Ancient vs modern day West Eurasian variation

The Principal Component Analyses (PCA) with ancient samples that I post on this blog are amongst the most accurate and best examples of their kind that you'll see anywhere. That's not just wishful thinking; it's a fact.

My PCA don't suffer from projection bias or shrinkage, which is a handicap of PCA in many ancient DNA papers, and they're run only on observed (rather than imputed) genotypes.

However, even my PCA are far from perfect, because they're based entirely on present-day variation. In other words, I still project the ancients onto eigenvectors computed with modern day reference samples. I guess that's the equivalent of putting the cart before the horse, when originally the horse may have been a donkey, or something like that.

Nevertheless, it's the only sensible way to plot heavily degraded ancient samples with a lot of missing data. But it does often leave me wondering whether the output says anything useful about the ancient world?

Thanks to the recent release of a lot of fairly high quality ancient genotype data from West Eurasia (most of it freely available at the Reich Lab website here), I can now test how well my trademark PCA of ancient West Eurasia reflects reality.

Below are two PCA featuring ancient composite samples. The first PCA is based on ~650,000 SNPs, with 100% call rates in each of the composites. For the second PCA I pruned the markers to correct for LD or linkage, and also made sure that about half of the SNPs were from transversion sites, which are less likely to be affected by postmortem damage. That left ~125,000, hopefully relatively high quality, SNPs.

Obviously, the plots are very similar, which makes me wonder whether there's any point thinning the markers when running decent quality ancient sequences? The datasheets are available for download here and here.

Now, below is a recent example of my PCA of ancient West Eurasia. It's basically almost identical to the plots above. This is very cool, and also very important, because it means that my strategy for running PCA with ancient samples produces solid and relevant results.

Interestingly, on closer inspection, the distance between the western and eastern Neolithic farmers on the first two plots appears bloated. Conversely, the distances between the northern Hunter-Gatherer (HG) samples are somewhat reduced. Any ideas why?

Update 31/08/2016: Open Genomes generated a 3D plot based on a new PCA datasheet that I posted in the comments. Click on the image below to check it out.

Update 01/09/2016: I added present-day samples to the PCA. Very happy with the outcome. The relevant datasheet is available here.

See also...

Ust'-Ishim man x2

PCA: Neolithic Central Anatolians

Note that the individuals from the earlier site of Boncuklu basically cluster with early Neolithic Europeans, while those from Tepecik-Ciftlik are shifted south and east, suggesting an influx of admixture into central Anatolia from perhaps eastern Anatolia and the Levant after the early Neolithic. This is in accordance with the findings of Kılınç et al. who published these genomes.

I also tested the same samples with the Basal-rich K7 (refer to the spreadsheet here). Their results appear to correlate very nicely with the PCA. However, I deleted Tep001 from the PCA plot because his PCA and Basal-rich K7 outcomes didn't match, suggesting that either one or the other, or both, were spurious. This isn't surprising, however, since Tep001 only has a coverage of 0.023x.

Citation...

Gülşah Merve Kılınç et al., The Demographic Development of the First Farmers in Anatolia, Current Biology, August 8, 2016, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2016.07.057

Update 15/08/2016: Below are a few admixture f3-stats from an analysis involving the new Anatolian samples. Please note, the more negative the Z score, the more likely that the target is admixed. Also, I had to use transversion SNPs to make this work, so the Z scores aren't as imposing as they might have been with more markers behind them. I'm posting all of the outcomes with Z scores lower than -1, but it might be best to ignore anything above -2.

Boncuklu_EN + Levant_N > Barcin_N f3 -0.005525 Z -2.62 SNPs 48620
Boncuklu_EN + Natufian > Barcin_N f3 -0.004252 Z -1.34 SNPs 28893

Boncuklu_EN + Natufian > Tepecik-Ciftlik_N f3 -0.013262 Z -1.566 SNPs 4384

Barcin_N + Villabruna > LBK_EN f3 -0.003652 Z -2.685 SNPs 49325
Barcin_N + LaBrana1 > LBK_EN f3 -0.003382 Z -2.462 SNPs 53537
Barcin_N + Motala_HG > LBK_EN f3 -0.002539 Z -2.388 SNPs 57533
Barcin_N + Loschbour > LBK_EN f3 -0.003089 Z -2.272 SNPs 48728
Tepecik-Ciftlik_N + Villabruna > LBK_EN f3 -0.004176 Z -1.452 SNPs 34905
Barcin_N + Hungary_HG > LBK_EN f3 -0.001939 Z -1.32 SNPs 41610
Boncuklu_EN + Levant_N > LBK_EN f3 -0.003035 Z -1.221 SNPs 40815

Barcin_N + Loschbour > Iberia_EN f3 -0.002457 Z -1.171 SNPs 38141
Tepecik-Ciftlik_N + Hungary_HG > Iberia_EN f3 -0.004022 Z -1.039 SNPs 21848

Barcin_N + Villabruna > Hungary_N f3 -0.006408 Z -4.28 SNPs 44545
Barcin_N + Hungary_HG > Hungary_N f3 -0.005216 Z -3.355 SNPs 39808
Barcin_N + Bichon > Hungary_N f3 -0.002554 Z -1.667 SNPs 48500
Barcin_N + Motala_HG > Hungary_N f3 -0.001559 Z -1.298 SNPs 51052
Tepecik-Ciftlik_N + Villabruna > Hungary_N f3 -0.003929 Z -1.239 SNPs 31535
Tepecik-Ciftlik_N + Hungary_HG > Hungary_N f3 -0.003897 Z -1.192 SNPs 28472
Barcin_N + LaBrana1 > Hungary_N f3 -0.00179 Z -1.083 SNPs 46955

On the enigmatic early Neolithic farmers from Iran

There still seems to be a lot of confusion around the traps, including in the comments at this blog, about the genetic structure of the early Neolithic Iranian farmers.

They're certainly a unique and mysterious West Eurasian population, but I'd say the picture is generally pretty straightforward considering that they were dug up on the border between the Near East and Central Asia.

As per my K7 test, they're closely related to other West Eurasians, and especially Near Easterners, via an ancient component that appears to be a mixture of Basal Eurasian and something very similar to the Villabruna cluster (see post here and the last page of the accompanying comments).

Apart from that, they harbor a lot of AG3-related ancestry, albeit probably only distantly related. My guess for now is that this is mostly admixture from an as yet unsampled Central Asian forager population, perhaps with elevated affinity to Ust_Ishim (update: probably not, see here).

The graphs below are based on the datasheet available here. Like I say, these ancient Zagros farmers are unique and eastern shifted, but, at the same time, don't show the type of Southeast Asian pull that characterizes present-day South and South Central Asians.