Bell Beaker Sites In Spain and Portugal Mapped

Maju has a post with a nice map on the extent of Bell Beaker archaeology in Iberia, and also a dedicated permanent page discussing the Iberian Chalcolithic (i.e. the copper age in what is currently Spain and Portugal, which is the time period in which the Bell Beaker culture appeared in Iberia).

Why Care?

Why is this such salient information? 

Mostly because of the critical role that the Bell Beaker people may have played in the larger sweep of European prehistory and demographics.  It was not nearly is plausible that the Bell Beaker people (or if not them, some other Copper Age or Bronze Age population) had to be so demographically influential in Europe until ancient DNA results started to force the question.

The European Transition From Hunter-Gatherers To Herders and Farmers

No one disputes that human civilization in Europe profoundly changed almost every place that the Neolithic revolution (i.e. farming, herding and sedentary living in communities other than fishing economies) arrived, when the Neolithic revolution arrived in Europe. 

Ancient mtDNA data make fairly clear that, at least outside Southern Europe, this transition had a substantial demic component - i.e. it involved a major infusion of new immigrations from the general vicinity of West Asia and Anatolia (and perhaps Southeast Europe, Central Asia and the Near East), rather than merely involving a technology transfer absorbed by the existing residents.  The demographic shift involved in hunter-gatherer to farmer and herder transitions may have been less abrupt in Southern Europe than in Northern Europe, however.

Except for a few places that are liminal between the Near East and West Asia on one hand, and Europe on the other, the Neolithic revolution arrived in Europe starting around 6000 B.C.E. or later, with a Danubian Linear Pottery Culture in the East, and a Cardial Pottery Culture in Southern Europe constituting the two main first waves of Neolithic expansion.

The Atlantic Megalithic Culture

In an area roughly described as "Atlantic Europe," with outposts as far east as Sardinia, as far west as the British Isles, and as far North as Denmark, the Neolithic cultures crystalized into a "megalithic culture" (think Stonehenge) linked by maritime trade.  In some parts of Atlantic Europe, the megalithic culture is the initial Neolithic culture that can be discerned in the archaeological record.  In other parts of Europe including Atlantic Europe, there may have been some pre-megalithic Neolithic period for as much as one or two thousand years.

Residual Hunter-Gatherers Of Northern Europe

Not all of Europe experienced the Neolithic Revolution at once, however.  The Funnel Beaker culture (TBK) (more or less in Northern Continental Europe) and Comb Ceramic archaeological cultures (more or less in Slavic and Uralic Europe and Siberia) were some of the last hunter-gatherer-fishing cultures of Europe that did not practice farming or herding on a widespread basis and existed in areas that were marginal for agricultural food production at times contemporaneous with Neolithic European cultures.

The Genetic Evidence For A Demic Models

Ancient DNA evidence (combining mtDNA, Y-DNA and autosomal DNA), and evidence from skeletons of the respective cultures, shows both that the early Neolithic populations had substantial immigrant components, and that these early Neolithic populations, particularly on the Y-DNA and autosomal DNA side, were not typical of modern European populations.  There was surely some assimilation of individuals from pre-Neolithic societies, and later from early Neolithic societies, but the amount of gene pool influence exerted by the earlier layers is a closer fit to a pure replacement model than to a cultural diffusion model.

So, somehow or other, there must have been one or more major demographic transitions between the early Neolithic era and the point at which ancient DNA starts to look quite similar in overall character to modern European DNA (realistically, no later than the Middle Ages in most places).

When Could Demographic Transitions Have Taken Place After The Neolithic?

The natural question to ask next is what candidate cultural transition(s) could have coincided with this major post-Neolithic demographic transitions.  There are several plausible candidates.  All of the non-Bell Beaker candidates are historic groups of expanding Indo-Europeans, often in several sucessive waves (e.g. Latin and its successor Romance languages, often replaced Indo-European Celtic languages, and the Slavic expansion probably also replaced existing Indo-European languages in the region that are now mostly lost; the case that the culture from which the Corded Ware archaeological culture emerged spoke a language that was Indo-European is also a reasonably plausible one).

The archaeological record shows relative continuity within the Neolithic era in Western and Northern Europe until the Bell Beaker culture of the Copper Age arrives ca. 3000 B.C.E. and exhibits a substantial break with past cultures.  Craniographic evidence and very preliminary ancient DNA evidence suggest that the Bell Beaker culture had a meaningful migrant population component (at least in most places, the phenomena streched over a very large area and a quite lengthy time frame), and this view is coming to be the more widely held one as historical anthropology experienced ancient DNA driven paradigm shifts, contrary to a historical anthropological view that peaked around the 1970s that had tried to describe the phenomena as largely a technology transfer without meaningful migration. 

At its greatest extent the Bell Beaker culture extended over most of Western Europe (with some holes where there is no archaeological evidence for it within that area) and well inland from the Baltic Sea coast pretty much to the Baltic states.  Bell Beaker culture had a larger peak geographic range than the predecessor megalithic culture, although all or almost all megalithic cultural areas transitioned to the Bell Beaker culture.

Contemporaneously, in an area roughly corresponding to Cold War Eastern Europe, another European Copper Age culture, the Corded Ware Culture, prevailed.

The boundary between the two cultures overlapped somewhat, with distinctly Bell Beaker and Corded Ware archaeological sites found within dozens of miles from each other at approximately the same times, and also shifted over time.  But, there was a divide for something on the order of a thousand years.

The thin ancient DNA evidence available from the European Chalcolithic, and other evidence from archaeology tenatively suggest that at least by this point in time, the modern European pattern in which Western Europe has a strong component of Y-DNA haplogroup R1b, very roughly in the geographic region of the Bell Beaker culture where a first ancient DNA sample reveales the oldest known European R1b ancient DNA, while the area roughly in the geographic region of the Corded Ware culture has produced ancient DNA samples from the culture of Y-DNA haplogroup R1a, similar to that found there today, in both cases, in a tenantive contrast with early Neolithic Y-DNA in both the LBK and Cardial Pottery areas.  Thus, the Y-DNA landscape of modern Europe was starting to gel sometime around the European Chalcolithic, if not earlier (the ancient Y-DNA data gets much thinner at older date than the mtDNA data does because mtDNA is more easily preserved and sequenced from ancient sources).

Linguistic Affinities

The linguistic affinities of the Bell Beaker and Corded Ware cultures is a critical cutoff point in historical linguistics, because combined, these two cultures covered almost all of Europe at some point during the Chalcolithic.  If these archaeological cultures were associated with language families (which a demic component to the Bell Beaker culture is suggestive of), then these cultures provide a foundation from which subsequent linguistic developments can be tracked.  However, if this is the case, pre-Chalcolithic languages of Europe, other than proto-Indo-European or proto-Uralic, are irrevocably lost.

The Bell Beaker cultural area also appears to coincide with a region where some linguistic observers have pointed to the existence of a "Vasconic substrate" set of geographic proper names that appear to have no relationship of the Indo-European languages that prevail in all but a few regions of Europe (Basque country, Finland, Hungary, Latvia and a few Russian refugia) today.  The megalithic culture didn't have the geographic extent to be a fit for this toponymic region, and the post-Bell Beaker linguistic layers are known well enough to rule them out.  But, the evidence of a Vasconic substrate in typonymns is not terribly overwhelming either.

Legitimate arguments have been advanced that the Bell Beaker people may have been pre-Celtic Indo-Europeans linguistically rather than than speakers of a non-Indo-European language, and since there were no literate languages in Europe at the time (writing was just in its earliest days in Sumeria and Egypt at the time), and there aren't even any contemporaneous phonetic transcriptions of Bell Beaker speech from that era that have been deciphered, we have to make linguistic inferences based upon signs of substrate influences in later languages, proper names that survived, the known stories of other parts of the puzzle, like the reasonably well understood Bronze Age expansions of the Indo-European languages in the early historic era, and whatever hints we can derive from the existence of the Basque and Etruscan people's in the historic era, cryptic hints from the oldest surviving histories to discuss these areas, and evidence showing genetic and cultural ties that are suggestive that linguistic ties may have been present as well.

I personally believe at the time that I am writing this post that the Basque language is probably the last remaining survivor of a language family or subfamily that once encompassed all or almost all of the Vasconic substrate area and that the continental European branch of this language family has its roots in a near basal proto-language spoken by the earliest Portugese Bell Beaker peoples.  I also strongly suspect that this proto-language in turn distantly and at great time depth derived from a non-Indo-European language probably spoken in the Caucusas mountains, Armenia or Anatolia at the time that the proto-Bell Beaker people migrated to Iberia and from there to the rest of Atlantic Europe and beyond.  Most likely that language was related to the Northwest Caucuasian languages (e.g. Chechnyian) and spoken by proto-Bell Beaker people from the Steppe who acquired it via language shift from a relatively advanced for its time Caucasian superstrate metal culture.  As I've noted in a prior post, I also personally believe that the Basque language probably arrived in its current local via France and not Iberia to the South.  But, new evidence could easily shift the plausibility of this theory.

John Hawks on Andrew Lawler On Steven Pinker

Is human "progress" real in the sense that there is a secular trend towards reduced violence?

This is the core premise of Steven Pinker's book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. A recent issue of the journal Science contains a collection of articles on human conflict including a critique of Pinker by Andrew Lawler from the point of view of ethnographers of primative societies. Lawler notes that "biological anthropologists and archaeologists . . . find the data too weak to support such sweeping claims and add that the statistical averaging done by Pinker and Gat erases the enormous variation in small-scale societies."

Upper Paleolithic era physical and evoluationary anthropologist John Hawks takes on this debate concluding that:

My oversimplified view of matters is that Pinker abstracts a single latent variable from the data on violence and aggression: violence appears to decrease as social complexity and hierarchy increase. The anthropologists here are arguing for a more complex, and possibly cyclical, relationship in which other factors besides social complexity are important. George Milner's example:

He cites the example of the Hopewell culture of the 1st through 5th centuries C.E. in eastern North America, which appears to have been “socially permeable,” allowing traders to safely transport obsidian from sources in what is today Wyoming as far east as Ohio. Such ease of movement would have been unthinkable before and after that era, when violence between groups was more common. The interesting question, Milner says, is what changed. “To see this from a solely Hobbesian viewpoint misses the real story,” he adds. “We want to know why people switch from peace to war and back again.”

Rousseau was wrong. The Pleistocene was never a peaceful state of nature.

Hobbes is too simplistic. Violence in human societies is multidimensional and we perceive it differently depending on its cultural motivation. This is why every discussion of Pinker's thesis (including Lawler's) begins by acknowledging the industrial-scale warfare and mass killing of the 20th century. Such events mean something different than big-city crime. Pinker's generalization is correct, but why it is correct depends on how the social uses of violence have changed over time. Hunter-gatherer groups often used violence, in ways that varied among groups and across time to maintain sometimes-elaborate systems of social control. Pinker's generalization is incomplete, and its incompleteness may be explained by the multidimensionality of violence in human societies.

Like Hawks, I'm not sold in Lawler's critique of Pinker. Pinker may not have the whole story, but he has at least an important part of it right.

There may be enormous variation in the levels of violence in small scale societies. But, given the relatively short time periods of any ethnographic data in small populations that inherently leaves room for considerable sampling error, averaging to mitigate against mere random variation is a necessary evil.

Also, the Hopewell example cited itself can quite plausibly be explained by the social complexity thesis ad the heart of what Hawks gleans from Pinker.

An emerging narrative of modern era Mississippian culture depicts the Hopewell situation as likely involving the rise and fall of a pre-Columbian New World empire and not simply a decentralized archaeological culture. Hence, the existence of trade networks when it thrived is comparable to the Pax Romana experienced at the same time in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.

Indeed, given the increasing indications that longer term climate trends are a major driver of the rise and fall of empires and civilization, it is likely that the Roman and Hopewell parallels in the same error are not mere coincidences but represent a period of favorable climate in which independent Old World and New World empires thrive as a result and because of their success are able to maintain peace over large geographic areas sufficient for trade in ways not possible before they arose or after they fell. The largest city in the Hopewell culture, near modern day Saint Louis, Missouri, was on the same order of magnitude as ancient Rome in population at its peak.

If some of the most notable exceptions to the rule, like the Hopewell case, turn out to be cases that aren't actually exceptions but are instead insufficiently understood episodes of history, then the case for Pinker's thesis grows quite a bit stronger vis-a-vis his critics.

Nilo-Saharan Homeland Proposed

There is a firm linguistic based proposal for the place of origin of the Nilo-Saharan languages (with the reasoning behind it explained in the linked material), a language family most prominently represented by the Maasi of Kenya, who are known for a predominantly pastoralist lifestyle, particularly in East Africa.

The proto-Saharo-Sahelian society can therefore also be placed somewhere in the combined regions of northwestern Sudan and northeastern Chad.

From "The Archaeology of Africa" (1993) via the Linear Population Model blog.

The location in question included the Blue Nile basin near where it merges with the White Nile, and Lake Chad's endoheic basin, and probably dates to a time of increasing aridity in that region.

As my post yesterday noted, an expansion from this source may have been as recent as 1000 B.C.E., at the dawn of the Mediterranean basin's Iron Age, or perhaps a couple of centuries earlier, around the time of Bronze Age collapse.

The accomplishment of locating this homeland is somewhat muted by the fact that the Nilo-Saharan languages are probably the youngest of the major African language families, that it is one of the smaller major language families of the world, and that it is mostly fairly compact in its geographic range (with one notable branch of the language family providing an exception that proves the rule). This makes the task of discerning the relationships between the family's languages phylogenetically, and their geographic origins considerably easier than in the case, for example, of the far older and more widely dispersed Afro-Asiatic macro-language family that includes, for example, the Berber, Hebrew and Arabic languages. On the other hand, the Nilo-Saharan languages were not literate languages until very late in history, and that impedes inquiry into its historical origins, so the task was not entirely without its challenges.

The Origins Of Neighboring Language Families In A Nutshell

Much of the overall narrative of African pre-history hinges on how one resolves the places of origin and sequencing of linguistic expansions that gave rise to the current linguistic landscape of Africa.

The general vicinity where the Nilo-Saharan languages arose also probably overlaps or is adjacent to the homeland for the Chadic languages, associated with pastoralists who roam the African Sahel (most notably the Hasua people) within the Afro-Asiatic language family.

Marnie quotes Tishkoff who brings autosomal genetic insight to the potential relationships between the two language families established from other sources:

Our data support the hypothesis based on linguistic, archeological, mtDNA, and Y chromosome data, that the Sahel has been a corridor for bi-directional migration between eastern and western Africa.  

We observe the highest proportion of the "Nilo-Saharan AAC [ed. ancestral autosomal genetic component]” in the southern/central Sudanese populations (Nuer, Dinka, Shilluk, Nyimang), with decreasing frequency from northern Kenya (e.g. Pokot) to northern Tanzania (Datog, Maasai). From K = 5-13 [ed. refering to the number of ancestral components chosen by the analyst into which the autosomal data are arbitrarily resolved by a mathematical algorhythm], all Nilo-Saharan speaking populations from Kenya, Tanzania, southern Sudan, and Chad cluster with west-central Afroasiatic Chadic speaking populations.   

These results are consistent with linguistic and archeological data, suggesting a possible common ancestry of Nilo-Saharan speaking populations from an eastern Sudanese homeland within the past ~10,500 years, with subsequent bi-directional migration westward to Lake Chad and southward into modern day southern Sudan, and more recent migration eastward into Kenya and Tanzania ~3,000 ya (giving rise to Southern Nilotic speakers) and westward into Chad ~2,500 ya (giving rise to Central Sudanic speakers).   

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."

Since Tishkoff's dates are heavily driven by mutation rate methodologies that are often too unreliable to the level of accuracy necessary to make them useful in distinguishing alternative narratives of pre-history, they must be taken with a grain of salt although the relative sequence of events suggested by the mutation rate dates, at least, is probably the most probable possibility absent evidence to the contrary.

While Chadic linguistic populations tend to have generally East African mtDNA lineages (but see, in particular, this paper regarding distinctively Chadic mtDNA lineages), their most distinctive and defining Y-DNA haplogroup, R1b-V88 (which is a branching basal to the European branches of Y-DNA haplogroup R1b) has a likely origin somewhere in far Southeast Europe or Western Central Asia near the likely point of the Y-DNA haplogroup R1a v. R1b divide.  This is very far afield from most of the rest of the African genetic legacy for a population with its ethogenesis possibly taking place in the vicinity of Lake Chad, two thousand years or so before the world's first written historical records, and hence, at a time when what we know about the civilizations that existed is pretty much limited to pots and bones dated to that era.

The Chadic mtDNA paper linked above also notes that:

Within the Afro-Asiatic language phylum, the Chadic branch is linguistically close to the East African Cushitic branch although they are separated by ~2,000 km of territory in which different Semitic and Nilo-Saharan peoples live today. We show that only northern Cushitic groups from Ethiopia and Somalia are genetically close to Chadic populations. Thus, the archaeologically and linguistically supported route of proto-Chadic pastoralists via Wadi Howar [the remnant of the ancient Yellow Nile, a tributary of the Nile from about 8000 to 1000 BCE] to the Chad Basin may have genetic support.

Both language families probably expanded sometime after the initial expansions of the Niger-Congo language family, and the Chadic languages probably expanded no earlier than and quite possibly considerably later than the Cushitic language family.

The homeland of the Niger-Congo language family isn't terribly controversial, and was probably more or less smack dab in the midddle of West Africa at a confluence of some its major rivers; it has only a few remote members not attributable to Bantu expansion (the most notable is the Kordofan language family of Nuba Mountain in Sudan). The Niger-Congo language expansion in Africa, could pre-date the Afro-Asiatic language expansion in Africa, but could also plausible have taken place not long after Afro-Asiatic languages started to expand.

The Niger-Congo languages seem to be associated with locally domesticated Sahel crops, while the Afro-Asiatic languages seem to be associated with Fertile Crescent food production packages. A determination of which language family came first is deeply intertwined with the question of whether Sahel agriculture was developed independently of the Fertile Crescent package, or was only made possible because of animal domestications and concepts that had their source in the Fertile Crescent.

Afro-Asiatic Linguistic Origins

But, the Cushitic language family's origins are a much hotter issue. This is because the status of the Cushitic languages as a source or sink within the Afro-Asiatic languages, which in turn goes to the controversial question of whether the Afro-Asiatic languages have an African or West Asian place of origin.

A "First Farmers" paradigm would suggest a probably origin for the language family in the Levant that expanded and diversified with the Fertile Crescent Neolithic, or perhaps a secondary origin somewhere in the Nile Basin as a language of early adopters of the Fertile Crescent Neolithic in Africa who expanded elsewhere in Africa (with Semitic arriving in the Levant via Egyptian cultural influence).

The main argument for the African origin of Afro-Asiatic languages is that five of the six subfamilies of the Afro-Asiatic languages appear to have origins in Africa (Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, Omotic, and Coptic) and are exclusively African, leaving only the Semitic languages, whose origins can be traced quite a distance back in time through historic and linguistic means (the Ethio-Semitic languages arrived in Ethiopia as a single proto-language probably sometime in the Bronze Age from the Levant; the family tree of the West Semitic languages are reasonable well established in both time and place).

The argument for an African origin of the Afro-Asiatic languages is also bolstered by the fact that the speakers of the Afro-Asiatic languages are not united by a genetic signature that can be rooted in Levatine peoples. Some distinctively Semitic genetic ancestry markers are largely absent in other Afro-Asiatic populations, but the phylogeny of the most widely shared genetic ancestry markers of Afro-Asiatic language speakers have roots that are widely, although not universally, believed to have African origins. But, the genetics are not conclusive, because there is no one genetic ancestry marker that is clearly a distinctive component of the gene pool of all six of the constituent language families of the Afro-Asiatic languages.

In a West Asian origin theory, proto-Afro-Asiatic was imposed on Egyptians and perhaps separately upon Berbers by an early Neolithic colonist superstrate from the Levant made up of people who had enough power to induce language shift in the subject peoples despite not having much of a demic impact visibile in the gene pool, a phenomena documented more than once historically.

In an African origin theory, the Semitic languages, whose speakers are genetic outliers relative to the African language families in the Afro-Asiatic macro-language family, has its roots in an Egyptian superstate population that caused a language shift in the Levantine substrate peoples. We know, historically, that the Levant did have an Egyptian superstrate for more than a thousand years.  But, we don't know what kind of influence Egyptians had in the Levant centuries prior to the earliest attested West Semitic languages which is when the proto-Semitic language would have flourished somewhere in West Asia. 

As a footnote, it is also worth observing that, if there was an Egyptian origin, it would have had to have taken place at least 1500 years or so before Hebrew ethnogenesis which is relatively well dated historically and linguistically, since the West Semitic Akkadian languages and related Northwestern Semitic languages are attested long before the Hebrew people came into being as a cultural construct.  The origins of the Semitic languages in West Asia were most definitely not in a Hebrew Exodus from Egypt.

Of course, even though both a sub-Saharan African origin for the Afro-Asiatic languages and an Egyptian origin for the Afro-Asiatic languages would both probably have the same Egyptian mediated origin for the West Semitic languages (since almost all road to West Asia from Africa with any demographic must pass through Egypt), the case for the Cushitic or Coptic languages (or for that matter the Berber or Omotic languages) being the most basal root of the Afro-Asiatic linguistic tree within Africa is not at all settled (and hence the controversy over the location and timing of the Cushitic homeland).

For what it is worth, while I am personally agnostic on the question of whether the Afro-Asiatic languages arose in Egypt or the Levant (most plausibly Jericho, the first Levantine city, given the tendency of languages to snowball into being predominant in a way very sensitive to the initial conditions when the expansion starts), but I believe that there is a very strong case that the Afro-Asiatic languages expanded from Egypt within Africa with the expansions of the Fertile Crescent Neolithic package of crops and animals, rather than from Ethiopia, for example, which is where the Cushitic languages are mostly spoken today, or some other location. And, there is a very solid archaeological and inferential case that the Fertile Crescent Neolithic package first established itself in Africa in the Nile Basin.

In my view, to the extent that the genetic patterns don't unequivocally show this pattern it is a result of Epipaleolithic (or earlier) population migrations that have a well established archaeological basis, and non-demic language shift events. But, the pattern of languages spreading with societies that have adopted food production methods to the detriment of the existing languages of hunter-gatherer populations is too close to universal to make it anything other than the possibility that is by far the most likely. Clearly there were at least one instance, and really there is a good case that there were two or three instances of predominantly non-demic language shift in the origin of the major Afro-Asiatic language families, given the evidence from the population genetics of the modern speakers of these languages, so genetics can't easily resolve the question of the relationship between the main Afro-Asiatic language families and other evidence must be brought to bear to answer it. Given that there is considerable disagreement amongst linguists on this question given purely linguistic evidence, this also isn't conclusive.

Dating Cattle Husbandry In Africa

Marnie at the Linear Population Model blog has a nice post on the archaeological evidence for cattle domestication at specific points in time in specific regions of Africa (numerous citations in blog post omitted, all material below quoted from other sources):

The history of cattle in Africa is better known than that of any other domestic species; it is also very complicated because for at least three thousand years the continent has been a melting-pot for unhumped cattle (Bos taurus) brought in from Eurasia and humped cattle (Bos indicus) brought in from Asia, in particular from India. In addition, it is possible that cattle were locally domesticated in north Africa from the endemic wild aurochs (Bos primigenius).

At present, the earliest securely dated finds of cattle in a cultural context come from Capeletti in Algeria and date from the seventh to the sixth millenium BC. Other early finds have been recorded from sites in the Sahara and in west Africa. Whether these cattle originated from western Asia, through Egypt or were domesticated in Africa, cannot be determined . . . . By 6000 BP [i.e. 4000 BCE] it is probable that cattle pastoralism was well established throughout north Africa and that with the increasing desertification of the Sahara people began to move south with their cattle, only to meet the tsetse-fly belt.

The archaeological evidence for the presence of cattle in west Africa for a very long time and their continuity to the present day is provided by the small humpless N'Dama breed, which has evolved a natural immunity to trypanosomiasis, the disease carried by tsetse-fly. In east Africa pastoralism became established late in the third millenium BC, and over the next 1000 years domestic livestock slowly moved towards Tanzania. These cattle were probably humpless, for the earliest evidence for humped cattle comes from ancient Egyptian paintings dated to around 1500 BC. These authors believe that cattle with cervico-thoracic humps (i.e. with humps on their necks) were first introduced into the Horn of Africa.

If the Egyptian evidence is to be credited, the arrival of humped cattle significantly preceded the arrival of the Austronesians who settled Madagascar (which came sometime between 1000 BCE and 0 BCE) and brought Southeast Asian origin tropical plants like the banana to Africa.   Presumably humped cattle arrived in Africa from India, providing a latest possible date for trade networks that included cattle trading with India, quite possibly a maritime trade for at least part of the route (something that is known to have existed between Sumeria and the Indus River Valley ca. 1000 BCE from historical records in Sumeria and archaeological evidence; the Indus River Valley civilization emerged with a complete Fertile Crescent package of crops a thousand or two years after this package had been consolidated in the Fertile Crescent itself, around the same time that the package reached Egypt).  Another post at the same blog quoting a different source commenting on a painting from 1350 B.C.E. in Egypt sheds more light on the path that the earliest humped Zebu cattle must have taken: "The few ancient depictions of true zebu cattle always occur in the context of tribute from Syria[.]"  Hence, the last leg of the trip for humped cattle to arrive in Egypt took place either by land or sea through or along the Levant, not via the Indian Ocean, and not with the Austronesians who made their way to Africa from Borneo.

Prior African cattle having their origins either in the western Asia (i.e. the Middle East) or an independent domestication in the Nile Valley. West African N'Dama cattle appear to be derived from North African stock, whatever its provenance, and must have come at least somewhat later in time than cattle arrived in North Africa.

Give the strong association of both Chadic populations and Nilo-Saharan populations with herding, the archaeological evidence for the arrival of domesticated cattle in different parts of Africa also provides a plausible basis with which to calibrate less reliable estimates of the origins of these peoples based upon genetic mutation and recombination rates.

The quite late arrival of pastoralism in East Africa, which is also some to relict hunter-gatherer populations which are absent in North Africa and in West/Central Africa to the North of the Congo jungle, suggests that herding (and probably farming as well, at least in less arable land) may have come much sooner to North Africa and West Africa than to East Africa (with Southern Africa not experiencing agriculture until the Bantu expansion arrived there after it had swept the rest of the continent). Indeed, the arrival of  cattle herding in East Africa could conceivably have predated Bantu expansion by only a thousand years or so.

If one makes the plausible assumptions that the ancestors of Cushitic populations predate Nilo-Saharan populations in East Africa who in turn pre-date Bantu populations in East Africa, and that all of these language families were spread by cultures that employed herding or farming, the late arrival of cattle herding to East Africa (ca. 3000 BCE to 2000 BCE), the fairly well dated arrival of Bantus in East Africa (ca. 1000 BCE-500 BCE), and the known paleoclimatic wet sahara/dry sahara/chad basin size changes quite tightly constrain and compress the timing of Cushitic and Nilo-Saharan expansions in East Africa. It also probably puts the time that the source cultures for these language families arrives in East Africa sometime after the ethnogenesis of the culture that gave rise to the Niger-Congo languages that are dominant in West Africa (which necessarily predated the expansion of its Bantu branch of that language family ca. 1500 BCE-1000 BCE).

Tishkoff argues based on genetic evidence associated with the digestion of cow's milk by adults and archaeological evidence that:

Cushitic-speaking Afro-Asiatic populations . . . are thought to have migrated into Kenya and Tanzania from Ethiopia ~5,000 years ago and practice a mixture of agriculture and pastoralism . . . [while] the Nilotic-speaking Nilo-Saharan populations. . . are thought to have migrated into Kenya and Tanzania from southern Sudan within the past ~3,000 years and are strict pastoralists.

Thus, according to Tishkoff's account, Nilo-Saharan linguistic populations arrived in East Africa proper only a few centuries before the Bantu expansion reached the area, and the Cushitic population was expanding south from Ethiopia only shortly after Egypt and Sumeria developed written languages at about the same time as the high point of the Indus River Valley civilization, although their arrival in or ethnogenesis in Ethiopia clearly must have happened earlier.  Tishkoff doesn't reach a conclusion about whether a milk digestion gene specific to Africa arose first in Cushitic or Nilotic populations, but another quote from the same article strong suggests that the Cushitic people, rather than the Nolitic population was its source (and hence that the Cushitic people had cattle farming): "The absence of C-14010 in the southern Sudanese Nilo-Saharan–speaking populations suggests that this allele either originated in or was introduced to the Kenyan Nilo-Saharan populations after their migration from southern Sudan."

Tishkoff also recaps the archaeological evidence for cattle domestication in Africa:

Archeological evidence suggests that cattle domestication originated in southern Egypt as early as ~9,000 years ago but no later than ~7,700 years ago and in the Middle East ~7,000-8,000 years ago, consistent with the age estimate of ~8,000-9,000 years (95% c.i. ~2,200-19,200 years) for the T-13910 allele in Europeans. The more recent age estimate of the C-14010 allele in African populations, ~2,700-6,800 years (95% c.i. ~1,200-23,000 years), is consistent with archeological data indicating that pastoralism did not spread south of the Sahara and into northern Kenya until ~4,500 years ago and into southern Kenya and northern Tanzania ~3,300 years ago

Interestingly, the arrival of cattle herding herding in East Africa happens at roughly the same time as the South Indian Neolithic at the core of what was the approximate point of origin of the Dravidian languages which included a number of crops domesticated in the African Sahel, and only 1500 to 500 years or so before the arrival of cattle from India in Africa.  It could be that both events were the product of a single Neolithic expansion wave intermediate in time between the West African Sahel Neolithic and Bantu expansion and largely lost to recorded history since the literate caste of the two literate cultures of that time (Egypt and Sumeria) had much more narrow horizons then than they would later in their histories. We do know, however that there was significant maritime trade between Sumeria and the Indus River Valley in that era (late fourth millennium BCE) and it wouldn't be too surprising if this maritime trade network also extended to the Horn of Africa. We know that maritime trade did extend that far no later than about 0 CE which it is documented in an Egyptian geography text.

The main crops of the West African Sahel and some of the Ethiopian Highland crops are indigenous African domestications that were not part of the Fertile Crescent agricultural package. Fertile Crescent crops are a poor fit for parts of Africa beyond the Mediterranean fringe and the Nile basin; they are confined to regions further north than the regions where Fertile Crescent livestock can thrive without evolving to adapt to African weather and diseases. The quoted post dealt only with cattle husbandry, and one needs to look at dating for goats and sheep herding and for indigenous African crops to reliably date the West African and East African Neolithic (I've seen some references, that I'll have to track down, that have proposed an early date of arrival for these herd animals than for cattle.) It could be that early African agriculture didn't include cattle until other parts of the agricultural package were better established.

One possibility that could reconcile the various lines of evidence, and also relax some of the tight constraints in timing discussed above, is to envision the Cushitic languages expanding to the herding of sheep and goats, and the Nilo-Saharan expansion as being boosted by the addition of cattle husbandry to the Cushitic food production package (although, as noted above, Tishkoff's sources, at least, doubt that scenario). A comment from Marnie in the Tishkoff post on milk digestion genese also provides some dating boundaries from the original domestication of various Fertile Crescent farm animals:

Regarding the dates that Tishkoff is mentioning, she is referring specifically to cattle domestication. The earlier dates that I believe you might be referring to are for sheep and goats. Zeder's 2008 open access paper "Domestication and early agriculture in the Mediterranean Basin: Origins, diffusion and impact" has these domestication dates BP: sheep 11,000; goats 11,000; pigs 10,500; cattle 10,000(Upper Euphrates Valley). However, she states that morphologically altered domestic cattle are not found in Central Anatolia until after 8,500 BP.

I continue to think that an association of the Niger-Congo language family with the West African Sahel Neolithic is the most likely scenario, but that dating of that event as of the most recent sources I am familiar with, isn't very precise although there is some room to bound to a range of historical dates. The evidence from the arrival of cattle in the region quoted above puts that expansion at least as far back in time as the 4th millennium B.C.E. (i.e. at least more than 5000 years before present) and possibly a thousand or so years before then (i.e. as much as 8000 years before present).

Recent East African autosomal genetic data also makes clear that there was not any significant demic impact of West African Niger-Congo populations in East Africa prior to the Bantu expansion into that region, although the domesticated crops of West Africa and East Africa respectively a testaments to the mutual exchange of locally domesticated plants between the regions at some point in time.

I have seen sources that point to a very early domestication of crops in West Africa (possibly independently of contact with the Fertile Crescent Neolithic and possibly even slightly earlier than the Fertile Crescent Neolithic), such as Jared Diamond's classic "Gun, Germs and Steel", and I have also seen sources (e.g. in journal articles referenced at Mathilda's Anthropology blog, which is also references articles suggesting a two stage dissemination of herding with sheep and goats coming before cattle) that suggest that the crops that were domesticated in West Africa from indigenous plants were not cultivated in anything other than proto-agriculture (i.e. cultivation of wild plants unmodified with dietary supplementation from other sources) until around the time that the source above says that cattle husbandry arrived there. All of the sources I've seen on those points are fairly old and I don't know that literature well enough to evaluate the relative reliability of the competing sources (if I could even locate them quickly), or to know if there has been any important new discoveries in the archaeology of African farming and herding since then.

Another implication of this narrative, if it is accurate, is that within the Afro-Asiatic language family, the Berber and Coptic language families probably significantly predate the Cushitic and Chadic language families.  (These speculations don't resolve one way or the other the relative origins of Berber and Coptic languages on one hand and the Levantine Semitic languages on the other, although Ethio-Semitic languages surely broke off as a branch of the Semitic languages after all of the language families within the Afro-Asiatic macro-language family were established, probably sometime in the Bronze Age).

MOND and Dark Matter Discussed

The Cosmic Variance blog has a nice discussion of the debate over dark matter v. MOND post-Bullet Cluster in the form of an e-mail thread from March 2012, involving one of the leading researchers in the modified gravity area, Sean, the proprietor of the blog, and another astrophysicist, Rainer Plaga.

A particularly cogent observation in that discussion is whether the dark matter effects beyond MOND predictions observed in galactic clusters must be non-baryonic (i.e. not made out of ordinary atoms) to fit the data. According to Stacey McGaugh, one of the most knowledgeable academics in the area of modified gravity theories, the answer to that question is no.

Clusters you certainly could fit just with baryons. They’re rare systems. If that is the only place we need dark baryons, then do the integrals. You can satisfy the residual mass discrepancy in clusters in MOND without making much dent in the BBN missing baryon budget.

Do I *like* such a solution? Certainly not. Neither do I like that fact that clusters are the only systems that come close to having the right baryon content in LCDM. Why are galaxies missing more than half of their baryons? Dwarfs > 90%? I can imagine how this might happen, but the solutions are comparably contrived. The more basic point is that I am not willing to condemn a theory for needing some dark baryons if its competitor also needs dark baryons.

To this Rainer Plaga clarifies:

90% of all cosmic baryons are presently undetected, right? Only a fraction of the baryonic matter we see directly is in clusters (O(a few percent), let’s say 10%) So why can’t a small fraction, say O(2%), of all the cosmic dark baryons be in the form of e.g. jupiters in the central parts of clusters? They and stars would then dominate the cluster mass and be dissipationless —> no problem with the bullet cluster in MOND. . . . In [Sander's paper] http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0703590 he states about cluster dark matter in MOND: “For example, there are more than enough undetected baryons to make up the missing dark component; they need only be present in some non-dissipative form which is difficult to observe.”

There are also a couple of other pro-MOND points made there which aren't new to me, but are notable.

First, MOND produces remarkably accurate estimates of the dynamics of galactic scale and smaller system with a single parameter. Dark matter theories take many more parameters to get that quality of fit. Clearly, dark matter theories are missing something that produces much more regular behavior than the model requires, but the model does not explain why this is the case.  (The debate doesn't address the more general point that a galaxy's general structure seems to be pretty much a direct product of the size of its black hole so that the single parameter of black hole size can nearly completely describe the range of observed galaxies, but there is a gap in the distributions for medium sized galaxies with masses intermediate between ellipical and spiral galaxies.)

Second,  MOND itself, as originally proposed by Milgrom, is a straw man. Everyone agrees that it does not reproduce well established general relativity phenomena. Bekenstein (TeVeS) and Moffat have produced relativistic theories for the modification of gravity that address the theoretical shortcomings of the original theory, and no one is claiming that it isn't possible that someone could come up with somewhat better relativistic gravity modification theories.

Third, none of the main proponents of dark matter theories or modified gravity theories disputes that a cosmological constant in the equations of general relativity (or the modified analog) fully describe all observed dark energy phenomena.

The discussion does miss, or only superficially treat, a few key points, however:

1. Considerable evidence falsifies the cold dark matter version of dark matter theory with heavy (ca. 10GeV to 100 GeV) weakly interacting massive particles (called WIMPs), particularly evidence from the large scale structure of the universe. "Warm dark matter" theories (with 1-13 keV size dark matter particles) appear to be a better fit to the data than either "cold dark mater" (with heavier, slower moving dark matter particles) or "hot dark matter" (with electron neutrino sized dark matter particles moving at close to the speed of light).

2. The most commonly modeled spherical distribution of dark matter in spiral galaxies has also recently been falsified both with models of its effects and with detailed Milky Way rim astronomy measurements that rule out such large quantities of dark matter in the galactic rim in the vicinity of the solar system (a result confirmed by some, but not all, direct dark matter detection experiments). The observed dark matter distribution in spiral galaxies appears to be close to cones around the axis of the galaxy through the central black hole of the galaxy.

3. Particle accelerator experiments like those at the large hadron collider (LHC) have ruled out all of the most plausible and well motivated fundamental particle candidates that interact via the weak force for dark matter with masses in a range consistent with cold dark matter or warm dark matter. There are also no known stable composite particles with the right mass for warm dark matter or cold dark matter theories.  (Sterile neutrinos are a top candidate for warm dark matter theories, neutrino condensates could also conceivably be a warm dark matter fit, and I wouldn't rule out the impact of ultra fast outflows aka black hole barf from galactic cores because the galactic bulge shape which is strongly influenced by ultra fast outflows appears to be more indicative of dark matter halo shape than the entire galaxy's shape including its rim).

4. A fairly recent discovery revealed that the amount of ordinary baryonic matter in elliptical galaxies (one of two main galaxy types, spiral galaxies like our own are the other) was dramatically undercounted and that therefore estimates of the amount of dark matter in the universe as a whole. The new data suggest an overall dark matter v. ordinary matter ratio closer to 50-50, than the canonical account in which there is far more dark matter than ordinary matter.  There also appears to be a significant uncount of the amount of ordinary matter in the form of very dim stars (ca. 0.18 times the mass of the sun) in galactic clusters.

5. There is a legitimate reason to doubt the correctness of estimates of the gravitational effects in spiral galaxies due to unmodified general relativity, which is often approximated with purely Newtonian gravity in computer models. Published papers estimating the phenomenological difference between Newtonian gravity and general relativity in a spiral galaxy vary widely. Some see no effect, some see this accounting for most of the effects otherwise attributable to dark matter.  The full GR calculation is difficult to carry out and requires simplifying assumptions.  The hard part is to know whose simplifying assumptions involve the smallest sacrifice of accuracy and most closely approximate the actual structure of these galaxies.

6. In the last few years we have learned more about the impact of matter ejected from black holes at the centers of galaxies (ultra fast outflows aka black hole barf), and about the fine detail of the make up galactic clusters than we knew in the past. Black holes eject more matter in different directions and at different speeds than previously known and this has more of an influence of the shape of the bulge at galactic centers than previously known.  This ejected matter may also help to explain why there appears to be a maximum size for central black holes of galaxies which appears to produce a corresponding maximum size for individual galaxies generally (galactic clusters have multiple distinct galaxies and some amount of other stuff in between).

I have references to published research or lay level articles describing published research on all of these points in previous posts at this blog tagged "dark matter", but will probably not manage to get links to those sources today.

For what it is worthy, my current subjective belief (and heck, I'm just a lawyer in Denver who was an undergraduate math major with a blog who reads way too many physics journal articles), is that there is no undiscovered dark matter particle or modification to gravity, even though the effects attributed to those causes undeniably exist and lots of data seem to fit each of these theories.  I personally think that instead of new fundamental physics:

(I) dark matter is some combination of dim baryonic matter that forms the regular patterns observed in the MOND equation because the process by which galaxies are formed, which highly constrains their structure on what amounts to a pretty much linear continum, and that ultra fast outflows play a critical part in this structure,

(II) neutrino condensates may also be critical to explaining the observed dark matter/MOND phenomena (and that the number of slow moving neutrinos may be dramatically underestimated; neutrino oscillation and weak force interactions may produce neutrinos that have exhausted sufficient kinetic energy to keep them at an equilibrium at the same energy scale as the cosmic background radiation), and

(III) the general relativistic corrections to Newtonian approximations of gravity, correctly calculated with more observationally accurate mass distributions than are known today for most of the universe, probably account for any remaining discrepencies.

Study Points To Place of Origin Of Y-DNA hg G

Y-DNA haplogroup G is notable because it is found at a much higher frequency in Neolithic ancient DNA than it is in most modern populations.  Where did it originate?

According to a new study:

We estimate that the geographic origin of hg G plausibly locates somewhere nearby eastern Anatolia, Armenia or western Iran. The general frequency pattern of hg G overall shows that the spread of hg G extends over an area from southern Europe to the Near/Middle East and the Caucasus, but then decreases rapidly toward southern and Central Asia. . . .

Concerning the presence of hg G in the Caucasus, one of its distinguishing features is lower haplogroup diversity in numerous populations compared with Anatolia and Armenia, implying that hg G is intrusive in the Caucasus rather than autochthonous.  

Another notable feature is its uneven distribution. Hg G is very frequent in NW Caucasus and South Caucasus, covering about 45% of the paternal lineages in both regions2 in this study. Conversely, hg G is present in Northeast Caucasus only at an average frequency of 5% (range 0–19%). Interestingly, the decrease of hg G frequency towards the eastern European populations inhabiting the area adjacent to NW Caucasus, such as southern Russians and Ukrainians, is very rapid and the borderline very sharp, indicating that gene flow from the Caucasus in the northern direction has been negligible.

The paper's methodology is generally reliable.  It traces the phylogenetic relationships of subhaplogroups of Y-DNA haplogroup G and then examines the geography of each with an eye towards analytically determining the kind of pattern of distribution that could produce that result.

Historians Make Ancient Roman GIS Highway Map

If the Romans had Michelin and personal digital assistants, they would have intended ORBIS, a handy highway map for ancient Rome complete with a feature that compares travel prices in denarii for passengers and freight along different route.  Your friendly neighborhood Latin Club member would love to receive one for Saturnalia.

Why Care That A Dead Language Was Discovered?

Last week, I posted at some length about a newly discovered ancient language, which may never have even been a written language for its native speakers at any time. Today, I want to step back for a moment to explain why this might be worth caring about.

There are lots of dead languages which we know exist but which we have no written text documenting, not even second hand documents like the Assyrian tablet with the women's names transliterated from this newly discovered ancient language.

If this language turns out to be, for example, a divergent dialect of the Hittite language previously spoken in that part of Anatolia for a while that had grown into its own language in the four hundred years since the collapse of the Hittite empire, it would still be a little bit interesting, but would really not add much to what we already known, especially since would only add some proper nouns to the existing lexicon in that family of languages.

This is a new language family we didn't know we were missing at the cradle of civilization long after writing was invented.

But, this find is so much more.  It is not just a newly discovered ancient language, but one that is a language isolate that isn't part of any known modern or ancient language family.  Indeed, while there is a good chance that this particular lost language is one that was attested to have existed historically, it appears to come from a language family that we didn't even know existed.  We had assumed that the attested languages mentioned in ancient historical accounts from around the 8th century BCE in this general region were all members of the West Semitic, Indo-European, Hurrian-Uratian, Caucasian, Elamite language families, or perhaps a relict community of Sumerian language speakers, or perhaps even Dravidian language family or Etrustcan language family members.  A none of the above conclusion for a language in the vicinity of a place where we have a longer historical record than anyplace else in the world is pretty remarkable.

The prevailing assumption was that Indo-European and West Semitic language family expansions had wiped out pretty much all language families other than the Elamite language and Caucasian languages in this region thousands of years earlier.  The fact that an entire unknown language family could have survived this long so close to areas where we have a historical record suggests that the process of language extinction as farming societies expanded may have taken place much later than conventional wisdom had suggested.

Many factors should have led us to expect an undiscovered language family in this region.

Of course, there is also, in hindsight, good reason to suspect that the Zargos mountains where this language family appears to have persisted, at least until the Assyrian king conquered them, could be an exception to the general trend.  Relict languages and populations tend to survive in places that are unsuitable for conventional horticulture - the Caucasus mountains, Nuba Mountain, the Kalahari desert, the arid American Southwest, the depth of the Congo and Amazon and Mesoamerican jungles, the Himalayas, the Andaman Islands, the Highlands of Papua New Guinea (which are mountains surrounded by jungles at lower elevations), the Australian Outback.

We know, in particular, that after the Sumerian empire discarded Sumerian in favor of the Semitic Akkadian language, that the non-Indo-European, non-Sumerian language speaking Kassites from the Zargos Mountains swept in when the Akkadian empire was laid low by a major drought and imposed their own language on the part of the Sumerian empire that they conquered, which had escaped extinction experienced by nearby lowland languages including Sumerian.

Linguistic and cultural regions also tend to line up with drainage basins, probably because pre-modern peoples migrated and traveled mostly along river basins that provided reliable access to fresh water and fish, and along coastlines.  Any pattern of exploration based upon those connections, however, omits endorheic basins that aren't connected to any oceans.

The eastern side of the Zargos Mountains marks a break between the Tigris-Euphrates River Valley and an endorheic basin (i.e. one that does not drain to an ocean) in Iran called the Zaytandeh river basin, which was home to an archaeological culture contemporaneous with that of the Sumerians and the Harappans, to the West and the East respectively.  We also know that the Zargos mountains were advanced enough to be home to trade partners of the Sumerians when their civilization was in existence, and the Mediterranean climate forest steppe that prevails in that basin before it becomes a desert could have provided a friendly enough region for a civilization self-sustaining enough to develop its own distinct language family to persist.

Implications for linguistic models

A strong confirmation of the existence of a previously undiscovered language family in this region significantly impacts how we go about modeling the course of linguistic prehistory. It suggests that large swaths of Iran previously assumed to have spoken Indo-Iranian languages may have not done so until the Medes and the Persians conquered that territory in the 6th century BCE, rather than the 15th century BCE or earlier when the Mittani were encountered by the Hittites. It also, by discounting the effectiveness of Bronze Age civilizations at wiping out pre-existing language families, at least in endorheic basins and refugia, suggests that the substrate language environment encounted by expanding Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, Bantu, Austronesian, Austroasiatic and other language families may have been more of a patchwork than Occam's razor driven assumptions would suggest. Such a patchwork of whole language families prior to the expansion of the main language families known today also suggests that local cultures may have been more persistent to greater time depths than previously supposed, at least prior to the Iron Age, and that post-Neolithic society may have been comprised of fairly modest sized, insular, culturally isolated polities to a greater extent than previously supposed, at least in some kinds of environments. For example, this find tends to support a supposition that any common ancestor of the various Caucuasian language families may have been quite ancient.

In contrast, this find tends to discredit theories of a common origin of living language families that simply fits the language families that survive today into a neat branching structure with few major branches pruned off in the historic era or late pre-historic era. Any distinctive element of a newly discovered language family (for example, phonemic features that might be implied by a list of names from women who spoke that language), has the potential to upset "grand unified theories" of language evolution by providing an additional, and ancient data point.

Finally, the evidence involved in this tablet may provide something close to being one of the most direct, first hand accounts, of the ultimate extinction of an entire language family at the tail end of the period where much of this pruning of linguistic diversity is believed to have taken place. It provides a much uglier story than the relatively peaceful ones by which the Akkadian language replaced Sumerian, and the Hittite language replaced the Hattic language, for example.

Physicist Bloggers Discuss Entanglement

Blogger and physicist Lubos Motl, discusses a recent preprint by physicists Roman Buniy and Steve Hsu (another blogger), on quantum entanglement, in which they ask not "why are things entangled", but why aren't things so entangled, given their common origins at the Big Bang, that it is impossible to distinguish quantum subsystems.

Motl, never one to mince words, argues that their implicit assumptions about what entanglement involves are deeply wrong, and hence that their paper is rubbish.

A discussion of the merits of the arguments of both expositions after a close reading takes more time than I have today. But, I will offer a few thoughts.

1. These are all intelligent people with PhDs in physics, who are also both talented at explaining physics ideas to the educated layman public, talking about very fundamental bread and butter quantum physics concepts, and reaching contradictory conclusions about how one should apply them in ways that have meaningfully different consequences. This doesn't happen in all areas of science. The fact that this happens at all, suggests that the debate of "interpretations" of quantum physics, is not, as often claimed, just semantics that doesn't mean anything to someone who really understands the physics at a professional level. Those intepretations (not just the standard ones with names, but the differing sets of rules for conceptionalizing and applying quantum physics concepts including entanglement), are meaningful discussions about non-equivalent rules of physics.

2. Another key point that the debate illustrates is that there is more to an equation than what ends up getting written down on a blackboard or in an academic paper. Equations are stylized summary of a set of relationships that routinely suppresses all sorts of assumptions from view from units, to applicable context, to a lot of other subtle interpretive and definitional issues. But, out of context and without the interpretive gloss that they are embedded in and arise from, they don't tell a coherent story.

3. Entanglement is a huge idea. Apart from it, quantum physics is understandable and useful, because every particle with a given set of quantum numbers behaves independent of its history in precisely the same way. No particle is an individual. Every particles is some subtype of one of fifteen kinds of particles, the fermions come in only about four variations each (plus momentum and location), and the bosons also have limited dimensions of variation (photons are identical except for frequency, polarization and direction; there are eight basic kinds of gluons, there are three basic kinds of weak force bosons). Entanglement contradicts that assumption. Particles with a common history of the right kind are not independent of each other. A particle with one history is not an interchangable part with a particle with a different history. Moreover, while usually entanglements from more or less random histories of isolated particles in the past with each other average out and disappear at a macrolevel, there are circumstances where they don't and render an assumption of statistical independence when evaluating the behavior of the particles later in time unsound, sometimes less obviously than other times.

4. Then again, without digging too far into the morass, one of the core issues that Motl identifies is the notion of entanglement as a subjective property that is observer dependent, rather than an objective and universal property. A particle may be entangled as to one observe who does not know a particular quantum property of the particle, but not to another one who has observed it. This is foundational and important.

New Ancient Language Discovered

Tushan and vicinity at the time that the tablet was written.  The Zargos Mountains would be to the right side of the illustration below the illustrated area.

Archaeologists have discovered evidence for a previously unknown ancient language – buried in the ruins of a 2800 year old Middle Eastern palace.

The discovery is important because it may help reveal the ethnic and cultural origins of some of history’s first ‘barbarians’ – mountain tribes which had, in previous millennia, preyed on the world’s first great civilizations, the cultures of early Mesopotamia in what is now Iraq.

Evidence of the long-lost language - probably spoken by a hitherto unknown people from the Zagros Mountains of western Iran. . . .

Typical names, born by the women – the evidence for the lost language – include Ushimanay, Alagahnia, Irsakinna and Bisoonoomay. 

From here. (source press release here).  

Around 2,150 B.C.E., the short lived Gutian dynasty of Sumer, founded by invaders from the Central Zargo Mountains seized power from the dynasty that established the Akkadian Empire.

About 3,400 years ago (1400 B.C.E.), the Northern Zargos Mountains and this site were both home to the Mittani Empire, whose leaders spoke a Sankrit derived Indo-Aryan language.  But, the Mittani Empire was long gone by 800 B.C.E.

Just to the North of the region of interest at the same time, the Uratu Kingdom was in existence in the Armenian Highlands.

The Sumerian language had ceased to be spoken in neighboring Mesopotamia, except as a liturgical language, about a thousand years earlier.  The Semitic Akkadian language would have been in decline in favor of the Semitic Aramaic language at around this time, and the adjacent lowlands would have been part of the Neo-Assyrian empire at the time.

Both this site and the possible place of origin of the women were in the area claimed by a stateless people called the Kurds in Western Iran, Northern Iraq and Southeastern Turkey (although these events took place about fourteen hundred years before the period of Kurdish ethnogenesis).

Akkadian was first attested in Sumerian texts in proper names from the late 29th century BC. From the second half of the third millennium BC (circa 2600-2500 BC), texts fully written in Akkadian begin to appear. Hundreds of thousands of texts and text fragments have been excavated to date; covering a vast textual tradition of mythological narrative, legal texts, scientific works, correspondence, political and military events, and many other examples. By the second millennium BC, two variant forms of the language were in use in Assyria and Babylonia (known as Assyrian and Babylonian respectively).  Akkadian had been for centuries the lingua franca in Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near East. However, it began to decline around the 8th century BC, being marginalized by Aramaic during the Neo Assyrian Empire.

This is also around the time that the Jewish state begins to emerge in the Levant and that the Hebrew language starts to become a distinct Semitic language.

This find would have been from about 400 years after Bronze Age collapse (and hence also post-Hittite), about three hunded years before the classical Greek "Golden Age," and around the legendary date attributed to the founding the City of Rome by Romulus.  Etruscan would have been spoken in Tuscany at the time.

From at least ca. 1,500 B.C.E., Indo-Iranian languages (most prominently Persian) and (after Alexander the Great ca. 550 BCE, Greek) were spoken in parts of Iran.  Afro-Asiatic languages, other than some relatively short lived incursions of Akkadian, weren't believed to be present in the Zargos Mountains until the advent of Islam ca. 700-800 C.E. in this area.

Turkish and Monoglian expansions didn't reach anywhere close to this area until a millenium or two after this find.  The earliest Dravidian writings are attested around this time, but no Dravidan language has ever been attested anywhere West of Pakistan.

Elam is shown in red, with its neighbors a couple hundred years after the time of the tablet.  The Persian Gulf is darkened blue where it was probably an above water delta area at the time.

One of the last attested West Eurasian non-Indo-European language was spoken in the Elamite Empire (2800 BCE to 550 BCE) in present day Iran (with proto-Elamite writings a few hundred years earlier), and according to Wikipedia: "Elamite is regarded as a language isolate and has no close relation to the neighboring Semitic languages, to the Indo-European languages, or to Sumerian, even though it adopted the Sumerian syllabic script." (I personally suspect some distant relationship between Elamite and the Sumerian, Hattic, Hurrian and Minoan languages.)  These names aren't an obvious fit to any of these.

The best guess for the source of the people speaking the newly discovered language would be between Elam and the Neo-Assyrian empire.  The Medes and Persians came onto the scene after the tablet was written.

Background on the author's work at this site can be found here: "He has also been working for over a decade at the site of Ziyaret Tepe in southeastern Turkey, now identified as the Neo-Assyrian provincial capital of Tushan, where he is both project epigrapher and directs excavations in the lower town." The dig also has its own blog. According to the Wikipedia article on the Zargos Mountains:

During early ancient times, the Zagros was the home of peoples such as the Kassites, Guti, Assyrians, Elamites and Mitanni, who periodically invaded the Sumerian and/or Akkadian cities of Mesopotamia. The mountains create a geographic barrier between the flatlands of Mesopotamia, which is in Iraq, and the Iranian plateau. A small archive of clay tablets detailing the complex interactions of these groups in the early second millennium BC has been found at Tell Shemshara along the Little Zab. [Eidem, Jesper; Læssøe, Jørgen (2001), The Shemshara archives 1. The letters, Historisk-Filosofiske Skrifter, 23, Copenhagen: Kongelige Danske videnskabernes selskab, ISBN 87-7876-245-6.] Tell Bazmusian, near Shemshara, was occupied between the sixth millennium BCE and the ninth century CE, although not continuously.

Another story with more detail is here:

‘It is a list of women, written in Assyrian cuneiform, yet most of the names are not Assyrian,’ he told CWA. ‘One is Hittite, one Hurrian, but most do not belong to any known language. Could these women be either descendants of the indigenous (Shubrian) pre-Assyrian population, or deportees brought in by the Assyrian government? As Shubrian is thought to be a dialect of Hurrian, the latter explanation seems more likely. A current theory is that these women were most likely speakers of a non-Indo-Iranian language, deported from the Zagros in western Iran.’ . . . The new research, published in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies, reports that all the common languages of the Assyrian Empire – as well as others spoken at the time such as Egyptian, Elamite, Urartian and West Semitic – have been ruled out. . . . the names could be Shubrian – a language which until now was believed never to have been written down. Another option is the language of the Mushki, a people who were migrating to Eastern Anatolia at the time the tablet was made – though this is described as ‘less plausible’.

Dr MacGinnis suggests that the language was spoken by people from elsewhere in the Assyrian Empire who had been forcibly relocated by the ruling powers. This was a popular tactic by Assyrian kings, as it helped to break the control of local elites. ‘If people were deported to a new location, they were entirely dependent on the Assyrian administration for their wellbeing,’ he said. One possibility for the origin of these people is the Zagros Mountains, an area known to have been annexed by the Assyrians but for which no language has yet been identified. Tantalisingly, one Assyrian king, Esarhaddon, refers to an as-yet unidentified language, Mekhranian, which he links to the Zagros. ‘If correct, this suggests that Iran was home to previously unknown languages,’ Dr MacGinnis said. ‘The immediate impression is that the names on this tablet were those of women who belonged to an isolated community. It may be, however, that there were others whom we still have to find out about.’

A prior story on the site (which is scheduled to be flooded in the near future by a major new dam), provides historical context specific to that location.

The Early Iron Age – roughly the end of the 13th century BC to the 10th century BC – takes its name from a new metal, heralding a new stage of technological progress, which coincides with a tumultuous shift in the established world order that sent shock waves through the region. Many important states and big cities that had existed throughout the Late Bronze Age were now either destroyed or abandoned, with even superpowers such as Assyria and Egypt contracting and becoming weaker.

From the 13th century BC, the Uruatri and Nairi tribes in Northern Syria and Eastern Anatolia, including the Upper Tigris region, began to threaten the northern frontiers of Assyria. By the 11th century BC, a tribe called the Mushki was migrating through the Taurus mountains to the south. At much the same time, Semitic-speaking Aramean tribes began to migrate from their Syrian homelands into south-eastern Anatolia and Assyria.

This is the most active time for this region with almost half the sites excavated in the Ilısu Dam area yielding remains from this period. At Ziyaret Tepe, these levels consist of pits full of ashes, pieces of handmade ‘grooved’ pottery (so-called because of the distinctive grooves between the rim and the shoulder of the bowls) and cremation burials. This type of pottery was widespread in the upper Tigris area, particularly the western part, and is found at Hakemi Use, Hirbemerdon, Kuriki Höyük, Kenan Tepe, and Salat Tepe. Storage jars and grinding stones bear witness to village settlements. Even after the Neo-Assyrian conquest of the upper Tigris region in 10th century BC, the influence of the indigenous culture thrived, and the evidence is that some semi-nomadic people from the Early Iron Age survived and lived under the rule of the Neo-Assyrian state as settled villagers.

Now came one of the high-water marks in the imperial history of the area, the resurgence of the Assyrian empire. Opportunistic campaigning by the king Tukulti-Ninurta II (891-883 BC) was followed by a coordinated policy on the part of his son, Ashurnasirpal II (882-859 BC). Abandoned cities were reoccupied and rebuilt, with the Tigris itself now serving as the northern border of Assyrian territory, and the region formed part of the empire for the next 270 years.

The site of Ziyaret Tepe came into its own on the back of this (see CWA 37). Re-established as the capital of a province, it became a city of great power and prosperity. Consequently, investigation of this site was considered a top priority. Fieldwork commenced by Timothy Matney of the University of Akron Ohio in 1997 has continued every year since then, and excavation has revealed exceptional results: the palace of the governor, a major administrative complex, a monumental city gate and both elite residences, and the dwellings of common soldiers.

The Assyrians are known to have buried their dead beneath the floors of their houses, and we find evidence for both rich and poor: the graves of soldiers buried in the chambers of the gates where they stood watch; and the graves of the ruling class, in this case primary cremations, cut into the courtyard of the palace on the high mound, and containing spectacular artefacts – bronze vessels, palace ware beakers, stone bowls, worked ivory, and seals. Many finds have been sensational but equally intriguing is the discovery of an archive of cuneiform texts dating to just before and just after the fall of Nineveh in 612 BC. Another tablet hints at the existence of a language hitherto unknown.

But Ziyaret Tepe is not the only Assyrian site in the region, indeed far from it. The Assyrians populated the region, once pacified, with deportees from other parts of the empire. Plentiful evidence, backed up by historical texts, bears witness to their farmsteads dotting the countryside: at Kavuşan, Hakemi Use, Boztepe, and Müslüman Tepe.

At the end of the 7th century BC, the Assyrian empire was overthrown by a coalition of the Babylonians and the Medes who divided up the spoils between them. It is unclear which side seized the upper Tigris region, as historical sources are vague.

Archaeologically, a major problem is the difficulty in identifying diagnostic ceramic types for the period, so surface surveys are not yet able to reliably map the settlement patterns for post-Assyrian occupation. The situation is little better for the Achaemenid period that followed. No major Achaemenid sites have been found, although the occasional discovery, like the Achaemenid graves at Ziyaret Tepe and Aşağı Salat with their characteristic omphalos bowls that probably belonged to soldiers, is a sign of their presence. The area must have been under the at least nominal control of a Persian satrap, but which one? This may be one of the secrets the Ilısu Dam takes to its watery grave.

South-eastern Turkey has been a crossroads and crucible of civilisations since prehistoric times. From the 3rd millennium BC, it was populated by speakers of Hurrian, a language related to just one other: Urartian. In the 2nd millennium the Hittite and Mittani empires held sway, followed a millennium later by the Assyrians. At this time, the Arameans rose to prominence, and then the Scythians and Phrygians. Achaemenid rule with Persian influences followed, before Alexander passed through on his campaigns, with Hellenisation following in his wake. Here, too, was the eastern frontier of the Roman Empire. More recently, Armenians, Kurds, Turks, Arabs and (modern) Assyrians have all played their part.

The author behind this find also reviewed a book on Neo-Babylonian court procedure based on ancient legal texts, and translated a tablet with the dying plea of the last ruler of this city before it was sacked.

Cats And Farming Present In Cyprus 10,600 BP

Cyprus appears to have participated in the Neolithic revolution almost two thousand years before second Neolithic appearances in Egypt, the Indus River Valley, the Balkans, the Danubian basin, and Southern Europe.  The first evidence of cats as pets is often ascribed to Egypt, but Cyprus had them much sooner.

Parallel Human Evolution

More than one mutation that evolves independently can have the same phenotypic consequence. For example, there are at least three separate mutations that confer the ability to drink cow's milk as an adult without ill effect (called lactase persistance), with frequencies that vary from region to region in the world.

More recently, a study quite clearly summarized at Maju's blog has shown that there is more than one mutation that can produce blonde hair.

[T]he gene causing blond hair among Melanesians (and some relatives like Fijians) is not the same as those involved in blond hair in Europe. Mind you that it is not clear yet which are these European genes of blondism but it is clear that the Melanesian allele is not it[.]

In the case of lactase persistance, there is a clear selective advantage to having the mutation, so it isn't surprising that multiple independent mutations that confer the phenotype would emerge.

Another less obvious example of what appears to be multiple, independent genetic causes for the same phenotype which apperas to have been driven by some sort of selective advantage is the set of mutations that lead to short stature in Pygmies and other Asian populations sometimes called Negritos. Rather than having deep origins the pre-date the Out of Africa era shared genetic histories of these populations, it appears that short stature is a relatively recent (i.e. Holocene era) adaptation to life in a marginalized hunter-gatherer population.

In the fairly simple examples mentioned above, only a handful of genes are at work. But, in the case of broad phenotypes like mental retardation, autism, or genetic predispositions to schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, the number of separate mutations that are expressed in ways that are currently indistinguishable in clinical diagnosis are probably in the hundreds or more each, with no single mutation playing a dominant role in any of these conditions at the level of specificity with which they are diagnosed today.

The Limits Of Current Genome Databases

Also instructive is the fact that no gene causing blond hair in Melanesians was present in any of the thousand genomes database individuals. The database can be very helpful in catching the lion's share of genetic variation for traits that are found a more than trivial frequency in large global populations, but rare traits in small populations can still easily be absent in the current set of published human genomes, even though each individual's genome provides hundreds of thousands of datapoints each.

Rich data on each individual in the sample may be useful for efforts to locate the ancestral origins of individuals in relation to each other with considerable precision despite having only a thousand or two individuals (and much smaller subsets for given geographic regions).  But, they don't capture the long tail of genetic diversity in modern humans.

MtDNA J and T Are Pre-Neolithic In Europe, Or Not

Some proposals on the mtDNA makeup of populations who arrived in the late glacial recolonization of Europe are contained in a recent new paper along with the evidence that the authors argue supports their claims. As the abstract explains:

Human populations, along with those of many other species, are thought to have contracted into a number of refuge areas at the height of the last Ice Age. European populations are believed to be, to a large extent, the descendants of the inhabitants of these refugia, and some extant mtDNA lineages can be traced to refugia in Franco-Cantabria (haplogroups H1, H3, V, and U5b1), the Italian Peninsula (U5b3), and the East European Plain (U4 and U5a). Parts of the Near East, such as the Levant, were also continuously inhabited throughout the Last Glacial Maximum, but unlike western and eastern Europe, no archaeological or genetic evidence for Late Glacial expansions into Europe from the Near East has hitherto been discovered.

Here we report, on the basis of an enlarged whole-genome mitochondrial database, that a substantial, perhaps predominant, signal from mitochondrial haplogroups J and T, previously thought to have spread primarily from the Near East into Europe with the Neolithic population, may in fact reflect dispersals during the Late Glacial period, ∼19–12 thousand years (ka) ago.

The claim that "European populations are believed to be, to a large extent, the descendants of the inhabitants of these refugia" is not, in fact, a consensus belief of population geneticists. Indeed, the genetic evidence accumulated in the last decade or so has fairly decisively shifted the weight of the evidence against that belief and in favor of the value that European population genetics probably owe more to migration after the late glacial recolonization of Europe than they do to the populations in the several European refugia at that time. At the very least, there is not a consensus on the issue, with estimates of the pre-Neolithic contribution to modern European mtDNA ranging from 20% to 80%, without a whole lot of middle ground.

The ancient DNA makes a very solid case that U4 and U5 were present in Europe prior to the Neolithic revolution, and a recent ancient DNA find from Southwest Europe has also cemented the case that there were at least some people with mtDNA haplogroup H in Iberia prior to the Neolithic revolution.

The populations where mtDNA haplogroup V is found (Berber, Basque, and Saami), and its near absence in many other European populations, likewise supports a hypothesis that this distribution may be the product of a martime migration of a population that did not engage in farming (although not necessarily before any population in Europe had adopted farming). It also isn't at all obvious to me that the currently extant lineages of mtDNA haplogroup V originated in Iberia and then migrated to North Africa, rather than originating in North Africa (probably in the Epipaleolithic) and migrating to Europe via the Strait of Gibralter (quite possibly quite a bit later).

For what it's worth, I think that the case that mtDNA haplogroups J and T probably do originate in the Near East (and perhaps Anatolia, Western Iran and the Caucasus Mountains, if they aren't included in your definition of the Near East) is quite strong, based upon their distributions and diversity.

But, I'm not at all convinced that the evidence is strong enough one way or the other to distinguish between Epipaleolithic and early Neolithic migrations.

Mutation rate dating is not precise enough to distinguish the two reliably. Dienekes notes that recent papers on the ages of different mtDNA haplogroups do not produce consistent sets of ages. And, mutation rate dates simply can't tell you where the mutation arose, only where descendants of people with that mutation started to expand.

The ancient mtDNA evidence isn't there to make the case very convincingly either. The distributions of the two haplogroups are also not sufficiently similar that I can even be comfortable that they are part of the same migration era from the same general region. Finally, I am particularly skeptical, in general, of any attempt to advance a hypothesis that has no archaeological support whatsoever, in addition to having no prior support from genetic evidence.

There doesn't seem to be any strong positive evidence that definitively rules out an Epipaleolithic entry of J and T into Europe. But, the case for this hypothesis is very thin, and there are alternatives that appear to be at least as likely, if not more likely, as a means of explaining the distribution of these mtDNA haplogroups. For example, the case that a fairly significant share of mtDNA J and T in Europe has a source in early Indo-European expansion in Europe, in migrations during the reign of the Roman Empire, and in the wanderings of the Jewish diaspora, and that much of the rest made it into Europe during the early Neolithic Linear Pottery (LBK) expansion and Cardial Pottery expansion, appears at least as plausible as the late glacial migration proposal made in this paper.

In my humble opinion, the field would be better off acknowledging what it doesn't know, recognizing the inherent limitations of inferences drawn from modern mtDNA distributions, and re-examining the archaeological evidence with the points that have been firmly established in mind.

300 Posts

This is the 300th post at Dispatches From Turtle Island, which has been in place since May 22, 2011, a little less than one year. This is about a third of the combined number of posts at Wash Park Prophet, from which this blog is a spin off, and this blog.

So far, most posts on this blog have fit pretty neatly into two main catagories: pre-history and ancient history with a major focus on human evolution, genetic and linguistic evidence on one hand, and modern physics on the other hand. Just over half of the posts (166) are on physics. These are areas where some of the most interesting developments in scientific discovery are taking place.

I'd initially considered including neuroscience and mental health posts in this blog, but these subjects are so deeply tied to matter of immediate policy importance that I've diverted them to Wash Park Prophet instead. Today I moved the Neuroskeptic blog link from this blog to that blog to reflect this reality. Technology coverage, and in particular, Internet and defense technology, have also tended to end up at Wash Park Prophet for the same reason - they are too deeply intertwined with policy issues.

Physicists On LHC Physics

Matt Strassler has links to a panel discussion on upcoming Large Hadron Collider Physics by some of the big names in the field together with a glossary of key terms and ideas. Peter Woit provides anti-string theory/anti-SUSY commentary (with solid support from the talks) at his own blog. The bottom line, so far, from the LHC has been that there have been no Beyond the Standard Model discoveries (the Higgs boson was the last unobserved part of the Standard Model), despite a wealth of data at record high energy levels. The LHC has years to go, of course, but so far the experiment is doing a much better job at ruling out beyond the Standard Model theories that have accumulated over the last several decades than it has at supporting any of them. The possibility that this will continue to be the case for the rest of the life of the LHC looms large over the physics community.

Early Native Americans Co-Existed With Megafauna

Improved dating technologies confirm the widely expected finding that early Native Americans co-existed with megafauna.

Key Gene Associated With Hominin Leap ID'd

What is it that makes humans different from other extant primates?

A new study points the finger at a small number of genes associated with brain development which are also have some connections to common developmental disorders and mental health conditions, and in particular to a gene called SRGAP2 which is one of the several dozen genes that seem to be most plausible candidates for genes that distinguish hominins from other great apes.

[L]oss of SRGAP2 function accelerates neurons' migration in the developing brain, potentially helping them reach their final destination more efficiently. Moreover, neurons that have decreased SRGAP2 function, due to expression of the human-specific SRGAP2 display more knob-like extensions or spines on their surfaces, making the neurons appear much more like those found in the human brain. These spines enable connections between neurons to form.

The authors of the study think the effect of this mutation would have been dramatic as soon as it emerged.  "If this gene duplication did indeed produce an immediate effect during evolution . . . there must have been a fascinating period in human history characterized by "huge variation" in human cognition and behavior." 

Bell Beaker Ancient R1b Y-DNA

I've hypothesized in a previous post that Y-DNA R1b may have a Bell Beaker culture source in Western Europe. New ancient DNA data showing two Bell Beaker men with Y-DNA haplogroup R1b support that conjecture, although the sample size is too small to be definitive. These are the oldest European Y-DNA R1b samples of which I am aware and were found in Germany.

Update (May 4, 2012): Maju's post on the study notes that R1b is a contrast with early Neolithic ancient DNA from the vicinity of this find stating that "we do know that some local precursors were of other patrilineages: F*, G2a3 (local Danubian) and R1a1 (from Eulau, right across the Elbe)." 

Maju also expressed some skepticism about the identification of the remains which are near an interference between the Bell Beaker "phenomena" and the Corded Ware culture the flourished in Europe to the east of the Bell Beaker area (the dates would be consistent with either), on the grounds that the grave goods found with these remains don't seem to be a great fit to the prototypical Bell Beaker grave good package.

For approximately a thousand years sometime around the second or third millenium B.C.E., almost all of Europe was divided between these two cultures who had an ongoing hot and cold armed stalemate, with the Bell Beaker associated peoples generally on the West and the Corded Ware peoples generally one the East.  Eventually, the civilizations on the Bell Beaker side of the divide lost. 


My hypothesis is basically that the Basque people and language, and the Vasconic substrate evidenced in typonymns in much of the historically Bell Beaker parts of Europe may be the most direct linguistic legacies of the Bell Beaker people, which is otherwise more Indo-European in origin, although their population genetic legacy may have been more persistent and widespread than their linguistic legacy.

The Latest Y-DNA Phylogeny

A new methodology has produced the latest Y-DNA phylogeny for modern humans.  As Dienekes explains, the gist of the difference is that a much more complete and hence stable and robust set of data about Y-DNA haplogroups is used to make mutation rate based age estimates for Y-DNA haplogroups while 1000 genomes data from 526 individuals (only men have Y-DNA, so only about half of the 1000 genomes can be used to look at Y-DNA).

Particularly notable is the fact that the first back of napkin estimates made using this method has Y-DNA haplogroup A (associated mostly with Paleoafrican relict populations) splitting from the rest of the modern human Y-DNA tree at about the same time as the mtDNA tree starts to split (about 140,000 years ago) and about 85,000 years before the rest of the modern human Y-DNA tree starts to split up (starting about 55,000 years ago).  In contrast, Y-DNA haplogroup B splits off less than five thousand or so years before DE and CF break off into distinct phylogenetic branches.  All of the absolute dates are subject to uncertainties in a handful of parameters like an assumed constant mutation rate, and an assumed generation length, that haven't been very precisely calibrated.

I'm a bit skeptical of also skeptical of the big conclusions reached in this first stab at an absolutely dated age based on SNP mutations because the data set contains only one Y-DNA haplotype A and only two Y-DNA haplotype B individuals.  Even with the very rich data provided by more than eighteen thousand SNP data points per individual in the 1000 genomes data, small sample sizes always leave a certain amount of room for doubt, and a fluke individual can distort the data. 

It is also worth recalling that Y-DNA is subject to pretty powerful selective pressure and that mutation rate dating in Y-DNA has already experienced one bout of being cast deeply into doubt already for a variety of reasons, some of which, like differential mutation rates between STR loci, have the potential to be relevant in SNP dating as well, even if the new measure should theoretically be more robust.

And, as I understand the matter, not all of the Y-DNA chromosome is non-recombining.  It isn't clear to me if this data includes exclusively non-recombining parts of the Y-DNA chromosome.  Particularly in the case of Paleoafricans where there have been some hints of cryptic admixture with one or more unknown archaic hominins, a purely tree like phylogenetic mutation rate dating approach may be inappropriate to the extent that the Y-DNA data contains recombining parts of the Y-DNA chromosome.  This is less of a concern with non-African, non-Melanesian individuals, since Neanderthal admixture is roughly identical and at a fixation level within this population.

It is reassuring, however, that the tree produced with this independent SNP phylogeny is almost precisely the same in how it classified individuals into particular branches of the tree as the old method.