What's Maykop (or Iran) got to do with it? #2

For the past few days I've been trying to copy and also improve on the qpGraph tree in the Wang et al. preprint (see here). I've managed to come up with a new version of my model that not only offers a better statistical fit, but, in my opinion, also a much more sensible solution. For instance, the Eastern Hunter-Gatherer node now shows 73% MA1-related admixture, which, I'd say, makes more sense

Cultural hitchhiking and competition between patrilineal kin groups may have led to the post-Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck (Zeng et al. 2018)

A very interesting paper has just appeared at Nature Communications that potentially offers an explanation for the well documented explosions of certain Y-chromosome lineages in the Old World after the Neolithic, such as those that led to most European males today belonging to Y-haplogroups R1a and R1b (LINK). I might have more to say about this paper in the comments below after I've read it a

What's Maykop (or Iran) got to do with it?

I had a go at imitating this qpGraph tree, from the recent Wang et al. preprint on the genetic prehistory of the Caucasus, using the ancient samples that were available to me. I'm very happy with the outcome, because everything makes good sense, more or less. The real populations and singleton individuals, ten in all, are marked in red. The rest of the labels refer to groups inferred from the

More Botai genomes (Jeong et al. 2018 preprint)

Over at bioRxiv at this LINK. Actually, these may or may not be the same Botai genomes that have already been published along with Damgaard et al. 2018 (see comments below for the discussion about that). Here's the abstract. Emphasis is mine:

The indigenous populations of inner Eurasia, a huge geographic region covering the central Eurasian steppe and the northern Eurasian taiga and tundra,

Global25 workshop 2: intra-European variation

Even though the Global25 focuses on world-wide human genetic diversity, it can also reveal a lot of information about genetic substructures within continental regions.

Several of the dimensions, for instance, reflect Balto-Slavic-specific genetic drift. I ensured that this would be the case by running a lot of Slavic groups in the analysis. A useful by-product of this strategy is that the

Global25 workshop 1: that classic West Eurasian plot

In this Global25 workshop I'm going to show how to reproduce, more or less, that classic plot of West Eurasian genetic diversity seen regularly in ancient DNA papers and at this blog (for instance, here). To do this you'll need the datasheet below, which I'll be updating regularly, and the PAST program, which is freely available here.

G25_West_Eurasia_scaled.dat

This is what you'll get if you

Global25 PAST-compatible datasheets

I'm planning to run regular workshops over the next few months on how to get the most out of Global25 data with various programs, and expecially PAST (see here). So if you have Global25 coordinates, please stay tuned.

To that end, I've put together four color-coded, PAST-compatible Global25 datasheets with thousands of present-day and ancient samples, available at the links below: