The Root of Our Civilization

There seems to be a different major haplogroup to be prevalent in each of four sets of populations that occupy distinct geographic regions and belong to different linguistic branches of the North Caucasian family spoken by the Caucasus populations.

The haplogroup frequencies correlated with geography and, even more strongly, with language. Within haplogroups, a number of haplotype clusters were shown to be specific to individual populations and languages.

The data suggested a direct origin of Caucasus male lineages from the Near East, followed by high levels of isolation, differentiation and genetic drift in situ. Comparison of genetic and linguistic reconstructions covering the last few millennia showed striking correspondences between the topology and dates of the respective gene and language trees, and with documented historical events. Overall, in the Caucasus region, unmatched levels of gene-language co-evolution occurred within geographically isolated populations, probably due to its mountainous terrain.

Hhaplogroup E1b1b1 has a more Mediterranean distribution and is conspicuously absent in the North Caucasus. Unfortunately no downstream markers were typed, but (a) its presence in small amounts in NW Caucasians (1-1.7%) together with a similar low frequency (1.5%) in Georgians, (b) its absolute absence among Nakho-Dagestanians, except for one Lezghin, suggest to me that it arrived to the region from the west, and is probably a low-frequency trace of Ancient Greek colonies of the Black Sea, just as it is associated with Greek colonists in the West Mediterranean and Sicily.

There is a little haplogroup L in the North Caucasus. L-M27 and L-M317 seems concentrated in the Northwest, while L-M357 is found only in Nakh speakers. The detection of L-M357 in North but not South Iran may be related with this population, and also the L-rich population of Syria, especially from the eastern inland area.

Haplogroup T is in this region found in 2 NW Caucasians, 1 Ossete and a couple of Lezgins, but unfortunately with no fine phylogenetic resolution.

At least two population events in the Caucasus are documented archaeologically, which allows additional comparison with these “historical” dates. In both cases, the historical (archaeological) date is similar to a genetic estimate based on the “genealogical” mutation rate.

The correspondence seems remarkable; the only major discrepancy is for Iranic (Indo-European) Ossetes who group with NW Caucasians genetically, which makes sense as the Ossetes are probably to a large extent NW Caucasians that underwent a language shift at the influence of the Alans.

Speaking of the Ossetes, their negligible R1a1-M198 frequency (0.4-0.8%) should be a warning that Iranic steppe nomads does not equal R1a1. While a limited contribution of Alans to the Ossetes is expected, it is not expected that Ossetes will have two of the lowest M198 frequencies in the Caucassus: in all probability R1a1 was not particularly important among Alans, and, by implication Sarmatians.

There seems to be a correspondence between Y-chromosome haplogroups and language groups. Overall, the most frequent haplogroups in the Caucasus were G2a3b1-P303 (12%), G2a1a-P18 (8%), J1*-M267(xP58) (34%), and J2a4b*-M67(xM92) (21%), which together encompassed 73% of the Y chromosomes, while the other 24 haplogroups identified comprise the remaining 27% .

Haplogroup G2a3b1-P303 comprised at least 21% (and up to 86%) of the Y chromosomes in the Shapsug, Abkhaz and Circassians. Haplogroup G2a1a-P18 comprised at least 56% (and up to 73%) of the Digorians and Ironians (both from the Central Caucasus Iranic linguistic group), while not being found at more than 12% (average 3%) in other populations.

Interestingly, G2a3 is one of the lineages of early Central European farmers. G2 is also, curiously, one of the West Eurasian lineages that are found in very small quantities in India, especially among upper caste Hindus. We are beginning to make connections across space and time, even though the patterns are far from clear yet.

Two of the modal haplogroups in this paper are G2a1a-P18 (Iranic, 56-73%) and G2a3b1-P303 (NW Caucasians, 21-86%). Battaglia et al. (2008) also found a high frequency of G2a* in Georgians and Balkars (~30%, also modal in both populations). It appears that G2a is a mainly West (both NW and SW) Caucasian phenomenon within the context of this region.

Haplogroup J2a4b*-M67(xM92) comprised 51-79% of the Y chromosomes in the Ingush and three Chechen populations (North-East Caucasus, Nakh linguistic group), while, in the rest of the Caucasus, its frequency was not higher than 9% (average 3%).

To make things more interesting, the Nakh groups (Ingush and Chechens) have J2a4b*-M67(xM92) as their modal haplogroup. Nakh is also a Northeast Caucasian language subfamily, like Dagestani, and indeed NE Caucasian is also called Nakho-Daghestanian.

Haplogroup J1*-M267(xP58) comprised 44-99% of the Avar, Dargins, Kaitak, Kubachi, and Lezghins (South-East Caucasus, Dagestan linguistic group) but was less than 25% in Nakh populations and less than 5% in the rest of Caucasus.

Surpisingly, even in the Caucasus and in Anatolia, the region where this haplogroup is thought to have originated, there are wide discrepancies between regions. For example, the Kubachi and Dargins from Dagestan in the Northeast Caucasus have over 80% of J1 lineages, while in their Ingush neighbours, 200 km to the north, it barely reaches 3%. East Anatolia around Lake Van sees over 30% of J1, whereas south-west Anatolia has only 2%. Even within Kurdistan frequencies vary greatly. The small sample sizes for each region is surely to blame.

The prevalence of J1*-M267(xP58) in Dagestan is well known (or suspected) from previous studies. Notice that J-P58, if we use the genealogical rate has an age of ~5.4ky in Semitic groups, and this is in concordance with the 5,750 years ago origin of Semitic languages based on Bayesian phylogenetics. So, it is clear that part of haplogroup J1 was prevalent in ancient Semitic groups, another, disjoint part in ancient Dagestani groups.

It would be tempting to think that Proto-Nakho-Dagestanians were J1-dominated, as J1 exists in both Nakh (16-25%) and Dagestani (58-99%) groups, whereas J2a4b-M67 (the Nakh modal haplogroup) is nearly completely absent in Dagestanians.

Like haplogroup G, J1 might have been of the principal lineages to bring domesticated animals to Europe. Both G and J1 reach their maximal frequencies in the Caucasus, some ethnic groups being almost exclusively J1 (Kubachis, Kaitaks, Dargins, Avars), while others have extremely high levels of G (Shapsugs, North Ossetians). Most of the ethnic groups in the North Caucasus have between 20 and 40% of each haplogroup, which are by far their two dominant haplogroups.

Haplogroup J1 is a Middle Eastern haplogroup, which probably originated in eastern Anatolia, near Lake Van in central Kurdistan. Eastern Anatolia being the region where goats, sheep and cattle were first domesticated in the Middle East, haplogroup J1 is almost certainly linked to the expansion of pastoralist lifestyle throughout the Middle East and Europe.

The Haplogroup J1e found among Dagestanis in high Percentage is found in high Percentage among Semitic further south. This Haplogroup originated somewere in Mesopotamia, Zagros migrated North and South (Arabian Peninsula). In South it mutated to a own subclade what is distinct from Caucasian.

In Arabic countries, J1 climaxes among the Marsh Arabs of South Iraq (81%), the Sudanese Arabs (73%), the Yemeni (72%), the Bedouins (63%), the Qatari (58%), the Saudi (40%), the Omani (38%) and the Palestinian Arabs (38%). High percentages are also observed in the United Arab Emirates (35%), coastal Algeria (35%), Jordan (31%), Syria (30%), Tunisia (30%), Egypt (21%) and Lebanon (20%). Most of the Arabic J1 belongs to the J1c3 variety.

While Proto-Indo-European is dated to 6400 BC., in agreement with the work of Gray and Atkinson, Kitchen et al. (2009) estimate for Semitic languages somewhat less than 3,750 BC. All in all, it’s good to see different researchers using different techniques, but coming up with similar solutions.

It is increasingly clear that while the Proto-Indo-Europeans originated in the Neolithic Near East, the Proto-Semites followed them by about three thousand years. In the latter case there is also a Y-chromosome marker (J-P58) with an apparent age in impeccable agreement with the linguistic evidence, now that the genealogical-“evolutionary” mutation wars seem to have been won.

This also brings into focus the weakness of the argument that Anthony (2007) (p. 76) brings to the table by hypothesizing that the first farmers of northern Syria were Afro-Asiatic speakers like the Semites of the Near Eastern lowlands. Semites come into the picture 5,000 years after the onset of the Neolithic, and 3,000 years after the Proto-Indo-Europeans. Their relationship with Afroasiatic speakers of Africa make it quite likely that they lived in the south, probably in Arabia, and certainly not in eastern Anatolia or northern Syria.

Indeed, the recent discovery that haplogroup J1*(xP58) is associated with Northeast Caucasian languages, together with the absence or paucity of J1 in most African Afroasiatic speakers suggests to me that the J-P58 Proto-Semites may be the result of the transfer of an African language on a basically West Asian population. Such a scenario might also explain some of the -incorrectly quantified, but nonetheless existent- African genetic components in both Jews and Arabs, as well as the pastoralist/dry-climate J1 associations.

Frequencies og haplogroup J1 in Europe and West Asia tend to vary considerably from one regional community to the next. The highest local percentages in Europe are found in Greece, Italy, France, Spain and Portugal and hardly ever exceed 5% of the population. However Italy, France and Spain also have areas where J1 appears completely absent. Even in northern Europe, where the nation-wide frequencies are below 0.5%, very localised pockets of J1 have been observed in Scotland, England, Belgium, Germany and Poland. Larger sample sizes are needed to get a clearer picture of the distribution of J1 in Europe.

In the South Caucasus (Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan), haplogroup J2 comes into the admixture and is in fact slightly higher than either J1 or G. Most of the Caucasian J1 is at present J1*, meaning that at present no common SNP has been identified that could form a new subclade. Armenia stands out of the lot by having a substantial J1c3d minority (at least one third of all J1, i.e. roughly 4% of the population).

The Caucasus is most probably the source of Indo-Europeans which migrated Northward and created the Kurgan culture from there they migrated in all directions. The Urartain, Hurrians and Gutians, proberly early Tocharians, are somehow the missing link between Indo-Europeans and Caucasians. My opinion is that this three groups were the first one which separated from Northeast-caucasians (in Dagestan) and created the Proto Indo-Europeans.

I think Proto Indo-Europeans could have been just one of many language in some Caucasus valley that found its way onto the steppes. Goats, sheep & cows were domesticated somewhere in the Middle-East & it’s known that the Proto-Indo-Europeans made a living herding those animals. So maybe some Caucasians went to the Pontic-Caspian steppe to find grassland for their herds, much like the Turks came to eastern Europe for the same reason.

The Lezgians are an ethnic group living predominantly in southern Dagestan and northeastern Azerbaijan and who speak the Lezgian language, one of seven branches of the Northeast Caucasian language family. The Samur languages (also called Nuclear Lezgic) are the principal component of the Lezgic branch of the Northeast Caucasian languages.

The Lezgic languages are relevant to the glottalic theory of Indo-European, as several have undergone the voicing of ejectives that has been postulated but widely derided as improbable in that family. A similar change has taken place in non-initial position in the Nakh languages.

The Northeast Caucasian or Dagestanian (Daghestanian) languages constitute a language family spoken in the Russian republics of Dagestan, Chechnya, Ingushetia, in northern Azerbaijan and northeastern Georgia, as well as in diaspora populations in Russia, Turkey, and the Middle East. They were formerly called Nakho-Dagestanian (Nakh-Dagestanian), and sometimes Caspian, the latter together with Pontic for the Northwest Caucasian languages.

The most common term, Northeast Caucasian, contrasts the three established families of the Caucasus language area: Northeast Caucasian, Northwest Caucasian, and South Caucasian (Kartvelian). This may be shortened to East Caucasian, especially by those linguists who accept the North Caucasian languages as a language family.

Some linguists such as Sergei Starosin think that the Northeast and Northwest Caucasian languages should be joined into a putative North Caucasian family, citing shared vocabulary and typological features as evidence. This proposed family does not usually include the neighboring Kartvelian languages. This hypothesis is not well demonstrated.

The older term Nakho-Dagestanian reflected an erstwhile primary division of the family into Nakh and Dagestanian branches, a view which is no longer widely accepted. The rare term Caspian (that is, bordering the Caspian Sea) is only used in opposition to Pontic (that is, bordering the Black Sea) for the Northwest Caucasian languages.

The Lezgic family, along with a couple of other families (Avar–Andic, Tsezic, Lak, Dargin, and Khinalug), forms the Daghestanian part of the Nakh–Daghestanian language family (the Nakh part is constituted by Chechen, Ingush and related small languages).

Some linguists – notably I. M. Diakonoff and S. Starostin – also see similarities between the Northeast Caucasian family and the extinct languages Hurrian and Urartian. Hurrian was spoken in various parts of the Fertile Crescent in the 3rd and 2nd millennia BC. Urartian was the language of Urartu, a powerful state that existed between 1000 BC or earlier and 585 BC in the area centered on Lake Van in current Turkey.

The two extinct languages have been grouped into the Hurro-Urartian family. Diakonoff proposed the name Alarodian for the union of Hurro-Urartian and Northeast Caucasian. The Alarodian family was first proposed by Fritz Hommel (1854–1936). The term comes from the name that Herodotus used to refer to the kingdom of Urartu.

The connection between the Northeast and North-central families was based on claimed similarities in phonetics and grammar, such as sentence structure and an ergative case system. However, neither of these characteristics is limited to languages of this area, and neither constitutes the extensive evidence required to demonstrate a genetic relationship. The Hurro-Urartian languages were included on the basis of grammatical and lexical similarities. However the genetic relationships between these languages is not clear.

The Proto-Northeast Caucasian language had many terms for agriculture, and Johanna Nichols has suggested that its speakers may have been involved in the development of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent. They had words for concepts such as yoke, as well as fruit trees such as apple and pear that suggest agriculture was already well developed when the proto-language broke up.

”Yoke“, one of the most archaic and productive terms in Indo-European, present from prehistorical times in all the branches of the family, could be one of the keys for unlocking the enigma of the original cradle of the Indo-Europeans. ”Yoke“ appears to be one of the linguistic proofs that the ancestors of today‘s Europeans, Iranians and Indians spread out from a region in the vicinity of the Caucasus, and that the Proto-Indo-Europeans were in direct contact with both South Caucasians and North Caucasians.

The term is of vast antiquity and presents a remarkably regular form: Hittite iúkan, Vedic Sanskrit (yugá, meaning yoke, but also: pair; yoga comes from the same root), Ancient Greek ζυγόν (zugόn), Latin iugum, Gothic juk (German Joch), Old Church Slavonic igo, Lithuanian jungas, etc. So enduring was this root that it remains productive to our days in the sense of (re)uniting something, as under a “yoke”, into a “junc-tion”… that when the modern Lithuanian language had to invent the notion of a political “Union”, as in the European Union, it used the old jug-/jung- : Europos Są-junga…

Gamkrelidze and Ivanov, in their groundbreaking The Indo-European language and the Indo-Europeans (Индоевропейский язык и индоевропейцы, Tbilisi, 1984) have convincingly reorganised the traditionally accepted phonetic system of the Proto-Indo-European by giving the voiced consonants (b, g, d) the value of the Caucasian ejectives, which are unvoiced gutturals (p‘, t‘, q‘, this last sounding like the Semitic q). From this perspective, the famous law of the German ”Lautvershiebung“, whereby the Indo-European voiced sounds become un-voiced in German (cf. Latin iug-um – Gothic juk) loses its relevance: it is Germanic (and Armenian) which prove to be more archaic, closer to the pan-Caucasian sound system, while the other branches of the I-E family have innovated by voicing the q‘ into g. The root would thus be: *juq‘ -, and not *jug-, as accepted historically.

From Indo-European, the term has passed, in its voiced form, as an archaic loan into the South-Caucasian (Kartvelian) languages: Georgian uγel, Mingrelian uγu, Svan uγwa.

The Indo-european etymologies proposed traditionally are unconvincing and circular, like: ”from verb *yeug- (join, unite)“. It is here that a comparison, never effectuated, with the North-East Caucasian languages, totally unrelated to the South Caucasian Kartvelian languages, brings a possible solution.

Chechen, and all the languages from Daghestan, present a rare particularity: they are ”class languages“. All words are distributed between various nominal classes corresponding to our grammatical genders. Where Indo-European languages have historically three grammatical genders, Chechen has six. These are indicated by a set of four markers appended initially to words: v- indicates masculinity, like in: vasha = brother; y- indicates a female person, like in

yisha = sister, but it can also be the mark of some neuters, alternating with b- and d- to produce various notions. The set of v-, y-, b-, d- initial markers are also appended to verbs and adjectives, which change their beginning according to the gender of the ruling noun.

This creates a heavy but predictable grammatical machinery, and also an easily analysable lexical corpus. Thus, from the root -q‘-, ”to divide“ / ”to reunite”, Chechen possesses the set vuq‘, yuq‘, buq‘, duq‘ : thus, duq‘ and vuq‘ commonly indicate the yoke; yuq‘ is the ”middle“, or a ”pair“… buq‘ is the spine, the backbone, or a mountain ridge…

The Chechen series is extremely productive, yuq‘ being the most used, and, besides various verbs with meanings going from ”reunite“ to ”put together“ and ”put in the middle“ (cf. Latin derivatives, from jugum > con-jugare, sub-jugare, etc., or Sanskrit yoga, from the same root), yuq‘ can also take on temporal values: Chechen yuq‘-yuq‘a = from time to time, periodically (cf. Sanskrit yugá, ”period of time“, in parallel with ”yoke“); and, very important from a socio-cultural point of view, to get married, to ”go under the same yoke“: hence the Latin con-iux, spouse, (under the same con-jug-al yoke), the notion being borrowed as well into Old Georgian: me-uγle = spouse.

The morphological and semantical concordances between Chechen yuq‘ (and the other Daghestani languages) on the one hand, Indo-European *yuq‘ on the other are too systematical, coherent and symmetrical to be due to mere chance. The disturbing fact is that the root *yuq‘- is unexplained in Indo-European, while in Chechen-Daghestani it is native, part of the system of indicators of nominal classes y-, v-, b-, d-…

The word seems thus to have been borrowed by the Indo-Europeans from the North-Caucasians… together with the tool it designated : the ”yoke“ itself.

Quite consistent with the idea that Proto-Indo-European is related to the West Asian autosomal component. This component occurs at a a level  greater than 50% level in modern North Caucasian speakers, is absent in Europe prior to 5,000 years ago, and occurs at levels greater or equal to 10% in most present-day Indo-European speakers from Europe.

There seems to have been early contacts between Proto-Indo-European (PIE) and the languages of the Caucasus. Although we were not able to find certain proofs of lexical borrowing between PIE and North Caucasian, there are a few undeniable areal-typological parallels in phonology and grammar.

Some features generally attributed to PIE are not found in the majority of languages of North and Northeastern Eurasia, while they are common, or universally present, in the languages of the Caucasus (especially North Caucasus). Those features include the high consonant-to-vowel ratio, tonal accent, number suppletion in personal pronouns, the presence of gender and the morphological optative and, possibly, the presence of glottalized consonants and ergativity.

In the early 6th century BC, the Urartian Kingdom was replaced by the Armenian Orontid dynasty. In the trilingual Behistun inscription, carved in 521/0 BC by the order of Darius the Great of Persia, the country referred to as Urartu in Assyrian is called Arminiya in Old Persian and Harminuia in Elamite.

Aleppo has scarcely been touched by archaeologists, since the modern city occupies its ancient site. The site has been occupied from around 5000 BC, as excavations in Tallet Alsauda show.

Aleppo appears in historical records as an important city much earlier than Damascus.

The first record of Aleppo comes from the third millennium BC, when Aleppo was the capital of an independent kingdom closely related to Ebla, known as Armi to Ebla and Armani to the Akkadians. Giovanni Pettinato describes Armi as Ebla’s alter ego. Naram-Sin of Akkad destroyed both Ebla and Armani in the 23rd century BC. In the Old Babylonian period, Aleppo’s name appears as Ḥalab (Ḥalba) for the first time.

Scholars such as Carl Friedrich Lehmann-Haupt (1910) believed that the people of Urartu called themselves Khaldini after their god Khaldi.

Chaldea or Chaldæa, from Greek Chaldaia; Akkadian: Ḫaldu; Hebrew: Kaśdim; Aramaic: Kaldo) was a marshy land located in south eastern Mesopotamia which came to rule Babylon briefly. Tribes of Semitic settlers who arrived in the region from the 10th century BC became known as the Chaldeans or the Chaldees. The Hebrew Bible uses the term Kaśdim and this is translated as Chaldaeans in the Septuagint.

The shared paternal lineages observed today between Armenians and Assyrians, such as R-M269 and J1*, converge, perhaps, 2000-4000 years ago. With the caveat, of course, that predictions based on STR markers may lack significant precision. If we exclude Y-DNA T, Assyrians and Caucasian populations, particularly those of Dagestan, may share a close relationship, as far as the Y chromosome is concerned. Assyrians also show Y chromosome affinities to minority populations of the Levant and Mesopotamia, such as the Syrian Alawites (R-M269), Druze (R-M269 and T), “Babylonian” Jews (T), and Marsh Arabs (J1*).

The ancestral element(s) captured by the Dodecad K12b “Caucasus” component may represent the principal element of the ancient Levantines and Mesopotamians. At least, in my opinion, as far back as the 1st millennium BCE. I believe this to be a possibility because even in the extreme SW Levant (not far from the Asian/African continental divide), the “Caucasus” component remains significant.

Assyria (Akkadian: Aššur), a Semitic Akkadian kingdom, existing from the late 25th or early–2400 until 605 BC., was centered on the Upper Tigris river, in northern Mesopotamia (present day Northern Iraq). The Assyrians came to rule powerful empires at several times. It was named for its original capital, the ancient city of Aššur (Akkadian: Aššūrāyu; Aramaic: Aṯur; Hebrew: Aššûr; Arabic: Ašūr).

As part of the greater Mesopotamian civilization, Assyria was, at its height, a highly advanced nation for its time in terms of architecture, engineering, agriculture, economics, civil service, mathematics, medicine, literature, military technology, law, astronomy and libraries/record keeping. A number of Assyrian kings showed an early interest in botany and zoology also.

Assyria was also sometimes known as Subartu prior to the rise of the city state of Ashur and, after its fall, from 605 BC through to the late 7th century AD variously as Athura and also referenced as Atouria according to Strabo, Syria (Greek), Assyria (Latin) and Assuristan. The term Assyria can also refer to the geographic region or heartland where Assyria, its empires and the Assyrian people were and still are centred. The modern Assyrian Christian minority in northern Iraq, north east Syria, south east Turkey and north west Iran are the descendants of the ancient Assyrians (see Assyrian continuity).

Assyria was originally one of a number of Akkadian city states in Mesopotamia. In the late 24th century BC, Assyrian kings were regional leaders only, and subject to Sargon of Akkad, who united all the Akkadian Semites and Sumerian-speaking peoples of Mesopotamia under the Akkadian Empire, which lasted from c. 2334 BC to 2154 BC. Following the fall of the Akkadian Empire c. 2154 BC, and the succeeding Sumerian Third Dynasty of Ur, there were a number of other competing Amorite states, such as Isin and Larsa, but Mesopotamia eventually coalesced into two distinct nations: Assyria in the north, and Babylonia in the south.

In the Old Assyrian period of the Early Bronze Age, Assyria had been a kingdom of northern Mesopotamia, initially competing with their fellow Sumero-Akkadian states in southern Mesopotamia for dominance of the region, and also with the Hattians and Hurrians to the north in Asia Minor, the Gutians to the east in the Zagros Mountains and the Eblaites and later Amorites in the Levant to the west.

Chaldea as the name of a country is used in two different senses. In the early period it was the name of a small territory in southern Babylonia extending along the northern and probably also the western shores of the Persian Gulf. It is called in Assyrian mat Kaldi “land of Chaldea”. The expression mat Bit Yakin is also used, apparently synonymously. Bit Yakin was likely the chief or capital city of the land. The king of Chaldea is also called the king of Bit Yakin, just as the kings of Babylonia are regularly styled simply king of Babylon, the capital city. In the same way, the Persian Gulf was sometimes called “the Sea of Bit Yakin, instead of “the Sea of the Land of Chaldea.”

Though conquerors, the Chaldeans were rapidly and completely assimilated into the dominant Semitic Akkadian Babylonian culture, as the Amorites before them had been, and after the fall of Babylon in 539 BC the term “Chaldean” was no longer used to describe a specific ethnicity, but rather a socio-economic class.

The homeland of the Semitic Chaldean people was in the far south east of Mesopotamia. It is not certain when they migrated at an unknown period into the country of the Mesopotamian sea-lands about the head of the Persian Gulf. They seem to have appeared there at about the same time that other new Semitic peoples, the Arameans and the Sutu appeared in Babylonia, c. 1000 BC. This was a period of weakness in Babylonia, and its ineffectual kings were unable to prevent new waves of peoples invading and settling in the land.

Though belonging to the same Semitic ethnic group, they are to be differentiated from the Aramean stock; and the Assyrian king Sennacherib, for example, is careful in his inscriptions to distinguish them. When they came to possess the whole of southern Mesopotamia, the name “Chaldean” became synonymous with “Babylonian”, particularly to the Greeks and Jews. In the Hebrew Bible, the prophet Abraham is stated to have originally been from “Ur of the Chaldees” (Ur Kasdim); if this city is to be identified with the Sumerian Ur, it would be within the original Chaldean homeland south of the Euphrates, although Chaldeans were not extant in Mesopotamia at the time of Abraham. On the other hand, the traditional identification with a site in Assyria would then imply the later sense of “Babylonia”, and a few interpreters have additionally tried to identify Abraham’s birthplace with Chaldia, a distinct region in Asia Minor on the Black Sea. According to the Book of Jubilees, Ur Kasdim (and Chaldea) took their name from Ura and Kesed, descendants of Arpachshad.

The language used by the Chaldeans was the Babylonian dialect of Akkadian, the same Semitic language, save for slight peculiarities in sound and in characters, as Assyrian Akkadian. In late periods both the Babylonian and Assyrian dialects of Akkadian ceased to be spoken, and Aramaic took its place across Mesopotamia, and remains the mother tongue of the Assyrian (also known as Chaldo-Assyrian) Christians of Iraq and its surrounds to this day. One form of this widespread language is used in Daniel and Ezra, but the use of the name “Chaldee” to describe it, first introduced by Jerome, is incorrect and a misnomer.

Sumer (from Akkadian Šumeru; Sumerian ki-en-ĝir, approximately “land of the civilized kings” or “native land”) was an ancient civilization and historical region in southern Mesopotamia, modern Iraq, during the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age. Although the earliest historical records in the region do not go back much further than ca. 2900 BC, modern historians have asserted that Sumer was first permanently settled between ca. 4500 and 4000 BC by a non-Semitic people who may or may not have spoken the Sumerian language (pointing to the names of cities, rivers, basic occupations, etc. as evidence). These conjectured, prehistoric people are now called “proto-Euphrateans” or “Ubaidians”, and are theorized to have evolved from the Samarra culture of northern Mesopotamia (Assyria).

The Ubaid period is marked by a distinctive style of fine quality painted pottery which spread throughout Mesopotamia and the Persian Gulf. During this time, the first settlement in southern Mesopotamia was established at Eridu (Cuneiform: NUN.KI), ca. 5300 BC, by farmers who brought with them the Hadji Muhammed culture, which first pioneered irrigation agriculture.

It appears this culture was derived from the Samarran culture from northern Mesopotamia. It is not known whether or not these were the actual Sumerians who are identified with the later Uruk culture. Eridu remained an important religious center when it was gradually surpassed in size by the nearby city of Uruk. The story of the passing of the me (gifts of civilisation) to Inanna, goddess of Uruk and of love and war, by Enki, god of wisdom and chief god of Eridu, may reflect this shift in hegemony.

Inanna (Cuneiform: MUŠ; Sumerian: Inanna; Akkadian: Ištar) is the Sumerian goddess of sexual love, fertility, and warfare. Inanna can be considered the most prominent female deity in ancient Mesopotamia. As early as the Uruk period (ca. 4000–3100 BC), Inanna was associated with the city of Uruk. The famous Uruk Vase (found in a deposit of cult objects of the Uruk III period) depicts a row of naked men carrying various objects, bowls, vessels, and baskets of farm produce, and bringing sheep and goats, to a female figure facing the ruler. This figure was ornately dressed for a divine marriage, and attended by a servant. The female figure holds the symbol of the two twisted reeds of the doorpost, signifying Inanna behind her, while the male figure holds a box and stack of bowls, the later cuneiform sign signifying En, or high priest of the temple. Especially in the Uruk period, the symbol of a ring-headed doorpost is associated with Inanna.

Seal impressions from the Jemdet Nasr period (ca. 3100–2900 BC) show a fixed sequence of city symbols including those of Ur, Larsa, Zabalam, Urum, Arina, and probably Kesh. It is likely that this list reflects the report of contributions to Inanna at Uruk from cities supporting her cult. A large number of similar sealings were found from the slightly later Early Dynastic I phase at Ur, in a slightly different order, combined with the rosette symbol of Inanna, that were definitely used for this purpose. They had been used to lock storerooms to preserve materials set aside for her cult. Inanna’s primary temple of worship was the Eanna, located in Uruk (c.f. Worship).

Inanna’s name derives from Queen of Heaven (Sumerian: nin-anna). The cuneiform sign of Inanna however, is not a ligature of the signs lady (Sumerian: nin; Cuneiform: SAL.TUG) and sky (Sumerian: an; Cuneiform: AN). These difficulties have led some early Assyriologists to suggest that originally Inanna may have been a Proto-Euphratean goddess, possibly related to the Hurrian mother goddess Hannahannah, accepted only latterly into the Sumerian pantheon, an idea supported by her youthfulness, and that, unlike the other Sumerian divinities, at first she had no sphere of responsibilities. The view that there was a Proto-Euphratean substrate language in Southern Iraq before Sumerian is not widely accepted by modern Assyriologists.

It appears that this early culture was an amalgam of three distinct cultural influences: peasant farmers, living in wattle and daub or clay brick houses and practicing irrigation agriculture; hunter-fishermen living in woven reed houses and living on floating islands in the marshes (Proto-Sumerians); and Proto-Akkadian nomadic pastoralists, living in black tents.

The Ubaidians were the first civilizing force in Sumer, draining the marshes for agriculture, developing trade, and establishing industries, including weaving, leatherwork, metalwork, masonry, and pottery.

However, some scholars such as Piotr Michalowski and Gerd Steiner, contest the idea of a Proto-Euphratean language or one substrate language. It has been suggested by them and others, that the Sumerian language was originally that of the hunter and fisher peoples, who lived in the marshland and the east Arabian littoral region, and were part of the Arabian bifacial culture.

Sumerologist Samuel Noah Kramer asserts “No people has contributed more to the culture of mankind than the Sumerians” and yet it is only comparatively recently that we have built up a knowledge of the existence of this ancient culture.

During the 3rd millennium BC, a close cultural symbiosis developed between the Sumerians (who spoke a Language Isolate) and the Semitic Akkadian speakers, which included widespread bilingualism. The influence of Sumerian on Akkadian (and vice versa) is evident in all areas, from lexical borrowing on a massive scale, to syntactic, morphological, and phonological convergence. This has prompted scholars to refer to Sumerian and Akkadian in the 3rd millennium BC as a sprachbund. Sumer was conquered by the Semitic-speaking kings of the Akkadian Empire around 2270 BC (short chronology), but Sumerian continued as a sacred language.

Subarian is the term used by certain scholars (such as I. J. Gelb & E. A. Speiser) to describe the aboriginal language and inhabitants of Subar-Tu an ancient kingdom in Ararat mentioned in Sumerian records.

The theory is that even the Sumerians originally came down from this area or if not then at least the exonym originated there. Arno Poebel & S.N. Kramer pushed this hypothesis even further to suggest that the original tribe carrying the Sumer/Subar ethnonym was actually the original Shem tribe whose memory is recorded in the Bible (sumerian final -r being an amissable consonant in words with a Semitic form).

Tribes called Subarians were living in an area extending to Zagros Mountains in the north Mesopotamia and to Habur and Balih in the west.The Khabur River (Arabic‎ al-khābūr, Kurdish: Xabûr, Syriac ḥābur/khābur, Turkish: Habur) is the largest perennial tributary to the Euphrates in Syrian territory.

Subarians were known as preliminary Asurians by historians and their country was called Subarto. The Assyrians, also known as Syriacs, Chaldeans, and Aramaeans (see names of Syriac Christians), are a distinct ethnic group whose origins lie in ancient Mesopotamia. They are Semitic people, who speak and write distinct dialects of Eastern Aramaic exclusive to Mesopotamia and its immediate surroundings.

Assyrians trace their ancestry back to the Sumero-Akkadian civilisation that emerged in Mesopotamia circa 4000–3500 BC, and in particular to the northern region of the Akkadian lands, which would become known as Assyria by the 24th century BC. The Assyrian nation existed as an independent state, and often a powerful empire, from the 24th century BC until the end of the 7th century BC.

Subarians are known to have established the first country in the history by making Tel Halief city (Tell Half), which was in the south of Ceylanpınar and Rasulayn (Ra’s al-‘Ayn) 40 km.

Important sites that have been excavated include Tell Halaf, Tell Brak, Tell Leilan, Tell Mashnaqa, Tell Mozan and Tell Barri. The region has given its name to a distinctive painted ware found in northern Mesopotamia and Syria in the early 2nd millennium BCE, called Khabur ware. The region of the Khabur River is also associated with the rise of the kingdom of the Mitanni that flourished c.1500-1300 BC.

The Halaf culture, is a prehistoric period which lasted between about 6100 and 5500 BCE. The period is a continuous development out of the earlier Pottery Neolithic and is located primarily in south-eastern Turkey, Syria, and northern Iraq, although Halaf-influenced material is found throughout Greater Mesopotamia.

While the period is named after the site of Tell Halaf in north Syria, excavated by Max von Oppenheim between 1911 and 1927, the earliest Halaf period material was excavated by John Garstang in 1908 at the site of Sakce Gözü, then in Syria but now part of Turkey. Small amounts of Halaf material was also excavated in 1913 by Leonard Woolley at Carchemish, on the Turkish/Syrian border. However, the most important site for the Halaf tradition was the site of Tell Arpachiyah, now located in the suburbs of Mosul, Iraq.

Although no Halaf settlement has been extensively excavated some buildings have been excavated: the tholoi of Tell Arpachiyah, circular domed structures approached through long rectangular anterooms. Only a few of these structures were ever excavated. They were constructed of mud-brick sometimes on stone foundations and may have been for ritual use (one contained a large number of female figurines). Other circular buildings were probably just houses.

The Halaf period was succeeded by the Halaf-Ubaid Transitional period (~5500 – 5200 cal. BCE) and then by the Ubaid period (~5200 – 4000 cal. BCE).

Although the Khabur originates in Turkey, the karstic springs around Ra’s al-‘Ayn are the river’s main source of water. Several important wadis join the Khabur north of Al-Hasakah, together creating what is known as the Khabur Triangle, or Upper Khabur area. From north to south, annual rainfall in the Khabur basin decreases from over 400 mm to less than 200 mm, making the river a vital water source for agriculture throughout history. The Khabur joins the Euphrates near the town of Busayrah.

Shulaveri-Shomu culture is a Late Neolithic/Eneolithic culture that existed on the territory of present-day Georgia, Azerbaijan and the Armenian Highlands. The culture is dated to mid-6th or early-5th millennia BC and is thought to be one of the earliest known Neolithic cultures. The Shulaveri-Shomu culture begins after the 8.2 kiloyear event which was a sudden decrease in global temperatures starting ca. 6200 BC and which lasted for about two to four centuries.

Shulaveri culture predates the Kura-Araxes culture and surrounding areas, which is assigned to the period of ca. 4000 – 2200 BC, and had close relation with the middle Bronze Age culture called Trialeti culture (ca. 3000 – 1500 BC). Sioni culture of Eastern Georgia possibly represents a transition from the Shulaveri to the Kura-Arax cultural complex.

In around ca. 6000–4200 B.C the Shulaveri-Shomu and other Neolithic/Chalcolithic cultures of the Southern Caucasus use local obsidian for tools, raise animals such as cattle and pigs, and grow crops, including grapes. Many of the characteristic traits of the Shulaverian material culture (circular mudbrick architecture, pottery decorated by plastic design, anthropomorphic female figurines, obsidian industry with an emphasis on production of long prismatic blades) are believed to have their origin in the Near Eastern Neolithic (Hassuna, Halaf).

The Kura–Araxes culture or the early trans-Caucasian culture was a civilization that existed from 3400 BC until about 2000 BC, which has traditionally been regarded as the date of its end, but it may have disappeared as early as 2600 or 2700 BC. The earliest evidence for this culture is found on the Ararat plain.

Hurrian and Urartian elements are quite probable, as are Northeast Caucasian ones. Some authors subsume Hurrians and Urartians under Northeast Caucasian as well as part of the Alarodian theory.

The presence of Kartvelian languages was also highly probable. Influences of Semitic languages and Indo-European languages are also highly possible, though the presence of the languages on the lands of the Kura–Araxes culture is more controversial.

In the Armenian hypothesis of Indo-European origins, this culture (and perhaps that of the Maykop culture) is identified with the speakers of the Anatolian languages.

Shupria (Shubria) or Arme-Shupria (Akkadian: Armani-Subartu from the 3rd millennium BC) was a Hurrian-speaking kingdom, known from Assyrian sources beginning in the 13th century BC, located in the Armenian Highland, to the southwest of Lake Van, bordering on Ararat proper. The capital was called Ubbumu. Scholars have linked the district in the area called Arme or Armani, to the name Armenia.

Weidner interpreted textual evidence to indicate that after the Hurrian king Shattuara of Mitanni was defeated by Adad-nirari I of Assyria in the early 13th century BC, he then became ruler of a reduced vassal state known as Shubria or Subartu. The name Subartu (Sumerian: Shubur) for the region is attested much earlier, from the time of the earliest Mesopotamian records (mid 3rd millennium BC).

Together with Armani-Subartu (Hurri-Mitanni), Hayasa-Azzi and other populations of the region such as the Nairi fell under Urartian (Kingdom of Ararat) rule in the 9th century BC, and their descendants, according to most scholars, later contributed to the ethnogenesis of the early Armenians.

Subartu was apparently a polity in Northern Mesopotamia, at the upper Tigris. Most scholars accept Subartu as an early name for Assyria proper on the Tigris, although there are various other theories placing it sometimes a little farther to the east, north or west of there. Its precise location has not been identified. From the point of view of the Akkadian Empire, Subartu marked the northern geographical horizon, just as Martu, Elam and Sumer marked “west”, “east” and “south”, respectively.

The Sumerian mythological epic Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta lists the countries where the “languages are confused” as Subartu, Hamazi, Sumer, Uri-ki (Akkad), and the Martu land (the Amorites). Similarly, the earliest references to the “four quarters” by the kings of Akkad name Subartu as one of these quarters around Akkad, along with Martu, Elam, and Sumer. Subartu in the earliest texts seem to have been farming mountain dwellers, frequently raided for slaves.

Eannatum of Lagash was said to have smitten Subartu or Shubur, and it was listed as a province of the empire of Lugal-Anne-Mundu; in a later era Sargon of Akkad campaigned against Subar, and his grandson Naram-Sin listed Subar along with Armani (Armenians), -which has been identified with Aleppo-, among the lands under his control. Ishbi-Erra of Isin and Hammurabi also claimed victories over Subar.

Three of the 14th century BC Amarna letters, Akkadian cuneiform correspondence found in Egypt, mention Subari as a toponym. All are addressed to Akenaten; in two (EA 108 and 109), Rib-Hadda, king of Byblos, complains that Abdi-Ashirta, ruler of Amurru, had sold captives to Subari, while another (EA 100), from the city of Irqata, also alludes to having transferred captured goods to Subari.

There is also a mention of “Subartu” in the 8th century BC Poem of Erra (IV, 132), along with other lands that have harassed Babylonia. In Neo-Babylonian times (under Nabopolassar, Nebuchadrezzar II and Nabonidus), Subartu was used as a generic term for Assyria. The term was still current under Cambyses II, who mentions Subarian captives.

Subartu may have been in the general sphere of influence of the Hurrians. There are various alternate theories associating the ancient Subartu with one or more modern cultures found in the region, including Armenian or Kurdish tribes. Some scholars, such as Harvard Professor Mehrdad Izady, claim to have identified Subartu with the current Kurdish tribe of Zibaris inhabiting the northern ring around Mosul up to Hakkari in Turkey.

Hurrian names occur sporadically in northwestern Mesopotamia and the area of Kirkuk in modern Iraq by the Middle Bronze Age. Their presence was attested at Nuzi, Urkesh and other sites. They eventually infiltrated and occupied a broad arc of fertile farmland stretching from the Khabur River valley in the west to the foothills of the Zagros Mountains in the east. I. J. Gelb and E. A. Speiser believed Semitic Subarians had been the linguistic and ethnic substratum of northern Mesopotamia since earliest times, while Hurrians were merely late arrivals.

According to the historian Henry Hoyle Howorth (1901), Assyriologist Theophilus Pinches (1908), renowned archaeologist Leonard Woolley (1929) and Assyriologist Ignace Gelb (1944) the Gutians were pale skinned and blonde haired. This identification of the Gutians as fair haired first came to light when Julius Oppert (1877) published a set of tablets he had discovered which described Gutian (and Subarian) slaves as namrum or namrûtum, meaning “light colored” or “fair-skinned”. This racial character of the Gutians as blondes or being light skinned was also taken up by Georges Vacher de Lapouge in 1899 and later by historian Sidney Smith in his Early history of Assyria (1928). Ephraim Avigdor Speiser however criticised the translation of “namrum” as “light colored”.

An article was published by Speiser in the Journal of the American Oriental Society attacking Gelb’s translation. Gelb in response accused Speiser of circular reasoning. In response Speiser claimed the scholarship regarding the translation of “namrum” or “namrûtum” is unresolved.

Linguists classify Armenian as an independent branch of the Indo-European language family. Armenian shares a number of major innovations with Greek, and some linguists group these two languages together with Phrygian and the Indo-Iranian family into a higher-level subgroup of Indo-European, which is defined by such shared innovations as the augment. More recently, others have proposed a Balkan grouping including Greek, Armenian, Phrygian, and Albanian.

The earliest testimony of the Armenian language dates to the 5th century AD (the Bible translation of Mesrob Mashtots). The earlier history of the language is unclear and the subject of much speculation. It is clear that Armenian is an Indo-European language, but its development is opaque. In any case, Armenian has many layers of loanwords and shows traces of long language contact with Hurro-Urartian, Greek and Indo-Iranian.

The large percentage of loans from Iranian languages initially led linguists to erroneously classify Armenian as an Iranian language. The distinctness of Armenian was only recognized when Hübschmann (1875) used the comparative method to distinguish two layers of Iranian loans from the older Armenian vocabulary.

W. M. Austin (1942) concluded that there was an early contact between Armenian and Anatolian languages, based on what he considered common archaisms, such as the lack of a feminine and the absence of inherited long vowels. However, unlike shared innovations (or synapomorphies), the common retention of archaisms (or symplesiomorphy) is not necessarily considered evidence of a period of common isolated development.

Soviet linguist Igor Diakonov (1985) noted the presence in Old Armenian of what he calls a Caucasian substratum, identified by earlier scholars, consisting of loans from the Kartvelian and Northeast Caucasian languages such as Udi. Noting that the Hurro-Urartian peoples inhabited the Armenian homeland in the second millennium b.c., Diakonov identifies in Armenian a Hurro-Urartian substratum of social, cultural, and animal and plant terms such as ałaxin “slave girl” (< Hurr. al(l)a(e)ḫḫenne), cov “sea” (< Urart. ṣûǝ “(inland) sea”), ułt “camel” (< Hurr. uḷtu), and xnjor “apple(tree)” (< Hurr. ḫinzuri). Some of the terms he gives admittedly have an Akkadian or Sumerian provenance, but he suggests they were borrowed through Hurrian or Urartian. Given that these borrowings do not undergo sound changes characteristic of the development of Armenian from Proto-Indo-European, he dates their borrowing to a time before the written record but after the Proto-Armenian language stage.

The Proto-Armenian sound-laws are varied and eccentric (such as *dw- yielding erk-), and in many cases uncertain. For this reason, Armenian was not immediately recognized as an Indo-European branch in its own right, and was assumed to be simply a very eccentric member of the Iranian languages before H. Hübschmann established its independent character in an 1874 publication.

Proto-Indo-European voiceless stops are aspirated in Proto-Armenian, a circumstance that gave rise to an extended version of the Glottalic theory, which postulates that this aspiration may have been sub-phonematic already in PIE. In certain contexts, these aspirated stops are further reduced to w, h or zero in Armenian (PIE *pots, Armenian otn, Greek pous “foot”; PIE treis, Armenian erekʿ, Greek treis “three”).

Another interesting discovery of this study is the lack of European influence in the populations of the North Caucasus. It seems that both R1a1a-M198 and I2a-P37 have a major barrier eastward in the Don river. The former is not strictly a European haplogroup, but it nonetheless experiences a massive drop in frequency, and is negligible everywhere except in Abkhaz-Circassians (NW Caucasus; 10.3-19.7%), with an outlier in Dargins (22%).

This seems to put a limit on the origin of any hypothetical movements across the Eurasian steppe east of the Don river, as haplogroup I2a-P37 is largely absent in Central Asia, and occurs 3 times in 1,525 individuals in this sample. So, while there have been proposals of a Central European origin of some steppe pastoralist groups, these are hard to reconcile with this picture.

As a result of a glotto-chronological approach to the North Caucasian languages, which provides a unique opportunity to make direct comparisons of linguistic and genetic data from the same populations, and lexico-statistical methods to a number of language families using a Bayesian approach to increase the statistical robustness of language classification, to the problem of language time depth.

I have recently speculated about a possible link between the Caucasus region and India based on the appearance of a “Dagestan” component in India, the clear West Asian origin of Ancestral North Indians, as well as a possible linguistic link between Northeast Caucasian, Hurrian, and Indo-European.

A problem with that theory is that the high J1*(xP58) frequency in Dagestan has no counterpart in South Asia. The current study, however, adds data on the Nakh part of the Nakho-Dagestanian (Northeast Caucasian) family, showing this to be J2a4b-M67 dominated. So, while I think that J1*(xP58) may have been present among Proto-Northeast Caucasians, these must have interacted with J2a folk.

J-M67 is clearly intrusive into the Central Caucasus, from the South where a much greater variety of J2a-related lineages is observed among Armenians, North Iranians, and Anatolian Turks.

We now have good coverage of J2a in the entirety of the West Asian region, with the exception of Azerbaijan, and a few patterns are beginning to emerge: The center of the J2a world is somewhere between eastern Turkey, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iran, and Syria. The Caucasus is a northern extension of this world, just as Greece and Italy are its main western extensions, with a strong extension into Central Asia as far as Xinjiang, and well into South Asia all the way to upper caste South Indian Hindus. In the Caucasus itself J-M67 is dominating Nakh speakers, but with little other J2a related variation. In comparison to Nakhs, J2a seems more varied in Georgians, among Ossetes, and among NW Caucasian speakers.

It is hard to make any pronouncements on how J2a spread northwards from its Transcaucasian cradle, but I would think that the Kura-Araxes and Maikop cultures are fairly good candidates for that spread, with the former being J2a dominated, and the latter being more G2a dominated. I would not, however, dismiss a more recent spread of J2a into the region.

The “Dagestan” genetic component is to be found in South Asia and Europe. This component is modal in populations of Dagestan: Dargins from Urkarah, Lezgins, and Kumyks from Stalskoe.

Dargins and Lezgins are Northeast Caucasian speakers, and while Kumyks are Turkic, this is probably due to a small East Eurasian component in their ancestry, and it’s a fair guess that they too are natives to the region who underwent language shift.

Surprisingly, this component occurs at a high frequency in some South Asian populations, including Telugu and Tamil Brahmins from South India. These are believed to be descended from Indo-Aryan speakers from North India and to have maintained a genetic distinctiveness vis a vis the native inhabitants of South India.

There are two reasons why I think I am picking a really meaningful signal: Differentiation between Tamil and Andhra Pradesh Brahmins and non-Brahmin populations from the same states. The levels of the component in India are as high as any other Eurasian populations save for the Dagestanis immediate neighbors in the Caucasus.

Indeed, if you inspect the project members’ results on this component, you will see that the “Dagestan” component is found at many South Asians who belong to other populations than those available in the public references. Without giving anything away, it’s clear that the “Dagestan” component is found frequently in many parts of India.

The question of the origin of the Indo-Aryans is obviously very difficult, and attempts at tracing their origin use either a type of “geolinguistic trigonometry” to make them fit in the broader context of Indo-European dispersals, or rely on archaeological interpretation of the material culture of sites such as Arkaim or the BMAC.

I’ll leave these speculations to those competent to make them, and I will turn to the concrete: the Mitanni of Syro-Anatolia. Here we have what seems to be Indo-Aryan personal/deity names, as well as numerals in what appears to have been a largerly Hurrian-speaking population.

The Kingdom of the Mitanni flourished in the 2nd millennium BC, a time also generally considered to be that of the earliest Indo-Aryan linguistic monument, the Rigveda.

What is most interesting, however, is that Hurrian, like Urartian are part of the Hurro-Urartian language family, which has been linked by some linguists to Northeast Caucasian.

I won’t comment on whether such a link exists, but a relationship between Hurro-Urartian and Northeast Caucasian coupled with the known proximity of Indo-Aryans with Hurrians would immediately supply an explanation for the “Dagestan” component: it might be the legacy of an absorption of Hurrian elements by the ancestors of the Indo-Aryans while the latter were still in the Near East.

By the 2nd millennium BC, the Indo-Aryan element seems to have been well on its way to disappearance in the region, and we find no trace of it after the demise of the Mitanni. A millennium later came the disappearance of Urartian, replaced by various types of Indo-European (such as Armenian and Iranian), and Semitic. We are fortunate that the Indo-Aryans of Syro-Anatolia left traces of their existence before their demise.

The Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex was excavated by Viktor Sarianidi (here is a trailer for a documentary about it, and a Discover magazine article). According to Sarianidi, it is at least Indo-Iranian (if not specifically Indo-Aryan) and can be traced to the Syro-Anatolian region. The formation of the BMAC begins in the 3rd millennium BC, and it ends its existence in the 2nd, at around the time when Indo-Aryans are said to have made their appearance in the subcontinent. The geographical region of the BMAC (aka Oxus River civilization) is pictured on the left.

Whether we trace it to Anatolia, or, more modestly, to Iran, the likely western origin of the BMAC would almost certainly mean that it could have served as a conduit for the dispersal of the mystery “Dagestan” component to India.

The scenario I have outlined above derives the Indo-Aryans from the Transcaucasus where they pick up the “Dagestan” component, south of the Caspian, to the Oxus River civilization (BMAC) of Turkmenistan, to Afghanistan, and then via the Khyber Pass to Pakistan. The Mitanni are seen as Indo-Aryans who “stayed behind” and became thoroughly Hurrianized in the 2nd millennium BC.

We have one piece of evidence of the association of this component with Indo-Aryans: its presence in Brahmins and absence from low caste and tribal groups.

But, there is a different source of evidence that can potentially complete the argument: the non-Indo-European speakers of Pakistan: the Dravidian Brahui and the Burushaski speakers.

My theory predicts that they should have less of this component than Indo-Aryan and Iranian speakers from Pakistan such as Pathans, Sindhi, and Balochi. To test this, I repeated my South Asian experiment, but this time I added these two populations as well.

The East Asian and Southeast Asian components have “folded back” into one, and the Burusho isolate has formed its own cluster. The component is minimized in tribals, low castes, and non-Indo-European groups of Pakistan (Burusho and Brahui).

I am not going to bet that all the details presented in this scenario are correct. But, this theory seems to make sense of many different pieces of evidence (such as the presence of Indo-Aryans in the Near East) and to harmonize with the genetic evidence. The presence of component #1 in Uygurs and in Pathans may mean that it may have been carried by Indo-Iranians rather than specifically Indo-Aryans.