On the association between Uralic expansions and Y-haplogroup N

Almost all present-day populations speaking Uralic languages show moderate to high frequencies of Y-chromosome haplogroup N. I reckon there are two likely explanations for this:

- the speakers of Proto-Uralic were rich in N because they lived in an area, probably somewhere around the Ural Mountains, where it was common, and they spread it with them as they expanded from their homeland

- Uralic

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

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

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

On the doorstep of India

One of the most remarkable discoveries in the recent Narasimhan et al. 2018 preprint has to be the presence of what are essentially Eastern European migrant populations within the Inner Asian Mountain Corridor (IAMC) during the Middle to Late Bronze Age (MLBA). Remarkable for so many reasons, but seemingly under-appreciated by a lot of people, judging by the online discussions that I've seen on