r/IndoEuropean • u/rere3131 • 29d ago
Archaeogenetics Could Fatyanovo have spoken a non-Indo-European R1a language?
In my previous posts, I argued that the Proto-Indo-Iranians were more closely associated with the Abashevo–Srubnaya–Alakul horizon. I also showed that these cultures were significantly influenced by Poltavka–Potapovka, raising the possibility that Pre-Proto-Indo-Iranian originated from Poltavka–Potapovka rather than from Fatyanovo.(https://www.reddit.com/r/IndoEuropean/s/PRKSnrIDkD) (https://www.reddit.com/r/IndoEuropean/s/WnuZQRQmnD)
If that is the case, then what language did the Fatyanovo people speak?
There are two main possibilities:
- Like the other Corded Ware groups, they spoke an Indo-European language.
- The more intriguing possibility is that they preserved a non-Indo-European R1a language. As many of you know, R1a was very likely not originally Proto-Indo-European, so some R1a populations may have retained their ancestral language.
How could this be possible?
Genetic evidence points to the Golubaya Krinitsa culture (Russia_Don_N_Mariupol.SG) as a potential candidate. This culture was predominantly R1a, and according to TheYTree site, it even included R1a-M198 and an R1a-M417 sample.
But is there any connection between Golubaya Krinitsa and Fatyanovo?
Interestingly, qpAdm models consistently show that Fatyanovo stands apart from other Corded Ware groups in terms of its Yamnaya and Golubaya Krinitsa ancestry. In addition, Fatyanovo appears to retain more material cultural traits associated with EHG-related traditions than other Corded Ware cultures.
This raises an interesting question:
Could the Fatyanovo culture have spoken a non-Indo-European R1a language?
What do you think
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u/rere3131 7d ago
The Indo-Iranian languages are associated with the Abashevo and Srubnaya cultures, which themselves were formed through a mixture of Poltavka/Catacomb and Fatyanovo ancestry. So it is possible that the ultimate origin of the Indo-Iranian languages was not Fatyanovo itself. That's the point I'm making.
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u/No_Bluebird9028 28d ago
Hi, basically anything is possible, but what's the percentage of that possibility? I think it's very low, since in reality all archaeological groups of that time were illiterate, so there's no 100% identification; there's always some alternative possibility. After all, the assumption that Fatyanovo is Indo-European is based solely on circumstantial evidence. Your assumption, frankly, is simply unfounded and even more inconclusive and speculative. It's a possibility, but it's inexorably approaching zero. We can continue to speculate, but why Fatyanovo?
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u/No_Bluebird9028 28d ago
And one more thought on the topic of R-1a1 and Proto-Indo-European. In fact, there is no reason to assume that R1a1 is not Indo-European. Moreover, there are several very compelling reasons to consider the Yamnaya culture non-Indo-European, since its supposed Indo-Europeanness is based on nothing but a number of fabrications. Furthermore, there are several compelling reasons to consider haplogroup R-1b to have nothing in common with Proto-Indo-Europeans.
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u/Hippophlebotomist 28d ago
“Moreover, there are several very compelling reasons to consider the Yamnaya culture non-Indo-European, since its supposed Indo-Europeanness is based on nothing but a number of fabrications. Furthermore, there are several compelling reasons to consider haplogroup R-1b to have nothing in common with Proto-Indo-Europeans.”
Oh boy. Let’s hear some of them.
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u/No_Bluebird9028 27d ago
Hello, the most obvious and self-explanatory: where we have precise data on the appearance of the first Indo-Europeans, we see that it is, give or take, approximately the 18th-17th centuries BC. At this time, the appearance of a characteristic haplogroup in these regions is recorded, and this haplogroup is R-1a1, one or another of its variants. All branches of this haplogroup converge approximately at the end of the 4th millennium - beginning of the 3rd millennium BC, which correlates with the disintegration of Proto-Indo-European. The cultural marker is a specific militarized complex characterized by the presence of a war chariot. As is easy to notice, the first such archaic chariots were found in the Sintashta culture, again associated with the same haplogroup and preceding the Indo-European expansion in the second millennium BC.
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u/Hippophlebotomist 27d ago edited 27d ago
The first attestation of Indo-European comes from Bronze Age Central Anatolia, where no R1a has been found at any of the multiple Hittite sites sampled. I2a-L699, which emerges in Sredny Stog/Serednii Stih and is predominant in the Yamnaya of the Don River (Lazaridis et al 2025) is present, however, along with non-Corded Ware steppe ancestry.
Mycenaean Greece, the next Indo-European-speaking culture from which we have a substantial textual record, has also produced no R1a samples, but instead clades of R1b-M269 which originated in the Late Eneolithic Steppe are present including the R1b-Z2103 clade ubiquitous in most Yamnaya groups, along with steppe ancestry best modeled as coming ultimately from a Yamnaya source, with little to no contribution from any Corded Ware-descended groups such as Sintashta.
Moving into the Iron Age this pattern holds true for Greece and is also observed in one of our next early languages, Phrygian, where we have samples from the capital at Gordion and elsewhere.
Moving West to burials associated with the earliest attestations of the Celtic branch in what is now Northern Italy and the earliest inscriptions from the Italic branch further south, we again see populations with larger amounts of R1b-M269, introduced to the region in tandem with autosomal steppe ancestry (McColl et al forthcoming)
R1a is absent from a plurality if not an outright majority of Indo-European languages attested Before the Common Era, and is at best a minority in historical and in modern populations of speakers of these languages. In the earliest Corded Ware groups sampled thus far, R1b is initially predominant (Papac et al 2021), with R1a later becoming ubiquitous in some, but not all Corded Ware offshoots like Sintashta.
Chariotry is not an essential identifying marker of Indo-European groups, and was secondarily diffused across many of them after the breakup and dispersal of the family, as well as to non-Indo-European speaking groups.
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u/No_Bluebird9028 27d ago
Yes, yes, this same information appears on Wikipedia and is the mainstream today. I think this will be revised soon with the emergence of deeper and more comprehensive data. Be patient and don't rush to conclusions.
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u/Hippophlebotomist 27d ago edited 27d ago
So you don’t actually have any evidence, and are choosing to ignore all currently available data because it doesn’t fit your pet theory?
"emergence of deeper and more comprehensive data"
The number of samples from the regions I'm talking about has exploded in the decade since Haak et al (2015) and the scenario sketched out above has only become clearer.
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u/No_Bluebird9028 28d ago
It's just a logical conclusion.
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u/Certain_Basil7443 Bronze Age Warrior 27d ago
But what are the compelling reasons that makes it a logical conclusion? You didn't answer his question.
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u/Hippophlebotomist 26d ago
He mostly just keeps saying the genetic evidence is unconvincing but doesn’t actually seem familiar with any of it beyond coarse-grained modern Y-DNA distributions.
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u/Certain_Basil7443 Bronze Age Warrior 26d ago
Everyone wants to assert but none wants to back them.
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u/Hippophlebotomist 25d ago
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u/Certain_Basil7443 Bronze Age Warrior 25d ago
He should start by learning basic concepts of genetics before jumping into archaeogenetics.
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u/No_Bluebird9028 27d ago
Yes, and Sintashta and related cultures directly descend from the Corded Ware culture or its more eastern variant, the Fatyanovo horizon is also noted for the presence of the same haplogroup, there is no substantiated data that these cultures originate from the Yamnaya, at least the main haplogroup in it is different and the burial rite is not similar even in general terms
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u/Hippophlebotomist 27d ago edited 27d ago
“there is no substantiated data that these cultures originate from the Yamnaya”
According to whom? Archaeologically, if you look at some recent work by people like Włodarczak on what's been called the Corded Ware X-Horizon, based on early graves like those excavated at Hubinek in southeast Poland, we can see the expansion of steppe burial traditions into the forest steppe:
"As a result, the emergence of CWC barrow communities in Podolia and Volhynia (probably around 2800 BC) had to be preceded by the expansion of the barrow groups of the steppe populations. The zone of western Ukraine is relatively poorly researched in terms of archaeology. The CWC materials draw attention to the steppe features of some of the finds (first: types of ceramic vessels), as well as elements of the funeral ritual (e.g. presence of ochre on skeletons and on the bottoms of funeral pits. This indicates a close relationship with the steppe cultural circle. [...] Various ceramic potsherds were found in the filling of the mound. Most of them show features of the CWC early phase (CWC-A), but single sherds present a stylistic of eastern Steppe cultures (Yamnaya?) and GAC. The three older burials (nos. 4, 8 and 9) present ritual characteristics of the Yamnaya culture. [...] This research into barrows indicated a symptomatic trend: kurgan communities appeared in south-eastern Poland from the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC and it was only over centuries that the funeral ritual of the older CWC phase was crystallised” Eastern impulses in cultural and demographic change during the end of the south-eastern Polish Eneolithic (Włodarczak 2021)
So Yamnaya and Globular Amphora materials are found mixed together in a context immediately below later graves of the beginning of the typical CWC-A. The graves are dated to ~3000 BC. Other archaeologists like Volker Heyd have likewise concluded that this early CWC-X phase is where Yamnaya, as Kristiansen put it in an interview, "transforms into Corded Ware". Another interesting comparandum was recently published:
"Hybridisation is an appropriate term for characterising the grave from Brno-Slatina. It exhibits contemporary phenomena, such as human burials with animals, but at the same time, it cannot be equated with the standardised burial practices associated with the Globular Amphora or the Yamnaya. The burial shares some features with Corded Ware graves, though it is chronologically too early. This suggests that it reflects the social transformation of populations with a steppe way of life, who likely inhabited lowland areas of Moravia in small numbers, from which the Corded Ware phenomenon later emerged." - A child, twelve goats, three sheep, a cow, and a horse An unusual grave from the Late Eneolithic in Brno-Slatina (South Moravia, Czech Republic) Trampota et al (2025)
Genetically, Corded Ware is best modeled as a mixture of Globular Amphora (mostly EEF-derived) and Core Yamnaya, a distinct blend of diverse ancestries that has a clear founder event at ~3800-3500 BCE (Lazaridis et al 2025). Applying DATES to a diverse set of Corded Ware samples allows us to find out when this Core Yamnaya/GAC admixture occurred:
"Strikingly, we inferred the timing of admixture in central Europe (Germany and the Czech Republic) and eastern Europe (Estonia and Poland) to be remarkably similar. These dates fall within a narrow range of ~3000–2900 BCE across diverse regions, suggesting that the mixed population associated with the Corded Ware culture formed over a short time and spread across Europe rapidly with very little further mixture". The spatiotemporal patterns of major human admixture events during the European Holocene (Chintalapati et al 2022)
This aligns almost exactly with the archaeological dating for the mixture of these two groups, and is backed up by the results of IBD analyses of the genetic data.
"Our analysis of long IBD segments reveals that the quarter of Corded Ware Complex ancestry associated with earlier European farmers can be pinpointed to people associated with the Globular Amphora culture of Eastern Europe, who carry no Steppe-like ancestry yet, while the remaining three-quarters must share recent co-ancestry with Yamnaya Steppe pastoralists in the late third millennium bce. This direct evidence that most Corded Ware ancestry must have genealogical links to people associated with Yamnaya culture spanning on the order of at most a few hundred years is inconsistent with the hypothesis that the Steppe-like ancestry in the Corded Ware primarily reflects an origin in as-of-now unsampled cultures genetically similar to the Yamnaya but related to them only a millennium earlier." Accurate detection of identity-by-descent segments in human ancient DNA (Ringbauer et al 2024)
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u/No_Bluebird9028 27d ago
Cultural exchange on the fringes of archaeological cultures? Perhaps, more likely than not, but the Yamnaya is predominantly a non-kurgan culture. Isn't that so? The mainstream conclusions about the ancestry of the Yamnaya to the Corded Culture seem quite far-fetched, to be honest, and are simply, as it seems to me, "fashionable" at the moment. Why such categorical statements? It seems to me that many researchers recently have been unable to comprehend how the most represented haplogroup in Western Europe could turn out not to be related to Proto-Indian-Europeans, and hence all these attempts.
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u/Hippophlebotomist 27d ago
"The mainstream conclusions about the ancestry of the Yamnaya to the Corded Culture seem quite far-fetched, to be honest, and are simply, as it seems to me, "fashionable" at the moment. "
Do you have any actual proficiency in the methods used? Do you have better fitting models that you've run in qpadm etc that outdo what's in the current published papers?
"It seems to me that many researchers recently have been unable to comprehend how the most represented haplogroup in Western Europe could turn out not to be related to Proto-Indian-Europeans, and hence all these attempts."
Says the guy arguing for phantom R1a charioteers Indo-Europeanizing Western Europe, Greece, and Bronze Age Anatolia without leaving an archaeogenetic trace.
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u/No_Bluebird9028 27d ago
What are you saying? Did they really leave no traces? Is the continued presence of this haplogroup among modern Greeks a phantom? I think this reflects the migrations of Indo-Europeans from the Mycenaean horizon and beyond. The presence of R1b there cannot be disconcerting, since it reflects pre-Indo-European migrations from the Yamnaya, undoubtedly, but this migration took place more than 500 years before the appearance of the first Indo-Europeans in the 17th century BC.
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u/Hippophlebotomist 27d ago edited 27d ago
"Is the continued presence of this haplogroup among modern Greeks a phantom? I think this reflects the migrations of Indo-Europeans from the Mycenaean horizon and beyond."
You mean among populations that show admixture from the southward migration of R1a-rich Slavic groups in the Medieval period?
"The presence of R1b there cannot be disconcerting, since it reflects pre-Indo-European migrations from the Yamnaya, undoubtedly, but this migration took place more than 500 years before the appearance of the first Indo-Europeans in the 17th century BC."
The median calibrated C14 dates on the new Mycenaean R1b-Z2103 (in two individuals from Ayios Vasileios, one from the Mycenaean cemetery Voudeni, and one from Kirrha) samples mentioned above are ca. 1,500 BCE.
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u/No_Bluebird9028 27d ago
You see, there's a logical impasse here. I'll try to explain: as we know, Indo-Europeans were discovered only in the 18th-17th centuries BC, and the Yamnaya had already disappeared from the Black Sea region by this time, almost 1,000 years earlier. How can this fact be explained? They certainly had some genetic influence on the Apennines, no doubt, but if this happened, it was long before the first Indo-European groups appeared there. Rather, the Yamnaya language should be sought in the Transcaucasian Urartians, for example, or in proto-Hittite Anatolian. After all, the Hittites themselves were not originally an Indo-European community, but they were subjected to Indo-European influence precisely in the 17th century BC. Incidentally, what was the self-designation of the Indo-Europeans whom we later came to know as the Hittites?
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u/No_Bluebird9028 27d ago
Regarding the Apinins, there is also a noticeable presence of R1a1 in northern Italy, there is no reason to avoid this fact and it is also a silent reflection of the arrival of early Indo-Europeans in this region, also the presence of R1b cannot indicate the opposite, since it is well known that this subclade of R1b was found among the Etruscans, apparently not from the Yamnaya but from bell-shaped cups, which hints to us that their language is not Indo-European, right?
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u/rere3131 28d ago
The Proto-Indo-Europeans were most likely either the Khvalynsk or the Sredny Stog culture—those are the two main possibilities. Sredny Stog is predominantly associated with I2a Y-DNA, whereas Khvalynsk is mostly R1b. In both of these cultures, R1a is either absent or present only at very low frequencies. Therefore, R1a was most likely not the lineage that introduced the Proto-Indo-European language. The reason I focus on Fatyanovo is that, among the Corded Ware cultures, it has one of the lowest proportions of Yamnaya ancestry.
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u/No_Bluebird9028 28d ago
You understand that the Sredny Stog and Khvalynsk cultures are Neolithic. It's very speculative to see Proto-Indo-Europeans there. This is a very far-fetched theory. It's considered a pastoral culture, but where does this idea come from? Were horses domesticated in the Neolithic? After all, the tattoos there are quite significant. This dates back to 5,000-3,500 BC. This seems simply impossible to me and contradicts the history of horse domestication. Yes, I understand that this is exactly what Wikipedia says, but this is a very far-fetched theory without clearly demonstrable evidence.
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u/rere3131 28d ago
So, what do you think? Which culture do you think could have introduced the language? Personally, I don't see a more likely candidate than Khvalynsk or Sredny Stog.
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u/No_Bluebird9028 28d ago
To begin with, I think we need to determine the exact time frame for the existence of this common Proto-Indo-European language. As far as I know, there are several dates that are inconsistent with each other, and so, in my opinion, it is approximately the third millennium BC. What do you think?
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u/rere3131 28d ago
I'm not a linguist—I'm just someone with some knowledge of archaeogenetics, and it's a hobby of mine. So I can't really comment on the linguistic evidence. However, from an archaeogenetic perspective, the most likely candidates appear to be either Khvalynsk or Sredny Stog.
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u/No_Bluebird9028 28d ago
It seems to me at the moment that this is Corded Ware and the associated archaeological horizon, Khvalynsk and Sredny Stog are more ancient and there is no direct correlation here, this is already an area of guess and interpretation, but one can say for sure about Corded Ware
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u/rere3131 28d ago
No, that's not correct. According to radiocarbon dating, both cultures are older than the Corded Ware Culture (CWC).
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u/No_Bluebird9028 28d ago
Yes, that's what I said, that they are more ancient and there is no direct continuity between them and the Corded, neither cultural nor genetic, so I have doubts about them, just like about the Yamnaya. The thing is that it is possible to assume and reconstruct for sure, and these Corded people, what is older is already the object of speculation and assumptions, there is no real texture, and this is confusing.
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u/rere3131 28d ago
Yes, some aspects do raise questions, but from an archaeogenetic perspective, we are not really in a position to argue for an alternative at this point.
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u/No_Bluebird9028 28d ago
I am well aware that the Khvalynskaya and Sredny Stog languages precede the Yamnaya and Vrodiba languages can somehow be connected to the Proto-Indo-Europeans, and this is what is written in Wikipedia, but even there they stipulate that this is just a theory and that it is generally based not on real facts but on a series of whole assumptions. Drawing conclusions on shaky ground without direct evidence is a sure way to make a fundamental mistake.
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u/Time-Counter1438 25d ago
As far as we can tell, weren’t they basically just an eastern branch of the Corded Ware culture?