Thank you for the picture. A little adjustment of my monitor brings out the inner glow, manifesting the all-around excellence of R1a1.

Descent from Charlemagne is fairly easy to document genealogically, because royal and aristocratic genealogies have long been carefully recorded. I don’t know if a genetic marker has been identified for such descent, comparable to that for Ghengis Khan.

Virtually all past and present European royal families descend from Charlemagne, and surprisingly many people of native stock in each country can trace their ancestry to a past monarch, typically through a younger son’s line or a daughter’s. The usual connection in English genealogy is through Edward III, seven of whose twelve children had issue.

Thanks for an interesting piece; I’m just speculating here but I’m also assuming that the Mongols got exceptionally “lucky” with the wholesale destruction of the Qanat system in Central Asia & Khorasan. I think that’s what precipitated the Turkisication of Turan? An interesting corollary could be the 11th century Banu Hillal invasions of the Maghreb that de-urbanised (and Arabised) the region. It could also be that the astonishing Ashkenazi Jewish pop growth rates in the middle ages were in the relatively fallow areas of Eastern Europe (I’m speculating here). Essentially the theme I’m thinking on is to what extent do geography and social niches contribute to the rise of super-lineages (which is why most of them seem to be pre-historical).

I’d love to be enlightened on this matter because that’s the only historical event (I can think of) of a “super-lineage”. I wonder if either Charlemagne or the Holy Prophet have been nearly as successful as Genghis Khan?

The split between R1a and R1b is unlikely to be as recent as ~10,000 years. Estimates based on full R1a/R1b sequences and calibrated with the Mal’ta boy R* sequence show ~20,000 years or more.

But that’s not as important as the structure within R1a, which shows that Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic R1a subclades are sister clades dating back to ~6,000 years ago. What this means of course is that they came from the same source population not that long ago, which was probably Indo-European speaking.

The truly remarkable thing here I think is that decades ago linguists and archeologists identified the Poltavka culture of southern Russia as pre-proto-Indo-Iranian, and speculated that this culture had close contacts with the ancestors of the Balto-Slavs.

It seems that Poltavka gave rise to Andronovo, which was probably the proto-Indo-Iranian culture. Now, there are six samples from Andronovo and related Scytho-Siberian Kurgans in this Y-chromosome paper, and four of them belong to the DC2 cluster, which shows a strong correlation with Indo-Iranian languages.

I’m curious if you have any strong thoughts or speculations on R1b1b? Some very amateurish googling on my part shows some researches thinking it popped up between 10k years ago and 4k years as near as I can tell and moved form Asia into Europe, but I imagine this is quite different than the later WH R1a move right?

Forgive any mistakes I’ve made in interpretation I’m very much an amateur on this. I do think there’s quite the field here for those willing to write “lay friendly” material on the recent findings of the last 10 years on this. If there’s any reading material you recommend I’d welcome the suggestion.

Cheers and keep up the great work.

I have used “Bjarmaland”/”Permia” as shorthand for the unwieldy “homeland of the speakers of the proto-Permic language, i.e. the territory inhabited by the most recent common ethnolinguistic ancestors of the modern Udmurts and Komis,” which may or may not overlap to any degree with the historical Bjarmaland. I apologize if this has caused any confusion.

Bjarmaland is associated with the southern coast of the White Sea and regions of modern Archangelsk Oblast, the Permians there were most likely Komi-related. Udmurts live in the the Volga-Kama region and any Baltic Finnic influence there is unlikely. It’s actually visible from the graphic I linked too, as components are differentiated Udmurts’ result overlaps more with Russians and Mordvins than with Karelians and Vepsians who belong to the Baltic Finnic group alongside Finns of Finland, and Udmurts also share the minor West Asian component with IE-speaking Europeans when it is present.

The red hair could just be a founder effect though, its distribution in Eastern Europe outside Udmurts doesn’t follow ethnolinguistic borders.

ohwilleke wrote,

“Red hair might be from a Finnish migration which would be unlikely to bring much R1b.”

The Permians (i.e. Udmurts and Komis) vie with the Finns of Finland for the maximal frequency of Y-DNA haplogroup N in Europe and pretty much in the world except perhaps the Northern Samoyeds and the Siberian Turkic-speaking Yakuts (cf. Tambets et al. 2004, Mirabal et al. 2009).

However, the portion of the Y-chromosome gene pool that does not belong to haplogroup N differs between the Permians and the Finns; the remainder of the former being mostly R1a, and the remainder of the latter being mostly I1. Of course, some R1a (and R1b) has been found among Finns, and some I (and R1b) has been found among Permians, but the difference is quite stark. The Y-DNA pool of the Permians can effectively be summarized as N + R1a, whereas the Y-DNA pool of the Finns can be summarized as N + I1. Any hypothesis of a migration from Finland to Bjarmaland (Permia) needs to explain why the modern Finns have so much I1 whereas the modern Permians have so much R1a. Is it really ascribable to mere Swedish (or other Germanic) influence in Finland and Russian (or other Balto-Slavic or even other satem Indo-European) influence in Bjarmaland subsequent to a prehistoric migration of people from Finland to Bjarmaland or vice versa?

@5

“Udmurts and Bashkirs live right next to each other, and both have peculiarities (high frequency of red hair and R1b respectively) but little genetic overlap, so their distinctive qualities are most likely unrelated.”

Unrelated perhaps, but probably not coincidental precisely either. Mountains tend to be genetic sinks that act as refuges for relict populations that get wiped out in less hostile terrain. Both the Udmurts and Bashkir communities probably ended up surviving in a remote part of the Ural Mountains while not in surrounding areas for this reason.

Red hair might be from a Finnish migration which would be unlikely to bring much R1b.

Plenty of speculation on R1b. Looking at very extensive HLA haplotype data [n= >10,000,000], the data suggests that all regions characterised by notable R1b Y DNA frequencies today [all clades], coincidentally appear to have experienced gene flow from Northern Africa &/or West Asia within the last 20kya. These HLA haplotypes found at high frequency in high R1b populations reach peak frequencies and diversities within N.Afr/W.Asia and nowhere else. While in Iberia, Caucasus, Urals, etc. the haplotypes are in very strong linkage dis-equilibrium indicating more recent entry. My money is on R1b origins in the Nile Valley or proximal regions. I realise that the majority of people will strongly disagree with my opinion. I say give it another few years and let’s see,

L23’s highest diversity is in Romania, then Bulgaria. It is less than 6300 years old. Too young for any migrations from West Asia, but fits Cernavoda. The expansion of Pontic Kurgans into the Balkans. And a good lead to Ezero, and Troy as an introduction of L23 into Anatolia.

Basal R1b is not found in Iran. It is found in Central Asia. As well as much more M-335, that was once thought to only be in Anatolia. It is an obvious transplant by Central Asian Turks, as is the M-73 in Turkey. M-343 is most common in Kazakhstan. You will not find a migration out of Anatolia or Iran/Caucasus to match the ages of R1b subclades.

Descendants of Cernavoda, in Ezero and Cotafeni did not reach the Carpathian basin before 3000 BCE. Getting to Iberia in less than two-hundred years?… Very, very doubtful. Beakers and R1b were not dominated by Corded Ware. It was Bell Beaker that went in and took over most of the area. It expanded clear into Belarus and down the Adriatic. Hardly a conquered people. Those Indo-European cultures of later years, are dominated by R1b. Why would a people that did the dominating and moving around, also introduced Bronze to Corded Ware, be inferior? It makes more sense that R1b was always Centum speaking. Proto-Celtic dates to 3000BCE. A perfect time for a launching time out of the Carpathian Basin. It sure as hell wasn’t Corded Ware there, but descendants of Cotafeni and Ezero.

The ANE and WHG in BR1, in Hungary, excludes West Asia as a source of R1b. It’s over a 20% increase in WHG, with 12%ANE. Doesn’t sound very Neolithic or West Asian. Bell Beaker doesn’t have West Asian and Caucasus mtDNA, but Corded does. R1b was either too far North, or in Ukraine, already mixed with Balkan Neolithic peoples, avoiding West Asian mixture.

Udmurts and Bashkirs live right next to each other, and both have peculiarities (high frequency of red hair and R1b respectively) but little genetic overlap, so their distinctive qualities are most likely unrelated.

Yunusbayev et al in their pre-print “The Genetic Legacy of the Expansion of Turkic-Speaking Nomads Across Eurasia” had quite a bit of populations from that area in their ADMIXTURE run. Udmurts at no point show the South China-centric component that appears at K=3 or the Buryat-Mongol centric orange component appearing at K=9. Bashkirs show both and these could be taken as some sort of indicator of Turkic expansion in West and Central Eurasia.

http://biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/suppl/2014/08/13/005850.DC2/005850-1.pdf

Ebizur, I’ll have to bow to your superior knowledge of haplogroup frequencies on this one. The R1B map had reminded me of this map I’d seen or red hair, with the Udmurts being the center of the outliar population in question. That’s an interesting coincidence then that both maps put an odd eastern bullseye in roughly the same place, but with apparently different populations.

Kosmatka,

The blob of high R1b frequency in that area should be ascribable to the Bashkirs, a Turkic-speaking people, and not to the Permic-speaking Udmurts. The Udmurts instead have been noted for their exhibiting Y-DNA haplogroup N with extremely high frequency.

I see the Udmurts are popping out again, north and east of the Caspian Sea. (An island of redheads in a sea of brunettes)

I’d wondered if the Udmurts’ were actually connected to more western populations, or if they’d simply derived their unusual hair color frequencies locally through some parallel process, but this seems to seal the matter.

1. One kind of study that is striking for its absence (since it has been possible for a long time now), is a study the tries to meaningfully correlate data about the coincidence of language, religion/ethnicity, geography, Y-DNA haplogroups, mtDNA haplogroups, informative markers such as those for pigment and lactose persistance and blood type, and other autosomal data from the same individual into a picture correlated at the individual by individual level, rather than looking at total distributions of each separately at the population level and looking for correlations that way. Multi-dimensional cluster analysis ought to be able to leverage more information out of the data if each data point was linked with all relevant data.

2(a). I was familiar with the outlier R1b population in Africa, mostly speakers of the Chadic language family, mostly Sahel pastoralists who have converted to Islam, with a smattering in Northeastern Fulani community (a Niger-Congo linguistic group at the fringe of the Niger-Congo range to the immediate south). This is overwhelmingly of the R1b-V88 subhaplogroup, a very basil branch of the R1b clade relative to the European clades that diversify in a star-like manner much more recently. This migration can be dated quite precisely because the archaeology very strongly points to a specific time and place at which the Chadic people came into being (making it a nice archaeological calibration point of mutation rates). Tishkoff (in a paper I have a hyperlink to that has gone bad) states:

“A proposed migration of proto-Chadic Afroasiatic speakers ~7,000 ya [5000 B.C.E.] from the central Sahara into the Lake Chad Basin may have caused many western Nilo-Saharans to shift to Chadic languages. Our data suggest that this shift was not accompanied by large amounts of Afroasiatic gene flow. Analyses of mtDNA provide evidence for divergence ~8,000 ya [6,000 B.C.E.] of a distinct mtDNA lineage present at high frequency in the Chadic populations and suggest an East African origin for most mtDNA lineages in these populations.”

2(b). I was not aware of the cluster of R1b in the mid-Urals of Russia which appears to be some combination of Bashkir people and Komi people. The Bashkir people are Sunni Muslim people who speak a language in the Turkic family and had an ethnogenesis in the early Middle Ages that may have also incorporated people who previously spoke languages in the same macrolanguage family as Finnish (i.e. Uralic) who were probably close kin of the modern Komi people. The Komi people speak a Uralic language and are located nearby.

One would not expect R1b in people who spoke a Turkic language (a language family with roots in the Altai Mountains until the historic era that was followed by an expansion of the nearby Mongolian people where R1b is rare). But, apparently, they made their way to their current home via the Danubian Plain and Southern Urals, and picked up R1b on the way. Founder effects in one or more of the seven clans of this people (probably organized patrilineally) probably account for the exaggerated R1b fractions in the Northern Ural Bashkirs relative to their source populations in this thinly populated area.

2(c). In Europe, most R1b appears to have arrived when an Eastern R1b population migrated there and expanded out of Iberia to most of the current range, although the source and route are unclear. The best fit to the archaeological culture that was the source of that rapid Western European expansion in light of ancient DNA appears to be the Bell Beaker culture in the Copper Age (a people whose language family was shared with modern day Basque and has left a substrate in subsequent Indo-European languages such as words for base twenty numbers), although this isn’t universally accepted. The Bell Beaker archaeological range and the R1b distribution in Europe are very similar and the timing is right in light of ancient DNA data — older farmers tend to be Y-DNA haplogroup G; older hunter-gatherers tend to be Y-DNA haplogroup I. The Y-DNA mix of Europe in ancient DNA is pretty stable from that point onward.

Increasingly, it looks like the Bell Beaker genetic source stock (at least for men) was somewhere South of the Black and/or Caspian Sea and the Caucasus mountains, but no further south than the Northern Fertile Crescent and the Iranian highlands. There are many similarities in ancient Minoan DNA and the Minoans probably made their way to Crete from Anatolia. The Bell Beaker people were known for the pottery (obviously), their metalworking, and their archery. Northern migrants of this culture acquired lactose tolerance and then back migrated to modern Basque Country.

This culture maintained a more or less unchanging border with the Indo-European Corded Ware affiliated people to the east of them within Europe (a predominantly Y-DNA R1a people that exploded demographically at the same time with similar technologies) for about 1,000 years, although the Western R1b side collapsed and was eventually overrun by Indo-Europeans (especially Celts and linguistically Germanic people) ca. 1300 BCE.

2(d). The ultimate source of the most basal branches of R1a, R1b and R2 extant today appears to have been in Iran, although the diversification of the various branches happened elsewhere to a great extent.

2(e). I recall reading somewhere in the last few days that a division of R1 that is a sister branch to R1a and R1b with equal footing that was recently discovered in Bhutan.

The Norman Conquest of 1066 replaced virtually all of the Anglo-Saxon (and remaining Celtic) nobility with Norman masters (Robin Hood notwithstanding). French became the language of the nobility, government, justice, and the bourgeoise. It remained so for several hundred years. Even the word Parliament is a corruption of the French “Parle Mont” (speaking place). Parliament was ceded (grudgingly) legislative power by King John after the battle of Runnymeade in 1215. By the time of Shakespeare’s Henry V, English had become a meld of Anglo-Saxon and French words.

Vestiges exist in the American judicial system. In many states, the baliff enters the court room shouting the words “Oyez, Oyez, Oyez” (French for “Hear Ye”), the ____ court is now in session, Judge _____ presiding.

Another surviving genetic vestige was discovered during WWII. The Germans bombed many areas other than London. After one particularly devastating raid, the general populace was asked to donate clothing and shoes to those who had lost everything. The authorities discovered that the shoe sizes worn in at least two different areas were vastly different. The dividing line was approximately along the trace of Offa’s dike.

I checked some papers on the Anglo-Saxon invasion, and one states that the replacement of Celt by Anglo-Saxon Y markers was 65-100% in the Midlands, a typical area.

http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/19/7/1008.long

If this is correct, it wasn’t a matter of elite replacement. Any speakers of a Celtic dialect remaining would have been under considerable pressure to adopt Anglo-Saxon.

The source I remembered stated that Anglo-Saxons replaced only 20% of the gene pool of the British Isles. But this ignores the enormous local variation.

Also, R1a is a minor haplotype in the Anglo-Saxon gene pool and represents only about 5% of the British population. It may have arrived with Viking invaders, as well as Anglo-Saxons.

“I have trouble imagining the social processes and institutions that produced the complete language replacement.”

One process that is probably pretty pertinent is that the conquerers probably had a single language that was highly homogenized following the practices of their own ruling court. In many cases, however, the conquered people would have had a hodge-podge of somewhat related dialects with the dialects of geographically distant communities being mutually unintelligible and each individual dialect being spoken in a consistent way by only a small community of illiterates.

In a divide and conquerer kind of linguistic scenario it is somewhat less difficult to see how the language of the conquerers that carried both access to power in the community and horizons beyond one’s own local community, could be seductive.

Fascinating article – the comments are even more interesting! First time I have ever heard that “English is a creole of Medieval Norman French!” If so, then I can relax instead of complaining to myself that I still haven’t learned French! There is still so much to be learned about genetics, cultural and linguistic development. This is a wonderful conversation.

@RogerBi
“There’s probably more to be learned from the variety and sharp contrasts of the Asian and African examples of language replacement.”

No doubt. My point was simply they’re two known examples of invasions of the same place where one led to language replacement and one didn’t. The one that didn’t is known to have been elite replacement only. The other is less clear cut but there must have been a difference of some kind because it did lead to language replacement.

There may have been a male preponderance in the first settlement of the Saxon Shore, but the expansion over England took several centuries. The Y haplotype was R1a, and there’s only about 10% in the British Isles data base. I have trouble imagining the social processes and institutions that produced the complete language replacement. The Norman Conquest had little impact on the gene pool and didn’t replace the language. I’ve never seen it put this way, but English is a creole of Medieval Norman French.

There’s probably more to be learned from the variety and sharp contrasts of the Asian and African examples of language replacement. This is in keeping with the WASP striving to be bland and boring, within limits.

Too many comments but anyway…

If one standard pattern where a population was seemingly completely replaced was:

1) Whole-population colony settles at the mouth of a river. Mostly maternal incomer DNA with some native.

2) Male-only or male-majority conquest groups expanding radially from original colony replacing native males on a village by village basis but *only* within a distance that can be militarily supported by the original colony. All or mostly all native maternal DNA. Incomer language remains dominant however because still linked to main site.

3) Whole-population offshoot colony from the original (now with some maternal native DNA) settles upriver a few miles. A bit more native maternal admixture

4) Repeat of the radial male-only conquest groups again within support distance of the new colony.

Rinse and repeat.

If so then a pre-historic expansion might still be visible in some places by a plot of the proportion of incomer and native maternal DNA i.e if native maternal DNA was dark blue and incomer light blue the initial colony would stand out and the various daughter colonies also as they gradually shaded from lighter blue to darker blue along the path(s) of expansion.

Also, it makes me think the varying proportions of maternal and paternal DNA across different sites may be more relevant than the whole in discovering prehistory through genetics.

Also that the oldest still-existing DNA in a geographic region will be paternal DNA in the least desirable real estate *if* it matches the female DNA or the female DNA in the same real estate otherwise.

In European terms that might be North Wales or the remoter parts of Ireland, Scotland and Brittany. North wales in particular because although the language is Celtic there is a distinctive physical type there which is shortish, darkish, curly brown hair, brown eyes – (i always assumed they were the basis for Tolkein’s hobbits) – which is quite distinctive.

I think the dominant language outside the home would be the critical factor.

If the invasive males are only in enough numbers to replace the native elite then the children would be bilingual but most of their conversations would be in the mother tongue and the invader’s language might peter out over a few generations. If the invaders replaced say 60%+ of the native males then again the children would be bilingual but the bulk of the conversations would be in the invader’s tongue.

Put another way, if you divide the population into
Aristocracy
Sergeants, Merchants and Stewards
Peasants
then if the invaders just replace the aristocracy they have to learn the native language. If they replace both the aristocracy and the sergeants and stewards then they don’t.

I think the Norman conquest of England is an example of the first and the Anglo-Saxon invasion an example of the second.

Religon might follow the lower threshold because it’s more a matter of elite emulation whereas language is a mixture of elite emulation and practicality.

#2

“The failure of Islamic invaders to produce language shift in South Asia despite producing religion shift, is also notable”

The language shift did happen in south asia. Moguls used persian at official level. Then Arabic-Persian-Sanskirit mix Urdu/Hindi language spread.

In 19th century, Urdu was chosen by British for schools in Panjab, even though it was not their native language

There are some notable examples of conquering elites (probably male dominated) losing their language; the classical Romans in the Greek area and, as suggested recently at this blog, the Tutsis. The failure of Islamic invaders to produce language shift in South Asia despite producing religion shift, is also notable.

Another interesting motiff along these lines is the Mongol imposition of a female dominate elite of Mongol princesses, with extraordinary power due to their connections in the larger empire, in Korea. This too did not produce languge shift and ultimate produced a successful counterrevolution.

When the parents have different linguistic backgrounds, it may often be the language of the father that is dominant within the family group….

Is there a formal study on this? I’d actually expect the opposite since the kids are around the mother far more than the father. I think it’d be more related to the local population the children are raised within though. Maybe the father largely controls that (they bring wives to their own community – which is what that quote might be hinting at).

I’d actually expect the major issue is trade. As invasive languages become trade languages they would have more of an effect. That might be what underlies your point in your final paragraph. If a language is necessary for trade then there is an incentive for at least some individuals of a local community to learn it.

Razib, when you say “never trust estimates of coalescence between two lineages” are you referring to the specific timing (in years or whatever) of coalescence?

This claim is made in the conclusion, and I quote so that I do not do disservice to it:
“Age estimates based on sets of Y-STRs carefully selected to possess the attributes necessary for uncovering deep ancestry (for example, from the almost 200 recently characterized here [33]), and from whole Y chromosome sequence comparisons, will provide robust dates for this haplogroup in the future.”

Many hobbyists have made similar arguments before, and have asserted that many papers by academics in this field based on 10 STR or 17 STR haplotypes made unsupported claims. Possibly, the need for headlines in the past has trumped more reasonable arguments (and better supported science). Instead, a reasonable assertion that the question is currently unanswered is the better answer, rather than making claims based on the desire for a headline snippet that later turns out to be unsupported by the data.

Good for them: “For now, we can offer no date as to the age of R-M269 or R-S127”

I do hope that advances in extracting viable Y-Chromosome aDNA (ancient DNA) over the next 10 years will give us alot clearer picture. Jean Manco has a list of ancient DNA recovered in Europe here:
http://www.buildinghistory.org/distantpast/ancientdna.shtml

So far most of the aDNA extracted from Neolithic males appears to belong to Haplogroup G with Haplogroup I been other major component. The earliest R1a appears to be from Bronze age. However without alot more samples from across the continent it’s too earlier to derive any valid inferences let.

-Paul

Xiongnu were pacified by the Chinese through divide and conquer. Southern xiongnu became part of Chinese force to fight against northern xiongnu. Southern xiongnu elites were awarded with noble and military titles. At end of Jin dynasty (After Han and three kindoms), southern xiongnus were first rebel force uprising against Jin rulers since xiongus felt they had been treated like `slaves’.

hi razib, thanks for the superberb post: do you have any nice reference on magyars/hungarian case?

Nice, thick, nuanced analysis with excellent examples.

Another interesting example to add to the mix would be the case of Mongol efforts to incorporate Koreans into their domains by forcing local notables to marry Mongol princesses and then giving those princesses real power politically with the Mongol elite and via religious patronage.

While it made a dent, in the end it basically failed. When the Mongol war machine’s impact became less dominant, the Mongol princesses were purged, assassinated or marginalized by forces led by an emergent bourgeois and class of courtiers and lesser aristocrats that hated them with a passion. The religious institutions were looted and appropriated by the state. The Mongol princesses also didn’t manage to stay in power long enough (just a few generations) to consolidate Mongol culture and the fact that it was princesses rather than princes that were brought into the Korean culture may also have been too great a leap for the Korean society to accept even though the Mongols were somewhat more accepting of powerful women. The relatively small number of political subdivisions in Korea at the time and the peripheral location also probably helped.

One can also look more recently at the persistence of Western institutions in newly independent colonial powers. British institutions survived in India after almost five hundred years of British colonial rule before independence (although arguably penetrated less deeply in Pakistan than in India or even Bangladesh), but places where colonial powers had ruled less long (e.g. much of Africa) seem not to have developed the critical mass necessary to make that approach work.

Then again, that could be a function of the theory that political complexity must advance sequentially. India has a fairly well developed system of regional states in place when the British arrived and the British colonial rule relied on playing one regional state against another. In the African case, there were few full fledged states, more big man run villages and chiefdoms, when colonial powers arrived, so political units had to be built from the gound up, often without success.

Put another way, while “barbarism” may reduce resistance to assimilation, it also means that the number of “chunks” of organized people who have to be assimilated one group at a time is greater if the society is too fragmented.

Along the same lines, one important factor in Islamic expansion was rapid assimilation of existing elites. This was also the case in the rapid Nazi expansion where local business and political leaders were co-opted. (I’m not, by the way making an Islamo-Fascist suggestion, adoption of local elites, also Holy Roman Empire, is a general phenomena). The ideal state for assimilation may be one where the substate people are divided, but into chunks just a single level of political complexity below the one aspired to by the rulers.

If the substate people are truly unified and do not have co-opted elites (as the Roman Catholic church did for the Irish in the face of British rule), it can be almost impossible even after a millenium to secure assimilation, while in the case where the elites are co-opted (e.g. Mary Queen of Scots), it can happen much more quickly.

Tibetan assimiliation hasn’t been too effective without heavy handed demic replacement in part because the Tibetans have maintains political unity through a government in exile.

The point that “unlike the Christians of Egypt the Zoroastrians of Iran almost disappeared”, of course, has at least one very obvious source: Islamic tolerates “People of the Book” (i.e. Jews and Christians) as a matter of religious doctrine (perhaps to defuse early resistance from these locally powerful groups), while it officially does not tolerate other religions (whose Mediterranean influence was already weak due to the active suppression of these religions by the late Roman emperors).

The classic case of a superstate succumbing to a substate which also bears examination is the case of the Romans in the Eastern empire adopting the language and culture of the Greeks that they conquered (and the early Arabs as well, as noted).

One way to think about it is that co-opted local elites may only be sincere in their adoption of superstate norms when the superstate can somehow demonstate that they have something that is worth emulating. Actual “barbarism” in the substate people may be less important than a self-perception that the leadership and culture of the conquered society is rotten. The cultural self-esteem of the elites may be at work as a powerful factor.

The Sumerian replacement by Akkadian elites, the demise of Harappan culture that opened the door to Indo-Europeans, and the weakness of the C-T culture that opened the door to Indo-Europeans in the greater Balkans involved rather advanced cultures for their day, but elites that were discouraged about the value of their own traditions as a result of the climate setbacks of the drought/climate shift of ca. 2000 BCE.

The climate shift producing leadership failures that accompanied Bronze Age collapse ca. 1200 BCE, may similarly have undermined the self-confidence of the Bronze Age elites of that time making them open to the new post-Bronze Age collapse regimes. For example, it appears that the megalithic culture saw a massive collapse in metal trade goods and trade in general before the way was opened for a Celtic replacement of that culture. Classes of leaders who can’t deliver lose confidence in themselves and are open to alternatives.

Perhaps there is something to the unending cycles of self-doubt and condemnation of corrupt leadership regimes that pervade the Hebrew Bible. Perhaps it is that kind of self-image of one’s society (which is seen again in the hand wringing classical literature about the late Roman empire’s corruption), that cause existing substrate regime leaders to lose faith and become vunerable to momentarily militarily strong superstrate leader’s alternatives.

Would the Spanish culture have become so dominant if the Aztecs and Incas hadn’t experienced such spectacular defeats that make the old rulers and culture look inferior to the new, even if culturally neutral germs may have been as important as guns and steel and cultural advantages in fact?

Was the willingness of the elites of Britain to assimilate into Germanic culture, and the Hungarian to assimilate into Urgic culture, to a great extent a product of the fact that the Roman-Christian approach to which local elites owed residual allegiance been so deeply discredited by the fall of the Roman empire, rather than simply the loss of ties to it?

The longest lived non-Indo-European societies of Europe (Basque and Etruscans) were also those that had the least to gain from conversion to Indo-European society because they had adopted many of the non-linguistic technological innovations (e.g. art technique, metal working, more advanced farming, architectural and military technologies) that their neighbors had not. Survivors and sustainers of old regimes tend to be those that are early cultural adopters than use their imitation to hold their own.

The Saxon Shore forts don’t correspond well with the earliest anglo saxon pagan cemeteries in the Yorkshire Wolds, Sancton, Newbald etc. and the Upper Thames valley, eg. Berinsfield. These areas also show the highest frequencies of haplotypes judged to be of continental origin. The forts in Norfolk do correspond with early cemeteries and the area is similar in terms of genetic evidence but the majority of the forts are along the south east coast, from the Isle of Wight to Essex, where the genetic signal is weaker. I think it would be wrong to equate the shore forts with early settlement and a mechanism for achieving control. They may be, but only in some parts.

The trading function of these forts at the end of the roman period is likely unimportant as the economy had collapsed. Their importance may be that they were garrisoned by germanic auxilliaries or that laeti, settlers who were granted land in return for miliary service in times of need, were relocated from the continent to these areas. This appears to have happened along the gallic saxon shore for example, around Boulogne.

Magyars

I’d suggest they remain culturally self-coherent because they were situated between a lot of not-especially coherent German populations and not-especially coherent Slavic populations (at least compared to themselves), neither of which had any particular cultural cachet, so a cultural tug in one direction is immediately counter-balanced by a tug in the other leaving them preserved in a default state of Magyar. Or is that just simplistic?

Saxon Shore

Perhaps not so much about defense as tax collecting and trade management and has the effect of instituting Saxon-Frisian as the default trade language of the entire coast of Britain and northwest Europe, so when the Romans collapse the Germans have these established business and family ties to fall back on and the language quickly filters over Britain as the standard in business opportunity. And Celts, who may be divided among themselves, then find it convenient to speak in Saxon rather risk a quarrel, with one another, over nothing.

Perhaps Britain wasn’t so much conquered as bought.

I read on Wiki that the earliest male lineages in the British Isles now regarded as originating from a Balkan migration instead of an Iberian migration, as was earlier hypothesized. That hypothesis is based upon Y-DNA analysis though — I don’t know if there’s an estimate for ancestry percentage from autosomal DNA. Do you? You gave the 70 percent figure, but it would be interesting to see that disaggregated for the different waves of pre-Roman migration (e.g, Celts, Balkans, etc)

It’s interesting how these theories correspond with those of John Morris’ The Age of Arthur: A History of the British Isles from 350 to 650.

This book emphasized a point that this modern American had not grasped which is the geography of Britain. The Southeast contains the high productive land, and the terrain of the island also offers key military advantages to control the core of the island. Thus, there is a tipping point where control of the Southeast will result in control of the island.

Morris gives credence to the Anglo-Saxon story that German warriors were invited by a British lord to defend his lands from Pictish raids. In exchange they were given land for their people to settle along the Saxon shore. These were not large settlements, but created a productive base to which later Germans would be invited (I believe in response to British efforts to push out the Germans). In the ensuing wars, a tipping point was reached that reduced the native population to peasantry or into the hills of Wales or the North.

The medieval mind may have attributed this to divine providence, but it was probably more a function of higher nutritional levels which very elite individuals could take for granted.

Probably? You think? Any actual evidence to back up this statement? Until I see any, I’ll give equal weight to divine providence and higher nutritional levels!

(Mild) apologies for the snark. This is very impressive. Trying to synthesize the genetics with other fields to make sense or figure out something about a part of history where the details are not clear is fascinating. Because of my greater familiarity with European history than that of Africa or East or South Asia, I find this very interesting.

2 questions:
1) In the 2nd paragraph from the end, you refer to an unadmixed German population. Does this mean one that has not (yet) crossed with another (e.g., Britain or Roman)?

2) Your conclusion is not clear to me. Are you saying that the reason that the Britains assimilated to the Germans and not vice-versa is, most likely, that the Germans came with their families/women so were able to maintain their culture long enough to incorporate the locals? And that, in contrast, the reason that the Magyars and Turks assimilated to the local cultures was that they were basically victorious armies who, having conquered, settled down with local women and eventually assimilated into the local culture though of course they did so as a ruling caste?

Thank you for this post and the massive effort behind it. I third Rowe.

The small male dominated military elite model of the anglo saxon adventus model was formulated as the numbers required for a single event mass invasion are not credible. One to two million north germanics moving into England, where Millet estimated the population of Britain as 3.9 million, is simply too high a number. Yet Britons remain more or less archaeologically invisible in contrast to the ample evidence for germanic settlement in the east and the language is replaced. The question then arose, if a smaller number of germanic settlers came, what were the mechanisms by which their culture became dominant?

Heinrich Härke proposed that Britons may be found in germanic graves and that we should not assume that all germanic grave assemblages imply the presence of germanic settlers. Furthermore he suggested that the presence of weapons in graves should not imply warriors, pointing out that these were often found in burials of infants, women and men too old to fight. They should therefore be seen as a badge of rank, an indication of the status of their family within the community.

There are parts of England which do not produce germanic archaeology for the years 450 – 600 AD but which show virtually no evidence of Britons either. We don’t know why this is but it seems clear that production of goods, hair pins, ceramics, clasps etc either ceased or were made of of materials which were of poorer quality and which simply perished. In contrast, germanic settlements in the east show the presence of imported goods. These are not confined to jewellery or other metallic artefacts but include household items such as quernstones, sometimes imported from the Vulkaneiffel between the Mosel and Rhine and we also see differences in dietary practices.

Identifying Britons living amongst the Germans is therefore difficult. We don’t have anything which is typically British to use an an indicator. Nor do we know the fate of Britons who were not living under germanic rule. With a few exceptions such as Tintagel in the far west, their situation appears to be one of complete social and economic collapse.

Capelli’s 2003 study broadly confirmed Weale’s earlier study fregarding the high frequency of continental y chromosomal haplotypes in England, ie ~54% but showed that the distribution was far from even. The map in the article by Der Spiegel,has been redrawn by them but is based on one produced by Mark Thomas sometime around the publication of the Capelli study. The hotspots for continental haplotypes on this map are not, as often claimed, completely obscured by later Danelaw settlement as the most western hotspot is in the upper Thames valley, outside of the the Danelaw. Capelli’s admixture analysis suggested a presence of 70.8% of continental haplotypes for Chippenham. The map corresponds nicely with Page’s distribution of pre 650AD runic finds in England, again well before Danelaw settlement,
If the question of how these early settlements led to a complete cultural transition remains unanswered, so too does the question of when these early settlements started. The sort of land apportionment Eurologist refers to above was not limited to high level officers but was given to large groups too:

276 – 279 (Zosiumus): Probus defeats alemannic insurection around the Rhine and along with their leader Igillus “sent [them] to Britain, where they settled, and were subsequently very serviceable to the emperor when any insurrection broke out”.

372 (Ammianus Marcellinus): Valentinian sends the Alamannic Fraomarius of the Bucinobantes [an alamannic canton], along with other Alamannic troops commanded by Bitheridius and Hortarius, to Britain.

The Romans had started a policy of resettling tribal groups within the Limes and giving them land in return for military service during times of need, known as laeti. One of the better researched groups are the Saxonnes Biocassini, or the Saxons of Bayeaux. ‘Lats’ appear as a special grouping in the early law codes in Kent and may refer to Laeti whose priviledges and responsibilities were still recognised at the start of the 7th cent.

Heinrich Härke is publishing an article entitled ‘Estimating demographic parameters in Early Anglo-Saxon England’ in the journal Medieval Archaeology towards the end of this year. It promises to be a good read especially as it will be published at around the same time as the first publication of the People of the British Isles genetic study.

I like your description of a “warrior-farmer” elite. Coming back to my idea that perhaps there already was a foothold settlement to make it all work so smoothly in the beginning, one should note two things: firstly, it was very common in Roman times that higher-level officers were given land upon retirement, and secondly, soldiers from NW German/Frisian/Dutch “tribes” were often selected to lead difficult missions in adjacent regions, including the Isles. These people were known to be highly organized and were well-versed in Roman military and leadership know-how (which later enabled them to drive out the Romans and create the Frank empire). So, many of them were very familiar with the geography and country as a whole, and I don’t find it far-fetched that some of them settled there (were given land). And they probably clustered to remain in contact. I also agree that communication pathways across central Europe seem to have been very strong at the time.

I second Rowe.

Janes Scott wrote in “The Art of Not Being Governed” that irrigated rice farming is ideal for labor exploitation, but his focus was on southeast asia and I doubt he had cane/cotton (which aren’t food staples) in mind as a comparison.

Speaking of which, accounts I’ve read of cane planatations in the caribbean depict it as uncommonly harsh and involving a very high death rate that needed replenishment with slave importations. Southern american cotton slaves, in contrast, underwent population growth and were exported further into the south. Does anyone know to what extent that was a matter of the geographic location vs the crop?

So, more or less what Bede said.

Very informative and comprehensive article. I would love to read up more on how these dynamics were at play in other historical situations. In particular, I wonder what were the mechanics of Romanization in western Europe, as it is often assumed that everybody simply adopted the “superior” Roman culture and Latin language, though the truth was undoubtedly more complex. One detail which was off, though- Persia was already called “Iran” well before the Arab conquest.

I think the difference between the Bulgars and the Magyars is that the Magyars were actually a large folk migration. I’ve read estimates of 400K. At the time of their migraion, they had been in the Pontic Steppes for 400-500 years and took on the general European characteristic that existed there. The elite warriors may that could have maintained a Uralic/Turkic element numbered only 20K.

The Bulgars, on the other hand, were probably only a warrior elite.

Well worth a long article, its a fascinating subject. You can see how “elite emulation” can work when people join a military ruling class, or when middle-easterners adopt islam for tax reasons, or when literacy starts to take off, but otherwise its very tricky. I’m always reminded of the lines in Holy Grail:

“I am Arthur, King of the Britons!”
“The Britons? Who are they?”
“We all are, we are all Britons”

In many periods the peasants will only have cared about the fact that every now and then a load of armed men (who claimed to “own” the land they farmed) would turn up and steal most of the food they’d grown. Whether these men had the same skin colour, the same religion or spoke the same language would have been a minor detail.

Sorry I am probably being a bit slow, but I am finding it hard to get what your overall conclusion is. Are you saying that the majority of the ancestors of current English people date from pre-roman Britain? You say:
“If my model is correct then the majority of the ancestry of the people in some eastern English localities should cluster with Frisians, while very little of the ancestry of English people in regions like Devon may be German at all.”
But can you give a rough percentage of what proportion of the current genes in England as a whole is from pre-Roman Britain and what proportion is from Germany?

Yes, very impressive. Thank you so much for spelling it all out in such great detail. It fits in with much that I’ve read in the past but really illuminates and adds to it.

Nothing useful to add. But this is very impressive, Razib.

[comment removed. i believe the commenter made some good points, but there was a lot of political stuff thrown in. not acceptable. i’m not an editor]

Like the Armenians the Kurds are an antique population, claiming descent from the Medes, and referred to as Isaurians during the Roman and Byzantine period.

kurds in byzantine lands. two byzantine emperors were isaurian, zeno and leo iii. leo may have been ethnic syrian, but zeno probably came from an iranic tribe. presumably the kurds were religiously diverse before islam, and some of this surely remained after islam. i don’t know the details of the areas inhabited by kurds then and now, but i don’t think the byzantine exclusion of muslims would be dispositive in the early period.

Razib, what is your evidence for Isaurians being Kurds, Medes or any other Iranic-speaking people? As ZooKeeper states, they are much more likely to have been an Anatolian IE-speaking people. In any case, Isaurians had centuries ago totally switched to Greek language – probably also completely losing all their ethnic identity – by the time the Seljuqs and Turkmens arrived Asia Minor and today’s Kurds’ (including Zazas) “traditional” region has absolutely no intersection with that of historical Isaurians, who, we know, lived around the Taurus Mountains; so today’s Kurds shouldn’t be expected to have any descent from historical Isaurians.

I’m wondering why you made the Isaurian = Kurdish connection, though. Taking into account the Isaurians’ location, isn’t it much more likely that they were an IE-Anatolian-speaking population or something like that?

I agree with you, ZooKeeper. I am too waiting for an answer from Razib on this matter.

Some corrections: “pre-historic times”, “transferred to the Balkans”. Pardon.

-“Just as plausible to me is that eastern Anatolia as a whole exhibited little genetic difference between Greeks and Armenians, and the former were wholly assimilated or migrated”

The Greek-speaking Chalcedonian Christians inhabiting the area from the Aegean to Cappadocia and the Pontus (the easternmost and northeasternmost locations where they could have been found in high numbers in the early 11th century, the local languages having gradually disappeared in a process beginning in the 4th century BC and where they were still found in smaller numbers – though barely in Cappadocia – in the 20th century) would have been mostly native in ancestry (despite the important colonization of Asia Minor from mainland Greece in Hellenistic times, it was obviously a very slow process of acculturation that eliminated the native languages) rather than mainland Greek so this must be the case. In other words, Turks are mostly acculturated Anatolians who were mostly Christian (of various “denominations”) and spoke a variety of languages, most importantly Greek, Armenian and Aramaic. Are genetic data offering us something that history doesn’t, so far?

-“the Greek mainland may always have been subject to more influence from the lands to the north”

That’s true from pre-historic ancient times, achaeology attests to that and quite likely that’s where the first IE-to-be-Greek speakers came from, after all, but Anatolian – Balkan contacts might have been somewhat important in historical times as well (you already mentioned the Greco-Turkish population exchange). For example, Slavs were settled in Bithynia, Anatolian Paulicians in Thrace etc. Also, some of the exchanged Balkan Muslims were, in part, Anatolian populations that had been transferred in the Balkans some centuries ago (e.g. Turkish-speaking Muslims in certain areas of Macedonia) so genetically speaking, those were essentially returning, at least in part.

We also need to remember that modern Turkey is a vast country, with an important west-east axis, so the place of origin of the samples is important too.

I’m wondering why you made the Isaurian = Kurdish connection, though. Taking into account the Isaurians’ location, isn’t it much more likely that they were an IE-Anatolian-speaking population or something like that?

Considering the nature of this discussion and some rather rude posts (oh Elias!) I have to commend Onur on his attitude and replies!

Steven Colson,

A common J2a4b1 between us is indeed astonishing. The advent of DNA analysis will force a lot of history to be re-examined!

Hi Corduene… in response:

1) If it makes a difference to you, there were enough Armenians the eastern provinces for their political autonomy, if not outright secession.

2) Land claims and other demands are not fully based on population percentages but rather are reparations for the genocide and for the survival of what remains of Armenia.

3) It is best not to open this topic in this forum. I respectfully suggest you review http://www.regionalkinetics.com. You will find a contact email where this can be discussed more appropriately.

You may be right, Davidian. Similarly to “Turks”, Kurds may have assimilated lots of Armenians and Assyrians in their last one thousand-year expansion in the east of what is now Turkey.

I would suggest notable differences between Kurds themselves. Iraqi Kurds (as noted in the study) and, for example, the people of Dersim (in today’s eastern Turkey, referred to as Zazas or Kurds of Dersim) are not only linguistically different but probably genetically different as well. The former being in the mountains from Mosul, Kirkuk, to Urmia and the latter probably indigenous Anatolian.

A J2a4b1 Armenian from Dersim…

George, you must have meant western Anatolia, not eastern.

This DNA Tribes genetic map (the map right below the title “A Detailed World Map of Genetic Territories”) supports that conclusion:

http://www.dnatribes.com/populations.html

The entire southern half of the Balkans, eastern Anatolia, Sicily and the bottom of The Pennisuala are genetically Hellenes.

George, you must have meant western Anatolia, not eastern.

Corduene, you may be right when it comes to Kurds of Turkey, as Kurds spread in most of their “traditional” region in what is now Turkey only after the Seljuq and Ottoman conquests and coexisted there with a significant “Turkish” and Armenian population for centuries.

Corduene, most of the lands in what is now “Northern Kurdistan” were Byzantine territory before the Seljuq conquests and their populations were almost totally Christian (mostly Armenians and Assyrians), the rest being Jew.

Here, by “Kurdish “traditional” region” and “”Northern Kurdistan””, I meant the parts of Turkey with a Kurdish majority today and not necessarily before the Armenian Genocide, the Ottoman conquests, the Seljuq conquests or anything else in the past. That is why I put the words “traditional” and “Northern Kurdistan” in quotation marks.

Extent of the Byzantine Empire right before the arrival of the Seljuqs and Turkmens:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/Map_Byzantine_Empire_1025-en.svg

Note that only the part of what is now Turkey south of Lake Van and east of Euphrates (except Edessa – what is now Urfa) is in Muslim control (there were Kurdish emirates).

I also gave you antic Sources all of them show kurdish presence in any Region what is today pre dominantly kurdish.

AFAIK, there was no recorded Kurdish presence north of Lake Van before the Islamization of those lands in the last thousand years. Ottomans helped a great deal in the spread of Kurds in what is now eastern Turkey (and lately in some other parts of what is now Turkey). Kurds in what is now Turkey seem to have been pretty limited to the area south of Lake Van and east of Euphrates (I am not saying Kurds could be found in every part of that area) before the Seljuq conquests.

On the question of how far modern Turks are “acculturated Armenians”, I don’t see how this can be answered without seeing how far, if at all, genetic variation within the Anatolian Turkish population maps onto the ethnic map of pre-conquest Anatolian peoples. It’s all very well for Cavalli-Sforza to make hand wavey remarks about Hittites, but Anatolia in antiquity was very complex ethnically, and, except on its eastern and western margins, that complexity is no longer visible.

Since we have no idea how close genetically the Cilicians and Bythinians (for example) were to the Armenians – even most of the languages concerned are entirely unknown, we can’t tell a priori whether the genetic match between Turks and Armenians actually represents a large Armenian contribution to the Turkish population or whether it represents an Anatolian substrate which is similar because adjacent to the Armenians.

If a pattern of variation could be established which might represent such a substrate, then the erxtent that distances from the mean in the Armenian cluster vary within such a pattern might suggest how far the apparent Armenian input is real and how far it reflects similarities between ancient populations across Anatolia and the rest of western Asia. If no such pattern can be established, at least it would suggest something about the impact of the Turkish occupation of the region.

Thanks.

as a practical matter muslims accommodated zoroastrians as people of the book. they did the same in sindh to buddhist monks and brahmins, allowing these groups to retain special tax privileges because of their role in the pre-islamic state.

Razib, I’ve already read about those accomodations, but I don’t know whether they were equal to the treatment towards Christians and Jews. Also was their People of the Book status constant or flexible?

I don´t really believe that Muslim Conquerers at the beginning let Christians and Jews stay as they are when they even forced Sassanids to become Muslims.

There was difference between the treatments of Muslims towards Christians and Jews and towards Zoroastrians because of the Islamic doctrine of the People of the Book. So, yes, Christians and Jews were tolerated more than Zoroastrians by Muslims.

BTW, I don’t deny that some of the regions of what is now southeastern Turkey south of Lake Van have been uninterruptedly populated by Kurds since ancient times, so I don’t understand what we are discussing.

@Onur I don´t really believe that Muslim Conquerers at the beginning let Christians and Jews stay as they are when they even forced Sassanids to become Muslims. Also if it was like you are saying the Region known as Eastanatolia changed many times the Hand from Byzantine to Parthian and Sassanid. i think you heared about the Roman-Parthian and Sassanid- Byzantine wars. So I don´t think the Byzantinians had not better things to do than forcing people to Christianity while a big Empire like theParthian- Sassanid was waiting as neighbor. And we know even After the Sassanids gone down still this Region doesen´t fall in Byzantine but Muslim hand! The Sassanid Empire was destroyed by Muslims not Byzantines. So there wasn´t really any bigger Period where Christians had the overhand in Eastanatolia. Only at the period of Greater Armenia with Tigran as King this Region was ruled by Christians and we know that a Empire isn´t equal to settlements and we also know that Tigran killed native people and settled his People there like he dead in Silvan.

Fellow Julian and Gregorian calender peoples, haven’t you Turks even read Deinekes’s site before? The entire southern half of the Balkans, eastern Anatolia, Sicily and the bottom of The Pennisuala are genetically Hellenes. As are the French of Marseille and the Greeks of Nicoisa if there’s any of them left in the Muslims sections.

Razib K truly a groud breaking couple of post’s by you and Deinekes.

Corduene, Christians and Jews (People of the Book) were allowed to live and preserve their faith under Muslim rules (however limited), this wasn’t the case for Muslims under Christian rules (is there any Andalusi Muslim in Iberia today?). As to Christian Kurds, there were probably some Christian Kurds in the Byzantine, but based on historical sources their numbers don’t seem to have been much.

@ Onur this is not a explain that this Regions were Armenian. Cause if we go in your logic than The Armenians can´t have existed before Byzantine because the muslim Conquest started 632 b.c.

muslim conquest

So weren´t there any Armenians cause Arabs would have never let Christians live there? Is this a good declaration? Not really!

And of course many Kurds had to convert to Christianity at Byzantine time.
Even my Ancestors were first Christian this is told to me by my father. You can´t use the Religion as indicator for if there was a group of people before or not.

I also gave you antic Sources all of them show kurdish presence in any Region what is today pre dominantly kurdish. I am not claiming this Regions were Homogene Kurdish this would be totally wrong cause there was also a Armenian presence in this Regions

@ Eliasalacuard it isn´t that simple to come here write this Region belonged to Armenians Assyrians without any prove or any other Sources which show my sources are wrong. And i also know you don´t try to look like a open minded person who is only interested in Genetic. I know you from Forumbiodiversity and you know me. And everybody there knows your bias against Kurds Turks and Iranians.

http://www.forumbiodiversity.com/showthread.php?t=3197&page=28

There are Maps made by European people showing exactly the number of Christians living in Eastanatolia. This maps are from 1896 means 23 years before any genocide against Christian so this ” Kurds and Turks are in majority in East cause of the genocide “doesen´t works. The Northeast Pontus Region was never pre dominantly Armenian but still Armenians claim this Region as Greater Armenia how?
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/42/Armenian_population_in_Eastern_Anatolia_(1896).JPG

You should stop claiming things without sorces.

Corduene, most of the lands in what is now “Northern Kurdistan” were Byzantine territory before the Seljuq conquests and their populations were almost totally Christian (mostly Armenians and Assyrians), the rest being Jew. No Muslim was allowed to live there except for commercial or military reasons. So Kurds must have spread there after the Seljuq conquests in those lands. So even if there had been some Kurds or proto-Kurds in those lands in more ancient times, they would assimilate to the “Armenian” or “Assyrian” identity by the Byzantine times, thus Kurds of today cannot be their descendants without being descended from Armenians and/or Assyrians.

@onur: thanks for your comment. I’m well aware “Turk” was a political ideology romanticised by the militant Young Turks group.

@Corduene: Eastern Anatolia has always been inhabited by Armenians, long before Kurds lived there, and long before Medes invaded Assyria. It’s also not a reason of Kurds to seize Assyrian and Armenian land, but it’s done because of group competition.

@Randy: the “Arabs” of the Fertile Crescent are descendants of Phoenicians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Amorites, and also some European crusaders, and so on. They’re not really Arabs. “Arab” has always been an ethnic identity of the Arabic speaking peoples native to the Arabian peninsula, however.

Randy, unlike the “Arab” identity, the “Turkish” identity was never applied by the very people designated with that identity (not even by the conquerors from Central Asia) before the spread of nationalism from the West. Before nationalism, the “Turkish” identity was an identity of the other (and often a despised other), not oneself (read my comment #10).

“Turkmen” identity, OTOH, was used by the conquerors from Central Asia and by their descendants (not pure of course, there are apparently no pure descendants of them) for themselves, but its use has always been rather limited to a minority among the Turkish-speaking Muslims of the former Ottoman and Iranian lands.

@ Randy McDonald: “Likewise, the category “Arab” is at least as much cultural and linguistic as it is anything else….”

Agreed. Which is precisely why “Christian Arab” does not apply to the culturally distinct and Aramaic-speaking Assyrian populations of northeastern Syria, northern Iraq, southeastern Turkey, and northwestern Iran.

The country name “Turkey” (and its other versions in other languages) was also only used by the West (for the territories ruled by “Turkish” rulers) before the spread of nationalism among “Turks”. Seljuqs of Anatolia called their own country “Rum” (=Rome) and Ottomans called their own country “Osmaniyye” (=Ottoman state). The name “Türkiye” (Turkish version of Turkey) is a late 19th century borrowing from the Italian word “Turchia” (then used for the Ottoman Empire) and was subsequently applied to the republic founded by Kemal Ataturk.

@ EliasAlucard: “Pseudo-Turk”? It isn’t apparent to me why they’d be “pseudo” anything, inasmuch as “Turk” is used to describe an ethnolinguistic group with a shared history, the myth of a common ancestry from central Asia exclusive of Anatolia not meaning the Turks are neo-Hittites instead. Likewise, the category “Arab” is at least as much cultural and linguistic as it is anything else; again, the myth of a completely shared ancestry doesn’t disprove the existence of that broad category.

@Onur I agree and disagree. We know from very old Roman, Arab and jewish sources that Kurds lived traditionally even before in most of the Regions they are living now. Strabo the Roman Emperor described the Region between Mus, Diyarbakir and Zagros as Corduene. Jewish sources say that Ararat was located in Corduene in Armenia( carduchian land conquered by Armenian Kingdom) the Arabs at least clarified that this Corduene was the ancient name of Kurdish land calling it ekrad ( meaning in Arabic as Kurdistan they still use to call kurdish land Ekrad). It is true that Kurds coexisted peaceful with Turks and Armenians but it is not true that they expanded at the Ottoman empire. It is rather so that Armenians with Artaxias and Zariadris expanded from Caucasus over East Anatolia this is also written down by Strabo.

“According to report, Armenia, though a small country in earlier times, was enlarged by Artaxias and Zariadris, who formerly were generals of Antiochus the Great,”

http://soltdm.com/sources/mss/strab/11.htm

Armenians also conquered many Lands from Medes and the local Hurric-Scythian tribes of Corduene. So we can´t say this Land belonged to this people and than became conquered by other people. If we talk like that than Anatolia belongs to Hurrians Hethits and Sumerians.. We can´t try to change ethnic borders cause of Wars and genocides in early times. This early times were known for conquering but today we live in the 21 Century and people should not think in Conquering way and try to settle their own People in Regions just to make the majority like Saddam tried with Kirkuk or the former turkish Government tried with Adiyaman by settling Turks there. Also Kurds conquered Regions which doesen´t belong to them like some districts of Van. The Regions belong to the People who live there this is my opinion

@Onur The used study by Dienekes is Xing et al. and about iraqi Kurds, not Kurds overall this explains why they are so strongly isolated. I bet using studies about Kurds in hole would show stronger Relations to their neighbour Population even while I think they would still be very homogenes and distinctive from their neighbors.

Corduene, you may be right when it comes to Kurds of Turkey, as Kurds spread in most of their “traditional” region in what is now Turkey only after the Seljuq and Ottoman conquests and coexisted there with a significant “Turkish” and Armenian population for centuries.

It’s not without reason I call them “pseudo-Turks”

Actually, the “Turkish” identity of Anatolian + Rumelian (=Balkan) + Cypriot “Turks” is the result of nationalism imported from the West during the late 19th and early 20th centuries by the Ottoman intelligentsia, and it spread among the masses only after the establishment of the Turkish Republic and with the nationalist reforms of Kemal Ataturk. Before all these, there was no “Turkish” ethnicity or nation, Seljuqs and Ottomans were called “Turks” only by the West, but no individual or group in the Seljuq and Ottoman empires from the sultans to the lowest levels of the society applied the “Turkish” identity for themselves, the word “Turk” was just an insult and not an ethnic term (in fact, there was no concept of ethnicity or nation in the Seljuq and Ottoman empires, the Millet system was a religious system, not ethnic). Before the spread of the “Turkish” identity among the masses beginning from Ataturk, Turkish-speaking Muslims of the former Ottoman lands didn’t call themselves “Turk”, but only “Muslim”.

This sentence “Many areas once occupied by Armenians are now occupied by Kurds and Turks”

isn´t that correct. Before the genocide yes there were many Armenians on Anatolia. But I can´t agree about the occupied thing. Cause of two facts! First before the genocide Germans and other Europeans maid ethnic maps about Anatolia. In 90% of so called Greater Armenia made by Russian generals the Armenians were not the majority not before and not after the genocide. A map of 1896 shows us this clear. Only some districts of Van were majority Armenian but the Rest not.

This map was made in Gotha, Germany in 1896, showing the percentage of the Armenian population in Anatolia. As it is stated, Armenian were over 50% of the population in three districts. In most of the locales, the form less than 10% of the population.

So please stay at the truth. I am not a Armenian hater and also sorry for what happened to Armenians but this is not a Reason to claim this lands for them.

@Onur The used study by Dienekes is Xing et al. and about iraqi Kurds, not Kurds overall this explains why they are so strongly isolated. I bet using studies about Kurds in hole would show stronger Relations to their neighbour Population even while I think they would still be very homogenes and distinctive from their neighbors.

strong endogamy

The endogamy of Kurds is traditionally tribal rather than “ethnic” (ethnicity traditionally has little place, if any, in West Asia). This explains their heterogeneity on the PCA map.

And then there’s my maternal J2a4b1 Ashkenazi ancestry that is nearest to Armenians and not other Jewish groups. I’m thinking some Hurrian gave birth to a lot of distinct modern cultures, some of whom hate the other.

As to Kurds, as in previous genetic analyses of them, they show up as a relatively isolated population. Mountainousness of their region and their tribal way of life and strong endogamy should have played a significant role in their relative isolation.

Oh and by the way, Razib, there’s no such thing as “Christian Arabs”. Seriously. It’s only a disinformation term applied on non-Arabic MENA peoples like Assyrians, Lebanese Christians, and Egyptian Christians, none of which are Arabs. Much like the “Turks” of Anatolia, they aren’t Arab either, but rather, linguistically Arabized Fertile Crescent Semites. You can compare my genome similarity with “Arabs” from the Fertile Crescent and real ethnic Arabs from the Arabian peninsula. You’ll notice that aside from a few exceptions, I score clearly below 74% @ 550k SNPs with most ethnic Arabs, whereas the the pseudo-Arabs (Mashriq and Maghreb populations), I’m above 74% with those from the Fertile Crescent whereas with Berber and Egyptian folks I’m below 74% because they have some minor SSA admix.

So if even Muslims from the Fertile Crescent and Egypt/Berber regions aren’t genetically Arabs, it’s even less likely that Christians from these regions would be Arabs, because in the Middle East, there’s a certain religious endogamy (Christians and Muslims usually avoid marrying with each other).

Exaggeration of Arab ancestry in the Muslim world always had a political motive, since it was a means to gain political power by claiming descent from Muhammad.

These results may be due to regional selection bias. One might expect that the descendants of Rumelian Turks be more “European” than Anatolian Turks.

Indeed, Rumelian Turks look more European and less West Asian than Anatolian Turks. I wonder how Rumelian Turks, Anatolian Greeks and Cypriot Turks would show up genetically. Also we need much more samples than these also in quantity.

Cavalli-Sforza touched upon it in his HGHG:

http://www.forumbiodiversity.com/showthread.php?t=916

Anatolian “Turks” are basically Anatolians of Greek, Hittite, Armenian, Assyrian ancestry, and some minor (below 10%) actual Mongoloid admixture. The ethnic Turks (Seljuq Turks, Turco-Mongols etc.) were of Mongoloid stock and though they did conquer Anatolia and other parts of the Middle East, they never really colonised the regions properly and contributed very little of their genes to Anatolia. The result was that the Turkic language became dominant in Anatolia, but aside from that, not much changed.

It’s not without reason I call them “pseudo-Turks”, because they aren’t the least genetically Turkic, and they are genetically more similar to Armenians and Assyrians than any other group. Their minor Mongoloid admixture does pull them slightly eastward on a global PCA plot (which can be seen better on deCODEme’s threedimensional PCA plot), so Anatolian “Turks” are usually positioned close to Russians on a global PCA. However, on an intra-Euro PCA plot in which only West Eurasian DNA is counted, they’re right next to Assyrians, with a minor drag toward the Balkans:

^^ This plot is made out of the positions Dr. Doug McDonald positioned all members after they sent him their raw data. Notice how close Assyrians and Turks are. Polako, Dienekes and Doug McDonald have all shown that Assyrians lack admixture from East Asians and sub-Saharan Africans, so in that regard, Assyrians are a genetically and culturally better preserved Anatolian population. I say Anatolian, because the dominant Y-DNA in all Semitic-speakers, Y-DNA J1c3, according to Chiaroni et al. 2009 has been found to be a minor haplogroup in Assyrians, but with highest genetic variation, and it seems to have originated in Anatolia, and still to this day there are “Anatolian Turks” carrying Y-DNA J1c3.

Armenians have always had a long history in Anatolia though. The Kingdom of Cilicia was Armenian, and Assyrians and Armenians are almost the exact same genetic group, and Assyrian demographic presence has always been part of Anatolia, until the 20th century genocides and persecutions of Assyrians and Armenians by the “tolerant Turks”.

There’s was a fair bit of recent Armenian assimilation–the Hemshin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemshin_peoples), Muslim Armenian-speakers, come to mind. A non-trivial number of Georgian-speakers are also at least partly assimilated, the Ajaria region of southwestern Armenia having been created as a homeland for Muslim Georgians with ethnically related Laz nearby in northeastern Turkey.

If we’re going for counterfactuals, a Turkey that still had millions of Armenians would also be a Turkey with millions of Greeks. The ethnic cleansing of Greeks and Armenians from modern Turkey (and, I need not add, of Turks and Muslims from modern Greece and Armenia) was an inevitable product of the nationalist wars of independence that hit southeastern Europe and the Black Sea region starting with Greece and becoming worse with the various wars in the north Caucasus and Balkans in the 1860s and 1870s. Absent the various ethnic cleansings and genocides, there probably still would be very large Greek and Armenian populations in Anatolia and Istanbul.

Aryan prehistory is never going to be sorted out satisfactorily. But JP Mallory, “In Search of the Indo-Europeans” provides a clue noting “Aryan warbands did not emerge until the late Bronze age”. The cover of his book is another clue, seen at http://daybrown.org/artifax/artifax.htm because he describes the archer taking a “classic Parthian shot over his shoulder” despite the fact you can see HER left tit- with what every bull dyke knows is a leather plate bra holding the nipple back out of the way. The earlier Aryans were matriarchic, and when they got horses, became Steppe Amazons.
Which Tamerlane later used as scouts cause they could ride horses further & faster than heavier men.

Mallory also takes Gimbutas to task debunking her notions of the original Aryan homeland was; both were unaware of Ryan & Pitman’s “Noah’s Flood”, so nobody looked for that homeland on the bottom of what is now the Black Sea. But Ballad’s “Titanic crew” reports structural remains off the coast of Sinop, on the bottom.

No satisfactory explanation of “proto-Indo-European” can work without considering these two factors. I note PIE is an oxymoron because the original Aryan language was never used in India.