A new genetic analysis reveals that Otzi the Iceman is most closely related to modern-day Sardinians.
CREDIT: Reconstruction by Kennis © South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology, Foto Ochsenreiter
Posted on 11/11/2012 12:44:27 PM PST by Renfield
SAN FRANCISCO — Ötzi the Iceman, an astonishingly well-preserved Neolithic mummy found in the Italian Alps in 1991, was a native of Central Europe, not a first-generation émigré from Sardinia, new research shows. And genetically, he looked a lot like other Stone Age farmers throughout Europe.
he new findings, reported Thursday (Nov. 8) here at the American Society of Human Genetics conference, support the theory that farmers, and not just the technology of farming, spread during prehistoric times from the Middle East all the way to Finland.
"The idea is that the spread of farming and agriculture, right now we have good evidence that it was also associated with a movement of people and not only technology," said study co-author Martin Sikora, a geneticist at Stanford University....
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
A new genetic analysis reveals that Otzi the Iceman is most closely related to modern-day Sardinians.
CREDIT: Reconstruction by Kennis © South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology, Foto Ochsenreiter
Ping
And what of the Sardinians? I believe that the “islanders” of the Mediterranean are a relatively “pristine” snapshot of a particular moment in the history of the region. This is evident in Dienekes’ Dodecad Ancestry Project. Unlike their mainland cousins both the Sardinians and Cypriots tend to lack a “Northern European” component. Are the islanders in part descendants of the Paleolithic populations? In part. Sardinians carry a relatively high fraction of the U5 haplogroup, which has been associated with ancient hunter-gatherer remains. But it is also possible that the preponderant aspect of Sardinian ancestry derives from the first farmers to settle the Western Mediterranean. I say this because the Iceman carried the G2a Y haplogroup, which has of late been strongly associated with very early Neolithic populations in Western Europe. And interestingly some scholars have discerned a pre-Indo-European substrate in Sardinian which suggests a connection to the Basque. I wouldn’t read too much into that, but these questions need to be explored, as Ötzi’s genetic nature makes Sardiniaology more critical to understanding the European past.
Related to Sardines? Something a little fishy here!
The Dude Abides.
Sardinian is the most archaic Romance language, closer to Latin than any of the others. But I doubt that Oetzi could have declined cerevisia to save his life.
Since the Basques speak the only surviving pre-Indo-European language in Western Europe, you would expect them to have DNA that reflected the earlier population of Europe before the spread of Indo-European languages.
IOW, farmers invaded and conquered Europe, displacing the original hunter-gatherers.
Just as they did in the Americas, Australia, Africa, Indonesia, etc.
It's just that the prehistoric invasions are reported without all the moralizing applied to those of the last few centuries perpetrated by whitey.
..."In any case, the haplogroup R1b, which originated during the last ice age at least 18.500 years ago,[21] when Human groups settled in the south of Europe and that is currently common in the European population, can be found most frequently in the Basque Country (91%), Wales (89%) and Ireland (81%). The current population of the R1b from western Europe would probably come from a climatic refuge in the Iberian Peninsula, where the haplogroup R1b1c (R1b1b2 or R1b3) originated. During the Allerød oscillation, circa 12.000 years ago, descendants of this population would have repopulated Western Europe.[17] The rare variety R1b1c4 (R1b1b2a2c) has almost always been found among the Basque people, both in the Northern and Southern Basque Country. The variety R1b1c6 (R1b1b2a2d) registers a high incidence in the Basque population, 19%.[22]"
Etymology of the words
Jose Miguel Barandiaran, patriarch of the Basque culture, presented the thesis of the Neolithic origin of the Basque language when analyzing the etymology of several Basque words. Based on the fact that Basque is a descriptive and agglutinative language, he points out that some words clearly describe instruments and ideas from Prehistoric times. An example of this is the word "aizkora" (axe), which includes the root "haiz" that means "rock", describing the tool as made of rock, when, since Neolithic times, the axes have been made from steel, iron, or copper, while some other researchers believe that the word "aizkora" is actually a loan word from the Latin asciola "hatchet". We also have the word "arto" (corn, and before its arrival, millet); the root is "hartu", which means "to pick", and that literally would mean "what is picked" or "the thing that is picked", pointing the times when the harvest was still not common. The names of fruit trees native of the country are named in Basque with the name of the fruit and the indication "next to" (as in "located next to"), so we have "sagarrondo" (apple tree), 'next to the apple'; "madariondo" (pear tree), 'next to the pear'; "mahatsondo" (vitis), 'next to the grapes', etc.
The mummy's got cousins? Are any of 'em good lookin?
You know how I am about a good lookin' mummy!!
The Greeks and then the Romans regularly made slaves of the Guanches.
Maybe asciola and aizkora are evidence that the Seminole Indians sailed across to Spain in ancient times and introduced the people to the hatchet, which was then named in honor of the Seminole war leader Osceola.
I don't doubt that at all.
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The Rhesus factor negative being highest there supports that theory.
fascinating. Ping to blam and odds
I think ‘invasion’ is a wrong term. The numbers of people in 2000 BC were 50 million or less. People would have wandered slowly from places where it was easy to farm (the nile, tigris/euphrates, indus valley) to places where they had to cut down trees (and all of europe was one giant forest at one point and all of india east of the Thar desert prior to 1700 BC was a giant jungle)
Bwaaaaaaaaahaaaaaaaaaaa!
I hope he didn’t refer to her as “Mummy Dearest”....
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