I’m sometimes asked in the comments here and elsewhere what I think of Carlos Quiles and his Indo-European website (see here if you’re game). Discussing this topic is a waste of time and effort, so I’m writing this blog post for future reference just in case this question comes up again. In all honesty, I think Carlos is a troll and his ramblings are of no value.
Now, many of you probably think that this is a very harsh appraisal. It certainly is, and it’s unfortunate that I have to write a post like this, but let me assure you that Carlos has worked tirelessly over the last few years to deserve my scorn. Please let me explain…
Ancient DNA has revolutionized our understanding of prehistoric Europe, particularly in regards to one crucial, controversial and hotly debated topic: the origins of the Corded Ware Culture (CWC) and its people, who, during the Late Neolithic, came to dominate vast stretches of Europe all the way from the North Sea to the forest steppes of what is now western Russia.
Thanks to ancient DNA from burials associated with the CWC and those of preceding archaeological cultures, there is now a very strong academic consensus that the CWC was introduced into Northern Europe by migrants from the Pontic-Caspian (PC) steppe. It’s also widely accepted that these migrants were rich in Y-chromosome haplogroup R1a and, in terms of genome-wide genetic ancestry, shared a very close relationship with the Yamnaya people who lived on the PC steppe at around the same time.
The question of the linguistic affinities of the CWC is still a controversial issue. It has to be, because assigning languages to long dead, illiterate cultures is a tricky business. But the generally accepted view that the CWC was the first Indo-European-speaking culture in Northern Europe has certainly gained strength thanks to the ancient DNA data, which has revealed an intimate genetic relationship between the CWC people and present-day Indo-European speakers of Northern and Eastern Europe and South Asia.
There are several recent papers freely available online on the CWC and its potential linguistic affinities authored by teams of well known geneticists, archaeologists and historical linguists, all basically saying the same thing. For instance…
Massive migration from the steppe is a source for Indo-European languages in Europe
Population genomics of Bronze Age Eurasia
The genetic prehistory of the Baltic Sea region
Extensive Farming in Estonia Started through a Sex-Biased Migration from the Steppe
Mitochondrial genomes reveal an east to west cline of steppe ancestry in Corded Ware populations
However, for some unknown reason, and against all odds, Carlos is adamant that this is a false narrative. As best as I can discern from his barely coherent scribbles, his argument is based on the following highly questionable, if not outright false, claims that:
– the subclades of R1a most commonly associated with the CWC, namely R1a-M417 and the derived R1a-Z645, are native to Northern Europe and did not arrive there with migrants from the steppe
– the CWC was introduced into Northern Europe via elite dominance by Indo-European-speaking males from the steppe belonging to Y-chromosome haplogroup R1b
– but the CWC was actually Uralic-speaking and had nothing at all to do with the eventual formation of the Baltic, Slavic and Germanic language groups in former CWC territories
– and the CWC people weren’t really all that closely related to the Yamnaya people anyway, except maybe for some minor admixture via female gene flow, because obviously they didn’t come from the steppe.
He doesn’t appear to be at all concerned that reality is not on his side. What about the fact that there are no reliable instances in the already ample Northern European ancient DNA record of R1a-M417 or R1a-Z645 dating to earlier than the CWC expansion? Or that the earliest instance of R1a-M417 is in a sample from the PC steppe that shows a lot of Yamnaya-related genome-wide ancestry? But don’t just take my word for it, take a look at this…
The Homeland: In the footprints of the early Indo-Europeans
Oh, wait, that map is from the Copenhagen group of academics that Carlos accuses of pushing the false narrative. Maybe it’s rigged? Perhaps this is all a conspiracy, and Carlos is the only one fighting the good fight? Nah, it’s more likely that Carlos is hopelessly confused by the genetic data, which he is unable to comprehend and interpret, let alone analyze himself. Is the computer still too busy to run anything Carlos? Maybe one day, eh?
At the risk of suffering significant brain rot, let’s wrap things up with a quick look at a couple of Carlos’ somewhat comical attempts to expose and challenge the supposedly false mainstream narrative.
Back in 2017, Jones et al. authored an ancient DNA paper on the genetic prehistory of the East Baltic region titled The Neolithic Transition in the Baltic Was Not Driven by Admixture with Early European Farmers (see here). One of the key samples in this paper was Latvia_LN1, a female from an early CWC burial.
The authors noted that this individual was, in terms of genome-wide genetic structure, practically identical to the samples from the Early to Middle Bronze Age PC steppe (in other words, including those from Yamnaya burials) and logically concluded that the CWC in the Baltic region was founded by Yamnaya-related migrants coming directly from the PC steppe. But, as you can imagine, Carlos was flabbergasted by this suggestion:
I keep expecting that more information is given regarding the important sample labelled “Late Neolithic/Corded Ware Culture” from Zvejnieki ca. 2880 BC. It seems too early for the Corded Ware culture in the region, clusters too close to steppe samples, and the information on it from genetic papers is so scarce… My ad hoc explanation of these data – as a product of recent exogamy from Eastern Yamna -, while possibly enough to explain one sample, is not satisfying without further data, so we need to have more samples from the region to have a clearer picture of what happened there and when. Another possibility is a new classification of the sample, compatible with later migration events (a later date of the sample would explain a lot).
Blah, Blah…please let it be a mistake, says Carlos (see here for the full treatment if you’re game). But surely for anyone who understood all of the relevant ancient data available at the time, this was the expected outcome. It certainly was for me. That’s because the CWC samples sequenced to date showed very high genetic affinity to Yamnaya, and, on average, more than 70% admixture either from Yamnaya or a very closely related source.
Indeed, a few months later, in a paper titled The genetic prehistory of the Baltic Sea region, which I already linked to above, Mittnik et al. presented another two Baltic CWC individuals of the same exceedingly Yamnaya-like type. Again, these authors argued that the CWC in the Baltic region was established by migrants coming from the PC steppe. But Carlos wouldn’t have any of it:
If we take the most recent reliable radiocarbon analyses of material culture, and interpretations based on them of Corded Ware as a ‘complex’ similar to Bell Beaker (accepted more and more by disparate academics such as Anthony or Klejn), it seems that the controversial ‘massive’ Corded Ware migration must have begun somehow later than previously thought, which leaves these early Baltic samples still less clearly part of the initial Corded Ware culture, and more as outliers waiting for a more precise cultural context among Late Neolithic changes in the region.
Controversial? Only in his mind. As far as I’m able to understand his ramblings (see here for the full treatment if you’re still game), he attempts to explain these samples as either Yamnaya individuals who were wrongly associated with the CWC, or female Yamnaya migrants who ended up in CWC territory as a result of long range female exogamy between Yamnaya and CWC populations. What he apparently failed to notice was that one of these samples, labeled Gyvakarai1, was a male who belonged to R1a-M417. Oops.
See also…
Late PIE ground zero now obvious; location of PIE homeland still uncertain, but…
Source
https://xissufotoday.space/2018/08/indo-european-crackpottery/