Inferring the linguistic affinity of long dead and non-literate peoples: a multidisciplinary approach

Ancient DNA has treated us to many surprises in recent years. But it has also uncannily corroborated some well established hypotheses that were formulated decades ago from historical linguistics and archeological data. One such hypothesis is that the population associated with the Late Neolithic Corded Ware culture (CWC), and its myriad offshoots, spoke early Indo-European languages and spread

Some myths die hard

Ancient DNA tells us that the Bronze Age wasn't kind to the indigenous populations of Central Asia. It seems to have wiped them out totally. Indeed, Central Asia might well be the only major world region in which native hunter-gatherers failed to make a perceptible impact on the genetics of any extant populations.

Before the Neolithic transition, much of Central Asia was home to hunter-gatherers

Map of pre-Corded Ware culture (>2900 BCE) instances of Y-haplogroup R1a

Below is a map showing the global distribution of Y-chromosome haplogroup R1a prior to the expansions of the R1a-rich Corded Ware culture (CWC) people and their descendants across Europe and Asia from around 2900 BCE. I'll be updating this map regularly and using it to help me narrow down the options for the place of origin of R1a, and also to counter the misinformation about this topic that 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 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)

Dutch Beakers: like no other Beakers

In my last two blog posts I tried to explain why the so called Bell Beakers of prehistoric Europe cannot be confidently derived in any significant way from the Yamnaya population of the Carpathian Basin, and are more likely to have been an offshoot, in varying degrees, of the Single Grave or Corded Ware people of the Lower Rhine region (see here and here).

To help drive my message home, below is

Single Grave > Bell Beakers

I've been studying in detail the genetic substructures within the Bell Beaker population with formal statistics and Principal Component Analyses (PCA). As far as I can see, among the two most homogeneous, and thus least likely to be recently admixed, Beaker groups are the Dutch Beakers and also the Dutch and British Beaker males belonging to Y-haplogroup R1b-P312. This, of course, makes good

Hungarian Yamnaya > Bell Beakers?

Ever since the publication of the Olalde et al. Beaker paper (see here), there's been a lot of talk online about Hungarian Yamnaya as the most likely source of the Yamnaya-related, R1b-P312-rich northern Bell Beakers who went on to dominate much of Central and Western Europe during the Late Neolithic and Bronze Age.

Certainly, this is still possible, and we might find out soon if it's true

The PIE homeland controversy: January 2019 status report

Last year, the preprint that claimed to have presented archaeogenetic data that opened up the possibility of the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) homeland being located south of the Caucasus was, ironically, also the preprint that considerably strengthened my confidence that the said homeland was actually located north of the Caucasus.

Of course, I'm talking about the Wang et al. manuscript at bioRxiv,

Some German guy once said...

If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself.

On a totally unrelated note, the Max-Planck-Institut für Menschheitsgeschichte (aka MPI-SHH) is apparently still claiming that its southern Proto-Indo-European (PIE) homeland theory has been corroborated by archaeogenetic data. For instance, check out the Youtube clip here.

Below is a screen

On the trail of the Proto-Uralic speakers (work in progress)

Historical linguists have long posited that Fennoscandia was a busy contact zone between early Germanic and Uralic languages. The first ancient DNA samples from what is now Finland have corroborated their inferences, by showing that during the Iron Age the western part of the country was inhabited by a genetically heterogeneous population closely related to both the Uralic-speaking Saami and

Big deal of 2018: Yamnaya not related to Maykop

I was going to write this post after the genotype data from the Wang et al. preprint on the genetic prehistory of the Greater Caucasus became available, because I wanted to demonstrate a few key points with analyses of my own. But I've got a hunch that the formal publication of the manuscript, and thus also the release of the data, has been indefinitely delayed for one reason or another. So here

Corded Ware people =/= Proto-Uralics (Tambets et al. 2018)

A new paper on the genetic structure of Uralic-speaking populations has appeared at Genome Biology (see here). It looks to me like the prelude to a forthcoming paleogenetics paper on the same topic that was discussed in the Estonian media recently (see here). Although not exactly ground breaking (because it basically argues what I've been saying at this blog for years, like here and here), it's a

Indo-European crackpottery

I'm sometimes asked in the comments here and elsewhere what I think of Carlos Quiles and his Indo-European website (see here if you're game). Discussing this topic is a waste of time and effort, so I'm writing this blog post for future reference just in case this question comes up again. In all honesty, I think Carlos is a troll and his ramblings are of no value.



Now, many of you probably

Modeling genetic ancestry with Davidski: step by step

There are many different ways to model your genetic ancestry. I prefer the Global25/nMonte method (see here). This is a step by step guide to modeling ancient ancestry proportions with this simple but powerful method using my own genome.



As far as I know, the vast majority of my recent ancestors came from the northern half of Europe. This may or may not be correct, but it gives me somewhere to