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 (