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)

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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