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Thursday, January 30, 2020

The great and the good


Here's a quote from a new paper on the impact of genetics, and especially ancient DNA, on archeology and linguistics co-authored by archeologist James Mallory and geneticist Oleg Balanovsky:

Just as the genetic evidence for a steppe homeland appeared to weaken a popular theory (among archaeologists more than linguists) that the Indo-European languages spread from an Anatolian homeland with the spread of farming and the AF genetic signature, a new complication arose: the steppe signal that is found from Ireland to the Yenisei comprises an admixture of EHG and CHG. Such an admixture would appear to involve two deep sources that should have developed separately over the course of thousands of years; in short, there is no reason to believe that the two components spoke closely related languages or even belonged to the same language families. Such a model suggested that Proto-Indo-European may have originated out of the merger of two very different language families, a theory that had once had been suggested by several linguists but had never attained anything remotely resembling consensus [62]. If one does not accept an “admixture language” then the natural question remains: did Proto-Indo-European evolve out of language spoken by EHG or out of language spoken by CHG? So genetics has pushed the current homeland debate into several camps: those who seek the homeland either in the southern Caucasus or Iran (CHG) and those who locate it in the steppelands north of the Caucasus and Caspian Sea (EHG). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1134/S1022795419120081

Make no mistake, this is, in common parlance, total horsehit. That's because:

- if we go back far enough, every goddamn human population that ever existed is a mixture of genetically highly diverged earlier populations, but this obviously doesn't mean that all languages are creoles

- in fact, the so called CHG/EHG mixture that Balanovsky and Mallory are talking about was already present on the Pontic-Caspian steppe around 4,300 BCE, and probably much earlier, so it's likely that it first emerged there before the existence of anything even resembling an Indo-European language

- come to think of it, I'm not aware of any tradition in historical linguistics that requires language families to be directly traced back to specific Mesolithic hunter-gatherer populations. So, with all due respect to Mallory and Balanovsky, it looks like they pulled that theory out of their hats.

The impression that I've been getting for a while now is that the great and the good at various major academic institutions are having a rather difficult time interpreting the ancient DNA data relevant to the Indo-European homeland debate. Why? I don't have a clue. Someone should e-mail them and ask. Feel free to let me know what they say in the comments below.

See also...

A final note for the year

A note on Steppe Maykop

Did South Caspian hunter-fishers really migrate to Eastern Europe?

232 comments:

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Matt said...

Working out the phenotypic correlates, that truly can be associated to ancient components and represent descent, is a hard problem.

I've tried to do it in the past using skeletal data for ancient transects of populations (where in many cases we do actually have specific skeletal data which actually matches specific ancient samples), and the reported growth changes in 20th and 19th centuries for populations (where we do have very rich data that we can link to changes in income and GDP as a proxy for living standards) and then high resolution maps of genetic ancestry (G25 for instance).

From these I am personally circumspect about these ideas that ancient peoples like EHG for instance, were these huge, robust people or Anatolian Neolithic people for instance were these tiny, small people. Although there are likely to be differences, I think that the idea that this is so to the sort of degree people often seem to speculate on, seems to be from wild extrapolation from heavily confounded and correlated relatively recent changes in populations from both genetic and non-genetic causes (last 4000 years in genetics, last 300 in non-genetics) and a mishmash of bits of selective memory / belief when it comes to physical anthropology.

For instance, Ruff's *massive* dataset tends to show that Mesolithic HG in Europe seem about the same body size as contemporary farmers (but then when I have mentioned this it seems almost always explained away as it doesn't seem to fit what people want to believe). There's some mixture of sign on cranial shape where Pinhasi and Cramon-Taubadel found something (https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1010&context=humbiol_preprints) but of unclear magnitude, while a later article by Pinhasi suggested very little / no clear change between pre- and post- agricultural populations in Iberia and Ukraine (who we would know to be genetically quite different) - https://www.nature.com/articles/srep33316.

(I think ultimately the idea is fairly sensationalistic it will continue to appeal to online folk who don't really trust big science on these questions and so forth, possibly until we have proper and robust predictions of when and how these changes happened, from really massive dna sets.)

It's somewhat similar for pigmentation and other traits that are salient between populations.

There's not much point digging further into this skeletal stuff though as Davidski doesn't like it on his blog and ultimately he calls the rules and provides a place for people to discuss.

zardos said...

@Matt: As far as I understood it, what David dislikes the most is vague "racial speculation", which even if it starts well usually deteriorates onto something unpleasant which doesn't look well for the Blog and starts flame wars. But here its about real differences which were began to be studied with ancient DNA, like robustness and height. It becomes less speculative with every year actually.

About CHG in the Caucasus region very little is known, because there are so few samples. This is actually the main problem: From Eastern Europe we don’t have enough, but from the Caucasian region close to nothing. Look at Dzudzuana and Satsurblia: Only teeth and Fragments!
But people lived there and the rising sea levels made it even worse, because the demographic centres of these people might be now under water.

With Eastern hunter gatherers its not about cherry picking, because you have a regional tradition from Paleolithic to Mesolithic inhabitants. They were just massive individuals. Add to that the studies on genetic height proving constantly their tendency for bigger bodies.

Neolithics were not always short, they were not that gracile, especially in comparison to modern people of Southern Europe. But in comparison to Eastern European foragers they were, definitely. Its all relative. But the typical EHG was fairly tall, robust and large faced-headed relatively and absolutely.
The adult Sunghir specimen (I know there are differences too) wouldnt have sticked out at all among them for size and height.

CrM said...

Since we're discussing Anthropology, these images may interest you.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sYgSBCZ27dB89aozJREXjK5LyEZXVBtW/view
https://imgur.com/a/XlQ4Iia

Matt said...

It's certainly really a big gap that we don't have anything like Ruff's dataset that covers Eastern European and Caucasus HGs to do proper comparisons there. I find it hard to be that confident in the absence of any big, curated, metric set (I agree that people do talk about them being large, but I don't really get a clear sense of it).

I don't really have a big objection to EHG being likely to being somewhat larger than other populations at their time by some not very not clear amount, so much as I'm pretty circumspect about well, the sort of methodologies that are heavily based on extrapolation of the present day, like, for a notional example:

"Extrapolate from a set of present day European national heights using Steppe fraction and that suggests "Steppe" were would be 6'4" for males or something like this in modern conditions! Now assume that this was diluted by 50% CHG at a lower height, and EHG must have been 7'1"! Assume this was diluted by 1/3 WHG and their ANE ancestors may have been 7'8" in modern conditions!".

I mean, this is the sort of thing that is highly unlikely and unlikely to be favoured by natural selection. You can easily get to "Basal Eurasians were basically pygmies!" and suchlike if you really go down the rabbit-hole of extrapolation with this sort of thing.

TLT said...

@zardos

> The original EHG would be just larger and more robust than any modern European people.

In what sense? Phenotypically the average EHG height was something like 172 cm. I have some EHG/Karelia neolithic cranial measurements and they seem to be normal in terms of cranial length and width. IDK about the zygomatic measurement values since I can't read all of the info that I have which is in Cyrillic. Sagittal and transverse arc measurements seem normal as well (figured this one out with google translate).

Though there is a much more extensive source that I have heard of which mentions measurements from (mesolithic?) Oleni Ostrov, I think its by K Jacobs. It might have the kind of measurements you qualitatively speak of. Don't have access to it though.

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

Europeans get their height from WHG and UP Euro populations. Hence why human height peaks in Europe and not in Tajiks or other ANE rich populations. ANE rich populations are quite short.

zardos said...

@Matt: Selection is the joker, because it doesnt matter which percentage of a people had this or that trait, if selection favoured one allel and corresponding phenotype, this one will spread. Like depigmentation and lactase persistence.

So its wrong to assume any mixed people need to be percentage wise the same phenotypicaöly as their ancestral components. That is just wrong. Minority and New traits can spread very fast if the environment causes selective pressures strong enough.

That said, the Yamnaya and CWC populations lost massiveness craniofacially rather than on the body skeletons. So you see a trend for selection and inheritance pattern: Body height and robustness were more widespread than the massive faces.
Which is part of the reason why the relationship of GAC to CWC was so dubious: They were to close physically for excluding mixture and ancestral relationship with certainty.


Did you see some sample series from Eastern European hunter gatherer skulls? If those guys had no body like Sunghir, that would be at odds proportion wise. It won't fit.

In all comparisons the Eastern European people of the Mesolithic to the Bronze Age being described as tall and robust. The genetic study on height said so too. More will come.

zardos said...

@TLT: Do you have data on Dnieper Donets series at hand?

Matt said...

@zardos and TLT:

More generally re; trends, this new paper from last year (published October) may be of interest - https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12520-019-00850-3 -

"Human stature in the Near East and Europe ca. 10,000–1000 BC: its spatiotemporal development in a Bayesian errors-in-variables model".

Seems to have some data from other sets than Ruff which has coverage of Ukraine and other regions in SE Europe and the Near East.

Abstract: A sample of 6098 published prehistoric skeletons consisting of long bone lengths, stature estimated from them using three different methods, as well as recalculated stature data created with other methods, was used to model tempo-spatial variance of stature in the Holocene prehistory of the Near East and Europe. Bayesian additive mixed modeling with errors-in-variables was applied, fitting a global spatiotemporal trend using a tensor product spline approach, a local random effect for the archaeological sites and corrections for mismeasurement and misclassification of covariates to obtain stature isoline maps for various time slices and diachronic stature trend curves for various regions. Models calculated for maximum long bone lengths and for stature are all largely consistent with each other, so Bayesian errors-in-variables models can be regarded as a viable means of smoothing regional and temporal variance in skeletal data as well as in estimation methods so that only robust trends become manifest. In addition to a general northwest-southeast gradient in stature, tallest stature in Eurasia and declining stature in Iberia confirms archaeogenetic insights. Transition to farming shows stable, decreasing, or even increasing stature depending on the region and the mode of Neolithization, putting into question the common assumption of a general negative effect of Neolithic lifeways on physical health. Particularly, Northern Europe experienced a rise in stature after the 4th millennium BC. Likely caused by both genetics as well as generally improving living conditions, our findings date the origin of the modern NW-SE gradient in stature to around 3000 BC.

Does seem to confirm taller PC steppe: "In general, all four bone lengths appear to follow an East-West gradient for both sexes with longer bones in a zone stretching from Eurasia into the Eastern part of the Fertile Crescent and shorter bones towards the West of the modeled area. F1 (Fig. 7), for instance, is around 45 cm for males and 43 cm for females in the Pontic Steppes (K) throughout the whole period, but only approx. 43 cm (males) and 41 cm (females) in the mid-Holocene of the Iberian Peninsula (I). Likewise, T1 (Fig. 8) is approx. 37 cm and 34 cm in the Pontic Steppes (K) and only approx. 36 cm and 33 cm in the Iberian Peninsula (I)."
Their final figures on height estimates and regions, here, excerpted: https://imgur.com/a/LVOcMbI (in height estimates red line is female, blue is male)

(tbc)

Matt said...

(continued...) Point estimate for male height on Pontic Steppe at 3000 BCE taking Model A: is about 166 cm, Southern British Isles and Iberian Peninsua about the same time estimate of 163 cm. About 1/3 to 1/2 of a standard deviation of height, which seems reasonably likely to me.

Model B has a bit more volatility over time in every region except P steppe (seems like statures increase in every Northern and Western European region in EBA, except P Steppe) but still this is only 167cm for P steppe and 164cm for Southern BI and Iberia at around 3000 BCE. 1/2 SD again, which seems reasonable.

Interesting under Model B, post 2500 BCE the P steppe is overtaken in height by many Europeans. Certainly Northern European CW and NW European Beaker and subsequent groups, but even Iberian Bronze Agers, though not Italian or Greek Bronze Agers. Which seems to indicate that the people who came to live on the PC steppe after Yamnaya were very slightly shorter or the same, while much of the rest of Europe that saw steppe ancestry intrusion became taller. This may be a result of sample bias in the datasets in some way tho. (That mirrors that Mathieson's study on adna and Ruff's dataset did also seem to find a selective signal that hit around this time.)

Matt said...

@Romulus, some have made that hypothesis, but then it seems like actual measured Mesolithic and late Upper Paleolithic WHG long bones (again quoting Ruff's big dataset again and the above data), despite some differences in sites, don't indicate that they had vastly high stature (and they do seem significantly phenotypically shorter than early Upper Paleolithic people) and somewhat similar in size to neolithic folk. Genetically not clear but, unless they were actually nutritionally subpar and more effect by disease relative to early neolithic people (which is backwards to all the hypothesizing) it seems like it should not be the case. (Which is why extrapolating from modern people subject to selection and where Europeans have had some nutritional advantages recently, may come to unusual conclusions.) I would still guess probably more selection based.

TLT said...

@Zardos
Unfortunately I don't. If you want to look for detailed measurements involving EHG then this is the best bet: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0278416585710185

@Matt
Thanks for the info.

Matt said...

Quick comparison of the height sequences of Central Europe and Pontic Steppe from that above paper ("Human stature in the Near East and Europe ca. 10,000–1000 BC: its spatiotemporal development in a Bayesian errors-in-variables model"), under their Model A and Model B: https://imgur.com/a/nTPLdTH

More or less equalises by 2500 BCE then crosses over by 1000 BCE, at least for males? It seems like the male:female height gap is slightly smaller in the Pontic Steppe group at the beginning. MF gaps today tend to be 10-13 cm so these gaps seem slightly small.

Gaska said...


It seems that things have changed substantially. Now the Spaniards are world and European basketball champions, it must be that we are taking better advantage of our steppe genes- Ha Ha Ha Ha

Here in Spain we are clear that we have inherited our blue eyes from the WHGs and the white skin mainly from Anatolian farmers.

Yamnaya, steppes? as always, fairy tales for people with inferiority complex

zardos said...

Thanks Matt, that's exactly what I had missed so far. If looking at Fig. 7 b and c (prefer absolute measurement comparisons), as well as Fig. 9 b, this sums it up very nicely.

"In the Pontic Steppes (K), males and females were very tall throughout, whereas towards the South and West, stature was significantly shorter."

Two things to consider: The samples seem to be not particularly large for Esatern Europe and they included different age groups and contexts.

Like they wrote in the study:

"All ten models (Figs. 1, 7, 8, 9, and 10; Supplement 4) show that regions in the center of the study area, such as the Central Balkans (D), Central Europe (E), and Italy (H), have reasonably small uncertainty intervals, because they are “surrounded” by data. In contrast, the Fertile Crescent (A) and the Pontic Steppes (K) as well as Northern (F, G) and Western (I, J) Europe are on the fringe of the modeled area and therefore have larger uncertainty intervals."

Also, even with this small samples, virtually all are from the borderzone with the tendency still increasing further East. Remember, we are not talking about the later Pontic-Caspian steppe people, aka Proto-Indoeuropeans, but the still unmixed hunter gatherer population before that.
Still the trend is very obvious, very stable (almost the same estimated border for many thousands of years) and we have to take into account the genetic height factor, which means like what I said, transferred into modern living conditions, they would be among the tallest in Europe. WHG can be securely excluded from being the "tall-maker" of Europe. I think Dzudzuana and WHG are actually medium statured, while ANE introduced taller stature (again?).

The other interesting part is that Eastern Iranian, with high ANE as well, falls in the same (very East, borderline for the samples) or taller category than Eastern Europe. More data will prove a correlation of ANE in particular and greater height in prehistory.

Again from the paper:
"Longest bone lengths and tallest stature in the Pontic Steppes and the declining trend in the Iberian Peninsula already noted by Lalueza-Fox (1998) not only confirm expectations derived from a genetic study on potential body height in these regions (Mathieson et al. 2015), but also supply evidence for the validity of the Bergmann rule of larger bodies in colder climates also for humans."

"Longest bone lengths and tallest stature in the Pontic Steppes and the declining trend in the Iberian Peninsula already noted by Lalueza-Fox (1998) not only confirm expectations derived from a genetic study on potential body height in these regions (Mathieson et al. 2015), but also supply evidence for the validity of the Bergmann rule of larger bodies in colder climates also for humans. While the open landscapes of Eurasia might have had a greater carrying capacity for large game enabling the continuation of taller stature similar to the Paleolithic, stagnating proximal and declining distal bone lengths in Eurasia could be related to climate directly via Allen’s rule, stating that colder climates demand shorter distal limbs"

ANE were THE large game hunters of Eurasia! Even though Sunghir might have been a dead end, I see the adult male in particular as a close relative to the ANE -> EHG tradition in Eurasia, physically he shows the trend which was preserved and further developed.

Gaska said...

Light eye pigmentation variants were present at high frequencies in WHG, SHG, EHG and EEF (not present in PEHG), while the blue-eye color founder haplotype h-1 was found in the La Braña, Loschbour, Villabruna WHGs, SF12, Motala1 and Motala12 SHGs and at least one early farmer. Such results suggest that the blue eye-color allele is rather old.

CHG- Both Kotias and Satsurblia CHGs were predicted by Hirisplex to have brown eyes (>0.96) and a dark hair shade (>0.92). Looking at skin-pigmentation sites, both individuals carried the dark-skin allele at rs16891982 and the light-pigmentation allele at rs1426654. Similar to the Hum2 and Motala12 individuals, Kotias showed exclusively haplotype-associated alleles at the C11-defining positions (with at least 5 reads of such alleles per site), suggesting it carried the C11 haplotype.

Karelian-EHG presents high probabilities of being brown-eyed (0.99), and having a dark hair (0.96). Without speculating about the genetic architecture of skin pigmentation, we suggest an intermediate skin-pigmentation phenotype for the Karelia individual, as it carried the ancestral allele at rs16891982 and the derived allele at rs1426654

The derived alleles at both rs1426654 and rs16891982 positions are found at extremely high frequencies in present-day European populations (where the former allele is virtually fixed and the latter is ~90%), an observation that has been interpreted as the signature of RECENT positive selection in Europeans.

Rob said...

@ Zardos

“ There was admixture going both ways, but it is clear to me that the massive proportions of the EHG came mostly from the ANE mammoth hunters and possibly hybridisation with WHG and further selection as well.”

How’s that clear ? The skeletal data set of Late paleolithic “EHG” is virtually none existent
What is the data for heights of ANE people ?

''ANE were THE large game hunters of Eurasia! Even though Sunghir might have been a dead end, I see the adult male in particular as a close relative to the ANE -> EHG tradition in Eurasia,''

Is that view based on something?
Sungir isn't of the ANE tradition; not sure where you got that idea from

zardos said...

@Rob: I know Sunghir branched off earlier it seems and is more distantly related. But these people were still related and lived a similar way of life most. Also its one of those few skeletons which had good preservation to be sure about skull and body skeleton parts.

As for the ANE = greater height association, this is clear by all means. You know that Eastern European HG and later steppe people showed large measurements, as did Iranians. Where do you think they got it from? This study is just another fitting part of the puzzle. Genetic height did increase with steppe admixture and the borderline between the taller and shorter Europeans in Mesolithic and Neolithic times roughly equals the ANE distribution.

Rob said...

@ Zardos

''I know Sunghir branched off earlier it seems and is more distantly related. But these people were still related and lived a similar way of life most. Also its one of those few skeletons which had good preservation to be sure about skull and body skeleton parts.''

Sungir is most closely related to other post-40000 BP European UPs. ANE just has a cousin branch providing their west Eurasian component. Sungir is not culturally Siberian ('ANE') nor is its lineage (Y-DNA C1a) related to Y-DNA P*

''As for the ANE = greater height association, this is clear by all means. You know that Eastern European HG and later steppe people showed large measurements, as did Iranians. Where do you think they got it from? This study is just another fitting part of the puzzle. Genetic height did increase with steppe admixture and the borderline between the taller and shorter Europeans in Mesolithic and Neolithic times roughly equals the ANE distribution.
''

This is speculation in the absence of physical data.
One cant make claims about paleolithic ANE on the basis of Bronze Age steppe pastoralists

zardos said...

Indeed, but DDC was tall-robust too.

Matt said...

@zardos, sure, I guess the main point for me is, with this sample set, looks their estimate like P Steppe (males) at 10kya about 4cm taller than males from C Europe (WHG) and Central Anatolian (ENF). About an SD.

Assume nutrition constant, and the later changes mostly due to genetic selection (an assumption but more reasonable than +height being genetic for early P Steppe and +height nutritional for later other populations) and possibly continuing past the edge of the sets (which seems reasonable for Ruff's set, which does), then possibly they would be shorter than tallest European populations today.

They could be among the tallest though (comparable with Dinaric Alps or slightly, etc) though. I guess this is less my interest; the main point seems that it wouldn't be the case that they would be huge to the degree we might expect based on simply extrapolating from different ancestries in recent Europeans and that the differences between the populations at this time seem not large in the scheme of present day size differences between West Eurasian populations (looks like somewhat less than today).

I'd add that in terms of general robusticity of limbs, the trend noted by Ruff's data is that at least for limbs it looks like robusticity declines with HG->farming transition *but* also declines further with infusions of greater HG related ancestry through Copper Age migrations etc. That suggests that an increase in EHG ancestry did not lead to more robust limb morphology. (It doesn't look like people had more proportionately gracile limb morphology and then a new trait introduced by steppe ancestry really changed that?). Though really old EHGs might have had more robust limbs and gone through a selective process over time.

See - https://www.pnas.org/content/112/23/7147. Here's another one on neolithic females having high bone strength for their size than athletes today - https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/11/eaao3893. Ancients like Oetzi who more ENF than any people today still had a pretty robust limb morphology.

zardos said...

@Matt: I never said they will tower all of mankind, but as a group, they should be among the tallest or taller than any modern European population. Remind you, the Dinaric Alp example just shows the potential, they are no big population on their own, but just a regional subpopulation. Compare that with the original distribution of EHG/ANE.

However, the final verdict will come with more GWAS which will make the predictions based on the genome alone more reliable. If we reach that, we can start comparing all groups of which we have genetic samples, even CHG teeth.
Which might be quite soon, because if they can't grasp height, how can they tackle cancer, heart disease and diabetes which depend on many more environmental factors probably?
With the right predictions, bad or missing samples will no longer keep us from getting a better picture of genetic height, which I am talking about primarily. And there can be little doubt that the genetic height of ANE-EHG will be among the highest in West Eurasians imho. Don't know how they selected the samples, because some archaeologists even included pathological cases in their calculations.

As for bone density, this has a strong genetic and environmental component. That "Ötzi" had robust bones is particularly fitting, considering that he might have been a shepherd in the mountains (?). I would guess that later Bronze Agers had less to carry and/or less to walk at some point. My basic assumption is always that environmentally caused changes point to the dominant selective trend. Like if you live in a dark environment with low UV radiation, you will get phenotypically pale within your genetic range. If this trend will persist for a people, a population get's even more pale by shifting the genetic range in the direction needed through individual selection. This doesn't work out for all things, but for a lot. The first adaptation is always within the given variation, because the people would die out otherwise before genetic frequencies could change.
Negative selection means, in that sense, just that your genetic range was not flexible and optimal enough for the given environmental challenges - oftentimes just relatively, to other individuals in your population.

Mike said...


Davidski@

The samples are there, they just haven't been published yet. The spread of M269 went something like this...

Forest > Forest Steppe > Sredny Stog > Yamnaya & Corded Ware


R1a-m417 follows the same pattern?

Ric Hern said...

@ Davidski

Was there basically a split of M269 in Sredny Stog with Western forming Corded Ware/L51 and Eastern forming Yamnaya ?

Davidski said...

@Mike and Ric

I don't know.

Hopefully, many of these new samples that are ready to go will be published or at least revealed soon, so everyone can make up their own minds.

Ric Hern said...

@ Davidski

Thanks.

Rob said...

@ Zardos

''Indeed, but DDC was tall-robust too.''

Perhaps genetic potential optimised due to abundant resources in their environments, active life-style fishing & hunting.
Would be good to see some LUP Paleo-Siberian/ ANE skeletons, all 3 or so thus far are adolescents

end said...

Since ancient times the Mediterranean island of Sardinia has been known for harboring a population with an average body height shorter than almost every other ethnic group in Europe. After over a century of investigations, the cause(s) at the origin of this uniqueness are not yet clear.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28138956


today they sardinians average 1,69 m the shortest ethnic group in europe in the neholitic they averaged 1,61 m for men and 1,57 m for woman and the one with less steppe/whg admiture .
yamnaya as a proxy for steppe groups in other hand averaged 1,76m,EHG were shorter 1,72m but they were phisically stronger with masive head and bodies

the correlation between steppe admixture and height in europe is nearly total

Matt said...

With really big present-day samples they might be able to get good models that work for predicting height that are not confounded. Maybe they will then be able to extend these to ancients if the coverage is good enough. There are big issues it seems in finding the true causal variants, rather than ending up with another variants that is in LD with it, but is not the true variant.

Ric Hern said...

Wonder what is the correlation between Lactase Persistence and Height ? Are Milk Drinkers on average taller than Non-Milk Drinkers ?

Ric Hern said...

Does Lactase Persistence help with increased absorption of Calcium ? Could someone with Lactase Persistence absorb more Calcium from chewing a bone ?

archlingo said...

Blogger Davidski said...
@Gaska
Quit talking shit.
There's a consensus that Proto-Indo-European dates to around 4,000 BCE.
January 30, 2020 at 5:53 AM

Correct! This exactly aggrees with H. J. Holm (2017, 2019).
archlingo

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