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Friday, January 23, 2015

Yamnaya genomes are a 50/50 mix of eastern Euro foragers and something else ANE-rich


I'm posting a new entry about the upcoming Corded Ware/Yamnaya paper because the last entry (see here) now has over 400 comments which aren't easy to load for many people.

One of the authors of this eagerly awaited paper, Nick Patterson of the Broad Institute, briefly joined our discussion. Nick's contribution is much appreciated. He wasn't able to reveal a great deal, because the manuscript is in submission, but he did make a couple of interesting points:

- the paper will feature Y-haplogroup results from the Yamnaya culture, represented by nine samples in all, including seven males

- the population with Near Eastern ancestry that mixed with the Eastern Hunter-Gatherers (EHG) on the Russian steppe to form the Yamnaya pastoralists by 5,000 YBP was also "rich" in ANE

- ancient DNA from the Caucasus, Iran and India is probably necessary to work out how the Indo-Europeans got to India, but the paper won't feature such data

It's nice to hear that Y-haplogroups aren't being ignored. My opinion is that they're at least as important as genome-wide data when tracking the movements across vast space and time of highly patriarchal and patrilineal groups like the ancient Indo-Europeans.

Indeed, we already know that the Slavic, Baltic and Norse-specific R1a1a1b1, defined by the Z282 mutation, is the sister clade of the Indo-Iranian-specific R1a1a1b2, defined by Z93. Thus, if the Yamnaya males were found to belong to these or upstream markers, this would suggest that they were the paternal ancestors of many Balts, Scandinavians, Slavs and Indo-Iranians, and correlate very nicely with the linguistic and archeological "steppe hypothesis" of Indo-European origins.

In fact, even if analyses based on high density genome-wide data suggest that Indians don't harbor any genome-wide European ancestry, we'd still have to accept the likelihood of gene flow - albeit perhaps very indirect gene flow - from the European steppe to India because many Indians belong to R1a1a1b2.

The second point made by Nick is perhaps surprising, but at least for me not totally unexpected. That's because we've already known for a while that the Yamnaya genomes can be successfully modeled as half Karelian EHG and half present-day Armenian (see here), and according to my own estimates Armenians carry an average of 15.5% ANE.

The fact that these Armenian-like, ANE-rich newcomers dampened the genome-wide affinity to ANE-proxy MA-1 on the Russian steppe might look like a contradiction, but not if we remember that the higher the Near Eastern ancestry the lower the genome-wide affinity to MA-1, and also consider that the steppe foragers probably carried a lot more ANE than the newcomers.

Actually, as far as I know, all of the Yamnaya samples in this study come from the Samara Valley, which is some distance north of the Caspian Sea near the southern Urals. So it makes senses that the pseudo Armenians who turned up there more than 5,000 years ago were not like the Neolithic farmers of Western and Central Europe, who lacked ANE.

I'd say that this as yet unidentified group (wild guess: immediate ancestors of the Repin culture people?) was the result of an admixture event, or perhaps a series of admixture events, with ANE-rich foragers somewhere on the steppe south of the Samara. If so, I won't be surprised if it turns out that R1a only appeared in the Samara Valley after their arrival.

In any case, it looks like even after this paper comes out, we'll still need a lot more ancient DNA from across Eurasia to help map out the early Indo-European dispersals with any confidence.

Update 11/02/2015: Massive migration from the steppe is a source for Indo-European languages in Europe (Haak et al. 2015 preprint) .

499 comments:

1 – 200 of 499   Newer›   Newest»
Helgenes50 said...

David,

Don't you think it would be possible to find I1 (M253) samples among the Yamna or Yamna-like ?

Davidski said...

I think I1-M253 moved up into Scandinavia from Central Europe.

http://eurogenes.blogspot.com.au/2014/09/first-i1-m253-from-prehistoric-europe.html

Helgenes50 said...

Yes of course, but right now, this I1 from central Europe is the only ancient sample avalaible

Chad said...

The mixing should've started closer to 5000BCE, during the Khvalynsk culture.

Applicable100 said...

You are still running away from his assertion that the Yamnaya were not the PIE people. He would have said something if that was incorrect.

Tesmos said...

Cool info i also thought they had gnomes from the Corded Ware culture? Or is that an another upcoming study?

Maju said...

For me the most interesting piece of info is the second point because all the rest remains to be clarified (so in due time).

EHG are Epipaleolithic locals (which can be roughly expressed, I understand, as c. 60-70% WHG + 30-40% ANE, with some unique drift of their own) and therefore no big surprise they make up about 50% of Yamna. If anything the surprise is that they only account for half of the ancestry, needing something else.

What can be that something else? For all the Hindutva nonsense Nirjhar said, he gave us a very interesting thread also: the Yangelskaya culture of the SE Urals has origins in Jarmo Neolithic and may be that mysterious key piece. A mix of people from the North Zagros and local Paleo-Siberians would produce that West Asian + ANE mix that seems to constitute the other 50% of Yamna. It is also a plausible scenario for the migration of R1a from Iran/Kurdistan to the steppe if we choose to follow the Underhill 2014 interpretation.

If we knew the exact apportions of this PIE alchemy, we could already get to estimate the Yamna impact in other parts of Europe. But guess that it's best to wait for publication.

Maju said...

"... they had gnomes from the Corded Ware culture?"

Seems so, as well as some other references from Central Europe. CW seem to be close to Yamna but slightly more "westernized" towards a mix of EEF+WHG (~Gokhem). Modern populations should follow this pattern too, being more westernized than CW but that is an estimate I made.

My understanding (very limited yet, I admit) is that the WHG-EEF-ANE "Lazaridis triangle" can be replaced by a Gokhem-EEF-Yamna one, where Yamna and Gokhem (or something similar) are more proximal to the actual direct sources of modern Europeans.

Yamna can be expressed in "old" Lazaridis terminology as x.WHG + y.ANE + z.(Northern West Asian) (as constrasting to the Levant-like element in EEF). Gokhem we already know that can be expressed as EEF+WHG.

Alberto said...

If I'm not mistaken, those ancient Karelian HG were more related to modern West Siberian populations than European ones. And those populations are 50% or more East Asian.

Does anyone expect that the older (>5000 ybp) samples will show significant (or any at all) East Asian admixture? I would be really surprised, but maybe someone does have reasons to think it's possible or even likely.

Matt said...

Yes, Patterson's - Yamnaya models as "50% EHG and 50% something else rich in ANE."

Does that imply that "something else" cannot easily be explained as modeled East Eurasian+ANE or Basal Eurasian+ANE or WHG+ANE, in terms of relatedness to present day people and ancient samples?

At the same time, as you say, as Yamnaya supposedly fits also fairly closely as Armenian+Karelian HGs, and "something else" deflates overall affinity to MA1, the something else rich in ANE cannot be *that* rich in ANE and its "something else" component must inflate affinity to present day Near Eastern people.

So it does seem that ANE in prehistoric West Eurasia is not just found together with WHG, which does at least open a door ANE's introduction into Europe being demographically separate from increases in WHG to a degree (multiple routes for ANE into post Neolithic Europe - Corded, some from Scandinavian foragers (but mostly only of impact local to Scandinavia) and some from a separate wave?). Even if this may still be archaeologically and linguistically less plausible.

My thinking would still be that ANE has been absorbed into a number of regional components by this stage of history (proto-Amerind Northeast Asian, EHG, perhaps something in South Asia and/or "something else") and does not exist as a pure component anywhere.

Chad said...

Some Northern Europeans have more WHG than Gok2. We still have to use a composite of Loschbour, La Brana, and KO1 as a WHG component. There was a big mixing event prior to IE arrivals that turned everyone outside of the Mediterranean from about 28% WHG to around 50% WHG, going by the ENF composite.

A little East Eurasian in EHG is not out of the question, but it would probably be in the low single-digits.

ZeGrammarNazi said...

Over 400 comments on an abstract? You may need to start a forum when the actual paper is released, David.

Unknown said...

@ David

"the population with Near Eastern ancestry that mixed with the Eastern Hunter-Gatherers (EHG) on the Russian steppe to form the Yamnaya pastoralists by 5,000 YBP was also "rich" in ANE"

So that basically flies in the face of what you have been arguing against consistently for the past year.

Whatever the case, this opens the door for an intrusion of ANE -ruch people in our period of question from the Near East , along with R1b, anbd possibly even R1a.

Could this long awaited paper be the nail in the coffin for the Kurgan hyothesi instead of the final evidence of "proof" its worhsippers had been waiting for ?

(Jokingly but possibly :))

Krefter said...

Maju,

"With due caution (because I don't know yet the details, being PPV) I'd dare say that it could well support my theory of extra H arrival in Megalithic rather than Bell Beaker chronology."

Why do you think H is so important, and marks an ancient population like U5 does for WHG?

40% H across Europe might be simple luck.

Wouldn't you agree the best way to test relatedness in terms of mtDNA, is finding the most recent common maternal ancestor of every lineage in a population, not total frequencies of old lineages?

Unless you can show European's share the same ratio of young-H clades that have a common recent history, I don't care anymore about H, as any other west Eurasian lineage.

Unknown said...

@ Maju

"The Kurgan model works well in Asia, just that research is somewhat less advanced in terms archaeological and genetic. But for all I know it works better than well. You just keep beating the same old dead horse and you would not admit the truth if it was an elephant in front of your face because you're intently blind to it. "

Maybe He (Nirj) is 'blinded'; but the man has a point. The Kurgan model falls apart altoagher for Anatolia and central Asia. To explain an indo-Iranian entry into central Asia, Mallory resorts to poetry, and not facts. For Anatolia, they don't even bother trying to explain it

" The Russian and previously the Slavic identity arises in the Corded Ware area (its eastern frontier), not in the Yamna area. "

Whilst I totally undertand what you're trying to say, its actual a nonsense statement. There were no "Slavs" or their 'Russian ancestors' in the Bronze Age. Making primodrialistic, and at times, frankly incorrect statements doesn't really inspire confidence in the arguements which you aim to construct.

ZeGrammarNazi said...

Mike, Mallory uses Ezero as the IE cultural link between Anatolia and the Steppes in his "Encyclopedia of Indo-European Cultures".

Ryan said...

A comment of yours from the previous thread:

"It's interesting what you say about C4 being related to both Native Americans and Neo-Chalcolithic Ukraine/South Russia. I never thought it that way but it may indeed hold a clue re. ANE ancestry."

"On the other hand, I tend to think that East Asian mtDNA haps. among Amerindians were incorporated as these moved East, so the only genuinely "Paleosiberian" known mtDNA haplogroup seems to be X2 (but also found in West Asia, from where it surely originates, as does Y-DNA Q). Hence C4 can also be seen as part of the early "proto-Uralic" flow from East Asia (via the taiga in essence) related to Y-DNA N1 most apparently."

In the Americas, C4 is restricted to the same populations as X2, so the two seem to have arrived and spread together.

C4 also doesn't seem particularly linked to Y haplogroup N as far as I can tell. I think D4 and D5 may be a better candidate for that. D5a3a expanded with the Saami Z1a for example.

That's not inconsistent with your paleosiberian comment though - it just means that C4 was present in the ANE population before it split between the Americas and Eurasia. C4a seems to have expanded from the Altai as far as I can tell from this: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0015214

Unknown said...

ZGM. Yes - based on some similarities in 'barbarian pottery' and the construction of the citadel between Ezero and Troy. Apart from its limited nature, it is very basic, and naive reasoning. No archaeologists today would make such undeveloped argumentation. IN fact, Mallory barely discusses Troy , whose stratigraphy has been rather well explored. He rather focusses on a mere two aspects of a thousand year history of the site, not to mention neglecting the rest of Anatolia.

Nuff said.

Chad said...

That 50% something other is Armenian like. We already know that.... Hence, an ANE rich population with Near East/Caucasus links. Patterson was clear on this.

Ryan said...

Mike - This isn't inconsistent with the Kurgan hypothesis. It just means that the predecessor to PIE would have at some point been in the area of the Zagros or the Caspian or thereabouts.

Frankly, I think it would rather elegantly resolve the competing Anatolian and Kurgan hypotheses - both are correct in a sense, but just referring to different time depths. It would be a Zagros/Caspian->Pontic Steppe->Dispersal hypothesis, with any sister branches to IE being absorbed in the expansion of the Kurgan peoples.

Davidski's been arguing against that too, but I'm just saying, this doesn't exclude an urheimat on the steppe.

Chad said...

Ezero, beginning in 3300BCE, does have a connection to late Baden(post 3000BCE), and early Troy (2800BCE).

Krefter said...

EHG not being able to explain all ANE in Yamna, is defiantly the best leak.

It means there were pops who were mostly ANE, with little to no WHG or ENF somewhere around Russia, not too long ago. Also, that these ANE-type pops mixed with WHG to create EHG and mixed with ENF to create modern-west Asian(for the most part)-types. people.

The spread of ANE into west Asia is defiantly a (mostly)separate from the spread of ANE into Europe, and is older than the spread of ANE into western Europe.

Chad said...

Their hypothesis is more like the Armenian hypothesis, not the Anatolian.

Unknown said...

@ Ryan
True. But the vital 'genetic evidence' which was said to argue so much for the Kurgan hypotethesis is clearly more agnostic. But the Anatolian-farmer hypothesis is totally wrong. It is way to early, and assumes way to slow a rate of language change. Im not debating the chronology , at least its lower limit of a copper Age- early Bronze age period. What I am debating is the confidence attahced to the steppe locality - all of which is based on constructs, liberally/ crudely interpreted data, which at times , is wholly incorrect.

@ Chad.
"Ezero, beginning in 3300BCE, does have a connection to late Baden(post 3000BCE), and early Troy (2800BCE)"

Well, yeah. In simple terms.

Maju said...

I don't care about Mallory, Mark. I care about the current state of the art of the research (and if I have to cite any historical paladin of the Kurgan model, I'll always cite Marija Gimbutas because she had a very comprehensive understanding that is still very much valid). In the case of Anatolian, for example, Maikop → Kura-Araxes explains everything, for Indo-Iranians it's Andronovo and some conqueror offshoots (except Scythians who remained at the origin). Armenian is an Iron Age colonization from the Balcans via Phrygia.

"There were no "Slavs" or their 'Russian ancestors' in the Bronze Age."

Sure. Slavs only appear around 700 CE, it seems. They do appear within the area of Corded Ware expansion (3000 years earlier, yes) and not within the area of Yamnaya at that point (from that area you can track Scythians, Cimmerians and other peoples of the steppes and South Asia).

What's the point? It's not about "primordialism" but about explaining things. We don't have time here (nor the energies anymore) to go through those 3000 years. You don't either, so don't get me started, ok?

Unknown said...

@ Maju

" I'll always cite Marija Gimbutas because she had a very comprehensive understanding that is still very much valid"

LMFAO.
No comment.

Maju said...

@Ryan: "It just means that the predecessor to PIE would have at some point been in the area of the Zagros or the Caspian or thereabouts."

Not necessarily: if you have three (or more) different origins converging into PIE peoples genetically, the language could in principle come from any of them (and if not the grammatical skeleton, the vocabulary surely did). Modern linguistics is a bit fuzzier than your typical single ancestor tree.

It'll be interesting to read updated linguistic studies 20 years from now, after all this genetic prehistory "revolution" has settled down and linguists have been using it for some time as the thread for their explorations. If young linguists are up to the task, I'm sure it'll be fascinating - but right now it's probably too early to understand all that well enough.

Maju said...

@Mike: Read her work please. in 1979, Gimbutas was already saying that Khvalinsk was at the origin and other key points that still stand. Many other authors have been messing everything, overemphasizing Yamna and what not. It's incredibly refreshing to look back at that great archaeologist and polymath and see how before her time she was in many things.

Of course you can always criticize some of her interpretations but pop versions of her work often do not honor her quite wise and balanced approach and it's pop versions what most people know of her.

Davidski said...

It looks like Romulus and Applicable100 are twin village idiots from the same village.

Unknown said...

Maju , Thank you.

I actually have her books. But Maju, you're missing the big piuctre. It is not the mere detail, but the entire methodology is flawed. not only her, but Renfrew's anatolian hypothesis, and G & I's Armenian hypothesis. All have different conclusions, but rely on the same (flawed) approaches.

Honestly, I cannot begin to make you see until you first of all cultivate a knowledge of post-processual archaeology, the constructivitist critique on ethnicity, etc. If you're willing to make the effort, after a couple of years you'll see what Im talking about; and in turn, you'll cultivate a far better understanding in fields you're researching - Basques, IEs, whatever. You'll realize that statements like "the Srubnaya culutre represents early Indo-Iranians" or "the ancestors of pre-Germano-Balto-Slavic were the beareres of the Corded Ware
culture' are wrong on many levels.
Until then, i suggest you perous throught Kohl's "Archaeological Transformations: Crossing the pastoral/ agricultural divide", and Alisaid Whittle's "Europe in the Neolithic: The Creation of New Worlds" Ch 4.

Davidski said...

No Mike, the second point doesn't fly in the face of what I've been arguing here, because it's very unlikely that the ANE-rich population arrived in the Samara Valley from the Near East without mixing and picking up ANE along the way. Take a look where Samara is on a map.

The interesting questions here, perhaps crucial to the PIE question, are who these people were exactly and where the admixture between their Near Eastern and ANE ancestors took place.

Maju said...

@Krefter: "Why do you think H is so important, and marks an ancient population like U5 does for WHG?"

Because it's what stands out in the aDNA (mtDNA). I am somewhat agnostic about the ultimate origins of that H before the Atlantic-centric expansion of Megalithism/BB (if it is later demonstrated it only arrived to Europe with Neolithic, what I don't think is the case, the rest will still stand).

What we see in Early Neolithic is decrease of U and increase of typical Neolithic lineages like J, T, W, X, etc. but not enough new H to explain its modern levels (except in several parts of Iberia among the studied regions). By the Bronze Age however we do see modern pools in Germany (but only later in Hungary for example). And the key moment seems to be around the end of the Chalcolithic, with true BB sites of Germany showing 88% H, while other sites show low frequencies instead. Many have argued for BB being the carrier but I say that IMO Megalithism is the cause and BB only the reflection because of sample bias.

"40% H across Europe might be simple luck".

I don't think that non-explanation is of any help. Believe what you will but I look for causal explanations and I have a good theory much better than resorting to unlikely "luck".

"Wouldn't you agree the best way to test relatedness in terms of mtDNA, is finding the most recent common maternal ancestor of every lineage in a population, not total frequencies of old lineages?"

Why? That applies to individual lines but not to genetic pools. I'm looking at the genetic pools and many geneticists working with aDNA have taken that approach as well (even if their original conclusions may be different of mine). Geneticists concluded that WHGs and EEFs were not the direct source of modern Europeans because genetic pools do not match, not even approximatively. And they were right (at least in general terms and in the case of Germany). So which are the direct sources then? Kurgans can't explain that either, not in terms of mtDNA.

Megalithism on the other hand fits very well with all I know: largest demographic impact after first Neolithic, hints of Western or SW origins of that excess H precisely in Portugal (which is also at the origin of Megalithism and BB), etc. Is that the full picture? Surely not so simple (what about Brittany, Denmark, etc.) but it's a good draft that suggests where further research should be directed to.

"Unless (... blah-blah...) I don't care anymore about H".

Why should I care what you care about? It's not like you're paying me or anything. If you're smart, you'll pay attention, if you aren't... well, your problem. Others will.

Unknown said...

Next, read This https://www.scribd.com/doc/190234081/Multiregional-Pastoralism-and-Nonuniform-Complexity

Which analyses the data from Bronze Age Eurasian steppe, from West to East independently of attempting to model it within a language model.
It rapidly comes apparent that the Yamnaya -> Afansievo progression is a construct.

After a mere 3 papers, not to mention many others (which Im sure many of the good folks here are totally obvlivious to existing), it becomes apparent the flaws of the Kurgan model.

Chad said...

Gimbutas is no longer completely reliable... no ANE in Baden (3000BCE) or Baalberg. They were not influenced by the steppes.

Maju said...

I inquired you in the other thread as well: how do you "know" that Baalberge had no ANE?

Archaeologically it's at the root of CW, via a series of cultures around the Saale and Vistula which culminate in Globular Amphorae (and then CW).

Chad said...

Because, they said that the farmers in Germany were like the Gok farmers and like the ones in Northern Spain. So, about 50% Near East and 50% WHG.

Chad said...

We show that in western Europe, the farmers of both Germany and Spain >7,000 years ago were descended from a common ancestral stock. These farmers did not replace the earlier hunter-gatherers, but continued to mix with them, leading to a resurgence of hunter-gatherer ancestry in both Germany and Spain ~1,000-2,000 years later. In eastern Europe, the hunter-gatherers of Russia >7,000 years ago were distinct from those of the west, having an increased affinity to a ~24,000 year old individual from Siberia,....

Good enough?

Krefter said...

Maju, if you want people to change their minds, don't arrogantly insult them. It doesn't matter how smart you are, no one will listen. Nirj, is only going to become more Indian-centric, because of your insults.

Unknown said...

I'm wondering what is the geographic range termed Near East by Reich and Patterson? Could Turkmenistan or the South Caspian area of Northern Iran be a source of Near East and ANE to Yamnaya. If the Y chromosomes are mostly R1 (R1a and R1b) in Samara then I could easily see a dispersal from a source east of the Caspian. The highest YSTR variance of M269 in our Rootsi et al paper was from Pakistan and R2 is frequent in Pak-India.

ZeGrammarNazi said...

CO1 was from the Baden culture and had 0% ANE, or am I mistaken?

Unknown said...

ZG, that's correct. No kurgan influence before 3000BCE. Not in Hungary or Germany, as it sounds.

ZeGrammarNazi said...

Yeah, I just checked the study to make sure. CO1 is the fair-complected Baden individual that looks most similar to modern Sardinians.

Chad said...

She is between Basques and Sardinians, but shifted away from ANE. She only looks about 5% more Near Eastern than Gok2.

Krefter said...

C01 scored 45 WHG and 55 ENF in ANE K8, while Sardinians score around 33 WHG and 67 ENF.

C01 was like a Sardinian, with extra Loschbour-like ancestry. Like in Germany and Spain, WHG slowly rose overtime in Hungary, before ANE was brought from the east, to create what we have today, in everywhere except Sardinia.

Chad said...

She is way closer to Basques than Sardinians in NEF if I'm remembering correctly.

Davidski said...

Roy,

There's something very eastern about Yamnaya and even German Unetice mtDNA which possibly can't be explained by just admixture from near the Caucasus. In fact, both of these samples are more similar to the sample from Bronze Age Kazakhstan than any ancient samples from Europe or the Near East we've seen so far.

I think it's possible that Yamnaya was influenced by gene flow from present-day Turkmenistan. But in my opinion north Iran is too close to the Fertile Crescent to be a prehistoric source of ANE in eastern Europe.

Chad said...

ENF, sorry.

Krefter said...

"There's something very eastern about Yamnaya and even German Unetice mtDNA which possibly can't be explained by just admixture from near the Caucasus. "

The maternal connection between bronze age north Asia and bronze age central Europe, can be traced to older samples from Russia. That is unless similar people lived in central Asia to.

ZeGrammarNazi said...

Thanks for the clarification, Chad and Krefter. I was basing my "most like Sardinians' claim on the plot included in the Neolithic Hungarian paper.

Davidski said...

Krefter,

Yeah, I know the common link between Unetice and Bronze Age Kazakhstan mtDNA looks like Yamnaya mtDNA.

But maybe Yamnaya and the Bronze Age Kazakhs represent some sort of eastern Neolithic complex long isolated from the others, where both the eastern Unetice-like mtDNA and ANE were present?

Chad said...

ANE will be present in a good amount in Kazakhstan. If you remove the East Eurasian part, you come up with a Neolithic/Chalcolithic people near 30-40% ANE.

Ryan said...

@Maju,

True. We don't know which side PIE would have come from. If it came from the Armenian-like side, it would certainly explain a heck of a lot though.

@Davidski/Krefter - re: eastern affinities of Yamnaya DNA, I would think that would have come with the ANE component, no? Potentially from both the hunter-gatherer and the neolithic side.

Alberto said...

@David

If the EHG were something like 66/33 WHG/ANE, and the Near Eastern population picked high ANE by mixing with them, then they should pick twice more WHG ancestry. Armenian in your K8 test is some 16% ANE, but only 3% WHG.

I see you're considering Central Asia more, which I agree as I've been writing before (just because it's the most obvious choice). But in any case, the important point is not if the steppe people picked ANE from Central Asia, the important part is if West Asia picked it directly from Central Asia too (and not second hand from the steppe).

Because if ANE went directly from Central Asia to West Asia, it's also easier to see it entering the Balkans through Anatolia and then spreading to the west. Which would make for a strong alternative explanation of ANE in all Europe to the steppe hypothesis.

Unknown said...

But (asking again) how do we explain that ust-ishm is less related to modern euro's than it was to la brana, and yet allow for further eastern intrusion post-Neo

Ryan said...

@Mike - Presumably there was always gene flow between East and West Eurasians. A tree model is just a simplification.

Arch Hades said...

"ancient DNA from the Caucasus, Iran and India is probably necessary to work out how the Indo-Europeans got to India, but the paper won't feature such data"

They have ancient DNA from the pre Indo-European Aegean? I'm just curious how these models will form. I hope they're not just going to use Oetzi..who was in far Northern Italy as a pre Indo-European examplar of all of Southern Europe. They should have more samples from a variety of locations including Iberia and the Aegean/Balkans.

Davidski said...

Mike,

Basal Eurasian admixture in modern Euros makes Ust-Ishim closer to La Brana1.

Ryan,

I think the ANE in the ANE-rich but mostly Near Eastern population that helped to form Yamnaya came from some sort of forager group, and not the Near East.

mtDNA HGs like U2e and R among the Unetice samples might be a clue as to who those foragers were.

It's interesting in this context that the only Copper Age sample from the western Altai in that recent Hollard et al. paper belonged to Y-DNA Q and mtDNA R. Maybe these are the kind of people we're looking at here?

Alberto,

But my view is that any Central Asian influence that arrived in Europe during the early Indo-European time frame was mediated by the Yamnaya and related groups like Corded Ware.

You won't convince me that Indo-Europeans rushed into southern Europe from West Asia, because there's no evidence of that. As I've already said, southern Europeans are just more Neolithic and Near Eastern than other Europeans, which makes sense based on geography and history. This is what you're seeing in the data.

Krefter said...

Chad,

Patterson, told you he'll start answering questions again in a few weeks, right?

If so, I think we should start figuring out what the most informative question to ask would be.

I don't think we should ask about Y DNA haplogroups, except maybe we if there is any R1b from central Europe or Spain. There will be no surprise if R1a is found all over the place.

We already have an idea how ENF Yamna was, and a pretty good idea how WHG and ANE they were.

We know CWC was very similar to modern Germans-Lithuanians, and could be fit as 66.7% or 73% Yamna.

Therefore the best question i think to ask is what the other 1/3 or 27% of CWC is own their model. Or even better, who specifically in north-central Europe is CWC most similar to.

There's no way they solely used Neolithic farmers as CWC's non-Yamna ancestor proxy, they had of put some-type of hunter gatherer in there.

Krefter said...

The next best question to ask I think is how did they determine where Yamna-type ancestry in Europe is highest today.

The reason is because sure all Euros have Yamna-type ancestry, but they have very different non-Yamna ancestors. There's no way they used a single model for all Europeans, unless they assumed all ANE is of Yamna origin.

Unknown said...

"Basal Eurasian admixture in modern Euros makes Ust-Ishim closer to La Brana1."

yeah, so it was more close to Meso Europeans, than modern Europeans, But should it not be equal if nor *more* close to modern Euro's if there were eastern arrivals since Copper Age ??

"You won't convince me that Indo-Europeans rushed into southern Europe from West Asia, because there's no evidence of that. "

Actually there is. There are strong Balkano-Anatolian correlates in the Copper Age and continuously thereafter (and beforehand also). Not to mention the possiblity of entering R1b, and J2; etc; one could make the argumeent for as strong if not stronger than the steppe.

ZeGrammarNazi said...

Chad or David,

Where could I find the fateful triangle plot that included the last Yamnaya stand in you guys came up with?

Chad said...

Krefter,
He was a little vague with me. Some of what he said could point to something, if he has a feeling the same haplogroups point to IE.

He didn't say anything about answering more questions. He wouldn't give me any specifics.

I think that Corded, due to its shift, has excess Narva/Comb Ceramic stuff in it, with local Neolithic non-ANE populations in Germany.

As for ANE in West Asia, I don't have a problem with it being present from around 5000BCE. There's more ANE in Iran, than the South Caucasus. There is also steady cline in not just ANE, but even South Asian from Iran to Armenia.

This South Asian extends up into the Caucasus and at very low levels in some Europeans in the Balkans and other places. Whther it's real or not, I'm not sure, but the cline is interesting. The archaeology leading to Maykop does point to Turkmenistan/Afghanistan, as an origin for part of it. It may not have originally had the whole 15% that is Armenian, but it also could've had a hair more. The factor left out of this is gene flow from the Balkans/Varna/CT (prior to 3000BCE) being spread eastward by Dereivka/Dnieper Don/Sredny Stog, or whatever you choose to name all the commotion going on in that location.

Chad said...

ZG,
I think it is either in that fateful triangle or the crowdfunding one...

Ryukendo K said...

@ Mike Thomas

Ust Ishim is equally close in D stats to every single eurasian population. This means that either Ust-Ishim contributed equally to everyone from loschbour to Karitiana, or, more likely, Ust-Ishim left no descendants whatsoever. Like Tianyuan.

Unknown said...

The serious lack of WHG is a big problem to making its roots in the steppes. Caucasus pops would have more WHG than ANE. That certainly isn't the case.

ZeGrammarNazi said...

David, if you have the time and inclination, would you check out a couple of things for me on your Fateful Triangle?

If someone was 78% Yamnaya, 8% Stuttgart and 14% WHG, where would they plot?

Also, another hypothetical sample I would like to see would be 52% Yamnaya, 26%Stuttgart and 22% WHG.

If you don't have the time, or simply do not want to, that is fine. Just thought I would ask.

Unknown said...

The last one might be Hungarian.

ZeGrammarNazi said...

Interesting.

Can you give an estimate on where the first one would likely plot, Chad?

Davidski said...

ZeGrammarNazi,

Yeah, if you give me the ANE/WHG/ENF proportions I can plot them.

FYI, here are the results for Stuttgart and the hypothetical samples.

Pop ANE South_Eurasian Near_Eastern East_Eurasian WHG Oceanian Pygmy Sub-Saharan
Corded_Ware 0.19 1E-005 0.35 1E-005 0.46 1E-005 1E-005 1E-005
LNE/EBA 0.14 1E-005 0.4 1E-005 0.46 1E-005 1E-005 1E-005
Yamnaya 0.26 1E-005 0.39 1E-005 0.35 1E-005 1E-005 1E-005
Stuttgart_LBK380 1E-005 1E-005 0.721903 1E-005 0.278037 1E-005 1E-005 1E-005

The PCA with the hypothetical samples is here...

red = Yamnaya
orange = Corded Ware
yellow = bell beaker

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9o3EYTdM8lQY2VaUDg4cmZWbnc/view?usp=sharing

Krefter said...

I made a spreadsheet, with 3 possible Yamnas and EHGs, with a guess on Yamna's non-EHG side.

My conclusion based on this is that EHG had more than 25% ANE and less than 50%, that Gok2 or Loschbour can't be CWC's only non-Yamna ancestors, and that CWC was more ENF, more ANE, and less WHG than Balts.

So, my guess is that CWC will plot east of either Poles or west Scots. Yamna's closeness to CWC on the PCA, must be exaggerated. There's no way fitting CWC in north Europe, and having Yamna that close to them.

Also, Bell beaker from Germany, will probably fit right in north Europe(British-Irish, Scandinavians, Poles-Belorussians), because they had less ANE than CWC.

There are many different non-Yamna ancestors Laz could have pitted against Yamna, to figure out what modern Europeans have the most Yamna-type ancestry. Lithuanians were said to have the most Yamna, probably because they have the highest ANE(outside of eastern eastern Europe).

Unknown said...

East of Central Europe... But I'm not sure who would fit that bill with 38% ENF and 20% ANE.

Unknown said...

Out model works with 26% ANE. It could be as low as 22-23% 27% seems like it is almost stretching it.

ZeGrammarNazi said...

Awesome. Thanks, man. I'll go over everything and get back to you with some numbers soon.

Krefter said...

Here's the spreadsheet

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Kmyox5pIglBusnxbs3UWT-SASaY9n02SweeiIAyBFwA/edit?usp=sharing

BR1 and BR2 from Hungary are defiantly a sneak peak to bronze age Germany. It looks like BR1+2 got their ANE from a similar source, because they received ANE but kept high WHG. This wouldn't happen if BR1+2 got their ANE straight from Yamna.

This suggests to me there was very high WHG in eastern Europe during the Neolithic and bronze age, because Samara Yamna had less.

The Balkans may have mixed with different IE-types than west and north Europe. Southwest Europe is farthest away from an ANE source(unless you include BRitain, like Maju said), and have little recent west Asian ancestry, and so they also probably trace most of their ANE to bronze age east-central Europe.

ZeGrammarNazi said...

How about:

20.28 ANE
43.54 WHG
36.18 ENF

and

13.52 ANE
47.48 WHG
39.00 ENF

Unknown said...

First one maybe Belarus or just east of there. Second looks British.

ZeGrammarNazi said...

Btw, I was using David's ASHG plot and a graphics editing program to try and triangulate LNE/EBA and CWC using ENE (which appears to be Stuttgart, or something very close), WHG and Yamnaya to form the triangle, and it seems by doing this, my hypothetical LNE/EBA and CWC groups are almost going to be in the same place as the groups you and David came up with using ENF, WHG and ANE.

Nirjhar007 said...

@Krefter
''Maju, if you want people to change their minds, don't arrogantly insult them. It doesn't matter how smart you are, no one will listen. Nirj, is only going to become more Indian-centric, because of your insults.''
Dear krefter, if you read my comments you will find that I AM NOT INDOCENTRIC I NEVER ADVOCATE PIE TO ORIGINATE IN INDIA BUT N IRAN/ S CASPIAN!!!
@Maju
''What can be that something else? For all the Hindutva nonsense Nirjhar said, he gave us a very interesting thread also: the Yangelskaya culture of the SE Urals has origins in Jarmo Neolithic and may be that mysterious key piece. A mix of people from the North Zagros and local Paleo-Siberians would produce that West Asian + ANE mix that seems to constitute the other 50% of Yamna. It is also a plausible scenario for the migration of R1a from Iran/Kurdistan to the steppe if we choose to follow the Underhill 2014 interpretation. ''
Goodness gracious Maju since you are seeing that ''i'm making Hindutva centric comments'' i ask you to just Copy and Paste one of them now!!! other wise do what people do READ!

ZeGrammarNazi said...

Also, since this exercise shows that "ENE" is basically EEF, that means "MNE" is very Sardinian-like.

Davidski said...

Here they are (red and orange).

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9o3EYTdM8lQVW5TZ2ItNzNMVWc/view?usp=sharing

Who are they?

Nirjhar007 said...

@David
''The interesting questions here, perhaps crucial to the PIE question, are who these people were exactly and where the admixture between their Near Eastern and ANE ancestors took place.''
Those NE like folks i think can come from the Maikop Area bringing Indo-European Influx, The 5.9 KYO Event started the Maikop and it with time brought the IE Influx and it climaxed before it ended by 3000 BC.....

ZeGrammarNazi said...

I was trying to triangulate LNE/EBA and CWC using Yamnaya, WHG, ENE from the hand drawn plot you posted from ASHG.

It may not be the most useful exercise, given that the accuracy is dependent on a hand drawn plot after all, but I just wanted to see how my hypothetical groups would appear on your fateful triangle.

ZeGrammarNazi said...

Where are Armenians located on the plot, btw?

Davidski said...

They're in pink.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9o3EYTdM8lQRVdJcWhLMFM1MlU/view?usp=sharing

ZeGrammarNazi said...

Sorry, I meant "MNE"is Gok2-like not Sardinian-like. Gok2 is the light blue dot, correct?

Nirjhar007 said...

@David,
who are the Dark Blue Dark Green and Brown in your plot????

Krefter said...

Yes, Gok2 is the light blue dot.

Davidski said...

The full key is here...

http://eurogenes.blogspot.com.au/2014/12/crowdfunding-for-2015-new-test.html

Krefter said...

Maju, Davidski, and others

Can you think of anyone in archaeology who lived in east Europe around 5,000 years, who could have had something like 60% or more WHG? I'm asking because it's pretty obvious 5,000-6,000YBP west of Samara Russia and east of Germany, there were such people.

50/50 ANE/WHG simply doesn't work for EHG. They were certainly majority WHG, possibly as much as 70%, and lived very far away from Sweden where people had 15-20%. Hunter gatherers in northeast Europe, must have been something like 70% WHG, so maybe there were still people of full- hunter gatherer decent in Belorussia, Poland, and the Baltic states 5,000 years ago.

Interestingly Balts can be fit as SHG or WHG+Yamna.

Nirjhar007 said...

@Chad
''This South Asian extends up into the Caucasus and at very low levels in some Europeans in the Balkans and other places. Whther it's real or not, I'm not sure, but the cline is interesting. The archaeology leading to Maykop does point to Turkmenistan/Afghanistan, as an origin for part of it.''
Can you link the Archaeological reference please?

Chad said...

http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2013/05/origins-of-maykop-phenomenon.html

Chad said...

ZG,
Where would Corded, Beaker, and Yamaya fall using that method? Was that one with 20% ANE Yamnaya or Corded?

Chad said...

I'm guessing the British one is the Beaker/Unetice cluster?

Krefter said...

Lets say bronze age IEs in east Europe were a mix of Samara Yamna, EEF types, and something in between EHG and SHG, that I'll call BHG. And lets also say northern Europeans trace the vast majority of their blood to these people. What Y DNA haplogroups in Europe today(besides R1) could be descended of them, specifically from the BHGs.

N1c, I1, I2a2?

Unknown said...

Krefter
"so maybe there were still people of full- hunter gatherer decent in Belorussia, Poland, and the Baltic states 5,000 years ago"

I don;t know about these (hypothetical) proportions, but , economically, the eastern European forest zone was still very much a forager one into the 1st Mill BC, at which point slash and burn agriculture was introduced c. 600 BC.

Unknown said...

ie From karelia down to the northern Ukraine

Krefter said...

I wonder how Finns turned out to be a similar WHG/ANE/EEF mix as Balts. Did non-IEs with ENF from Russia come to Finland and mix with BHGs? I included N1c because of Finns.

Maybe N1c will pop up in a EHG. It's an east Asian Y DNA haplogroup, and there was east Asian influence in Karelia mtDNa wise and anthropologically wise, so why not? Also, Z1a was found in 3500YBP HGs from Karelia, which I've heard is common in Finno-Urgics today.

Chad said...

Krefter,
That's what the Comb Ceramic is. Your BHG. That's what I think is in Corded.

I think that Samara is going to have N, I, Q, and C. I'm a little on the fence about R, at the moment.

ZeGrammarNazi said...

Chad, yes, the one with 20 ANE would be the Corded group and the other would be Beaker/Unetice.

Unknown said...

Yes chad it'll be a lovely mix if all those turn up
I think calling N1 "eastern" nihjt be as wrong as calling C eastern, in the past

Unknown said...

Correcting myself " economically, the eastern European forest zone was still very much a forager one into the 1st Mill BC"
Supplementing animal husbandry , of course

Chad said...

ZG,
What does Yamnaya turn out to be with that method?

Chad said...

The North Caucasus and Western Black Sea cultures being very similar in the 5th Mil BCE, is very appealing to me regarding R1b.

Krefter said...

"Krefter,
That's what the Comb Ceramic is. Your BHG. That's what I think is in Corded."

Holy shit that's perfect!!

It looks to me north and west Europeans can mostly be explained as Yamna+EEF+BHG. Lithuanians look mostly Yamna+BHG.

When trying to find who gave west euros ANE(assuming it is from one source), we can easily exclude modern west Asians, SHG, and BHG(because of geographic distance).

Ancient DNA is supporting the theory it came through east Europe. And I think the pops who came out of east Europe were basically north Europeans genetically(Yamna+BHG+EEF).

I don't see any other explanation. A north-Euro type pop could not have been recreated in Britain(it could have been in Scandinavia), it has to be coming out of bronze age people who lived from Germany-Russia.

Y DNA N1c though is pretty absent in west Europe, so if there is significant BHG ancestry, I2a2 and I1 are better candidates to be their lineages.

Chad said...

It wont be significant. I think that 10%BHG in Corded would do the trick. They're probably not much different than SHG.

Chad said...

http://s55.radikal.ru/i148/1109/f1/7e5febe243b1.gif

It covers Corded, IR1, Magyar, and Turkic locations.

I'm not sure if N would be farther south than the Samara Valley.

Krefter said...

IF CWC was 73%(or 66.7%) Yamna, 17%(or 23%) Gok2, and 10% BHG, they would only have around 43% WHG. That could place them just east of Northwest Europeans. My guess is they had closer to 20% BHG.

Unknown said...

I wouldn't limit it to comb ware . As I said even further south to Northern ukraine, Belarus, looks very foraging

Chad said...

You won't need the 20% when you consider they mixed between Samara and Germany. Those people should certainly be more WHG than Gok2, and may have a hair of ANE, in Poland.

Krefter said...

I just sent Patterson an email, asking if there are signs of extra-hunter gatherer ancestry in Corded ware, which can't be explained by Neolithic central-west Euros and Yamna.

Hopefully he'll respond. If he says yes, then Corded ware was probably similar to north Europeans, if he says no, then Corded ware was probably just east of central Europeans.

Krefter said...

"I wouldn't limit it to comb ware . As I said even further south to Northern ukraine, Belarus, looks very foraging"

Okay, yeah, sure I mean east European and Baltic hunter gatherers in general.

Considering Hunter gatherers from Samara were probably something like 35% ANE and HGs further west were even less ANE, Yamna is probably the source of most ANE in just about all modern Europeans.

If someone samples genomes from Sweden, Britain, and Spain ranging 5,000-3,000YBP, I guarantee we'll a sudden introduction of ANE, like in Hungary and Germany.

Yamna or east Europe in general is defiantly where most ANE in Europe comes from. ANE may have come in multiple waves, but most of those waves came from the same source.

postneo said...

@maju
"The Kurgan theory is extremely solid in terms archaeological, linguistic and now also genetic. Face it."

OK Let us...

1) archeology: what makes the kurgan IE speaking? horses? Are turks mongols, native americans IE speaking? rituals/burials? they are generic in nature and cannot be connected specifically to any surviving or attested cults in europe or south asia.

2) linguistics:
Wheres the inscription? The kurgan language is unknown. There are sketchy vaguely iranian place and personal name references from a much later era than PIE.

3) genetics? there is an INDIRECT genetic linkage btw south asia and europe either through west asia or central asia. Its too early to pinpoint a source. This may or may not correlate with language spread. west asia has greater demographic weight than central asia.

Its too early to say anything. The current paper has implications for linking european genetics and archeological sites which is fabulous but lets not go overboard in making linguistic conjectures.

@davidski: a good point on why the early neolithic farming signature in Europe does not carry R1

Farming was very early in the levant. R1b and then R1a appeared in fringe populations in syria and iran. Being later adopters they fielded small populations initially. They participated in a later secondary boom aided by pastoralism. In both cases they were still expanded into relative vacuum.

Chad said...

Fringe population in Syria?? Where do you think farming came from? Southeast Anatolia and Syria. That's where the earliest farming sites are. They weren't in Syria.

Grey said...

Jeebus, epic read on previous thread and now another 111 on this...before i read and forget thoughts from last thread...

1) BB in Ireland are copper miners / smiths. Say for the sake of argument that is what BB were generally that would explain their wide distribution as a minority in a lot of places.

Where did they originate - multiple possibilities no doubt but if the earliest copper working cultures were those Balkan cultures which disappeared it seems to me they ought to be prime candidate.

If so then it would be no surprise if these coppersmiths radiated out from this origin before or as a result of those cultures disappearing.

If they were a small minority of artisans among a larger population in all the regions around their origin possibly including Levant, Egypt, North Africa as well as Europe then 1) they may have assimilated into the dominant culture wherever there was one and 2) only had a major demographic impact in regions that were relatively uninhabited i.e. the northern and western edges of Europe outside the farmer range.

A variation on that is R1b as a caste rather than a population and only became a population by accident in the underpopulated northern and western regions of Europe.

2) When two populations A and B mix I don't see any reason to assume they will mix 50/50. I'd say that is almost never going to happen as it requires everything to be equal: equal numbers, equal status, equal competitive advantage, geographically interlaced populations etc.

In particular, if one population is moving onto the territory of another they will pretty much by definition have some advantage or other over the original population.

3) There was a 1000+ years of static boundary between HGs and farmers in far northern Europe. I think that makes it possible for the knowledge of basic animal husbandry to spread leading to Ertobolle, Funnel Beaker etc.

If the far northern HGs did switch to an improved HG&Herding subsistence they would likely have had a dramatic population expansion.

4) I have a feeling the directional arrows may be wrong on some of this i.e. populations moving west into Europe and south into the Near and Middle east from the Caucasus / Transcaucasus region rather than north/northwest from the near east / levant.

Grey said...

@myself

"I have a feeling the directional arrows may be wrong on some of this "

and

"There's something very eastern about Yamnaya...."

maybe beyond Caucasus all the way to the valley of apples.

Unknown said...

Post-Neo
Spot on

Tobus said...

@Krefter:Yamna or east Europe in general is defiantly

Sorry to be a grammar Nazi (and perhaps it's your autocorrect) but "defiantly" and "definitely" mean very different things.

pnuadha said...

Actually there is. There are strong Balkano-Anatolian correlates in the Copper Age and continuously thereafter (and beforehand also). Not to mention the possiblity of entering R1b, and J2; etc; one could make the argumeent for as strong if not stronger than the steppe.

Not for R1b. Actually a Balkano-Anatolian launching point for the r1b waves entering western europe around the bronze is not even feasible. The population bringing r1b and ANE to western europe needed to have appreciable amounts of ANE, WHG, and EEF. That leaves us with only a few launching points, all of them being Eastern Europe. Archeologically, the best candidate is the yamnaya who went from the steppes to hungry; from there it takes little imagination to push their descendants west.

Just to take care of some ill fated alternative explanations that people tend to use. The ANE intrusion into places like France and the British isles was not mediated by the Corded Ware. Germany and Poland do not have more ANE than France and the British Isles, even though they most certainly have more Corded Ware heritage. We therefore need another, independent, vector. People should also keep in mind that we don't if yamnaya had any genetic impact on the Corded Ware much less the entire horizon. We do however, have the actual presence of yamnaya in Hungary which is independent of Corded Ware and overlaps with the later Eastern Bell Beakers. People are too hesitant to attach this yamnaya movement, which David Anthony himself ties to the West via Italo-Celtic, to R1b because of how strongly R1a is associated with eastern IE people 1000 years after the yamnaya! The yamnaya do not need to be the source of r1a for eastern indo europeans around 2000 bce. Two perfectly good alternatives are Corded Ware and CT, though the Corded Ware is the best candidate.

So there you have it. Corded Ware was not a primary source for ANE in West/Northwest Europe. Corded Ware, in all likelihood, did not need Yamnaya for ANE or R1a. If part of the Corded Ware spoke Indo European, then most eastern kurgans of 2000bce and onwards could have (in my opinion) derived from the Corded Ware, and hence have no need for Yamnaya Ydna. (The r1a rich IE people are already connected to a post yamnaya people since the languages they speak branched out AFTER tocharian, anatolian, and italo-celtic)

Unknown said...

"Y DNA N1c though is pretty absent in west Europe.."

"Maybe N1c will pop up in a EHG. It's an east Asian Y DNA haplogroup.."

N1c was found in Equatorial Guinea Bantu. This is unlikely to be due to colonial era Spanish admixture. So did it originate in east Asia?

Maju said...

@Krefter: I have more experience on discussing with Nirjhar than any of you here surely but anyhow it was not my intention to "insult" him, at most to poke him provocatively in an attempt to open the gates of his mind to further non-ethnocentric thought. I'm probably more "Shaivite" than he is anyhow, although not in a Vedic way (while Yahvism annoys me to no avail, some aspects of "substrate" Hinduism I consider interesting and not really distant from my own semi-forgotten Basque traditions).

As for what you asked earlier about H subhaplotypes, I believe I could have offered you a better answer, but I was tired and feeling that you were digging trenches on thin air ("luck"), so I reacted a bit emotionally in my last lines. Anyways, there is a study, Brotherton 2013, that I criticized with some good reason but that can still be very interesting from the viewpoint of your question. Because in it we see that the samples from Germany's Bell Beaker are hyper-westerner or hyper-Basque in H subhaplotype pool, while the rest are not (excepted Salzmünde and to some extent Corded Ware - but n=2 in each case, so maybe a fluke).

It is probably worth studying these issues in further detail but I don't have the means nor the patience.

Maju said...

@Chad:

I asked you: "how do you "know" that Baalberge had no ANE?"

Your replies:

"Because, they said that the farmers in Germany were like the Gok farmers and like the ones in Northern Spain. So, about 50% Near East and 50% WHG".

"We show that in western Europe, the farmers of both Germany and Spain >7,000 years ago were descended from a common ancestral stock. These farmers did not replace the earlier hunter-gatherers, but continued to mix with them, leading to a resurgence of hunter-gatherer ancestry in both Germany and Spain ~1,000-2,000 years later. In eastern Europe, the hunter-gatherers of Russia >7,000 years ago were distinct from those of the west, having an increased affinity to a ~24,000 year old individual from Siberia,....

Good enough?"

Nowhere in those lines there's any specific mention to Baalberge. The association (wrong) is only in your mind. By "farmers" they mean EEF, Danubians, not the Chalcolithic Baalberge culture, which, by the way is not just from (Eastern) Germany but also Poland.

My position remains: Baalberge are (partly?) intrusive (on a Danubian substrate and maybe even also with some Nordic-Megalithic adstrate) and they cannot be likened to Early or even Middle/Late Neolithic farmers from the Danubian (LBK) culture. At least not in principle. More importantly Baalberge are the first Kurgan culture in that area, showing individualist burials in mounds (kurgans) and an elitism that likens them to their steppe relatives, with whom they are chronologically consistent. You can easily track continuity from Baalberge to Corded Ware (you may want to look rather to Poland than to Germany though but they are eventually reunified under Globular Amphorae anyhow).

Anonymous said...

@Colin Welling
anything else than predominately r1a and a bit I,C or Q among the yamnaya samples would be a big surprise. R1b sounds very unlikely there but i think it is true that much of ANE in europe can not be explained by the corded ware. Also basques have some ANE, not so much like their indo-european neighbours, but it sounds reasonable for me that some of ANE in western europe predates indoeuropeans and that it has a different origin than ANE in eastern europe.

the tocharians had r1a and spoke a language closer to western indo-european languages than to eastern so it is hard for me to believe that r1b can be equated with centum languages and r1a with satem languages. It is more likely that r1a was also important among western indoeuropeans untill they assimilated many r1b carriers in central europe.

pnuadha said...

anything else than predominately r1a and a bit I,C or Q among the yamnaya samples would be a big surprise.

Do you think yamnaya was the source for most of the IE related r1a? Would if it was Corded Ware instead?

R1b sounds very unlikely there but i think it is true that much of ANE in europe can not be explained by the corded ware.

How do you explain France and the British Isles having pretty much the same ANE as Germany and Poland? Who brought it there independent of Corded Ware?

the tocharians had r1a and spoke a language closer to western indo-european languages than to eastern so it is hard for me to believe that r1b can be equated with centum languages and r1a with satem languages. It is more likely that r1a was also important among western indoeuropeans untill they assimilated many r1b carriers in central europe.

We don't know what the tocharians had. The Tarim mummies lived 1000 years later in a place we don't even know tocharians themselves lived.

BTW, i dont reference Centum or Satem; its just not necessary. The point is that Anatolian, Tocharian, and Italo-celtic broke off before the rest.

pnuadha said...

It is more likely that r1a was also important among western indoeuropeans untill they assimilated many r1b carriers in central europe.

Those r1b carriers transformed Western Europe at the same time ANE and Indo European did. That would be an mind bending coincidence if the three events were only connected superficially.

Davidski said...

Colin,

I wouldn't say that France has the same level of ANE as Poland. The difference is probably around 5%, which is relatively high.

Any estimates that don't show this must be wrong, because they won't be able to reproduce the position of French and Poles on a plot of West Eurasia.

Lazaridis et al. shows in Table S14.10 that the Southwest French, French and English do have lower levels of ANE than Lithuanians, Belorussians, Hungarians and Czechs. Obviously, Poles would be close to the latter group, but they weren't sampled.

Also, the Yamnaya groups that streamed into the Balkans and Carpathian Basin during the Copper Age might well have been rich in R1b. But your suggestion that the whole Yamnaya horizon was dominated by R1b just defies logic.

Maju said...

@Krefter and others who have mentioned that there seems to be excess WHG in NW Europe: I tentatively agree with you in this and it is another reason why I think that the wider Atlantic Neolithic needs more love (and by that I mean more research).

I've been suggesting that at least part of the excess ANE in NW Europe is not only attributable to Kurgan inflows but rather to aboriginal elements (reflected in Motala data). Not sure how what exactly is going on but it's something that needs attention quite clearly.

...

As for Finnic gradual genetic assimilation to their IE southern neighbors in terms genetic, I believe it can be explained in mere terms of patrilocal admixture: the southern populations will remain mostly unaffected (being much larger by mere reason of climate benevolence) even in a balanced exchange of wives along many generations but the small northern ones will get heavily diluted instead: it's a matter of numbers, of serious imbalance between the numbers involved. I've discussed this with some interested Finnish people and we tend to agree.

In a simplified example, the southern population has an Ne of 100 and the northern one of 10. The exchange of a single wife in each direction, barely alters the southern genome (1%) but significantly does the northern one (10%). Wash, rinse, repeat... through millennia. The northern population would still keep their patrilineages but not much of the related mt or autosomal DNA.

Maju said...

@Mike: "I wouldn't limit it to comb ware. As I said even further south to Northern ukraine, Belarus, looks very foraging".

That's Dniepr-Don → Pitted Ware (which is a NW "forager", neo-forager truly continuous HG, offshoot of DD).

It's an interesting idea but neither Comb Ware nor Pitted Ware make any known inroads west of the Baltic shores, so if they are to blame, they must have somehow hitchhiked other cultural processes. But which ones and how that makes any sense?

Instead I tend to think that NW Europe retained some WHG/SHG elements that are being ignored in all this discussion.

Maju said...

Erratum: "neo-forager truly continuous HG" should be "neo-forager truly RATHER THAN continuous HG".

Maju said...

@Postneo: I replied to you more extensively elsewhere but definitely "horses" is not what makes Kurgan, even if they are there and they surely added to their rather dramatic mobility.

Understanding properly Kurgan expansion requires looking at each of the cultures involved and their relations with substrate and other putative origins. It takes time and study.

Maju said...

"N1c was found in Equatorial Guinea Bantu".

Looks European to me. Europeans of various types have been meddling in Africa for centuries now, and that includes Dutch (very prominently, as they competed with Portuguese and were at war with Spain-Portugal in general) and very possibly various Scandinavians (Danish certainly, also Normans before them were very active in early exploration of West Africa for whatever they still retained of their Danish forefathers).

It also looks like a mere erratic that should not be over-emphasized unless there's suddenly lots of it (what I'm sure it's not the case).

I'm guessing that the sequence comes from the island and not the continental part of Equatorial Guinea, am I right?

Unknown said...

@Collin Welling
You're absolutely right about pointing out the role of R1b. If its entrance into central Europe was indeed rather late, then the total roll-out and takeover by R1b might have taken a further thousand or so years, bringing it to rather recent pre-History.

pnuadha said...

Lazaridis et al. shows in Table S14.10 that the Southwest French, French and English do have lower levels of ANE than Lithuanians, Belorussians, Hungarians and Czechs. Obviously, Poles would be close to the latter group, but they weren't sampled.

Lithuania does not approximate the ANE in Germans and Poles, who would have to have mediated any CW influence to Western/Northwest Europe. Hungarians, also, do not approximate Polish and German ANE due to more recent steppe invasions of Hungary.

That leaves Belorussians (15.1), Czechs (16.7), and Ukrainians (15.1) to generously approximate the ANE in Germany and Poland.

West/Northwest Europeans are French (13.5), English (14.1), Orcadian (15.8), and Scottish (18.2).

That is the same! Furthermore Belorussians can probably be considered an upper bound for ANE in Germans and Poles so we can reasonably guess 15 to 14.5.

Even if Germans were 17 and Western/Northwest Europeans were 14, a well mixed German CW population could not contribute enough ANE to Western Europe. The only way to get a nearly equal and massive amount of ANE to Western Europe is either by total population replacement from a mixed intermediary like the Germans, or a more pure source that moved through Europe quickly. The Corded Ware did neither to Western Europe, hence we need something independent of Corded Ware but similar to Corded Ware...

Unknown said...

@Collin
"We don't know what the tocharians had. The Tarim mummies lived 1000 years later in a place we don't even know tocharians themselves lived. "
Absolutely right. Most people, even peer-reviewed academics , seem to forget about that. Plus we are still yet to define exactly which sub-clades of R1a are found in the Tarim mummies as well as the Siberian ones.

pnuadha said...

Also, the Yamnaya groups that streamed into the Balkans and Carpathian Basin during the Copper Age might well have been rich in R1b. But your suggestion that the whole Yamnaya horizon was dominated by R1b just defies logic.

Fair enough, I see how it looks like a stretch. My reasoning is as follows. R1b must have been dominant in the western yamnaya. Also, r1a must have been mostly absent in the western yamnaya since Italo-Celtic populations barely have any. Eastern yamnaya must have some overlap with western yamnaya. As such I expect them to have some r1b. I think the r1b in bashkirs and the altai region cooperates this.

At the same time, IE related r1a seems to have an origin around CW region and not the steppe. The CW, I think, also had the means to be host to the latter IE language splits and then spread r1a and IE across the steppe.

So I just see r1a in eastern yamnaya as unnecessary. I can't reasonably say it wasn't there, but I see less need to place it there.

Yamnaya might seem like the center of the IE world but that has next to nothing to do with them being the source population for the IE world. In terms of R1a, maybe Corded Ware and CT were.

Davidski said...

Colin,

Scots don't have 18% of ANE. Those estimates are simply wrong. The table you're looking at also reports 16% for Pais Vasco Spaniards, who can actually be modeled as 0% ANE.

This table is more accurate (although even this one could be better IMO).

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8XSV9HEoqpFRHFNQlNMSU9DVEE/view?usp=sharing

Also, I'm not sure why you're bringing Bashkirs into this, since we actually have ancient Y-DNA from Bronze Age Kurgans, Altai and the Tarim Basin? It's mostly R1a, as you very well know.

What did those people have to do with the CT farmers of Romania/western Ukraine? I'm just not seeing the link.

Unknown said...

@ Maju - "I'm guessing that the sequence comes from the island and not the continental part of Equatorial Guinea, am I right?"

I don't know if it is from the mainland or Bioko Island. It was a sample of 112 Equatorial Guinean migrant workers in Madrid from 2001. Probably Fang from the mainland I expect. I found a separate paper on Sao Tome e Principe [R1a turned up in that sample].

"It also looks like a mere erratic that should not be over-emphasized unless there's suddenly lots of it (what I'm sure it's not the case)."

I generally agree. However this is against a backdrop of chronic under-sampling in Africa, an ever-increasing number of 'erratics' turning up, a tendency of people to ignore them or dismiss them, etc.

-R2 [R-M124] in Biaka pygmy;
-H*-M69 (XM82) in Biaka pygmy;
-Q-MEH2 in Tanzania Sandawe;
-I-P37.2 in Tanzania Sandawe;
-R1a in Sao Tome, Namibia, Zambia, Mozambique, Ethiopia;
-R1b R-M269 in Baka and Bakola pygmies;
-R1b R-M269 in Khoisan with no European ancestry;
-N1c-tat in Equatorial Guinea;

-mtDNA haplogroup R7 in Rwanda Tutsi;
-mtDNA haplogroup A in Sierra Leone and Mozamabique;

There will probably be countless others, I haven't included any Y DNA haplogroups J and T with these, or the numerous examples of DE*.

My suspicion is that they are probably West Asian-derived, though some could have originated in Africa and some could be due to modern European admixture.

Anonymous said...

@ Mike Thomas
yes this were probably rather proto-tocharians or a related population different from historical tocharians but there are till now not any evidences for an indoeuropean origin of r1b in asia. In many areas it is almost absent and it rather correlates with turkic people (founder effect) or with neolithic west asian influences (turkmenistan, iran, tajikistan.

Unknown said...

@ Collin
R1b could not have been dominant on the steppe, at least highly unlikely I guess its remotely possible, only to later virtually disappear). Moreover, although lacking aDNA, the current links point western -central Europe to Southern Pontid-Balkan region, and more remotely north central Asia.

@ Shilkur
"yes this were probably rather proto-tocharians or a related population different..."

we do not know which language group the R1a- Tarim mummies spoke, if only one at all. Tocharian appears thousands of years later. To assume 3000 years of a static language situation is highly unrealistic.

Anonymous said...

@Mike Thomas
"we do not know which language group the R1a- Tarim mummies spoke, if only one at all. Tocharian appears thousands of years later. To assume 3000 years of a static language situation is highly unrealistic."

yes we can not be sure about that but the samples in Xiaohe were negative for r1a-z93 and are too far in the east to be associated with indo-iranians of this early period so there are only two possibilities
1. they spoke proto-tocharian

2. they spoke another non-indo-iranian indoeuropean language which was replaced by tocharian and other languages

Unknown said...

No . There are millions of possibilities of which languages they spoke. Their Y-DNA is irrelevant for the matter of what they spoke.

Davidski said...

It's not relevant whether the Tarim Basin mummies were proto-Tocharians or not. It'd be interesting if they were, but this might never be possible to prove.

The important thing is that their DNA suggests very strongly that they came from the steppe, and perhaps even the European steppe, because their R1a was not R1a Z93+. And to get to the Tarim Basin by the early Bronze Age they would've had to leave the western steppe pretty early.

However, we know from other ancient DNA results that there were nomads in the western Altai during the middle Bronze Age with R1a Z93+. So it's obvious that groups with both R1a Z93- and R1a Z93+ were on the steppe during the early metal ages.

For some reason R1a Z93+ became very successful in Central and South Asia since then, while R1a Z93- didn't.

Unknown said...

David

Possibly from the steppe, but we still don't fully know what mix of R1a was there in the BA. They could have also been Z282 -ve, and/or now extinct groups.

Davidski said...

I have doubts their R1a was the European-specific Z282+. It was probably a subclade that no longer exists, or is extremely rare in western China now.

But that doesn't change what I said. The ancient R1a, including the R1a-Z93, and mtDNA sequences from the Tarim Basin, south Siberian Kurgans and western Altai suggest a series of migrations deep into Asia from the Copper Age onwards with a source somewhere on the western steppe.

Unknown said...

Yes, at least for Y-DNA, and from the current standing of the tree

Nirjhar007 said...

Their Mtdna is highly Asian and i think they were the population like of Kalasha-Nuristanis.....

Nirjhar007 said...

@David
''But that doesn't change what I said. The ancient R1a, including the R1a-Z93, and mtDNA sequences from the Tarim Basin, south Siberian Kurgans and western Altai suggest a series of migrations deep into Asia from the Copper Age onwards with a source somewhere on the western steppe.''
What are you saying David the Mtdna of Tarim was H,K and C! they all are of Asian Origin and Y-DNA if R1a-Z93 then Again Asian unless you show the technical reason why the Z-93 was not Asian!

Davidski said...

Yeah, you can read how "highly Asian" their mtDNA was here...

http://eurogenes.blogspot.com.au/2010/02/bronze-age-tarim-basin-caucasoids.html

And don't worry, I'm pretty sure those full genome and full mito sequences are coming.

Davidski said...

What do you mean by "technical reason"?

They tested the Z93 mutation in the Tarim Basin mummies, and they came back negative.

Nirjhar007 said...

That makes them European?

Nirjhar007 said...

Two Possibilities-
1. The Y-DNA belonged to an Older Clade.
2 The Y-DNA belonged to a Isolate Clade.
End Of Story.

Davidski said...

It suggests they came from a place where R1a Z93- was common, and where mtDNA H and C4 were also present.

This screams Eurasian steppe to me, possibly the Ukrainian steppe, where C4 was found in Neolithic and Kurgan remains.

Unknown said...

Maju

your idea about genetic exchange , north -south, and Ne is interesting one. Any of these chaps you've been discussing with citable ?
Although I think that its rather plausible that there are other aspects to account also. Something within Y-DNA itself. We can't keep blaming patrilocality.

Nirjhar007 said...

@DW and MT
I quote from an discussion i had'' the mtDNA Hg M is very frequent in Tibet (almost 70%),
and this perhaps can be connected with Sapir's theories on the Tibetan substratum of Tocharian.
H and K are of West Asian origin, and quite frequent among Iranians (K is 17% in Kurdistan), although
they reached Europe already in the early Neolithic.
C4 is rather Siberian, and it is a descendant of M.''
End Of Story....

Unknown said...

Maju,
Quit being a horses ass. Baalberg is in the paper and part of the 5000-3000BCE range they talk of. They found no MA1 affinity in them.

How about you stop your Holocene, UP, epi-Gravettian, Baalberg, megalith, Basque Atlantian supermen, Thessalian, 30kyo R1b nonsense and pay attention?!? Stepping out of 2003 isn't a bad thing...

Simon_W said...

So West Asian ANE isn't PC Steppe derived after all, as I've always said. There really are two kinds of West Asians: The gracile southern ones with low ANE who peak in Saudis and Bedouins. Earliest European farmers had a lot of ancestry from these. And there are the more robust northern ones with considerable amounts of ANE who peak in and near the Caucasus. Their spread is related with the spread of the West Asian autosomal component of many ADMIXTURE runs, and with the spread of yDNA haplogroup J2 and mtDNA haplogroups T1 and I. Ancient DNA suggests that these spreads occured long after the expansion of farming.

And how did ANE ancestry get to West Asia? Surely not with y-haplogroup J2. I think it's fairly obvious that it got there with R1b, from the east of course, through Iran.

If Yamnaya was 50% from West Asia there probably was considerable evidence for this in their yDNA. But will they turn out to have had a lot of J2? Hardly so. I guess that West Asian legacy will be R1b! This would fit well with the similarity of the West Asian part of the Yamnaya genomes with modern Armenians, since Armenians have more R1b than any other population around the Caucasus. And even at present there is a considerable, large and wide diffusion zone of R1b north of the Caucasus, in southern Russia and up to central Russia. The very high frequency of R1b in some populations around the southern Urals seems to be a relic, and it isn't far away from Samara.

R1a will probably reflect the hunter-gatherer part of the Yamnaya people's ancestry. It generally has a much more northern distribution than R1b at present. So I guess Yamnaya probably had both R1a and R1b. Founder effects may explain the quite differing frequencies of these haplogroups in the various IE populations.

But I fear the ultimate PIE homeland will be difficult to determine with ancient DNA alone. After all, if the Yamnaya population, a putative candidate for the PIE, were a 50 – 50 mix of local EHG and a population from the IE homeland according to G-I, there is plenty of room for argument about which part of the mix had spoken pre-PIE.

The fact that Hittite (and its relatives) was so distinct from the entire rest of IE languages might suggest that they were the only IE branch that didn't expand from the steppe.

Simon_W said...

On the other hand David Anthony writes:

„Proto-Indo-European also had contact with the languages of the Caucasus Mountains, primarily those now classified as South Caucasian or Kartvelian, the family that produced modern Georgian. These connections have suggested to some that the Proto-Indo-European homeland should be placed in the Caucasus near Armenia or perhaps in nearby eastern Anatolia. The links between Proto-Indo-European and Kartvelian are said to appear in both phonetics and vocabulary, although the phonetic link is controversial. (...) Johanna Nichols has shown from the phonology of the loans that the Proto-Indo-European/Proto-Kartvelian/Proto-Semitic contacts were indirect – all the loan words passed through unknown intermediaries between the known three. One intermediary is required by chronology, as Proto-Kartvelian is generally thought to have existed after Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Semitic. The Semitic and Caucasian vocabulary that was borrowed into Proto-Indo-European through Kartvelian therefore contains roots that belonged to some Pre-Kartvelian or Proto-Kartvelian language in the Caucasus. This language had relations, through unrecorded intermediaries, with Proto-Indo-European on one side and Proto-Semitic on the other. (...) Many experts agree that Proto-Indo-European shared some features with a language ancestral to Kartvelian but not necessarily through a direct face-to-face link. Relations with the speakers of Proto-Uralic were closer. So who were the neighbors? Proto-Indo-European exhibits strong links with Proto-Uralic and weaker links with a language ancestral to Proto-Kartvelian. The speakers of Proto-Indo-European lived somewhere between the Caucasus and Ural Mountains but had deeper linguistic relationships with the people who lived around the Urals.“

So it seems likely that the „pseudo-Armenians“ spoke a language related to Kartvelian, not PIE.

pnuadha said...

David,

This table is more accurate (although even this one could be better IMO).

Indeed. But the point remains. Belerussian (16.7), Czech (16.3), Lithuanian (16.0), and Ukranian (16.0) means 16.0 is a slightly generous estimate for Polish and Germans.

But thats not really different from English (14.4), French (14.0), Orcadian (15.7), and Scottish (17.1).

Again, either the Poles and Germans don't really have any more Corded Ware ancestry than French to Scottish (highly unlikely) or there was another group that made it quickly to West/Northwest Europe.

That other populations seems to have clearly been Yamnaya to Hungry, followed by East Bell Beaker from Hungry and Czech to West/Northwest Europe.

Krefter said...

Colin,

Poles and Germans are very different, even though they're neighbors. You should be able to see that looking at PCAs and admixtures.

Germans are southwest genetically(less ANE and WHG) of British-Irish, and have more drift with western Europeans. Poles are as northeast as Scandinavians, and southwest of Balts, and have more drift with eastern Europeans.

Also, Germany is nothing close to uniform genetically. North Germans are almost like Scandinavians, west Germans are almost like French, and southeast Germans are like a mix of Balkan and north German, southwest Germans are like a mix of west German and French, and east Germans are like a mix of west German and Polish.

Romulus the I2a L233+ Proto Balto-Slav, layer of Corded Ware Women said...

Y DNA N1 seems like a good candidate for EHG being that the comb ceramic culture was contemporaneous just North of Yamna, however Yamna is not brachycephalic or even mesocephalic which is a defining characteristic of N1 people.

pnuadha said...

Poles and Germans are very different, even though they're neighbors. You should be able to see that looking at PCAs and admixtures.

Thats not relevant.

Fanty said...

Isnt that a "defining characteristic" of HG in general (virtually everywhere on the planet)? While the stereotype of Farmers is dolchiocephalic?

Yamna beeing less brachycephalic than comb ceramics, just means, more of the middle eastern dolchiocephalicness.

Also, skullshapes apear to change without migration. See the middle ages. There is the iron age, where everyone is extremely dolchiocephalic, even populations that today are very brachycephalic.

And then there is the middle age, where everyone became very brachycephalic, even populations that apeared to be 100% dolchiocephalic in the iron age.

Maju said...

@David: totally in agreement with you re. Afanasevo new data: it screams Russia or Ukraine. However, as I said before, somehow they didn't manage to leave a major legacy in the genetic aspect, what is also intriguing.

Anyhow, in the PCA you posted earlier, what population do CWC fall on? Polish? And also how reliable is that PCA? Did you get privileged access to unpublished aDNA data or is it an estimate you made?

Romulus the I2a L233+ Proto Balto-Slav, layer of Corded Ware Women said...

Fanty,

Farmers and European HGs are dolichocephalics. Brachycephaly is only found under Y DNA Macro Group K which Y DNA G/I are not a part of. Although the Y chromosome doesn't affect skull shape groups under K would all share a Brachycephalic ancestor and pass along some of the trait.

postneo said...

poles and germans seem distinct phonologically. one language has dental stops vs mordern germanic which has alveolar stops.

Such supra areal features and schisms are older and more conservative than any language family.

Grey said...

Seems to me the most likely first impact of PIE would not be expansion themselves but hassling neighbors into moving away so the first wave impact would be neighbors of PIE moving away from the steppe to the south and west.

.

pushed south?

"There really are two kinds of West Asians: The gracile southern ones with low ANE who peak in Saudis and Bedouins ... And there are the more robust northern ones with considerable amounts of ANE who peak in and near the Caucasus."

Personally I expect ANE to turn out to be archaic northern/mountain admixture that was mostly in the far north (hence the IE connection) but also in small patches in mountain regions further south e.g. Caucasus.

.

pushed west?

"Actually a Balkano-Anatolian launching point for the r1b waves entering western europe around the bronze is not even feasible. The population bringing r1b and ANE to western europe needed to have appreciable amounts of ANE, WHG, and EEF."

What was the composition of the missing populations from the forest steppe down through the western shore of the Black Sea and into the Balkans that disappeared?

.

If steppe neighboring populations moved away they may have moved away in multiple directions.

If a farming or ex-farming population moved into the HG regions beyond the northern limit of LBK and adopted a hybrid HG+Herding subsistence model the population density in those regions north of LBK would likely increase possibly increasing conflict.

If some of the HG populations around the northern edge of LBK independently or as a result of the above also developed a hybrid HG+Herding subsistence model their pop density would increase also possibly increasing conflict.

.

IE and horses

In the forest zone north of the LBK range any migrating IE would be competing with HGs so they wouldn't need a specific military advantage other than numbers if having a hybrid subsistence model of HG+Herding domesticated animals gave them a numbers advantage.

It's the central route where they'd be competing with farmers.

Grey said...

@Fanty

"Also, skullshapes appear to change without migration."

If male and female skull shapes are effected by testosterone levels (or other sex hormones)...

(i read that somewhere, don't know if true)

...then skull shapes generally might shift with changes in those hormone levels.

Simon_W said...

N1 is associated with East Asian / modern Siberian admixture, which wasn't present in Yamnaya, at least not strong enough to influence the phenotype. In contrast to some of the Comb Ceramic skulls which clearly showed Mongolid traits.

Simon_W said...

And Yamnaya was mesocephalic afaik, at least some of the skull series. I wouldn't overrate that single trait though.

Fanty said...

@Romulus:

Well, there are some examples in wich is might fit. Like the suposedly "Dinaric" phenotype of Bellbakers. Dinaric is highly brachycephalic.

The meso to brachy "Borreby" in Denmark, wich modern (different to Coons claim of (Borreby = WHG) claims say, "that phenotype first apears 5000 years ago" and it makes its entrance to Skandinavia via Germany.

The strong connection between the distribution of R S-28 with the distribution of (West)"Alpinid" phenotype.

That may all fit into R people = bringer of brachycephalic indexes into Europe.

But what about I2a in the Balkans? By your theory, "I" people should be dolchiocephalic and many see a connection to Dinaric.

@Grey:
Maybe. And that might be connected to diet. Who knows.

I wonder if WHG had been really dolchiocephalic. I always thought in the stereotype:

Mesolithic: brachycephalic people

Neolithic: first apearance of dolchiocephalic people in Europe

Bronce Age: New brachycephalic people show up.

Iron Age: Everyone goes dolchiocephalic

Middle Age: Everyone goes brachycephalic

Modern Age: Everyone transforms into dolchiocephalic again

Simon_W said...

OMG where did you get this idea from? Just a guess? Brachycephaly was very rare in most mesolithic hunter-gatherer groups. UP Europeans were overwhelmingly dolichocephalic.

Simon_W said...

I think some people don't know what dolichocephalic and brachycephalic means.

Unknown said...

"But what about I2a in the Balkans? By your theory, "I" people should be dolchiocephalic and many see a connection to Dinaric"

The Balkan Slavs used to be dolicicephalic in the early Middle Ages. There was a brachycephalization in the 12-13 th century. No foreign arrivals, this so far unexplained. ? Diet ? Sleeping habits whilst neonates

Romulus the I2a L233+ Proto Balto-Slav, layer of Corded Ware Women said...

Loschbour was hyperdolichocephaic and I2a1b. The "Dinaric" Brachycephalic type arrived with the Beakers, although Oetzi was somewhat Mesocephalic. All HGs were pure Dolichocephalic though.

Simon_W said...

It's from elements in the pre-Slavic substrate. The cephalic index in the western Balkans increased steadily, the trend was just temporarily reversed by the Slavic incursions. It was already on the border to brachycephaly in antiquity. To offer an explanation for the trend is more tricky.

Romulus the I2a L233+ Proto Balto-Slav, layer of Corded Ware Women said...

WHG - pure dolichocephalic
EEF - Majority dolichocephalic, slight mesocephaly

Bell Beaker & Corded Ware coincide with the arrival of brachycephalic types. This is all well documented anthropology.

We know Bell Beaker and Corded Ware coincide with the arrival of the R1a/b clades, which are perfect candidates for introducing the Brachycephalic head shape as they share an origin with other Asiatic Brachycephalic types.

Fanty said...

"I think some people don't know what dolichocephalic and brachycephalic means."

Brachycephalic means that the head is round (almost as wide as long) when seen from above.

Dolchiocephalic is that the head is more long than wide, when seen from above.

So what?

What I know is that Neanderthals are kind of super extreme dolchiocephalic guys.

So of course, if you see UP as kind of neanderthal like then they of course need that trait... :P

Simon_W said...

The classic Dinaric type resembles West Asian types, like the Armenoids, the Mtebids and the Pamirids. Admixture experiments have established that West Asian admixture is indeed somewhat stronger in Southeastern Europe than more to the north and west. So ultimately it's probably derived from J2-West Asians. Bronze Age Cyprus was an early flourishing zone for this type, and J2 and West Asian admixture are very strong there. It's highly dubious that the spare Bell Beaker presence in southeastern Europe is responsible for the Dinaric admixture there.

Romulus the I2a L233+ Proto Balto-Slav, layer of Corded Ware Women said...

Dolichocephalic (long skull) - Neanderthal, Cro Magnon, Khoisan Hunter Gatherers in Africa (Y DNA A). Most of Africa is Dolichocephalic but I think there is some Mesocephaly amongst certain populations. Northern Europe. European Hunter Gatherers and Early Farmers.

Mesocephalic (round skull) - found in Central Europe, somewhat of a gradient towards east asia.

Brachycephalic - (wide skull) - found in east asian populations.

Simon_W said...

Romulus, there are serious problems with your theory. One is that Corded people were hyperdolichocephalic. I yet have to see a brachycephalic Corded skull. The other thing is that the Yamnaya skulls really have zero similarity with Dinarids.

Fanty said...

I think I know where Romulus got his theory from.

Maps like this:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/56/PSM_V50_D602_World_cephalic_index_map.jpg

Simon_W said...

Mesocephalic means just an intermediate cephalic index, it doesn't mean a particularly round skull at all. And central Europe used to be brachycephalic in most places at the end of the 19th century. Now the indices have dropped and indeed mesocephaly is more typical, in most areas. No there is no gradient towards East Asia. It has nothing to do with East Asia. And China and Japan are not particularly brachycephalic, they're rather intermediate on a global scale.

Fanty said...

Someone I once met, came up with the idea that dolchiocephalic shows up near coastlines while brachycephalic shows up more in the center of landmasses. BUt that might fit for Europe and Asia but if the map is right, not for the Americas.

Simon_W said...

Well, I remember having picked up that in Japan the cephalic index is increasing, IIRC. So the opposite of what's happening in Europe.

Fanty said...

I read that the cephalic index of Chinese people is increasing from 3000BC til now.

Alberto said...

I was watching now a video posted on Dienekes blog (http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2015/01/dna-origins-of-peoples-armenians.html) about Armenian people's origin, and one guy mentioned this when speaking about R1b haplogroup:

"There's a major, major study going on about R1b which should come out in the next year or so, I'm not involved in it, but it's going to explain exactly where these people came from and what path they used to get into Europe and they'll try to tie it to historical and mythological texts".

Anyone has any information about that study?

Davidski said...

Yeah, here it is...

http://eurogenes.blogspot.com.au/2014/12/latest-speculation-about-r1b.html

I'd say he oversold it.

Alberto said...

Ah, if it's that one then yes, I'd also say he oversold it :)

Thanks.

Chad said...

The new R1b/R1a paper should be about very young dates, also using SNP's.

Krefter said...

Davidski, what do you think differentiates North sea and Baltic people, besides slightly different WHG-ENF-ANE proportions?

It seems strange to me that north sea and Baltic people (probably)trace the majority of their blood to the same 5,000< ancestors, and can easily be distinguished from each other. Do you think R1b/I1/I2a2 vs R1a and Bell Beaker vs Corded ware, have something to do with it?

If CWC, BB, and UN turn out central European-like, how do know whether Germans and Hungarians are a continuation or a mixture of north sea-Baltic and southwes-east Euro types(like they appear in K15)?

Krefter said...

"Thats not relevant."

How is that not relevant? You can't assume Poles and Germans have similar ANE, when they obviously are very different genetically. Germany being very diverse as a country is also relevant, because they don't all have the same ANE.

Davidski said...

The difference is the excessive and very obvious IBS/IBD shared by Eastern Europeans, which is a phenomenon dating back to the Iron Age and later IMO. Western Europeans, except eastern Germans, aren't affected by it.

It's similar to the difference between Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews. Ashkenazi Jews, who share a lot of IBS/IBS with each other, create their own clusters in ADMIXTURE at high enough K, and Sephardi Jews usually won't show much membership in such clusters. But both of these groups are very closely related, and you can see that because, amongst other things, they plot next to each other on the classic West Eurasian PCA.

Krefter said...

"The difference is the excessive and very obvious IBS/IBD shared by Eastern Europeans, which is a phenomenon dating back to the Iron Age and later IMO."

Do Finns share this IBS/IBD, because they score more high in Baltic and east Euro?

Davidski said...

Southwest Finns show lower levels of membership in the Baltic/East European clusters, because they don't share as much of this IBD/IBS as other East Baltic groups. East Finns are more typically Eastern European in this regard.

Nirjhar007 said...

@Maju
''No, Nirjhar: language is not enough to support the nonsense of Brahuis being "immigrants", that would require of some genetic support (logically, think again please). In fact it says the opposite: that they are a fossil of a time long gone, when Dravidian was spoken so far NW.''
Don't you know a drift is the simple explanation???
Anyway what kind of Genetic Signature ''from south'' are you talking about?

Nirjhar007 said...

@Simon
''So West Asian ANE isn't PC Steppe derived after all, as I've always said. There really are two kinds of West Asians: The gracile southern ones with low ANE who peak in Saudis and Bedouins. Earliest European farmers had a lot of ancestry from these. And there are the more robust northern ones with considerable amounts of ANE who peak in and near the Caucasus. Their spread is related with the spread of the West Asian autosomal component of many ADMIXTURE runs, and with the spread of yDNA haplogroup J2 and mtDNA haplogroups T1 and I. Ancient DNA suggests that these spreads occured long after the expansion of farming.

And how did ANE ancestry get to West Asia? Surely not with y-haplogroup J2. I think it's fairly obvious that it got there with R1b, from the east of course, through Iran.

If Yamnaya was 50% from West Asia there probably was considerable evidence for this in their yDNA. But will they turn out to have had a lot of J2? Hardly so. I guess that West Asian legacy will be R1b! This would fit well with the similarity of the West Asian part of the Yamnaya genomes with modern Armenians, since Armenians have more R1b than any other population around the Caucasus. And even at present there is a considerable, large and wide diffusion zone of R1b north of the Caucasus, in southern Russia and up to central Russia. The very high frequency of R1b in some populations around the southern Urals seems to be a relic, and it isn't far away from Samara.

R1a will probably reflect the hunter-gatherer part of the Yamnaya people's ancestry. It generally has a much more northern distribution than R1b at present. So I guess Yamnaya probably had both R1a and R1b. Founder effects may explain the quite differing frequencies of these haplogroups in the various IE populations.''
But you are neglecting the Mtdna don't you think Mtdna also spread the Components from Archaic times???

Nirjhar007 said...

I think Mtdna like of U2 and H etc had role spreading the ANE from paleolithic times (Correct me if i'm wrong)....

Krefter said...

"I think Mtdna like of U2 and H etc had role spreading the ANE from paleolithic times (Correct me if i'm wrong)...."

I think U2 defiantly can be associated with ANE. It is most popular and diverse in South Asia, and existed in Mesolithic Sweden and Russia, along with ANE.

U itself may have originated in the WHG-ANE branch.

H though seems very near eastern to me. It could have a more complex history though, but probably not associated with ANE.

Davidski said...

There's no evidence that the Yamnaya genomes from the Samara were 50% West Asian.

The population with Near Eastern ancestry that formed the Yamnaya by mixing with the local Samara foragers might only have been 80% West Asian, or even less.

That's because the Samara Valley is way up north, so it's highly unlikely that unadmixed West Asians made it up there in prehistoric times. Their ancestors might have started mixing as soon as they entered Eastern Europe.

Modern West Asians are mixed. We don't know when ANE got to West Asia. It might have only first got there during the Bronze Age.

Maju said...

"Drift", "luck"... I'm bored of reading those spurious arguments. They are just trenches of the mind, just like "faith".

"what kind of Genetic Signature ''from south'' are you talking about?"

Well, something: lineages, autosomal DNA fractions, you know... They have nothing that suggests they are from South India, nothing that makes them different from Balochs particularly or their other neighbors more in general.

So the immigrant conjecture does not fit: they are living proof of Dravidian being spoken in Pakistan long ago.

Nirjhar007 said...

@David
''Modern West Asians are mixed. We don't know when ANE got to West Asia. It might have only first got there during the Bronze Age.''
ANE Is not Equal to Spread of IE languages BTW the 3000 BC influx which begun around 4000 BC IMO brought The IE languages in E Europe and they came from Maykop....
So my question is what is the current ANE-WHG-West Asian compo. status of the modern pops from the Maykop Area David and Others??

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