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