R-V1636: Eneolithic steppe > Kura-Araxes?

Ancient samples from the Wang et al. preprint on the genetic prehistory of the Greater Caucasus are now available as BAM files at the European Nucleotide Archive (see here). I've requested the genotype data from the authors and I'm eagerly awaiting their response.

But various online genetic genealogy communities are already studying in detail the Y-chromosome data from the BAM files. One

The Hajji Firuz fiasco

The specter of Hajji_Firuz_ChL I2327 still haunts us. Judging by some recent comments that I've seen here and elsewhere, it seems that a good number of confused souls haven't yet given up hope that this ancient sample represents a Near Eastern population ancestral to the Yamnaya people of Early Bronze Age Eastern Europe. But the chances of this are slim to none, because...

- Hajji_Firuz_ChL

Some German guy once said...

If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself.

On a totally unrelated note, the Max-Planck-Institut für Menschheitsgeschichte (aka MPI-SHH) is apparently still claiming that its southern Proto-Indo-European (PIE) homeland theory has been corroborated by archaeogenetic data. For instance, check out the Youtube clip here.

Below is a screen

Italians are interesting people (Raveane et al. 2018 preprint)

Over at bioRxiv at this LINK. As far as I can see from skimming through the preprint, it's a thorough effort with conclusions that make good sense. But, needless to say, it'll be very useful to plug the dataset from this study into the Global25 to see what these new Italian samples are really made of. Here's the abstract, emphasis is mine.

European populations display low genetic diversity as

How did Y-haplogroup N1c get to Bolshoy Oleni Ostrov?

Y-haplogroup N1c probably entered Europe from Siberia during the Bronze Age or the Eneolithic period. It first appears in the European ancient DNA record in two samples from a burial site at Bolshoy Oleni Ostrov, in the Kola Peninsula, dated to 1523±87 calBCE (see here). These individuals also harbor significant genome-wide Siberian ancestry, but it's possible that this is in large part a

Europe's ancient proto-cities may have been ravaged by the plague

The Cucuteni-Trypillia culture of the Eneolithic Balkans and Eastern Europe is best known for its mega-settlements or proto-cities, each one featuring hundreds of homes, temples and other structures, and likely to have been inhabited by as many as 20,000 people. But from around 3,400 BC these mega-settlements were no longer being built, and a few hundred years later the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture

On the trail of the Proto-Uralic speakers (work in progress)

Historical linguists have long posited that Fennoscandia was a busy contact zone between early Germanic and Uralic languages. The first ancient DNA samples from what is now Finland have corroborated their inferences, by showing that during the Iron Age the western part of the country was inhabited by a genetically heterogeneous population closely related to both the Uralic-speaking Saami and

How should we interpret the movements of people throughout Bronze Age Europe?

Below are a couple of interesting talk abstracts from the upcoming Genes, Isotopes and Artefacts conference in Vienna (see here). The first one looks like the abstract from a rewritten version of the Wang et al. preprint on the genetic prehistory of the Greater Caucasus. But I could be wrong. In any case, check out the links at the bottom of the post to see what I've said about this manuscript.

The Uralic cline in the Global25

The Uralic cline is a concept that was discussed in some detail in the recent Lamnidis et al. palaeogenomics paper on the origin and spread of Siberian ancestry in Europe (see here). It pertains to the most northerly genetic cline that links the populations of West and East Eurasia, and is largely made up of Uralic-speaking peoples rich in Y-haplogroup N1c.

This is what the Uralic cline looks

Steppe ancestry in Chalcolithic Transcaucasia (aka Armenia_ChL explained)

In 2016 Lazaridis et al. published a paper featuring five ancient samples from the famous Areni-1 cave complex, in what is now Armenia, dated to the Chalcolithic (see here). This is how they described the ancestry of these ancients, which they labeled Armenia_ChL, in the supplementary PDF to their paper (page 94):

We do not have a pre-Chalcolithic sample from Armenia. We first model it [

Yamnaya: home-grown

I have some interesting news. It looks like Khvalynsk_Eneolithic I0434 can be used as essentially a perfect proxy for the Eneolithic steppe trio from Wang et al. 2018 when modeling the ancestry of the Yamnaya people of what is now the Samara region of Russia. Consider the qpAdm mixture models below, sorted by taildiff.

One of the best fitting models that also fairly closely matches archeological

What happened to Maykop?

The Maykop culture was probably the result of population movements from Transcaucasia and beyond into the Northwest Caucasus during the Eneolithic and Early Bronze Age. Its peak lasted for roughly 700 years, from about 3700 BC to 3000 BC, after which it seems to have vanished suddenly. Why? Are there any decent papers on the topic?

The currently rather popular idea that Maykop gave rise to the

The story of the earliest wine

Here's an interesting YouTube video about the origin and spread of wine making. Many of you might also appreciate the discussion about the Kura-Araxes Culture (about 26 minutes into the presentation)...



See also...


A potentially violent end to the Kura-Araxes Culture (Alizadeh et al. 2018)

How relevant is Arslantepe to the PIE homeland debate?

Likely Yamnaya incursion(s) into Northwestern

On the spread of dairy pastoralism to East Asia (Jeong & Wilkin et al. 2018)

Over at PNAS at this LINK. Below is the abstract and a table with the uniparental haplogroups for the 20 ancient samples from the paper. Emphasis is mine.

Recent paleogenomic studies have shown that migrations of Western steppe herders (WSH) beginning in the Eneolithic (ca. 3300–2700 BCE) profoundly transformed the genes and cultures of Europe and central Asia. Compared with Europe, however, the

Big deal of 2018: Yamnaya not related to Maykop

I was going to write this post after the genotype data from the Wang et al. preprint on the genetic prehistory of the Greater Caucasus became available, because I wanted to demonstrate a few key points with analyses of my own. But I've got a hunch that the formal publication of the manuscript, and thus also the release of the data, has been indefinitely delayed for one reason or another. So here

Steppe Maykop: a buffer zone?

Unfortunately, the ancient data from the Wang et al. preprint still haven't been released online. As I've already pointed out many times, the manuscript conclusion looks horribly contrived (for instance, see here), but the data are awesome, and most of the preprint is quite solid.



One thing that I'd really like to do is to compare in detail each of the ancient populations from the preprint to

Y-haplogroup P1 in Pleistocene Siberia (Sikora et al. 2018 preprint)

Over at bioRxiv at this LINK. Below is the abstract, emphasis is mine. Two of the (unrelated) males from Yana RHS belong to Y-haplogroup P1 and mitochondrial haplogroup U2. Note that P1 is ancestral to Y-haplogroups Q and R.

Far northeastern Siberia has been occupied by humans for more than 40 thousand years. Yet, owing to a scarcity of early archaeological sites and human remains, its

A closer look at a couple of ancients from Hellenistic Anatolia

Not sure if anyone's mentioned or noticed this already, but the two currently available genomes from Hellenistic Anatolia (samples MA2197 and MA2198 from Damgaard et al. 2018) pack an impressive amount of steppe ancestry. Moreover, one of these individuals also shows obvious admixture from Central Asia.

This isn't particularly surprising, considering the well attested presence of Galatian Celts

ASHG 2018 open thread

The American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) annual meetings kicks off tomorrow in San Diego. Feel free to post anything near and far related to this event in the comment thread below.

You can explore this year's offerings via the online planner/abstract search located HERE. See anything really interesting? Here's what I found after a quick search using the term "ancient". Hopefully someone

The resistance crumbles

Over the years some scientists from the Estonian Biocentre have been among the staunchest opponents of the idea that Bronze Age pastoralists originating in the steppes of Eastern Europe had a significant genetic and linguistic impact on South Asia (for instance, see here).

But this week they put out a review paper titled The genetic makings of South Asia [LINK] featuring the figure below. It's a

Cimmerians, Scythians and Sarmatians came from...

Apparently they all came from the eastern Pontic-Caspian steppe. There's a new paper about that at Science Advances (see here). Below is the abstract, emphasis is mine:

For millennia, the Pontic-Caspian steppe was a connector between the Eurasian steppe and Europe. In this scene, multidirectional and sequential movements of different populations may have occurred, including those of the Eurasian

Greeks in a Longobard cemetery

I designed a new Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to help me test the fine scale genetic affinities of post-Bronze Age ancient samples from Southern Europe and surrounds. Below is a version of this PCA with a selection of the most Southern European-related ancients from this year's Amorim et al. and Veeramah et al. papers (for background reading, see the posts and comments here and here). The

The Hallstatt effect (?)

Just to see what would happen, I ran a subset of the highest coverage Bronze Age samples from what are now Britain and Ireland in my new Celtic vs Germanic Principal Component Analysis (PCA). Look for the Britain_&_Ireland_BA cluster. The relevant datasheet is available here.



Perhaps it's not a coincidence that the likely Celtic-speaking Iron Age individuals from present-day England (labeled

AmtDB: an interactive ancient human mitogenome database

A very useful resource called AmtDB has just come online. For background info, check out the relevant paper by Ehler et al. here. Below is the paper abstract:

Ancient mitochondrial DNA is used for tracing human past demographic events due to its population-level variability. The number of published ancient mitochondrial genomes has increased in recent years, alongside with the development of

Corded Ware people =/= Proto-Uralics (Tambets et al. 2018)

A new paper on the genetic structure of Uralic-speaking populations has appeared at Genome Biology (see here). It looks to me like the prelude to a forthcoming paleogenetics paper on the same topic that was discussed in the Estonian media recently (see here). Although not exactly ground breaking (because it basically argues what I've been saying at this blog for years, like here and here), it's a

Dzudzuana Ice Age foragers: a different type of Caucasus hunter-gatherer (Lazaridis et al. 2018 preprint)

Over at bioRxiv at this LINK. Below is the abstract. Emphasis is mine.

The earliest ancient DNA data of modern humans from Europe dates to ~40 thousand years ago, but that from the Caucasus and the Near East to only ~14 thousand years ago, from populations who lived long after the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) ~26.5-19 thousand years ago. To address this imbalance and to better understand the

Early Anatolian farmers were overwhelmingly of local hunter-gatherer origin (Feldman et al. 2018 preprint)

Over at bioRxiv at this LINK. The dataset in this preprint includes just one Anatolian hunter-gatherer, but that's enough to make the point that in Anatolia, unlike in Europe, there was very strong genetic continuity between the local foragers and earliest farmers. His Y-chromosome haplogroup is an interesting one: C1a2, which has been recorded in European remains from the Upper Paleolithic.

Celtic vs Germanic Europe

I have a feeling that ancient DNA from post-Bronze Age Northwestern Europe will be coming thick and fast from now on. To get the most out of such data I've designed a new Principal Component Analysis (PCA) that does a better job of separating the Celtic- and Germanic-speaking populations of Europe than my previous efforts of this sort (see here and here). Below are two different versions of the

Avars and Longobards

Most of the "barbarians" from today's Amorim et al. paper have made it into the Global25 datasheets. Look for the samples with Collegno and Szolad in their labels. Same links as always...

Global 25 datasheet (scaled)

Global 25 datasheet

Global 25 pop averages (scaled)

Global 25 pop averages

Here's my usual Principal Component Analysis (PCA) of West Eurasian variation with the same

Blast from the past: Yamnaya prediction from 2016

I wonder what's holding up the publication of the Wang et al. "Greater Caucasus" preprint? It was released back in May at the bioRxiv (see here). On a related note, I was looking back at some of the stuff that I wrote about the origin of the Yamnaya people (aka Steppe_EMBA), and found this...

But here's my prediction: Steppe_EMBA only has 10-15% admixture from the post-Mesolithic Near East not

ISBA 2018 abstracts

The ISBA 2018 conference is in a couple of weeks and the abstract book is now available here. Below are a few examples of what's on offer this year. Admittedly, the Scythian abstract looks a bit weird to me, because we know for a fact that the Scythians who lived in the Pontic-Caspian steppe harbored Siberian genome-wide and maternal admixture (see here and here). The abstract about the horses

Major horse paper coming soon

Horse domestication is an important and controversial topic, in large part because it's intimately tied to the debate over the location of the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) homeland. Based on the currently available genetic and archaeological data, it seems likely that all modern domesticated horse breeds ultimately derive from the Pontic-Caspian steppe in Eastern Europe (see here and here).

In the

Focus on Hittite Anatolia

I computed a series of D-statistics on most of the currently available ancient samples from Central Anatolia - dating from almost the Epipaleolithic (Boncuklu_N) to the Hittite era (Anatolia_MLBA) - to try and get a better idea of who the Indo-European-speaking Hittites may have been. The full output as well as details about the key ancient samples used in this analysis are available here. See

Global25 workshop 3: genes vs geography in Northern Europe

To produce the intra-North European Principal Components Analysis (PCA) plot below, download this datasheet, plug it into the PAST program, which is freely available here, then select all of the columns by clicking on the empty tab above the labels, and choose Multivariate > Ordination > Principal Components or Discriminant Analysis.





I'd say that the result more or less resembles a

Indo-European crackpottery

I'm sometimes asked in the comments here and elsewhere what I think of Carlos Quiles and his Indo-European website (see here if you're game). Discussing this topic is a waste of time and effort, so I'm writing this blog post for future reference just in case this question comes up again. In all honesty, I think Carlos is a troll and his ramblings are of no value.



Now, many of you probably

The South Asian cline that no longer exists

Before the Indo-Europeans and Austroasiatics got to South Asia, probably well within the last 4,000 years, it's likely that all of the genetic variation in the region basically sat along a genetic cline devoid of any Bronze Age steppe and Southeast Asian ancestry, like the one in the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) below running from the Paniya to the "Indus Periphery" ancient sample

Blast from the past: The Poltavka outlier

The Rakhigarhi ancient DNA paper is coming soon. Very soon.

Yep, you've probably read this sort of thing many times in the last few years, including here. But this time, by all accounts, it's really happening. For the latest Indian press teaser on the topic check out: We Are All Harappans.

At least I don't have to write up a blog post for the occasion, because I already wrote one over two years

Horses may have been ridden in battle as early as the Bronze Age (Chechushkov et al. 2018)

Over at the Journal of Archaeological Science at this LINK. Below is the abstract. Emphasis is mine:

The morphological similarities/dissimilarities between antler and bone-made cheekpieces have been employed in several studies to construct a relative chronology for Bronze Age Eurasia. Believed to constitute a part of the horse bit, the cheekpieces appear in ritual contexts everywhere from the

A closer look at the maternal origins of the Corded Ware people (Juras et al. 2018)

Over at Scientific Reports at this LINK. This is a nice paper, but I'm really looking forward to the Y-DNA and genome-wide data from these new samples. What's the bet that the Yamnaya men from Ukraine will belong to Y-haplogroup R1a-M417? Bring it on soon, please. From the paper, emphasis is mine:

From around 4,000 to 2,000 BC the forest-steppe north-western Pontic region was occupied by people

Global25 coordinates for almost 500 Ashkenazi Jews

I know that some of you are looking at the genetic structure of Ashkenazi and other Jewish populations with the Global25 data. So to help things along here are Global25 coordinates for 471 Ashkenazi individuals from Bray et al. 2010 (see here).

AJ G25 coordinates

AJ G25 coordinates (scaled)

AJ G25 coordinates PAST datasheet (scaled)

I don't know what the genotyping accuracy is for these

A Corded Ware-related Proto-Greek from the Pontic-Caspian steppe?

The recent Wang et al. preprint on the genetic prehistory of the Greater Caucasus features several supposedly already published ancient samples that, as far as I know, haven't yet appeared anywhere. These include five Yamnaya samples from Hungary and two Neolithic samples from Greece. I'm guessing that they're part of a paper that was scheduled to be released earlier this year, but was delayed,

A Mycenaean and an Iron Age Iranian walk into a bar...

What do they have in common? The same type of Near Eastern ancestry? From Iran? Nope, that's a joke. Obviously, they share the same type of steppe ancestry. This probably has some very important linguistic implications.



The relevant Principal Component Analysis (PCA) datasheet is available here. Below are two pairs of formal mixture models that support my inferences from the PCA.

Mycenaean

An early Iranian, obviously

Today, the part of Asia between the Caspian Sea and the Altai Mountains, known as Turan, is largely a Turkic-speaking region. But during the Iron Age it was dominated by Iranian speakers. Throughout this period it was the home of a goodly number of attested and inferred early Iranic peoples, such as the Airya, Dahae, Kangju, Massagetae, Saka and Sogdians.

Indeed, the early Iron Age Yaz II

"The Homeland: In the footprints of the early Indo-Europeans" time map

Click HERE to view the interactive time map, and give it some time to load if you're on a slow connection. Use the slider tool to explore different time periods from 6385 BC to 1 BC. It's still a work in progress, so feel free to let the author, Mikkel Nørtoft, know if anything should be added, tweaked and/or generally improved.

Below is a screen cap of the map with the slider moved to 3618 BC.

SMBE 2018 abstracts

Abstracts from the upcoming SMBE 2018 conference (8-12 July) are now available HERE. Below are a few that I found interesting. Emphasis is mine. Feel free to post your own favorites in the comments.

The first Epipaleolithic Genome from Anatolia suggests a limited role of demic diffusion in the Advent of Farming in Anatolia

Feldman et al.

Anatolia was home to some of the earliest farming

How relevant is Arslantepe to the PIE homeland debate?

Below is an abstract of a presentation from the recent 11th International Congress on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East (see here). It was discussed on at least a couple of DNA forums, and hailed by some as potentially pivotal to the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) homeland debate. Emphasis is mine:

Palaeogenetic and Anthropological Perspectives on late Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age

Friendly Yeniseian steppe pastoralists

For most people the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) homeland debate isn't just about language, but also, or even more so, about things like ancestry, politics, racism, and ethnic pride.

I don't want to get into all the dirty details in this post, but, for instance, many of those who argue vehemently against a steppe homeland seem to really hate the idea that their ancestors were, at some level,

Ahead of the pack

Eurogenes Blog January 2018 (see here):

Yamnaya and other similar Eneolithic/Bronze Age herder groups from the Eurasian steppe were mostly a mixture of Eastern European Hunter-Gatherers (EHG) and Caucasus Hunter-Gatherers (CHG). But they also harbored minor ancestry from at least one, significantly more westerly, source that pulled them away from the EHG > CHG north/south genetic cline.

...

Genetic borders are usually linguistic borders too

Note the awesome correlation between the two maps below. The first map is mine. I posted it on this blog almost a year ago (see here). The second map is from the recent Wang et al. preprint (see here). Also note that the Steppe and Caucasus clusters as defined by Wang et al. are rich in Y-haplogroups R1 and J, respectively (see here).





Very cool indeed. But I'm still scratching my head and

Guest post: we owe many of our genetic traits to ancient steppe pastoralists, but...

This is a guest post courtesy of Samuel Andrews, a regular commentator for several years at this blog. I did edit parts of the original text submitted to me, but these were just cosmetic changes. If you spot any issues with this article, feel free to complain to Samuel in the comments below.

Massive migrations of pastoralists from the Pontic-Caspian steppe in the 3rd millennium BC abruptly ended

A potentially violent end to the Kura-Araxes Culture (Alizadeh et al. 2018)

The Kura-Araxes Culture dominated large parts of West Asia during the Early Bronze Age. It's generally accepted that the peoples associated with this archaeological phenomenon were speakers of early Hurra-Urutian dialects, and that they eventually morphed into the Hurrians and other related groups across the northern Near East.

However, it has also been hypothesized that in and around the

An exploration of distance-based models of language relationships with a special focus on Indo-European (Kozintsev 2018)

The latest edition of the Journal of Indo-European Studies includes an interesting methodological paper by Alexander Kozintsev, in which the author tests the relationship between Indo-European and other language families using lexicostatistical data and a wide range of distance-based models (see here). My impression, after reading the paper a couple of times, is that we probably have a long way

Yamnaya isn't from Iran just like R1a isn't from India

A strange thing sometimes happens in population genetics: highly capable and experienced researches come up with stupid ideas and push them so hard that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, they become accepted as truths. At least for a little while.

It's obvious now, thanks to full genome sequencing and ancient DNA, that Y-chromosome haplogroup R1a cannot be native to India. It arrived

Of horses and men

Y-HT-1 is today by far the most common Y-chromosome haplogroup in domesticated horse breeds. According to Wutke et al. 2018, this is probably the result of artificial, human induced selection for this lineage, initially on the Eurasian steppe during the Iron Age, and then subsequently in Europe during the Roman period (see here).

However, during the Bronze and Iron Ages, before Y-HT-1 reached

What's Maykop (or Iran) got to do with it? #2

For the past few days I've been trying to copy and also improve on the qpGraph tree in the Wang et al. preprint (see here). I've managed to come up with a new version of my model that not only offers a better statistical fit, but, in my opinion, also a much more sensible solution. For instance, the Eastern Hunter-Gatherer node now shows 73% MA1-related admixture, which, I'd say, makes more sense

Cultural hitchhiking and competition between patrilineal kin groups may have led to the post-Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck (Zeng et al. 2018)

A very interesting paper has just appeared at Nature Communications that potentially offers an explanation for the well documented explosions of certain Y-chromosome lineages in the Old World after the Neolithic, such as those that led to most European males today belonging to Y-haplogroups R1a and R1b (LINK). I might have more to say about this paper in the comments below after I've read it a

What's Maykop (or Iran) got to do with it?

I had a go at imitating this qpGraph tree, from the recent Wang et al. preprint on the genetic prehistory of the Caucasus, using the ancient samples that were available to me. I'm very happy with the outcome, because everything makes good sense, more or less. The real populations and singleton individuals, ten in all, are marked in red. The rest of the labels refer to groups inferred from the

More Botai genomes (Jeong et al. 2018 preprint)

Over at bioRxiv at this LINK. Actually, these may or may not be the same Botai genomes that have already been published along with Damgaard et al. 2018 (see comments below for the discussion about that). Here's the abstract. Emphasis is mine:

The indigenous populations of inner Eurasia, a huge geographic region covering the central Eurasian steppe and the northern Eurasian taiga and tundra,

Global25 workshop 2: intra-European variation

Even though the Global25 focuses on world-wide human genetic diversity, it can also reveal a lot of information about genetic substructures within continental regions.

Several of the dimensions, for instance, reflect Balto-Slavic-specific genetic drift. I ensured that this would be the case by running a lot of Slavic groups in the analysis. A useful by-product of this strategy is that the

Global25 workshop 1: that classic West Eurasian plot

In this Global25 workshop I'm going to show how to reproduce, more or less, that classic plot of West Eurasian genetic diversity seen regularly in ancient DNA papers and at this blog (for instance, here). To do this you'll need the datasheet below, which I'll be updating regularly, and the PAST program, which is freely available here.

G25_West_Eurasia_scaled.dat

This is what you'll get if you

Global25 PAST-compatible datasheets

I'm planning to run regular workshops over the next few months on how to get the most out of Global25 data with various programs, and expecially PAST (see here). So if you have Global25 coordinates, please stay tuned.

To that end, I've put together four color-coded, PAST-compatible Global25 datasheets with thousands of present-day and ancient samples, available at the links below:

On the genetic prehistory of the Greater Caucasus (Wang et al. 2018 preprint)

Finally, the focus shifts to the Eneolithic/Bronze Age North Caucasus. In a new manuscript at bioRxiv, Wang et al. present genome-wide SNP data for 45 prehistoric individuals from the region along a 3000-year temporal transect (see here). From the preprint (emphasis is mine):

Based on PCA and ADMIXTURE plots we observe two distinct genetic clusters: one cluster falls with previously published

New PCA featuring Botai horse tamers, Hun and Saka warriors, and many more...

Just in case anyone's wondering how the ancient samples from the two recent archaeogenetic papers by Damgaard et al. (Nature and Science) behave in my two main Principal Component Analyses (PCA), here you go:



The relevant datasheet is available here. Just over 100 of the new samples made into onto this plot, but to keep things simple I only highlighted a few of them. To see the positions of

Hittite era Anatolians in qpAdm

The apparent lack of steppe ancestry in five Hittite-era, perhaps Indo-European-speaking, Anatolians was interpreted in Damgaard et al. 2018 as a major discovery with profound implications for the origin of the Anatolian branch of Indo-European languages.

But I disagree with this assessment, simply because none of these Hittite-era individuals are from royal Hittite, or Nes, burials. Hence,

Graeco-Aryan parallels

The clearly non-local admixture in the geographically and genetically disparate, but Indo-European-speaking, ancient Mycenaeans and present-day North Indian Brahmins is very similar. So similar, in fact, that it could derive from practically the same population in space and time. The most plausible source for this admixture are the Bronze Age herders of the Pontic-Caspian steppe and their

Protohistoric Swat Valley peoples in qpGraph #2

Three options. Just one passes muster; the one with Sintashta. Coincidence? I think not. Who still wants to claim that there's no Sintashta-related steppe stuff in these Iron Age SPGT South Asians? The relevant graph files are available here. Any ideas for better models?







Update 08/05/2018: The reason that I chose Dzharkutan1_BA, from what is now Uzbekistan, as the BMAC proxy in the above

The protohistoric Swat Valley "Indo-Aryans" might not be exactly what we think they are

I need some help interpreting these linear models of ancient and present-day South Asian populations. Overall, the Iron Age groups from the Swat Valley, or SPGT, look like rather obvious outliers. The relevant datasheet is available here.





The reason for this might be significant bidirectional gene flow and/or continuity between Central Asia and the northern parts of South Asia before

Open analysis thread: genetic distance (Fst) matrix focusing on ancient Central and South Asia

I'm hoping that we can learn something new about the genomic prehistory of Eurasia, and especially Central and South Asia, based on this massive new Fst matrix:

Ancient Central and South Asia genetic distance (Fst) matrix

Hint: it's probably easiest to initially explore this format with a program called PAST. Indeed, if you'd like to model fine scale ancestry proportions based on these data, it

Zoroastrian genetic origins revisited

About a year ago I found that the ancestry of present-day Iranians was best explained as largely a mixture between early Anatolian and Iranian farmers and Sarmatians from the Pontic-Caspian steppe (see here).

Things have now changed somewhat after the release of several hundred ancient samples from across Eurasia. Below are the best qpAdm models that I was able to find for various Iranian ethnic

The mystery of the Sintashta people

During the Middle to Late Bronze Age, the steppes southeast of the Ural Mountains, in what is now Russia, were home to communities of metallurgists who buried their warriors with horses and the earliest examples of the spoked-wheel battle chariot.

We don't know what they called themselves, because they didn't leave any written texts, but their archaeological culture is commonly known as

Likely Yamnaya incursion(s) into Northwestern Iran

Despite being stratigraphically dated to 5900-5500 BCE (ie. the Chalcolithic period), ancient sample Hajji_Firuz_ChL I2327 from Narasimhan et al. 2018, belongs to Y-haplogroup R1b-Z2103 and shows minor, but unambiguous, Yamnaya-related ancestry on the autosomes. Why is this a problem? Because both R1b-Z2103 and the Yamnaya culture are dated to the Bronze Age, and Yamnaya samples from Kalmykia and

Protohistoric Swat Valley peoples in qpGraph

If I was to add one thing to the Narasimhan et al. 2018 preprint, it'd be a series of uncomplicated qpGraph trees that back up, very simply and directly, the main conclusions in the manuscript. Such as this:















If some of you think that it's possible to show pretty much anything in these sorts of graphs, then you're wrong. For instance, it's not possible to swap West_Siberia_N for

On the doorstep of India

One of the most remarkable discoveries in the recent Narasimhan et al. 2018 preprint has to be the presence of what are essentially Eastern European migrant populations within the Inner Asian Mountain Corridor (IAMC) during the Middle to Late Bronze Age (MLBA). Remarkable for so many reasons, but seemingly under-appreciated by a lot of people, judging by the online discussions that I've seen on

Bronze Age Central Asia: terra incognita no longer

I've updated my Global25 datasheets with the samples from the Narasimhan et al. 2018 preprint (look for these labels). Feel free to use this output for anything you like, and please show us the results in the comments below.

Global 25 datasheet

Global 25 datasheet (scaled)

Global 25 pop averages

Global 25 pop averages (scaled)

Also, here's my Principal Component Analysis (PCA) of ancient

Andronovo pastoralists brought steppe ancestry to South Asia (Narasimhan et al. 2018 preprint)

Over at bioRxiv at this LINK. Note that the Andronovo samples that are shown to be the best fit for the steppe ancestry in South Asians are labeled Steppe_MLBA_East (ie. Middle to Late Bronze Age eastern steppe). Below is the abstract and a couple of key quotes from the paper and its supp info PDF. Emphasis is mine:

The genetic formation of Central and South Asian populations has been unclear

Central Asia as the PIE urheimat? Forget it

Right or wrong, the main contenders for the title of the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) homeland, or urheimat, are Eastern Europe, Anatolia and Transcaucasia, in that order. Central Asia, is, at best, one of the also-rans in this tussle, much like India and the Arctic Circle.

However, if you've been following the discussions on the topic in the comments at this blog over the last couple of years, you

Siberian ancestry and Y-haplogroup N1c spread across Northern Europe rather late in prehistory (Lamnidis et al. 2018 preprint)

A claim often made in popular culture is that the Saami people of Fennoscandia and Northern Russia are the last indigenous Europeans. I saw some guy blurt this out on a random cooking show the other day. But it's been obvious for a while now, thanks to analyses of modern-day DNA, that the Saami, and indeed almost all other Uralic-speaking groups in Europe, have a somewhat more complex population

The whiteboard

David Reich's book, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past, is coming out next Tuesday (see here). Chapter 6 has the potentially controversial title The Collision that Formed India, and indeed I know for a fact that Bronze Age steppe pastoralists, who seem to induce panic attacks amongst a lot of people, and especially Out-of-India proponents, get a big

The Iberomaurusians

I can honestly say that I've suddenly become a more open minded individual after running the five Iberomaurusian samples from M. van de Loosdrecht et al. 2018 in my Global25 Principal Component Analysis (PCA).

They're certainly a curious bunch. In many pairs of the 25 PCs, they sit alone, in parts of the plots that I never expected to see populated. Interestingly though, modern-day North

Max Planck scientists: on a mission against geography

I was just reading the new Marieke van de Loosdrecht et al. 2018 paper [LINK] about the Pleistocene North African hunter-gatherers, and really enjoying it, until I saw this strange map. Please note that I edited the image for the purpose of review and to highlight an error (red pointer and arrow).



This is either a stupid oversight, or the authors of the paper, mainly from the Max Planck

First real foray into Migration Period Europe: the Gepid, Roman, Ostrogoth and others...

This is going to be our first meaningful look at the all important Migration Period, thanks to the recently published Veeramah et al. 2018 paper and accompanying dataset (see here). The Migration Period is generally regarded to have been the time when present-day Europe first began to take shape, in a rather sudden and violent way, with, you guessed it, a lot of migrations taking place.

Here's

Exotic female migrants in Early Medieval Bavaria (Veeramah et al. 2018)

PNAS has a new open access paper on the genomics of Early Medieval Bavarians, with a special focus on women with artificial skull deformation [LINK]. The data also include two very interesting Medieval samples from Crimea and Serbia, associated with the East Germanic Ostrogoths and Gepids, respectively. Both show significant Asian admixture. I'll try to get my hands on the dataset ASAP. Here's

Was Ukraine_Eneolithic I6561 a Proto-Indo-European?

It's certainly a valid question, simply because the remains of this individual (sampled by Mathieson et al. 2018, see here) are from a cemetery of the Sredny Stog culture, which, based on historical linguistics and archaeological data, has already been posited to have been a Proto-Indo-European (PIE) culture, that gave rise to the supposedly Late Proto-Indo-European (LPIE) Yamnaya culture, that

Ancient genomes from Southeast Asia (McColl et al. 2018 preprint)

Over at bioRxiv at this LINK. I'm still reading and trying to figure out what the 25 ancient genomes from this preprint say about the peopling of Eurasia and, in particular, South Asian population structure, including the so called Ancestral South Indian (ASI) genetic component. Any ideas? Below are the abstract and Figure 4 from the preprint.

Two distinct population models have been put forward

Beakers vs modern-day Northern Europeans

Here are most of the Beakers from Olalde et al. 2018 in my Principal Component Analysis (PCA) of modern-day Northern European genetic variation. They look rather Celtic or perhaps Celto-Germanic, don't they? The relevant datasheet is available here.



If you're wondering why the Yamnaya and early Baltic Corded Ware individuals are sitting in the middle of the plot, I'd say it's because they

Main candidates for the precursors of the proto-Greeks in the ancient DNA record to date

Thanks to the recent release of the Mathieson et al. 2018 dataset (see here), I've been able to spot a very interesting northwest to southeast genetic cline running from the oldest Peloponnese Neolithic (Peloponnese_N) individuals to the Bronze Age Anatolians (Anatolia_BA). Here it is, highlighted in my Principal Component Analysis (PCA) of ancient West Eurasian variation. The relevant datasheet

On the origin of steppe ancestry in Beaker people (work in progress)

One of the major themes in the recent Bell Beaker Behemoth (ie. Olalde et al. 2018) is the presence of Yamnaya- or steppe-related ancestry in most of the Beaker individuals. Up to a whopping 75% in one guy from what is now Hungary. However, as far as I can see, the authors don't go into any specifics about the origin of this admixture. This is about as close as they come. Emphasis is mine:

Awesome substructure within Czech Corded Ware

This is where the three Czech Corded Ware samples from Olalde et al. 2018 cluster in my Principal Component Analysis (PCA) of ancient West Eurasian genetic variation.



The two individuals belonging to Y-haplogroup R1a look like they might be straight from the Pontic-Caspian (PC) steppe. That's because they're sitting right next to an Eneolithic sample from the North Pontic part of the PC steppe

The Yamnaya outlier

For a while now I've been arguing that the more exotic and southern, non-Eastern European Hunter-Gatherer (EHG), part of the Yamnaya genotype mostly made its way into the Pontic-Caspian steppe via female mediated gene flow, probably as a result of the practice of female exogamy with populations in the North Caucasus. For instance:

A plausible model for the formation of the Yamnaya genotype

The

Bronze Age Sicilian vs modern-day Sicilians

This is the first in a series of quick and simple posts focusing on genetic shifts across Eurasia since the Bronze Age. Any thoughts about what we're seeing in these Global25/nMonte models and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) below? Feel free to let me know in the comments.

By the way, the Bronze Age Sicilian, from a "Beaker" burial site at Partanna, western Sicily, and dated to 2500–1900 BCE

A swarm of locusts?

The dam has truly broken. Below is my usual Principal Component Analysis (PCA) of ancient West Eurasian genetic variation, except now also featuring the new samples from Mathieson et al. 2018 and Olalde et al. 2018. Incredibly, there are almost a thousand ancient individuals on this plot. The relevant datasheet is available here.



My imagination is probably running wild from all of this

Migration of the Bell Beakers—but not from Iberia (Olalde et al. 2018)

At last, after many months of waiting, the paper that I've been calling the Bell Beaker Behemoth will finally appear at Nature today or tomorrow, depending on your time zone [Update: the paper is here]. The accompanying dataset is already online, and it's twice as big as what the paper's bioRxiv preprint promised, packing 400 new samples from Neolithic, Copper Age and Bronze Age Europe (freely

C for Cheddar Man (?)

A new preprint has just appeared at bioRxiv on the Mesolithic to Neolithic transition and resulting massive population shift in Britain. It features genome-wide data from six Mesolithic and 67 Neolithic individuals, including the famous Cheddar Man.

Population Replacement in Early Neolithic Britain by Brace et al.

The peculiar thing about this preprint is that it doesn't list the Y-haplogroups

Modeling genetic ancestry with Davidski: step by step

There are many different ways to model your genetic ancestry. I prefer the Global25/nMonte method (see here). This is a step by step guide to modeling ancient ancestry proportions with this simple but powerful method using my own genome.



As far as I know, the vast majority of my recent ancestors came from the northern half of Europe. This may or may not be correct, but it gives me somewhere to

Unleash the power: Global 25 test drive thread

Ancestry modeling enthusiasts, feel free to do your best (or worst) with these datasheets and share the output, whatever it might be, in the comments below:

Global 25 datasheet

Global 25 datasheet (scaled)

Global 25 pop averages

Global 25 pop averages (scaled)

Global 25 PAST datasheet

The Global 25 is a more powerful version of the Global 10 ancestry analysis (see here). If all goes well in

Mitogenomes from the Iron Age South Baltic (Stolarek et al. 2018)

Over at Scientific Reports at this LINK. And yes, full genomes of many of the samples are on the way. Emphasis is mine:

Abstract: Despite the increase in our knowledge about the factors that shaped the genetic structure of the human population in Europe, the demographic processes that occurred during and after the Early Bronze Age (EBA) in Central-East Europe remain unclear. To fill the gap, we

Early Baltic Corded Ware form a genetic clade with Yamnaya, but...

This is what Mittnik et al. 2018 say about a couple of their Corded Ware, or Baltic Late Neolithic (Baltic_LN), samples from what is now Lithuania:

Computing D-statistics for each individual of the form D(Baltic LN, Yamnaya; X, Mbuti), we find that the two individuals from the early phase of the LN (Plinkaigalis242 and Gyvakarai1, dating to ca. 3200–2600 calBCE) form a clade with Yamnaya (

Indian smoke and mirrors

On January 4 this year Hindi newspaper Dainik Jagran published a so called special feature on Indo-European languages. In fact, the article claimed to be giving its readers a sneak peak at the results from the upcoming and much anticipated archaeogenetics paper on the northern Indian Harappan site of Rakhigarhi. [LINK]

I knew about this article when it first came out, because it was mentioned in

Paleoeuropeoid (steppe herder) infiltration into South Central Asia during the Bronze Age (Dubova et al. 2016)

Update 31/03/2018: Check out this awesome new preprint at bioRxiv: The Genomic Formation of South and Central Asia (Narasimhan et al. 2018)

...

I don't usually take cranial studies very seriously, mostly because they have a history of being way out of the ballpark. However, Interaction between Steppe and Agricultural Tribes during the Bronze Age: Morphological Aspects by Dubova et al. 2016 is,

mtDNAwiki on "Steppe folk" mtDNA and Indo-Iranian origins

Fascinating stuff from Samuel at mtDNAwiki. Emphasis is mine:

Steppe folk were people who resided in what are today Southern Russia and Eastern Ukraine between 6,000 and 4,000 years ago. They were very different from the Anatolian farmers I discussed earlier.

Ancient DNA shows that, between 3000 and 2000 BC, Steppe folk migrated en masse into Northern Europe, Central Asia and Siberia. Shortly

Unadmixed Basal Eurasians lived throughout the Near East ~45-15 KYA?

Below is a map from a recent review paper at Trends in Genetics by Melinda A. Yang and Qiaomei Fu titled Insights into Modern Human Prehistory Using Ancient Genomes.



It's somewhat speculative and an abstract of geographic realities (note that the ancient "Karelia" population is placed several thousand miles east of Karelia, in Northern Asia as opposed to Northeastern Europe). Nevertheless, the

The Kho people: archaic Indo-Aryans

I've manged to get my hands on two Kho samples from Chitral, northern Pakistan, courtesy of Khana from the comments at this blog and someone named Sam Sloan. Here's what Wikipedia has to say about the Kho, who are Dardic-speakers and thus close linguistic relatives of the Kalasha people:

The Kho people are likely descendants of those who arrived in the region during the Indo-Aryan migration.[5]

Ancient mitogenomes reveal Central Asian (Hunnic?) admixture in Hungarian Conquerers (Neparáczki et al. 2018 preprint)

Over at bioRxiv at this LINK. The number of ancient mitogenomes in this preprint (102) is fairly impressive, but obviously there's only so much insight one can gain from maternally-inherited genetic markers when studying male-driven conquests like that of the Carpathian Basin by the early Hungarians. So yeah, let's wait and see how the conclusions in this preprint gel with the relevant ancient

The case of Chalcolithic fortresses in the Northwestern Caucasus (Kozintsev 2017)

It's a pity that we still don't have any decent ancient DNA data from the North Caucasus and nearby steppes, apart from, of course, those few intriguing mitochondrial genomes from Maykop burials (see here). This leaves us guessing about the genetic origins of the people who lived in this region across the millennia, and thus their genealogical relationships to near and far ancient and modern-day

Another look at the genetic structure of Yamnaya

Yamnaya and other similar Eneolithic/Bronze Age herder groups from the Eurasian steppe were mostly a mixture of Eastern European Hunter-Gatherers (EHG) and Caucasus Hunter-Gatherers (CHG). But they also harbored minor ancestry from at least one, significantly more westerly, source that pulled them away from the EHG > CHG north/south genetic cline. This is easy to show with formal statistics (for

Genetic maps featuring 67 ancient genomes and more than 3,000 present-day individuals

I've got some eye candy for you guys as we wait for 2018 to really get going. Below are three Principal Component Analyses (PCA) plots, or genetic maps, based on the ancient diploid dataset from Martiniano et al. 2017 (described in more detail here). Click on the images to download hi-res PDFs of each plot. The relevant datasheets are available here.







The important thing about these PCA is

Ancient mitogenomes from Sardinia and Lebanon (Matisoo-Smith et al. 2018)

Over at PLoS ONE at this LINK. Emphasis is mine:

Abstract: The Phoenicians emerged in the Northern Levant around 1800 BCE and by the 9th century BCE had spread their culture across the Mediterranean Basin, establishing trading posts, and settlements in various European Mediterranean and North African locations. Despite their widespread influence, what is known of the Phoenicians comes from what

A genome from the first founding population of Native Americans (Moreno-Mayar et al. 2018)

Over at Nature at this LINK. By the way, when did Nature start adding those "Life Sciences Reporting Summaries" to its papers? I remember having a chat with Broad MIT/Harvard back in May about adding something like this to ancient DNA papers, especially in regards to data exclusions, right after my blog entry about the somewhat suspiciously missing Yamnaya males in Mathieson et al. 2017 (see here