The question of when ancient steppe or Yamnaya-related ancestry first entered Iberia is crucial to the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) homeland debate.
If the steppe or Kurgan PIE hypothesis is correct, then we'd expect this to have happened during the Bronze Age rather than, say, the Medieval Period with the migrations into Iberia of Northern Europeans likely rich in Yamnaya-related admixture like the Visigoths. That's because Indo-European languages are attested in Iberia as early as the Iron Age.
And indeed, the earliest Iberian sample in my dataset to show Yamnaya-related ancestry is Iberia_BA ATP9 from
Gunther et al. 2015, dated to 3,700–3,568 C14 cal yBP or the Middle Bronze Age. This has not been reported before, but I'm certain that my finding will be confirmed sooner or later in scientific literature.
Let's start with a basic Principal Component Analysis (PCA) featuring ATP9 alongside a wide range of modern-day and ancient samples from West Eurasia and South Central Asia.
Clearly, ATP9 is shifted east, closer to Yamnaya, relative to the earlier Iberia Chalcolithic (Iberia_ChL) group, and almost clusters with Basques, who are known to harbor significant Yamnaya-related ancestry (see
here). I can use formal statistics as well as models based on formal statistics to investigate this in more detail.
Mbuti Yamnaya_Samara Iberia_ChL Iberia_BA D 0.0031 Z 0.859
Mbuti Yamnaya_Samara Iberia_ChL Basque_French D 0.0086 Z 5.035
Mbuti Yamnaya_Samara Basque_French Iberia_BA D -0.0044 Z -1.316
Surprisingly, based on those D-stats ATP9 doesn't appear to share more drift with Yamnaya Samara relative to Iberia_ChL (Z<3). But I suspect this might be due to inflated hunter-gatherer ancestry in Iberia_ChL, so let's try something a little different.
Western_HG Yamnaya_Samara Iberia_ChL Iberia_BA D 0.0188 Z 4.987
Western_HG Yamnaya_Samara Iberia_ChL Basque_French D 0.024 Z 13.163
Western_HG Yamnaya_Samara Basque_French Iberia_BA D -0.0063 Z -1.768
OK, that's basically in line with the PCA above, and I can cement this finding with the qpAdm algorithm. Note the nice chunk of Early Bronze Age steppe (Steppe_EBA) ancestry in ATP9.
Outgroups
AG3-MA1
Chukchi
Dusun
Igorot
Iran_Neolithic
Karitiana
Kosipe
Kostenki14
Lebbo
Levant_Neolithic
Mbuti
Satsurblia
Ust_Ishim
Villabruna
Iberia_BA ATP9
Caucasus_HG 0.038±0.063
Lengyel_LN 0.683±0.066
Steppe_EBA 0.177±0.087
Western_HG 0.102±0.044
chisq 5.216 tail_prob 0.876272
Spanish
Caucasus_HG 0.014±0.028
Lengyel_LN 0.607±0.028
Nganasan 0.011±0.016
Onge 0.013±0.022
Steppe_EBA 0.273±0.043
Western_HG 0.059±0.020
Yoruba 0.021±0.006
chisq 1.605 tail_prob 0.978452
Basque_French
Lengyel_LN 0.590±0.027
Nganasan 0.009±0.016
Onge 0.015±0.022
Steppe_EBA 0.285±0.031
Western_HG 0.096±0.019
Yoruba 0.006±0.006
chisq 3.485 tail_prob 0.900346
Of course, Basques are not Indo-Europeans, so the fact that ATP9 has some Yamnaya-related ancestry doesn't necessarily mean she was an Indo-European. However, it's not unreasonable to assume that the ancestors of Basques incurred gene flow from early Indo-Europeans moving into the Iberian Peninsula, and this probably explains their relatively high level of Yamnaya-related ancestry. So ATP9 may well have spoken an Indo-European language, and if not, then like Basques she probably has Indo-European ancestry
See also...
qpAdm tour of Europe: Mesolithic to Neolithic transition
