Steppe Maykop: a buffer zone?

Unfortunately, the ancient data from the Wang et al. preprint still haven't been released online. As I've already pointed out many times, the manuscript conclusion looks horribly contrived (for instance, see here), but the data are awesome, and most of the preprint is quite solid.



One thing that I'd really like to do is to compare in detail each of the ancient populations from the preprint to

Y-haplogroup P1 in Pleistocene Siberia (Sikora et al. 2018 preprint)

Over at bioRxiv at this LINK. Below is the abstract, emphasis is mine. Two of the (unrelated) males from Yana RHS belong to Y-haplogroup P1 and mitochondrial haplogroup U2. Note that P1 is ancestral to Y-haplogroups Q and R.

Far northeastern Siberia has been occupied by humans for more than 40 thousand years. Yet, owing to a scarcity of early archaeological sites and human remains, its

A closer look at a couple of ancients from Hellenistic Anatolia

Not sure if anyone's mentioned or noticed this already, but the two currently available genomes from Hellenistic Anatolia (samples MA2197 and MA2198 from Damgaard et al. 2018) pack an impressive amount of steppe ancestry. Moreover, one of these individuals also shows obvious admixture from Central Asia.

This isn't particularly surprising, considering the well attested presence of Galatian Celts

ASHG 2018 open thread

The American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) annual meetings kicks off tomorrow in San Diego. Feel free to post anything near and far related to this event in the comment thread below.

You can explore this year's offerings via the online planner/abstract search located HERE. See anything really interesting? Here's what I found after a quick search using the term "ancient". Hopefully someone

The resistance crumbles

Over the years some scientists from the Estonian Biocentre have been among the staunchest opponents of the idea that Bronze Age pastoralists originating in the steppes of Eastern Europe had a significant genetic and linguistic impact on South Asia (for instance, see here).

But this week they put out a review paper titled The genetic makings of South Asia [LINK] featuring the figure below. It's a

Cimmerians, Scythians and Sarmatians came from...

Apparently they all came from the eastern Pontic-Caspian steppe. There's a new paper about that at Science Advances (see here). Below is the abstract, emphasis is mine:

For millennia, the Pontic-Caspian steppe was a connector between the Eurasian steppe and Europe. In this scene, multidirectional and sequential movements of different populations may have occurred, including those of the Eurasian

Greeks in a Longobard cemetery

I designed a new Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to help me test the fine scale genetic affinities of post-Bronze Age ancient samples from Southern Europe and surrounds. Below is a version of this PCA with a selection of the most Southern European-related ancients from this year's Amorim et al. and Veeramah et al. papers (for background reading, see the posts and comments here and here). The