Uralic homeland and genetics and their implications for PIE

[CopperAxe]

I always agree with the strongest evidence. So, can you tell me which evidence overrules the results of Tambets et al. 2018? No? That is exactly what I suspected.

Which results exactly, their admixture models? Those did not include sources such as Neolithic West-Siberians or Botai which both has an affinity to EHG due to a shared ANE heritage and carries some EHG ancestry with it. If you pay attention though, you can see in the graph that some of the populations lack a WHG component, and others lack an EHG component. In part this is due to simplistic modeling but if you want to abide by these results, they do not support there being one common european hunter-gatherer population Uralic speakers descend from.

[al1754]

I watched a documentary about Nenets reindeer herders on BBC, who lead traditional way of life. They travel enormous distances in search of reindeer moss annually. It appeared reindeers moved in search of moss, while shepherds followed them. Nenets' ancestors living around Taymyr could move and settle Kola peninsula in 4-5 generations.
They fact that a certain individual kra001 appeared in Krasnoyarsk region does not mean anything about Uralic languages originated in Krasnoyarsk region. A certain group of hunters moved south-east to trade. Most Uralic languages are spoken to the west of middle and lower Ob River today. Linguistic diversity is between Ural & western Siberia (?).

[VladimirTaraskin]

This is a case of overinterpretation. The Elunin male samples have less "mongoloid" features than the women but in anthropological terms are still very much sinilar to ANE-rich populations like those of Gumugou or neighbouring Krotovo peoples, and deviate from typical steppe or BMAC features significantly. Elunino remains have been sampled and they do not look one bit out of place in the area they were uncovered. Cattle and sheep by this time had already spread to various Siberian and Mongolian populations by the time of the Elunino culture, where most of the data is derived from 2nd millenium BC.

It is clear that all these are hypotheses. But the periodization of the ceramic complexes of the Kuznetsk Basin looks intriguing. Local ceramics are preserved until about 2500 BC. Then "false textile" ceramics appear among it. Then Yelunino/Krotovo and then Andronovo. Clearly some group came to the Novosibirsk-Novokuznetsk area before Elunino with "false textile" ceramics. In the Allentoft preprint there is one sample from this area 2900-2800 BC (Kostenkova izbushka), its Y-DNA C and it already has an admixture of Amur7500BP, albeit a small one

[Zelto]

Have you come across an explicit claim that the SK tradition must have emanated from the Mid Trans-Urals? Could you provide a reference to it? From what I know the Shaitanskoe Ozero II site is described as being transitional from ST to SK like you said but I haven't seen the broader, explicit claim that the SK originated from a slightly more western location (e.g. Trans-Urals) when compared to ST (e.g. Altai foothills).

From my previous link:

"In the light of the Shaitanozero finds, it became clear that the formation and development of metalworking of the Samus-Kizhir type took place in the mountain-forest and forest regions of the Middle Trans-Urals on the basis of the Seima-Turbino and Sintashta-Petrovsky traditions".
https://sciup.org/sejminsko-turbinsk...rialy-14328439

When it comes to the Samus culture, unless if we have genetic samples coming out soon physical athropology might be our best bet. It should be fairly easy to tell if a population had mixed Eurasian features or were purely northeast Siberian. Unfortunately I haven't come across much.

I also think we really need to understand precisely where in the bronze age demographic shifts exactly occurred, and when. I don't think we should assume that the current "continuous" chain of Uralic languages spoken had a similar continuous distribution during the bronze age, or that since we have no prominent WSHG-ESHG type populations anymore that they all were replaced by Uralic populations in the bronze age. I expect things to look a bit more patchier if you will . There are some areas where high WSHG ancestry must have persisted during the iron age to explain some of he genetic samples we have, and the areas where WSHG ancestry remained at a high figure also seemed to have been somewhat adjacent to the areas where steppe_mlba derived populations lived. I already brought up the Bolsherechenskaya and Staro-Aleiskaya cultures, which more or less were on the same latitude as the Sargat culture or the bronze age Mezhovska culture yet lacked Kra001 input. Now these were only present in the steppe/taiga transitional period but this makes it a bit unlikely their immediate northern neighbours were very rich in Kra001.

To give a clue, look at this sample from northeastern Kazakhstan dating to 50 bc - 200 AD:
Target: KAZ_Nomad_IA: DA92
Distance: 3.7454% / 0.03745370
31.6 RUS_Sintashta_MLBA
28.0 RUS_Tyumen_HG
27.0 MNG_North_N
12.0 IRN_Tepe_Hissar_C
1.4 RUS_Krasnoyarsk_BA

I'm not arguing that the Samus culture was initially kra001-like, I was more sympathetic to that view two years ago. My original comment was about the spread of Samus-Kizhirovo materials, which to some extent must be associated with kra001-like ancestry considering most EIA Taiga- zone cultures have metallurgy derived from that tradition. With that being said, IF kra001 was located near the nodal population, the most direct route west would be the Ket or Chulym river(s) and we should see an influx of kra001-like ancestry in the Samus culture. If that is not the case, it would be a pretty good indicator that the primary migration path was at a different latitude.

Regarding the demographic shift, we know where it occurred, the chronology is the main problem. I suspect you are correct about it occurring at different times across the relevant area, although probably via separate mechanisms. For instance, the Kulai culture expansion is visible archaeologically and probably contributed to the increase of kra001-like across West Siberia. ~1800 BC is the latest date the initial migration could have began and like I said before, kra001-like ancestry was already pretty widespread in the west by ~1500 BC, albeit at widely varying levels.

It should be noted that most Iron Age cultures show local continuity across the area as well, or were formed via movements we know weren't kra001-like. This isn't only a problem for a proposed expansion during the Bronze Age.

[Jaska]

Which results exactly, their admixture models? Those did not include sources such as Neolithic West-Siberians or Botai which both has an affinity to EHG due to a shared ANE heritage and carries some EHG ancestry with it. If you pay attention though, you can see in the graph that some of the populations lack a WHG component, and others lack an EHG component.

See for example the figure 6B (qpGraph), showing Corded Ware -mediated components even in the Samoyedic populations. How can you explain them away? How is your Kra001 case any stronger, taken that it is in the wrong place for Uralic?

In part this is due to simplistic modeling but if you want to abide by these results, they do not support there being one common european hunter-gatherer population Uralic speakers descend from.

Why there should even be one common population, when there must have been several migrations all over the region, both from the west to the east and from the east to the west?

[Jaska]

It is clear that all these are hypotheses. But the periodization of the ceramic complexes of the Kuznetsk Basin looks intriguing. Local ceramics are preserved until about 2500 BC. Then "false textile" ceramics appear among it. Then Yelunino/Krotovo and then Andronovo. Clearly some group came to the Novosibirsk-Novokuznetsk area before Elunino with "false textile" ceramics. In the Allentoft preprint there is one sample from this area 2900-2800 BC (Kostenkova izbushka), its Y-DNA C and it already has an admixture of Amur7500BP, albeit a small one

There seems to be a kind of match between the spreads of the Imitated Textile Ware = the Waffle Ceramics (Baikal Region > Yenisei? > North Siberia > Kola Peninsula) and the Kra001-like ancestry component. However, for geographical reasons these could have nothing to do with the Uralic languages at that time:

1. Uralic language was never spoken in the Baikal Region; even Pre-Proto-Uralic is without conclusive evidence.
2. Uralic language spread to the Northernmost Siberia only along with the North Samoyedic ca. 2000 years ago.
3. Uralic language spread to the Kola Peninsula only along with the Saami less than 2000 years ago.

An interesting archaeological-genetic phenomenon, but if we try to guess its language and only blindly stare at the one surviving language family (Uralic), we go utterly wrong. We must acknowledge the earlier presence of many other languages in the areas known to be Uralic-speaking (and of course also in the areas known to never have been Uralic-speaking).

Perhaps some day we can reach towards this ancient language by finding substrate loanwords shared by the Uralic speakers in Taimyr and Kola, and perhaps even by the Yukaghir speakers (the Ymyyakhtakh Ceramics shares similarities with the Waffle Ceramics). Or maybe this expansion was even connected to Pre-Proto-Yukaghir?

[Huck Finn]

1. Uralic language was never spoken in the Baikal Region; even Pre-Proto-Uralic is without conclusive evidence.

An early Tungusic etc. looking substrate in Uralic would nicely explain the eastern genetic component of Uralic speakers however besides the typological similarities there doesn't seem to be one. However, there's early Uralic-Yukaghiric loan word layer, even if it has been debated and related to that:

"Unfortunately, there are also Tungusic loanwords in Yukaghir which seem
to have been borrowed at this stage (T *s ~ Y Ø; see Nikolaeva 2006: 67). Tun-
gusic contacts pull the Yukaghir area eastward, as Tungusic is considered the
easternmost of the language families representing the Altaic typology; Juha Jan-
hunen locates Proto-Tungusic in Manchuria (Janhunen 1996: 216)."

https://www.sgr.fi/sust/sust264/sust264_hakkinenj.pdf

If kra001 people were immigrants in Krasnoyarsk Krai, because of the lack of WSHG etc, they could have come from say the NW corner of Trans Baikal i.e. somewhere near or even from the areas around river Vitim or from the watershed area between rivers Amur and Vitim, in more general terms. Then, related to the linguistic issue: maybe there are at least two layers of loan words in Yukaghiric, the first one being based on Pre Proto Uralic?

[CopperAxe]

See for example the figure 6B (qpGraph), showing Corded Ware -mediated components even in the Samoyedic populations. How can you explain them away? How is your Kra001 case any stronger, taken that it is in the wrong place for Uralic?

I mean, Siberia was inhabited by a Corded Ware derived people for over two thousand years, the Indo-Iranians. Nganasans basically dont have this and the very low amount of steppe_mlba in Todzhins and Tofalars doesn't exactly point to Proto-Samoyedic speakers having substantial Corded Ware ancestry.

Why there should even be one common population, when there must have been several migrations all over the region, both from the west to the east and from the east to the west?

There should be a common component if the claim is that Proto-Uralic circa 2000 BC came from such a population.

[CopperAxe]

An early Tungusic etc. looking substrate in Uralic would nicely explain the eastern genetic component of Uralic speakers however besides the typological similarities there doesn't seem to be one. However, there's early Uralic-Yukaghiric loan word layer, even if it has been debated and related to that:

"Unfortunately, there are also Tungusic loanwords in Yukaghir which seem
to have been borrowed at this stage (T *s ~ Y Ø; see Nikolaeva 2006: 67). Tun-
gusic contacts pull the Yukaghir area eastward, as Tungusic is considered the
easternmost of the language families representing the Altaic typology; Juha Jan-
hunen locates Proto-Tungusic in Manchuria (Janhunen 1996: 216)."

https://www.sgr.fi/sust/sust264/sust264_hakkinenj.pdf

If kra001 people were immigrants in Krasnoyarsk Krai, because of the lack of WSHG etc, they could have come from say the NW corner of Trans Baikal i.e. somewhere near or even from the areas around river Vitim or from the watershed area between rivers Amur and Vitim, in more general terms. Then, related to the linguistic issue: maybe there are at least two layers of loan words in Yukaghiric, the first one being based on Pre Proto Uralic?

Tungusic languages before the Evenk expansion were pretty much confined to the Amur basin so no surprise Proto-Uralic in 2000 BC does not have Tungusic influence.

[altvred]

Are you sure about this? It has been a while since I last looked at any relevant data, but I recall that even a significant proportion of Nganasans belong to what appear to be European HG mtDNA haplogroups, and European(-related) mtDNA accounts for at least half (more than half in fact IIRC) of all mtDNA among Khanty, Mansi, Selkups, and Kets (although the last are speakers of a Yeniseian language rather than a Uralic one).

Well, Nganassans seemingly belong to mtDNA haplogroups such as Z which most definitely isn't European. There's possibly some mtDNA that's West-Eurasian in origin however you're dealing with a indigenous group of less than 1000 individuals so it's possible some "European" mtDNA is there.

What I find far more telling is the Y data which shows 90%-92% of Nganssans belonging to N, the rest mainly to other East-Eurasian Y haplogroups such as "O" and "C".

It is worth noting that Khanty, Mansi, Selkups exhibit significant West-Eurasian admixture, specifically Steppe-MLBA (Corded-Ware derived) and WSHG components. However, Nganasans, in contrast, predominantly descend from an East Siberian population with minimal or no West-Eurasian genetic influence.

Furthermore, Khanty, Mansi, and Selkups, unlike Uralic-speakers in Europe, have WSHG-ancestry. The primary shared component of ancestry among Uralic speakers East/West of the Urals, aside from varying degrees of Steppe-MLBA present in Uralic-speakers near the Volga region and West/Central SIberia, is the "kra001/Nganasan/East Siberian" ancestry, not WSHG.