[vTLWqa1l]

I have followed Dienekes' Anthropolgy Blog for a few years now. The guy certainly knows how to find new studies, and copy and paste them on his blog. But I am increasingly bewildered, even dumbfounded by his point of view and theories regarding, well, just about everything...

It started with Neanderthals, when I realised that Dienekes was adamantly opposed to the idea that Homo Sapiens could have interbred with them (example 1, example 2) and only reluctantly retracted his position when the evidence of Neanderthal DNA among Eurasian became unavoidable this year.

Then comes his position on the diffusion of the Neolithic, about which he commented today.

Ötzi's genome will be extremely important for a different reason: for a long time a conflict has simmered in archaeology between idea diffusionists, demic diffusionists, and migrationists.

• Idea diffusionists aka proponents of acculturation propose that ideas (such as the idea of crop-raising or metal-working) spread without large movements of people. They predict that Europeans did not change much since the Paleolithic, and Neolithic/post-Neolithic processes have little affected them.
• Demic diffusionists propose that humans behave like mindless automata, random walking across the landscape, mating with whom they find, and filling up a continent by the accretion of millennia-long processes of diffusion. They predict that Europeans are a fairly smooth cline of Neolithic+Paleolithic constituent elements from southeast to northwest.
• Migrationists adhere to an older and much-maligned arrows-on-the-map paradigm, whereby humans intentionally decide to move from A to B, even across great distances. According to this idea, colonists sometimes mix with/sometimes kill/sometimes avoid pre-existing inhabitants. Migrationists predict that prehistoric Europe was a dynamic patchwork of genetic-cultural units entering the continent from different routes at different times, gradually forming the cornucopia of its proto-historical ethnic groups.

It's been about two years since I came out as a migrationist. In my view, the colonization of Europe was less a random process and more akin to the much later colonization of the Mediterranean and Black Sea by the Greeks, and of the Americas by Europeans. We can envision initial forays of exploration, prompted by either curiosity or tales of strange sights and great riches (be it the riches of Marco Polo's East, El Dorado, the Golden Fleece, etc.). These were followed by colonists, either pushed from their homelands by social/economic malaise, or pulled towards their destinations by opportunity, establishing long-range communication/trade networks. Finally, more people could flow along the established routes in a directional, intentional flow of people.

The first problem is the way he presents the choices. He obviously only allows for one diffusion or migration to have taken place, which is an overly simplistic view. He doesn't take into account the possibility of successive waves of Neolithic migrants, nor later migrations, including the expansion of the steppe people in the Bronze Age.

Secondly, the way he presents it presumes that all Europe was affected equally, when it seems obvious enough by now that the genetic impact of West Asian Neolithic farmers was much more important in Southeast Europe than in North Europe.

Thirdly, the way he imagines that Neolithic farmers intentionally decided to colonise Europe doesn't make much sense because these people were not organised in nations or city-states like the Greeks of the Classical Antiquity. They didn't have maps, and didn't even have writing. The Neolithic and Chalcolithic villages and towns of Southeast Europe didn't have any government or temple or any other public buildings associated with cities. Some towns in the Cucuteni-Tripolye culture were bigger than Mesopotamian cities, but cannot be called cities by archaeologists because they lacked these essential features of an organised society. If Dienekes doesn't even know the archaeology of Southeast Europe, where his ancestors are from, chances are he doesn't know much about archaeology in general.


Dienekes has mentioned many times that he supports the hypothesis that Neolithic farmers brought R1b and Indo-European languages to Europe. This is a double mistake, because all the evidences (ancient DNA, autosomal studies, study of R1b subclades, archaeological cultures, and linguistics of the IE languages) concur against a Neolithic arrival of R1b in Europe (except in the Pontic Steppe) and against a Neolithic spread of IE languages to Europe.

Dienekes obstinately thought that Ötzi would be R1b, and apparently is still convinced that R1b1b2 will show up in other Neolithic or Chalcolithic sites.


So which of the three choices do I think is correct ? None, of course ! The way I imagine things is more intricate and involves a bit of the three (depending on the region) and numerous migrations. Anybody who would choose only one of these scenarios is a fool (and I mince my words).

What probably happened, based on the current data, is this (chronologically) :

1) Early Neolithic : Anatolian farmers (G2a) move to the Balkans, the Danubian basin, and progress as far as Germany, the Low Countries and northern France. The migration is not an invasion. It is not sudden, nor planned. Farmers just keep advancing little by little every year, or every generation, in order to produce more food for the growing population. Only the most fertile regions are settled, leaving ample space for local hunter-gatherers (I2) to live around them. After a few centuries (or possibly millennia) of living side by side, hunter-gatherers learn to farm too, and the two groups increasingly merge with one another through exchanges of brides. I expect a lot of word borrowing from each part, as well as cultural exchanges.

Another migration from Anatolia (by sea) brings agriculture to Italy, North Africa, Iberia and South France. Similar process except that Mesolithic South Europeans are a blend of I2 and E1b1b.

A third migration from northern Anatolia/Mesopotamia to the Pontic Steppe brings mostly domestic animals (goats, pre-sheep, cows) and pottery. Agriculture fails in most places due to the cold climate. G2a3b and R1b2a1 merge in the southern steppes (North Caucasus to Southeast Ukraine). Foragers (R1a) in forest-steppe to the north.

Agriculture doesn't spread to Scandinavia and the British Isles at first due to the cold climate, but some Neolithic technology like pottery are adopted through contact with neighbours from the continent.

2) Late Neolithic & Chalcolithic : deeper fusion between Mesolithic and Neolithic populations in Europe. New wave of migrants from Anatolia to Greece and the Balkans (perhaps J2 ?).

3) Early Bronze Age : Pontic steppe pastoralists domesticate the horse, develop wool-sheep, the lactose tolerance mutation appears and spreads, bronze weapons first developed in the North Caucasus quickly adopted by steppe nomads (R1a1a, R1b1b2a1, G2a3b1a).

Thanks to the greater mobility (horse), increased population (lactose tolerance + more cattle thanks to herding on horses), superior weapons (swords and axes) and a new greed for copper and tin, Steppe nomads start attacking the rich copper-mining cultures of Southeast Europe. After a few centuries of killing and pillaging, they leave the ruined Danubian basin and continue westward and conquer Western Europe.

This latter migration brought Indo-European languages to Europe. It doesn't fit in any of the three categories, since it wasn't a slow and peaceful demic diffusion, but it wasn't a planned colonisation either. It was more like a disorganised series of raids by different clans that grew in power and number and progressively conquered most of Europe. It's difficult to find an analogy in historical times. Just imagine war-like Celtic or Germanic tribes each expanding their domains until there isn't any land left among the "Natives", then they start fighting against each others (which is pretty much what happened until the Roman conquest). View more random threads same category:

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[GetsTan]

That's not all. Yesterday Dienekes wrote :

It is rather remarkable that after millions of years of living as foragers, humans on opposite sides of the Eurasian landmass adopted agriculture at roughly the same time. Some would interpret this as evidence of long-range diffusion of ideas, or even people.

I don't reject that idea; it's possible that the notion of agriculture became widely known among contemporary hunter-gatherers even if they did not adopt it right away. If that was the case, then "agriculture" (the concept) could have traveled far and wide without the spread of people or domesticates, explaining why eastern and western Eurasian peoples domesticated different species. It was later that "agriculture" started expanding from its cradles not only as a concept, but also as a people and as a complete economic package.

Alternatively, agriculture as an idea sprouted at the same time in West and East because of a law-like response of humans to the changing environment after the end of the last Ice Age. Under that hypothesis, prehistoric climate change either led to increases in population size or changes in ecosystems, and people on either side of the Eurasian landmass responded in sync to the same problem in similar ways.

Although I agree that the end of the Ice Age was a necessary factor for the development of agriculture in Eurasia, it is too simplistic to say that it was the only reason. As he said himself, "humans" had been hunter-gatherers for millions of years. There were plenty of climatic variations during that period. Obviously the anatomically modern humans only appeared 200,000 years ago. But that is still plenty of time to develop agriculture. The Ice Age is a poor excuse for not developing agriculture since most of humanity lived in Africa or South Asia, where it was warm enough to farm. Furthermore, the Neolithic revolution wasn't just about farming, but also about making pottery and domesticating animals. Why didn't humans in Africa think about that earlier ?

What really changed is our brains, from about 50,000 years ago, when Homo Sapiens left Africa and started mingling with Neanderthals in the Middle East, then again in Europe and Central Asia 30 to 40,000 years ago. This was a crucial part of our recent evolution. Two sexually compatible types of hominids would meet for the first time (?) since they split from each others at least 700,000 years ago. The combined immune systems made the hybrid children stronger (as attested by a study this year). And the hybrid offspring could have inherited the best characteristics of each subspecies, including the best alleles for intelligence, adaptability, imagination, heat and cold resistance, social skills, and so on. Some of the hybrid offspring got many bad alleles from each parent and were eliminated from the gene pool through natural selection. This was a long process, probably spanning on tens of thousands of years. I believe that this is the reason why cave paintings suddenly appeared out of nowhere around 32,000 years ago in Europe, just a few thousands years before pure Neanderthals disappeared completely. Pure Homo Sapiens and pure Neanderthals each had their own qualities, making it impossible for one to eradicate the other for 30,000 years since they first met. But neither could compete with the new hybrids.

Consequently, when the climate eventually got warmer, the Eurasian survivors had inherited the most beneficial genes from both Homo Sapiens and Neanderthal, and were more creative and adaptable than any human had ever been before. This is why agriculture and pottery were invented (and could be invented at all) in such distant places as the Middle East and China/Japan roughly around the same time, then independently again a bit later by other Neanderthal hybrids in Papua and the Americas.

Agriculture only reached sub-Saharan Africa when a back migration of the new Middle Eastern hybrids "updated" the gene pool (they were surely the E1b1b, T and R1b-V88 lineages which are dispersed all around Africa today).

Australian Aborigines never developed farming, pottery, etc. because they descended from the first migration of Homo Sapiens out of Africa, the one that departed from East Africa 70,000 years ago and followed the coast of South Asia until Australia. Therefore they never interbred with Neanderthals (although they seem to have mated with the archaic Southeast Asian Homo Erectus, descended from the Java Man), and apart from a few very localised contacts with Papuans or South Asians never really had a fresh influx of new genes from outside either (unlike sub-Saharan Africans) before the Europeans arrived.

Dienekes rejected the idea of interbreeding with Neanderthals, so he obviously couldn't have thought about it. As usual he took the chose the first easy solution that any child could have thought of.

[ugosanchezo]

You direct harsh words there against Dienekes, Maciamo! But, I'm inclined to agree. The part that actually raised alert on my side was the vast mis-assessment regarding Ötzi, and his maintainance of R1b.

Regarding your own scenario, I'm confused by your statements regarding the Late Neolithic/Chalcolithic and the Bronze Age. Which archaeological cultures do you see at work there, exactly?

[neguoogleX]

I don't think the mating with Neanderthals was something important. It was something rather minoritary and occasional. As for the colonisation of Europe, we still can't explain how can R1b be so high in Western-Europe, unless it was a massive colonisation

[toponlinecasinoer]

I don't think the mating with Neanderthals was something important. It was something rather minoritary and occasional.

I'm inclined to agree with you there, given how we are talking about a percentage of admixture of a few percent. Having said this, I definitely won't rule out that this didn't have some benefits to humanity.

As for the colonisation of Europe, we still can't explain how can R1b be so high in Western-Europe, unless it was a massive colonisation Well, yes. But is it reasonable, despite obvious absence of R1b from all Neolithic sites known thus far, to assume that this occured in the Neolthic, if a Copper Age (or even Bronze Age) spread seems more likely?

[nerrttrw]

I tend to agree with you rather than Dienekes on most things, Maciamo, and you're definitely winning the prediction contest if anybody is keeping score. Still, it's worth taking any individual's speculation with a grain of salt, even someone with as much data in front of him as Dienekes, or you, or Taranis, or anybody. Of course, even if we are to relegate Dienekes' usefulness to a source aggregator, he's nonetheless a very good source aggregator.

Dienekes' definitions in his list of the three models are weird, as you indicate. Migrationism is becoming popular among genetic athropologists who see that idea diffusion and demic diffusion don't fit the data. But migrationism doesn't imply colonalism, that's an absurd jump in logic that nobody but Dienekes seems to hold. People can be migrating intentionally, keeping to their own groups, and making warfare with other groups (obviously not demic diffusion) without anything mirroring colonialism.

[SobiquYo]

All Europeans have Neanderthal admixture, but it's true we are talking about a few alleles. Not sure about the phenotypical impact, although sometimes I saw people with very curious traits.

I personally don't give too much importance to Dienekes' opinions. He is good performing admixture analysis, that's what I really care.

[Gastonleruanich]

I tend to agree, but I must partly contest this:

Dienekes has mentioned many times that he supports the hypothesis that Neolithic farmers brought R1b and Indo-European languages to Europe. This is a double mistake, because all the evidences (ancient DNA, autosomal studies, study of R1b subclades, archaeological cultures, and linguistics of the IE languages) concur against a Neolithic arrival of R1b in Europe (except in the Pontic Steppe) and against a Neolithic spread of IE languages to Europe.

In my opinion (as I have stated a few times), while it is true that the bulk of the R1b was brought to Europe with the Indo-European migrations of the Eneolithic/Bronze Age, I think that there was most probably some R1b (without the L11 mutation) in Neolithic Southeast Europe brought about by widely attested (archaeologically) migrations to what is now the Bulgarian Black Sea Coast from northern Anatolia. This, in my opinion, is supported by the frequency of R1b-M269 (xL11) in SE Europe:
Busby_R1b%28xL11%29.jpg

[GZFL2tDA]

In my opinion (as I have stated a few times), while it is true that the bulk of the R1b was brought to Europe with the Indo-European migrations of the Eneolithic/Bronze Age, I think that there was most probably some R1b (without the L11 mutation) in Neolithic Southeast Europe brought about by widely attested (archaeologically) migrations to what is now the Bulgarian Black Sea Coast from northern Anatolia. This, in my opinion, is supported by the frequency of R1b-M269 (xL11) in SE Europe:

I don't think R1b L11- was what Maciamo was talking about, but you bring up a good point. Still, R1b L11- doesn't mirror other clearly Neolithic haplogroups in Europe (namely G2a). Was this a distinct Neolithic migration from G2a's in your opinion?

I suppose R1b L11- has some similar spots as G2a, but generally, if your map is right, it trends more Eastern, at least. Just drift in favor of G2a as the Neolithic population moved West?

[retrahdggd]

I tend to agree, but I must partly contest this:
In my opinion (as I have stated a few times), while it is true that the bulk of the R1b was brought to Europe with the Indo-European migrations of the Eneolithic/Bronze Age, I think that there was most probably some R1b (without the L11 mutation) in Neolithic Southeast Europe brought about by widely attested (archaeologically) migrations to what is now the Bulgarian Black Sea Coast from northern Anatolia. This, in my opinion, is supported by the frequency of R1b-M269 (xL11) in SE Europe:
Busby_R1b%28xL11%29.jpg

Agreed it's a possibility, but I would see even older subclades in the Neolithic (L23 and upstream). The L11* in Romania and Bulgaria matches the area of the first Indo-European incursions into the Balkans circa 4000-3500 BCE. It may be a leftover from that period rather than from the Neolithic.

[qd0vhq4f]

I don't think the mating with Neanderthals was something important. It was something rather minoritary and occasional. As for the colonisation of Europe, we still can't explain how can R1b be so high in Western-Europe, unless it was a massive colonisation

Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals lived side by side from 50,000 years ago until the disappearance of the latter 28,000 years ago. That's a really long period (twice longer than from the Neolithic to now).

[meteeratymn]

All Europeans have Neanderthal admixture, but it's true we are talking about a few alleles. Not sure about the phenotypical impact, although sometimes I saw people with very curious traits.

A few alleles ? I suppose that you mean a few percent of our genome, which means over one hundred millions alleles !

I am not convinced that the percentage of Neanderthal admixture that emerged from the genome of the Croatian sample is very representative of the overall Neanderthal population. First of all, there were many very different subspecies of Neanderthal living at the same time (at least three in Europe, one in the Middle East and one in Central Asia). Based on the skeletons, these subspecies looked even more different that the most different humans today. We have probably inherited more from some subspecies than others, and if that is the case the Middle Eastern and Central Asian ones are the prime candidates. So until we don't have data for each subspecies, we won't know for sure how much of our genome actually comes from Neanderthal. I think it could well exceed 10%, perhaps as much as 20% in some individuals. I am not the only one to think so. The paleoanthropologist and Neanderthal expert Erik Trinkaus expressed exactly my opinion in an interview for National Geographic.

Trinkhaus adds that most living humans probably have much more Neanderthal DNA than the new study suggests.

"One to 4 percent is truly a minimum," Trinkaus added. "But is it 10 percent? Twenty percent? I have no idea."

[Kalobbis]

No Maciamo, I mean exactly from 5 to 27 alleles in Europeans according to Interpretome, wich considers a maximum number of 84. There's no evidence at the moment for hundreds of millions of alleles. Actually most Neandethal genes I tend to think that have been replaced, although more research would show more discoveries, but I don't expect any surprise in the direction you point.

[grizolsemn]

An answer to this last question is crucial (in the absence of pre-1000 BCE aDNA).

(I'm not sure where this will appear. I'm not talking neanderthals but archaeological cultures)

[Fededorbprago]

I just don't understand one thing and it doesn't make any sense. Let say that maciamo is right and that R1b in Europe is INDO-European. How is it possible then that R1b migrated from Anatolia into Europe after J2a without mixing with local Anatolian J2a? The native J2a is even more dominant than R1b in Anatolia.

If R1b INDO-European migrated out of Anatolia into Western Europe they would bring some J2a with them, since R1b and J2a have always been living together (with & next to each other) in Anatolia, since the very beginning when Central Asian R1b migrated into Anatolia. J2a was in Anatolia even before R1b.

But I think that it's true that some Anatolian Indo-European R1b subclades migrated into Europe.

[luffyplayaz]

I tend to agree with you rather than Dienekes on most things, Maciamo, and you're definitely winning the prediction contest if anybody is keeping score. Still, it's worth taking any individual's speculation with a grain of salt, even someone with as much data in front of him as Dienekes, or you, or Taranis, or anybody. Of course, even if we are to relegate Dienekes' usefulness to a source aggregator, he's nonetheless a very good source aggregator.

Let me say this, any model that anybody here or elsewhere makes is only as good as the data that we have. Everybody of us makes mistakes from time to time (I make and made quite a number of mistakes, I know that ). The part where things make a difference is a) how good our hunch was and b) how we deal with new data and how we adapt or own hypotheses in the face of that.

For instance, Maciamo (and a lot of other people) were absolutely right that Neolithic sites would yield no R1b, but I think nobody genuinely expected before that G2 would be the dominant Neolithic Haplogroup in Europe (people were more expecting E1b and J2).

On that, once we do finally get Beaker-Bell samples, I kind of expect now we will get such a weird right-but-wrong situation again...

Dienekes' definitions in his list of the three models are weird, as you indicate. Migrationism is becoming popular among genetic athropologists who see that idea diffusion and demic diffusion don't fit the data. But migrationism doesn't imply colonalism, that's an absurd jump in logic that nobody but Dienekes seems to hold. People can be migrating intentionally, keeping to their own groups, and making warfare with other groups (obviously not demic diffusion) without anything mirroring colonialism. I also agree that "colonialism" is definitely overhyped in this context, and what we saw in prehistoric times can in no way be compared with the European colonies, or even with the colonies of the Greeks and Phoenicians.

[echocassidyde]

I don't think R1b L11- was what Maciamo was talking about, but you bring up a good point. Still, R1b L11- doesn't mirror other clearly Neolithic haplogroups in Europe (namely G2a). Was this a distinct Neolithic migration from G2a's in your opinion?

I suppose R1b L11- has some similar spots as G2a, but generally, if your map is right, it trends more Eastern, at least. Just drift in favor of G2a as the Neolithic population moved West?

Agreed it's a possibility, but I would see even older subclades in the Neolithic (L23 and upstream). The L11* in Romania and Bulgaria matches the area of the first Indo-European incursions into the Balkans circa 4000-3500 BCE. It may be a leftover from that period rather than from the Neolithic.

Now I consider it, you may be right: L23* tends to correspond much better with G2a, except where we may assume G2a arrived through the Cardium Pottery culture (which is probably where most of the Iberian, French, Sardinian, Corsican and Italian G2a came from) or later, as with the Etruscan G2a:


But what could probably shed some light into this would be a study of, for example, R1b-M412*

[YpciJQdo]

As I already stated often before, I don't know much about genetics and ancient migrations. But Maciamo's theories sound very understandable and reasonable to me, where theories of other people (also Dienekes) often lack explanations. His theories sometimes miss some details, which he admits due to missing data. But he presents possibilities with ranked probabilities (without ridiculing the lower-chance possibilities), so I enjoy reading in the Genetics Forum.

The Neanderthal-Theories are really an exception for me. I find Maciamo's theories really interesting and don't want to deny the possibility of accelerated cultural evolution due to Neanderthal-admixture. But IMO it is still VERY hypothetical, but it's presentation seems a bit too certain.

Yet I get angry each time I read the name Dienekes, as he made me look like a jerk infront of the whole Eupedia-Forumhttp://www.eupedia.com/forum/showthr...ric-Calculator)

[Yarikoff]

No Maciamo, I mean exactly from 5 to 27 alleles in Europeans according to Interpretome, wich considers a maximum number of 84. There's no evidence at the moment for hundreds of millions of alleles. Actually most Neandethal genes I tend to think that have been replaced, although more research would show more discoveries, but I don't expect any surprise in the direction you point.

Sorry, I was wrong. I didn't mean one hundred millions alleles, of course. I meant that we share something like 2990 million alleles with Neanderthals. Only a few millions differ. But the same is true of out similarity with chimpanzees... (only a few tens of millions alleles more different than Neanderthal).

One recommendation: don't use the Interpretome gadget as your reference.

[lorryuncori]

I just don't understand one thing and it doesn't make any sense. Let say that maciamo is right and that R1b in Europe is INDO-European. How is it possible then that R1b migrated from Anatolia into Europe after J2a without mixing with local Anatolian J2a? The native J2a is even more dominant than R1b in Anatolia.

You have problems understanding this because you assume that Neolithic Anatolia was the same as it is today. Nowadays every region, city or even village in Anatolia is a mixture of all kinds of haplogroups, but things were very different 8000 years ago. Actually there is a good chance that Paleolithic and Mesolithic tribes of hunter-gatherers, small groups of a dozens or at most a few hundred people, all belonged to the same Y-DNA haplogroup, or perhaps two haplogroups (but many mtDNA haplogroups because women were exchanged between tribes or taken by the winner after a clash/war). Neolithic communities that evolved from these tribes also probably all belonged to the same haplogroup. I have always thought that, and this is exactly what we witnessed at the Treilles site in France. That's why I think that Anatolia was divided in territories, some belonging to R1b tribes, others to J2 tribes, and others to G2a tribes.

The best analogy are Amerindians tribes from North America until the European conquest. Some were nomadic, others semi-nomadic, and others settled. Most were hunter-gatherers, but a few were farmers. I believe that the situation in the Middle East at the three first millennia of agriculture (from 9,500 to 6,500 BCE) was very similar to that of Central and North America in the 16th century. Agriculture actually started in the Levant and south-central Anatolia, but didn't reach northern Anatolia until 6500 to 6000 BCE. This timing is perfect because it roughly matches the age of R1b1b2a (L23), which is the subclade that divides the Anatolia (later Greek) branch from the Indo-European steppe branch.