Thread by @blog_supplement

TLDR: A speculative hypothesis: Turkic language originated in the Eastern BMAC populations. Warning: what follows is a long thread on this matter

What was the origin of the Turkic languages? In the early days, buoyed up by the success of Indo-European it was proposed that Turkic, Mongolic & Tungusic were a monophyletic language family -- Altaic -- which originated somewhere close to the Altai region. The early formulations

also unified it with Uralic making the large Uralo-Altaic grouping. Since then, Uralo-Altaic has been seen as an artificial group, perhaps with some similarities arising from borrowings. However, Altaic was still believed to hold and even expanded into a ``Macro-Altaic''

formulation which came to include Koreanic & Japonic. More recently, this formulation has been rebottled as the "Trans-Eurasian" family. However, for more than 80 years there have been doubts -- Mongolic and Turkic diverge the farther back we go -- not something you would expect

if they were related by descent from a recent common ancestor. While I'm not an Altaic linguist, I too have come around to this view -- they are not part of a common family but have converged due to long-term close areal interactions. Here is where archaeo-genetics comes in. We

see several distinct contributions to Mongolian populations. 1. Ancestries that were local to the region from before the Bronze age: Ancient Northeast Asians (ANA), and Ancient Northern Eurasian (ANE). The Mongols, Turks and Tungusics derive their main ancestry from the former.

The latter vanishes by the Middle Bronze age 2. IEans: There were at least 5 waves of IE invasions of Mongolia: Afanasievo- EBA; Sintashta-derived- M/LBA; Eastern Iranian early to mid-Iron Age; Sarmatian Iranian: Before/around the foundation of 1st Hun Khaghanate; Alani: From

Turkic Khaghanate onward through Chingizid period. 3. BMAC-related ancestry: This is seen at differing levels from EBA to Chingizid period. It is prominent from EIA to Turkic Khaghanates. 4. Han-related ancestry: appears in the first Hun Khaghanate and remains prominent to the

current age. 5. Khovsgol LBA ancestry: remains at low levels from LBA to Chingizid period. 6. Chandman Iron Age: Restricted to the first Hun Khaghanate. Now we know that Turkic is not an IE or Sino-Burman language. Early Turk and Hun Khaghanates were influenced by IE and likely

had I-Ir elites but they did not speak IE. The lack of persistence of Chandman IA or ANE ancestry makes their languages lingering on less likely. That leaves us with Khovsgol LBA or BMAC-related. The former as noted above, is only present at a low level. This leads to the

possibility that Proto-Turkic could be a language of the eastern BMAC-related populations -- this population is prominent during the Hunnic and Turkic Khaghanate and declines with the rises of Khitans and Chingizids. Mongolic would be a descendant of one of the old ANA languages.

If this is true, we have not entirely lost the BMAC linguistic heritage.

From Jeong et al.