Uralic homeland and genetics and their implications for PIE

[K33]

TMRCA of the Samoyed-specific N-P43 line, i.e. N-VL64, is 3200 ybp, which is more or less 1200 BC. Therefore, this could be understood to mean that Proto-Samoyed started developing at that time. Common Eastern Uralic at the root of the Ugric and Samoyedic branches at 1500 BC makes much more sense than having Samoyeds separating 4000 BC and speaking Proto-Uralic until 500 BC. If you insist that Samoyeds separated 4000 BC, it is very difficult to fit with the yDNA data as the whole P43 that is shared with Turkic and other Altaic speakers has a TMRCA of only 4800 ybp, i.e. 2800 BC which coincides with the start of the Bronze Age.

This tree by Jaakko Häkkinen is much better from the archaeological, linguistic and yDNA point-of-view:
Attachment 37499

Thank you Kristiina. I was not versed in the details and accuracy of the split times, however even in this scheme you posted, it looks like the deepest dichotomy is still (one way or another) Samyoedic-Ugric vs Finno-Permic. So the autosomal distinctions in my OP still need to be explained: why do only Samoyed-Ugrics have substantial Botai-related ancestry, while only Finno-Permic speakers have substantial Baltic_EST_BA-related ancestry?

Btw, does Jaakko Häkkinen give an estimate for the formation date of proto-Uralic?

According to Eske Willerslev, have the Botai humans genetically disappeared from the map or are they Proto-uralics or have they been absorbed by Proto-uralics?

Botai ancestry is fairly rare today. DevilsGate/Boisman_MN is much more common, and it appears the latter (indigenous to East Siberia) beginning in the late bronze age largely replaced Botai-related ancestry across Central and West Siberia.

That's why the observation that Samoyed-Ugrics have Botai ancestry and Finno-Permics largely don't is important IMO. Botai-related ancestry pretty rare, it isn't like IE steppe ancestry, which expanded/contracted and re-expanded again and again in various waves across thousands of years.

I made a K=9 ancient calculator for East Eurasian peoples, was going to do a thread on this, but here are the other peoples with substantial Botai-related ancestry (this is an old run, doesn't include some of the Finno-Permics or others w/substantial/complex W Eurasian ancestry like Uzbeks etc, and "Scythian" is only used to sop up minor "western" ancestry).

What is quite interesting is that Kets' genome-wide ancestry is very similar to Khanty and Mansi:

[hokkanto]

Quick (dirty) run with the new Chinese samples.

china .png


With ADC - 0.25X

china adc025.png

[hokkanto]

Trying out the new Vahaduo 3D plotter.

[Kanenas]

Proto-Uralic is late PIE related, imo.

Cultures like Usatovo, Fatyanovo, Abashevo, Sintashta could have played a role, even if they were Indo-Iranian or Late PIE speaking or something like that.

There are similarities that cannot be the result of loans, especially in the declension of verbs, obvious if you compare Italian, Slovenian, Modern Greek, Finnish and Mari, for example.

But concerning the words that identified as loans:
EPA *kekro- → EPU *kekra/i ‘annual cycle’ (Carpelan & Parpola 2001)

That meaning exists in both Indo-Aryan and Greek. The existence of this concept has cultural significance, imo.

I had written the following (08-15-2019, I edited it for clarity)

There is a presentation online by someone called Martin Kuemmel with a title 'Early Indo-Iranic loans in Uralic', where he also considers the possibility of loanwords from Uralic to PIIr

PU *pe̮ŋka ‘mushroom’ PIIr. *bʱangá- ‘narcotic’

But Latin has fungus 'mushroom' (and some have compared the Latin word to Greek spoŋɡos / sphoŋɡos 'sponge')


PU *weŋćə ‘knife’ PIIr. *wā́ćī- ‘axe’

But Ancient Greek has eŋkhos 'spear' (which can descend from an earlier *weŋkhos,, see for example Greek epos / wepos < wekwos)

P(F)U *kota ‘hut’ PIr. *kata- ‘house’

Ancient Greek has koi̯te 'bed', 'abode', 'nest' (By the way, the word we use today to translate the German word Urheimat comes from this root and it is koitida /ci'tiða/)

PU *kala ‘fish’ PIr. *kara- ‘big fish’

Ancient Greek has galeos, galee used for big sea animals/fish (it is considered part of the substrate, but we just need a loan from a language that treated 'labiovelars' like Albanian or Lithuanian')

And an example concerning the other direction:
pPIIr. *pæćú/áw- > PIr. *pacú/áw- ↣ *päčä- > Ug ‘reindeer calf'

Latin has pecunia 'money' from pecu 'cattle'

I think the models should take these things into account.

[Norfern-Ostrobothnian]

PU *pe̮ŋka ‘mushroom’ PIIr. *bʱangá- ‘narcotic’

But Latin has fungus 'mushroom' (and some have compared the Latin word to Greek spoŋɡos / sphoŋɡos 'sponge')

Together with Latin fungus (“mushroom, fungus”) and Old Armenian սունկն (sunkn, “tree-mushroom”) a Mediterranean–Pontic Pre-Greek substrate loanword.[1]

On kala I think it is an innovation of Uralic speakers, fish were a vital source of nutrition in the proto-Uralic urheimat. I don't see why it would be loaned especially when the term only refers to a kind of fish.

[Ryukendo]

Reviving this thread, what do people make of this publication?

[etrusco]

Reviving this thread, what do people make of this publication?

How much a Volga or west of the urals homeland for PU is backed by ancient dna so far?

[Kristiina]

Reviving this thread, what do people make of this publication?

I cannot access the paper. It is behind the paywall.

The title goes "Distributional Typological View". I have no idea how typology and distribution back her claim that "Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Uralic had no connection, either genealogical or areal, until the spreading Indo-Iranian branch of Indo-European came into contact with the already-diverged branches of Uralic about 4,000 years ago".

This is also something that I have never heard of: "A severe and widespread drought beginning about 4,200 years ago cleared the way for a rapid spread of Uralic-speaking people along the Volga and across southwestern Siberia."

How do you understand the phrase "after the initial spread, the Uralic daughter languages retained their Volga homelands remarkably stably"? Is she supporting an origin in the Volga bend before Fatyanovo. That should mean Volosovo. I have my doubts about that, but any ancient data is not yet published.

In any case, I doubt that there is much stability, linguistic or any stability, in the Volga bend area in the past 8000 years.

[Keneki20]

Reviving this thread, what do people make of this publication?

How were you able to read it? The DOI isn’t even helping in gaining access this time, unfortunately.

However, if going off the abstract of the publication, I think the conclusion may be a bit premature. The pronouns, to me, show the connection between them is almost certainly deeper than when Uralic encountered Indo-Iranian. For instance, the Proto-Uralic 2nd person singular pronoun is broadly similar to the 2nd person singular throughout Indo-European (reflexes of PIE *tuh₁ (alternative reconstruction of PIE *túh₂)), but the greatest similarity is with the Anatolian branch’s 2nd person singular pronoun.

For instance, the 2nd person nominative singular in Proto-Anatolian is *tih₁), which more closely matches the Proto-Uralic 2nd person singular, which is *ti. Agamemnon has brought this up before. That, in addition to other apparent comparatively stronger similarities shared between Anatolian and Uralic, to me, makes a sound case for earlier contact between the two that goes to the proto-level (i.e., Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Uralic) and likely somewhat earlier.

[Ryukendo]

Its unfortunate that people cannot access this publication--looks like institutions are steadily countering sci-hub.... sad.

In it, she sums up a line of research that goes back to her "fur road" paper and synthesizes a lot of recent work, e.g. by Holopainen's thesis, Akio's review and Simon's publication last year, and references unpublished manuscripts shes about to publish apparently with Grunthal et. al., one about the distribution of Iranic loans in Uralic sub-branches, and another about the typological affinities of the Uralic family. I think a foretaste of the typological stuff can be found on some slides in Academia: https://www.academia.edu/35323506/A_...phy_for_Uralic

In the current paper she gives the typological arguments in verbal and not statistical form:

Typological similarities with North Pacific Rim languages:

High frequency of nonfinite verb forms in nonmain clauses, extensive use of inflectional person
marking, personal pronoun roots that contain no semantic feature of person (which is marked only
inflectionally), salient head marking, relatively high frequency of flexible noun-verb roots in the
lexicon, and traces of nonaccusative alignment; the base of verb derivational paradigms is usually
the intransitive form (Grünthal et al., manuscript in preparation)

Typological similarities with Altaic-type (Inner-asian type) languages:

Head-final word and morpheme order at all levels: verb-final clauses, noun-final NPs, postpositions, possessor preceding possessed noun; synthetic compounds with the second element as head; primarily or
exclusively suffixing morphology (inflectional and derivational)
Strongly configurational syntax: strict word order, strict phrase boundaries, recursive embedding, phrase structure within phrases
(These first two define a morphosyntax that is self-similar at all levels and structured by few and
simple principles.)
Monoexponential (separative) encoding of inflectional and derivational categories (one category per morpheme; few or no portmanteau morphs)
Transparent morpheme boundaries; minimal sandhi
(These two define what is often called the agglutinative type.)
Simple syllable structure; in particular, simple onsets
Minimal or no prosodic contrasts (such as tone or contrastive stress positions)
Context-free parsing of certain kinds; in particular, minimal or no effects of person hierarchies on the coding or interpretation of combinations of arguments, and minimal lexical
classes determining inflectional paradigms
A tendency to develop vowel harmony, either palatal-velar or ATR (advanced tongue root);
this trait is well developed in several modern Uralic languages but does not reconstruct to
PU

She points out that all these are highly unusual for a language in Western Eurasia but not so for languages from the Pacific Rim to Americas and from the Inner Asian zone. About the lack of contact with IE, she says:

Lexical resemblances between PIE
and PU have long been noted, and recent comparative work has pared the list down to about a
dozen carefully reconstructed words, which are viewed variously as early loans (Koivulehto 2001)
or cognates (Helimski 2001). The comparative work has been done with sophistication and rigor,
but the number of resemblant words is not enough to exceed chance, given the size of the total
wordstock surveyed and the semantic and formal latitude allowed in the search (Nichols & Rhodes
2018; see also Nichols 2010; regarding these and other statistical problems, see Simon 2020).5 ...

...There is thus no demonstrable relatedness, whether by borrowing or by descent, between PIE
and PU; the resemblances are indistinguishable from the chance look-alikes that can be found
between any two languages. In reality, of course, sets like PU ∗weti: PIE ∗watar-/weten- ‘water’ and
PU ∗nimi: PIE ∗h1nomn.- ‘name’, and the resemblances in personal pronouns and person suffixes
discussed below, are striking and raise questions. It is conceivable that they are genuine sharings
and very ancient—so ancient that too few survive to exceed chance—and that they antedate PIE
stem formation with extensions and/or the development of the PU CVCV stem canon. But such
developments, if real, preceded PIE and PU and also the Pre-PIE and Pre-PU that can be reached
by internal reconstruction, so it is not clear how or whether they bear on either homeland.
Stronger evidence against a middle Volga homeland for PU is the absence of any early IE
loans into Uralic before the Indo-Iranian contact episode, which was demonstrably post-PU. The
Yamnaya spread and the later Fatyanovo-Balanovo spread along the middle Volga brought major
cultural and technological advances, and it is hard to believe that words for domestic livestock,
wheeled transport, wool, and early IE cultural institutions would not have been borrowed
by neighboring languages including PU...

....Furthermore, it is unlikely that Proto-Samoyedic could have spread well to the east of the
Iranian cultural sphere by the time of the Indo-Iranian contact episode.

That last point is relevant because in her Grunthal et. al. forthcoming manuscript she is going to say:

At some point in this general time frame, PU dispersed and the nine elementary branches spread to
their reconstructed branch homelands (Saarikivi 2020; Grünthal et al., manuscript in preparation).
The spread appears to have been rapid, large, and sweeping: It brought branch protolanguages
to their core locations, which stretched from the southern Urals to the Volga-Oka confluence,
with no evidence of substratal effects on grammar, lexicon, or toponymy (except in the easternmost branch, Samoyedic)
and no evidence of isolation by distance effects on lexicon or grammar,
as would have been expected in a more gradual expansion. These facts plus the distribution of
the Indo-Iranian loans point to a rapid spread not long before the Indo-Iranian contact episode.
Samoyedic is exceptional in showing evidence of substratal lexical influence while preserving a
conservative inflectional morphology and phoneme inventory, in preserving notably fewer PU
lexical items than the other branches, and in having very few Indo-Iranian loans [Holopainen
(2019) finds only 4–8 in Samoyedic languages compared with 28–76 in other branches]. In the
other branches, the number of Indo-Iranian words varies but always in proportion to the total
number of PU words retained; thus, apart from Samoyedic, the variation is due to branch-internal
and language-specific vocabulary loss rates and not to different degrees of contact intensity...

The limited but independent Indo-Iranian borrowings in
Samoyedic indicate that it was geographically distant from the rest of the family and from the
Indo-Iranian sphere of influence...

The references which support ascribing the small number of Pre-IIr PIE-PU similarities to chance are:
Simon Z. 2020. Urindogermanische Lehnwörter in den uralischen und finno-ugrischen Grundsprachen: eine Fata Morgana? Indoger. Forsch. In Press
Nichols J, Rhodes RA. 2018. Vectors of language spread at the central steppe periphery: Finno-Ugric as catalyst language. In Digging for Words, ed. G Kroonen, R Iversen, pp. 58–68. Oxford, UK: BAR