The Steppe Maykop enigma

Who were the Steppe Maykop people exactly? Their ancestry must surely rank as one of the biggest surprises served up by ancient DNA to date.

I always thought that they'd turn out roughly like a mixture between populations associated with the Kura-Araxes and Yamnaya cultures (mostly because their territory was located sort of in between them). Nope, that wasn't even close. This is where they

All quiet on the eastern front

I put together this quick and dirty qpGraph tree just to double check what the Eneolithic trio from the Piedmont steppe (Piedmont_Eneolithic) were roughly made of, and how they related to some of the other populations from the eastern half of ancient West Eurasia. The relevant graph file is available here.



Yep, the tree basically lines up with scientific literature. In other words,

Catacomb > Armenia_MLBA

It's now clear, thanks to ancient DNA, that Transcaucasia and surrounds were affected by multiple, and at times significant, population movements from Eastern Europe during the Chalcolithic and Bronze Age periods. Based on the ancient samples from what is now Armenia, I'd say that this process peaked during the Middle Bronze Age. But who exactly were the people who perhaps swarmed south of the

On Maykop ancestry in Yamnaya

What Maykop ancestry in Yamnaya? There is none, or at least not enough worth discussing, except in one highly unusual female outlier from a burial in what is now eastern Ukraine. But apparently this is still up for debate? Well it shouldn't be.



To anyone with even a passing interest in the Yamnaya culture, it should be rather obvious that it formed during the tail end of the Eneolithic on the

Ancient Caucasus open analysis and discussion

The following samples from the recent Wang et al. paper on the genetic prehistory of the Caucasus are now in the Global25 datasheets:

Catacomb MK3003
Catacomb RK4001
Catacomb RK4002
Catacomb SA6003
Darkveti-Meshoko I1722
Darkveti-Meshoko I2055
Darkveti-Meshoko I2056
Kubano-Tersk BU2001
Kubano-Tersk GW1001
Kubano-Tersk LYG001
Kubano-Tersk MK5009
Kubano-Tersk PG2002
Kubano-Tersk RK1003

Blast from the past: Matters of basic geography

I'm re-posting this article from 2017 for the benefit of some Science News journalists, who are apparently having major problems dealing with basic geography. That's because they think that the Yamnaya culture was located in Asia rather than Eastern Europe. Take my advice and don't read Science News whatever you do. It might rot your brain.

...

The steppe north of the Black Sea in Ukraine has

A Bell Beaker superhighway

Below is a density heat map of Bell Beaker pottery finds from a recent paper titled Der Glockenbecher in Europa - eine Karteirung (The mapping of the Bell Beaker in Europe). It's freely available as part of a series of new archeological papers on the Bell Beaker phenomenon at the Journal of Neolithic Archeology (see here).



Particularly eye catching, at least for me, is the trail of high

The tracer dye

Remember that Wang et al. preprint at bioRxiv on the genetic prehistory of the Greater Caucasus? Well, it's just been published at Nature Communications under a new title: Ancient human genome-wide data from a 3000-year interval in the Caucasus corresponds with eco-geographic regions.

The authors also re-worked a few other parts of the manuscript, including the abstract and figures, but most of

The Boscombe Bowmen

I'm thinking that the Boscombe Bowmen site in Wiltshire, southern England, might be a valuable case study of how the Bell Beaker population, and thus also the present-day western European gene pool, came to be.

Dated to 2500–2140 BCE, this isn't an especially early Bell Beaker grave, but its inventory is intriguing. It includes seven All-Over-Cord (AOC) beakers and one Cord-Zoned-Maritime (CZM)