. Their core zone is really in Eastern Europe, Central Europe and the north. So modern day Germany, Poland, Belarus, and then it goes all the way deep into Russia, toward Moscow, and then also all of Scandinavia. And Scandinavia, they're called The Battle Axe culture, I think in in parts of Germany or Denmark, they're called the Single Grave Culture, because there's slight differences between the graves in the West. So the Corded Ware are Yamnaya, but they are not pure Yamnaya. They are genetically different because they have ancestry from a Neolithic culture called Globular Amphora and that's again based on the pots. And these are the last of the Northern European Neolithic cultures that go all the way back to Linear Beaker, linear pottery culture, the LBK culture in Germany that expanded northward, it turned into Funnel Beaker in Scandinavia. Then, eastward, it turned to various other cultures and Globular Amphora was the last of them. So these are the Neolithic people that the Yamnaya encountered. And they are about 30% of the ancestry of the Corded Ware. So some of the early Corded Ware shows some more heterogeneity. They show more yamnaya ancestry. And these Corded Ware people are the first that actually expanded into the very corner of the Northeast Baltic and brought agriculture to places like Estonia, probably southern Finland. And they show up in Scandinavia and seem to have, like, straight up exterminated the Funnel Beaker people who created these Palisades. But there's no genetic evidence of Funnel Beaker ancestry. So in the early quarter, where in Scandinavia, they're about 30% Neolithic, but that's all Globular Amphora, which is, like, kind of around Poland Belarus. So they didn't mix with any of the local substrate there in in Western Europe, or like the Rhineland, say, in Western Germany, now, there were still some Neolithic populations that they mixed with. And so the Neolithic percentage goes up on those Corded Ware populations who eventually around 2600 become Bell Beakers, which is just a cultural custom they seem to have adopted. But so the Bell Beakers are another distinct population, and they're overlap with the Corded Ware. But they're, they're clearly a descendant of the corded ware from the east with some more Neolithic ancestry. They are the ones that brought Indo European languages into France, probably like pushing it to the Paris basin. By like a little after 2600 like 2050 or so, and then a couple centuries later. So they move into Britain. So that after 2400 the local Neolithic people pretty much disappeared. Only 10% of their genes are left. They push it to Spain after 2400 as well into Italy, like a little later, maybe 2200 2300 in northern Italy. And then maybe they don't get to parts of southern Italy until the middle of the Bronze Age. So maybe, like 1500 or whatever. I've seen different things on this right. But so these are the Bell Beakers that start out in the Rhineland, and they just explode outward into France, into Britain, into Spain and into Italy. They also move into Scandinavia, and they basically marginalize the Corded Ware Battle Axe people in Denmark, much of Sweden and Norway, they don't make it to Finland. Finland at this point is probably Indo European speaking in the south corner, where, with some like native Eastern Hunter Gatherer foragers in the north, the Finnic people don't show up until about like 500 BC okay, something like that. So it's a while. And the Finnic people are actually not indigenous. They're actually newcomers that replaced the earlier people. So Bell Beakers also expanded back into the Czech Republic, into Poland, into parts of Eastern Europe, and they also start going into the Balkans. And so the Balkans is obviously kind of one of the central aspects of this paper that is prompting me to talk today, to talk to you. What they found here, and this is kind of known from archeology, is it looks like the the ancestry of the steppe peoples in the Balkans is strongly skewed towards pure Yamnaya okay. And that means it's not Corded Ware. So as corded ware expanded into Western Europe, into Northern Europe, into Southwest Europe, becoming Bell beaker in Western Europe, so somewhat different. But in the Balkans, there was an earlier population, or a separate population, that had moved in and some of them had moved in earlier than 3000 BC actually into the Danube basin valley of Yamnaya directly from the pontic steppe, rather than mediated through that forest zone of Northeast Europe as the Corded Ware were. And they don't have the 30% globular amphora. They don't have that Neolithic ancestry, so that tracer their genes is not there. What they are is like closer to 100% Yamnaya and then they mix with the local substrate, which is a variety of different Neolithic people. What is particularly interesting is you go as far as Greece, and here it does look like the earliest Indo Europeans in Greece were descendants of these yamnaya, probably they’re descendants of Catacomb Culture, which is the culture on the Pontic steppe that succeeded the yamnaya. So they're probably just descendants of the yamnaya. They are descendants of the yamnaya. And it looks like the archeological connections in the paper, in the pre print, are from Moldova, which is on the border between the steppe and Eastern Europe proper. And you have gene flow from this area into the Balkans and eventually reaches - it's basically in mainland Greece, like in substantial amounts, by 1800 BC. I think this is when middle Hellenic turns into late Hellenic And this is like the beginning of Mycenaean Greece. 400 years later they would eventually take Crete and then expand in to like large parts of the Mediterranean. There is another population that shows this exact same pattern of having, like, pure yamnaya ancestry, and that is Armenians. So Armenians don't have the Corded Ware ancestry either. It does look like they came straight from the from the Pontic steppe from some catacomb culture. Also, this is not exclusive, not like at high frequency, but both Armenians, actually, in Armenians, is relatively high frequency early Armenian samples, it was but also to some extent, in the Mycenaeans, you see the very distinct yamnaya branch of R1b as this is a very distinct, unique branch that's not very common today. It's mostly found in central Eurasia, probably like assimilating Yamnaya. These indicate that elite lineages directly from the yamnaya, the same elite lineages, Patralineages, were ancestral to the proto Greeks and the proto Armenians. There was a third group that actually exhibits the same pattern of lack of admixture initially, and that's the Afanasievo People who live all the way across Eurasia. They crossed the Eurasian steppe and went into the pasture lands of the Altai, into western Mongolia. And here they transmitted a lot of their culture to the people of Mongolia. They show up like 3200 3300 BC, even before the mass intrusion into Europe, they are just basically 100% yamnaya. They didn't mix with anybody. Probably this is the answer their genetics, their Y chromosome is all R1b of the Yamnaya kind. These are probably the ancestors on the tocharians. And probably explains why tocharian is so distinct from other indo European languages. So the Heggarty paper, that's clear. So they're detecting some distinction of Tocharian. It's because it split off early and it was isolated from other Indo-European languages until the arrival of Indo-Iranian and they probably arrived, like 1500 years later, something like that, 1400 years later. Yeah. So they were very isolated, these Tocharians. In any case, you have these three Tocharians, proto Greeks and proto Armenians that are definitely Yamnaya. They actually sandwich the Anatolians the Luwians, the Hittites, and others. So these are, Sister language group to Indo-Europeans. So you probably had a migration that came out of Moldova, came to the Balkans, went to Greece, and then you probably had another migration. And there is a culture in the Caucasus that resembles the Mycenaeans somewhat in the preprint, they note probably the Armenians went from the eastern zone of the Catacomb Culture down through the Kuban steppe, through the Caucasus, and kind of recapitulated the migration of the Hittites, right, or of the of the Anatolians earlier. Sothis paper strongly points, this preprint, strongly points genetic evidence. Look, these are two groups that clearly are from the Catacomb Culture, post Yamnaya environment, and some linguists have seen similarities between them. Well, linguists are probably right, because the genetic evidence is just like, very strong that these two groups are genealogically correct. So I think what you need to do is probably like, reweight the variables and parameters you use to judge affinities, because obviously it seems like Armenian and Greek do have some strong similarities, so they probably would have diverged. I mean, there's probably structure within the Catacomb Culture. So you know, probably would have. Diverged, like 4500 years ago, something like that, on the step, and they they moved, you know, in separate directions, or meeting a little earlier than my sales. Another thing that I have to say is there's certain types of burials, certain cultural customs, like, for example chariot riding, which shows up around 1800 BC. What's this coming from? David Anthony has always said there's looks to be similarities between proto Greeks and Indo Iranians. Now, this doesn't make any sense to us. Indo Iranians mostly live in Iran and India. Now, Greeks obviously live in Greece. But some of you know, Finnic languages, like Finnish, they have a large number of unique words that are words that are unique to indo Iranian languages. And how did that happen? Well, what happened is, let's say, about four, 4000 years ago, 2000 BC. If you look at where Iranian languages into Iranian languages are, the Finnic languages are the ancestors of Finnish and the catacomb culture. They're all next to each other in sequence. So the Iranian languages probably, I mean, you know, we don't know their full extent, but we know they're Eastern branches of Santa, the southern Urals and the Volga, north of the Caspian. They probably extended westward into modern day Belarus. We can see a migration and a sequence of cultures, Fatyanovo-Balonovo, Abashevo, and then Sintashta over about 1000 years, a little less than 1000 years, as they drifted eastward. But there's a band of these Indo Iranians from, say, the Pripet marshes, as the eastern corner all the way to the Urals, the southern Urals, right north of the north of them in the Urals, are another people that are coming from the east, and they are probably Finnic people. These are part of the Seima-Turbino culture, probably foragers, but they probably learned copper working from the Indo Iranians. And there was conflicts between these two groups, the words for slave in Finnish is Ario. So that might be a recollection of their conflicts with the early Aryans, right? So that connection was there now right to the south and the east of the Indo Iranian zone would be the catacomb culture zone, right? So what I think is really happening here, that we see is the catacomb culture was influenced by Indo Iranians in particular ways, probably vice versa. Some of the things you see in Indo Iranian might have been influenced by the catacomb culture. But in any case, the horse culture of the Mycenaeans is almost certainly from Indo Iranians, and they may have been Indo Iranians who were assimilated into the catacomb culture, Indo Iranian war bands. So Robert Drew’s an archeologist, wrote a book 25 years ago, “The Coming of the Greeks” is a good book, and it was about how chariots brought the Greeks and whatnot. Well, I mean, there are some like details or equivalent, but it does look like the proto Greeks were kind of hanging around in the Balkans in various areas for, like, hundreds of years. And then once they got the chariot, it allowed them to have some sort of military advantage. And they spread southward. And with the chariot, you know, they spread certain motifs and certain aspects of the Sun cult, which I think I've talked about before, but basically, it looks like some sort of chariot related cult that is also associated with the sun or sun god. And so you know, as you know, some of you know, Helios is a chariot and he's drawing the sun. He's drawn by a bunch of horses. Surya, the Vedic tradition is the same. Sol the Germanic tradition and so forth. And we know that horses were domesticated around 2200 BC. I think they're probably domesticated, tamed earlier by Indo Europeans. There's some evidence in the Swadesh lists with the vocabulary but that current package of like horses with tack and bit and everything like that, that is definitely an Indo Iranian invention that spread really quickly, and with it, spread these ideas, right? So the sun god and the solar cult. And the solar cult was practiced in Scandinavia down to about 600 ad that's where it lasted the longest. But I think it was also present among the Mycenaeans. And so we see these connections. So there's these genealogical connections which are very easy to see. They are very, very easy to see with genetics. But there's also these historical connections that historical geographical connections that be the people have interacted with, you know? So it's like a French is romance language. English is a Germanic language, but of the Germanic languages, English is highly romancified Because of the huge load of French words that English has, which obviously is not as present in something like Icelandic, which is an old school Germanic language, right? That's the way I'm gonna say it. In any case. So you have these connections that we have, right? What is going on in in Western Europe? Well, it seems like this is like a very, very simple, much simpler. It's actually not that simple. So it's clear from this paper in Italy that multiple different Indo European groups did come to Italy, mostly Bell Beaker originated. But it does look like there are some Balkan predominantly yamnaya groups in the Adriatic so the dominant signal is probably Bell Beaker, evident in the particular y chromosome R1b branch that they have, which is different than the yamnaya. There's a common one that's really, really high frequency across Western Europe. I think l 27 is the branch associated with the bell beaker, specifically, but it's part of a bigger group of R1b that are kind of closely related to each other, and indicates like the spread of these cultures across Western Europe. Interestingly in Britain and most of France, there's no remnant of any non Indo European language or whatnot, right people. But in France, the Aquitani, who are related to the Basque, the Vascos, were not Indo European. You know, they're Aquitani in the south, the south west, and then in Spain, there's kind of like a hodgepodge. We know that the Vasco, the Basques, were not Indo European, because they aren't to this day. They don't speak into European languages. But there were these other languages called Iberian languages on the coast and Tartessian in the south. It's not clear whether they're Indo European or not. Some of these languages probably were not Indo European, or maybe like were partly Indo European. I don't know how you say it. There's vast areas of the interior, in the northern coast, like towards Galicia. You know Galicia, you know Gaul, so that were Celtic speaking. And probably Celts had arrived. There's arguments about whether Celtic dates to the bell beakers, or is later. I'm weak confidence on this, but I think it's probably Urnfield culture 1000 BC. I think there was an earlier set of Indo European languages spread with the Bell Beakers, and, you know, one of them probably Italic, actually, But setting that aside so it's related to Celtic it's part of like the broader Western Branch. But you have a situation in Italy and Spain
and Italy as well, where non Indo European languages persisted down into the modern period, or not modern, but historical period. So in Italy, Tuscany was Etruria, and it was inhabited by non Indo-European speakers, like raishin, I think also was not indo European speaking. But in any case, Etruscans definitely were not. It's definitely not an Indo-European language. Etruscan religion customs were quite distinct, but genetically, they're actually quite similar to their Latin neighbors. And so what that indicates is after about 1500 BC, there's just a lot of mixing going on, a lot of synthesis. But in the southern European peninsulas, non indo European people did persist, probably because the Indo European intrusions were not as overwhelming as they were in Northern Europe. And this way they're a little bit like India. In fact, like the steppe percentage is somewhat higher, you know, 30 to 40% as opposed to, say, 15% as a you know, on average in the Indian subcontinent. But still, that's enough for there to be relic non Indo European populations. Lower proportion than the Dravidian populations in the subcontinent, right? But again, the steppe proportion is higher in Greece. You know, there's these groups called Pelasgians, which may not have been Indo European speaking. It's not quite clear. It's almost certain that on the island of Crete there was non Indo European Minoan language. They call it a Cretan, Eteocretan. So it's like old cretin of some sort. And paleo Sardinian might not have been Indo European although I have to check out the citations on this because there's not that much evidence possibly of that. So Sardinia is interesting. Because it has the highest Neolithic ancestry in Europe. There were Indo Europeans that moved there, but it was later, and it was more gradual, and so the fraction is lower right, going back to the Balkans. I don't say anything about Albanian or Albanian or Illyrian, but I will say that Albanian does. There's another paper that I read on Albanian ancient DNA. It does seem that Albania is probably originally mostly yamnaya. But later on, there were Bell Beaker and Corded Ware related Indo European populations that moved into the Balkans, even before probably historical time. I mean, looking at the data of this paper, and obviously with the arrival of Slavs, who are descendants, you know, pretty clear descendants of corded ware populations from the Bronze Age or the Copper Age, the Albanian gene pool has shifted much more strikingly to be more similar to central Europeans, I think. But originally they were like the proto Greeks, mostly pure Yamnaya before they mixed it with the local substrate. Now, I think we might want to - I don't know the details, but I mean, could be that like Albanian, Greek and Armenian should be kind of taken together, as these Indo European languages. So to review, Greek is Yamnaya, Albania is Yamnaya, Albanian is Yamnaya. Armenian is Yamnaya. Then like Italic and Celtic, Balto Slavic are clearly Corded Ware. Also Indian is Corded Ware, Indo Iranian is Corded Ware, Indo Aryan and Iranian. And we know those because there's a paper that came out, like Saag et al, like 2020 it just shows the migration of of Indo Iranian peoples, and the particular Y chromosome R1a-z93 which is mine, going from Belorussia to central Eurasia, and then eventually they just go southward. So this is an Eastern branch of the corded ware that just kept going until they really couldn't go any further than they went south, you know. And so the rest is history. German is like is a somewhat different thing, because Germanic is kind of in the middle. So the paper that I mentioned steppe answered much in your age are the spread of Germanic languages. So they did detect that the expansion of Germanic occurred after about like 2000 BC, which is what we know. So coordinates associated with R1a Y chromosome haplogroup. That's the dominant one with Battle Axe culture, and that to some extent, it's replaced, but not totally, by R1b when the bell beaker show up, and then the expansion of Germanic seems to be associated with I1. And so, so I1 is kind of an obscure chromosome. It's originally a European Hunter Gatherer chromosome, like I2 which was very common the Balkans and used to be common in Northern Europe, but it seems to have been absorbed into the Indo European population and then expanded really rapidly. It is a star phylogeny. It expanded really rapidly around 1800 BC or so. And what this paper shows is that this group starts expanding, starts expanding maybe like around 2000 BC or later, and then later, really expands more, even into, like, almost the historic period. It appear to the Roman Empire, okay, the in terms of, like, going southward, and so this is the expansion of the Germanic people. And the weird thing about them is this paper is, it seems to be suggesting that Germanic might originally have come from Finland. It might have been the descendant of the Battle Axe culture of Finland. Maybe, who knows. They say this because there is, there is some Eastern Hunter Gatherer ancestry in excess in this group that indicates some connection with this area of the Northeast Baltic. And so what's what they're positing is Germanic spreads from Finland into Scandinavia, into Sweden, and then into Norway and Denmark initially, and then later, it pushes South out of Denmark, and that area in historical time, after 1000 BC until Celtic languages basically disappear from what's called modern Germany by about the time of the Roman Empire, pretty much they used to be prevalent as far east as Moravia and other other areas. So what you see is, you know, in Celtic speaker zone that is in Germany, just keeps going further and further south until it's just squeezed out by the Germans, you know. And today, obviously Germanic languages which is present in Austria. It's present in Switzerland. You know, these areas during the time of the Roman Empire, Switzerland was a Celtic speaking area, some of the last Celtics on the continent of Gaulish kind was probably in Switzerland, yeah. So we have like these languages that are coming together in these ways, and there's always an interaction that's going on that makes it really difficult to figure out who's really to who. So with the Germanic I think if this new paper is correct then the most likely possibility, probability is a Germanic is branching off of some like obscure northern Baltic Corded Ware that continued in Finland, and then, you know, obviously their cousins in the West, in Sweden and Scandinavia disappear, but after 1800 BC, they come back, right? So they spread all over the north. So, you know this sort of turnabout, you never know, like I talked about Celtic and Italic just earlier, which like switch places. Now the because of the Roman Empire, Italic is all over the place, whereas Celtic has mostly disappeared in the face of Germanic and romance, right? So these sorts of things can turn very quickly. One thing I want to say about Iranian many people get confused about this.
So the Iranian languages were, historically the most numerous ones, or the largest number of languages were found in the Eurasian steppe. They'd never been to Iran. Iran was like a side branch. What happened, obviously, is Persia became a great empire. Persian itself is a southwestern version of the Iranian languages. Even within Iran itself, there's different languages in the northeast, historically, out of the north, some of them are still around. So Persians status is partly due to the Persian Empire, but later on, under the Islamic period, it became the lingua franca of much of the Eastern world of Islam. And so it actually spread within Iran, replacing a lot of local languages. And in Central Asia, it's called Dari. It replaced a lot of indigenous Iranian languages. So Iranian is today considered like Persian, but Persian is actually something of an outlier. The Persian language was an Iranian speech in Elam, which was an agent Near Eastern Empire. So the persons were very atypical for Iranian people. Most Iranian people were more like Scythians or the Parthians, who were semi nomadic. And so that's something to note. Obviously, all of these cultures lost touch with each other very quickly. They don't have any memory of a deeper connection, but they still have a lot of motifs and a lot of things that are in common between them. Like so, for example, you know the the twins Gemini. The Gemini twins, Castor and Pollux in Greek, they're present the Germanic but they're also present in India as the Ashvins twins. It seems a very deep motif that binds together a lot of these in the European people. So even though they don't remember their common ancestry or their genealogical ancestry, their cultural ancestry, their cultural heritage, indicates these connections after all this time, and now we have ancient DNA that's really, really kind of putting flesh on the bones of all of us, right? So what we need to do is have a good genealogy and then combine it with archeology, obviously. So I told you David Anthony told me years ago, oh, there's similarities between Mycenaeans and Indo- Iranians and like, well, if we just rewind the clock, we see they're right next to each other. So there should be similarities, right? It makes a lot more sense when you think of it in a bigger historical context. And I think we can see interactions between these different streams. There's different structures. You know, we're gonna get more details of data about the Germanic peoples and how they spread, because there's still a little bit more that we need to know about. You know, someday we're gonna get data out of India, ancient DNA out of India. It's still not totally clear. Aside from, like, really, really coarse generalities in Iran, you can see steppe ancestry. Sintashta in Iranian ancestry show up around, like, 2000 BC in places like Khorasan in the north, the Far North. You know that by by the ninth century, you have Persians, you know, in Persia. But something happened in those 1000 years as these, you know, pastoralists, nomads spread across the land, right? What do we need to say? You know? What do we need to do? I mean you guys know. JP Mallory had a book “In Search of the Indo-Europeans” I think we found them. We found the Indo Europeans in 2024 that's what I gotta say. What we need to do is just fill in details. And also figure out the mechanisms of how they spread, why they spread, and like why they were so successful. And like some details of where. They left a cultural impact, but did not, did not actually leave as much of a genetic imprint or a memory. So I will say, for example, I mentioned this earlier, the sun cult, based around the chariot and the horses like as a package spread. I think it seems quite clearly with the adoption, with the domestication, of the top two lineage, which you guys know, is that it's just the domestic horse proper. It looks like it was domesticated intensely, 2200 BC, in the lower Volga region, the Volga region by the Sintashta people. And then within 400 years it was all over the Middle East. It was definitely in Eastern Europe. By about 1300 BC, it shows up in China. And you know, there are Scythians. There are Scythians in Mongolia there, right? But there are places like Syria, Egypt, where this is showing up, where we don't see the long term impact of these Iranian people, although in Syria we have, we have some not manuscripts, but tablets that are manuals for horsemanship. And they have, like Indo-Aryan gods and Indo Aryan words, right? So, anyway, we have, like, a little bit of evidence here, but they disappeared. All they left was their horsemanship, right? So they're like, mercenaries. They're mercenaries that didn't have like a cultural impact. So my point is, like, obviously they had a big, a big impact culturally Iran and India and on the Eurasian steppe, but they were also everywhere else, you know, the horse cult, the horse sacrifices, found in Italy with the October horse, you know. And then the motifs that are similar between the Mycenaeans and the Scandinavians are super interesting, and they probably indicate how horsemanship tied together these communities to some extent, but they kind of forgot later on with nomads, nomads didn't. Nomads didn't forget. The Scythians were all over the steppe right? So, you know, that's the exception. I do want to say this new paper has some interesting stuff that's outside of the wheelhouse of Indo Europeans, but that that are interesting that I want to note. So again, ancient genomics supports the deep divergence between eastern and western Mediterranean and European languages. Cyprus. They have a lot of samples from Cyprus. Cyprus was heterogeneous and showed like all sorts of random people very early on. So it looks like there's a Scandinavian person, like someone from Scandinavia, according to their isotopes and genes, living in Cyprus around 4000 years ago. Why were they on Cyprus? Around 4000 years ago? Well, Cyprus is a copper Island. Cypress means copper, and that's a big resource in the Bronze Age. So probably there are merchants from all over the world in Cyprus, and that's what it looks like. Cyprus looks like kind of a melting pot during the late bronze age. It looks like there's more people of Greek origin. So Greek steppe origin that show up, which makes sense, because the Cypriot Greek, traditionally, was the original. Cypriot Greek was related to southern Greek, and was related to the Mycenaean dialect, which is the ancestor of Achaean and Cypriot Greek historically. So you can see the Greeks showing up. This is the period of the sea peoples, the Denyens, the Pelestu And, you know, they're basically Greek speaking people, probably, that are scattering out of Greece, out of the Peloponnes, out of the islands in the eastern Mediterranean, including Cyprus. Cyprus, they took over, and they kept Cyprus, became Greek, and stayed Greek. You know, obviously throughout history down to the present, except for the Turkish minority in the north, right? But there's a lot of interesting stuff there about the migration and movement and all these different people that are in Cyprus. And there are some outliers here and there in other places in the paper too. And so that just indicates that there are just some random people that are going to be surprising to us. That doesn't mean that they're part of a general trend, but they're always there in the background. They're always moving information and ideas. And you just need a couple of people. So when it comes to demographics and genetics, obviously you need, like, a lot of people to leave a mark, but one person could introduce the idea of something, right? And just transform culture. So Ogham and Runes may have been inspired by literacy from Southern Europe. They're obviously not - Ogham in Ireland and Runes in Scandinavia, the Germanic world. They're not exactly like alphabets, but they might have been inspired by the idea of an alphabet. You just need one person to, you know, a merchant from the South who has a ledger, and they realize, oh, well, we just can record things like that, right? So I think this is one of the advantages of ancient DNA, and it's showing you these people that are moving in really low numbers, those people have a cultural impact. Then there are other people that move in large numbers that have a demographic impact, and we need to separate those two. So I think with that the monolog is nearing an end. So to review, I think we have structure among Indo European languages. Now, I can't speak to whether it's definitive from the viewpoint of a linguist, but from a Genetics viewpoint, it's very clear. We have a Corded Ware cluster, Balto Slavic, Indo Iranian, Germanic, Italic and Celtic that we have the Yamnaya cluster, Armenian, Greek, Tocharian. And then among these, we have a little bit more structure, Italic and Celtics seem to be similar. Could just be, it could just be proximity, but definitely like they're, they're coming out of, like, the bell beaker genetic zone. And then, you know, then about Balkans, you have further south you go, looks like it's still more Yamnaya, but there's a lot of in migration of Bell Beaker and Corded Ware. And then, obviously, the Iranian people just kind of left on their own into central Eurasia, and did not interact for a while. They have some Siberian Hunter Gatherer, other things that they assimilated with, right? And the Catacomb Culture is probably the parent culture of the Mycenaeans and the Armenians, like catacomb culture, is a successor of the Yamnaya culture.
So we have that that we know about, and I think that that will frame our future inquiries, future connections. I think the big question that I have is only talking to people who are classicists and linguists and other things, these languages, some of the old ones, like Greek, we have that goes back to 1400 BC with Linear B. And then we have Hittite that goes back a little earlier. And then the Vedic Sanskrit, which is contemporaneous with that, maybe a little later. But these are all very, very different languages. And if the Indo Europeans and the Yamnaya weren't like diversifying until 3000 like, how do they diversify so much in 1500 years? It may be that there were, like, multiple different languages, multiple tribal, tribal groups that were genetically homogenous. And this might be indicative of why R1a is found in the corded ware, R1b among the yamnaya. Later, there's other branches of R1a and R1b that are distinguishing the different groups. So there's all this intermarriage. But it could be that there's also, like a multicultural world of these Indo European steppe nomads. So they brought their languages. They brought their languages with them, the languages that have been evolving already for like, 1000 years or more before they disperse. I don't know that's just one thing that I think about, and I don't know the answer to that, but we do know a lot the answer to a lot of the genetic questions now. So that is great. So thank you for listening and again, like and review. Really, would really appreciate that.
