{"id":634,"date":"2024-04-03T10:02:07","date_gmt":"2024-04-03T10:02:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/barbara-huber.com\/?p=634"},"modified":"2025-02-05T15:52:03","modified_gmt":"2025-02-05T14:52:03","slug":"blog-post-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/paulheggarty.info\/blog\/2024\/04\/03\/blog-post-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Blog Post 1"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n

<\/h2>\n

Journal link:<\/p>\n

\n

Beating the retreat from the Steppe hypothesis<\/h3>\n

Comment by Paul Heggarty on:<\/h4>\n

Lazaridis et al<\/em>. (2025):\u00a0 The genetic origin of Indo-Europeans<\/h4>\n

Nature<\/em> has just released a paper on \u201cThe genetic origin of Indo-Europeans\u201d (Lazaridis et al<\/em>. 2025).\u00a0 Indo-European is a linguistic concept, the name of a family of languages, but this paper presents no language data or analyses.\u00a0 Rather, it reports data and analyses of ancient DNA.<\/p>\n

Although presented as if supporting the Steppe hypothesis of Indo-European origins, the paper\u2019s basic result is actually a retreat from it.\u00a0 Some smoke and mirrors are deployed to cover this retreat, not least in proposing to change what \u2018Indo-European\u2019 actually refers to (page 8).\u00a0 Harvard\u2019s shot was off-target, so they propose moving the goalposts.\u00a0 (See below on this naming issue.)\u00a0 This still does not obscure where the whole language family originated:\u00a0 not<\/u> on the Steppe, as this paper itself reconfirms, only not in such clear terms.\u00a0 Instead, it focuses on asserting the Steppe as the home of most<\/em> of the family, through some self-citation, but introduces no new data on that, and no linguistic data at all.<\/p>\n

Three years ago, Lazaridis et al. (2022) themselves acknowledged that the family\u2019s ultimate origins lie where many have long argued:\u00a0 in \u201cthe highlands of West Asia, the ancestral region\u201d.\u00a0 On page 1 of this new paper, they further subscribe to it being \u201cwidely agreed\u201d that a major ancestry component is \u201cNeolithic people from [the] Zagros and south Caucasus\u201d.\u00a0 Note that Neolithic here entails farmers (crops and animals), and that the Zagros mountains form the \u201chilly flanks\u201d (Braidwood 1960) to the Fertile Crescent, not least in north-western Iran. \u00a0The corresponding aDNA samples in the new paper\u2019s Figure 1b (reproduced below, with some observations) are labelled \u2018Iran\u2019, and in the key specifically \u2018Iran Ganj Dareh N[eolithic]\u2019.\u00a0 The link with (some) early farming origins is clear.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Journal link: Beating the retreat from the Steppe hypothesis Comment by Paul Heggarty on: Lazaridis et al. (2025):\u00a0 The genetic origin of Indo-Europeans Nature has just released a paper on…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-634","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-publications"},"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulheggarty.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/634","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulheggarty.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulheggarty.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulheggarty.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulheggarty.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=634"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/paulheggarty.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/634\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":716,"href":"https:\/\/paulheggarty.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/634\/revisions\/716"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulheggarty.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulheggarty.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulheggarty.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}