Y chromosomes and IE Languages

"Michal Milewski" <milewski@...> wrote:
<<The results of Y chromosome genetic population studies you mentioned could
also be interpreted in favor of Central Asian origin of PIE... [These
studies] are not free of some overstatements and even mistakes (all in my
personal opinion), for example in regard to the dating of the "Aurignacian" Y
marker M173, which in my opinion is much younger and may roughly correspond
to the Satem subfamily of IE languages.>>

Michal,
The problem of course is there is no clear and obvious correlation between
these genetic distibutions and the distribution of IE languages. It's clear
that a good many IE speakers don't show Central Asian "affliations." This is
important because 1:1 is the hypothetical target correlation, and 1:1 or even
.5:1 doesn't even happen with most individual languages, much less the whole
IE group. So the real bottom line conclusion from the Y-chromosome studies I
know is that we are dealing with essentially non-migrational language
transfer.

On a micro-level, this creates an interesting hypothetical scenario. If I am
a native speaker (Y-chromosome-male) of a non-IE language before say
5500-3000BC, what circumstances can we postulate that would cause me or my
child to suddenly change to speaking an IE language as a primary language?

It should be added that there does seem to be more of a
population-migrational rationale to satem IE, simply because it apparently is
moving westward when historical evidence of languages become available. But
that only reinforces the fact that the IE map may have been redrawn by IE
displacing IE, which would make the genetic correlation even less valid.

If we assume the Ukraine as the IE homeland, then we are faced with the fact
that as a matter of historical evidence, satem has essentially been the
spoken language of the Ukraine. So, the origin point (*PIE) in that
hypothesis can't provide us with an epicenter, unless of course *PIE was
satem, which is linguistically not very acceptible. A true epicenter effect
(like in an earthquake) would show some other variable correlating with the
amount of raw distance from the center, whether genetically or
linguistically. If you look for example at Ringe's UPenn IE phylogenic tree,
you won't see a correlation between the first and last split-offs from the IE
tree correlating with the degree of distance or location. Now, the satem
languages seem to have more of that, but not in a way that makes the original
IE spread transparent.

Finally, I noticed in the Semino study that the geneticists seem to be giving
up on relying on averaged rate of mutation to gauge the space between gene
populations and are now trying to correlate archaeological (and linguistic)
events instead. This is a dangerous proposition when they claim that there
data supports a non-genetic event because it ends up being circular. I don't
have the Underhill PDF I don't think. Would you mind sending it.
x99lynx[anti-spam interrupt]@aol.com. [anti-spam interrupt] is not part of
the address.

Steve