Genetic maps featuring 67 ancient genomes and more than 3,000 present-day individuals

I've got some eye candy for you guys as we wait for 2018 to really get going. Below are three Principal Component Analyses (PCA) plots, or genetic maps, based on the ancient diploid dataset from Martiniano et al. 2017 (described in more detail here). Click on the images to download hi-res PDFs of each plot. The relevant datasheets are available here.







The important thing about these PCA is

Ancient mitogenomes from Sardinia and Lebanon (Matisoo-Smith et al. 2018)

Over at PLoS ONE at this LINK. Emphasis is mine:

Abstract: The Phoenicians emerged in the Northern Levant around 1800 BCE and by the 9th century BCE had spread their culture across the Mediterranean Basin, establishing trading posts, and settlements in various European Mediterranean and North African locations. Despite their widespread influence, what is known of the Phoenicians comes from what

A genome from the first founding population of Native Americans (Moreno-Mayar et al. 2018)

Over at Nature at this LINK. By the way, when did Nature start adding those "Life Sciences Reporting Summaries" to its papers? I remember having a chat with Broad MIT/Harvard back in May about adding something like this to ancient DNA papers, especially in regards to data exclusions, right after my blog entry about the somewhat suspiciously missing Yamnaya males in Mathieson et al. 2017 (see here

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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