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Post by Admin on Feb 22, 2024 21:17:01 GMT
Friedrich hastens to assure us, however, that these connections "in no wise demonstrate matriliny or matriarchy" because "the recognition of maternity is a cultural universal'' and because the emotional tie between mother and son is "often the most dominant emotionally in patrilineal and patriarchal systems". In other words, the absence of a term denoting male offspring exclusively is merely additional evidence of the patriarchal society presupposed to exist in PIE antiquity-even as, for Szemen!nyi, the two terms signifying 'son' and 'sister,' though derived from the same root, connote the relative importance of the former and the unimportance of the latter. 'Daughter', incidentally, has been analyzed as derived from a verbal root meaning 'to milk' (hence the daughter was 'a milkmaid') and more recently by Szemen!nyi as denoting "the person who prepares a meal" (22). Nowhere has it been suggested that the association of an individual with milk might represent another important maternal function-at least in conjunction with 'daughter'; rather, importance has been assigned to the recipient of the milk, the son. In similar fashion, *bhriiter and *swesor, though generally agreed (by Friedrich (1966), Benveniste (1973), and Szemerenyi (1977), for example) to have functioned as classificatory terms before having been adapted to consanguineal significations, are analyzed so as to assign greater importance to male offspring. However each term is segmented, *bhriiter is said to have occupied a place of central importance in the extended social group, while *swesor existed on the periphery, gaining importance from the group. And her relative insignificance is said to rest on the fact, rather than despite the fact, that *swesor is etymologically derived from *swe, the term for the social group, "one's own blood". Evidence for IE patriarchy based on consanguineal kinship terminology therefore rests chiefly on the six primary terms discussed. The Latin term for the maternal uncle, avunculus, appears to be derived from avus, the Latin reflex of a common term meaning 'grandfather', while Latin nepos has the double sense 'nephew' and 'grandson'. The double sense of nepos is paralleled in other languages: its cognates denote only 'grandson' in Indo-Iranian, only 'nephew' in Western languages other than Latin. Moreover, evidence gathered from Latin inscriptions and literature suggests that corresponding Celtic words also referred to the sister's son alone (Benveniste 1973: 188-89): A study . . . of the sense of nepos in the Latin inscriptions in Brittany has shown that it always refers to the sister's son; nepos therefore has the same sense as in the corresponding Celtic word nia in Irish and nei in Welsh, which designated the sister's son, while the brother's son in Irish is called mac brather, a descriptive term. Aside from this, there are in Celtic legends traces of a uterine kinship; in the Ogamic inscriptions, filiation is established through the mother. . . . What are we to make of the classical use of nepos? Szemerenyi (1977) provides an ingenious analysis which overturns not only the hypothesis that IE kinship might be characterized as Omaha (advanced by Gates (1971), Friedrich (1966), and Wordick (1975)), but also any evidence for matriliny. He claims that, within the extended paternal family, a nephew had a need to distinguish maternal uncles from paternal uncles, because he would treat them differently, but would have similar "pleasant relationships, on the one hand, as grandson, towards grandfather, on the other, as nephew, towards his maternal uncle" (190). Moreover, patrilineal succession (which, as Szemerenyi later (191) admits, he cannot document clearly) determines the connection between the maternal uncle and the grandfather: In our view ... the (eldest) maternal uncle came to be identified with grandfather as a result of the not uncommon situation that, on the demise of his father (EGO's grandfather), he inherited his father's position. The consequence was that his name (*HauHosl*awos) acquired the secondary sense 'grandfather', and not the other way around.
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Post by Admin on May 7, 2024 7:17:46 GMT
The Genetic Origin of the Indo-Europeans Abstract The Yamnaya archaeological complex appeared around 3300BCE across the steppes north of the Black and Caspian Seas, and by 3000BCE reached its maximal extent from Hungary in the west to Kazakhstan in the east. To localize the ancestral and geographical origins of the Yamnaya among the diverse Eneolithic people that preceded them, we studied ancient DNA data from 428 individuals of which 299 are reported for the first time, demonstrating three previously unknown Eneolithic genetic clines. First, a “Caucasus-Lower Volga” (CLV) Cline suffused with Caucasus hunter-gatherer (CHG) ancestry extended between a Caucasus Neolithic southern end in Neolithic Armenia, and a steppe northern end in Berezhnovka in the Lower Volga. Bidirectional gene flow across the CLV cline created admixed intermediate populations in both the north Caucasus, such as the Maikop people, and on the steppe, such as those at the site of Remontnoye north of the Manych depression. CLV people also helped form two major riverine clines by admixing with distinct groups of European hunter-gatherers. A “Volga Cline” was formed as Lower Volga people mixed with upriver populations that had more Eastern hunter-gatherer (EHG) ancestry, creating genetically hyper-variable populations as at Khvalynsk in the Middle Volga. A “Dnipro Cline” was formed as CLV people bearing both Caucasus Neolithic and Lower Volga ancestry moved west and acquired Ukraine Neolithic hunter-gatherer (UNHG) ancestry to establish the population of the Serednii Stih culture from which the direct ancestors of the Yamnaya themselves were formed around 4000BCE. This population grew rapidly after 3750-3350BCE, precipitating the expansion of people of the Yamnaya culture who totally displaced previous groups on the Volga and further east, while admixing with more sedentary groups in the west. CLV cline people with Lower Volga ancestry contributed four fifths of the ancestry of the Yamnaya, but also, entering Anatolia from the east, contributed at least a tenth of the ancestry of Bronze Age Central Anatolians, where the Hittite language, related to the Indo-European languages spread by the Yamnaya, was spoken. We thus propose that the final unity of the speakers of the “Proto-Indo-Anatolian” ancestral language of both Anatolian and Indo-European languages can be traced to CLV cline people sometime between 4400-4000 BCE. Summary Figure: The origin of Indo-Anatolian and Indo-European languages. Genetic reconstruction of the ancestry of Pontic-Caspian steppe and West Asian populations points to the North Caucasus-Lower Volga area as the homeland of Indo-Anatolian languages and to the Serednii Stih archaeological culture of the Dnipro-Don area as the homeland of Indo-European languages. The Caucasus-Lower Volga people had diverse distal roots, estimated using the qpAdm software on the left barplot, as Caucasus hunter-gatherer (purple), Central Asian (red), Eastern hunter-gatherer (pink), and West Asian Neolithic (green). Caucasus-Lower Volga expansions, estimated using qpAdm on the right barplot as disseminated Caucasus Neolithic (blue)-Lower Volga Eneolithic (orange) proximal ancestries, mixing with the inhabitants of the North Pontic region (yellow), Volga region (yellow), and West Asia (green). www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.04.17.589597v1.full
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Post by Admin on May 10, 2024 21:14:03 GMT
Introduction Between 3300-1500 BCE, people of the Yamnaya archaeological complex and their descendants, in subsequent waves of migration, spread over large parts of Eurasia, contributing to the ancestry of people of Europe, Central and South Asia, Siberia, and the Caucasus. The spread of Indo-European language and culture1–7 transformed all these regions. Despite the centrality of the Yamnaya expansion to the human story of Bronze Age Eurasia, their ancestral origins are poorly understood. A first challenge has been the sparse sampling of the Yamnaya themselves across their enormous geographic distribution. The remarkable long-range mobility of the Yamnaya, quickly spreading over a vast region, adds further difficulties to tracing, from radiocarbon dating, the origins of their material culture and associated genetic profile. Nor can these origins be traced to the numerous earlier Eneolithic cultures that preceded the Yamnaya, and among whom their ancestors must be sought, as these have been sampled even more poorly and unsystematically.
The first formal study of the origins of the Yamnaya identified two disparate sources of ancestry: a northern, “Eastern Hunter-Gatherer” (EHG) source from far eastern Europe, and a southern, West Asian source related to present-day Armenians.2 The latter source was revealed, by ancient DNA, to be related to some of the region’s earliest inhabitants: Paleolithic-Mesolithic “Caucasus Hunter-Gatherers” (CHG) of Georgia,8 and Neolithic people of the Zagros9 and South Caucasus.6,10,11 Additional discoveries further complicated the stories of both the northern and southern ancestors of the Yamnaya. First, it was noted that both CHG and EHG were part of an interaction sphere across the boundary between West Asia and eastern Europe,9 suggesting the existence of intermediate populations and raising the question of when and where these came together to form the Eneolithic antecessors of the Yamnaya. Second, it was recognized that the steppe itself was an admixture zone of EHG with “Western Hunter-Gatherers” (WHG12).
Mesolithic hunter-gatherers from Ukraine were succeeded by more WHG-admixed Neolithic hunter-gatherers in the Dnipro valley,13 representing a local reshuffling within the European portion of a ∼7,000km-long trans-Eurasian cline of boreal hunter-gatherers.14 What was the relative contribution of the EHG (who were present in the Volga River at Lebyazhinka2 ca. 5660-5535 BCE) and these more western Ukraine Neolithic hunter-gatherers (UNHG) of the Dnipro to later populations? Third, it was discovered that the Yamnaya had not only CHG-related, but also Anatolian Neolithic ancestry, absent in the early known steppe inhabitants, and derived from European farmer neighbors west of the steppe5. This ancestry was later shown to be of rather Anatolian-Levantine-Mesopotamian origin, and to be mediated not from Europe but from the Caucasus neighbors south of the steppe.6 Such ancestry must have been added following the expansion of Neolithic farmers into the Caucasus, introduced thence into the steppe as a later exogenous element, distinct from the earlier CHG-related one. Finally, it was recognized that European steppe populations were formed not only by northern-southern admixture, but included, in at least some Eneolithic and Bronze Age people of the North Caucasus, contributions related to Siberians from further east.5 What was the extent of the spread of this eastern ancestry and did the Yamnaya themselves possess it?
Here we present a unified population genetic analysis of 372 newly reported individuals dating from 6400-2000 BCE, as well as increased quality data for 61 individuals. The present study serves as the formal technical report for 299 of the newly reported individuals and 55 of the individuals with increased quality data; more than 80% of the individuals are from Russia, but the dataset is also significant in including dozens of individuals from westward expansion of Steppe cultures along the Danube (Supplementary Information, section 1, Online Table 1). Technical details of the 803 ancient DNA libraries that are the basis for the newly reported data (and an additional 195 libraries that failed our screening) are presented in Online Table 2, while details of 198 newly generated radiocarbon dates on these individuals are presented in Online Table 3. A parallel study15 presents a combined archaeological and genetic analysis of population transformations in the North Pontic Region (Ukraine and Moldova) and serves as the formal report for the data from the other 73 of the newly analyzed individuals and the other 5 individuals with increased quality data, with both studies co-analyzing the full dataset. We grouped individuals into analysis labels based on geographical and temporal information, archaeological context, and genetic clustering (Online Table 4 lists all individuals used for analyses, with their labels). The potential of the combined dataset for shedding light on this period can be appreciated from the fact that it adds 79 analyzed Eneolithic people from the steppe and its environs (from Russia or Ukraine, west of 60E longitude and south of 60N latitude, between 5000-3500BCE) to 82 published5,7,13,15–20 and a total of 286 Yamnaya/Afanasievo individuals compared to 75 in the literature.2,4–6,13,21–29
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