Andronovo pastoralists brought steppe ancestry to South Asia (Narasimhan et al. 2018 preprint)

Over at bioRxiv at this LINK. Note that the Andronovo samples that are shown to be the best fit for the steppe ancestry in South Asians are labeled Steppe_MLBA_East (ie. Middle to Late Bronze Age eastern steppe). Below is the abstract and a couple of key quotes from the paper and its supp info PDF. Emphasis is mine:

The genetic formation of Central and South Asian populations has been unclear

Central Asia as the PIE urheimat? Forget it

Right or wrong, the main contenders for the title of the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) homeland, or urheimat, are Eastern Europe, Anatolia and Transcaucasia, in that order. Central Asia, is, at best, one of the also-rans in this tussle, much like India and the Arctic Circle.

However, if you've been following the discussions on the topic in the comments at this blog over the last couple of years, you

Siberian ancestry and Y-haplogroup N1c spread across Northern Europe rather late in prehistory (Lamnidis et al. 2018 preprint)

A claim often made in popular culture is that the Saami people of Fennoscandia and Northern Russia are the last indigenous Europeans. I saw some guy blurt this out on a random cooking show the other day. But it's been obvious for a while now, thanks to analyses of modern-day DNA, that the Saami, and indeed almost all other Uralic-speaking groups in Europe, have a somewhat more complex population

The whiteboard

David Reich's book, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past, is coming out next Tuesday (see here). Chapter 6 has the potentially controversial title The Collision that Formed India, and indeed I know for a fact that Bronze Age steppe pastoralists, who seem to induce panic attacks amongst a lot of people, and especially Out-of-India proponents, get a big

The Iberomaurusians

I can honestly say that I've suddenly become a more open minded individual after running the five Iberomaurusian samples from M. van de Loosdrecht et al. 2018 in my Global25 Principal Component Analysis (PCA).

They're certainly a curious bunch. In many pairs of the 25 PCs, they sit alone, in parts of the plots that I never expected to see populated. Interestingly though, modern-day North

Max Planck scientists: on a mission against geography

I was just reading the new Marieke van de Loosdrecht et al. 2018 paper [LINK] about the Pleistocene North African hunter-gatherers, and really enjoying it, until I saw this strange map. Please note that I edited the image for the purpose of review and to highlight an error (red pointer and arrow).



This is either a stupid oversight, or the authors of the paper, mainly from the Max Planck

First real foray into Migration Period Europe: the Gepid, Roman, Ostrogoth and others...

This is going to be our first meaningful look at the all important Migration Period, thanks to the recently published Veeramah et al. 2018 paper and accompanying dataset (see here). The Migration Period is generally regarded to have been the time when present-day Europe first began to take shape, in a rather sudden and violent way, with, you guessed it, a lot of migrations taking place.

Here's