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Archiver > GENEALOGY-DNA > 2007-06 > 1181346299


From: ellen Levy <>
Subject: Re: [DNA] Megalith Builders
Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2007 16:44:59 -0700 (PDT)
In-Reply-To: <00e501c7aa24$b433b2a0$6401a8c0@Richard>


Rich:

Europe was not an empty wasteland when the IE speakers
moved in, from where ever they migrated. They did not
arise in situ. So who was there earlier, as reflected
in the sub-stratum of IE languages, and how is that
earlier population found today in modern DNA results?

Problematically, this theory ignores the findings from
other disciplines, particularly that of archaeology.
Europe began to be settled by agriculturalists out of
the Levant as early as 8000 BC. So are you proposing
that the earlier sub-stratum represents these early
agriculturalists, who no doubt carried some frequency
of J and 3b and K (perhaps some I and even, dare I say
it, R1b, as well)? An example might be the Etruscans,
who in DNA studies are found to be unrelated to
modern-day Europeans and most closely (though very
distantly) related to modern-day populations in
Turkey?

Linguists generally date the development of the
majority of centum-based IE languages to much earlier
in time than 8000 BC, perhaps as late as the Bronze
Age. Gray & Atkinson's study actually pushed back the
dating system much further in time than traditional
linguistic theory has commonly put forth. For
instance, they dated the split between some of centum
languages and Slavic/Baltic languages to 6500 BP. The
split with the Indo-Iranian languages is dated
slightly earlier, to 6900 BP.

Note that earliest IE languages, including the
centum-based Tocharian and also Greek, are not spoken
in Northwest Europe. And the earliest is of couse
Hittite, spoken in Anatolia, dated by A & G to 8700
BP. That corresponds rather nicely to the Anatolian
farming hypothesis, causing A & G to note that "this
scenario is consistent with recent genetic studies
supporting a Neolithic, Near Eastern contribution to
the European gene pool (referring to Chikhi's study,
"Y genetic data support the Neolithic Demic Diffusion
Model.") However, they also note that there is
"evidence of a period of rapid divergence giving rise
to the Italic, Celtic, Balto-Slavic and perhaps
Indo-Iranian families that is intriguingly close to
the time suggested for a possible Kurgan expansion.
Thus .... these hypotheses need not be mutually
exclusive."

I don't know how you are dealing with the other
haplogroups (I, J, Eb, K) in your scenario, Rich.
Where exactly were they while R1b was sitting around
in ???? developing centum-based IE languages and R1a
was apparently developing satem-IE. Had they already
settled in Europe as part of the Neolithic movement?
And since Greek, a centum-IE language, split over a
thousand years earlier from IE tree, how have you
reconciled that to your theory, particularly in light
of the fact that archaeological evidence shows parts
of Greece settled by Levantine agriculturalists as
early as 10,000 BP? Are you proposing that the
Neolithic agriculturalists out of the Levant were
exclusively or primarily R1b? Then when exactly did J
and E3b hit Greece, then, as they comprise together
more than 50% of the genetic results?

It would be difficult to argue that J and E3b were in
Europe speaking Semitic-based languages (or maybe E3b
was speaking some African languages?) of which there
is absolutely no evidence remaining in the sub-stratum
of IE languages like Greek? Because the Greeks did
borrow a considerable element of their language from a
non-IE language, according to Mallory, but not of
Semitic origin. While he notes that "Joseph Haley and
Carl Blegen observed that many of the names and
suffixes were also to be found in Anatolia and that it
was probable that they expanded from that region into
Greece during the Early Bronze Age (3000-2000 BC),
when there was a general uniformity over much of the
Aegean. Whether all the details of this hypothesis
can withstand the more critical scrutiny in current
archaeological and linguistic circles is doubtful.
Yet the linguistic evidence taken as a whole does
indicate that the Greek borrowings ... were not wholly
random, but rather tend to focus on words that a
population intrusive into a new land might be expected
to adopt from the previous ihhabitants. At least some
of the land words ... derived from a culture familiar
with a level of metallurgy (copper, bronze, tin) that
existed no earlier than the end of the fourth
millennium BC. The logical consequence of all this is
that the Greeks are not native to Greece but were the
product of IE intruders who superimposed themselves on
an earlier Bronze Age population."

So who are you proposing comprised this earlier
population as reflected now in contemporary Greek DNA
results? E3b? J? I? R1b? R1a? All or none of these?

Ellen Coffman







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