On the genetic prehistory of the Greater Caucasus (Wang et al. 2018 preprint)

Finally, the focus shifts to the Eneolithic/Bronze Age North Caucasus. In a new manuscript at bioRxiv, Wang et al. present genome-wide SNP data for 45 prehistoric individuals from the region along a 3000-year temporal transect (see here). From the preprint (emphasis is mine):

Based on PCA and ADMIXTURE plots we observe two distinct genetic clusters: one cluster falls with previously published

New PCA featuring Botai horse tamers, Hun and Saka warriors, and many more...

Just in case anyone's wondering how the ancient samples from the two recent archaeogenetic papers by Damgaard et al. (Nature and Science) behave in my two main Principal Component Analyses (PCA), here you go:



The relevant datasheet is available here. Just over 100 of the new samples made into onto this plot, but to keep things simple I only highlighted a few of them. To see the positions of

Hittite era Anatolians in qpAdm

The apparent lack of steppe ancestry in five Hittite-era, perhaps Indo-European-speaking, Anatolians was interpreted in Damgaard et al. 2018 as a major discovery with profound implications for the origin of the Anatolian branch of Indo-European languages.

But I disagree with this assessment, simply because none of these Hittite-era individuals are from royal Hittite, or Nes, burials. Hence,

Graeco-Aryan parallels

The clearly non-local admixture in the geographically and genetically disparate, but Indo-European-speaking, ancient Mycenaeans and present-day North Indian Brahmins is very similar. So similar, in fact, that it could derive from practically the same population in space and time. The most plausible source for this admixture are the Bronze Age herders of the Pontic-Caspian steppe and their

Protohistoric Swat Valley peoples in qpGraph #2

Three options. Just one passes muster; the one with Sintashta. Coincidence? I think not. Who still wants to claim that there's no Sintashta-related steppe stuff in these Iron Age SPGT South Asians? The relevant graph files are available here. Any ideas for better models?







Update 08/05/2018: The reason that I chose Dzharkutan1_BA, from what is now Uzbekistan, as the BMAC proxy in the above

The protohistoric Swat Valley "Indo-Aryans" might not be exactly what we think they are

I need some help interpreting these linear models of ancient and present-day South Asian populations. Overall, the Iron Age groups from the Swat Valley, or SPGT, look like rather obvious outliers. The relevant datasheet is available here.





The reason for this might be significant bidirectional gene flow and/or continuity between Central Asia and the northern parts of South Asia before

Open analysis thread: genetic distance (Fst) matrix focusing on ancient Central and South Asia

I'm hoping that we can learn something new about the genomic prehistory of Eurasia, and especially Central and South Asia, based on this massive new Fst matrix:

Ancient Central and South Asia genetic distance (Fst) matrix

Hint: it's probably easiest to initially explore this format with a program called PAST. Indeed, if you'd like to model fine scale ancestry proportions based on these data, it