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.

...