Indo-European crackpottery

I'm sometimes asked in the comments here and elsewhere what I think of Carlos Quiles and his Indo-European website (see here if you're game). Discussing this topic is a waste of time and effort, so I'm writing this blog post for future reference just in case this question comes up again. In all honesty, I think Carlos is a troll and his ramblings are of no value.



Now, many of you probably

The South Asian cline that no longer exists

Before the Indo-Europeans and Austroasiatics got to South Asia, probably well within the last 4,000 years, it's likely that all of the genetic variation in the region basically sat along a genetic cline devoid of any Bronze Age steppe and Southeast Asian ancestry, like the one in the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) below running from the Paniya to the "Indus Periphery" ancient sample

Blast from the past: The Poltavka outlier

The Rakhigarhi ancient DNA paper is coming soon. Very soon.

Yep, you've probably read this sort of thing many times in the last few years, including here. But this time, by all accounts, it's really happening. For the latest Indian press teaser on the topic check out: We Are All Harappans.

At least I don't have to write up a blog post for the occasion, because I already wrote one over two years

Horses may have been ridden in battle as early as the Bronze Age (Chechushkov et al. 2018)

Over at the Journal of Archaeological Science at this LINK. Below is the abstract. Emphasis is mine:

The morphological similarities/dissimilarities between antler and bone-made cheekpieces have been employed in several studies to construct a relative chronology for Bronze Age Eurasia. Believed to constitute a part of the horse bit, the cheekpieces appear in ritual contexts everywhere from the

A closer look at the maternal origins of the Corded Ware people (Juras et al. 2018)

Over at Scientific Reports at this LINK. This is a nice paper, but I'm really looking forward to the Y-DNA and genome-wide data from these new samples. What's the bet that the Yamnaya men from Ukraine will belong to Y-haplogroup R1a-M417? Bring it on soon, please. From the paper, emphasis is mine:

From around 4,000 to 2,000 BC the forest-steppe north-western Pontic region was occupied by people

Global25 coordinates for almost 500 Ashkenazi Jews

I know that some of you are looking at the genetic structure of Ashkenazi and other Jewish populations with the Global25 data. So to help things along here are Global25 coordinates for 471 Ashkenazi individuals from Bray et al. 2010 (see here).

AJ G25 coordinates

AJ G25 coordinates (scaled)

AJ G25 coordinates PAST datasheet (scaled)

I don't know what the genotyping accuracy is for these

A Corded Ware-related Proto-Greek from the Pontic-Caspian steppe?

The recent Wang et al. preprint on the genetic prehistory of the Greater Caucasus features several supposedly already published ancient samples that, as far as I know, haven't yet appeared anywhere. These include five Yamnaya samples from Hungary and two Neolithic samples from Greece. I'm guessing that they're part of a paper that was scheduled to be released earlier this year, but was delayed,