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Wednesday, February 27, 2019

The Steppe Maykop enigma


Who were the Steppe Maykop people exactly? Their ancestry must surely rank as one of the biggest surprises served up by ancient DNA to date.

I always thought that they'd turn out roughly like a mixture between populations associated with the Kura-Araxes and Yamnaya cultures (mostly because their territory was located sort of in between them). Nope, that wasn't even close. This is where they cluster compared to Kura-Araxes and Yamnaya samples in my Principal Component Analysis (PCA) of world-wide genetic variation: the Global25.
To explore the ancestry of the Steppe Maykop people in more detail I ran a couple of unsupervised Global25/nMonte tests, using basically every ancient population in the (scaled) Global25 datasheet that seemed chronologically sensible and even remotely relevant. I narrowed things down to these two mixture models.

Steppe_Maykop
Geoksiur_Eneolithic,11.2
Piedmont_Eneolithic,44.4
West_Siberia_N,44.4
distance%=1.5161

Steppe_Maykop
Piedmont_Eneolithic,46.6
Sarazm_Eneolithic,10.4
West_Siberia_N,43
distance%=1.6408

But, you might say, Global25/nMonte isn't a published analytical method and it doesn't run on formal statistics, the meat and potatoes of ancient DNA papers. OK then, let's try the same models with the qpAdm software, which is a published method and does run on formal statistics, using exactly the same samples.

Steppe_Maykop
Geoksiur_Eneolithic 0.100±0.032
Piedmont_Eneolithic 0.433±0.053
West_Siberia_N 0.467±0.028
chisq 19.155
tail prob 0.159096
Full output

Steppe_Maykop
Piedmont_Eneolithic 0.429±0.051
Sarazm_Eneolithic 0.119±0.033
West_Siberia_N 0.452±0.026
chisq 18.090
tail prob 0.202699
Full output

They're basically identical. Importantly, my models must reflect reality at some level, because otherwise I wouldn't be able to produce a pair of essentially identical results using such vastly different statistical methods. So the pertinent question is what do these results actually mean?

It seems unlikely to me that we're dealing here with a highly complex three-way mixture process, involving populations from such far flung locations as western Siberia and southern Central Asia. Rather, I suspect that Steppe Maykop was the result of a two-way mixture between Piedmont_Eneolithic (the population that lived before it on the steppe north of the Caucasus) and someone just a little bit more easterly. I'm guessing that the latter was the (as yet unsampled) population associated with the Kelteminar archeological culture.


By the way, please note that Piedmont_Eneolithic is made up of samples from two different locations on the Piedmont steppe, and I occasionally treat them as separate populations labeled Progress_Eneolithic and Vonyuchka_Eneolithic (for instance, see here).

Update 28/02/2019: Below is a PCA focusing on West Eurasian genetic variation. Overall, the position of Steppe Maykop relative to Geoksiur_Eneolithic, Piedmont_Eneolithic and West_Siberia_N appears to reflect my nMonte and qpAdm models. However, as per our discussion in the comments, one of the Steppe Maykop individuals (the most southerly one in the PCA) probably also has recent ancestry from the Caucasus.

See also...

An exceptional burial indeed, but not that of an Indo-European

Maykop: a multi-ethnic layer cake?

Late PIE ground zero now obvious; location of PIE homeland still uncertain, but...

108 comments:

Mem said...

Are these piedmont people closer to khvalynks and other steppe folks.

And,what is the date of piedmont remains.

Leron said...

Makes perfect sense to be Kelteminar related. We can also supposed a proto-Dene-Yenisenian connection with a high proportion of Q1a males.

Desdichado said...

What's the relationship of the Piedmont_Eneolithic to Yamnaya (or proto-Yamnaya) and Maykop respectively? If any?

Mem said...

There is no Dene-Yenisean language.The distribution of Na-Dene populations is consistent with the spread of y DNA C3 haplogroup.

Yeniseic have Q1a mostly,not C3

Drago said...

Maria Ivanova picked it
“ion to the upper reaches of the Eu- phrates and Tigris or to the floodplains of Mesopotamia, but rather seem to have ties to the Iranian plateau and to South Central Asia. Recent excavations in the Southwest Caspian Sea region are enabling a new perspective about the interactions between the “Orient” and Continental Eu- rope. On the one hand, it is becoming gradually apparent that a gigantic area of interaction evolved already in the early 4th millennium BC which extended far beyond Me- sopotamia; on the other hand, these findings relativise the traditional importance given to Mesopotamia, because in- novations originating in Iran and Central Asia obviously spread throughout the Syro-Anatolian region indepen- dently thereof.


Only thing is , if you leave Siberia—N in the source list; it chooses it over Sarazm.
Davidski ; can you check with qpAdm

Davidski said...

@Dragos

Only thing is, if you leave Siberia—N in the source list; it chooses it over Sarazm.

Not sure what you mean? I'm seeing both Sarazm and West_Siberia_N in the same model.

Steppe_Maykop
Piedmont_Eneolithic,46.6
Sarazm_Eneolithic,10.4
West_Siberia_N,43
distance%=1.6408

Davidski said...

@Mem & Desdichado

You guys need to do some background reading.

Piedmont_Eneolithic is dated to around 4,200 BCE and it's actually the same thing as Eneolithic steppe, Progress_Eneolithic and Vonyuchka_Eneolithic from my previous posts.

They're very closely related to Yamnaya and Khvalynsk_Eneolithic, but don't show any relationship to Maykop, except, as per above, to Steppe_Maykop as a significant source of ancestry.

More details here...

On Maykop ancestry in Yamnaya

Big deal of 2018: Yamnaya not related to Maykop

Matt said...

G25 fits on both Piedmont and Steppe Maykop tends to include Sarazm Eneolithic when it's allowed. So hard to take seriously as evidence that Piedmont Eneo does not include Sarazm and Piedmont does. Probably neither are different in degree of non-West Siberian Central Asian influence.

Davidski said...

@Matt

I'm not sure what you mean, but my opinion is that neither Piedmont_Eneolithic nor Steppe_Maykop really have Sarazm_Eneolithic ancestry. To me this just looks like a proxy for excess ANE.

Although keep in mind that unlike Piedmont_Eneolithic, Steppe_Maykop can be modeled quite well with qpAdm with a significant stream of ancestry from Sarazm_Eneolithic.

And as you can see in my qpAdm model, this even happens with Piedmont_Eneolithic as a reference pop in the model.

Steppe_Maykop
Piedmont_Eneolithic 0.429±0.051
Sarazm_Eneolithic 0.119±0.033
West_Siberia_N 0.452±0.026
chisq 18.090
tail prob 0.202699

Samuel Andrews said...

There are three STeppe Maykop outliers with Caucasus/West Asian ancestry: SA6013, IV3002, AY2001. They might be the cause of the Sarazam_Eneolithic signal.

WHen they are taken out, this is what Steppe Maykop gets in G25.

1.4927"

Steppe_Maykop

Vonyuchka_Eneolithic:VJ1001,39.1
Botai,21.6
AfontovaGora3,15.9
West_Siberia_N,12.7
Progress_Eneolithic:PG2004,8.4
Yamnaya_Samara,2.3

the dude said...

I am pretty sure there is a paper in German on Maykop that is only a few years old and pointed to Turkmenistan links in the metallurgy of Maykop,

the dude said...

https://www.academia.edu/2543571/Kaukasus_und_Orient_Die_Entstehung_des_Maikop-_Ph%C3%A4nomens_im_4._Jt._v._Chr

Davidski said...

@Samuel Andrews

Steppe Maykop AY2001 is indeed something of an outlier, but I doubt that he has recent Caucasus ancestry, because he lacks a clear signal of Anatolian farmer admix.

He seems to have something from Iran or Turan instead. But so do the others, except they have less of it and more West Siberian ancestry.

But that's what I find particularly interesting, and the Sarazm_Eneolithic signal emphasizes it.

@the dude

Yep, if Maykop had such economic and cultural links with what is now Turkmenistan and surrounds, then that could also explain the genetic structure of Steppe Maykop.

It looks to me like migrants from just east of the Caspian Sea very deliberately moved onto the steppe next door to Maykop.

Drago said...

@ Dave
Yep i see, I get the same results
Btw that “German paper” is the abstract I quoted above, by M Ivanova. Pretty interesting stuff
So I guess we now have proxies for Kelteminar -, & Jeitun- type people

Aniasi said...

Would this be a similar population to the one that Andronovo East mixed with t.i form the Proto-Indo-Aryans?

Davidski said...

@Aniasi

Would this be a similar population to the one that Andronovo East mixed with t.i form the Proto-Indo-Aryans?

Sort of, if you're referring to the non-Piedmont steppe ancestry in Steppe Maykop, because people exactly like Steppe Maykop didn't exist in Central Asia.

But the samples from the southernmost Andronovo sites in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan don't have much of this type of ancestry. They're still mostly like Sintashta, except with a bit of BMAC or similar admixture.

So it looks like most of the mixing relevant to the formation of the Indo-Aryans happened in South Asia.

Open Genomes said...

This Steppe Maykop, AY2003, is 48.6% West Siberia Neolithic, and only 38.8% Steppe Eneolithic. The additional Iranian-like ancestry is 8.8%:

Chalcolithic and earlier ancestry composition of sample: AY2003 Population: Steppe_Maykop Bronze Age Steppe

This other Steppe Maykop, SA6001, is and West Siberia Neolithic + Botai 51.4%, and
Steppe Eneolithic, 38.2%, and additional Iranian-like ancestry at 10.4%:

Chalcolithic and earlier ancestry composition of sample: SA6001 Population: Steppe_Maykop Bronze Age Steppe

These are almost identical. The main ancestral influence here seems to be West Siberian Neolithic / Botai, with a secondary influence from the Steppe Eneolithic.

The extra small amount if Iranian-like ancestry could indicate some admixture from east of the Caspian (the Kelteminar culture) which mixed at about 16%-20%, (double what we see here) with a pre-BMAC Iranian-like pre-BMAC Neolithic group.

Davidski said...

@All

Correction: Steppe Maykop AY2001 is a female not a male. Oops.

Also, I need to qualify my earlier comment to Matt in regards to the Sarazm_Eneolithic signal. This appears to be a signal of excess ANE as well as Anatolian-poor farmer ancestry.

So my guess is that Kelteminar people will be mostly like West_Siberia_N, but with varying levels of this type of Anatolian-poor farmer ancestry.

Open Genomes said...

SA6004 is Y haplogroup Q-L939:

SA6004 Y-DNA haplogroup Q SNPs

Chalcolithic and earlier ancestry composition of sample: SA6004 Population: Steppe_Maykop Bronze Age Steppe

SA6004 is 43.6% West Siberia Neolithic, 36.6% Steppe Eneolithic, 10.6% Iran-related ancestry, and unlike from the others, 9.2% additional Khvalynsk Neolithic.

Y-DNA Q-L939 is found in Georgia today. The irony is that the Bagratid Dynasty, the rulers of Armenia and then Georgia for 800 years, are in haplogroup Q-L939.

Samuel Andrews said...

Theory of David's that Steppe_Eneolithic doesn't have direct CHG ancestry but instead direct basal ancestry related to the basal stuff in CHG is interesting.

I've always, wondered if all the Stone age Middle Eastern pops share mostly the same basal+WHGlike ancestry why are they all so unrelated to each other. Maybe, it is because each have different kinds of basal ancestry. Maybe, the basal stuff in CHG existed in near pure form for a long time.

Maybe several distinct basal Eurasian & "WHG"-related pops remained in Middle East for thousands of years. I put WHG in quotes because their link with WHG has been very over exaggerated.

Davidski said...

@Samuel Andrews

Theory of David's that Steppe_Eneolithic doesn't have direct CHG ancestry but instead direct basal ancestry related to the basal stuff in CHG is interesting.

It's not my theory, it was in the Wang et al. paper. I just waned to see if it made sense with a very different qpGraph topology. It seems to make sense.

Aram said...


There is no evidence that Bagratid dinasty had a haplogroup Q. Just one person with a surname Bagrationi means little. There should be data from many people of noble ancestry, to see which one is the most frequent. Many common people took surnames of ancient nobility in 19-20th centuries.
Tsitsishvili could be a descendant of Bagratids and he is tested I2c2. And given the presence of very young clusters in I2c2 present both in Armenia and Georgia, it makes I2c2a much better candidate for Bagradites.

Aram said...

Davifski

Do Lola culture descend from Steppe Maykop?

Davidski said...

@Aram

Lola does look like it might be mostly derived from Steppe Maykop.

Aniasi said...

@Davidski

Yes, I was referring to the non-Piedmont ancestry. I thought, though, that the Reich paper said that there was West Siberian Neolithic Ancestry, amongst others, in Andronovo East along the IAMC?

What I am very interested in is how these Central Asians made it across the steppe without leaving much a signal behind elsewhere. Maykop is to the Northwest of the Caucases.

Davidski said...

@Aniasi

Yes, I was referring to the non-Piedmont ancestry. I thought, though, that the Reich paper said that there was West Siberian Neolithic Ancestry, amongst others, in Andronovo East along the IAMC?

They show varying amounts. Some have very little of it, or maybe none at all.

What I am very interested in is how these Central Asians made it across the steppe without leaving much a signal behind elsewhere. Maykop is to the Northwest of the Caucases.

They may have moved along the Caspian coast and kept to the desert steppe area which was sparsely populated? I don't know.

Aniasi said...

"They may have moved along the Caspian coast and kept to the desert steppe area which was sparsely populated?"

Makes sense if they were Kelteminar, but I hope we get something from the northeast Caucasus sites that explains their movement.

Davidski said...

@Aniasi

I was thinking that the Kelteminar people, or whoever they were, may have moved into the Pontic-Caspian steppe along the northern shoreline of the Caspian Sea.

By the way, I updated the post with a map. Hopefully it's useful.

Grey said...

i may be remembering wrong but iirc someone on here mentioned PIE distinguishing between "slow horse" and "fast horse" - could "slow horse" mean draft horse i.e. for pulling sleds/wagons?

if so then if Maykop had a need for draft horses maybe they invited some Botai to move closer - in the process pushing out the original Piedmont HGs?

zardos said...

They bred horses and other animals, kept the PIE away from the Maykop settlements and were supported by their masters or allies from the Maykop people.
Refugees, mercenaries or colonists came very often from places far away and moved through different countries and people to finally reach their destination. And I'm talking about much more sedentarypeople of later times.
If they were invited and supported by the Maykop people, it would have been even easier for these Eastern tribals.
Assuming a strong and bitter rivalry between the Maykop allies and the Northern PIE tribals for generations, there is no wonder almost nothing was left after their defence collapsed.

For that theory to work out it would help if the steppe ancestry was mostly female mediated and ydna mostly Siberian in steppe Maykop.

zardos said...

Or better: Steppe Maykop ydna needs to be foreign to the local piedmont steppe people and intrusive.

Davidski said...

Steppe Maykop samples don't share any Y-haplogroups with the Piedmont Steppe samples. Their Y-haplogroups include Q, R1a and T.

So this was a diverse population in terms of male ancestry, and a fairly new population that came together from the mixing of rather highly diverged groups, and probably a brand new population to that part of the steppe.

zardos said...

To suspect mercenaries seems to be reasonable then. Such a militarized border with bitter fights and little to no mercy for defeated males might have been a highly important impulse for the PIE tribals. Such scenarios almost always lead to the tribals becoming more socially stratified, better and bigger organised, more warlike snd sophisticated if they cant be defeated initially.
Probably that conflict shaped PIE ideology and customs? Such events must have deeply impressed and changed a society.

I just want to stress it wouldnt have been the last time in history that hostilities with neighbours changed a people and their way of life.

Matt said...

For main trunk of Steppe_Maykop ancestry, Kelteminar seems too far south for me. "Semi-desert and desert areas of the Karakum and Kyzyl Kum deserts and the deltas of the Amu Darya and Zeravshan rivers". That's all pretty far south and east.

Considering Lola as re-emerging with aridification much later does suggest to me that groups like Steppe_Maykop were fairly long standing presence in deserts around the North Caspian Lola to me looks intermediate Steppe_Maykop and immediately preceding Caucasus Steppe EMBA ancestry groups.

Archaeology does seem to see North Caspian / Pre-Caspian (Pri-kaspiiskaya Culture) as synchronised with the Pontic-Caspian steppe sphere though so I don't know. Some Central Asian info about the period from "The Origin of the Indo-Iranians": https://imgur.com/a/QN5H8a2

AY2001 looks pretty much between the main Steppe_Maykop cluster and the Caucasus to me. Fits on clines when I reprocess the G25 samples and G25 distance differences are most pronounced with Caucasus post-Eneo populations always closer to the outliers including AY2001: https://imgur.com/a/Z8SOnoV. If you were to model her with Piedmont_Eneo, I don't think you'd get any sensible other population. YMMV.

Slumbery said...

I mentioned this under an earlier post, but Sintashta_MLBA_o1 seems to be this stock. I do not say it is exactly a Steppe Maykop descendant group, but very something similar.

The reason why I think so, is there in a few nMonte runs:

G25 nMontes Sintashta_MLBA_o1:Average
"fit": 2.5833,
"West_Siberia_N": 50.83,
"Progress_Eneolithic": 36.67,
"Geoksiur_Eneolithic": 12.5,
"Khvalynsk_Eneolithic": 0,
"Maykop_Novosvobodnaya": 0,
"Ukraine_Eneolithic": 0

G25 nMontes Steppe_Maykop:Average
"fit": 1.5412,
"West_Siberia_N": 40,
"Progress_Eneolithic": 37.5,
"Geoksiur_Eneolithic": 14.17,
"Khvalynsk_Eneolithic": 7.5,
"Maykop_Novosvobodnaya": 0.83,
"Ukraine_Eneolithic": 0,

vs.

G25 nMontes Yamnaya_Kalmykia:Average
"fit": 2.563,
"Progress_Eneolithic": 60.83,
"Ukraine_Eneolithic": 30,
"Khvalynsk_Eneolithic": 9.17,
"Geoksiur_Eneolithic": 0,
"Maykop_Novosvobodnaya": 0,
"West_Siberia_N": 0,

Based on this Sintashta_o1 simply cannot work as a mixture of Yamnaya&al. + local Siberians. It has the same affinity to Iran-mixed southern groups as Steppe Maykop, while lacks the western affinities of Yamnaya and its direct descendants.

Davidski said...

@Matt

AY2001 looks pretty much between the main Steppe_Maykop cluster and the Caucasus to me. Fits on clines when I reprocess the G25 samples and G25 distance differences are most pronounced with Caucasus post-Eneo populations always closer to the outliers including AY2001: https://imgur.com/a/Z8SOnoV. If you were to model her with Piedmont_Eneo, I don't think you'd get any sensible other population. YMMV.

True, but you drew a line from Steppe Maykop to the Caucasus. What if you draw a line from West_Siberia_N to Piedmont_Eneolithic?

Wouldn't that then show a subtle shift east/southeast by Steppe_Maykop including AY2001? And if so, wouldn't that be in line with the nMonte and qpAdm models of Steppe_Maykop being mostly a two-way mix between West_Siberia_N and Piedmont_Eneolithic, with a few per cent of ancestry from something like Geoksiur_Eneolithic?

@Slumbery

What are you getting for AY2001 with those models? Still Geoksiur_Eneolithic, or is significant Maykop_Novosvobodnaya ancestry turning up instead?

Slumbery said...

@Davidski

It is mixed. It has some Maykop_Novosvobodnaya, but it also has even more Geoksiur than the others.

G25 nMontes Steppe_Maykop:AY2001
"fit": 2.7665,
"Progress_Eneolithic": 34.17,
"Geoksiur_Eneolithic": 25,
"West_Siberia_N": 20,
"Khvalynsk_Eneolithic": 12.5,
"Maykop_Novosvobodnaya": 5.83,
"Ukraine_Eneolithic": 2.5


(The higher apparent Khvalinsk ancestry is also a feature of the Steppe Maykop outliers and I think it is possible that is some kind of balancing effect in the algorithm, because of the high southern affinities with not exactly the right reference populations. Because it would not make sense that the individuals with the most southern affinity also have the most northern affinity.)

Davidski said...

@Slumbery

Because it would not make sense that the individuals with the most southern affinity also have the most northern affinity.

Maybe it would though, if these individuals came from the most mixed settlements?

Slumbery said...

@Davidski

Well, it is not impossible or super unlikely, just not the first thing I'd assume. The outliers also have more affinity to Ukraine Eneolithic and that enforces your point.

Anyway, I tried different references "against" Geoksiur_Eneolithic instead (or alongside) Maykop_Novosvobodnaya (Iran ChL, multiple Kura-Araxes) and nothing diminished Geoksiur's share significantly.

Drago said...

A lot of people like to focus on Yamnaya, but I think the real “ homegrown “ culture is CWC.
It’s becoming increasingly clear that Afanasievo is an extinct group, and it’s hard to link Catacomb with anything IE.

@ Zardos
Lol your imagination certainly is vivid

Andrzejewski said...

@Dragos "hard to link Catacomb with anything IE."

I think you may be right. If Catacomb used to be associated with Cimmerians, who turned out to be East Eurasians rather than European.

Davidski said...

@Matt

Check this out.

Steppe Maykop - West Eurasia PCA

Davidski said...

@Andrzejewski

I think you may be right. If Catacomb used to be associated with Cimmerians, who turned out to be East Eurasians rather than European.

Ah, OK.

But Cimmerians were Indo-Europeans largely of European origin with significant but still minor East Asian ancestry.

Matt said...

@Davidski, ah yeah, actually maybe few percent or something like this seems possible, eyeballing it. Just excluding a Caucasus Eneo contribution and being primarily "most ANE Steppe_Maykop"+Central Asian Eneolithic that looks out for AY2001 to me, if you see what I mean.

Btw, for the three most ANE Steppe_Maykop (AY2003, SA6001, SA6004), do any two way fits between CHG and West_Siberia_N work or crap out? On the same kind of cline plot, it looks like they're intermediate West_Siberia_N and CHG, if we disregarded input from Piedmont_Eneo, though I'm not sure this makes any sense. (E.g - https://imgur.com/a/iaCsEOD , red line).

Davidski said...

@Matt

Btw, for the three most ANE Steppe_Maykop (AY2003, SA6001, SA6004), do any two way fits between CHG and West_Siberia_N work or crap out?

The fits look very poor in qpAdm, so this is unlikely to be close to reality.

Looking again at all of the data, it seems to me that a population that was closely related to West_Siberia_N, except with varying levels of Central Asian farmer admixture, migrated from the desert steppes east of the Caspian Sea to the steppes just north of the Caucasus, probably to take advantage in some way of the economic success of Maykop. Here they mixed in varying degrees with the Maykop population, and then largely vacated the area when Maykop collapsed.

Davidski said...

Oops, forgot to mention that these eastern migrants first mixed with the descendants of Piedmont_Eneolithic.

Gabriel said...

What became of Steppe Maykop? Did they leave descendants, move elsewhere or die out?

Cy Tolliver said...

@Samuel Andrews

"I've always, wondered if all the Stone age Middle Eastern pops share mostly the same basal+WHGlike ancestry why are they all so unrelated to each other. Maybe, it is because each have different kinds of basal ancestry."

I've never been convinced that Basal Eurasian is a truly discrete population for precisely this reason. From what I recall Natufians/Levantines and Iran_Neo didn't share any closely related uniparental lineages in common either, although granted the sample sizes we have so far are small.

Also, the fact that Hotu and Iran_Neo also had nearly as much Basal as Natufians leads me to believe Basal ancestry in Southwest Asia can't be directly tied to E1b1b tribes migrating from Northeast Africa after the LGM, which I think the Dzudzuana pre-print from last year seems to confirm as well.

Matt said...

Poor like p value <0.05 or infeasible?

Re groups migrating long range specifically to be part of the Maykop phenomenon, I don't know. It sounds a bit farfetched to have that sort of long range migration "gold rush" attraction thing, to me, especially people at the level that the Kelteminar culture were at (basically fisher gatherers as I understand it). I'd expect they were just there anyway in they desert steppe region on the north or western coast of caspian and ended up encountering maykop as maykop expanded into that zone. YMMV.

Davidski said...

@Matt

Poor like p value <0.05 or infeasible?

Tail probs of around 0.02 or less.

I'd expect they were just there anyway in they desert steppe region on the north or western coast of caspian and ended up encountering maykop as maykop expanded into that zone.

I think there are three problems with this...

1) Yamanaya Kalmykia samples are from near the western coast of the Caspian Sea, and they don't show any influence from any Siberian-like population, and I'd expect they would if such people were native to the region

2) Maykop proper never expanded into the desert steppe around the Caspian Sea; its expansion into the steppe was mostly limited to the river valleys near the eastern coast of the Black Sea

3) I'm not even aware of any Steppe Maykop sites in the desert steppe near the Caspian Sea.

Drago said...

@ Matt
I bet the Kairshak sites would be genetically just like earlier Khvalynsk (~ EHG).

@ Themmeee
Steppe Majkop didn’t linger around much either
So the major continuous group across the steppe seems to have been Andronovo

Samuel Andrews said...

@Cy Tolliver,
"From what I recall Natufians/Levantines and Iran_Neo didn't share any closely related uniparental lineages in common either, although granted the sample sizes we have so far are small."

mtDNA haplogroups H, HV, J, T, N1a1 looks like they existed in all the stone age Middle Eastern pops. They shared something.

Cy Tolliver said...

@Sam

Sure, but simply saying H, HV, J, T, or even N1a1 doesn't mean much because all those mtdna are extremely old. I'd have to take a peak at both groups mtdna profiles again to see if they shared anything more recent, I know in terms of y-DNA they didn't.

Drago said...

@ Davidski
Adding the “central steppe EMBA” individuals from Damgaard (2; up to 9x coverage) would be helpful here
(Btw any luck with Kum6?)

Davidski said...

@Dragos

You mean these?

Kazakh_Steppe_EBA:EBA1
Kazakh_Steppe_EBA:EBA2

They're in the datasheets. Kum6 will be later today.

Gabriel said...

Did any steppe Maykop population survive, did they move somewhere else or were they all killed by Yamnaya?

@Samuel Andrews

Sure, but these subclades of these haplogroups are quite different, which is why it must be deep ancestry as opposed to identical Basal Eurasian across the board.

Samuel Andrews said...

"Sure, but these subclades of these haplogroups are quite different, which is why it must be deep ancestry as opposed to identical Basal Eurasian across the board."

Not identical across the board. But there is stuff relatively recent that they share. IranNeo & Anatolia share multiple haplogroups that are younger than 20,000 years. For example J1 & T2 & HV. IranNeo & Anatolian genetic clusters formed at least 11,000 years old. So, we're talking somewhat recent maternal ancestry.

Ric Hern said...

@ Samuel

What is basal Eurasian supposed to be linked to ? Y-DNA Haplogroup CT and MtDNA Haplogroup N ?

Davidski said...

@Them meee

Did any steppe Maykop population survive, did they move somewhere else or were they all killed by Yamnaya?

This is the other great mystery in regards to these people.

There were some major climate changes for the worse on the steppe at the time, and human conflicts correlate well with climatic deterioration, so I can imagine that a large proportion may have been butchered by expanding Yamnaya, Catacomb etc. bands.

But most of them probably got the hell out of there, and either sought refuge in the Caucasus or went east...maybe back east, if they came from there in the first place?

Drago said...

@ Davidski

''You mean these?

Kazakh_Steppe_EBA:EBA1
Kazakh_Steppe_EBA:EBA2''

Ah yeah so they are.
They don't lie on the Botai - Steppe Majkop cline but are instead ENA shifted

Samuel Andrews said...

@Original post.
"Who were the Steppe Maykop people exactly? Their ancestry must surely rank as one of the biggest surprises served up by ancient DNA to date."

Another big surprise is near pure ANE survived in central Asia until at least 2000bc. Steppe Maykop was also technically well over 50% ANE. The story of ANE has to be the biggest surprise in ancient DNA so far.
-Siberia is considered a sink in human history not a source.
-ANE formed in Siberia 20ky-30ky. It was a very successful lineage.
-ANE was apart of the founding pop of Native Americans.
-Survived in pure form in central Asia till recently.
-Proto Indo European were around 50% ANE.
-ANE contributed a lot to most Eurasians.

Davidski said...

@Samuel Andrews

Another big surprise is near pure ANE survived in central Asia until at least 2000bc.

Which samples are these?

Samuel Andrews said...

.....West SiberiaN, Botai, Dali_EBA, Kazah_EBA.

Gaska said...

The main consequence of the results of Wang in the Caucasus, is that the theory of the kurgans as it had been reformulated by some geneticists and archaeologists and large number of fans has been definitively debunked.

That is, there is no R1b-L51 in the steppes and therefore neither he nor his descendants are responsible for extending the Indo-European language in mainland Europe.

Since this haplogroup does not exist in Repin, Yamnaya, Lola, Maykop and Catacomb cultures, there would only be Khvaliynsk or Sredni-Stog as possibilities to find L51, and this is materially impossible because this haplogroup is too young and those cultures are too old (nor is it has found so far). To think that L51 will still be found in the steppes does not make much sense. If someone has time to look at YFull Tree- R1b-L51- Formed (4.100 BC) TMRCA (3.700 BC)- you will see that L51 * and the oldest subclades are in Italy, ergo are clearly Western.

Another consequence is that he could not accompany R1a in his migration to the west and therefore despite what Davidski says the chances of finding R1b-L51/L11/P312 in the CWC (in any of its many regional variants) is very very very remote.

According to Gimbutas,

First Wave-Cultures of Bug-Dniester (6.300-5.500 BC), Samara (V Millenium) on the banks of the Volga River, Culture of Khvalynsk (5500-4,500 BC), Dnieper-Donets (5,000-4,000C). Coexistence of the culture of the Kurgans and the culture of Cucuteni-Trypillian- The migrations from the steppes reached the Balkans, and through the Danube to the cultures of Vinca (Serbia) and Lengyel (Hungary).

Second Wave/Invasion (3,500-3,000 BC) - Originated in the cultures of Sredni Stog and Maykop, extended the Indo-European language through northern and western Europe and created hybrid cultures such as the culture of the Globular Amphoras (GAC), the CWC and the culture of Baden. This migration is only a hypothesis that have never found archaeological or linguistic support, and not even genetic because Maykop is anything but R1b

Third Wave-(3,000-2,800 BC)- Expansion of Yamnaya culture through Romania, Bulgaria, eastern Hungary and Georgia. It matches what archaeologists have discovered in the Lower Danube regions, the Thracian plains of Bulgaria and southeastern Romania with the evidence of hundreds of burial mounds (2,900-2,475 BC).Yamnaya is also not R1b-L51 and not R1a but I2a, Q, R1b-Z2013, R1b-V1636. Z2013 has been found in Hungary and Poland then that is the maximum point of expansion of this culture.

On the other hand, the oldest dates of the CWC are 2,900 BC (up to approximately 2,300 BC),and it is mostly R1a (with some cases of I2a in Poland and the Czech Republic), then where did those R1a come from if they could not come from Yamnaya? They can only come from the culture of Sredni Stog-Alexandria (4,006 BC) R1a-M417, then or there were migrations related to that culture, or R1a stay in the steppes until 3,000 BC and then created the CWC, because at the moment it has not been found in Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Balkan or German Neolithic cultures.

Regarding R1b-L51, it could not participate in any migration because it has not been found in the steppes, then it has to have its origin in mainland Europe maybe in the Baltic, the Neolithic cultures of Germany, the Alps or even in France.

Everyone can continue to dream of the horsemen of the steppes invading Europe and massacring the Western Europeans, but this is still a science fiction movie.

Critias said...

"So my guess is that Kelteminar people will be mostly like West_Siberia_N, but with varying levels of this type of Anatolian-poor farmer ancestry."

How can we explain the presence of an Anatolian farmer signal so far east as Kelteminar ?

Gabriel said...

But R1b-M269 has been found in the steppes, and is not found anywhere else.

If found elsewhere, it is always found in steppe admixed populations.

That alone turns your argument to dust.

Gaska said...

What is the case of R1b-M269 in the steppes to which you refer? -

In any case, that does not mean anything, because R1b-L51, has nothing to do with the steppes. The argument that we have been hearing for years saying that as R1bL23-Z2103 is in Yamnaya means that also L51 as brother of the previous one has to be found there has been shown totally incongruous. The longer it takes people to accept the evidence, the longer it will take to find coherent explanations

Davidski said...

@Diego

What is the case of R1b-M269 in the steppes to which you refer?

Holy shit, get another hobby.

Who's your (proto) daddy Western Europeans?

Aram said...

Dragos

Z2103 has many sub-branches. One that was popular in Eastern Yamnaya burials was the branch KMS67. This branch was also found in Kubano-Tersk culture.

Now this branch is not very popular in modern Europe because another branch (Z2110) became popular.
But nevertheless it has some presence in Europe. And guess where?
Surprise surprise. It is in Greece and South Italy / Calabria.
https://yfull.com/tree/R-KMS67/

Notice the Greek guy is from western islands and additionally the presence in South Italy makes it very unlikely to be the result of Slavic influx. Btw Calabrians have one of the highest level of Z2103 in Italy. (Lucotte et al.) The most parsimonious explanation is that they settled there from Greece and not via Hungary etc.

Davidski said...

@Critias

How can we explain the presence of an Anatolian farmer signal so far east as Kelteminar?

Even Sarazm Eneolithic has a bit of Anatolian farmer ancestry, so it had to have moved east via the South Caspian region at some point much earlier than 3,000 BCE.

Samuel Andrews said...

I'm pretty sure the Anatolian ancestry that moved all the way to Uzebckstan was from the Caucasus because it appears alongside even more CHG ancestry.

Aram said...

Diego

L51 is a mutation that formed few centuries after L23. Where it formed means nothing because it is very close to L23. It could have formed in Germany, or in Poland or in Steppe. But this change nothing because L51 do NOT speak a language. It is a population in which it is found do speak a language or has a concrete origin.
The hard undeniable fact is that L51 is predominantly found among that northern BB and not in Chalcholithic Iberia, Balkans or any other Eneolithic culture in main Europe.
L51 is not everything.

Aram said...

Even if You find a L51 lost in Neolithic context then again nothing will change. As nothing changed when Z2103 was found in Eneolithic Ukraine with very little CHG.
Nothing changes because it is the majority that dictates the rule and not exotic outliers.
This is how dtatistical science works.

Gaska said...


@Davidski

The conclusions that I have mentioned are more than obvious, even an amateur geneticist can understand that L51 could not participate in any migration simply because he was not at the point of origin of that migration. I do not think it's that hard to understand.

We have been hearing for years that the Yamnaya culture invaded Europe, that men were massacred, that they imposed the Indo-European language of the conquerors, even that BB culture originated in the steppes. Now the genetics is putting things in place, M269 will appear sooner or later throughout Europe because L754 and P297 have already done it a long time ago. Then many people will have to accept the harsh reality. Many have already done it, better for them.

This really is very simple, Harvard geneticists and their Kurganist friends, just have to prove what they are saying

Have they proven that R1b L51 is in any of the steppe cultures? NO
Have they proven that P312 is in any of the steppe cultures? NO
Have they proven the language that the BBC spoke? NO
Have they proven that there were violent conquests? NO
Have they proven that there is R1b in the CWC? NO
Have they proven that the BBC originated in the steppes, Hungary or the Czech Republic? NO
Have they proven how the steppe ancestry spread throughout Europe? NO
Do you know for sure what are the uniparental markers related to this expansion? NO

Therefore to believe what they are saying is not a reasonable scientific position, but an act of faith. It is more reasonable to be skeptical until proven otherwise.

Do you know what has been proven so far?

BB culture originated in Iberia 2800-2.750 BC
Migrations related to this culture throughout Western Europe
Technological superiority of Western Europe over the steppes since the VI Millennium BC
R1b throughout Europe from the Balkans to Spain at least from the Mesolithic.






Grey said...

Matt
"It sounds a bit farfetched to have that sort of long range migration "gold rush" attraction thing, to me, especially people at the level that the Kelteminar culture were at (basically fisher gatherers as I understand it)."

you'd think fisher-foragers would be especially tied to specific locations (lakes, rivers, wetlands etc) so if they expanded at all you'd think they would be restricted to hopping from one suitable location to another ignoring the steppe in-between but their wiki page also says "Over time, they adopted stockbreeding." so if that's correct (?) maybe it's a question of when that started?

(if becoming sedentary was a necessary pre-adaptation for the transition to farming then i'd imagine ex wetlands foragers as the prime candidates for early farmers but in this particular case it would depend on when they first started stock breeding)

the other thought i had was Siberia = sleds?

(and by extension did the Piedmont get colder/snowier during this period?)

Matt said...

@Davidski:

"1) Yamanaya Kalmykia samples are from near the western coast of the Caspian Sea, and they don't show any influence from any Siberian-like population, and I'd expect they would if such people were native to the region

2) Maykop proper never expanded into the desert steppe around the Caspian Sea; its expansion into the steppe was mostly limited to the river valleys near the eastern coast of the Black Sea

3) I'm not even aware of any Steppe Maykop sites in the desert steppe near the Caspian Sea."


1) Point, but admixture doesn't always happen; didn't for Afanasievo for'ex (other examples like Yamnaya_Ukraine and many Yamnaya_Caucasus barely different from other Yamnaya). This is a region of somtimes fairly sharp genetic transitions over short range (by standards of most of Europe, if not Near East), and of populations that have unexpected barriers to flow that coincide with ecological barriers.

2) Yeah, hence I'd expect these Steppe Maykop samples who have both this genetic profile and burial context only to show up on the margins of the desert steppe.

3) Well, the thing is that wouldn't we expect the diagnostically Steppe Maykop sites are only going to show up near the Maykop phenomenon? So really we're talking about testing sites that exist in the desert steppe and North Caspian and whether they will be genomically like the Steppe Maykop samples that don't look admixed with Caucasus_Eneo.

That'll be done if it can be. If they aren't much like those samples, it'll show one thing and make a longer range migration more favourable (long range connection to East Caspian followed by migration), while if they are like SM, that will support some more short range migration (drawing in from closer desert steppe). I may be right or you may be right, but either way it's testable in theory.

@Dragos, thanks for pointing me in the direction of the Kairshak sites. My archaeological knowledge is still pretty thin in this area (always seems to be easier to grasp the connections with a genetic model to work off).

For what it's worth FrankN over at Alberto's blog on his guest posts in late January seems to be arguing on the basis of pottery material, building, lithics for these neolithic sites on the Lower Volga as connected to or an extension of the North East Caspian sphere. He suggests Kelteminar pottery links but not actually this culture as a direct source, for reasons of distance and material culture. Excerpts: "A more likely and proximate source is the Neolithic of the Ustjurt Plateau (between the Caspian and Aral Seas), archeologically poorly described and so far lacking AMS dating, but according to Brunet 2005 sharing various commonalities with Kelteminar, partly going back to Epi-Paleolithic/ Mesolithic traditions that relate to the SW Siberian Yangielsk culture (see Part 1 for details).... In summary, the Lower Volga Neolithic appears to be the north-western outpost of an East Caspian communication sphere, with which it shares lithic, pottery and building traditions. In the absence of any Neolithic aDNA from the region in question, we may only speculate what that means genetically... (I haven’t yet come across any description of Pottery Neolithic mudbrick buildings outside the Lower Volga region, however, which speaks against substantial demic expansion outside of that area.)

(I'll refrain from direct linking here as Davidski would probably prefer me not to, but you know where it is if you want to go out there and check it out).

adna if it's possible will give some genetic framework for these discussions when if it comes through.

Gaska said...

@Aram-"The hard undeniable fact is that L51 is predominantly found among that northern BB and not in Chalcholithic Iberia, Balkans or any other Eneolithic culture in main Europe.
L51 is not everything"

1-What has been found on the BBC is P312 and his descendants.
2-Not even the BBC is genetically homogeneous, Hay I2a and G2a in Spain, the British Isles, Germany and Hungary
3- There are only 1 Dutch BB that can be qualified as chalcolithic, the rest of the cases studied by Olalde are from the Bronze Age.
4-In Spain there are more cases of R1b-P312 related to the BB culture than in any other European BB region except Germany- In the first paper of Olalde were 5 (40% of the men analyzed), but in the second paper the number is much higher.
5- They are also older than in the rest of Europe (before 2,500 BC), with the exception of Osterhofen
6-R1bL51/L11/P312 are fundamental to understanding the history of their descendants in Western Europe.

Regarding the problem of languages- It is assumed that the PIE/IE was spoken in the steppes, and since Yamnaya is the heir of Khavlynsk and Sredni Stog, we must assume that all these cultures spoke some kind of Indo-European. You know how many male and female haplogroups have been found in the steppes related to these cultures?. It would be long to analyze them one by one, but they are many and of very different origin.

It is assumed that these men are responsible for the dispersion of IE truth? - You just have to follow their genetic trail, and you know what? except for R1a, which is relatively abundant in Central Europe, the rest of haplogroups have never been found in prehistoric sites in Western Europe.

Ergo, the dispersion of Indo-European languages ​​in mainland Europe is much more recent than people think.

There is no prehistoric culture genetically compact enough (except CWC) to be responsible for the expansion of IE. But you know what the problem is? - That there is no Prehistoric-R1a in France, Italy, the British Isles, Spain or Portugal.

Davidski said...

@Matt

I can't accept the ecological barriers argument in this case, because we're dealing with essentially the same ecological zone: the Eurasian steppe.

So it's very unlikely the both the ascendants of Piedmont_Eneolithic and Steppe_Maykop were indigenous to the steppes between the Black and Caspian seas.

It had to be one or the other, and since Steppe_Maykop is much younger than Piedmont_Eneolithic, then it had to be the ascendants of Piedmont_Eneolithic.

Indeed, you need something tangible to argue your case successfully, like hunter-gatherer samples from the arid steppes near the Caspian sea with significant Siberian ancestry.

Matt said...

@Davidski, there are a fair few models of biomes of the world that distinguish the arid steppe stretching into the South Caspian and inclue the Lower Volga and NW Caspian in this region (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasian_Steppe, https://www.researchgate.net/figure/World-map-of-coverage-of-14-terrestrial-biomes-The-14-terrestrial-biomes-adapted-from_fig1_274288653, etc.). We will know more when and if there are more samples. There's not enough for me to be sure about what happened, but don't think there's a lot of a basis for your model at this point either. Fine if you want to hold it as your null hypothesis here, I won't.

Drago said...

@ Matt
It would make some sense that the ANE rich EHGs are in the north & older (microblades, etc); whilst the more basal in the south, with the “eastern Neolithic”, arriving as early as 6th millennium

Gabriel said...

@Diego

You’re clearly distraught by the steppe hypothesis, and seem determined to downplay it as much as possible.

But none of the genetic evidence favours the idea that R1b-L51 is native to Western Europe. It seems like all that admiration of the Basques as native Europeans got to you, and the steppe theory seems like some sort of propaganda meant to humiliate the Basques and other Iberians. You’re seeing it from a ethnopolitical angle, rather to seeing the facts.

And to other users reading this, please don’t follow in his footsteps.

K33 said...

David, what does qpadm say about modelling Steppe Maykop as a two-way mixture between Piedmont Eneolithic + Botai? Botai = WSHG + add'l ANE + Baikal_HG-like admixture, it's basically contemporary w/Steppe Maykop but this two way model is a decent fit in nMonte and more parsimonious than the 3-way.

If Botai isn't a direct source, at least this means Botai is the single best stand-in for Kelteminar we have, right? Is Botai a genetic/cultural stepping stone between Kelteminar and Pit Comb Ware?


"sample": "Test1:Steppe_Maykop",
"fit": 2.0084,
"Botai": 39.17,
"Progress_Eneolithic": 32.5,
"Vonyuchka_Eneolithic": 28.33

Slumbery said...

@Lenny Dykstra

In nMontes Botai is noticeably a worse fit than West Siberia Neolithic. Possibly exactly because of the stronger BHG affinity of Botai, but that is just a guess.

"sample": "Steppe_Maykop:Average",
"fit": 1.7218,
"Progress_Eneolithic": 46.67,
"Botai": 37.5,
"Geoksiur_Eneolithic": 10,
"Khvalynsk_Eneolithic": 5.83

vs.

"sample": "Steppe_Maykop:Average",
"fit": 1.5275,
"West_Siberia_N": 40,
"Progress_Eneolithic": 38.33,
"Geoksiur_Eneolithic": 15,
"Khvalynsk_Eneolithic": 6.67,


Also it is notable that Steppe Maykop takes AG3 and/or MA1 ancestry quite happily as a significant minority in the presence of West Siberia N or Botai, despite those two being very ancient. I interpret is as a sign that Steppe Maykop had significant ancestry from an ANE population that had a deep divergence from WSHG. And Botai does not seem to be a bridge between that population and the NW at all.

"sample": "Steppe_Maykop:Average",
"fit": 1.36,
"Progress_Eneolithic": 35.83,
"West_Siberia_N": 27.5,
"Geoksiur_Eneolithic": 15.83,
"AfontovaGora3": 14.17,
"Khvalynsk_Eneolithic": 6.67


(BTW, we do not have samples from Siberian Comb Ceramic. The Estonian Comb Ceramic sample we have does not show any recent Siberian connection at all.)

Gaska said...

@Them meee

The Spaniards, French, Irish, Italians etc are Western Europeans for millennia and even the theory of the steppes can not change this fact. But we are free people, and what we do before supporting such an important theory that can explain our origins, is to contrast all possible sources of information and then draw our conclusions freely.

It is not necessary that anyone follow my footsteps, what is needed, is that people are well informed and think freely.I guess everyone will be curious to know their origins, whatever they are and whatever the place.

In order to convince the international scientific community it is necessary to demonstrate the theories that are proposed, it is not enough to say that those who think differently have ethnopolitic, ethno-linguistic, ethno-social, ethno-racial agendas.

So far the Kurganists have not shown anything of what they propose, or maybe you can answer some of the questions I have asked before? Can you prove that R1b-L51 has an oriental origin or is it just what you would like?

Gabriel said...

Your answer proves my point.

It is not your theories that are ethnopolitical in and of itself. It is the way you present them, and your motivations and intentions, that are obviously ethnopolitical.

You always seem to present yourself as someone who valiantly defends Western Europe’s honor against the evil hordes of Kurgan theorists who ought to destroy it and humiliate the region until their spirit is subjugated and submissive in nature.

So far the Kurganists have not shown anything of what they propose, or maybe you can answer some of the questions I have asked before? Can you prove that R1b-L51 has an oriental origin or is it just what you would like?

You can’t be serious. For starters...

Late PIE ground zero now obvious; Location of PIE homeland still uncertain, but...

Samuel Andrews said...

From the little I've read from textbooks, my impression from history is ethnic groups are destroyed & recreated "constantly." Conquest is common. Ancient people always looked for better land, better resources. So they "constantly" conquered each other & migrated. By contsnatly I mean maybe once every 500 years or thousands of years. Modern nations descend from long line of conquerors & conquerored.

Taking this into perspective, it shouldn't be shocking that a certain nation/ethnic group conquered western Europe between 2300 and 2000bc. These were the R1b people & the reason R1b is the dominate Y DNA haplogroup in western Europe till this today.

It shouldn't be hard for western Europeans to accept this today if you consider that this kind of thing was not weird in the ancient world. We descend from the conquering Kurgan people & the "native farmers".

We don't know yet the nature of this "conquest." Military wasn't advanced enough yet to do a true conquest. But, it is true that the R1b L151 nation dominated one or way another over the "native" people in western Europe.

Conquest was not comparable to known ancient empires like Rome or Persians or whatever. The insult of the conquest, like stealing of women & slavery & oppression of natives, was definitely not comparable to what Spanish did in America.

Bob Floy said...

@Diego

"It is not necessary that anyone follow my footsteps"

That's good to know.

Gaska said...

@Them meee

It is clear that you can not prove that there is L51/L11/P312 in Eastern Europe, and while you can not do it, you can never convince us that Western Europeans have our origin in the cultures of the steppes.

@Sam "Taking this into perspective, it shouldn't be shocking that a certain nation/ethnic group conquered western Europe between 2300 and 2000bc"

It would not be if it were true, but in this case nobody has been able to prove it. Archaeologists can perfectly demonstrate if there were violent conquests, fires, killings etc and nothing of that can be demonstrated neither in the chalcolithic nor in the Bronze Age. Hardly could, R1b-P312 conquer Iberia between 2,300 and 2,000 BC when there are samples of P312 before 2,500 BC

@Sam-"Conquest was not comparable to known ancient empires like Rome or Persians or whatever. The insult of the conquest, like stealing of women & slavery & oppression of natives, was definitely not comparable to what Spanish did in America"

I suppose you mean what Western Europeans (English, French and Spaniards) did in America. But not only in America, also in Africa, Australia, and Asia. That is exactly what the Romans did with our Celtiberian ancestors.

The intention of some geneticists is to make us believe that nobody is native to their land, and that even Europeans can not boast about this. These ideas can have an effect on public opinion and can then justify migrations, social and racial policies, etc. But not all genetics revolves around Harvard, many doctoral theses are published annually throughout Europe where young independent researchers analyze hundreds of samples. The databases increase and our knowledge allows us to have a more accurate view of our history.

Do you know something? The most frequent mitochondrial haplogroups in Spain (H and U5) are documented in our deposits more than 20,000 years ago. What conquests or population replacements are you talking about?

Trying to interpret genetics as a kind of revenge against ancient colonizing powers is totally absurd.

Drago said...

@ Aram
Yes there’s good amount of R1b-Z110 etc in SEE, in the -teens %.
Do you think that this is from Yamnaya or Catacomb ?

@ Diego
You should understand that all the R1b-Z2103 in Yamnaya is M269..

Davidski said...

@Lenny Dykstra

David, what does qpadm say about modelling Steppe Maykop as a two-way mixture between Piedmont Eneolithic + Botai?

It's a pretty bad fit.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1z18IDBIlmcwU4XPbubGZWj_MMqaMIXlm/view?usp=sharing

@Dragos

The Global25 run for Kum6 and Kum4 failed. Not enough data.

Gabriel said...

@Diego

See, you just admitted that you see this from a political angle and that you have a political motivation behind your ancient DNA passion.

Look dude, the data is the data. It wasn’t cooked or manipulated, it is what it is, and what happened.

Obviously it is true that ancient DNA data can have political impact and that it matters to a lot of people. Researchers have often tried to slant articles a certain way. But the facts are the facts, and we’re here to discuss the facts, not policy or the culture wars.

Nevermind that autosomal DNA matters more than haplogroups.

Gabriel said...

By the way, how can we explain H, T, etc in the steppe if their basal ancestry is near pure basal? I was under the impression these haplogroups came from PEHG-related groups in the Middle East...

Samuel Andrews said...

@Diego,
"I suppose you mean what Western Europeans (English, French and Spaniards) did in America. But not only in America, also in Africa, Australia, and Asia. That is exactly what the Romans did with our Celtiberian ancestors.

The intention of some geneticists is to make us believe that nobody is native to their land, and that even Europeans can not boast about this. These ideas can have an effect on public opinion and can then justify migrations, social and racial policies, etc"

Heck yes, you are right. But, saying your Y DNA & big chunk of ancestry is from a migration from eastern Europe 4,000 years ago certainly doesn't make western Europeans not native to their home.

Andrzejewski said...

@JuanRivera "It is abundantly clear that western Europeans aren't pure WHG. H6a, H2a2, most clades of U4, most clades of U2e, some clades of U5, W, H11..., and some clades of I2a, most clades of R1b, all clades of R1a, Q1a... are clearly steppe associated. More uniparentals are of farmer origin. Most R2 today is in South Asia, but R2 isn't indigenous to South Asia."

Barely 10% of Western European aDNA is from Villabruna cluster WHG. What's interesting is that Lazaridis found out how Gravettians who largely preceded WHG in Europe were more similar to Anatolia_N farmer population.

Andrzejewski said...

@JuanRivera "Khvalynsk west siberian ancestry seems to vacillate between West_Siberia_N and Botai."

Impossible! Damgaard et al 2018 ruled out any genetic link between Botai and Khvalynsk/Repin/Yamnaya. They were totally distinct populations.

I read that Yamnaya was 50% ANE, but was it actually substantiated? It was 15% - 17% EEF, so ANE must've been much lower from both CHG and the EHG sources, right?

Drago said...

@ Davidski

Thanks for looking into it
What feasible qpADM output do you obtain for Kum6?
Eg with 1) Barcin, Iron Gates, CHG, Levant
2)Barcin; WHG, Iran Neol. Levant

John Thomas said...

I'm surprised in that rant Diego never but once mentioned the Arab conquest and occupation of Spain which lasted over 800 years and most certainly *did* have a genetic impact.

Another case of chauvinistic cherry picking of which are the 'right' ethnicities to claim or not claim.

John Thomas said...

The English are a very proud people, and traditionally a very insular and somewhat isolationist in their outlook.

However, hardly any English - at least, those who take an interest in such matters - seems to have a problem with an ultimate Steppic origin of their ethnicity.

Gaska said...

@Dragos-"You should understand that all the R1b-Z2103 in Yamnaya is M269"

And you should understand that Z2103 and its subclades have nothing to do with R1b-L51 and theirs. The first ones are orientals and the second ones are western ones. Therefore, it can not be established at the moment that there were direct migrations between the steppes and Western Europe. It's very easy to understand.

@Them meee-"Nevermind that autosomal DNA matters more than haplogroups".

Do you really believe that? I suppose you have no choice but to believe it, because you can not demonstrate a direct relationship between the uniparental markers of the steppes and the western ones. Then you can only resort to autosomal markers to try to explain the theory in which you believe.The autosomal signal can be different even among individuals of the same family, however the Y chromosome is inherited directly from parents to children, which is the best tool we can use to know our origin, simply by following the aDNA.

But science does not work as well. In other words, scientists do not have to believe in a theory beforehand and then look for all kinds of arguments to prove it. What they have to do is first look for arguments and proofs and then develop their theory. If what they try is to demonstrate a previously existing theory like the theory of the Kurgans, the following happens- Someone finds R1b in the steppes and in the West and the conclusion is- "We have demonstrated the theory of Gimbutas, the migrations of the horsemen of the steppes and the expansion of the Indo-European language by mainland Europe". Then it turns out that this Oriental R1b is totally different from the Western one, so nothing has been proven, but the damage has already been done and many people feel disappointed.

@mickeydodds-

You should read some history of Spain. I can recommend you good books about it.

Aram said...

Dragos

Z2110's TMRCA is old 5400 years ago. This fits into Yamna period. But it's most frequent subclade CTS7556 is younger 4800 years ago, which could mean another wave from Catacomb. But all this is conjecturing. We just need more ancient DNA to know the details.
This CTS7556 is well structured among Albanians. As for Greeks the main problem is that there is no much Greek BAM files in Yfull to know how they are structured.

BTW I am not sure what You mean by home - grown. But if You mean the presence of EEF, then I will say that with 90% certitude the true homeland of R1b-M269 is the Sredni-Stog like profile and not Progress/Khvalynsk/V1636 like ones.

Grey said...

Davidski
"I can't accept the ecological barriers argument in this case, because we're dealing with essentially the same ecological zone: the Eurasian steppe."

one of the things that has stuck with me most since first reading about this stuff is the presence of pottery using wetlands foragers around the west shore of the Black Sea before farming started which combined with the idea that pottery started somewhere around north Korea made me think there could have been a string of wetlands populations like islands among a sea of steppe foragers: Black, Azov, gap?, Caspian, Aral, Baikhal etc

#

"So it's very unlikely the both the ascendants of Piedmont_Eneolithic and Steppe_Maykop were indigenous to the steppes between the Black and Caspian seas."

if the island idea was correct then it might imply the steppe forager population would have been in the Piedmont zone with wetlands populations at their western and eastern edges around the Azov and Caspian.

#

"Indeed, you need something tangible to argue your case successfully, like hunter-gatherer samples from the arid steppes near the Caspian sea with significant Siberian ancestry."

this is the thing - were there arid steppe foragers or were there empty arid steppes with islands of wetlands foragers around lakes and river deltas?

Gabriel said...

@mickeydodds1

The Moorish invasion is something often used to beat down Spaniards. They are very sensitive about it, and the usage of it to portray Spaniards as Moors/Berbers, that they often like to call themselves Visigoths or Celts to seem more European or to distinguish themselves from the Moors, whom they largely expulsed in the late Middle Ages.

But they do have some North African admixture. Which still doesn’t prevent Iberians from being a fairly northern population. But many like to deny it. The facts don’t. Nevermind that it looks very recent.

Matt said...

@Grey: "one of the things that has stuck with me most since first reading about this stuff is the presence of pottery using wetlands foragers around the west shore of the Black Sea before farming started which combined with the idea that pottery started somewhere around north Korea made me think there could have been a string of wetlands populations like islands among a sea of steppe foragers"

That's an interesting suggestion, but as far as I know, early pottery use by foragers is thought to have spread beyond any zones associated to wetlands?

So that would make an association with being passed between wetlands difficult (there would not be any particular reason why that would have to be so). I'm not hugely knowledgeable about early pottery use by foragers in East Asia and later dispersal among other foragers to the west though, so I can't say for sure.

As far as I know pottery also emerges independently with the neolithic in at least Africa* (apparently before West Eurasia**) and the Americas, so that suggests multiple Eurasian inventions are also possible.
Pottery probably would've been materials limited though, as there is a need for good sources of clay and fuel.

*https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/swiss-archaeologist-digs-up-west-africa-s-past/5675736 - "A Swiss-led team of archaeologists has discovered pieces of the oldest African pottery in central Mali, dating back to at least 9,400BC."

Matt said...

Related you may be interested in this piece by Dorian Fuller which touches on how later pottery in the west eurasian farming neolithic shaped food culture - http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1538333/1/Fuller_How%20rice.pdf -

"The frontier of sticky cereals and milk: While differences in cooking tradition may have separated north and south India, even more pronounced are the long-term divisions in cooking and taste between the Indian subcontinent and Eastern Asia. This was explored recently in terms of a long-lasting difference between a boiling and steaming cultural niche in Eastern Asia and a bread and roasting niche in western Asia, with India tending to have more in common with western Asia (Fuller and Rowlands 2009; 2011). The archaeology of western Asia at least as far east as the Indus valley indicates the presence of clay ovens (tandur) was typical in settlements before the development of ceramics. Together with the prominence of querns, this suggests the baking (e.g. bread) and the dry cooking (roasting) of meat were likely widespread in the Neolithic if not earlier. By contrast in early China, even before clear evidence for domesticated crops, ceramic assemblages for boiling (of grains, nuts, tubers, fish) were widespread. Accompanying the rise of agriculture was the development of compound steaming vessels. This suggests that rice and millets were adopted into a cultural system of cooking and taste, and became increasing adapted to better fit this system.

Despite sharing the same crops, between China or Southeast Asia and India, such as rice, foxtail millet, broomcorn millet, and sorghum, the varieties that are sticky, or technically have waxy starch, rarely cross this South Asia- Southeast/ East Asia divide. Instead only nonsticky forms are widespread outside Southeast/East Asia. This division in terms of the texture of the cooked cereal has little adaptive meaning in terms of ecology of the cultivated environment, but instead represents adaptations to human taste preferences. As a current map of the distribution of sticky cereals reveals, these are diverse in Eastern Asia and rare west of Assam, except for some more westerly occurrences of sticky rice in the Himalayas, which we suggest correlated with Tibeto-Burman speakers, who originated further east, or their influence (Figure 8.2.2).

....

We suggest that the origins of this difference started with cooking traditions that necessarily made foods that were different in character. With food boiled or steamed in China, where ceramics developed already in the Pleistocene, consumed foods were sticky and more cohesive in texture compared to most those of South Asia—from the Indus to South India, where grinding stones and grain cultivation likely preceded ceramics, which came to be made from ca. 6000 BC in the Indus and 3500-3000 BC in most other parts of India. Here flours could be baked, griddle cooked or stone boiled but resulting in drier, doughier products. The Ganges valley is a potential exception where ceramics develop early (by 7000 BC), perhaps also associated with the boiling of wild rice, fish and other aquatic resources, but not elaborated to the extent of early to middle Holocene China. The differences in textures created by cooking traditions, such as the stickier, more cohesive cereal products from boiling or steaming in China created a taste preference that snowballed through subsequent genetic changes in the crops. This would have been further reinforced by rituals and belief systems about the relationships between kin lineages, transmitted bodily substances, and ritual interactions with ancestors (Fuller and Rowlands 2009; 2011).

Matt said...

Also worth a quick sci-hub is probably this: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/modelling-the-diffusion-of-pottery-technologies-across-afroeurasia-emerging-insights-and-future-research/1085C3DD5DADB0E15056C2A31AAABF81 - "Modelling the diffusion of pottery technologies across Afro-Eurasia: emerging insights and future research: Where did pottery first appear in the Old World?

Statistical modelling of radiocarbon dates suggests that ceramic vessel technology had independent origins in two different hunter-gatherer societies. Regression models were used to estimate average rates of spread and geographic dispersal of the new technology.

The models confirm independent origins in East Asia (c. 16000 cal BP) and North Africa (c. 12000 cal BP). The North African tradition may have later influenced the emergence of Near Eastern pottery, which then flowed west into Mediterranean Europe as part of a Western Neolithic, closely associated with the uptake of farming."


North Africa would probably be some sort of people like the Iberomaurasians, deeply divergent from Eurasians with some exchange and shared ancestry with southern-western Eurasian, or even just an African group.

Bastian Barx said...

Am I The only one Who stopped reading Diego's posts?

Davidski said...

@Dragos

Kumtepe4 and Kumtepe6 are now in the Global25 datasheets...

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1FSzKKknFGcOgfyA76q9PD7B-n-MJs7L8

Gaska said...


@Bastian @Juan rivera

I nevertheless think that your posts are super interesting. I do not know what the international scientific community would do without your contributions to the debate.

Especially yours Juan, demonstrate a deep knowledge of European prehistory. Now you should try to specialize in the prehistory of America, surely you can teach us many more things.