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Thursday, April 25, 2024

Uralic And Yeniseian Origins

New ancient DNA data informs both that origins of the Siberian Yeniseian peoples, the Native American populations of North America, and the Uralic people. 

In Siberia, two genetically distinct populations emerged from admixture between the early Northeastern Siberian population that was a major source of Native American ancestry, and "groups from Inland East Asia and the Amur River Basin."

One of these populations, the Cis-Baikal Late Neolithic–Bronze Age, was ancestral to the Yeniseian peoples of Siberia, who in turn admixed with some other Northeast Asian and North Central Asia populations.

The other of these populations, the Yakutian Late Neolithic–Bronze Age, was the proto-Uralic population. They spread from an east Siberian origin ca. 2500 BCE, along with subclades of Y-chromosome haplogroup N occurring at high frequencies among present-day Uralic speakers, into Western and Central Siberia in communities associated with Seima-Turbino metallurgy, a suite of advanced bronze casting techniques that starteds to expand rapidly ca. 2000 BCE. As they expanded they admixed with many other people in the region, including Indo-Iranians and various hunter-gather peoples.
The North Eurasian forest and forest-steppe zones have sustained millennia of sociocultural connections among northern peoples. We present genome-wide ancient DNA data for 181 individuals from this region spanning the Mesolithic, Neolithic and Bronze Age
We find that Early to Mid-Holocene hunter-gatherer populations from across the southern forest and forest-steppes of Northern Eurasia can be characterized by a continuous gradient of ancestry that remained stable for millennia, ranging from fully West Eurasian in the Baltic region to fully East Asian in the Transbaikal region
In contrast, cotemporaneous groups in far Northeast Siberia were genetically distinct, retaining high levels of continuity from a population that was the primary source of ancestry for Native Americans. By the mid-Holocene, admixture between this early Northeastern Siberian population and groups from Inland East Asia and the Amur River Basin produced two distinctive populations in eastern Siberia that played an important role in the genetic formation of later people. 
Ancestry from the first population, Cis-Baikal Late Neolithic–Bronze Age (Cisbaikal_LNBA), is found substantially only among Yeniseian-speaking groups and those known to have admixed with them.

Ancestry from the second, Yakutian Late Neolithic–Bronze Age (Yakutia_LNBA), is strongly associated with present-day Uralic speakers. We show how Yakutia_LNBA ancestry spread from an east Siberian origin ∼4.5kya, along with subclades of Y-chromosome haplogroup N occurring at high frequencies among present-day Uralic speakers, into Western and Central Siberia in communities associated with Seima-Turbino metallurgy: a suite of advanced bronze casting techniques that spread explosively across an enormous region of Northern Eurasia ∼4.0kya. However, the ancestry of the 16 Seima-Turbino-period individuals—the first reported from sites with this metallurgy—was otherwise extraordinarily diverse, with partial descent from Indo-Iranian-speaking pastoralists and multiple hunter-gatherer populations from widely separated regions of Eurasia
Our results provide support for theories suggesting that early Uralic speakers at the beginning of their westward dispersal where involved in the expansion of Seima-Turbino metallurgical traditions, and suggests that both cultural transmission and migration were important in the spread of Seima-Turbino material culture.

6 comments:

  1. In related to the recent paper, it seems that Uralo-Yukaghir hypothesis is quite certain.

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  2. "Uralo-Yukaghir hypothesis is quite certain."

    This doesn't follow at all. The fact that the homeland of the Uralic languages and the homeland of the Yeniseian people is in the same general part of Siberia does not establish that they are languages derived from a common source.

    Indeed, the fact that the source populations are genetically distinct tends to favor the hypothesis that similarities between the two are due to loan words and areal effects instead.

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  3. "The Uralic–Yukaghir hypothesis is rejected by many researchers as unsupported. While most agree that there is a core of common vocabulary that cannot be simply dismissed as chance resemblances, it has been argued that these are not the result of common inheritance, but rather due to contact between Yukaghir and Uralic speakers, which resulted in borrowing of vocabulary from Uralic languages (especially Samoyedic) into Yukaghir. Rédei (1999) assembled a large corpus of what he considered as loans from Uralic into Yukaghir.[20] Häkkinen (2012) argues that the grammatical systems show too few convincing resemblances, especially the morphology, and proposes that putative Uralic–Yukaghir cognates are in fact borrowings from an early stage of Uralic (c. 3000 BC; he dates Proto-Uralic to c. 2000 BC) into an early stage of Yukaghir, while Uralic was (according to him) spoken near the Sayan region and Yukaghir near the Upper Lena River and near Lake Baikal.[21] Aikio (2014) agrees with Rédei and Häkkinen that Uralic–Yukaghir is unsupported and implausible, and that common vocabulary shared by the two families is best explained as the result of borrowing from Uralic into Yukaghir, although he rejects many of their (especially Rédei's) examples as spurious or accidental resemblances and puts the date of borrowing much later, arguing that the loanwords he accepts as valid were borrowed from an early stage of Samoyedic (preceding Proto-Samoyedic; thus roughly in the 1st millennium BC) into Yukaghir, in the same general region between the Yenisei River and Lake Baikal.[22]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uralic%E2%80%93Yukaghir_languages

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  4. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukaghir_languages

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  5. The paper doesn't really say anything one way or the other about the speakers of the Yukaghir languages.

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  6. Well, seems legitimate after all.

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