Exotic female migrants in Early Medieval Bavaria (Veeramah et al. 2018)

PNAS has a new open access paper on the genomics of Early Medieval Bavarians, with a special focus on women with artificial skull deformation [LINK]. The data also include two very interesting Medieval samples from Crimea and Serbia, associated with the East Germanic Ostrogoths and Gepids, respectively. Both show significant Asian admixture. I'll try to get my hands on the dataset ASAP. Here's

Was Ukraine_Eneolithic I6561 a Proto-Indo-European?

It's certainly a valid question, simply because the remains of this individual (sampled by Mathieson et al. 2018, see here) are from a cemetery of the Sredny Stog culture, which, based on historical linguistics and archaeological data, has already been posited to have been a Proto-Indo-European (PIE) culture, that gave rise to the supposedly Late Proto-Indo-European (LPIE) Yamnaya culture, that

Ancient genomes from Southeast Asia (McColl et al. 2018 preprint)

Over at bioRxiv at this LINK. I'm still reading and trying to figure out what the 25 ancient genomes from this preprint say about the peopling of Eurasia and, in particular, South Asian population structure, including the so called Ancestral South Indian (ASI) genetic component. Any ideas? Below are the abstract and Figure 4 from the preprint.

Two distinct population models have been put forward

Beakers vs modern-day Northern Europeans

Here are most of the Beakers from Olalde et al. 2018 in my Principal Component Analysis (PCA) of modern-day Northern European genetic variation. They look rather Celtic or perhaps Celto-Germanic, don't they? The relevant datasheet is available here.



If you're wondering why the Yamnaya and early Baltic Corded Ware individuals are sitting in the middle of the plot, I'd say it's because they

Main candidates for the precursors of the proto-Greeks in the ancient DNA record to date

Thanks to the recent release of the Mathieson et al. 2018 dataset (see here), I've been able to spot a very interesting northwest to southeast genetic cline running from the oldest Peloponnese Neolithic (Peloponnese_N) individuals to the Bronze Age Anatolians (Anatolia_BA). Here it is, highlighted in my Principal Component Analysis (PCA) of ancient West Eurasian variation. The relevant datasheet

On the origin of steppe ancestry in Beaker people (work in progress)

One of the major themes in the recent Bell Beaker Behemoth (ie. Olalde et al. 2018) is the presence of Yamnaya- or steppe-related ancestry in most of the Beaker individuals. Up to a whopping 75% in one guy from what is now Hungary. However, as far as I can see, the authors don't go into any specifics about the origin of this admixture. This is about as close as they come. Emphasis is mine:

Awesome substructure within Czech Corded Ware

This is where the three Czech Corded Ware samples from Olalde et al. 2018 cluster in my Principal Component Analysis (PCA) of ancient West Eurasian genetic variation.



The two individuals belonging to Y-haplogroup R1a look like they might be straight from the Pontic-Caspian (PC) steppe. That's because they're sitting right next to an Eneolithic sample from the North Pontic part of the PC steppe