
















































A prediction in genetics




Also Villar, in 2014:















Villar (2014):



European hydrotoponymy (I): Old European substrate and its relative chronology


These first two posts on Old European hydro-toponymy contain excerpts mainly from Indoeuropeos, iberos, vascos y sus parientes, by Francisco Villar, Universidad de Salmanca (2014), but also from materials of Lenguas, genes y culturas en la Prehistoria de Europa y Asia suroccidental, by Villar et al. Universidad de Salamanca (2007). I can’t recommend both books hardly enough for anyone interested in the history of Pre-Roman peoples in Iberia and Western Europe.

NOTE. Both books also contain detailed information on hydrotoponymy of other regions, like Northern Europe, the Aegean and the Middle East, with some information about Asia, apart from (outdated) genetic data, but their main aim is obviously the Prehistory of Iberia and neighbouring regions like France, Italy, or Northern Africa.

Here are only some excerpts (emphasis mine), translated from Spanish (see the original texts here), accompanied by images from both books.


Alteuropäisch and Krahe

The investigation of “Old European” or Alteuropäisch, popularized by Krahe, began precisely with the study of some toponyms and personal names spread all over Europe, previously considered “Ligurian” (by H. d’Arbois de Jubainville and C. Jullian) or “Illyrian” (by J. Pokorny), with which those linguistic groups – in turn badly known – were given an excessive extension, based only on some lexical coincidences.

This is a comment made by the author about Krahe‘s data and his opinions, frequently used against his compiled data, which I find paradoxically applicable to Villar’s data and his tentative assignment of the relative linguistic chronology to an absolute one – including the expansion of a “Mesolithic” Indo-European vs. a “Neolithic” Basque / Iberian vs. a Bronze Age Celtic – when it is now clear that the sequence of events was much later than that:

It is very widespread today a derogatory and globally disqualifying attitude to everything that sounds like Alteuropäisch and Krahe, sometimes without the necessary discrimination between different hypotheses, or even between data and hypothesis. It is not fair that the version of H. Krahe and that of W. P. Schmid be disqualified in a single simplistic judgment as if they were the same thing. But it is a major mistake to reduce the value of the hydro-toponymic data of Europe by the mere fact that Krahe attributed an implausible historical explanation to them. The data are real and still need an adequate explanation within a real historical framework, despite the unfeasibility of Krahe’s explanation.

With that we reach a point that I want to highlight. Among those who are allergic to anything that involves deviating one iota of the Indo-European paradigm as a single event, an attitude gaining momentum considers that hydro-toponymy was introduced in the different regions of Europe and Southeast Asia by the same Indo-European languages ​​that appear historically occupying their territory. H. Krahe had argued strongly against this possibility, so now I will save myself a deeper refutation and I will limit myself to pointing out some difficulties that position is forced to face.

Sala, Sala, Sala, Sala, Sala, Sala, Sala, Sala, Sala, Sala, Sala, Salaca/Salis, Salaceni,
Salacia, Salacia, Salaeni, Salam, Salandona, Salangi, Salangi , Salaniana, Sãlantas,
Salapa, Salapeni, Salaphitanum, Salapia / Salpia / Salapina palus / Salpe, Salar, Salara, Salarama,
Salarbima, Salariga, Salars, Salas, Salat, Salauris, Salcitani, Sale, Sale, Sale, Sale
stagnum, Salecon, Saleia, Salentina, Salentini, Salernum, Salerni, Sales, Sali, Salia, Salia,
Salica, Salica, Salice, Salii, Salija, Salinẽlis, Salìnis, Salìnis, Salìnis, Salìnis, Salinsae, Salionca,
Salius, Salō, Salō, Saloca, Salodurum, Salona, Salonae, Salonenica, Salonia, Saloniana,
Salonime, Salonium, Salontia, Saluca, Salum, Salum, Salunatasi, Saluntum / Salluntum,
Salùpis, Sãlupis, Salur, Salurnis, Selepitani, Sõlis.

The defenders of that alternative have to assume that the process of dialectalization, that before the migrations from the Urheimat was separating into the different Indo-European branches, affected each of them in the phonetic aspect in the general naming vocabulary, but left them unaltered in its phonetic predialectal state with regards to hydro-toponymy, as well as a good part of the naming lexicon related to the concepts of “river, water” and the different qualities of water currents. For example, according to those sharing that opinion, the Hispanic Palantia of the area of Vaccei would be in fact Celtic, but in that name the loss of the initial /p/ that characterizes Celtic would not have been applicable. Similarly, the hydro-toponymy in Germania is largely exempt from the Lautverschiebung, in Greece the loss of initial /s/, etc. These names not only fail to suffer the dialectal innovations corresponding to their zones, but sometimes they present innovations different from the features of the dialect involved. For example the word *mori “sea, standing water” is sometimes found in the hydro-toponymy of Gaul in the form *mari instead of *mori proper of Celtic (Marantium, Marisanga, Marsus), which in the framework of the paradigm has to be inevitably interpreted as a non-Celtic innovation.

Potential geographic relationship between a priori unrelated graphic-phonetic variants.

Names of this nature that appear in areas where a pre-Roman historical Indo-European language never existed remain unexplained, such as in North Africa, Arabia Felix or the Caucasus: Lake Pallantias in Libya; the Salat River in Mauritania Tingitana; Auso in Mauritania Caesariensis; the Alonta River in Georgia; the Abas River in Caucasian Albania; Salma and Salapeni in Arabia Felix; etc. Of course, for these cases it is always possible to deny any relationship of kinship between these forms and their European cognates, and attribute everything to the chance of random homophonies. Thus, once again, the annoying comparative data are sacrificed in the sacred altar of the paradigm, despite the fact that they are so numerous and consistent that if there were no blind faith in the current dogma, they would be sufficient to articulate a new paradigm over them.

The choice of each Indo-Europeanist between the non-Indo-European and the Indo-European interpretation to explain the prehistoric toponymy of Europe is not motivated by the fact that they manage partial sets of hydronyms that are more propitious alternatively for the one or the other option. On the contrary, frequently the same batch of materials is claimed by both trends as its own. An extreme example is that of Th. Vennemann, who considers simply as non-Indo-European (specifically Paleo-Basque) exactly the same material that H. Krahe used to support his Indo-European interpretation. Thus, the structure and linguistic characteristics of the studied material have little role in the choice of one or the other path, which is rather conditioned by convictions and adhesion to a varied range of personal beliefs, traditional dogmas and scientific paradigms.


The linguistic column

The sequence of languages ​​that were successively spoken in any territory constitutes what by analogy [with the “geological column”] we could call its “ethno-linguistic column”.

Next I offer the list of the languages ​​detected in the compositional (and to a lesser extent derivational) toponymic syntagms in which the appellatives ub-, up-, ab-, ap-, ur-, il-, igi, tuk, -ip – analyzed in this work – are involved.

From the interaction of the different strata in words and hybrid syntagms we can, therefore, establish the linguistic column in the Iberian Peninsula and its neighboring territories (Western Europe and Northern Africa) with the following sequence:

1. A first stratum of very old chronology, which in a previous publication I have proposed to call Palaeo-Indo-European [“arqueo-indoeuropeo”]. The toponymic elements belonging to this stratum dealt with throughout this text are abundant: kerso-, turso-, alawo-, lako-, mido-, silo-, tibo-, etc.

They always function as determinant toponyms of a place-name in any other language. It never uses the name “city” (or “river”) in hybrid syntagms. Their place names (determinants) are combined with names of the following languages:

   a) Iberian in Iberia or Southern France: kiŕś-iltiŕ, tuŕś-iltiŕ, alaun-iltiŕte, lakunm ∙ -iltiŕte.

   b) The language of the igi in southern Iberia and perhaps Northern Africa: Cantigi, Saltigi, Sagigi, Sicingi.

   c) The southern language of the postponed -il: Mid-ili, Sil-ili, Tib-ili.

   d) The language of the postponed -ip: Lac-ipo, Ost-ipo, Vent-ipo.

   e) Celtic in Gaul: kerso-ialos > Cersolius > Cerseuil; Ibili-duros > Ibliodurus.

Cariensi, Carantium, Carandonis, Carae, Caraca / Caracca, Carrinensis, Cariaca, Carneus, Carula, Carlae, Carieco, Cariocieco, Caricillum, Carona, Carnona, Caranta, Carantonus / Carantana, Caronte, Carantomum / Carantomium, Carronenses / Garronenses, Cares / Carus, Caranusca, Carona, Caro vicus, Carninia, Carus, Carnutes, Carnonis castrum, Carenses, Caralis / Carallis, Carni, Carnicum, Caraceni, Careia, Carici, Carant / Carrant, Carnonacae, Carontō, Cariolum, Caritani, Carinum, Carantani, Carnuntum, Cariniana Vallis, Cariones, Careotae, Caroia, Caria, Careum, Carnae, Caran, Carnasium, Carnus, Carneates, Carnium, Carenus, Karlasuwa, Carnias, Karahna, Karna, Cariuntis, Kariuna, Careotis, Karu, Caralitis, Carus, Carnasso, Cares, Carene, Caranum, Caria, Carina, Carura, Caralis, Coralis, Carana, Carnalis, Carinum, Carnus, Carium, Carnium, Carnus Carnuntus / Carnusii, Chariuntas, Carandra, Carna, Carana, Carine, Cariatae, Caralae, Carura, Carei, Carura, Caricum, Caranis, Caralia, Carustum, Carystus, Carastasei.

This first Palaeo-Indo-European layer also corresponds to:

Several Palaeo-Indo-European varieties that have ab-, ap-, ub-, up- as a name for «river». To them belong also numerous place names (balsa-, siko-, wol-, etc.) that act as first members composed in both monoglotic and hybrid syntagmas.

Palaeo-Indo-European varieties in which ur- is the name “river”.


2. The second stratum in decreasing order of antiquity is formed by the language of the place name igi “city”, although its presence is only verified with certainty in Iberia (especially in the south) and Northern Africa:

   a) It sets the igi name in compounds with Palaeo-Indo-European toponyms as in Salt-, Ast-, Olont-, Cant-, Aur- (Hispania) and Sagigi, Sicingi (Northern Africa).

   b) It works as the first place-name of the compound when the second is il: Igilium, Igilgili, Singili.

3. The third stratum is the language of the name il “city”:

   a) It puts the nickname il as determined in hybrid syntagms with Palaeo-Indo-European determinants: Mid-ili, Sil-ili, Tib-ili.

   b) It puts the nickname il as determined in hybrid syntagms with determinant toponyms igi: Igilium, Igilgili, Singili.

   c) It puts the place names (determinants) in front of the name (determined) of the language -ip (Il-ipa, Il-ipula and Il-ipla).


4. Fourth is the language of the name ip- “city”, which puts the name (determined) in syntagms with:

   a) Palaeo-Indo-European toponym (determinant): Lac-ipo, Ost-ipo, Vent-ipo.

   b) Toponym (determinant) il: Ilipa.

   c) Second generation hybrid toponym of Palaeo-Indo-European + il: Balsilippa.

   d) In the Balsilippa and Sicilippa conglomerates, the three strata appear in the expected sequence: Palaeo-Indo-European + il + ip.


5. In the fifth place of the sequence is the language of the tuk-:

   a) It puts the name tuk- in compounds in which the place-name is a Palaeo-Indo-European element: Acatucci (see Aduatuci in Germania).

   b) It puts the name tuk- “height, top” in compounds in which the place-name is an ip- fossilized as place-names: Iptuci, etc.

   c) On at least one occasion an ip-fossilized syntagm acts as a toponym opposite a Celtic name: Itucodon (<Iptuco-dunum).

NOTE. Even though Villar talks about this stratum -tuk in Germania (Aduatukus) and the British Isles (Itucodon), only one case is found in each territory.


6. The last place is occupied by Celtic:

   a) In Itucodon it puts the name (dunum) in front of a complex toponym of two previous strata, ip- + tuk-; and in Iliodurus it gives the name duro- in front of an equally complex Ibliodurus (<Ibili + duro).

   b) In bilbiliz it puts the casual morpheme in a fossilized bi-member toponym of a previous stratum, one of whose components is il-: Bilbil-iz.

[First column modified to include relative instead of absolute chronology]

A hard change of paradigm

More effort did it cost me to accept that ub- is a dialectal variant of a known Indo-European word for “water, river”, of which previously knew three others: ap-, ab-, up-. The obviousness of the phonetic correlation ap- / ab- // up- / ub- together with the semantic link with rivers, which can be verified above all outside of Spain, but is also present in our Peninsula, forced my resistance little by little. And with it fell the first trench of the dogma, unshakable until that moment, that everything in the Peninsula in the south was to be non-Indo-European.


Along with this serial component, many other isolated place names were revealed as very likely of Indo-European etymology, both in the “Iberian” East and in the “Tartessian” South. So the ubiquity of Indo-European throughout the Peninsula began to impose itself to me painfully. I say painfully because I lacked a paradigm in which to fit the new perspective that was making its way into my mind, which was therefore suspended in nothing, without any theoretical support, leaving me with a feeling that I was losing my footing. And for a time I was reluctant to accept the profound implications that all of this had entailed.

All il languages, in any of their locations, exhibit a compositional behavior in hybrid toponymic syntagms that place them all in an intermediate position between the clearly [first/second layer] strata, with place-names for their human settlements semantically derived from water realities (ur), and those clearly attributable to the [fifth layer] with appellations derived from settlements in heights (briga, dunum). But in that intermediate segment of the column there are three strata: 1) il, 2) ip-, 3) tuk-. In Andalusia there is an additional one: the igi stratum, of opaque semantics, which immediately precedes the il stratum.

Hydronyms in -or-, -ur-.

To postulate that any of the toponymic strata of our column imply a new linguistic stratum, certain additional requirements will be necessary. One of them is that, in addition to the name in question, the languages ​​involved should share other features that could not have been lent, such as the very precise order of elements in the compounds Toponym + Name coexisting with Name + Adjective. Or the sharing of additional lexical elements that are not usually subject to loans, such as the semantically basic adjectives beri «new» and bels «black».

Unfortunately, the toponymic method, like the Comparative Method itself, does not have the capacity to establish precise absolute chronologies. (…)

Linguistic chronology

Old European hydrotoponymy. Baltic data compensated. Statistical method Kriging.

In Europe (Hispania, South of France, Germania, British Isles, Baltic) the oldest stratum that can be identified is an indeterminable number of palaeo-varieties of the Indo-European macro-family, which do not have a direct local relationship with historical Indo-European languages, to the extent that we can verify. In fact, we have seen that stratigraphic signs lead us to consider the main Indo-European pre-Roman language of Hispania, the Celtic language, as a stratum after the il language, which in turn is later than the peninsular Indo-European palaeo-varieties.

In North Africa there is also a Palaeo-Indo-European stratum present. But there is also a very old non-Indo-European stratum whose identity I can not define through the material used. Nor has it been possible for me to establish relative antiquity of one and the other on African soil.

Another of the languages ​​involved, which has il- as an appellation for “city” in the Southwest of Hispania and North Africa, could have some kind of kinship relationship with Basque on the one hand and the Iberian language on the other, but the same indirect form that I have just pointed out for the Indo-European palaeo-varieties with respect to the historical Indo-European languages. Or in other words: the language(s) of the place-names referred to in this work would be palaeo-varieties of a linguistic family to which two known historical languages, Iberian and Basque, may have belonged, although we can’t establish a relation of direct affiliation neither between those two historical languages ​​among themselves, nor between any of them and the palaeo-varieties of the prehistoric toponymy.

[First column modified to include relative instead of absolute chronology]

In general, Celtic does not have in its historical territories the onomastic behavior of an ancestral language, but that of an intrusive language, whose presence there is not only more recent than other Indo-European varieties, but also after that of various non-Indo-European strata, which are themselves ranked between the oldest detected (Palaeo-Indo-European) and the last of Pre-Romans, which is Celtic itself. If we only detected two strata, the Indo-European and the Celtic ones, we could discuss if it is possible that both are one and the same, so that what we define as “Celtic” is nothing other than the modern in situ evolution of Palaeo-Indo-European. But examples like those of kiŕśiltiŕ, kerso-ialos, Cirsa or Itucodon, among many others analyzed throughout this book, make it unlikely. And, in addition, the mediation of several strata in the column between the Palaeo-Indo-European language of Cirsa, as well as the greater antiquity of the ip- and tuk- languages ​​in Spanish, Gallic and British territory, defines the latter as a new and more recent layer than the aforementioned, which burst into its historical sites during the Iron Age.

Because Archaeology continues to deny the existence of population movements of a size worthy of consideration in the Iron Age, it is necessary to accept that the Indo-European Problem remains intact. It is understandable that before this aporia, many minds who are uncomfortable living with doubts, prefer to adopt a creed (the traditional, the Neolithic or the continuist) and expose it as a certainty to their students in the classrooms or their colleagues in conferences and publications. It’s not my case. For me, with Voltaire, “le doute est désagréable, mais la certitude est ridicule”. Or with Manzoni: “E men male l’agitarsi nel dubbio, che riposar nell’errore”.

Continue reading on European hydrotoponymy (II): Basques, Iberians, and Etruscans after Old Europeans.





Interesting excerpts (emphasis mine):



A-B) Geographic location of Grotta d’Oriente.


Genetic analysis





Discussion and Conclusion



The same statistic as in A plotted with geographic position

The South Italian corridor






Afroasiatic and Nostratic


















Interesting excerpts (emphasis mine):



Genetic Affinities.

Discovering Two Divergent and Extinct Lineages of Horses



Modeling Demography and Admixture of Extinct and Extant Horse Lineages


Rejecting Iberian Contribution to Modern Domesticates



Iron Age horses



















Ancient Sardinia hints at Mesolithic spread of R1b-V88, and Western EEF-related expansion of Vasconic


New preprint Population history from the Neolithic to present on the Mediterranean island of Sardinia: An ancient DNA perspective, by Marcus et al. bioRxiv (2019)

Interesting excerpts (emphasis mine, edited for clarity):

On the high frequency of R1b-V88

Our genome-wide data allowed us to assign Y haplogroups for 25 ancient Sardinian individuals. More than half of them consist of R1b-V88 (n=10) or I2-M223 (n=7).

Francalacci et al. (2013) identi fied three major Sardinia-specifi c founder clades based on present-day variation within the haplogroups I2-M26, G2-L91 and R1b-V88, and here we found each of those broader haplogroups in at least one ancient Sardinian individual. Two major present-day Sardinian haplogroups, R1b-M269 and E-M215, are absent.

Compared to other Neolithic and present-day European populations, the number of identi fied R1b-V88 carriers is relatively high.

(…)ancient Sardinian mtDNA haplotypes belong almost exclusively to macro-haplogroups HV (n = 16), JT (n = 17) and U (n = 9), a composition broadly similar to other European Neolithic populations.

Geographic and temporal distribution of R1b-V88 Y-haplotypes in ancient European samples. We plot the geographic position of all ancient samples inferred to carry R1b-V88 equivalent markers. Dates are given as years BCE (means of calibrated 2s radio-carbon dates). Multiple V88 individuals with similar geographic positions are vertically stacked. We additionally color-code the status of the R1b-V88 subclade R1b-V2197, which is found in most present-day African R1b-V88 carriers.

On the origin of a Vasconic-like Paleosardo with the Western EEF

(…) the Neolithic (and also later) ancient Sardinian individuals sit between early Neolithic Iberian and later Copper Age Iberian populations, roughly on an axis that differentiates WHG and EEF populations and embedded in a cluster that additionally includes Neolithic British individuals. This result is also evident in terms of absolute genetic differentiation, with low pairwise FST ~ 0.005 +- 0.002 between Neolithic Sardinian individuals and Neolithic western mainland European populations. Pairwise outgroup-f3 analysis shows a very similar pattern, with the highest values of f3 (i.e. most shared drift) being with Neolithic and Copper Age Iberia, gradually dropping off for temporally and geographically distant populations.

In explicit admixture models (using qpAdm, see Methods) the southern French Neolithic individuals (France-N) are the most consistent with being a single source for Neolithic Sardinia (p ~ 0:074 to reject the model of one population being the direct source of the other); followed by other populations associated with the western Mediterranean Neolithic Cardial Ware expansion.

Principal Components Analysis based on the Human Origins dataset. A: Projection of ancient individuals’ genotypes onto principal component axes de fined by modern Western Eurasians (gray labels).

Pervasive Western Hunter-Gatherer ancestry in Iberian/French/Sardinian population

Similar to western European Neolithic and central European Late Neolithic populations, ancient Sardinian individuals are shifted towards WHG individuals in the top two PCs relative to early Neolithic Anatolians Admixture analysis using qpAdm infers that ancient Sardinian individuals harbour HG ancestry (~ 17%) that is higher than early Neolithic mainland populations (including Iberia, ~ 8%), but lower than Copper Age Iberians (~ 25%) and about the same as Southern French Middle-Neolithic individuals (~ 21%).

Principal Components Analysis based on the Human Origins dataset. B: Zoom into the region most relevant for Sardinian individuals.

Continuity from Sardinia Neolithic through the Nuragic

We found several lines of evidence supporting genetic continuity from the Sardinian Neolithic into the Bronze Age and Nuragic times. Importantly, we observed low genetic differentiation between ancient Sardinian individuals from various time periods.

A qpAdm analysis, which is based on simultaneously testing f-statistics with a number of outgroups and adjusts for correlations, cannot reject a model of Neolithic Sardinian individuals being a direct predecessor of Nuragic Sardinian individuals (…) Our qpAdm analysis further shows that the WHG ancestry proportion, in a model of admixture with Neolithic Anatolia, remains stable at ~17% throughout three ancient time-periods.

Present-day genetic structure in Sardinia reanalyzed with aDNA. A: Scatter plot of the rst two principal components trained on 1577 present-day individuals with grand-parental ancestry from Sardinia. Each individual is labeled with a location if at least 3 of the 4 grandparents were born in the same geographical location (\small” three letter abbreviations); otherwise with \x” or if grand-parental ancestry is missing with \?”. We calculated median PC values for each Sardinian province (large abbreviations). We also projected each ancient Sardinian individual on to the top two PCs (gray points). B/C: We plot f-statistics that test for admixture of modern Sardinian individuals (grouped into provinces) when using Nuragic Sardinian individuals as one source population. Uncertainty ranges depict one standard error (calculated from block bootstrap). Karitiana are used in the f-statistic calculation as a proxy for ANE/Steppe ancestry (Patterson et al., 2012).

Steppe influx in Modern Sardinians

While contemporary Sardinian individuals show the highest affinity towards EEF-associated populations among all of the modern populations, they also display membership with other clusters (Fig. 5). In contrast to ancient Sardinian individuals, present-day Sardinian individuals carry a modest “Steppe-like” ancestry component (but generally less than continental present-day European populations), and an appreciable broadly “eastern Mediterranean” ancestry component (also inferred at a high fraction in other present-day Mediterranean populations, such as Sicily and Greece).


Aquitanians and Iberians of haplogroup R1b are exactly like Indo-Iranians and Balto-Slavs of haplogroup R1a


The final paper on Indo-Iranian peoples, by Narasimhan and Patterson (see preprint), is soon to be published, according to the first author’s Twitter account.

One of the interesting details of the development of Bronze Age Iberian ethnolinguistic landscape was the making of Proto-Iberian and Proto-Basque communities, which we already knew were going to show R1b-P312 lineages, a haplogroup clearly associated during the Bell Beaker period with expanding North-West Indo-Europeans:

From the Bronze Age (~2200–900 BCE), we increase the available dataset from 7 to 60 individuals and show how ancestry from the Pontic-Caspian steppe (Steppe ancestry) appeared throughout Iberia in this period, albeit with less impact in the south. The earliest evidence is in 14 individuals dated to ~2500–2000 BCE who coexisted with local people without Steppe ancestry. These groups lived in close proximity and admixed to form the Bronze Age population after 2000 BCE with ~40% ancestry from incoming groups. Y-chromosome turnover was even more pronounced, as the lineages common in Copper Age Iberia (I2, G2, and H) were almost completely replaced by one lineage, R1b-M269.

Proportion of ancestry derived from central European Beaker/Bronze Age populations in Iberians from the Middle Neolithic to the Iron Age (table S15). Colors indicate the Y-chromosome haplogroup for each male. Red lines represent period of admixture. Modified from Olalde et al. (2019).

The arrival of East Bell Beakers speaking Indo-European languages involved, nevertheless, the survival of the two non-IE communities isolated from each other – likely stemming from south-western France and south-eastern Iberia – thanks to a long-lasting process of migration and admixture. There are some common misconceptions about ancient languages in Iberia which may have caused some wrong interpretations of the data in the paper and elsewhere:

NOTE. A simple reading of Iberian prehistory would be enough to correct these. Two recent books on this subject are Villar’s Indoeuropeos, iberos, vascos y otros parientes and Vascos, celtas e indoeuropeos. Genes y lenguas.

Iberian languages were spoken at least in the Mediterranean and the south (ca. “1/3 of Iberia“) during the Bronze Age.

Nope, we only know the approximate location of Iberian culture and inscriptions from the Late Iron Age, and they occupy the south-eastern and eastern coastal areas, but before that it is unclear where they were spoken. In fact, it seems evident now that the arrival of Urnfield groups from the north marks the arrival of Celtic-speaking peoples, as we can infer from the increase in Central European admixture, while the expansion of anthropomorphic stelae from the north-west must have marked the expansion of Lusitanian.

Vasconic was spoken in both sides of the Pyrenees, as it was in the Middle Ages.

Wrong. One of the worst mistakes I am seeing in many comments since the paper was published, although admittedly the paper goes around this problem talking about “Modern Basques”. Vasconic toponyms appear south of the Pyrenees only after the Roman conquests, and tribes of the south-western Pyrenees and Cantabrian regions were likely Celtic-speaking peoples. Aquitanians (north of the western Pyrenees) are the only known ancient Vasconic-speaking population in proto-historic times, ergo the arrival of Bell Beakers in Iberia was most likely accompanied by Indo-European languages which were later replaced by Celtic expanding from Central Europe, and Iberian expanding from south-east Iberia, and only later with Latin and Vasconic.

Ligurian is non-Indo-European, and Lusitanian is Celtic-like, so Iberia must have been mostly non-Indo-European-speaking.

The fragmentary material available on Ligurian is enough to show that phonetically it is a NWIE dialect of non-Celtic, non-Italic nature, much like Lusitanian; that is, unless you follow laryngeals up to Celtic or Italic, in which case you can argue anything about this or any other IE language, as people who reconstruct laryngeals for Baltic in the common era do.

EDIT (19 Mar 2019): It was not clear enough from this paragraph, because Ligurian-like languages in NE Iberia is just a hypothesis based on the archaeological connection of the whole southern France Bell Beaker region. My aim was to repeat the idea that Old European hydro-toponymy is older in NE Iberia (as almost anywhere in Iberia) than Iberian toponymy, so the initial hypothesis is that:

  1. a Palaeo-European language (as Villar puts it) expanded into most regions of Iberia in ancient times (he considered at some point the Mesolithic, but that is obviously wrong, as we know now); then
  2. Celts expanded at least to the Ebro River Basin; then
  3. Iberians expanded to the north and replaced these in NE Iberia; and only then
  4. after the Roman invasion, around the start of the Common Era, appear Vasconic toponyms south of the Pyrenees.

Lusitanian obviously does not qualify as Celtic, lacking the most essential traits that define Celticness…Unless you define “(Para-)Celtic” as Pre-Proto-Celtic-like, or anything of the sort to support some Atlantic continuity, in which case you can also argue that Pre-Italic or Pre-Germanic are Celtic, because you would be essentially describing North-West Indo-European

If Basques have R1b, it’s because of a culture of “matrilocality” as opposed to the “patrilocality” of Indo-Europeans

So wrong it hurts my eyes every time I read this. Not only does matrilocality in a regional group have few known effects in genetics, but there are many well-documented cases of population replacement (with either ancestry or Y-DNA haplogroups, or both) without language replacement, without a need to resort to “matrilineality” or “matrilocality” or any other cultural difference in any of these cases.

In fact, it seems quite likely now that isolated ancient peoples north of the Pyrenees will show a gradual replacement of surviving I2a lineages by neighbouring R1b, while early Iberian R1b-DF27 lineages are associated with Lusitanians, and later incoming R1b-DF27 lineages (apart from other haplogroups) are most likely associated with incoming Celts, which must have remained in north-central and central-east European groups.

NOTE. Notice how R1a is fully absent from all known early Indo-European peoples to date, whether Iberian IE, British IE, Italic, or Greek. The absence of R1a in Iberia after the arrival of Celts is even more telling of the origin of expanding Celts in Central Europe.

I haven’t had enough time to add Iberian samples to my spreadsheet, and hence neither to the ASoSaH texts nor maps/PCAs (and I don’t plan to, because it’s more efficient for me to add both, Asian and Iberian samples, at the same time), but luckily Maciamo has summed it up on Eupedia. Or, graphically depicted in the paper for the southeast:

Y chromosome haplogroup composition of individuals from southeast Iberia during the past 2000 years. The general Iberian Bronze and Iron Age population is included for comparison. Modified from Olalde et al. (2019).

Does this continued influx of Y-DNA haplogroups in Iberia with different cultures represent permanent changes in language? Are, therefore, modern Iberian languages derived from Lusitanian, Sorothaptic/Celtic, Greek, Phoenician, East or West Germanic, Hebrew, Berber, or Arabic languages? Obviously not. Same with Italy (see the recent preprint on modern Italians by Raveane et al. 2018), with France, with Germany, or with Greece.

If that happens in European regions with a known ancient history, why would the recent expansions and bottlenecks of R1b in modern Basques (or N1c around the Baltic, or R1a in Slavs) in the Middle Ages represent an ancestral language surviving into modern times?


If something is clear from Narasimhan, Patterson, et al. (2018), is that we know finally the timing of the introduction and expansion of R1a-Z645 lineages among Indo-Iranians.

We could already propose since 2015 that a slow admixture happened in the steppes, based on archaeological finds, due to settlement elites dominating over common peoples, coupled with the known Uralic linguistic traits of Indo-Iranian (and known Indo-Iranian influence on Finno-Ugric) – as I did in the first version of the Indo-European demic diffusion model.

The new huge sampling of Sintashta – combined with that of Catacomb, Poltavka, Potapovka, Andronovo, and Srubna – shows quite clearly how this long-term admixture process between Uralic peoples and Indo-Iranians happened between forest-steppe CWC (mainly Abashevo) and steppe groups. The situation is not different from that of Iberia ca. 2500-2000 BC; from Narasimhan, Patterson, et al. (2018):

We combined the newly reported data from Kamennyi Ambar 5 with previously reported data from the Sintashta 5 individuals (10). We observed a main cluster of Sintashta individuals that was similar to Srubnaya, Potapovka, and Andronovo in being well modeled as a mixture of Yamnaya-related and Anatolian Neolithic (European agriculturalist-related) ancestry.

Even with such few words referring to one of the most important data in the paper about what happened in the steppes, Wang et al. (2018) help us understand what really happened with this simplistic concept of “steppe ancestry” regarding Yamna vs. Corded Ware differences:


As with Iberia (or any prehistoric region), the details of how exactly this language change happened are not evident, but we only need a plausible explanation coupled with archaeology and linguistics. Poltavka, Potapovka, and Sintashta samples – like the few available Iberian ones ca. 2500-2000 BC – offer a good picture of the cohabitation of R1b-L23 (mainly Z2103) and R1a-Z645 (mainly Z93+): a glimpse at the likely presence of R1a-Z93 within settlements – which must have evolved as the dominant elites – in a society where the majority of the population was initially formed by nomad herders (probably most R1b-Z2103), who were usually buried outside of the main settlements.

Will the upcoming Narasimhan, Patterson et al. (2019) deal with this problem of how R1a-M417 replaced R1b-M269, and how the so-called “Steppe_MLBA” (i.e. Corded Ware) ancestry admixed with “Steppe_EMBA” (i.e. Yamnaya) ancestry in the steppes, and which one of their languages survived in the region (that is, the same the Reich Lab has done with Iberia)? Not likely. The ‘genetic wars’ in Iberia deal with haplogroup R1b-P312, and how it was neither ‘native’ nor associated with Basques and non-Indo-European peoples in general. The ‘genetic wars’ in South Asia are concerned with the steppe origin of R1a, to prove that it is not a ‘native’ haplogroup to India, and thus neither are Indo-Aryan languages. To each region a politically correct account of genetic finds, with enough care not to fully dismiss national myths, it seems.

NOTE. Funnily enough, these ‘genetic wars’ are the making of geneticists since the 1990s and 2000s, so we are still in the midst of mostly internal wars caused by what they write. Just as genetic papers of the 2020s will most likely be a reaction to what they are writing right now about “steppe ancestry” and R1a. You won’t find much change to the linguistic reconstruction in this whole period, except for the most multicolored glottochronological proposals…

The first author of the paper has engaged, as far as I could see in Twitter, in dialogue with Hindu nationalists who try to dismiss the arrival of steppe ancestry and R1a into South Asia as inconclusive (to support the potential origin of Sanskrit millennia ago in the Indus Valley Civilization). How can geneticists deal with the real problem here (the original ethnolinguistic group expanding with Corded Ware), when they have to fend off anti-steppists from Europe and Asia? How can they do it, when they themselves are part of the same societies that demand a politically correct presentation of data?

This is how the data on the most likely Indo-Iranian-speaking region should be presented in an ideal world, where – as in the Iberia paper – geneticists would look closely to the Volga-Ural region to discover what happened with Proto-Indo-Iranians from their earliest to their latest stage, instead of constantly looking for sites close to the Indus Valley to demonstrate who knows what about modern Indian culture:

Tentative map of the Late PIE and Indo-Iranian community in the Volga-Ural steppes since the Eneolithic. Proportion of ancestry derived from central European Corded Ware peoples. Colors indicate the Y-chromosome haplogroup for each male. Red lines represent period of admixture. Modified from Olalde et al. (2019).

Now try and tell Hindu nationalists that Sanskrit expanded from an Early Bronze Age steppe community of R1b-rich nomadic herders that spoke Pre-Indo-Iranian, which was dominated and eventually (genetically) mostly replaced by elite Uralic-speaking R1a peoples from the Russian forest, hence the known phonetic (and some morphological) traits that remained. Good luck with the Europhobic shitstorm ahead..


Iberian cultures, already with a majority of R1b lineages, show a clear northward expansion over previously Urnfield-like groups of north-east Iberia and Mediterranean France (which we now know probably represent the migration of Celts from central Europe). Similarly, Eastern Balts already under a majority of R1a lineages expanded likely into the Baltic region at the same time as the outlier from Turlojiškė (ca. 1075 BC), which represents the first obvious contacts of central-east Europe with the Baltic.

Iberia shows a more recent influx of central and eastern Mediterranean peoples, one of which eventually succeeded in imposing their language in Western Europe: Romans were possibly associated mainly with R1b-U152, apart from many other lineages. Proto-Slavs probably expanded later than Celts, too, connected to the disintegration of the Lusatian culture, and they were at some point associated with R1a-M458 and R1a-Z280(xZ92) lineages, apart from others already found in Early Slavs.

PCA of central-eastern European groups which may have formed the Balto-Slavic-speaking community derived from Bell Beaker, evident from the position ‘westwards’ of CWC in the PCA, and surrounding cultures. Left: Early Bronze Age. Right: Tollense Valley samples.

This parallel between Iberia and eastern Europe is no coincidence: as Europe entered the Bronze Age, chiefdom-based systems became common, and thus the connection of ancestry or haplogroups with ethnolinguistic groups became weaker.

What happened earlier (and who may represent the Pre-Balto-Slavic community) will be clearer when we have enough eastern European samples, but basically we will be able to depict this admixture of NWIE-speaking BBC-derived peoples with Uralic-speaking CWC-derived groups (since Uralic is known to have strongly influenced Balto-Slavic), similar to the admixture found in Indo-Iranians, more or less like this:

Tentative map of the North-West Indo-European and Balto-Slavic community in central-eastern Europe since the East Bell Beaker expansion. Proportion of ancestry derived from Corded Ware peoples. Colors indicate the Y-chromosome haplogroup for each male. Red lines represent period of admixture. Modified from Olalde et al. (2019).

The Early Scythian period marked a still stronger chiefdom-based system which promoted the creation of alliances and federation-like groups, with an earlier representation of the system expanding from north-eastern Europe around the Baltic Sea, precisely during the spread of Akozino warrior-traders (in turn related to the Scythian influence in the forest-steppes), who are the most likely ancestors of most N1c-V29 lineages among modern Germanic, Balto-Slavic, and Volga-Finnic peoples.

Modern haplogroup+language = ancient ones?

It is not difficult to realize, then, that the complex modern genetic picture in Eastern Europe and around the Urals, and also in South Asia (like that of the Aegean or Anatolia) is similar to the Iron Age / medieval Iberian one, and that following modern R1a as an Indo-European marker just because some modern Indo-European-speaking groups showed it was always a flawed methodology; as flawed as following R1b for ancient Vasconic groups, or N1c for ancient Uralic groups.

Why people would argue that haplogroups mean continuity (e.g. R1b with Basques, N1c with Finns, R1a with Slavs, etc.) may be understood, if one lives still in the 2000s. Just like why one would argue that Corded Ware is Indo-European, because of Gimbutas’ huge influence since the 1960s with her myth of “Kurgan peoples”. Not many denied these haplogroup associations, because there was no reason to do it, and those who did usually aligned with a defense of descriptive archaeology.

However, it is a growing paradox that some people interested in genetics today would now, after the Iberian paper, need to:

  • accept that ancient Iberians and probably Aquitanians (each from different regions, and probably from different “Basque-Iberian dialects” in the Chalcolithic, if both were actually related) show eventually expansions with R1b-L23, the haplogroup most obviously associated with expanding Indo-Europeans;
  • acknowledge that modern Iberians have many different lineages derived from prehistoric or historic peoples (Celts, Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Jews, Goths, Berbers, Arabs), which have undergone different bottlenecks, the last ones during the Reconquista, but none of their languages have survived;
  • realize that a similar picture is to be found everywhere in central and western Europe since the first proto-historic records, with language replacement in spite of genetic continuity, such as the British Isles (and R1b-L21 continuity) after the arrival of Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, or Normans;
  • but, at the same time, continue blindly asserting that haplogroup R1a + “steppe ancestry” represent some kind of supernatural combination which must show continuity with their modern Indo-Iranian or Balto-Slavic language from time immemorial.
Replacement of R1b-L23 lineages during the Early Bronze Age in eastern Europe and in the Eurasian steppes: emergence of R1a in previous Yamnaya and Bell Beaker territories. Modified from EBA Y-DNA map.

Behave, pretty please

The ‘conservative’ message espoused by some geneticists and amateur genealogists here is basically as follows:

  • Let’s not rush to new theories that contradict the 2000s, lest some people get offended by granddaddy not being these pure whatever wherever as they believed, and let’s wait some 5, 10, or 20 years, as long as necessary – to see if some corner of the Yamna culture shows R1a, or some region in north-eastern Europe shows N1c, or some Atlantic Chalcolithic sample shows R1b – to challenge our preferred theories, if we actually need to challenge anything at all, because it hurts too much.
  • Just don’t let many of these genetic genealogists or academics of our time be unhappy, pretty please with sugar on top, and let them slowly adapt to reality with more and more pet theories to fit everything together (past theories + present data), so maybe when all of them are gone, within 50 or 70 years, society can smoothly begin to move on and propose something closer to reality, but always as politically correct as possible for the next generations.
  • For starters, let’s discuss now (yet again) that Bell Beakers may not have been Indo-European at all, despite showing (unlike Corded Ware) clearly Yamna male lineages and ancestry, because then Corded Ware and R1a could not have been Indo-European and that’s terrible, so maybe Bell Beakers are too brachycephalic to speak Indo-European or something, or they were stopped by the Fearsome Tisza River, or they are not pure Dutch Single Grave in The South hence not Indo-European, or whatever, and that’s why Iron Age Iberians or Etruscans show non-Indo-European languages. That’s not disrespectful to the history of certain peoples, of course not, but talking about the evident R1a-Uralic connection is, because this is The South, not The North, and respect works differently there.
  • Just don’t talk about how Slavs and Balts enter history more than 1,500 years later than Indo-European peoples in Western and Southern Europe, including Iberia, and assume a heroic continuity of Balts and Slavs as pure R1a ‘steppe-like’ peoples dominating over thousands of kms. in the Baltic, Fennoscandia, eastern Europe, and northern Asia for 5,000 years, with multiple Balto-Slavs-over-Balto-Slavs migrations, because these absolute units of Indo-European peoples were a trip and a half. They are the Asterix and Obelix of white Indo-European prehistory.
  • Perhaps in the meantime we can also invent some new glottochronological dialectal scheme that fits the expansion of Sredni Stog/Corded Ware with (Germano-?)Indo-Slavonic separated earlier than any other Late PIE dialect; and Finno-Volgaic later than any other Uralic dialect, in the Middle Ages, with N1c.
Genetic structure of the Balto-Slavic populations within a European context according to the three genetic systems, from Kushniarevich et al. (2015). Pure Balto-Slavs from…hmm…yeah this…ancient…region…or people…cluster…Whatever, very very steppe-like peoples, the True Indo-Europeans™, so close to Yamna…almost as close as Finno-Ugrians.

To sum up: Iberia, Italy, France, the British Isles, central Europe, the Balkans, the Aegean, or Anatolia, all these territories can have a complex history of periodic admixture and language replacement everywhere, but some peoples appearing later than all others in the historical record (viz. Basques or Slavs) apparently cannot, because that would be shameful for their national or ethnic myths, and these should be respected.

Ignorance of the own past as a blank canvas to be filled in with stupid ethnolinguistic continuity, turned into something valuable that should not be challenged. Ethnonationalist-like reasoning proper of the 19th century. How can our times be called ‘modern’ when this kind of magical thinking is still prevalent, even among supposedly well-educated people?


Haplogroup R1b-M167/SRY2627 linked to Celts expanding with the Urnfield culture


As you can see from my interest in the recently published Olalde et al. (2019) Iberia paper, once you accept that East Bell Beakers expanded North-West Indo-European, the most important question becomes how did its known dialects spread to their known historic areas.

We already had a good idea about the expansion of Celts, based on proto-historical accounts, fragmentary languages, and linguistic guesstimates, but the connection of Celtic with either Urnfield or slightly later Hallstatt/La Tène was always blurred, due to the lack of precise data on population movements.

The latest paper on Iberia is interesting for many details, such as:

  • The express dismissal of the newest pet theory based on the simplistic “steppe ancestry = IE”: the obsessive comparisons of Dutch Bell Beakers as the origin of basically anything that moves in Europe.
  • A discrete influx of North African ancestry in certain samples before the Moorish invasion (which was probably mediated by peoples of North African rather than Levantine admixture).
  • The finding of very Mycenaean-like Greek colonies of the 5th century (interestingly, under R1b lineages).
Modified from section of PCA of ancient samples by Olalde et al. (2019). “IE Iberia” refers to Pre-Celtic Indo-European languages of Iberia, such as Galaico-Lusitanian in the west (see more on Lusitanian), and a potentially Ligurian-related language in the North-East and southern France.

The paper is, however, of particular importance from the perspective of historical linguistics. It confirms that:

  • Celtic-speaking peoples expanded in Iberia likely during the Late Bronze Age – Early Iron Age (probably with the Urnfield culture, before 1000 BC) with North/Central European ancestry.

NOTE. The paper marks what are believed to be the boundaries of non-Indo-European languages during the Iron Age in later times, extrapolating that situation to the past. Mediterranean sites with Iberian traits (ca. 6th century on) were probably non-Indo-European-speaking tribes, but it is unclear what happened in the centuries before their sampling, and there are no clear boundaries. These incoming Celts from central Europe with the Urnfield culture makes it very likely that the Iberian expansion to the north happened later, incorporating thus this central European ancestry in the process. The southern (orientalizing, Tartessian) site of La Angorrilla shows incineration and influence from Phoenician settlers, and their actual language is also far from clear. The other investigated samples, with higher central European contribution, are from Celtiberian sites.

  • The slightly later arrival of (Phoenician, Greek and) Latin-speaking peoples into Iberia is marked by Central/Eastern Mediterranean and North African ancestry.
Expansion of different ancestry components in Iberia during Prehistory. Modified from Olalde et al. (2019) to include labels with populations expanding with each component.

While both confirm what was more or less already known about the oldest attested NWIE dialects, and further support the role of East Bell Beakers in expanding North-West Indo-European, the first part is interesting for two main reasons:

  1. Koch’s Celtic from the West hypothesis, which made a recent comeback with a renewed model based on “steppe ancestry”, is once again rejected in population genomics, as expected. At this point I doubt this will mean anything to the supporters of the theory (because you can propose as many “Celtic-over-Celtic” layers as you want), but if you are not obsessed with autochthonous continuity of Celtic languages in the Atlantic area we might begin to judge the most correct dialectal split (and thus classification) among those proposed to date, based on ancestry and haplogroup expansions.
  2. We believed in the 2000s that the expansion of haplogroup R1b-M167 (TMRCA ca. 1100 BC for YTree or 1700 BC for YFull) was coupled with the expansion of Iberians from the Pyrenees, in turn (thus) closely related to Basques. This non-IE presence has been contested with toponymic data in linguistics, and with the testing of many modern samples and the subsequent discovery of the widespread distribution of the subclade in western and northern Europe. Now it has become even more likely (lacking confirmation with aDNA) that this haplogroup expanded with Celts.

NOTE. Regarding R1b SNPs, YTree has more samples (and thus more SNPs) to work with estimates, due to its connection with FTDNA groups, so it is in principle more reliable (although estimates were calculated in 2017). Nevertheless, the methods to estimate the age of the MRCA are different between YTree and YFull.

YTree estimations of TMRCA for R1b-Z262 (left) and R1b-M167 (right).

Why this is important has to do with the realization that Celts must have expanded explosively in all directions during the estimated range for Common Celtic (ca. 1500-1000 BC), and as such R1b-M167 is probably going to be one of the clear Y-DNA markers of the Celtic expansion, when it appears in the ancient DNA record, maybe in new SNP calls from samples of the Olalde et al. (2019) paper, or in future Urnfield/Hallstatt/La Tène papers.

Sister clades derived from R1b-Z262 (TMRCA ca. 1650 BC for YTree, or 2700 for YFull), although sharing a quite old origin, may have taken part in the same communities that expanded R1b-M167, likely from some point in central Europe, possibly as remnants of a previous (Tumulus culture?) central European expansion, as the sample SZ5 from Szólád (R1b-CTS1595) and the distribution of modern samples suggest.

Left: Modern distribution of upstream clade L176.2 (YFull R1b-CTS4188); Right: Modern distribution of M167. Both include later expansions within Iberia (probably with the Crown of Aragon during the Reconquista). Contour maps of the derived allele frequencies of the SNPs analyzed in Solé-Morata et al. (2017).

EDIT (23 APRIL): In Hernández et al. (2018), the TMRCA of R1b-M167 is reported as 3372-3718 ybp:

The youngest sub-branch, R1b-M167, dates to approximately 3.5 kya (95% CI= 2.5-5.3 kya), i.e. even after the Bronze Age.

Contour (surface) maps displaying the frequencies of Y-chromosome haplogroup and its sub-lineages across Europe and the Mediterranean basin. Modified from Hernández et al. (2018).

NOTE. Admittedly, the maps are mainly based on Iberian samples and certain limited sampling elsewhere, so most of the frequencies displayed in other territories are extrapolated. Since the percentage of R1b-M167 in France is estimated to be ca. 3%, and in Bavaria ca. 5%, the distribution in Central Europe is probably much higher, and around the Mediterranean much lower than represented in them.

The Celtic expansion might not have been a mass migration of peoples replacing all male lines of their controlled territories (as was common in the Neolithic and Chalcolithic), because of the Bronze Age dominant chiefdom-based system that relied on alliances, but it is becoming clear that Early Celts are also going to show the expansion of certain successful male lineages.

Oh, and you can say goodbye to the autochthonous “Vasconic = R1b-DF27” (latest heir of the “Vasconic = R1b-P312”) theory, too, if – for some strange reason – you hadn’t already.

EDIT (16 MAR) Just in case the wording is not clear: the fact that this haplogroup most likely expanded with Celts does not mean that its lineages didn’t become eventually incorporated into Iberian cultures and adopted non-IE languages: some of them probably did at some point, in some regions of northern Iberia, and most were certainly later incorporated to the Roman civilization and spoke Latin, then to the medieval kingdoms with their languages, and so on until the present day… Only those eventually associated with Iron Age Aquitanians may have retained their non-IE language, unless those lineages today associated with Basques were incorporated later to the Basque-speaking regions by expanding medieval kingdoms. A complex picture repeated everywhere in Europe: no haplogroup+language continuity in sight, anywhere.

NOTE: This here is currently the most likely interpretation of data based on estimations of mutations; it is not confirmed with ancient samples.


Iberia: East Bell Beakers spread Indo-European languages; Celts expanded later


New paper (behind paywall), The genomic history of the Iberian Peninsula over the past 8000 years, by Olalde et al. Science (2019).

NOTE. Access to article from Reich Lab: main paper and supplementary materials.


We assembled genome-wide data from 271 ancient Iberians, of whom 176 are from the largely unsampled period after 2000 BCE, thereby providing a high-resolution time transect of the Iberian Peninsula. We document high genetic substructure between northwestern and southeastern hunter-gatherers before the spread of farming. We reveal sporadic contacts between Iberia and North Africa by ~2500 BCE and, by ~2000 BCE, the replacement of 40% of Iberia’s ancestry and nearly 100% of its Y-chromosomes by people with Steppe ancestry. We show that, in the Iron Age, Steppe ancestry had spread not only into Indo-European–speaking regions but also into non-Indo-European–speaking ones, and we reveal that present-day Basques are best described as a typical Iron Age population without the admixture events that later affected the rest of Iberia. Additionally, we document how, beginning at least in the Roman period, the ancestry of the peninsula was transformed by gene flow from North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean.

Interesting excerpts:

From the Bronze Age (~2200–900 BCE), we increase the available dataset (6, 7, 17) from 7 to 60 individuals and show how ancestry from the Pontic-Caspian steppe (Steppe ancestry) appeared throughout Iberia in this period (Fig. 1, C and D), albeit with less impact in the south (table S13). The earliest evidence is in 14 individuals dated to ~2500–2000 BCE who coexisted with local people without Steppe ancestry (Fig. 2B). These groups lived in close proximity and admixed to form the Bronze Age population after 2000 BCE with ~40% ancestry from incoming groups (Fig. 2B and fig. S6).

Y-chromosome turnover was even more pronounced (Fig. 2B), as the lineages common in Copper Age Iberia (I2, G2, and H) were almost completely replaced by one lineage, R1b-M269. These patterns point to a higher contribution of incoming males than females, also supported by a lower proportion of nonlocal ancestry on the X-chromosome (table S14 and fig. S7), a paradigm that can be exemplified by a Bronze Age tomb from Castillejo del Bonete containing a male with Steppe ancestry and a female with ancestry similar to Copper Age Iberians.


For the Iron Age, we document a consistent trend of increased ancestry related to Northern and Central European populations with respect to the preceding Bronze Age (Figs. 1, C and D, and 2B). The increase was 10 to 19% (95% confidence intervals given here and in the percentages that follow) in 15 individuals along the Mediterranean coast where non-Indo-European Iberian languages were spoken; 11 to 31% in two individuals at the Tartessian site of La Angorrilla in the southwest with uncertain language attribution; and 28 to 43% in three individuals at La Hoya in the north where Indo-European Celtiberian languages were likely spoken (fig. S6 and tables S11 and S12).

This trend documents gene flow into Iberia during the Late Bronze Age or Early Iron Age, possibly associated with the introduction of the Urnfield tradition (18). Unlike in Central or Northern Europe, where Steppe ancestry likely marked the introduction of Indo-European languages (12), our results indicate that, in Iberia, increases in Steppe ancestry were not always accompanied by switches to Indo-European languages.

I think it is obvious they are extrapolating the traditional (not that well-known) linguistic picture of Iberia during the Iron Age, believing in continuity of that picture (especially non-Indo-European languages) during the Urnfield period and earlier.

What this data shows is, as expected, the arrival of Celtic languages in Iberia after Bell Beakers and, by extension, in the rest of western Europe. Somewhat surprisingly, this may have happened during the Urnfield period, and not during the La Tène period.

Also important are the precise subclades:

We thus detect three Bronze Age males who belonged to DF27 (154, 155), confirming its presence in Bronze Age Iberia. The other Iberian Bronze Age males could belong to DF27 as well, but the extremely low recovery rate of this SNP in our dataset prevented us to study its true distribution. All the Iberian Bronze Age males with overlapping sequences at R1b-L21 were negative for this mutation. Therefore, we can rule out Britain as a plausible proximate origin since contemporaneous British males are derived for the L21 subtype.

New open access paper Survival of Late Pleistocene Hunter-Gatherer Ancestry in the Iberian Peninsula, by Villalba-Mouco et al. Cell (2019):

BAL0051 could be assigned to haplogroup I1, while BAL003 carries the C1a1a haplogroup. To the limits of our typing resolution, EN/MN individuals CHA001, CHA003, ELT002 and ELT006 share haplogroup I2a1b, which was also reported for Loschbour [73] and Motala HG [13], and other LN and Chalcolithic individuals from Iberia [7, 9], as well as Neolithic Scotland, France, England [9], and Lithuania [14]. Both C1 and I1/ I2 are considered typical European HG lineages prior to the arrival of farming. Interestingly, CHA002 was assigned to haplogroup R1b-M343, which together with an EN individual from Cova de Els Trocs (R1b1a) confirms the presence of R1b in Western Europe prior to the expansion of steppe pastoralists that established a related male lineage in Bronze Age Europe [3, 6, 9, 13, 19]. The geographical vicinity and contemporaneity of these two sites led us to run genomic kinship analysis in order to rule out any first or second degree of relatedness. Early Neolithic individual FUC003 carries the Y haplogroup G2a2a1, commonly found in other EN males from Neolithic Anatolia [13], Starçevo, LBK Hungary [18], Impressa from Croatia and Serbia Neolithic [19] and Czech Neolithic [9], but also in MN Croatia [19] and Chalcolithic Iberia [9].

See also