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Why is this important? Because 2018 is going to be a huge year for population genetics, and especially for ancient DNA, and if this blog is also going to be huge, then I'll need some money. So if you like this blog, or even if you hate it, but you like spending time here hating it, then

Corded Ware as an offshoot of Hungarian Yamnaya (Anthony 2017)

David W. Anthony has just posted a new paper at his Academia.edu page titled Archaeology and Language: Why Archaeologists Care about the Indo-European Problem (see here).

It's not only an interesting discussion about why the search for the Indo-European homeland is still such a big deal, but also a useful, almost up to date, summary of the fascinating stuff that ancient DNA has revealed about

Watch the red arrows naysayers

Here's a map from yesterday's presentation by Italian archaeologist Massimo Vidale at the MPI-SHH Jena Cross Roads conference on South Asia. He was focusing on the skeletal remains from the protohistoric, and likely early Indo-Aryan, cemeteries at Udegram and Gogdara in the Swat Valley, modern-day Pakistan. Source: Twitter.



And this is my own map from back in August (see here) summarizing what

Descendants of ancient European (fair?) maidens in Central Asia's highlands

Several South Central Asian populations have a reputation for producing individuals who look surprisingly European, even the lighter shade sort of European from Eastern and Northern Europe. This is especially true of the Pamiri Tajiks, and that's unlikely to be a coincidence, because these people probably do harbor a lot of ancient Eastern European ancestry.

My own estimates, using various

The ancient genomics revolution (Skoglund & Mathieson 2017 preprint)

Two former Harvard scientists Pontus Skoglund and Iain Mathieson are working on a new review paper on the wide range of scientific breakthroughs provided by ancient genomics over the past decade. The preprint is available at Dropbox here. There's also a thread about the preprint at Mathieson's Twitter account here.

I've read through it a couple of times, especially the parts about Europe, and

Who's your (proto) daddy Western Europeans?

Considering the increasingly large numbers of paleogenomic samples being released online nowadays, it's no longer practical for me to try to highlight most archaeological cultures and even genetic clusters in my Principal Component Analyses (PCA) of the ancient world. Thus, from now on, I'll be focusing attention in such PCA on the main population shifts that have led to the formation of the

Descendants of Greeks in the medieval Himalayas?

Below is an abstract from the upcoming Human Evolution 2017 conference (Cambridge, UK, November 20-22). It'll be interesting to see when the paper comes out how Harney, Patterson et al. uncovered the Greek affinities of some of these individuals; uniparental markers, rare alleles? The accompanying pic is from Wikipedia.

The skeletons of Roopkund Lake: Genomic insights into the mysterious