Göran Dahl Simon Ström

So is the data settled now?

  1. The European-aryan branch spread west and down into and across Europe.

  2. The Hitite-aryan branch spread south either thru the caucuses or by water on the coastal route (black sea).

  3. the iranian-aryan branch spread north above the caucuses, above the aral sea, then back down into present day iran.

  4. The Indian peoples were a mix of west eurasians from present day Iran and earlier local (afro-asiatic?) hunter gatherers. The indo-aryan branch spread into the weak(drought) Indus river peoples and either caused or completed their fall. For all intents and purpose they outbred and are now extinct?

  5. The (which branch) that spread east to the yellow-river of china is now extinct?

  6. Every group appears to spread by male outbreeding?

by Goran Dahl

  1. If by Aryan you’re referring to Indo-Iranians, they came from the West originally. More specifically, the Eastern border of the Corded Ware culture, from which they are derived, i.e. Russo-Ukraine.

  2. The proto-Hittites most likely spread West from the Sredny Stog culture, and then went South via the Balkans. Sredny Stog -> Usatovo -> Ezero into Anatolia, in a crescent-like pattern following the outline of the western coastline of the Black Sea.

  3. The Indo-Iranians go from Eastern Europe–their point of origin–to Central Asia, and from there on to Northeast Asia and down to the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex in Afghanistan. From the BMAC, they go down into Iran and India.

  4. The Indian peoples are a mix of Indo-Iranians (Steppe_MLBA), IVC people who were closely related to Iranian farmers (Iran_Neolithic) but were nevertheless a separate line, and people who were similar to the Andamanese (hence the dark skin and Australoid features). The Indo-Iranians outbred, as always.

  5. Two branches reached the periphery of China: the Tocharian branch derived from the Afanasievo culture, and the Indo-Iranians (Tarim Basin mummies, Yuezhi). The Mongols of Genghis Khan’s period had significant Indo-Iranian or general North European-like admixture, and Tocharian-derived R1b clades were more widespread in their gene pool based on the samples we have available.

Nowadays, local East Asian haplogroups dominate the lineages of modern Mongols to a larger extent. So it seems as though Mongols have admixture from both Indo-Iranians and the ever mysterious, elusive Tocharians.

Indo-Iranians seem to have occupied all of Central Asia along with certain Chinese regions.

  1. Yeah, basically.

by Simon Ström

Nothing of consequence has changed in this regard during the past couple of years, AFAIK. A boiling point of technological innovations was reached ~6kya causing a deluge of human mobility emanating from the Pontic-Caspian steppe.

Hittites descend from the first group to split from the coherent PIE language community, that we can trace linguistically. We conjecture that they traveled via the Balkan coast becoming lords of the collapsing Old European sedentary civilization in the process, which was among the richest and most developed parts of the world at the time (imagine them like the Aztecs).

The PIEs projected in several directions and waves; proto-Tocharians were likely harbored by the Afanasievo culture in Siberia–essentially a twin culture of Yamnaya–that needs separate mention because they seem to have have expanded into a demographic void in Siberia, branching off just before the next key development.

A period of chaos, disease and dramatic shifts on the “western front” of early PIE movements eventually brought a new political and social order upon Europe, also transcending Yamnaya and related prior cultures.

A brief period of remarkable cultural homogeneity across Eurosiberia with evidence of large-scale interconnectedness in terms of movement and kinship (Corded Ware culture et al; Late PIE) coincided with an equilibration of formerly distinct “east” and “west” European gene pools (both of which were originally derived from variants of primordial h-gs and Near Eastern farmer-pastoralists having pushed north).

This marks the ethnogenesis of modern white people in terms of autosomal DNA and uniparental markers in broad strokes, as the resultant genetic structure is largely intact in northern and central Europe.

Then, mobility seems to have decreased again and uniformity necessarily faded. Various lineages began to differentiate into distinct cultures harboring the remaining known Indo-European languages (Nordic Bronze Age/Germanic, bronze age Brits speaking an undocumented language, Celts in central Europe and their Italic cousins and proto-Greek tribes moving south, and a “satem” group splitting into Balto-Slavs and early Indo-Iranians somewhere in eastern Europe ~4.5kya, officially ending what we define as the Proto-Indo-European language period.

Göran explained well what happened with the Indo-Iranians as they expanded from south of the Urals. They were essentially very successful but drowned genetically as they inherited the prior Indus valley and Iranian plateau civilizations–however markers of their paternal ancestry are dominant to this day.

In central Asia, a lot of mixing and displacement subsequently occurred with the rise of Turco-Mongols beginning in the Iron/Late Bronze Age.