Unmasking AIT

[Husky]

On this:

[quote name='Husky' date='27 April 2016 - 08:52 PM' timestamp='1461770074' post='118480']

And Mallory also found no close connection between Afanasevo and Tarim. Only Mair imagines there to be one.

[/quote]



Their theorising is far more flimsy than the above indicates, BTW.



Transcript of Tarim-related part of J.P. Mallory talk:

[Map of Afanasievo trek - going E out of steppes into their 'locus of emanation' in south Siberia somewhere N of Jungghar Basin - captioned with:]

Afanasievo culture: the long trek (?3800-2400BC)



The steppe solution to the Tocharians coming into the Tarim Basin, at least the best one that I can imagine, has always been associated with the Afanasievo culture, that gets out very early -- possibly too early to work. Read - I think probably - the forthcoming issue of Current Anthropology. But it involves a long cultural trek from north of the Caspian Sea to the [Aral Sea? innersea?] and the High Altai and at the second stage - somehow - they move into the Tarim Basin.





The actual evidence within the Tarim Basin is flimsy thin.

Afanasievo cemeteries would be surrounded by round stone enclosures in the innersea and the Altai.

At Qäwrighul, one of the earliest of our cemeteries in the Tarim Basin, we have evidence for timber circles.

And that I'm afraid is about it.



[Image caption:] Qäwrighul

Stone enclosures > Timber circles



The fact that the Afanasievo culture, if you follow this, moves from north to south however, takes them to the Jungghar Basin. And there you can at least make contexts/contacts.

You can establish a credible archaeological link between the cemeteries of Afanasievo and Shamirshak (I'll use the Turkish since it's a lot easier than the Chinese here) where we do have similarities in ceramics, particularly the so-called ritual-footed vessels that are very characteristic of the steppe land and here we're finding in Xinjiang.

A bit more remotely, we might imagine that the baskets that we find in the steppe land regions in these earlier cemeteries are basically borrowing from earlier ceramic shapes.

Not sure if Mallory means to say "Aral Sea" but it sounds like he's saying "inner sea". My geography of the region is non-existent, and I couldn't locate it on the maps shown. Not sure what he was saying there, in other words.



NOTE the map at this point shows:

- that the site marked Qäwrighul - situated on the NE edge of the large circle encapsulating the Tarim Basin - is north of the site marked Xiaohe.

- the Jungghar Basin is north of Qäwrighul and north of ALL the Tarim Basin. I.e. Jungghar Basin lies in the centre of the line from N to S connecting Afanasievo with the Tarim Basin.

So while Mallory thinks there is some archaeological connection between Afanasievo and Jungghar Basin - in the centre of N to S line purporting to be the Afanasievo voyage - he finds nothing reliable in the material culture to connect them to Tarim Basin. Qäwrighul at the NE edge has "timber circles" which is a most tenuous connection - but we can leave out Xiaohe further south, or the rest of the Tarim Basin.



And can leave out his imagining the Qäwrighul baskets (no feet to the photo of the Qäwrighul basket, it's a regular basket) are connected to the (drawings) of ceramics with feet of the Afanasievo and Shamirshak of Jungghar Basin.

In contact with Jilin University, just to find out what the latest opinion is by someone who did their PhD on this subject, basically confirms: we've got good connections between the Afanasievo, the steppe cultures and the Jungghar basin, but beyond that it is really difficult to demonstrate any further southern movement.



[Slide contains:]

Shao Huiqiu, Jilin University PhD

* As for the connections between the cultures in Xinjiang and Afanasievo culture, based on the finding recently, there was a similar culture with Afanasievo in Aletai northwest of Xinjiang. But it belongs to a different culture named "Qie Mu'er Qie Ke" [=Chinese variant of place name that's "Shamirshak" in Turkic]. According to the research of Kovalev, this culture was also found in western Mongolia.



* In my opinion, the connection between these two cultures are very close. They probably have co-existed for a period of time. Because of the lack of materials of northwest Xinjiang it is difficult to carry out a further study on this point.

Except the above mentioned culture in Aletai, no cultures could be connected Afanasiev directly in other areas of Xinjiang, I think..



* Hope this information is helpful to your research.



* Best Regards.

* Shao Huiqiu

(Red colouring as in original.)





In conclusion:

1. Material culture of Tarim Basin is NOT related to Afanasievo. I'm not even going to count the admittedly tenuous (or rather: desperate) identification of Qäwrighul timber circles with Afanasievo stone enclosures around cemeteries. Let alone "imagining" similarities between the baskets at Qäwrighul and ceramics at Afanasievo said to have associations with those in Jungghar Basin.

2. Compared with: Material culture of Tarim Basin starting with earliest strata at Xiaohe (i.e. from 2000 BCE) is specifically related to the Indian subcontinent: (woolen textiles,) wheat farming, ephedra all of which do NOT come from steppe regions and cultures of Russia/Kazakhstan or Afanasievo culture. Ephedra is specific to... the subcontinent while wheat farming was already at Mehrgarh since about 7000 BCE, so we needn't look further than the subcontinent for that either.

(Woolen textiles, wheat, irrigation and) ephedra are undeniable material culture links between Tarim Basin and the subcontinent at 2000 BCE. Further, not only did the steppists and Afanasievans not have these, there's no evidence that they were into importing and using ephedra either. Meaning: if the Afanasievans magically went to the Tarim Basin after all, it wasn't *them* who imported and thus left the woolen textiles, wheat and ephedra behind since the Tarim's earliest archaeological strata.

The date of 2000 BCE (4000 ybp) is significant: because it rules out a lot of that "R1aZ93 in the steppes" whining by steppists. NOT Srubna, NOT later Andronovo. Because nothing before 2000 BCE will do. That's most of Sintashta too by the way. And IIRC nothing before any of those steppe kulturs was even claimed to be "proto-Indo-Iranian" about the steppes, by even the steppe PIE theory.

3. And again mtDNA at Xiaohe includes:

++ Indian-specific M5,

++ U7 which is NOT steppe, "not found" in modern E European (Kivisild 1999) and barely attested among Europeans ("virtually absent" in Europe as per Metspalu 2004). Also as per Metspalu 2004: U7's origins estimated to lie between Gujarat to Iran (and is distinct since "ancient times" between Indians and Iranians). Oh and not to forget that U7 occurs in high frequencies among Veddas.

++ further Hgs, which have Near East/West Asian origins and all of which are present in modern Indian, Iranian and various European populations.

Since the data presented by Li et al 2015 lacks specific resolution to nodes, Europeans (Afanasievo etc) need not be invoked, since we can stick to a minimum of just Indians and Afghans to explain all the mtDNA Hgs.





Yeah, I'm not surprised that the Li et al 2015 paper never even gets mentioned by AITists let alone the steppist kind.

And again, there's also Li et al's "unforgivable mistake" - from the POV of the steppist PIE theory of events* - of saying that BMAC (which has SSVC origins as per archaeologists) intermarried with the steppes and then went to Tarim. Li et al probably thought this compromise would make Mair happy. Instead, Mair is probably fuming.

The Chinese researchers were too honest and too open-minded. More proof that white supremacism is lost on them. (All of which is a compliment to the Chinese authors, by the way.)



* Of course, proponents of Plan A of the Anatolian PIE Theory (note: Renfrew abandoned Plan A for Plan B, wonder if he'll be kicking himself before the year is out) will feel this magically vindicates them. It vindicates only a S to N movement: i.e. all except the actual "Anatolian PIE urheimat" part of their theory. But the above is all certainly in direct and immediate agreement with a far more "extreme" theory of PIEism though. Guess which one that is.