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A large international team of researchers has found that Neolithic hunter-gatherers living in several parts of Europe interbred with farmers from the Near East. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the team describes comparing DNA from several early groups in Europe and evidence of interbreeding.
The Neolithic period, often described as the New Stone Age, was a period of human history from approximately 15,000 BCE to 3,000 BCE. It was a time defined by the development of settlements and the refinement of tools and the arts. Prior research has shown that people living in what is now Germany, Hungary and Spain were mostly hunter-gatherers during the early Neolithic period, but were "replaced" by farmers moving in from the Near East (Anatolia). In this new effort, the researchers suggest that interbreeding between the two groups led to the decline of the hunter-gatherers. The end result is that most modern Europeans are descended from the Near East immigrant farmers, but have remnants of hunter-gatherer DNA.
To learn more about the early history of humans in Europe, the researchers obtained and analyzed 180 DNA samples of people from early Hungary, Germany and Spain dating from between 6,000 and 2,200 BCE.
Ironic that Europeans resist admitting Turkey to the EU when they're descended from people from Asia Minor.
Mark Lipson et al. Parallel palaeogenomic transects reveal complex genetic history of early European farmers, Nature (2017). DOI: 10.1038/nature24476
(Score: 2) by Arik on Saturday November 11 2017, @10:20PM (2 children)
While English considered a germanic language purely on the basis of the continuity from Old Ænglisc forward, it is indeed heavily influenced by Latin languages - through French, through Spanish, through Church Latin, etc. This is not just about the norman conquest either - this process starts centuries earlier, even before the Romans conquered Britain. This is *mostly* loan words but not all, the grammar has been affected as well. And it's such a massive influence that it's not at all apparent that English is NOT a Latin language at first glance - you really have to have some historical records to be sure of the classification.
And so this wasn't a horrible analogy for you to draw, actually, because that's a very similar story to the one about Turkic and Iranian languages. From the very earliest period we have any record of Turks, they are as I said a people on the periphery of Persia, which was a very productive and influential center at that time. The very earliest turkic is already influenced by iranian, and that only increases dramatically over time. Osman Turkish actually had more Persian in it than English has Latin, and more Arabic than we have Greek.
Don't confuse it with Modern Turkish, which is essentially an artificial language, created by nationalist ideologues in the 1930s by systematically purging the language of loan words (particularly the Persian) and inventing new words judged to sound more 'turkish' to replace them.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Sunday November 12 2017, @01:01AM (1 child)
Nevertheless, Turkish is not tenuously Altaic. It is. It has been influenced by Persian and Arabic, but those are Indo-European and Semitic, respectively. Their contact with Turkish has not drawn it into either of those two families, just like the great preponderance of English words in modern Japanese has not rendered the latter an Indo-European tongue.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Sunday November 12 2017, @11:02AM
*Especially* with any of the Turkic languages, since they were spoken by mixed multitudes from the earliest known time.
It's like generalizing English speakers as sharing some 'germanic temperament' on the same sort of basis.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?