Friday, August 2, 2019

August 2019 status report

So Davidski describes David Anthony's latest, as Davidski annotates it. Anthony himself is basically annotating Wang although the bibliography on Anthony's link is truncated.

Anthony is probably the best archaeologist of Indo-European studies. His prose is still dry and his presentation still jumbled, but he has improved upon his work in The Horse, The Wheel, And Language. I recommend to my readers to go read Anthony's paper in full.

Over the last four to five years has come a veritable flood of genetic information, from the high steppes of Eurasia as much as from hinterland Africa. (And they intersect: this is whence we found the N1 mtDNA - Eurasian - in Somalia.) As of 2015 it all got rather overwhelming; we had to keep track of West Hunter Gatherer and East Hunter Gatherer, sometimes they mixed, and then we found out about Ancient North Eurasians somehow related to American Indians as well and... oh I give up.

Fortunately (for those keeping track of it all) the last four years have mostly resulted in consolidations. Anthony is, as best he can, laying down the consensus, to the extent there is one.

Ancient North Eurasians roamed around the Eurasian steppe accompanied by dogs and hunting the big beasts of the region. After the Ice Age, those who stayed in Eurasia became the East Hunter Gatherers. (Further east, the ANE mixed with Asians and moved to Alaska, no longer concerning us here.) Anthony calls it a "mating network", an amusing turn of phrase, but accurate enough, because when ANE>EHG met outsiders, they didn't accept much of their gene-flow. Not in central Asia anyway; we've already agreed not to speak of the East Asian branch.

On those outsiders, there was a Western Hunter Gatherer "network" too. I suppose these were the holdovers from the Magdalenians. Anthony thinks they were a springback from Spain and mainly even from North Africa. EHG and WHG met around the Danube 7000 "BC" (like me, Anthony has no truck with "BCE") and established a "frontier". If you were in EHG or WHG and you were really up for mating outside the network, the Danube is where you went. Otherwise you stayed home.

Further east meanwhile, a group of EHG met up with a third set of hunter-gatherers: from the Caucasus. (Nobody is farming up here yet.) Along the northern Black Sea, EHG and CHG formed their own frontier, mixing to 50/50 parity. I am unsure what happened to EHG further northeast; Anthony seems to accept they became Finns.

In 5000 BC, everything changed. For a start, pottery starts appearing. Because people were storing up for the winter. That's right: farming is starting up. Those farmers came from Anatolia. And - so Anthony and Davidski are deriving from Wang - this came straight across the Euxine or even from the Balkans; not from the Caucasus this time.

From the Caucasus was a different lot, centred around Maykop. Davidski adds a group in between them: Steppe Maykop, who were partly "Siberian foragers". Asian invaders so far into the west are hardly unheard of; witness the Mongols and (we now know) the Avars.

So Maykop and this EHG/CHG/Anatolian hybrid had little in common and didn't mix; and if Davidski is right, these two Mating Networks didn't even meet, because the Steppe Maykop were, er, cock-blocking them.

The EHG/CHG/farmer mix concocted a culture at Yamnaya and spoke a common language, IndoEuropean. The rest of the story went as it went, ending up with people like me.

One interesting remaining question is: what's up with those weird language-groups in the Caucasus today. Maykop proper is sometimes associated with the Circassian groups of the "northwest Caucasus". But there's also Kartveli, spoken in modern Georgia. We can add the old Caucasian Albanians, now the Udi, and related to the Chechens. During the Bronze Age, Anatolia further hosted the Hattians and the Hurrians. So anyone musing that Maykop is Circassia has, by my calculations, a 20% chance of being right. Maximum.

Some work on the Kura-Araxes culture might help. Pots Aren't People but, as symbols put to concrete form, pottery may well map to language.

UPDATE 9/27: Where we go from here.

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