Peggy Mohan’s Wanderers, Kings, Merchants is a strange book for a reader of this weblog. The author is really fixated on retroflex consonants, but she’s also aware of the latest archaeogenetic work. It’s a pretty academic work, and if you aren’t interested in questions like how Sanskrit evolved along with early Dravidian languages, it’s not for you, but I think Mohan’s book illustrates a possible future for synthetic interdisciplinary research. I’d like to see more of this.
Defund the Police Meets the Crime Wave. Crime is coming close to my friend’s Leighton Woodhouse’s life (he lives in Oakland). It looks like the Democrats really want the Republicans to win again on “tough on crime.” This shit is not sustainable.
There is now a TV series based on The Wheel of Time. I haven’t read these books since I was a literal teenager, and I do not personally feel the source material is rich enough to really produce anything comparable to Game of Thrones. Obscure fact: this series is set in our far future, in a post-apocalyptic world.
The Man in the Lineup – Alice Sebold’s best-selling account of her own rape was headed for the big screen. Then the film’s unlikely producer started asking questions. The author of The Lovely Bones isn’t going to live this down.
Charles C Mann recently appear ed on the UL podcast. We talked for nearly an hour and a half; there is a lot to talk about. Please rate the podcast on Apple or Stitcher. One thing Charles mentioned to me privately is that it was fun to talk to me because I’d read his books and actually knew his writing. That struck me as funny, but it’s not like I’m Terry Gross, I don’t just talk to anyone. Usually, I am interested in talking to the person for a reason.
Thanksgiving squabbles are a feature, not a bug – How eternally unsettled debates are the lifeblood of the republic. This is on my Substack.
Dark Horse out of the Steppe – Fishing the Sintashta, Scythians and Sarmatians out of obscurity.
So for the retroflex consonant issue – we have to remember that the Vedas are preserved in recessions based on a final codification somewhere around the 7th century BCE.
There’s some debate in the Aitreya on when retroflexion occurs, or even if it should be done, indicating that this was still not accepted phonology.
When we look at the geography of the Vedic and early Janapada period, it basically follows a line from Punjab to Bengal, with little reference to the lower Sindh, Gujarat, or Thar region.
I’m therefore increasingly skeptical of a Dravidian substratum in Vedic and Earlyb Indo Aryan, and think that it was interaction with another language. If it were Dravidian, you’d see the loss of certain voiced and aspirated consonants, as is seen in Sinhalese.
the weirdest thing re retroflex is andamanese have it. burusho has it. mohan doesn’t think it’s diagnostic of dravidian but something deeper. wtf!?!?!
I recall that Terry Brooks’ “Shannara” series was set in the post-apocalyptic future, and a less popular contemporary-set series was supposed to bridge some of the gap, but I guess I didn’t read enough Wheel of Time books to pick up on that aspect.
I was not able to get Mann to respond when I commented on that Substack post, but he replied to someone who replied to me on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/CharlesCMann/status/1469682856976961538
If both Burosho and Andamanese have retroflex, then it most likely originated from AASI language, no? This would also mean the Dravidian is not an AASI language.
It is time to declare victory and bring our troops back home.
“Middlebury College goes remote, cancels in-person events due to rise in COVID-19 cases” By Andrew Brinker and Associated Press | December 10, 2021
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/12/10/nation/middlebury-college-goes-remote-cancels-in-person-events-due-rise-covid-19-cases/
Middlebury College has shifted to remote instruction and postponed in-person events for the rest of the semester because of a rise in COVID-19 cases on campus.
The small liberal arts school in Vermont said Thursday evening that 34 new cases have been confirmed on campus, bringing the total number to 49 active student cases and one employee case. Those numbers were updated Friday afternoon to include three more positive tests, bringing the total of active cases on campus to 53.
* * *
More than 99 percent of students are fully vaccinated against COVID-19 and many have already received booster doses, Ray said.
* * *
The total student population at Middlebury is 2,937.
“India’s population will start to shrink sooner than expected: For the first time, Indian fertility has fallen below replacement level” Dec 2nd 2021
WHEN SOMETHING happens earlier than expected, Indians say it has been “preponed”. On November 24th India’s health ministry revealed that a resolution to one of its oldest and greatest preoccupations will indeed be preponed. Some years ahead of UN predictions, and its own government targets, India’s total fertility rate—the average number of children that an Indian woman can expect to bear in her lifetime—has fallen below 2.1, which is to say below the “replacement” level at which births balance deaths. In fact it dropped to just 2.0 overall, and to 1.6 in India’s cities, says the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5) … That is a 10% drop from the previous survey, just five years ago.
The number of Indians will still grow, because many young women have yet to reach child-bearing age. But lower fertility means the population will peak sooner and at a lower figure: not in 40 years at more than 1.7bn, as was widely predicted, but probably a decade earlier, at perhaps 1.6bn.India’s government has sought a lower fertility rate for decades. At independence in 1947 it was close to 6. …
It took 25 years for the fertility rate to fall to 5. …
The southern state of Kerala was the first to see fertility fall below replacement level, in the 1990s. One by one, other states have followed. Out of India’s 36 states and “union territories”, 29 now have rates of 1.9 or less. In poor and largely rural Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, the rate stands at 2.4 and 3 respectively. But it is falling faster in those places than in the country as a whole. …
I remember Jordan’s phrase for it was “They inspire our myths and we inspire theirs” (time is a circle). There’s also hints that the Age before the Third Age of the books followed our Age, and that the magic showing up was the point where the Age changed.
I really like the TV series so far. I enjoyed the books, but they kind of got lost in the weeds and made a bunch of unfortunate plot choices that damaged a whole bunch of the later novels. The show can’t have a main character sit off-screen brooding for three seasons, so I bet the whole thing is going to be a lot tighter and more concise.
Probably the same causes as everywhere, too. Much lower early childhood mortality, reliable contraception, and delayed childbirth with education. Probably the first two more than anything – the incentives change a bit when you know all your kids are probably going to survive to adulthood. Even the places that still have really strong patriarchal limitations on women’s options and mobility have drastically falling birth rates.
Re; Sebold, is it really her fault? Memory is an unreliable thing, and people tend to draw to many patterns and inferences between unrelated things in their lives, to think they’ve intersected with people on their life path for special and mystical reasons, to overread into the complexity of communities far larger than the human past ever maintained the coincidences that were present in small bands. Simply human nature. It’s a failure of the justice system to not challenge her and to believe her and try to evidence her confused judgment?
But how many more such occurances like this will the “Believe women” slogan have created in the last 10 years that it has been a popular slogan? And presumably, at least somewhat influenced behaviour? If cops just “Believing the woman” was a problem here, taking a presumption that she “had no reason to lie” and that was sufficient evidence, then either that idea was originally wrong… or there’s some weird “Oh, we still believe that, but not if the rapist was Black, and in that case we should have higher standards of proof” thing. Either are a further sign of a descent into flip-flopping intellectual clownery and faddism, but particularly the latter.
(These ideas really did of course exist and were proposed – https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2014/10/does-liberalism-have-an-answer-to-campus-rape.html – Jonathan Chait, reporting an article by Ezra Klein: “Unlike his colleagues, Klein does not wave away the possibility that California’s law might encounter operational snags if students fail to change their sexual practices to comport with the state’s stringent standards. Instead, he acknowledges the downsides but accepts them as “a necessarily extreme solution to an extreme problem.” He concedes that it will result in more innocent people being prosecuted by universities as rapists, and that the miscarriages of justice it yields are not merely an acceptable price, but actually a positive result“ … and Klein’s own words: “To work, “Yes Means Yes” needs to create a world where men are afraid. … Critics worry that colleges will fill with cases in which campus boards convict young men (and, occasionally, young women) of sexual assault for genuinely ambiguous situations. Sadly, that’s necessary for the law’s success. “.
I wonder if Klein would, today, take the stance that it was good for Broadwater to be convicted in this case, because it contributed positively to a climate of fear and anti-rape culture, which wouldn’t have been the case if no attacker had ever been “found”? After all, what could be more influential at raising awareness of violence against women and girls beyond Sebold’s memoir, and the “The Lovely Bones”? Probably not and he’d simply glide the other way under the prevailing political currents.)
Looking through the ENA for upcoming abstracts from upcoming adna papers:
“The genetic identity of the earliest human-made hybrid animals, the kungas of Syro-Mesopotamia” – https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/browser/view/PRJEB47929?show=reads
“Before the introduction of horses in Mesopotamia in the late third millennium BCE, contemporary cuneiform tablets and seals document intentional breeding of highly valued equids called kungas, for use in diplomacy, ceremony and warfare. Their precise zoological classification, however, has never been conclusively determined. Morphometric analysis of equids uncovered in rich Early Bronze Age burials at Umm el-Marra, Syria, placed them beyond the ranges reported for other known equid species.
We sequenced the genomes of one of these ~5,000-year-old equids, together with an 11,000-year-old Syrian wild ass (hemippe) from Göbekli Tepe and two of the last surviving hemippes. We conclude that kungas were F1 hybrids between female domestic donkeys and male hemippe, thus documenting the earliest evidence of hybrid animal breeding.”
Kungas, the equids favoured by the Mesopotamians at around 3000 BCE (contemporaneous with earliest CWC) weren’t onagers, but donkey-onager hybrids (as has sometimes been proposed, e.g. https://www.persee.fr/doc/mom_1955-4982_2008_act_49_1_2721).
(https://spiritedhorse.wordpress.com/tag/kunga/ – picture of kunga drawing Mesopotamian battle-wagons).
“I do not personally feel the source material is rich enough to really produce anything comparable to Game of Thrones.”
The best is the enemy of the good.
Also, Jordan’s early death in 2007, along with post-mortem series completions by the estates of Frank Herbert and J.R.R. Tolkien, are suggestive of how Game of Thrones is likely to be ultimately finished in book form. Jordan’s efforts to conclude the Wheel of Time series once he knew his days were few in number is particularly relevant (it took three long volumes to get down what he had conceived of as his final volume of Wheel of Time).
Jordan’s personal life, by the way, is also fascinating. Particularly for conservatives who like science fiction, his work illustrates how an atypical background as a helicopter gunner and then as military oriented nuclear engineer before becoming a writer, could inform one’s fictional works. He was also quite public about the writing process and his role as the primary writer of the Conan the Barbarian books.
“Dark Horse out of the Steppe – Fishing the Sintashta, Scythians and Sarmatians out of obscurity.”
Re the map at the top of the page, I’m not convinced that depicting Bell Beaker as a direct offshoot of Corded Ware makes sense, even though they are roughly contemporaneous, parallel, and share significant overlap in having autosomal steppe ancestry.
The sharp segregation of Y-DNA haplogroups between them, and some of the differences in material culture (e.g. archery playing more prominent role in Bell Beaker, while horses seem to be more prominent in Corded Ware) makes it feel more like they were competing expansionist movements, a bit like the European great powers fighting to carve up the rest of the world into colonial empires in the early modern period. I would be surprised if the Corded Ware and Bell Beaker languages were the same (or even mutually intelligible), and while the founding populations of each were probably aware of each other, I doubt that they were the same.
Also, the story of how a Southern Iberian cultural movement without people with steppe ancestry got adopted by the people who became the European Bell Beaker people would be a fascinating one.
I also think 1500 BCE for the earliest Indo-Aryans is probably too late by a few hundred years, based on some very early archaeological evidence for an earlier date.
Someone should do a Conan tv/streaming series that is faithful to the books.
@ohwilleke, the case that BB with R1b-M269 and later R1a-Z93 CW branched from the same early CW which was more diverse in y-dna seems strengthen by “Dynamic changes in genomic and social structures in third millennium BCE central Europe”.
It could be that there was an earlier branch of these two which we haven’t detected and actually both were diverse in y DNA with thinning of y-dna diversity later, but separately. The case for that isn’t precluded, but seems weaker.
There are some findings that indicate that post-Beaker Iberian_BA samples and Lech Valley Beaker culture in Germany both had balanced autosomal and X steppe contribution, so I wonder if the solution, and perhaps BB origins are found in some offshoot that mixed intensely in a male biased way with EEF, then as intensely male biased again with female steppe migrants to Europe. Which would explain R1b-M269, but absence of X:A bias. But then a more complicated model might be needed, because that would predict steppe mtdna, which is not seen…
Re; early IA, trying to find earliest migrants is v complex. We can easily say that as late as I think 1100-900 BCE, the people we find at LBA sites in Turan in Narasimhan’s paper have no detectable steppe ancestry or y DNA. But whether people were about in that region in the same way as early CWC were about in Europe, hard to say. Mittani evidence indicates it is possible, and they were not preponderant or frequent.
While awaiting Nick Patterson’s big paper, podcast about ancient dna in Britain from Late Neolithic to later periods, featuring Brace, one of authors:
https://play.acast.com/s/the-ancients/stonehenge-thebronzeage
Talked about one of the Boscombe Bowmen from the early Beaker samples, who was particularly EEF rich having enough Neolithic ancestry that they think father was from an entirely Neolithic community… though if it’s the same sample from Boscombe Bowmen, I2416 from Olalde’s previous paper, who seems to be the very EEF rich sample, that seems wrong since he’s R1b1a1b1a1. So either that’s a bit of a slip up, or they have another sample. Maybe more likely to be a slip up.
Talks a little about how the LBA event of increase in Neolithic related ancestry, from France.
Brace talks about quite a lot of clustering of relatedness around Stonehenge sites (12/21 relatives) and at Amesbury Down (8/11). Surprised it was that high, didn’t remember that from Olalde’s paper, or really them talking about it at all. It seems like the burials were either quite the small community or quite non-randomly selected indeed.
Overall 1950 BCE to 1800 BCE looks more in line with the evidence for Indo-Aryan arrival at the fringes of culturally Harappan areas beginning a swift subcontinent wide expansion.
The Indo-Aryan Mittani show up in Mesopotamia in ~1600 BC.
A July 2019 paper in Science (Marta Pereira Verdugo, “Ancient cattle genomics, origins, and rapid turnover in the Fertile Crescent”) demonstrates with ancient cattle mtDNA that there was surge of South Asian domesticated cattle from the Indus River Valley civilization into the Near East in the Bronze Age ca. 4000 to 3500 years ago.
Based upon Lily Agranat-Tamir, The Genomic History of the Bronze Age Southern Levant, 181(5) Cell 1146-1157e11 (May 28, 2020),The Megiddo samples include a trio of interesting outliers dated to 1600-1500 BCE with significant ancestry from the steppe. One of these individuals is a male, I2189, who belongs to Y-haplogroup R and probably R1a. So he might . . . be of Indo-Aryan origin. Another Megiddo male, S10768, belongs to R1b-M269 and probably shows a few per cent of steppe ancestry.
The is evidence for going back as far as 1950 BCE based upon evidence from Cemetery H of cremation coinciding with inhumation in transition (cremation is a key litmus test of Indo-European cultures in the Bronze Age and there is continuity from that period mentioned in the Rig Vedas).
The Harappan civilization appears to have started to collapse on its own prior to the advent of the Indo-Aryans in connection with the 4.2 kiloyear climate event, an arid period that was accompanied by the drying up and disappearance Saravasti River mentioned regularly and centrally in the Rig Vedic epics around which much earlier Harappan civilization was organized as ruins recovered in the ancient, now dry, riverbanks reveal. The Saravasti was drying up starting around 1900 BCE. L. Giosan et al. Fluvial landscapes of the Harappan civilization. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. doi:10.1073/pnas.1112743109.
Traces of new metallurgy technologies also favor a date around 2000 BCE to 1900 BCE.
Eurogenes notes that what we might be seeing here is substructure within the steppe-related admixture amongst South Asians, with Indo-Aryan speakers apparently showing Yamnaya-related (Catacomb?) ancestry, and Iranic speakers, as well as possibly groups with significant Iranic ancestry, showing a preference for later Andronovo-related ancestry.
Pre-Indo-Aryan Harappan probably survived to about 2000 BCE. Evidence of rice phytoliths from Harappa was presented by Fujiwara et al. (1992) who tentatively dated some of their samples to the Mature Harappan period, confirmed by Madella (2003) in contexts c. 2200 BCE, although the only macrobotanical evidence for rice grains from the site places it in the Late Harappan period ( Weber, 1997 and Weber, 2003). As such Possehl (1999: 246) has argued that there is no evidence for rice cultivation before the Mature Harappan period (i.e. pre-c.2500 BCE). Fuller and Madella (2002: 336–7) have argued that “rice was available as a crop […] but not adopted” and “there is no reason as yet to believe it was an important crop”, while Fuller and Qin (2009) have argued that there is no evidence of rice agriculture until the Late Harappan period c.2000 BCE, when it is likely O. sativa ssp. japonica arrived.
Also, incidentally, curry dates to the pre-Indo-Aryan mature Harappan period. In the Indus River Valley (basically modern Pakistan), the Harappans were eating meals with the characteristic ingredients of curry (such as ginger, tumeric and garlic). The conclusion is based on the residual remains on food infused on pottery, human teeth, and cow teeth from archaeological digs in the Indus River Valley dated to between 2500 and 2200 B.C.E. These are the oldest discovered examples of ginger and tumeric in the region.
Data from about 60 South Asian groups was used to estimate that major ANI-ASI mixture occurred 1,200-4,000 years ago. Some mixture may also be older—beyond the time we can query using admixture linkage disequilibrium—since it is universal throughout the subcontinent: present in every group speaking Indo-European or Dravidian languages, in all caste levels, and in primitive tribes. After the ANI-ASI mixture that occurred within the last four thousand years, a cultural shift led to widespread endogamy, decreasing the rate of additional mixture. Modeling of the observed haplotype diversities suggests that both Indian ancestry components are older than the purported Indo-Aryan invasion 3,500 YBP. https://www.cell.com/AJHG/fulltext/S0002-9297(11)00488-5
Particularly notable are inferred admixture dates for different South Asian sub-sample populations in Moorjani (2013) 64 +/- 11 generations in the North and 144 +/- 27 generations (about 2176 BCE ± 783 years) in the South. Historical, archaeology, geographical realities and the patterns seen in the data itself, all strongly support the notion that steppe admixture in South Asia was not a single event happening at a single time every place in the subcontinent. But, the geographic distribution of the dates also isn’t a good fit for a single admixture event that gradually expanded from a core area where admixture happened first to a gradually moving frontier where it happened later. The only way to interpret the LD data in a way that makes any sense is to assume that there were at least two separate waves of ANI-ASI admixture many centuries apart from each other in what are mostly linguistically Indo-European populations in South Asia. This interpretation is possible because the LD method used mostly reflects the most recent admixture date, and ignores the time at which one or more additional previous episodes of ANI-ASI admixture that contribute to the current ANI-ASI genetic mix in modern populations could have taken place. A narrative like the one below with a first episode of ANI-ASI admixture that spans the entire subcontinent and a second one that is limited to linguistically Indo-European areas can provide a plausible fit to the data (that also makes sense in terms of the historical linguistics of the Dravidian language family which appears much less diverse than it should be given archaeological clues about the timing of the South Asian Neolithic, which can be explained by a contraction in the face of a first wave of Indo-Aryan contact followed by a linguistically Dravidian reconquest involving a single Dravidian dialect that retains the hybrid Hindu religion and caste structure but repels later Indo-Aryan intrusion).
The mature period of the IVC lasted until about 1900 BC. Pushing the migration back to 1950 BC opens up doors to interactions with Indo-Aryans at the twilight of the civilization period.
The Indian cline she talked about was ANI and ASI apparently, which is not very helpful since its better to go with 3 populations instead. Mixture between different kinds of South Asian ancestries, some with more AASI and some with much more Iran-like ancestry could mess up estimations like that. The Dravidian movement into South India would have happened 4500 to 5000 years ago so this could mess with steppe admixture dates if they aren’t separated from ANI since ANI is mostly constructed out of Iran-like ancestry.
Looking back at Moorjani 2013, the generational estimates were for the most recent admixture duration which starts when the mature period of IVC ends (though this event lasted a few centuries of decline). Which makes sense but since ANI is constructed to be mostly not steppe, the mixture of a relatively Iran-rich population could make it hard to tell what is going on. What dates did Narasimhan’s 3 population dates indicate in 2019 for the steppe admixture specifically (and not just generic ANI)?
Comment from a passing-by linguist: retroflex consonants are not something uniquely Indian, they are found here and there in all sorts of languages around the world. Already within Indo-European, we have at least the following independent cases:
– The modern Scandinavian languages have recently developed a fairly large inventory of retroflex consonants, mainly from consonant clusters: rt [ʈ], rd [ɖ], rn [ɳ], rl [ɭ], in Norwegian also ll [ɽ] (= Indic ṭ, ḍ, ṇ, ḷ, ṛ). A sibilant /ʂ/ (= ṣ) comes from earlier palatalized š.
– Sardinian has developed a voiced stop /ɖ/ from earlier dd, nd (same in a few other Romance varieties of Italy).
– Polish cz, sz, rz, Russian ш, ж and the corresponding sounds elsewhere in Slavic are sometimes considered to be retroflex as well.
I would even think retroflex sibilants which occur in most modern eastern Iranian languages (Pashto, etc.), Burushaski, and Tibetic is mostly an independent phenomenon from Indic / Dravidian, where the stable category is instead retroflex stops.
North of Indo-Iranian, also most of the Uralic languages have some retroflex sibilants, of which at least an affricate *č [ʈʂ] existed already in Proto-Uralic, and a sibilant *š [ʂ] is common in old loanwords from Indo-Iranian. IMO the Proto-Indo-Iranian *š created by the RUKI sound law can be probably considered retroflex. There seems to be evidence for this in Iranian too even: it develops to xš- in Avestan when word-initial (e.g. xšwaš ‘six’, xšnā- ‘to know’) where the intrusive velar consonant might reflect the common habit of retroflex consonants to develop some degree of velar coarticulation.
Hence, retroflex consonants in Andamanese do not need to have anything at all to do with Indic either. The Ongan (“south Andamanese”) languages have been instead suggested to be related to Austronesian, where some reconstructions also suggest a few original retroflex consonants.
Doesn’t retroflex also exist in Russian and Polish languages? I don’t think it’s unique to South Asia
Looks like embargoed paper on MBA migration into England will be out today – https://www.eurekalert.org/specialtopic/archaeology/embargoed
Actual papers released just now:
https://phys.org/news/2021-12-harvard-geneticists-ancient-britain-insights.html – “Geneticists’ new research on ancient Britain contains insights on language, ancestry, kinship, milk”. Paper on migration into Britain in MBA.
https://phys.org/news/2021-12-ancient-dna-reveals-world-oldest.html – “Ancient DNA reveals the world’s oldest family tree” – kinship reconstruction in a neolithic long-barrow. One polygynous founder, quite unusual compared to most of the record, and a cousin-marriage.
Thought this figure from Patterson, Isakov et al was quite striking on population size changes – https://imgur.com/a/sB0zIz9
Estimates a reproductive effective population size of only 4000 for the Middle-Late Neolithic British set. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7864882/ – “Ne estimates can be used to infer census population size, which in humans is typically three- and up ten-fold greater”).
The problem is that social structure could confound it; perhaps with methods to detect distant relatives, they could potentially detect how many distant relatives are shared between e.g. Orkney and Southern England in their set, and then estimate to what degree there is a single mating population or discrete demes, then that could get closer to working out a real census size.
This also aggregates the “Boom” and “Bust” phases of Neolithic farming in NW (latter due to soil depletion etc potentially). So possibly the real pre-Beaker population that was in Great Britain before the arrival of Beaker people could even have been lower than 3×4000 people. May have been smaller than or similar size to even an offshoot of a population that entered Europe as 500 people around 3000 BCE and experienced 25% population growth per generation for about 20 generations up to 2500 BCE (when Beaker arrives in Britain).