An exceptional burial indeed, but not that of an Indo-European

Not too many people have been buried sitting on wagons. The most famous case is that of an Early Bronze Age man who, considering his injuries, may have died in a high-speed crash - high-speed for its time anyway - on the Pontic-Caspian steppe in Eastern Europe.

It's likely that this guy was one of the very first wagon-drivers in human history, because his four-wheeled wooden model is dated

Maykop: a multi-ethnic layer cake?

Let's speculate about the linguistic affinities of the currently available ancient populations from the Caucasus and surrounds. I put together a series of outgroup f3-stats to help things along. They're available for download here.

Maykop
Georgian 0.258224
Abkhasian 0.257899
Latvian 0.257376
Swedish 0.257301
Turkish_Trabzon 0.256996
Basque_Spanish 0.256589
Chechen 0.256514
Icelandic 0.256418

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

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