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