Why a large portion of E-V13 in the Iron Age might have been Dacian

[Riverman]

This is bit contradictory. You state yourself that Greeks had a similar profile before mixing with more Iranian shifted people, so why do you need a "Northern" source for Bulgarians who look like Greeks without Iranian/Anatolian input? (btw, I think that the people in Greece already had elevated CHG before Greek speakers arrived, not that this was later input).

The South Thracians are after prolonged regional admixture post-EIA still more Northern than the early Greeks were on average. The average of the early Greeks, even the more Northern ones, was between 10-15 % rather, with a couple of outliers in both directions, but rarerly much above 20 %, and those seem to have more recent steppe admixture. The Thracian average shows a homogenised population, something we can't expect in the LBA, when quite obviously many different people fused autosomally, and later IA influence still shifted the population, primarily from the Aegean-Anatolian. The average for the Thracians is 22 % steppe ancestry.

Unlike the early Northern Greeks, the Southern Thracians show slight but significant Iranian ancestry of about 2 %. If we extrapolate that, this suggests Aegean-Anatolian influence of about minimum 20 %, either from the Pre-Thracian locals or from outside in the Iron Age, like Anatolian backflow and Greek contacts.

Again this is a bit contradictory. If SE-Bulgaria was taken over by a small group that got autosomally shifted and then had a huge expansion as Thracians, we should see this clearly in the branching, but we don't. We see the same kind of V13 diversity everywhere.

I explained that before by the peculiar pattern of Thracian colonisation, which seems to have involved never only one main branch, but always a representative selection of many branches. This suggest, in my opinion, for all early Thracian expansions something like a ver sacrum.

The practice consisted in a vow (votum) to the god Mars of the generation of offspring born in the spring of the following year to humans or cattle. Among the Sabines, this was the period from March 1 to April 30.

The practice is related to that of devotio in Roman religion. It was customary to resort to it at times of particular danger or strife for the community. Some scholars believe that in earlier times devoted or vowed children were actually sacrificed, but later expulsion was substituted.[3] Dionysius of Halicarnassus states the practice of child sacrifice was one of the causes that brought about the fall of the Pelasgians in Italy.

The human children who had been devoted were required to leave the community in early adulthood, at 20 or 21 years of age. They were entrusted to a god for protection, and led to the border with a veiled face. Often they were led by an animal under the auspices of the god. As a group, the youth were called sacrani and were supposed to enjoy the protection of Mars until they had reached their destination, expelled the inhabitants or forced them into submission, and founded their own settlement.

The tradition is recorded by Festus,[4] Livy,[5] Strabo,[6] Sisenna,[7] Servius,[8] Varro, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus.[9]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ver_sacrum

Interestingly, we find both in the Thracian sphere:
- the actual sacrifice of people, especially children
- the spread of non-single lineage based, fairly representative colonies

This is all the more interesting, since in Italy, while probably not genetically that closely related, the Proto-Villanovans are among the closest cultural relatives in Europe at that time to the Gáva/Channelled Ware people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Villanovan_culture

Their pottery and weapons were more similar to that of the Channelled Ware people, in many respects, than the ones of the latter to their neighbouring Balkan groups.

The timing is not necessary a big issue. We can see often that there is a time gap between the movement of people and the moment of fast branching. We can see this for example with Slavic peoples. So V13 branching in LBA, and spreading in IA makes sense.

But this needs a demographic base, which was not there. The Slavs had the big advantage of prolonged, relatively safe growth, while their main competitors either suffered horrible defeats (like the Dacians, Eastern Celts and Sarmatians) or the strongest parts of these people just left the region (East Germanic tribes). So they could first grow, then start to trickle in, and after that quickly take huge swaths of land.

While something similar did happen in the case of E-V13, it started much earlier (EBA-LBA) to reach a sizeable level, which can't have existed in a relatively dead zone, which was occupied by a series of foreign invaders. And we know from the results we got, because we have Encrusted Pottery, Noua-Sabatinovka-Coslogeni etc. samples, that these were not merely cultural phenomenons, but these were people being there, taking those areas!
And we have their direct neighbours, North and South, those too don't fit.

If you look at E-V13, even if taking E-Z5018 on its own, it would be rather too big for hiding somewhere around the Rhodopes in the MBA. Its remotely thinkable, but would contradict the comparative data for other haplogroup branches of similar size, other than E-V13, which occupied much larger territories to achieve a similar level. That's just E-Z5018 alone!
For all of E-V13, throughout the whole EBA-LBA, its even less meaningful.

[Riverman]

Are we sure that Scythian where mixed with Sarmatians at this time ?

I recall the gothic migration from the baltic sea to the black sea began 150BC ............and the goths merged with the sarmatians but clashed all the time with the scythians, eventually losing many centuries later

The main Scythian thrust into the region came after the Cimmerians, so in the Hallstatt-Vekerzug period. In 1.500 BC we might talk about related Iranians from Srubna, but not developed Scythians in the same way as they appeared later. That's kind of an anachronism.

[slavomir]

Are you looking at the dates, how is 1400bc iron age? Here's an earlier one from 1600bc -
https://haplotree.info/maps/ancient_...*&ybp=500000,0

Sarmatians formed more than 1000 years later -
"The ethnogenesis of the Sarmatians occurred during the 4th to 3rd centuries BC, when Scythian-related nomads originating from the southern Ural foothills migrated southwest into the territory of the Sauromatians, between the lower Volga and Don rivers."

the sample from Romania isn't radiocarbon dated, he has some rough dating like 2000-1000 BC. but autosomally he looks like a Sarmatian.
the Merichleri sample doesn't exist, it was supposed to be in the Southern Arc, but it's not there. Maybe it was something misinterpreted from that presentation, or they removed it from the study for some reason

[Karagjoz]

Are we sure that Scythian where mixed with Sarmatians at this time ?

I recall the gothic migration from the baltic sea to the black sea began 150BC ............and the goths merged with the sarmatians but clashed all the time with the scythians, eventually losing many centuries later

I got it off the internet, either way sarmatians had nothing to do with r-z93 in 1600bc Bulgaria as they didn't exist yet

[Karagjoz]

The main Scythian thrust into the region came after the Cimmerians, so in the Hallstatt-Vekerzug period. In 1.500 BC we might talk about related Iranians from Srubna, but not developed Scythians in the same way as they appeared later. That's kind of an anachronism.

Would you say proto Thracians were in Romania/Bulgaria/Serbia in 1600bc?

[Riverman]

Would you say proto Thracians were in Romania/Bulgaria/Serbia in 1600bc?

Yes. The question is just whether the Kostany-Füzesabony block introduced it, which would fit into a scheme putting Thracian close to Baltoslavic, or whether it was spread earlier, in the EBA, say by Cotofeni. The latter could imply a closer relationship to other Paleobalkan languages, possibly.

In the latter case, many groups especially from the Carpatho-Balkan cremation block could have been Thracian or at least Para-Thracian, down to groups like Vatin and Verbicoara. I would rather associate Paeonians and Brygi with those people, but that's up to debate as well and I'm absolutely not sure about that anyway.

To put it another way, Suciu de Sus is for me the safest starting point of all, I have no doubt it was involved. The question is just whether other, more or less related groups, were Thracian or Para-Thracian AS WELL.

Around 1.600 BC, the area between Füzesabony and Wietenberg is the safest starting point. Largely covered by the Eastern Otomani Gyulavarsand group, which cremated, and groups which might be considered part of it well into Pre-Suciu de Sus and Wietenberg. All of them cremated their dead and were largely local phenomenons with Füzesabony and later Tumulus culture and Noua influence.

[Kunig]

Yes. The question is just whether the Kostany-Füzesabony block introduced it, which would fit into a scheme putting Thracian close to Baltoslavic, or whether it was spread earlier, in the EBA, say by Cotofeni. The latter could imply a closer relationship to other Paleobalkan languages, possibly.

If this were the case, intuitively we should see at least some amount of R1a-Z280-something in the central-Eastern Balkans, which we don't.
What we see in MLBA-IA Thrace is post-Srunbaja migration toward Bulgaria (~ the Babino impact) characterised by R1a-Z93, then a large rise in E-V13, coincident with a very Mycenean/ BA Greek like autosomal prpofile.
These are the proximate processes which led to the development of Thracians, although still not 100% clear.

[rafc]

The South Thracians are after prolonged regional admixture post-EIA still more Northern than the early Greeks were on average. The average of the early Greeks, even the more Northern ones, was between 10-15 % rather, with a couple of outliers in both directions, but rarerly much above 20 %, and those seem to have more recent steppe admixture. The Thracian average shows a homogenised population, something we can't expect in the LBA, when quite obviously many different people fused autosomally, and later IA influence still shifted the population, primarily from the Aegean-Anatolian. The average for the Thracians is 22 % steppe ancestry.

As Greece shows, the LBA could be quite comparable to IA.

Unlike the early Northern Greeks, the Southern Thracians show slight but significant Iranian ancestry of about 2 %. If we extrapolate that, this suggests Aegean-Anatolian influence of about minimum 20 %, either from the Pre-Thracian locals or from outside in the Iron Age, like Anatolian backflow and Greek contacts.

Not sure how relevant 2% is.

While something similar did happen in the case of E-V13, it started much earlier (EBA-LBA) to reach a sizeable level, which can't have existed in a relatively dead zone, which was occupied by a series of foreign invaders. And we know from the results we got, because we have Encrusted Pottery, Noua-Sabatinovka-Coslogeni etc. samples, that these were not merely cultural phenomenons, but these were people being there, taking those areas!
And we have their direct neighbours, North and South, those too don't fit.

I agree that Bulgaria was not a very interesting area in the LBA, but that would be the ideal circumstance for a haplogroup to expand unbothered. By contrast the Carpatian basin was a very volatile and dynamic area. While many haplogroups would have expanded and dissapeared there, it's hard to imagine such conditions allow the type of expansion of V13.

If you look at E-V13, even if taking E-Z5018 on its own, it would be rather too big for hiding somewhere around the Rhodopes in the MBA. Its remotely thinkable, but would contradict the comparative data for other haplogroup branches of similar size, other than E-V13, which occupied much larger territories to achieve a similar level. That's just E-Z5018 alone!
For all of E-V13, throughout the whole EBA-LBA, its even less meaningful.

Well, it would also be weird if it was hiding somewhere we have a lot of samples

[Riverman]

If this were the case, intuitively we should see at least some amount of R1a-Z280-something in the central-Eastern Balkans, which we don't.
What we see in MLBA-IA Thrace is post-Srunbaja migration toward Bulgaria (~ the Babino impact) characterised by R1a-Z93, then a large rise in E-V13, coincident with a very Mycenean/ BA Greek like autosomal prpofile.
These are the proximate processes which led to the development of Thracians, although still not 100% clear.

That's why I prefer the Cotofeni scenario, but I wouldn't just dismiss the Kostany-Füzesabony one, because they heavily influenced Gyulavarsand and early Suciu de Sus, but they never fully conquered them. And in the MBA, when E-V13 started to really grow rapidly, that was the Suciu de Sus time, when they emancipated themselves from the destroyed and transformed Füzesabony, which had some sort of afterlife in Piliny, possibly, which led up to Kyjatice. Kyjatice was in this respect both more Füzesabony and Tumulus culture influenced than Gáva.

Its therefore possible that in the post-Füzesabony, after the Tumulus culture invasions, local clans which had adopted the language of their former mentors, developed on their own. Like a transmission when Füzesabony was at its height, but when it broke up, the already "Thracianised" East Otomani/Suciu de Sus people kept the language. That's of course less likely than the Cotofeni scenario, but I wouldn't exclude it.
Also, we don't know, even if my scenario is right, whether E-V13 was as dominant in the North as it became later. Possibly other Pre-Thracian lineages survived there for longer, and primarily the Southern expanding groups had E-V13 near total replacement founder events.
Again not that likely, but possible.

As Greece shows, the LBA could be quite comparable to IA.

The funny part about Greece is that the later average is pretty similar to the earlier average, but for completely different reasons, namely because the earlier period was an ongoing amalgamation process. Therefore the end product resembled the earlier situation, but that's not like "the Proto-Greeks" were like this average. On the contrary, it rather looks the Proto-Greeks had more steppe and less Iranian, while the locals had less steppe and more Iranian. In the end, the fusion resulted in something in between.

And that's exactly what I expect for Thrace, with an ongoing process of amalgamation for a prolonged period of time. Because there is no way that the profile the EIA Thracians had, which is fairly homogenised, was the widespread profile in Thrace or even Bulgaria in the LBA. What we see in the LBA of Bulgaria is that pots mean people, like the Mycenaean associated groups will be Aegaeo-Anatolian/Mediterranean shifted, the Encrusted Pottery group was I2+G2 and WHG rich, the early Noua-Coslogeni were steppe rich and had a lot of R-Z93, we already knew their initial steppe character from physical anthropology, and so on.
Then we see that Channelled Ware spread from the Danube down and this group was dominant afterwards, again, this is unlikely to have happened without a migratory event.

Therefore we see these different people and what likely happened is that some being largely knocked out, whereas the rest fused to a homogenised amalgam, which received additional gene flow from the much more populous South East (Aegean-Anatolian) in the EIA.

What we know for sure is that in this process, the Thracian ethnos and E-V13 became dominant. We don't know anything about how exactly it happened, or which shifts took place in the Transitional and Early Iron Age period, because we have zero data.

Just keep in mind who was there:
- Noua-Coslogeni people = Srubna-Satanovka with Monteoru and Wietenberg substrate influence, like R-Z93 dominated, but could have had I2, G2 and E-V13 (presumably via Wietenberg other cremating groups) as well.
- Encrusted Pottery people = WHG-rich, I2 + G2 dominated, they played their role in groups like Vartop, which fused with Channelled Ware, later, and we see their influence in some aspects of the Thracian Psenichevo culture
- Brnjica, Paracin and Belegis I people = ? Probably more Central Balkan, probably more EEF-rich, they largely fled from Channelled Ware and Tumulus culture, but were already influenced by both, bringing already some aspects of this culture, possibly even first admixture with them
- Channelled Ware groups = ? Likely E-V13 dominated, more similar to Mezocsat Late Gáva samples, but possibly already very Central Balkan shifted if coming primarily from Belegis II-Gáva, which many suggest.
- Aegean-Anatolian influences from the earlier inhabitants, but especially from the Mycenaean and later Greek and Anatolian world, including Anatolian backflow.
- Koban-Belozerka Cimmerian influences influences, especially visible in the incised pottery from Babadag, influencing the whole region.

We might see that many of these influences played in, created a new mix in the area of Bulgaria, in which the latest-strongest clans simply kept the upper hand, resulting in a mixed population which was E-V13 dominated. Just like the dominance of E-V13, that autosomal profile too was the result of the great shifts and dynamics of the LBA-EIA transition and the later period, it was not really there before and we likely won't find it for the same reason. Not exactly that.

Again, the EIA Thracian samples are fairly homogenised, so they speak for a group of people which took different ancestral elements, united them under one banner, and spread it to different regions. That is clearly Psenichievo as a phenomenon, but it was an EIA phenomenon, based on a recent amalgamation. We see that, if anything, in their culture as well:
Psenichevo pottery shows elements from Gáva, Noua-Coslogeni, Belozerka, Babadag, the Aegean-Anatolian sphere etc. Its really syncretistic, and that's what it has in common, to some degree, with the Greek world. We see the fusion of Northern, Eastern and Southern elements to form a new culture.
The second evolution of that is Basarabi, which in turn influences Hallstatt. And Hallstatt too, while clearly Central European, is to some degree also a syncretistic culture.

But the starting point of this process was probably in Thrace, because so many population elements came together. And that's what I expect to see genetically as well: Different populations and provinces in the LBA-EIA, none being exactly like the EIA Thracians, but only one (in my opinion Channelled Ware) bringing E-V13 to the party.

I agree that Bulgaria was not a very interesting area in the LBA, but that would be the ideal circumstance for a haplogroup to expand unbothered. By contrast the Carpatian basin was a very volatile and dynamic area. While many haplogroups would have expanded and dissapeared there, it's hard to imagine such conditions allow the type of expansion of V13.

It was not just thinly populated, but used as a "march through" area and occupied by a variety of people and cultures which were genetically distinct, like Encrusted Pottery, Noua-Coslogeni etc. Its completely wrong to say that we know nothing about these people, because the dominant groups from Bulgaria are, for the most part, mere extensions of the larger formations outside of it. That's what's the unpleasant truth for more Nationalist oriented Bulgarian scholars, by the way, and a reason for their absurd ideas about local continuity. Like there were people which claimed even a Neolithic continuity for the Thracians, which is completely out of question.

At the time Bulgaria was repeatedly conquered, devastated, occupied by foreign people, the Suciu de Sus and related people in the East Carpathians just flourished and had a dramatic increase in total population and population density. We all know what that means in a time of crisis, namely pressure to migrate from there.

Bulgaria was in that period a mere sink of a variety of people, which all took their part of the pastures, since they were mostly half-nomadic pastoralists.

Well, it would also be weird if it was hiding somewhere we have a lot of samples

We have exactly zero samples from the relevant groups. Zero. From Bulgaria we have some of the most important groups (like Encrusted Pottery, Noua-Sabatinovka and Monteoru, the Greeks to the South) already sampled, so much less to speculate about.

And again, Noua-Coslogeni, Encrusted Pottery, Brnjica etc. were not mere pottery styles, we have the results from aDNA and physical anthropology and masses of archaeological material, they were real people which just took their part of Bulgaria to graze their herds and build their huts. If you think that the sparsely populated area of Bulgaria was more safe and pleasant to live than e.g. Transylvania or the Banat in the MBA-LBA, you are dead wrong. Because they had even less places to hide or to expand into. Definitely no place to build up the demographic power needed to account for the E-V13 expansion. Its mathematically impossible to bring the remaining dots in accordance with such a huge demographic phenomenon. Simply impossible.

On the one hand we have nothing, on the other, in the Upper Tisza area, for Suciu de Sus into Lapus and Gáva, we have a massive build up of population density, innovation, technology, military power and then an abrupt depopulation, while all over the Balkans Channelled Ware finds pop up - here and there and everywhere. That's how an expansion of an ethnic group and patrilineages looks like, not something hidden without traces between much larger groups in a sparseley populated hinterland.

Thrace became more important with Psenichevo, but that's just the point I was making, with this syncretistic culture after the amalgamation. There was nothing important enough there before and it wasn't a protected one either, on the contrary. So backflow from that region to the North in the IA? Absolutely possible. But that the MBA-EIA build up of E-V13 started there, from some local phantom group, that's not possible.

Compare the J-L283 map:
https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer...0499999996&z=5

Do you see the line of samples from Eastern Slovenia down to Albania? That's the area J-L283 covered in that time frame already, likely much more. Yet all the data points to E-V13 being minimum as big, rather double time as numerous.
And they should hide somewhere between Noua-Coslogeni and Brnjica etc., in the form of a local phantom population which left no traces? How ridiculous is that?

Even the "more local" groups all have their origin and source rather outside, again in the Danubian (Enrcrusted Pottery), Carpatho-Balkan cremation block or Noua-Coslogeni sphere. These three were the main players, there were no others around, left standing, in the LBA, which would be important enough.

We can play the same game for other haplogroups, count their branch numbers in a given period and it practically always correlates with a population size - in a reasonable way. E-V13 can't be confined to anything small in the LBA, not possible. The numbers we have from the modern DNA are clear: They lived together, which is why they evenly spread, with participation of all major branches, and they were already very numerous, a relatively (for their time) large people, by the MBA.

[Riverman]

I made a simple PCA for showing some patterns:


The only Greeks which are more Northern than the Thracians are those with the more recent steppe ancestry and the overall cline for the Greeks points directly to the steppe, to groups like Sabatinovka (Iranians?).

Contrary to that, the Southern Thracians are very homogenous but could be placed on a cline to Mezocsat in particular by simply putting the two Himeran E-V13 individuals in between, which have a rather Central Balkan profile. These Himerans are roughly half way between Mezocsat locals and South Thracians, and they are not much younger!

What we see therefore is a mere overlap with other Balkan groups, based on general North <-> South and West <-> East clines of the Balkans.

There is no way to put the South Thracians AND the Himeran E-V13 individuals on one cline with the Central Balkan or East Balkans that easily. But if assuming steps in between, the only confirmation we need for such a North to South cline for Thracians is samples from Mezocsat/Gáva with E-V13, obviously.

Note also that the Illyrian spread is miniscule in comparison, even if adding Southern admixed, shifted samples, relative to the HRV_IA ones. The E-V13 carriers were obviously fairly diverse, if just counting the Himerans and Southern Thracians, already around 500 BC. These were never coming from the same population, its impossible. And those two individuals from Himera were not brothers, but belonged to different branches. Even more, the third E-V13 carrier was largely Caucasian and closest to an R-Z93 with the same Caucasian profile!

This just tells us that E-V13 was widely distributed and took up different autosomal profiles. If just prolongating a cline from South Thracians -> Himeran E-V13 carriers - you simply end up in or around the Mezocsat/Gáva-Kyjatice Western fringe cluster by extension. Not just on this, but on many PCA versions.
I think it is very possible that e.g. Belegis II-Gáva was already shifted towards these Himeran samples relative to the potential Northern Gáva source, whether E-V13 came from there or not. But I would suppose that the local Belegis population, with which the Gáva migrants mixed, was already more EEF, so was Paracin and Brnjica, with which they mixed as well, before moving on.

The Himeran samples are not that much younger, and they show such a wide distribution, up to a Caucasian profile, just like R-Z93 derived from Noua-Sabatinovka does! So the Thracian-related groups surely mixed with a lot of people, we see it with both E-V13 and R-Z93.