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Tuesday, June 21, 2022

My take on the Erfurt Jews


I had a quick look at the genotype data from the recent Waldman et al. preprint focusing on the ancestry of early Jews from Erfurt, Germany. My impression is that the genetic origins of these Jews are somewhat more complex than claimed in the manuscript.

Indeed, I'd say the Waldman et al. characterization of the Erfurt Jews as a three-way mixture between populations similar to present-day Lebanese, South Italians and Russians doesn't exactly reflect reality.

Unlike Waldman et al., I designed an ADMIXTURE analysis that separated East Asian ancestry into East Asian and Siberian clusters, and also included Mediterranean and North African clusters. The output is available in a spreadsheet HERE. Below is a bar graph based on some of the output.
Now, keeping in mind that ADMIXTURE is not a formal mixture test, and that it estimates ancestry proportions from inferred populations, as opposed to ancient groups that actually existed, here are some key observations:

- in terms of fine scale ancestry, the Erfurt Jews show enough variation to be divided into three or four clusters, as opposed to just two as per Waldman et al.

- some of the Erfurt Jews show excess "Mediterranean" ancestry, while others excess "North African" ancestry, and this cannot be explained with ancestral populations similar to Lebanese and/or South Italians, but rather with significant gene flow from the western Mediterranean and possibly North Africa

- several of the Erfurt Jews show relatively high levels of "East Asian" ancestry that cannot be explained by admixture from Russians, or even any Russian-like populations, because such populations almost lack this type of ancestry, and instead show significant "Siberian" admixture

- as far as I can see, there are no correlations between any of the observations above and the quality of the samples. That is, low coverage doesn't appear to be causing the aforementioned excess "Mediterranean", "North African" and/or "East Asian" ancestry proportions.

Investigating this in more detail with, say, formal statistics will take some time. But I was able to reproduce the results from the above ADMIXTURE run using several somewhat different datasets, so that's something.

It seems to me that Waldman et al. want a simple and elegant model to explain the data, which is understandable, but I do think they should at least expand their ADMIXTURE analysis to include "Siberian", "Mediterranean" and "North African" clusters, and go from there depending on what they find.

Citation...

Waldman et al., Genome-wide data from medieval German Jews show that the Ashkenazi founder event pre-dated the 14th century, bioRxiv, posted May 16, 2022, doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.05.13.491805

See also...

Mediterranean PCA update

308 comments:

1 – 200 of 308   Newer›   Newest»
Leo Cooper said...

Thanks for taking a deeper look at these David! Two questions:
1. Is there a way to see the results sample-by-sample in this model you made?
2. Does Middle Eastern contain a West Asian-rich reference?

Davidski said...

@Leo

Yep, the ancestry proportions for each of the samples in the analysis are listed here.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Q4m91DkOd8thkiYC-vstlp2Vz7Ri1Lus6IFNIjfyRDc/edit?usp=sharing

The spreadsheet also shows that the so called Middle Eastern cluster is modal (that is, it peaks in) the Druze, but also shows up well in Armenians, so it does have a high West Asian input.

Druze HGDP00583 0.887954
Druze HGDP00568 0.885731
Druze HGDP00574 0.872008
Druze HGDP00567 0.867398
Druze HGDP00604 0.857945
Druze HGDP00560 0.845064
Iranian_Jew IranianJew1845 0.838156
Druze HGDP00575 0.83749
Druze HGDP00588 0.837258
Druze HGDP00558 0.829929
Assyrian Assyrian151 0.829358
Iranian_Jew IranianJew1409 0.826653
Iraqi_Jew IraqiJew1417 0.826511
Iranian_Jew IranianJew1143 0.825464
Iraqi_Jew IraqiJew4291 0.824431
Iranian_Jew IranianJew1132 0.8228
Georgian_Jew GeorgianJew1594 0.822493
Iraqi_Jew IraqiJew1430 0.820346
Iranian_Jew IranianJew1513 0.819037
Assyrian Assyrian152 0.817517
Druze HGDP00572 0.815385
Assyrian Assyrian165 0.814212
Armenian armenia279 0.812728

Chad said...

It's interesting, but not a surprise to see the heterogeneity still. North African Jews are very important to the story of modern Ashkenazi origins. I think this has been clear for some time now.

rozenblatt said...

Do you think that this East Asian component may be related to Khazars? Or we should wait for high quality Khazar genomes before we can decide it?

LivoniaG said...

@Davidski -
sorry if this is a stupid question --

when you say "western Mediterranean" does that mean Iberia?
and when you write "excess "North African" ancestry" does that mean everything from Morocco to Egypt or some more specific part or people in that wide location

again, sorry. It sounds like the answer should be obvious

Davidski said...

@rozenblatt

No idea, but yeah I think we'll need ancient DNA from many plausibly relevant groups, including Asian Jews, to work this out.

Davidski said...

@LivoniaG

Western Mediterranean might be Iberian ancestry and/or some Mediterranean Jewish group with a high level of this component.

The North African component peaks in Berbers, but it shows up strongly in the Middle East too, so I don't know what it means in these Jews? It might actually mean different things.

You might be able to work this out to some degree by running ancestry models on the Erfurt Jews using my ADMIXTURE output.

Ryan said...

@David - is the East Asian component shared with any non-Ashkenazi Jewish groups?

Davidski said...

You can check in the spreadsheet.

Davidski said...

@All

There's probably some minor South Asian (Roma?) ancestry in some of these Erfurt Jews.

This might be slightly elevating the "East Asian" signal in them, because there's no South Asian cluster in my analysis.

Michalis Moriopoulos said...

^ Yeah, I've noticed a South Asian signal when running their G25 coords through a typical "basic components" test (which includes DMXX's AASI sim) with Vahaduo:

https://i.imgur.com/0A9Hg24.png

The East Asian and North African ancestry is easily evidenced here as well (many samples clearly scoring Devil's Gate, Hanben, and Iberomaurusian).

Puree said...

This is an interesting day for those of us studying this topic, because the Erfurt data are the first set of samples I know of allowing for an in depth view of 14th Century, N. European Jewry. Many thanks to Davidski for the G25s and the quick visualization, which I believe is spot on with regard to there being at least 3 clusters in the Erfurt data. I have gone a little further this evening to develop a simple model which could explain what is happening historically.

I don’t know how to post a chart directly into a post so I must refer here for the image: https://1drv.ms/u/s!AuwT-4qnkJLBnVu3UA7YAT6ndXmi?e=Ffl4ze

According to this model, the three Erfurt clusters represent: 1) Erfurt1a: older N. European Ashkenazim (perhaps descendants of the first wave of Jewish migration to the area circa 800-1100 CE); note that modern German Ashkenazim in the same cluster area as Erfurt1a, 2) Erfurt1b: a wave of migrants from Spain (many Jews were fleeing from Sepharad as early as the Granada Massacre of 1066 and after the Almohads conquered Sepharad circa 1121 until about 1269); on the scatter, Erfurt1b clusters nearby to modern Sephardim; 3) Erfurt2: this is the one that I find most fascinating because it introduces a new aspect to the history which I had not thought about until now: a wave of Jewish migrants coming from the Southern Italian Peninsula seem to have acquired Avar-Longobardic genes since the time when the Longobards and their Avar allies invaded those territories. I am not too clear on the exact historical exigencies that brought this group to N. Europe, nor when the migration may have occured, but I believe that the data support a period of Jewish-Avar hybridization in Southern Italy (and possibly N. Italy as well) from about 650 CE until 1000 CE.

I really don’t know too much about the Avars, besides their Uralic linguistic affinities, but I suppose they could be the vector bringing the unusual East Asian genes into the Erfurt samples, via the Longobards in S. Central Italy. According to this recent study: https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.01.19.476915, the Avars received Xiongnu genes before coming into the Pannonian Plain. According to Amorim, et al, (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-06024-4) the Avars became allies of the Longobards (the sample SZ1 which is on the scatter is a later burial from a Longobard cemetery in the Pannonian area, reported in this paper). Amorim goes on to say: “the Longobard duchies of Spoleto and Benevento ruled much of the inland areas of the [Italian] peninsula…” This would have been the time of the Lombard princes Pandulf and Landulf. It is known that Benevento was a Jewish population center during this period (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevento#Jewish_history), so there appears to have been an opportunity for introgression.

I am not sure what to make of the Erfurt3s: I14897 appears to be a Sephardic-S. Italian hybrid. I13867 could be an Erfurt1a-Erfurt2 hybrid.

An interesting aspect of this model is that the Erfurt average point clusters with modern Eastern European Ashkenazim which suggests to me that we see in Erfurt, the ingredients which were later to become the Eastern Ashkenazim population.

There is much to be unraveled here and I am curious to see what models others make of these data.

rozenblatt said...

@Puree Why do you think that Avars spoke Uralic language? They much more likely spoke some Mongolic or Turkic language. We now know that genetically Avar elite was of East Asian, which agrees with historical sources, that relate Avars to Rourans. And Rourans, as it seems more likely spoke Mongolic language.

Ryan said...

Isn't this too early for Roma in Erfurt?

Davidski said...

Some of those Jews aren't from Erfurt.

They're somewhere from the east. Maybe the Balkans?

Queequeg said...

It looks like NE European i.e. something looking like Estonian, Finnish or Lithuanian, East Asian i.e. apparently Han and Siberian i.e. Nganasan components would be somehow connected, possibly inherited from the same ancestral group? Maybe something related to the Jews in the early Rus' state? Or then maybe Ancient Hungarians, if they were NE European enough?

Davidski said...

There's practically no correlation between the East Asian and Siberian components in the Erfurt Jews.

Some have the East Asian admix and others have the Siberian admix, while a few have both.

Even the correlation between the Northeast European and Siberian components isn't particularly strong.

The Erfurt sample with the highest Northeast European score doesn't show any East Asian or Siberian.

Queequeg said...

@ D and re etc.:

”There's practically no correlation between the East Asian and Siberian components in the Erfurt Jews. Some have the East Asian admix and others have the Siberian admix, while a few have both.”
I'd guess that these components simply act as substitutes in the analysis. The source population is probably not strictly Han like i.e southern or Nganasan like i.e. northern, in Asian terms.

”Even the correlation between the Northeast European and Siberian components isn't particularly strong.”
O.K., so you think that these two are anyhow correlated?

”The Erfurt sample with the highest Northeast European score doesn't show any East Asian or Siberian.”
If there's say one sample looking like a genetic Lithuanian there can still be other people with a different genetic backround.

Davidski said...

In homogeneous populations these components are very evenly distributed. In some we basically only see Siberian and in others only East Asian, while some have both components at quite specific levels.

Take a look at the Mordovians. They show both components, with the East Asian at a very minor level, and this makes sense considering their contacts with some Turko-Mongol populations.

But the Erfurt Jews are very heterogeneous, and their eastern admixture is too, which makes sense.

Erikl86 said...

@David,

Thanks for this analysis - this also corresponds to what I (and I know several others) have got using G25 models using both modern and ancients.

Although I will admit the North African levels when one model the Erfurt samples with G25 coords (using either ancient Guanches or modern Berbers as a reference) are nowhere near as high - highest is ~12-13% for the most North African shifted individual.

Unfortunately, this doesn't bring us closer into pinpointing the most plausible East Asian and/or Siberian admixture source, which in my opinion still could be:
1. Actual direct East Asian wives (via Silk Road etc.).
2. East Asian Jews.
3. Some Central Asian Jewish population which no longer exist.
4. Crimean Karaites joining Rabbinical Judaism.
5. Remnants of some Khazar converts.
6. Some East Asian-admixed Caucasian population.
7. Early Avars
8. Early Magyars

The thing is, thanks to uniparentals, we can see that Erfurt-EU seem to have partial origins in Erfurt-ME, so we can trace some part of their ancestry to Western migration as well.
No doubt though the ancestors of Erfurt-EU absorbed this East Asian in their experience East of 14th century Erfurt.

What is missing to me in both the study and here though is any West North European admixture - something French-like perhaps.

@Puree
There is no proof that Lombards converted to Judaism, plus Erfurt-ME should also have Italian ancestry, and as David shown (and all of us can also corroborate this with the G25 coords he produced) there's no link between the East Asian / Siberian to the North European admixture.
There's also no proof for any substantial Sephardic migration in Germany that early on.
Also, there doesn't seem to be any significant Sephardic subclades among these samples.
It could be remnants from South Italian Jewry which perhaps, just perhaps, had more North African ancestry in the past, regardless of Sephardi ancestry.

Davidski said...

@Erik

There are French and even eastern French samples in my run. They're similar to Poles, but with more Mediterranean ancestry.

So the Northeast European cluster can be called Northern European, while the Mediterranean cluster basically represents a western shift in North/Central Europeans.

BCBrendan said...

The samples with an East Asian component are high in Middle Eastern and lack any North African. I am also hearing about a possible South Asian-like signal.

I know it's unlikely, but is there any possibility these could be unadmixed Levites, descended in part from royal Mitanni indo-aryans?

I recall talk that the R1a carried by many Askenazi Levites could be Mitanni in origin. Who knows what the earliest indo-aryan mitanni would have looked like but I imagine today they might leave a South Asian trace.

I'm just wondering why the samples with the East Asian component look the most Middle Eastern and the least admixed

AWood said...

The patrilines are overwhelmingly of Middle Eastern origins from the sample, and the female lines are absorbed locally. I suspect the bottleneck effect of the 3-4 main Ashkenazi lines happened in western Europe (presumably France, western Germany, or even England) a few centuries before this study. What's interesting is that the EU group seems to be from a different group of Jews, and merged in with the ME one to some or a limited degree. The EU group of females obviously did not become the dominant group which indicates some degree of segregation or selection process at work here.

Joshua Lipson said...

Worth noting that the two clusters identified by Waldman et al. aren’t derived simply from their PCA positions/degree of Northern/Eastern European ancestry - but also based on dental isotope ratios. Plotted, these values create clusters that almost perfectly match the 2-cluster PCA-based scheme. While it’s clear that Erfurt-EU is somewhat heterogeneous in its components, I think the isotope evidence makes a more-than-2-cluster scheme difficult to argue for.

Erikl86 said...

@David, some modelling I did with ancients:

Target: Erfurt_ME:I13861
Distance: 2.0151% / 0.02015113 | ADC: 0.25x RC
55.8 IA_to_Roman_Levant
44.2 IA_Italic
0.0 Ancient_Greeks
0.0 Berber
0.0 East_Asian
0.0 MA_West_German
0.0 MA_West_Slav
^half n' half 😉 .

Target: Erfurt_ME:I13863
Distance: 1.6740% / 0.01673956 | ADC: 0.25x RC
44.4 IA_to_Roman_Levant
25.6 IA_Italic
16.6 Ancient_Greeks
10.2 Berber
3.2 East_Asian
0.0 MA_West_German
0.0 MA_West_Slav
^Highest Berber and high East Asian, but zero North European.

Target: Erfurt_EU:I14904
Distance: 2.6547% / 0.02654747 | ADC: 0.25x RC
23.6 IA_to_Roman_Levant
22.6 Ancient_Greeks
21.8 MA_West_German
18.0 MA_West_Slav
5.8 IA_Italic
4.4 East_Asian
3.8 Berber
^Highest East Asian is not surprisingly Erfurt-EU, but also has Berber AND a lot of West German.

All in all, what I think this means, is that just as the paper mentions, these people were more heterogenous than modern AJs.
And I think they show recent admixture events as if two different populations merged which is also what Waldman et al. suggest.

However, your analysis David, echoed in these G25 models as well, does suggest a mix of wildly, seemingly unrelated, components, with no trend connecting these components.

Davidski said...

@Joshua

The same dental isotope ratios just mean that they were born and lived in the same areas.

But at least some of their immediate ancestors look like they have very different genetic origins.

The PCA in the Waldman preprint could be better. Their ADMIXTURE analysis should be much better.

Elias said...

This is essentially evidence for Khazar admixture, no other explanation makes sense. It's mental gymnastics to think otherwise and I find it pretty amusing to look at. As for the North African excess, I would imagine this is a sign that the bulk of Italian Jewry, known mostly to have originated in Sicily, stemmed from Carthaginian Jewry.

Elias said...

"But at least some of their immediate ancestors look like they have very different genetic origins."

This shouldn't be overlooked. One groups of Jews via Italy to the Rhine, another via the Caucasus to the Steppe (where some Khazars are converted) and then along the Danube to Regensburg. Ashkenaz originally referred to Scythian, then Slavic and finally German territories: follows the route of these Steppe Jews.

Rob said...

@ Rozenblatt


“ We now know that genetically Avar elite was of East Asian, which agrees with historical sources, that relate Avars to Rourans. And Rourans, as it seems more likely spoke Mongolic language.”


If one observes closely, there is no clear historical link between the Ruran and Avars, quite the contrary Chinese sources very clearly state that the Ruran core was exterminated.
Moreover , we know Avar elite hg N was rare in iron age Mongolia
If we were to speculate, I would say that the Avar elite represent a Hunicized paraFU group

Wise dragon said...

There was a study that suggested that Ashkenazi Jews descend from 350 people. Does anyone know whether this assertion is still valid? Plus, I wonder why German Ashkenazi Jews score more "Middle Eastern" than Eastern European ones. Many German Jews have around 60% Middle Eastern ancestry which is a lot and barely German admix.

Wee e said...

@Erikl86 the Bukhara / Tajik jews had a very long history, perhaps since the time of king Cyrus. Chiefly in Bukhara itself and Samarkand. They also had an input over the centuries both from the middle east and from North Africa. They do have descendants nowadays, but not there, at least not as jews there: they were somewhat suppressed under the Emirate and finally bailed out with the advent of the USSR. Apparently there is a descendant community in New York, some in Israel and perhaps some in Ubzbekistan.
I don’t know whether this helps.

Puree said...

@rozenblatt That was merely a guess based on several pieces of information: the theory that the Avars originated from the Uars (who I believe were Uralic speakers), and the possibility that the language spoken by the elite Rourans and the common Avars may not have been the same. I also looked at Marotti's Figure 3 (https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.01.19.476915) and since the Avars seem to have emerged from that same Conqueror Core as the Mansi (Uralic speakers) that they too would have been Uralic speakers. Anyhow, I can't say for certain and it is only a side bar to the main point I was making, which is that the Logobards, who were allied with Avars, could have brought not only their own Germanic genes but also the Avar/Xiongnu/Sarmatian genes into the Benevento area. I should not have even mentioned Uralic....

Puree said...

@Erikl86 I do agree that part of the Erfurt-ME group could just as well be Italian Jews migrating to Erfurt, not necessarily early Sephardic migrants to that area. In some ways that would make the model simpler: a heterogeneous group of Italian Jews consisting of two sub-pops, one with some admixed Longobardic-Avar genes (Erfurt2) (BTW: I don't mean to suggest there was Longobardic-to-Jewish conversion, only that there was genetic mixing), and the other perhaps more recently arrived from the Levant (Erfurt1(b)), being more Middle Eastern. In Erfurt they meet a resident population of German Ashkenazim (Erfurt1(a)), and (this is new) they are met there also by a small number of Sephardic refugees (Erfurt3a: I14736 and I13867; the third Erfurt3 sample, I14897, seems to be a horse of different color, perhaps a person of more slavic origins, not sure). In time these 4 sub-pops merge into what we now call Eastern European Jewry (joined there perhaps by other populations migrating into EEs from other places, not included in this model). The fact that Erfurt 1(b) and Erfurt 2 are two different clusters does not imply they came from different places: both could have been S. Italian sub-pops, I figure. And I believe it makes some sense that there were already Jews in Erfurt who could have formed a slightly different cluster.

It always seems that new data raise even more questions....

Synome said...

@Rob

Not to stray off topic but the Avar elite from that paper clearly has a strong Baikal ancestry, much stronger than in any FU population. As far as their Y subclades, founder effects are quite possible given the commonality of the N1a subclades among them, but for example there is a Middle Avar with N3a2 M2118, a firmly Siberian haplogroup that does not occur west of the Urals. They are quite clearly a northeast Asian/Siberian population, which lines up with the Rouran Khaganate just fine. We don't need to rely on what ancient Chinese historians said, especially when we have plenty of other historical evidence in favor of the connection.

Wee e said...

Maybe I should have been more explicit in my post: Bukharan /Tajik jews was a suggestion for 3 on Erikl86 list.
It would tick a number of boxes:
1. No longer extant (although assimilated remnants may exist in Uzbekistan, and a discrete subsection of New York Jews claims descent.
2. An origin with the Persian empire, (they spoke an Iranic language too) including from Iran itself, from possibly around 500bc (even some claims for them arriving in the time of King David 500 years before that, though it’s exactly the apocryphal claim that would be made.)
3. An obvious opportunity (given large communities in Samarkand and Bukhara) for far eastern input
4. Discrete chunks of input over the centuries from North Africa, Yemen, the Levant, Western Asia and easy connection to eastern Europe, as more communities of Jewish merchants from these areas traded, and some settled. Also Turkic influence seems likely, if later than the period you’re looking at — and north Asian contact seems plausible in some of the Silk Road byways.

Wee e said...

Oh, and also, some Bukharan Jews adopted the customs and rites of the Ashkenazim in the 19th century, while still living in Central Asia, so there can well be Ashkenazim in various parts of Europe, the US and Israel who are not aware that their ancestry is not the conventional Ashkenazim story . It would be traceable to an extent through some surnames, although others will have been Russianized, Germanized etc from Tajik-language monikers.

rozenblatt said...

Slight offtopic: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History as we know it will cease to exist. It's being renamed, but judging from a description, it's essentially complete overhaul:

https://www.mpg.de/18857834/renaming-max-planck-institute-for-the-science-of-human-history

Queequeg said...

"Another important observation from our perspective is that a third subgroup of haplogroup N,
N3a2-M2118 is practically absent from Europe except for North-Western Bashkortostan, but it is
sporadically present among Hungarian conquerors and contemporary Hungarians. It is
remarkable that the subgroup N3a2-M2118 in Europe only appears in North-Western
Bashkortostan, and even there only among the Yenei tribe, but there with a relatively high
frequency."

https://epa.oszk.hu/03100/03120/00078/pdf/EPA03120_anthropologiai_kozlemenyek_2019_043-064.pdf

Otherwise, Avars may or may not have spoken something based on Pre Proto Uralic, which apparently was spoken somewhere in Siberia. They apparently can't have spoken anything based on Proto Uralic, which was born near Ural mountains. It anyways seems that Ancient Northern Asian, well represented in the areas next to or maybe actually mostly to the East of Lake Baikal is the only Siberian or East Asian genetic trait shared by all Uralic speakers. If I'm right, Avars share the same genetic feature too, even though they are somewhat more southern in Asian terms.

Puree said...

Update: I've identified a modern descendant of a yline that is quite close (if not identical: cannot say for sure due to lack of SNPs of ancient) to I13865. The modern descendant is R-A13358 and the line goes back to a rabbinical figure known as Meir ben Baruch, a 13th century (1215-1293) Talmudic scholar who officiated in Rothenburg ob der Tauber, about 115 miles from Erfurt. I13865 I believe is R-Y19847+ which is about 4 steps up the ladder from A13358. They can't be the same person because the historical figure is buried in Worms, not Erfurt. But since the remains at Erfurt are dated from about 1275-1398, the two could easily be close relatives (brothers?, father and son? close cousins? etc.)

This could have some bearing on the more general discussion of the phylogeographies because Meir is considered to be a Tzarfati (I believe), rather than an Ashkenazi. I13865 is in the Erfurt1 (ME) group so this finding is an early indicator of the Tzarfati MA genome.

Curiously, sample I14904 is also nearby on the haplotree (R-Y4364+) and could be even closer were all SNPs present in the sample. However, I14904 is in the Erfurt2 (NE) group. I'm not sure what this means but it is worth noting, I reckon.

Rob said...

@ Synome

Yes Im aware that Avars have NEA ancestry rather than Siberian, but that doesn't mean they were Rouran . And it would be quite odd to ignore the only relevant contemporary sources just so we can play along with the Rouran = Avars idea, even if some philologists have imaginatevely tried to link the two.
NEA ancestry was more widespread than Rourans, and even if the Avars were originally within the northern or northwestern sphere of Rouran influences, it's not instructive to conflate the 2. It would be like claiming any perhpheral Germanic group having once been loosely within the Hun sphere of influence in Europe - doesn;t make them Huns.
The Rouran dissipated and died, their identity erased. The Avars appear specficially when the Gokturks were attacking the Hephthalites, an opportuine rebellion from some other group.

Rob said...

in other words Avars were fleeing Turk vassals, rather than fleeing Rouran. In fact, apart from mass beheadings, sources tell us that Rouran fled to China & Korea. Not close to Byzantium.

MOCKBA said...

This recent paper concluded that genetically, the early Avar elites were the Rouran (but subjugated tribes lived alongside East of the Tisza and South of the Danube, while the Rouran descendants were located on the interfluvial
https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(22)00267-7

Davidski said...

@All

G25 coords for the new Medieval Hungarian samples...

https://drive.google.com/file/d/19N5S2T6FjLyJB_8jz71KXt9wxV3Vwmu3/view?usp=sharing

MOCKBA said...

@Rob, but should we expect as much homogeneity from Y lineages as from the autosomal DNA?? Different patrilinieal clans in an otherwise well mixed population might look unrelated on Y...

Queequeg said...

Re N-M2118 and Bashkortoshtan I should apparently also have mentioned that Magna Hungaria was probably located in the forest-steppe regions of Bashkortostan i.e. in the area of the Kushnarenkovo etc. cultures.

Rob said...

@ MOCKBA

''Different patrilinieal clans in an otherwise well mixed population might look unrelated on Y...''

Could be, but this well mixed population was already widely spread, but with subtle differences . E.g. Ruruan might have detectable Han-related admixture ?
I guess my guage was that Y-hg N is rare in Xiongnu-era Mongolia, so would be found outside the core parts of the Ruruan khanate. The fleeding proto-Avars would be from a region rich in the relevant Y-hg N1, and indications suggest regions well to the northwest, as NEA-related ancestry had already began to reach Kazakhstan by 300 BC. I get that the Ruruan explanation is economical & have nothing against it per se, but I personally would seek greater conviction for such a link (e.g. IBD, Y-hg correlation).

Copper Axe said...

Rob is correct, there are major issues with connecting the Rouran to the Avars. After having a hard look at the genetics I don't agree with the connection. I think the Avars were Mongolic speakers but the Rouran hypothesis does not simply mean that the Avars were Mongolic but that they were the elites of the Rouran fleeing away.

All the Avars are under one subclade of N that you are not going to find south of the Gobi desert at that time, where the Rouran originated. Their autosomal ancestry implies a more northern origin too. We dont have evidence of the "Pre-Avar" population within a Rouran context but even if we did that wouldnt automatically make them Rouran. The Gokturks were part of the Rouran empire also but we dont call them Rouran as well right?

Both the low status peasants and elites of the Avars had this N clade and the same autosomal ancestry and there is a sample in Kazakhstan that is their literal cousin but it is from the 4th century AD, contemporsry to the formation of the Rouran (on the other side of the Gobi desert) and outside of Rouran territory.

Copper Axe said...

@Davidski

Thank you for the Magyar period coordinates, I will have a good look at them in a few days.

Synome said...

@Copper Axe
@Rob

Thanks for the responses. I think we can reach a decent middle ground here. I didn't mean to imply that the Avars were necessarily descendants of the Rouran elite, only that they were likely part of the Rouran steppe empire. Indeed the terminology for steppe confederations can be very slippery because of the indistinct barriers between political coalitions and ethnic identity. E.G. before they struck out on their own the ancestors of the Gokturks were probably part of the Xiongnu polity and may have identified as Xiongnu during that time period. But I agree that the Avars were more likely to be a peripheral group from the Rouran hegemony that then fled the Gokturks and not the actual fleeing Rouran core.

LivoniaG said...

It just takes a quick look at David's inferred ancestral chart to see how "Mediterranean" this community was. Most of those blue/purple bands are much deeper than the Lebanese and more than match the Southern Italian.

A Jewish group in Germany that is so deep in "western Mediterranean" (along with Middle Eastern) may show traces of eastern ancestry. But the big picture points I think to Iberia. And maybe it's older than Sephardic and later migrations.

At the start of the Iron Age, there were already Semitic language speakers from the Levant in Iberia. Maybe this suggests that the Jewish presence there is quite a bit older than medieval times.
I mean how do you get more "Mediterranean" than Southern Italian?

Gaska said...



@Livonia G

Semitic language speakers at the start of the iron age in Iberia? really?
You mean the Phoenicians? They only founded Gades and Ibiza and some small commercial factories, their genetic trace in Spain is non-existent. What do they have to do with the medieval Jews of Erfurt, 2.000 years later?- The uniparental markers of the latter, are heterogeneous and those that are not Central European or Asian point to Italy, not Iberia. The North African percentages have to do with the genetic variability of the Italian Jews because at that time the Sephardim still did not have excessive problems to live in Iberia and therefore significant migrations did not take place.

Matt said...

OT: Some Latvian Iron Age with adna - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2352409X22001821?via%3Dihub

Not sure if the genotypes will be public.

capra internetensis said...

The Xiongnu from Buryatia are closest thing to the 'pure' early Avars in G25 afaict. N-F4205 peaks there today but of course that could be due to later events. Those Xiongnu had only 1/4 N iirc (and no call for F4205).

Samuel Andrews said...

I published a new video about how Yamnaya were not the Proto-Indo Europeans.

Yamanya were NOT the Proto-Indo Europeans
https://youtu.be/rpGs1UQa9EE

My videos are getting more professional. I think it is worth the watch.

I'm curious what you guys think. I might have gone too far in section "How my theory changes things." But there is some truth to it. If Yamnaya is not Corded Ware's ancestor, it would change the overall storyline in significant ways.

LivoniaG said...

Gaska said...
"You mean the Phoenicians? They only founded Gades and Ibiza and some small commercial factories, their genetic trace in Spain is non-existent. What do they have to do with the medieval Jews of Erfurt, 2.000 years later?"

Respectfully, Gaska -- I only have a vague idea of what "Mediterranean" means in David's chart, but there's a lot of it in the Erfurt Jewish samples. At least half of them more than "Southern Italian." So I speculated. Not saying this proves anything.

The Bible says that, at certain points, Solomon, etc, had very close economic ties with the Phoenicians. It says they sent out joint merchant fleets. So this part is not completely out of the blue.

And scholars like José Luis López Castro describe very intensive Phoenician settlements in Iberia that lasted 100s of years. Jewish merchants might have been there.

Now I don't know how David's "inferred ancestry" applies to residents of Iberia, but my guess is that they would be very "Mediterranean."

If that's true -- it may not be -- than it looks like the community at Erfurt shared some kind of broad ancestry with Iberians. I guess even going back 2000 years. Maybe?



Rob said...

@ Capra

have a go with 'KAZ_Hun-Sarmatian''

Gaska said...


@Livonia

Ok, you were just speculating because you have read about an excess of "Mediterranean ancestry" in some Erfurt Jews who apparently do not have their origin in Italy because, according to Davidski, this excess can only have its origin in the western Mediterranean while the excess North African component must mean migrations from that region.

That Mediterranean component exists in all European countries to a greater or lesser extent and reaches very high levels in Sardinians (82-92%) and Basques (>74%) followed by south Frenchs (>70%), Northern Italians (Bergamo >50%), the rest of Spaniards (48-60%), some Erfurt jews (40-55%), Ashkenazi Jews (26-35%) Sephardic Jews (26-30%), Hungarians and Czechs (26-35%) etc etc...In my opinion this excess of Mediterranean component is not due to Iberian migrations but confirms the migrations of Italian or French Jews to Germany and also confirms their genetic heterogeneity (hence the small North African component)

Therefore, nothing to do with Semitic populations in Iberia (Phoenicians, Jews). Note that this North African component exists in many Erfurt Jews (both in those who have an excess of Mediterranean component and in those who do not). The Phoenicians in the western Mediterranean were a few traders and settlers who mixed with North Africans so that they quickly lost much of their Levantine signal and became North Africanized Semites. In the Phoenician sites analyzed in Spain (Gades and Ibiza) only European uniparental markers have been found so far, which confirms that these traders mixed with local women.We are waiting for a work to be published on the oldest Phoenician necropolis of Gades, I suppose that there they will find Phoenician Semites and it will help to explain their mixture with the autochthonous populations

Matt said...

@Sam, no comment on the video but if part the idea is that Yamnaya didn't speak late Proto-Indo European (the ancestor for all the living IE languages), then the timing is not good, as Reich's just basically hinted to us that Armenian is from a Yamnaya derived culture and not a Corded Ware derived culture and Armenian is LPIE.

So you could argue that both Yamnaya and early CWC are really just one people linguistically, with divergent burial practices and clan ydna, that's still defensible, but it seems untenable now to argue that Yamnaya spoke a divergent para-proto late Indo-European.

Gaska said...

Harvard and Max Planck never made Yamnaya solely responsible for extending ALL Indo-European languages but only some of them. In this sense, they were never supporters of the steppe hypothesis as understood by Gimbutas and his followers. This left open the possibility that other cultures and other lineages were responsible for the spread of IE into Anatolia and even the Balkans. Genetic data from these regions and the linkage of Hittites and Mycenaeans with the Y chromosome J2 seem to confirm a different spread (both in time and in relation to the uniparental markers involved). I have always thought that Z2103 had to appear in Greece, Anatolia and Armenia to confirm their Yamnaya/Catacomb linkage and I guess they will have found something in those 731 samples they have to publish. Evidently when Reich speaks of the southern arc he refers to an origin of the PIE in Iran so I suppose that he will be able to demonstrate the linkage of the Iranian or Levantines with the Yamnaya culture (second wave?), otherwise I do not understand that he affirms it so categorically.In any case, if all of that is true then Yamnaya would be totally irrelevant to the history of IE ergo Delenda est Yamnaya

Kelteminar said...

I think it's very probable that the Avars spoke a Finno-Ugric language, probably a relative of Hungarian.

To be honest, the earlier theories about Hungarian language seems all wrong to me, and taking into account all the newly discovered archeologic and genetic facts about the Scytho-Siberians, it seems very possible to me that Hungarian-related languages were once more widespread in the Scytho-Siberian world than we thought.

Maybe these haplogroups and the language were introduced in Mongolia by some scytho-siberian groups before the Xiongnu era (as Xiongnus emerged after the arrival of Scytho-Siberian tribes from the west.)

Also, there are at least two Avar groups in historical sources, one of them arrived in Europe with the Sabirs way before the Rouran's fall, and the later arrived after 550. Moreover, Byzantine texts say these late Avars spoke the same language as the Ogurs.

Matt said...

Very off topic but might be interesting to some:

Fine-scale structure of y-dna in the whole UK Biobank sample from as far as I can tell is the first publication on the topic: https://datashare.ed.ac.uk/handle/10283/4450 - "Prevalence of Y chromosome haplogroups by area of birth in UK Biobank" - 2022-06-06 - "Data pertaining to the publication "Limited effect of Y chromosome variation on coronary artery disease and mortality in UK Biobank". Phylogenetic analysis was performed using yhaplo v1.1.2 and 166 genotyped SNPs, which identified 89 haplogroups among 152,186 unrelated White British men from UK Biobank.". Very large sample here.

The relevant medical genetics paper seems unpublished as of yet.

Presented as maps, e.g.:

R1b-S128 (aka R1b-L151?): https://tinyurl.com/5y6j3ku4 . Irish associated subclade S116 peaks in Western Scotland - https://tinyurl.com/2x7jvmbr . Some other R1b-M269 subclades seem to peak in Scotland too, but I could see any peaking in Wales. It looks like Wales has a diverse set within S128 not marked by any more recent founder expansions?

E1b1b-V13 (hotspot, at a low level, in North Wales for some reason): https://tinyurl.com/3r9whusx

I1 (peak at about 17% in Northern East Anglia): https://tinyurl.com/3szv75v7 (probably around 12-15% in England as a whole)

I2 (around 7%, more or less, in most places without strong geographical peak): https://tinyurl.com/yc8f5dky

North London looks like a zone of reduced GHIJK, since it seems to have a reduction in everything under F-M89 (https://tinyurl.com/3ca5pnf5). Similar pattern around some other cities.

Samuel Andrews said...

@matt,

Yamnaya could not have spoken LPIE if they aren't the ancestor of all IEs

The common ancestor Corded ware and Yamnaya is who spoke LPIE.

Unless yamnaya and Corded ware spoke the exact same dialect of the same language.

In that sense I guess you can both of them spoke the common ancestor of all languages.

But tius would be weird because each gave rise to different ie languages, neither gave rise to all of them.

Rob said...

@ Gaska

Maria Gimbutas was a woman.

LivoniaG said...

Blogger Samuel Andrews said...
"I published a new video about how Yamnaya were not the Proto-Indo Europeans.
https://youtu.be/rpGs1UQa9EE"

Always check the expiration date.

LivoniaG said...

Matt wrote:
"Reich's just basically hinted to us that Armenian is from a Yamnaya derived culture and not a Corded Ware derived culture and Armenian is LPIE."

This is based on new dna from Armenia? Is this supposed to be a migration that happened when and from where? LPIE doesn't exactly seem to make sense.

Linguistically, it hard to separate the Armenian language from either early Greek or IndoIranian. And are we now ok with IE crossing the Caucasus?



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

@Matt

Thanks a lot for sharing that, very interesting indeed.

Matt said...

@Livonia, the alternative is that a post Yamnaya descendent culture crossed that Caucasus, founded a community rich in Yamnaya ydna and steppe ancestry and this just happens to be in the same place we find Armenian language later on from pure coincidence, even though the language is from somewhere totally different. Not very believable.

Matt said...

@Sam, yeah, there may have been some slight dialect divergences emerging already, but LPIE is dated to the time when wheel vocabulary is established, so it would have been the sort of differences emerging in 500-1000 years. If we can reconstruct a history where we could confidently place, say, Germanic+Celtic+Balto-Slavic under early CWC and Greek-Armenian under Yamnaya/Catacomb, we could have some ideas about what sort of dialect differences might have begun to emerge, although contact effects between languages after communities "split off", would complicate this.

Rob said...

agree. it would be a complex web of shared/ retained isoglosses in addition to secondary contacts.

StP said...

The Indo-Europeanist L. Bednarczuk (Języki indoeuropejskie /Indo-European languages/, vol. I, 1986, p. 38) reasoning that part of the population of the original kentum dialect did not make any common innovations, and even could not make them, because apparently right after leaving their common homeland, PIE broke up and migrated, creating separate centum languages.
The remaining PIE population, still remaining in the geographic center of PIE and in the original linguistic community, made several satemic innovations in the original kentum and only after them split up, migrating, creating separate languages of the satem dialect.

Matt said...

Another off topic, but may be of interest to anyone interested in North Asian stuff:

Recent published paper by Harald Ringbauer/Yilei Huang mentions off hand that they tested their method of identifying contamination against a set of samples from an unpublished paper:

"To test our method on even older samples" (than a set of <8000 year old Iberian samples) "which are genetically more distant from the modern reference panel" (a European reference panel) "we additionally tested both methods on 60 male Eurasian hunter-gatherer samples (Yu et al., in preparation) ... The collection of 60 hunter-gatherers is unpublished data and will become publicly available with the publication of this data (Yu et al., in preparation)."

This author is probably He Yu from the Max Planck and her page indicates that one of her major projects is "Population dynamics of Baikal hunter-gatherers from Neolithic to Bronze Age" - https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/advance-article/doi/10.1093/bioinformatics/btac390/6607584?login=false

And she has already published a set on this region - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009286742030502X

So it's possible this could be a large and old new set of HG genomes from North Asia, which could be older than 8000 years. But she also has some authorship on other projects including European Paleolithic/Mesolithic HG so this could be related to that - https://www.researchgate.net/profile/He-Yu-22

StP said...

I must explain here that L. Bednarczuk believes, however, that "unlike the satem group, the centum languages, due to their peripheral location (and contacts with non-Indo-European languages), have never formed a community and do not have common innovations" (p. 39)

LivoniaG said...

Matt said:
"Yamnaya descendent culture crossed that Caucasus, founded a community rich in Yamnaya ydna and steppe ancestry and this just happens to be in the same place we find Armenian language"
The linguists have already studied Armenian to a fare-thee-well.
Comparative studies with other IE languages are already exhaustive.
The latest try at it was H Martirosyan The place of Armenian in the Indo-European language family (2013)

The "core" IE attributes found in Armenian are very Greek and very Indo-Iranian.
A lot of "borrowed substrate" is very Mediterranean.

What is strikingly strange about Armenian linguistics is that it has borrowed a lot of late features from other IE languages even though it was relatively isolated.

"considerable number of lexical correspondences with European branches
of the Indo-European language family, a large portion of which too should be explained in terms of substrate rather than Indo-European heritage."

If Armenian "culture" evolved directly from Yamamaya "culture" it sure took the long road from where Yamamaya was located.

And it looks like it was at some point the same dialect as Indo-Iranian.
"the Indo-Iranians then moved eastwards, while the Proto-Armenians and
Proto-Greeks remained in a common geographical region a long period and developed
numerous shared innovations."

The linguistics does not support the idea that Armenian just crossed the Caucasus.

What you are saying linguistically instead suggests that the Pre-Greek language crossed the Black Sea to get to Greece.

LivoniaG said...

"Population dynamics of Baikal hunter-gatherers from Neolithic to Bronze Age"

Hunter-gatherers from the Bronze Age.
This is a terminological problem.

Samuel Andrews said...

@LivoniaG,

😁😁😁

Puree said...

Returning for a sec to the topic of the thread, and after some more specific ydna hgs became available, I now believe the Erfurt samples have given us an unprecedented glimpse into a Medieval Tzarfati-Ungvari-Ashkenazi dynamic, in the process of forming something new, and consisting primarily of a) Medieval Tzarfatim (French Jews re-located to Germany, Austria, and Hungary from French territories (which include some of Catalunya back then), 2) Medieval Ashkenazim already in Germany from earlier times, 3) Medieval Ungvarim (Hungarian Jews, living (and mixing) in the Pannonian area for some time (this being the source of trace eastern ethnicities previously discussed). These three sub-pops and others eventually blend into the modern Eastern European Ashkenazic composition. A revised and annotated scatter chart summarizes this better than mere words can:
https://1drv.ms/u/s!AuwT-4qnkJLBnVu3UA7YAT6ndXmi?e=i7gJ36

Rob said...

Hunter Gatherers existed as late as the metal ages . Eg Pitted Ware

Matt said...

@Livonia, I have no confidence in whether anyone can work out whether Armenian had a family relationship with Indo-Iranian or was subject to some mutual influence. I don't think there is a strong consensus on that point. The most common reconstruction, found in trees focusing more on grammar and phonology (Ringe, Warnow) or core lexicon (Kassian) is of a family relationship with Greek.

Or to work out a migratory route, from linguistic features.

AlexDeLarge said...

Looking at the spreedsheet, it's obvious that those South Italians are actually all Sicilians, with only 4 samples from the mainland, hence the elevated North African. Davidski should rename those samples "South Italian/Sicilian" or simply make 2 separate clusters.

Davidski said...

Sicilians are also South Italians, and they don't have significantly more North African admix than, say, Italians from Calabria.

Also, the point I'm making is that the Erfurt Jews have more North African admix than South Italians, not less, so having the Sicilians in the bar graph doesn't change anything.

StP said...

@Davidski

D. Behar connects such Jews / sefard / from Morocco and Iberia

Erikl86 said...

@Davidski and all, the elevated North African could be connected to Kairouan:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Kairouan

Kairouan, Sicily and Narbonne (S. France) had important centers of Halakhatic and Rabbinic centers roughly at the same time, and could have exchanged not only ideas but people. And from Sicily and S. France, the connection to Ashkenaz is pretty clear.

capra internetensis said...

@Rob

Thanks! I was using some crappy average based on the borked labelling from Damgaard. 'Hun-Sarmatian' DA20, rich Korgantas culture burial (11 horse sacrifices), 366-176 BC, is close to the Avars. KBO001 (Korgantas culture) and BRE002 (Pazyryk) also from same general area and time period fall into this group too; all of them Q1b-L330. Not that this is a particularly tight or exclusive cluster by any means.

DA95, AD 241-530, is the only one with N1c-F4205, he is not super far from the Avar group either. The other 'Hun-Sarmatian', DA27, AD 265-539, R1a-Z93, is much more Yellow River-shifted, closer to the Hun Asian Core.

So yeah, not surprisingly this kind of autosomal profile was not very localized. Finding the specific Y hg might be the best way to find the ancestral Avars in the east. I am really looking forward to the results of the new Y DNA capture stuff they have, so far we've only seen the Neolithic hg H paper but I hope they are deploying it left right and centre.

Samuel Andrews said...

@Matt,

About whether Corded Ware & Yamanya spoke the same dialect of the same language.

Something to consider is Corded Ware and Yamanya may have originated in locations within the PC STeppe which were far away from each other.

What I suggested in the video, and which I think Davidski agrees with, is Corded Ware's ancestors probably lived in southwest Ukraine before moving northwest. And Yamanya's ancestors probably originated in the Repin culture, somewhere in Russia, before moving across the Steppe.

If that is the case, then the image of them being apart of the same language community right up until their respective expansions would be wrong.

Davidski said...

I don't subscribe to the theory that Yamnaya pushed Corded Ware out of the steppe, because I don't think it fits the available facts.

The main problem is that Corded Ware was adapted to the forest zone, and very successful there, so the chances that it got pushed out of the steppe aren't good.

I think what happened is that Yamnaya and Corded Ware expanded from the same population that lived in the border zone between the steppe and forest somewhere, except Corded Ware went north and Yamnaya went south.

I discussed that here...

https://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2021/07/on-origin-of-corded-ware-people.html

So I don't know about Repin, but I'm pretty sure that both Corded Ware and Yamnaya are from Sredny Stog.

Samuel Andrews said...

@Matt,

Hey can you resend me that image from the powerpoint showing Hungarian Yamnaya Y DNA results?

I forgot to save it the last time you sent me it.

A few people in the comment section of my Yamnaya video have asked for it.

Samuel Andrews said...

Yamanay did occupy land that Corded Ware's ancestors used to occupy. Did they not? This is reason to believe they pushed them off the land.

But the main reason I suggested Yamanya pushed Corded Ware out, is the moment Corded Ware moved north, was the same time Yamanya moved west into southwest Ukraine. Circa 3000 BC. The timing matches up.

Samuel Andrews said...

Btw, I am not really serious about this idea Yamanya pushed Corded Ware out of the Steppe.

I am just suggesting it.

Which is why in the video I said "I suspect" this is what happened. And why I said "I am not seriously suggesting Yamanya bullied Corded Ware like that."

I am not really serious about anything do with the details of the origins of Corded Ware & Yamanya. Whether Yamanay comes from Repin, where in the Steppe they originated, I am only confident that they are two different Indo European tribes.

Samuel Andrews said...

You make a good point that Corded Ware was already adapted to the forest zone. This is contrary to how in my video I suggested they didn't want to move to the forest zone and only did so because their brother Yamnaya forced them to.

But once again, I only suggested this is what happened.

Davidski said...

@Samuel

Yamanay did occupy land that Corded Ware's ancestors used to occupy. Did they not? This is reason to believe they pushed them off the land.

I don't know.

But the point I'm making is very important and should be obvious, which is why I'm surprised that many people have gone for these other less obvious ideas, like Yamnaya pushing Corded Ware out, or Corded Ware being a Yamnaya underclass (as per David Anthony).

Successful adaptation to ecological zones is something so important that it's a do or die for animals and people.

So considering that Corded Ware was so successful in the forests, it must have had time and opportunities to learn to live there.

If Corded Ware was pushed out by Yamnaya into the forests, it would have become extinct IMHO.

Samuel Andrews said...

If Corded Ware was totally adapted to the forest zone, this is important, For a reason I tried to communicate in the video.

Because, the Harvard lab likes to talk a lot about how the Indo Europeans had a lifestyle adapted to the Steppe. They were the first people to live on the Steppe not along rivers. They were the first Steppe nomads.

They describe Corded Ware as these Steppe people who moved to the forest zone and then learned to live in a brand new habitat.

But you, describe Corded Ware as people who had always been "forest people." As people who had a lifestyle, that developed for generatons before their expansion, designed for the forest zone,

This means the narrative of PIEs being Steppe people, Steppe nomads is wrong. It means only one IE tribe were truly Steppe Nomads, Yamanya.

This if true, is a big change in the storyline. I have been thinking this myself and tried to communicate it in the video.

Samuel Andrews said...

@Davidski,

I really have had similar thoughts.

I communicated in my video that Corded Ware were "masters of the forest zone" and Yamnaya were "masters of the Steppe zone."

Davidski said...

Sredny Stog sites are located in the forest steppe as well as the steppe.

So there might be a clue in that.

Samuel Andrews said...

I had similar thoughts because of this blog post from you, where you said the same stuff you are now.

https://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2021/07/on-origin-of-corded-ware-people.html

So kudos to you for doing that. I think you are on to something.

LivoniaG said...

Blogger Matt said…
"@Livonia, I have no confidence in whether anyone can work out whether Armenian had a family relationship with Indo-Iranian or was subject to some mutual influence.

Matt - Respectfully. Armenian had to have a family relationship with Indo-Iranian because they are both IE.

You mention the Ringe and Warnow trees — the trees I’m aware of show one split when Indo-Iranian branches away from the Greek Armenian branch.
No other IE language branches are anywhere as close.

Celtic, Germanic and Hittite are all relatively distant from the branch that includes Greek/Armenian/Indo-Iranian on Ringe’s trees

And that points to the problem of Armenian coming out of Yamamaya — it implies the Indo-Iranian branch came out of Yamamaya.
I don’t think that feels acceptable based on how the genetics say Indo-Iranian was supposed to have spread.

Cladistically early Armenian almost looks like it is from a early Greek colony — like Greek speakers at some point moved there from Greece and then were heavily influenced by Persian -- a lot like Romanian, sitting in somehow the wrong place.

Part of the problem is the language is only first attested in 500 AD from writing by maybe a Caucasian polyglot.
and a lot of early documentation in Armenian comes a short while later from the “Kingdom of Armenia” which was located not in Armenia but in southwest Anatolia.

And of course, Armenian should look a lot less like Greece if they parted around 3000 BCE up on the steppes.

LivoniaG said...

I wrote:
"Population dynamics of Baikal hunter-gatherers from Neolithic to Bronze Age"
Hunter-gatherers from the Bronze Age.
This is a terminological problem.

Rob said...
Hunter Gatherers existed as late as the metal ages . Eg Pitted Ware

Hunter-gatherers existed in the Atomic Age in some places.

One practice is to identity HG populations by earlier ancestry (e.g.WHG)
so even after the Bronze Age had arrived, the ancestry is still WHG

The other is to identify HG populations by contemporaneous lack of metal use
If the Baikal hunter-gatherers were still hunter-gatherers, then they weren't in the Bronze Age.

Matt said...

@Sam, here are those slides again: https://imgur.com/a/JmH0yDK . I've also included a copy of the PCA from David Anthony's talk showing the cline of admixed Yamnaya Hungary individuals, in case this is of interest to your readers/watchers.

Matt said...

@Livonia, well Ringe's tree has Armenian in a clade with Greek and Indo-Iranian in a clade with Balto-Slavic, but does not support a closer family relationship of Armenian with Indo-Iranian.

Kassian's tree has a simultaneous divergence of Albanian, Greek-Armenian, Indo-Baltic and Germano-Celt-Italic.

There's no family of Armenian with Iranian languages in either.

I just don't fundamentally think it seems parsimonious to suggest that we have this infusion of ydna and autosomal steppe ancestry to the Armenian Highland, the y-dna is later associated to Armenian speakers, and the area is associated with Armenian language and polity.... But this is just coincidence and the language came later via Greece.

I would guess that Greek-Armenian diverged from each other in separate movements from the steppe zone around 2300BCE, and the similarities of these with Indo-Baltic languages are due to contact both before and after 2300 BCE.

@Sam; agree I can't say they were 100% the same community. But if we have;

1) likely descendents from Yamnaya all the way down to Armenian, then we know that Yamnaya was speaking a LPIE language which is constrained by wheel vocab to have bene around 3700-3500 BCE at earliest, only 500-600 years before the first CWC in Central Europe (800 at most).

2) Ringbauer showing direct fourth cousins between Yamnaya and early Corded Ware.

Then I don't think they could have been separated by much more than 500 years and would have been in mutual linguistic (and likely religious and cultural) influence. I can't say how mutually intelligible the languages might've been though as different rates of change can hold over that time period.

This is also the case if it's likely that Yamnaya is responsible for some paleo-Balkan languages.

Rob said...

There is the curious case of Yhg I2c in the Iron Age Armenian ..
Although present in Barcin N , it seems to disappear in Anatolia. Seems to be a Central European / Balkan connection . Not 100% sure how it got there

StP said...

I think now IE's homeland in Europe and IE's migration route to South Asia could help determine the severe COVID-19 samples :-)
http://www.tropie.tarnow.opoka.org.pl/images/covid-germany2022-04-18.jpg

In these COVID-19 samples, the western border of the PIE with which the Neanderthal Vindija (Croatia) haplotype was associated, was likely to be revealed, creating a susceptibility to infection and the risk of severe COVID especially for people from Central-Eastern Europe to India and Bangladesh, and of the Neanderthal himself probably led to extinction (Zeberg and Paabo 2020; Marszalek, Kosmos 70, 3, 2021)

LivoniaG said...

@Matt
Ringe Warnow Taylor, Indo‐European and Computational Cladistics(2002)
page 87 the nearest clade to Greek-Armenian by two branchings are the Indo-Iranian clades.

This tree says the nearest relative of Greek-Armenian is Indo-Iranian.

By this tree, Late PIE should have been history by the time of the branching, which already was separated into Celtic, Germanic and Anatolian. By this, the Greek Armenian clade are well past Late PIE.

If Armenian speakers crossed the Caucasus to get to Armenian, they took the long way home.


StP said...

@All
Archaeologists hardly confirm that the CWC population is forestry people. They write rather that steppe-forest areas were their ecumena for cattle breeding. And if forest for cattle, it is rather forest glades (polish: polana). A common ethnonym among the Slavs is the name "Polanie". The etymology of the word for "broad, arable plat, cultivable land" is difficult and erroneous.

"Polanie", it is easily associated with the word "polana" (forestry clearing). The "Polana" is an empty area among forests. Certainly not from the word "pole" (i.e. arable field), but from "polana" (forestry clearing) come. The Latin variations of the name of Poland: "Polania, Polenia, Polonia", i.e. from the word "polana" (forestry clearing).

The 15th-century Hungarian historian Antonius Bonfini (in R.H.D.) revealed the old wording of the name of the country, the birthplace of the Polish hermit Andreas Zoerad, who came to Hungary under the authority of St. Stefan: “ex ea Sarmatie parte, quam POLANIAM dicunt”.
This tradition of living in forest clearings probably dates back to the CWC era.

Matt said...

@Livonia, sure here's that figure: https://imgur.com/a/tijGsPX

The branching order is like I said - Greek-Armenian splits from Indo-Baltic.

The point is that these are all late PIE languages, not that some developments could've happened in Greek-Armenian which are shared in other branches, which may be due to contact or family relationships. Armenian and Indo-Iranian, nor Greek-Armenian, do not have a special relationship with Indo-Iranian compared to Balto-Slavic, in this tree.

There are other trees which are possible in any case: https://armchairprehistory.com/2018/01/30/words-and-rules-and-the-contrasting-family-trees-of-indo-european/

Vladimir said...

For the later branches of the Greek-Armenian, Thracian, Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic languages, it is important to have the genetics of the Babino culture. There is a suspicion that, unlike the monolithic Z93 in Abashevo, Babino was a mix of Z93 and Z2103, and in its northwestern territories, where the Komarovo culture was subsequently formed, Z282 is also possible.

Matt said...

Another off-topic (if Davidski will allow it) but might interest folks:
A podcast ("History Extra" - https://www.historyextra.com/period/roman/fall-roman-britain-empire-what-happened-why/) on "End of Roman Britain", giving a preview of new adna work claiming large scale replacement with Anglo-Saxon migration, in England.

Link: https://media.immediate.co.uk/volatile/sites/7/2022/06/HistoryExtraRomanBritainE8-44d1bc2.mp3?_=1

I know these findings were also presented at a conference and shared on Anthrogenica, where the claim has been that large scale Anglo-Saxon migration was accompanied by or followed by large scale migration from France which sort of masked out some of the signal of migration in an almost exactly balancing amount.

I'm quite skeptical of this simply because G25 shows the England_IA and England_Roman projecting so close on a neighbour joining tree to England and Wales, and these are almost completely preferred as donors over Denmark_IA, France_Grand_Est_IA (northern France), and even England_Saxon. It also seems to be asking a large coincidence to have an exactly balancing pattern of French+Germanic donations that pushes back to the EEF:HG:Steppe ratios of England_IA. PCA Compression should also be relatively minimal as an issue for G25 here - the G25 can find fine-structure between present day Britain and continental North Europe, the samples would be within the bounds of present day EEF:WHG:Steppe ratios, and generally not too distant.

So possibly something has gone awry with the complex haplotype based models, which are well able to find structure beyond unlinked analyses, and able to find immediate relationships, but have never really been particularly good at admixture proportions and admixture models. I think by now we all have major reservations about Chromopainter based mixture models.

However, it is possible there could be some quality issue which make the Roman and IA England samples better on G25 - the England_Roman could be particularly high quality (indeed England_Saxon which was sampled similarly is preferred as a donor to Denmark over the Denmark_IA set) and the England_IA set from Patterson are very numerous, which should remove noise. They are selected to be closer to England today because of high quality or sample count or something like this. So I will wait and see.

Rob said...

Might be something to it, although surprising if it as weightly as Anglo-Saxons
Archaeologists have always drawn distinctions in south of the Thames, where distinctive material culture - barbarian but rooted in Roman provincial forms (inhumation and certain types of quoit brooches; rather than obviously heathen cremation & A-S metalwork to the north)'. From Wiki - ''The brooches, the belt-fittings and the style, are mainly found in high-status burials in southern-eastern England, south of the Thames, and right across northern France, dating from the middle quarters of the 5th century''
Vera Evison in the 1960s had suggested that Salian Franks played a major role in orchestrating the 5th century invasions of Britain.

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

Maybe North German/ Dane like = Anglo, and French like = Saxon

Davidski said...

French like = Saxon

Nope. Both the Angles and Saxons were like Scandinavians.

https://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2018/09/celtic-vs-germanic-europe.html

LivoniaG said...

@Matt - thanks for the reply.
I appreciate what you are saying. What doesn't feel parsimonious about Yamamaya speakers as a source of both Greek and Armenians is a least partly the Caucasus as a barrier. There's always the question of why languages could cross to the south, after years of Mallory saying over and over again for 25 years crossing to the north was impossible.

If one accepts that slammed door both way, north and south, then pick another way for them to get so far from Greece. I do like river and sea faring as a plan B route planting early Greeks on the east coast of the Black Sea where in time they become Armanians. Not sure how that settles the R1b-Z2103 problem. Maybe Iranians might have enough early relatedness with early cousin Armenians to transfer cousin genes but not a complete Iranian language to Armenian speakers.

In any case thanks for your time and obvious rational thinking about this stuff

LivoniaG said...

@Rob wrote
"Vera Evison in the 1960s had suggested that Salian Franks played a major role in orchestrating the 5th century invasions of Britain."
This idea or something like it should get more attention.
Along with how many Saxons were already signed up and in England as auxiliary soldiers and camp followers or merchants BEFORE things fell apart. How much was migration before it became invasion.

Matt said...

@Livonia, likewise, I do think you do raise significant questions here with how the linguistic phylogeny might (or not) relate to the pulses of population migration that are seen in dna, not that certain how to resolve them.

....

Re; Saxon migration again, another comment back on Anthrogenica by Ryukendo was that the models didn't just use Chromopainter haplotypes, but used qpAdm and PCA to check. OK, that would make sense, although Sayers did only mention haplotypes in the podcast above!

However, I did have a lot of doubts. G25 is pretty good already at distinguishing continental Germanic ancestry from Iron Age Great Britain. Is more or better distinction going to result really from much larger sample sizes of present day people?

E.g. to try and totally get around the sampling issue, well, we don't have very many Iron Age Scandinavian samples, but we do have 160 Viking Age Scandinavian samples.

So what I did next was I took three averages, England Iron Age (All) (n=247, average date ~200 BCE), France Iron Age (All) (n=27, average date ~300 BCE), and the combined Sweden Denmark and Norway Viking Age (All) (n=160, average date ~1000 BCE).

(England IA lumps together several samples from early to late IA and some may overlap Roman period, but aren't the samples specifically labelled as England_Roman in the G25 datasheets).

Those averages should be pretty rock solid and not distorted by random sample error. But then to get around any remaining variation in random position on G25, and any variation caused by EEF:WHG:Steppe proportions, what I did was simulate a "cloud" of 16 points per average which were 1 SD around the average. Visually on Vahaduo: https://imgur.com/a/6gR7Ybt

Then using those in Vahaduo for modern populations I get:

Population, France_IA, England_IA, Scandinavia_VA
------------------------------------------
English, 11.3, 55.2, 33.5
English Cornwall, 11.4, 57.8, 30.8
Irish, 2, 70.8, 27.2
Scottish, 5.4, 53, 41.6
Welsh, 13.7, 56.5, 29.8
Danish, 2.7, 13.2, 84.1
Icelandic, 0, 22.8, 77.2
French_Brittany, 28.1, 52.0, 20.0
French_Nord, 70.6, 5.9, 23.5
Published England Saxon on G25 (n=8), 0.8, 25.7, 73.5
Published England Roman on G25 (n=9), 6.6, 61.2, 32.2 (Interestingly, these samples, were gladiators who may have been not strictly local? and the model places them as not just from England_IA...)
----------

(They're also very similar proportions with just the averages, but the simulated cloud should reduce the concern that some variation that's not represented by averaging breaks fits without introducing the problem of uneven sampling).

So I still have trouble seeing it; unless there's a very large difference in these guys continental North European ancestry samples from the Scandinavian VA samples we have, or their France IA from the published, or they're projecting very differently on a very different PCA. But G25 should be quite good at detecting this fine structure already.

(Anyway, enough of these tangents, I will stop distracting from people discussing the Erfurt Jews).

Davidski said...

@All

So considering the crazy genetic heterogeneity of these Erfurt samples, as revealed by my Admixture run and the G25, what are the chances that the Ashkenazi founder effect actually pre-dates the 14th century?

Gaska said...

The Erfurt Jews had been away from their homeland for more than 1,000 years, and had Italian, African, Iberian, French, German, Asian.... blood. Zero chances

StP said...

QDavidski

Is it not possible to deduce a basin from the Ashkenazi igrek? See D. Behar 2017.

Garvan said...

Matt,
France_IA, England_IA & Scandinavia_VA are more or less in a straight line in he graphic you linked, and because of this my own efforts to make admixture estimates in the past have always proved too sensitive to selected samples. I like your results, and wondered if you would share the PCA of your simulated pops.


Thanks.

LivoniaG said...

Davidski said
"@All So considering the crazy genetic heterogeneity of these Erfurt samples, as revealed by my Admixture run and the G25, what are the chances that the Ashkenazi founder effect actually pre-dates the 14th century?"

Does this make sense? This heterogeneity shows there were different colonies of populations that traveled and came together in Erfurt. Any of those colonies may have actually been quite homogeneous. So, somewhere besides -- but maybe nearby Erfurt -- there is a much older line of descent that would already be establishing the founder effect? Does that make sense?

LivoniaG said...

@Matt - this has a fascinating side implication.

If "English IA"/"Irish" is very "Celtic"
then "French Nord" is very "not Celtic"

Why are all the "Gauls" in French Nord not "Celtic?"

France_IA, England_IA, Scandinavia_VA

Irish, 2, 70.8, 27.2

French_Brittany, 28.1, 52.0, 20.0
French_Nord, 70.6, 5.9, 23.5

Matt said...

Hey Garvan, these are the G25: https://pastebin.com/Qh2JzKXt

The averages are the first three lines, then the remaining are random generated simulations around them.

Matt said...

@Garvan, I guess just on those simulations I made, note that the Scandinavia VA set is significantly different from England_Saxon: https://imgur.com/a/OzSc17q

Although it is dominated by 70 Danish VA samples, to only 26 Norwegian VA and 64 Sweden VA...

If we do assume that the sampled English Saxon set contributed to later English... Then it does seem like the other population would be more like France_IA rather than England_IA.

However, this is kind of weird as the English present day land very close on G25 to the England_Roman and England_IA set. So it's kind of weird to imagine that an opposite influence came in and genetically cancelled the population right back to the same balance of things and position as in the Iron Age.

It also would mean that the England_Saxon would be fairly different to the Viking Age population of Denmark. The Denmark Viking Age population seems significantly more "southern".

Carlos Aramayo said...

Recently, Vasant Shinde commented to 'The Hindu' that there are plans to extract ancient DNA from skeletal samples of:

"...other Harappan settlements and those of contemporary regional settlements at places as diverse as Kalibangan (Rajasthan), Inamgaon (Maharastra), Sanauli (Uttar Pradesh), Ramapuram (Andhra Pradesh) another site yet to be chosen in Bengal or Bihar."

http://tinyurl.com/jce7bfzu

Matt said...

@Livonia, I guess it seems like the French Gauls, taken as a set from across France had a stronger degree of EEF ancestry over time.

See - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589004222003649 ("We documented here the genomic diversity of Iron Age communities originating from six French regions. The 49 acquired genomes permitted us to highlight an absence of discontinuity between Bronze Age and Iron Age groups in France, lending support to a cultural transition linked to progressive local economic changes rather than to a massive influx of allochthone groups. Genomic analyses revealed strong genetic homogeneity among the regional groups associated with distinct archaeological cultures. This genomic homogenization appears to be linked to individuals’ mobility between regions and gene flow with neighbouring groups from England and Spain. Thus, the results globally support a common genomic legacy for the Iron Age population of modern-day France that could be linked to recurrent gene flow between culturally differentiated communities.".

The genomic affinity detected between the IA groups from north-western France and England is not surprising. Indeed, the north-western French groups are represented by individuals originating from the Urville-Nacqueville necropolis (Normandy), where specific archaeological features, such as roundhouses, are clearly related to the English IA cultural sphere (Lefort et al., 2015). Moreover, Normandy and South England are part of a well-documented network of exchanges during the Bronze Age (Atlantic BA and Manche-Mer du Nord Complex; Marcigny et al., 2017) and the Iron Age periods (part of the medio-Atlantic Iron Age; Milcent, 2006). It is finally worth adding that the three individuals from Urville-Nacqueville that provided genomic data are three males, all buried in the so-called “Durotrigian” position, which is well known in Dorset (Fitzpatrick, 2011; Lefort et al., 2015). Consequently, we cannot exclude that these individuals might originate from southern England.

ENA data from this study is here - https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/browser/view/PRJEB50940?show=reads, but because these are not genotypes, as I understand it significant work would have to be done to get them on G25 to bolster our France IA set.)

Matt said...

OT: https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/browser/view/PRJEB53198?show=reads

Uploaded 21/06/2022

Study Title: 4000-year-old hair from the Middle Nile highlights unusual ancient DNA degradation pattern and a potential source of early eastern Africa pastoralists

Project: PRJEB53198
Petrous bones and teeth are the skeletal elements most often targeted by researchers for ancient DNA (aDNA) extraction, and the sources of the majority of previously published ancient African genomes. However, the high temperature environments that characterise much of Africa often lead to poor preservation of skeletal remains. Here, we successfully reconstruct and analyse genome-wide data from the naturally mummified hair of a 4000-year-old individual from Sudan in northeastern Africa, after failed attempts at DNA extraction from teeth, petrous, and cranium of this and other individuals from the site of Kadruka. We find that hair DNA extracted with an established single-stranded library protocol is unusually enriched in ultra-short DNA molecules and exhibits substantial interior molecular damage. The aDNA was nonetheless amenable to genetic analyses, which revealed that the genome is genetically indistinguishable from that of early Neolithic eastern African pastoralists located 2500 kilometres away. Our findings support established models for the southwards dispersal of Middle Nile Valley pastoral populations to the Rift Valley of eastern Africa, and provide the first direct evidence for a genetic source population for this dispersal. Our study highlights the value of mummified hair as an alternate source of aDNA from regions with poor bone preservation.


From this area, more or less: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dongola_Reach

Dave the Slothtopus said...

I'm really looking forward to the G25 data on these two from the "Stable population structure in Europe since the Iron Age, despite high mobility" paper.
They are burials from the Roman fort at Klosterneuberg, Austria (believed to be manned at the time by Batavi auxiliaries of the Cohors Secunda Batavorum). The DF19 one appears (from the horse/archer pathology) to be one of the auxiliaries, and the U106 one is a neonate probably a son of another auxiliary (might be half Batavi with a local mother?):
R10657, 26 - 126 calCE, Klosterneuburg, Austria: R1b-L51>>P312>DF19>DF88
R10659, 26 - 126 calCE, Klosterneuburg, Austria: R1b-L51>U106>S263>S264

LivoniaG said...

@Matt - "I guess it seems like the French Gauls, taken as a set from across France had a stronger degree of EEF ancestry over time."

thanks for the reply. Shouldn't the EEF ancestry already be in the Irish numbers if there was a "Celtic" migration into Ireland from the area of France?

Among the things you did here showed something that looks unexpected.

If a "Celtic" migration from the continent to Ireland happened, maybe we would expect that Irish population to have more French IA ancestry, including that EEF element.

The EEF ancestry in French IA would have already been part of the "Celtic" migration, whether it happened in the Iron or Bronze Age.

(And the article you quoted seems to say that the French BA should look like the French IA.)

So where is the French IA in Ireland, if France/Gaul is supposed to be the origin of the Celtic population in Ireland?

There is none.

France_IA - England_IA - Scandinavia_VA
Irish 2.0, 70.8, 27.2
French_Nord 70.6, 5.9, 23.5

J.S. said...

@LivoniaG
https://twitter.com/Boothicus/status/1473695614881906692?s=20&t=d-QGx_-p9lkZyte6uvCDhg
https://twitter.com/Boothicus/status/1473750589590802432?s=20&t=d-QGx_-p9lkZyte6uvCDhg

Rob said...

Im starting to think that Celtic really did develop in the Atlantic

Wee e said...

@Matt. I wonder if it would work for the hair of bog bodies. They cover a long span of time.

Matt said...

@Wee E, that's probably an interesting question; I certainly don't know enough about the chemistry to be sure. I think with the bog bodies though, there might be the question of whether the ossicles or petruous might be a better option (hair here is good because those hard bones apparently didn't preserve well). However maybe hair could be an option there if there were concerns about damaging or cutting into the preserved body...?

Anonymous said...

I am damn sure this won't get accepted but would like to rant...


"It so happens 3000bce Indians, Iranians and BMAC were much more IranN/CHG shifted (75% on avg) than Yamnaya who were only 50% through their mothers."

Simon Stevens said...

@Davidski

What do you think about these runs posted by Vladimir Taraskin over AG?

Target: Yamnaya_RUS_Samara: I0444
Distance: 2.6283% / 0.02628276 | R3P
46.8 SIM_Don_Forager_PROG
28.4 RUS_Steppe_Maykop_o
24.8 RUS_Khvalynsk_En

Target: Yamnaya_RUS_Caucasus: SA6010
Distance: 2.7573% / 0.02757297 | R3P
64.4 RUS_Progress_En
19.0 RUS_Steppe_Maykop_o
16.6 SIM_Don_Forager_PROG

Target: Corded_Ware_CZE_early: VLI085
Distance: 1.9091% / 0.01909121 | R3P
44.8 POL_Globular_Amphora
27.8 RUS_Steppe_Maykop_o
27.4 SIM_Don_Forager_PROG

Target: Corded_Ware_Baltic_early: Gyvakarai1_10bp
Distance: 2.4414% / 0.02441429 | R3P
58.6 SIM_Don_Forager_PROG
23.2 BGR_MP_N
18.2 RUS_Steppe_Maykop

I find the use of Steppe_Maykop a little confusing here. Is there actual Steppe_Maykop admixture in these guys, or are these sources simply a stand in until something better shows up? I thought Steppe_Maykop was a genetic dead end and too eastern shifted; they have East Asian-Siberian-like admixture that Yamnaya and Corded Ware lack. The use of the Steppe_Maykop_o does make some sense, for that sample appears to have little to no East Asian, but it does have a large Eneolithic North Caucasus Piedmont steppe component; this sample appears to be related in some way to SA6010 (perhaps this explains its usage as a source pop). By the way, do you think Yamnaya and Corded Ware have minor ancestry from Maykop itself? If so, does that mean by proxy, all modern Europeans have very minor Maykop ancestry?

Davidski said...

I don't take models with simulated ancient pops very seriously.

Matt said...

@Simon, yes, it's like that; the Steppe_Maykop outliers, particularly AY2003, are not very differentiated from Yamnaya, on average together they're about as differentiated from Yamnaya as Sintashta are (https://imgur.com/a/ZsYl3zt), primarily through IV3002 and SA6013 being richer in CHG related ancestry...

So it's possible someone could make a simulated model population that was less rich in ANE and CHG ancestry than Yamnaya and then use the Steppe Maykop outliers with that to get to a Yamnaya like place.

There's just nothing really proving it to be the case, since simulated populations can be unconstrained.

Rob said...

@ Simon yeah AG is full of gems


- somehow they still think Myceneans arrived c. 1600 bc, even after the Clemente (2021) paper
- every Balkan forun turns into a Albo-centric, Thraco-manic digression
- Avars are Mongolic. wrong. S-T related FU spread . wrong
- proto-Germanic being from eastern Sweden "because of the excellent linguistics of Jasko Hakkinen" & language spreads dont have any archaeological trail, apparently.
- UP Europeans come from SEA
- Slavs have been in central Europe since the Luxzxatian culture, because "M458 are the real Slavs''
- Yamnaya comes from the LDC because Vlad & Zardos hallucinated so

how do these people even manage to breathe, let alone take themselve seriously ?

Carlos Aramayo said...

@Rob

"...AG is full of gems...somehow they still think [Mycenaeans] arrived c. 1600 bc, even after the Clemente (2021) paper..."

Of course that's a wrong view, if we also consider the archaeological analysis by Alex Knodell (2021), but somehow Clemente et al. (2021) do not reject the traditional chronology in their introductory section, as they write:

"...including the Mycenaean (i.e., the last phase of Helladic [1,600–1,100 BCE])..."

Actually, Early Mycenaean period began around 1750 BC, in Middle Heladic III, see Knodell (2021), page 7, Table 1.

Istakhr said...

@Davidski Could you please convert the aDNA data from the recent Micronesian study to G25? Thanks

Study:https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm6536

Geonotypes:https://reich.hms.harvard.edu/sites/reich.hms.harvard.edu/files/inline-files/Liu22_Science_Micronesia.tar.gz

Rob said...

@ Carlos

Whether 1700 or 1600 , that’s just “Mycenaean period”, so-called
Point is - proto-Greeks were already in northern Greece by at least 2300 bc
So claims relating to Babino / KMK (an academic fringe theory) are difficult to sustain

Matt said...

The data's not up here yet, but this should be interesting when they upload it - https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/browser/view/PRJEB50507

"A genomic snapshot of demographic and cultural dynamism in Upper Mesopotamia during the Neolithic Transition"

"Upper Mesopotamia played a key role in the Neolithic Transition in Southwest Asia through marked innovations in symbolism, technology, and foodways. Here we present thirteen ancient genomes (c.8500-7500 calBCE) from Pre-Pottery Neolithic Çayönü in the Tigris basin, which we study together with bioarchaeological and material culture data. We find that Çayönü was a diverse population, carried mixed ancestry from western and eastern Fertile Crescent, and that the community received immigrants. Our results show that the Çayönü society was likely organised along biological family lines. It was also open to cultural innovation, including bodily interventions such as head-shaping and cauterization. Finally, we identify Upper Mesopotamia as the likely source of eastern gene flow into Neolithic Anatolia, in line with material culture evidence. We hypothesise that Upper Mesopotamia’s cultural dynamism during the Neolithic Transition was the product not only of its fertile lands but also of its interregional demographic connections."


Maybe this would outline that the eastern flow in Anatolia is not CHG/Caucasus related?

Matt said...

The Canoyu site is very northern though - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%87ay%C3%B6n%C3%BC . Not the lower Mesopotamia that everyone is interested in. They may actually have more CHG like "eastern" input rather than southern or Iran_N related...

Davidski said...

@Istakhr

https://drive.google.com/file/d/13zfclp2hFvTAECLJVLXTH1bxEj851NuV/view?usp=sharing

alex said...

Rob said...

"- somehow they still think Myceneans arrived c. 1600 bc, even after the Clemente (2021) paper"

I don't have an opinion on when Mycenaeans/Greeks arrived but why are you so sure that the 2 women from Macedonia in Clemente et al are proto-Greeks, let alone proto-Mycenaeans? Is there an archaeological smoking gun that makes them specifically Greek, rather than members of one of the numerous groups with steppe ancestry that would've been present in the Balkans around 2000BC? The paper itself is also rather badly written, but that's another story.

Simon Stevens said...

@Matt

So I take it that the Steppe_Maykop ancestry those runs show in Yamnaya and Corded Ware, is nothing more than a possible avenue towards a plausible fit, which itself is a byproduct of the unconstrained nature of runs with simulated populations. So no there isn’t literal Steppe_Maykop in CW and Yamnaya (the East Asian admixture in Sheppe_Maykop alone demonstrates this). By the way, where can I access pops for G25? Thanks

Anonymous said...

10/32 Nairs are R1a derived. Out of which 2 are R1a-Z2123, steppe specific lineage.

20/58 Kodavas are R1a derived. 6 of these are R1a-Z2123, steppe specific marker.

qpAdm with central_steppe + IVC + Onge does not work for these, except for tribals with low steppe autosomal ancestry. Which means that we are still missing the exact steppe source in Indians, which could be a later populations admixed between steppe and something else.

Uniparental Markers from the Bunt, Nair, Kodava preprint.

Copied post from Archaeogenetics

Dravidian speakers with steppe specific lineages.....

StP said...

@Assuwatama July 8, 2022 at 12:07 PM said…
10/32 Nairs are R1a derived. Out of which 2 are R1a-Z2123, steppe specific lineage.
20/58 Kodavas are R1a derived. 6 of these are R1a-Z2123, steppe specific marker.
qpAdm with central_steppe + IVC + Onge does not work for these, except for tribals with low steppe autosomal ancestry. Which means that we are still missing the exact steppe source in Indians, which could be a later populations admixed between steppe and something else.
Uniparental Markers from the Bunt, Nair, Kodava preprint.
Copied post from Archaeogenetics
Dravidian speakers with steppe specific lineages.....

See: Dravidians in PIE Europe
Kaja et al. 2021
The Thousand Polish Genomes Project - a national database of Polish variant allele
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.07.451425v1.full.pdf
Fig.S8A

Rob said...

“ Finally, we identify Upper Mesopotamia as the likely source of eastern gene flow into Neolithic Anatolia, in line with material culture evidence. ”

Absolutely. Like I said previously, I expect Pinarbasi related ancestry to drop as low as 30% in Anatolian farmers
People had a hard time believing it, and Vasistha chimed with his qpAdm “models”, but it’ll be true.

Rob said...

@ Alex

''but why are you so sure that the 2 women from Macedonia in Clemente et al are proto-Greeks, let alone proto-Mycenaeans?''

There are no other possibilities.
But you don't even need to be super clued up - the answer is easily visible in a plot. How can the Myceneans represent a second, imaginary, migration when they are clearly shifted toward Minoans c.f. Logkas

I'm not sure, why you think that the Logkas population will be limited to females ?
But in reality, I would have thought anyone with a passing familiarity of Greece would know that the major disruptions occurred ~ 2200 BC. As classicaly described, these northerners from the Balkans separated from the main body of ancestral Phrygo-Macedonians, and 'became Greeks' inside Greece itself. The well-connected elites on the Aegean littoral, in turn became ''Myceneans'', when stability returned and a new golden age developed.

btw KMK has nothing to do with Greece. It represents a local western-steppe phenomenon where R1a-Z93 rich Srubnaya became more dominant than the R1b-Z2013 Catacomb people. A few show up in Bulgaria, thats it. That's why the KMK theory doesn't even exist, but 2 or 3 people on the internet seem to be fixated on it for some reason.

Rob said...

heres a basic plot https://ibb.co/DbCHk28

EastPole said...

@Rob
“KMK has nothing to do with Greece.”

That’s what I have been thinking. There is Slavic influence on Phrygian and Thracian religion and not Iranian/Indian influence. It came from Trzciniec/Füzesabony.

A.B. Keith in "The religion and philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads" wrote about Vedic Bhaga:

"His name is the equivalent of the Avestan bagha, ' god,' which is an epithet of Ahura himself, of Bagaios in Phrygia, and of the Old Church Slavonic bogu, 'god '."

https://i.postimg.cc/Vv3BDCwH/screenshot-146.png

Also Thracian/Phrygian Sabazios has clearly Slavic etymology

prasł. *sъbožьje (subozje)→ szczęście, pomyślność (happiness, fortune) –> zboże (cereal, grain, crop)

https://pl.wiktionary.org/wiki/zbo%C5%BCe

also:

su-+ bog- –> zbożny, (holy, god related).

It is not Indo-Slavonic because Balts don’t have it.

Anonymous said...

Let me clarify

Y-HG can't tell what language a person spoke. Its just a Patrilineal marker nothing else.

If my family migrate to Poland and marry polish speakers and become polish citizen our 3rd generation will no longer speak Hindi.

Anonymous said...

Indo-Aryan king was named :

Su-dasa = Good Servant
Funny name for a king :)

Anonymous said...

Teach,

If Afanasievo is considered proto-Tocharian why is Yamnaya considered PIE. They were same people. Why then Yamnaya not considered Proto-Tocharian?

StP said...


@Assuwatama said...
If my family migrate to Poland and marry polish speakers and become polish citizen our 3rd generation will no longer speak Hindi.

The creators of ethnic features only in the family or tribal system are the igrex, but not individual, but only paternal families and tribes.

LivoniaG said...

@Rob
you wrote: " the major disruptions occurred ~ 2200 BC. As classicaly described, these northerners from the Balkans"

So, you'd have Proto-Greek or Pre-Greek just entering Greece with Tiryns/ Early Helladic III archaeologically?

Vara said...

Yes, Bagaios comes from invisible Slavs not the countless Megabyzuses that ruled that region for centuries.

Saba(zios/dios), Wise Zeus, the bearded guy upstairs common to all IE.

Rob said...

@ LivoniaG

Yes, more or less. Quite a bit whas happening. Just perior, you get the 'Anatoliazing' ceramics period, which is why in the past some thought Greeks from Anatolia, but just after we get the migrations from the Balkans.

Matt said...

OT: Unfortunately this won't be uploaded to YouTube, I don't think, but the titles are interesting:

https://www.histogenes.org/events

"HistoGenes at the IMC 2022

TUESDAY 05 JULY 2022: 09.00-10.30

Session: 501, Esther Simpson Building: LG08

Title: INTEGRATING GENETIC, ARCHAEOLOGICAL, AND HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES ON EASTERN CENTRAL EUROPE, 400-900 (HISTOGENES), I: FAMILIES, PEOPLES, AND MOBILITY

➢ Walter Pohl, “Early Medieval History and the Genetic Challenge: The Aims of the HistoGenes Project”

➢ Zuzana Hofmanová (Max-Planck-Institut für evolutionäre Anthropologie, Leipzig): “Inferring Large Pedigrees and Mobility Patterns from the Analysis of Early Medieval Genomes”

➢ István Koncz, (Institute of Archaeological Sciences, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest): “The Role of Kinship in the Formation of Early Medieval Communities”

"11.15-12.45

Session: 601, Esther Simpson Building: LG08

Title: INTEGRATING GENETIC, ARCHAEOLOGICAL, AND HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES ON EASTERN CENTRAL EUROPE, 400-900 (HISTOGENES), II: STEPPE PEOPLES BETWEEN THE LOCAL AND THE GLOBAL

Moderator: Walter Pohl

➢ Bendeguz Tobias, Institut für Mittelalterforschung, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Wien “Living on the Edge of the Avar Empire: Archaeological Perspectives”

➢ Doris Pany-Kucera, Anthropologische Abteilung, Naturhistorisches Museum Wien “Living on the Edge of the Avar Empire: Anthropological Perspectives”

➢ Sandra Wabnitz, Institut für österreichische Geschichtsforschung, Universität Wien “Horse Lords of the Eurasian Steppe: Comparison of Latin, Greek, and Chinese Accounts of Steppe Peoples, 4th-9th Centuries"

Anonymous said...

Any info on David's lecture. Heard anything interesting....

Puree said...

I've searched the Ancient G25 dB and cannot find anything listed under Khazar or any of the apparent Khazar samples such as KEII/61, NF/2, TUK-9A, TUK-10, TUK-18, or TUK-23. Can anyone please recommend a Khazar proxy sample or two from the dB? Thanks.

Davidski said...

Something like KAZ_Karluk:DA222 should be OK for now.

Dave the Slothtopus said...

Expanding my G25 plea to all the late file additions for Klosterneuburg:

R10654, 258.5 - 407 calCE, Klosterneuburg, Austria: G2a-M406>>FGC5185
R10656, 26 - 407 calCE, Klosterneuburg, Austria: R1b-L51>>P312>L21>DF13
R10657, 26 - 126 calCE, Klosterneuburg, Austria: R1b-L51>>P312>DF19>DF88
R10659, 26 - 126 calCE, Klosterneuburg, Austria: R1b-L51>U106>S263>S264

Davidski said...

Which paper are these Austrian samples from?

Dave the Slothtopus said...

They are from (but data were initially missing from)
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.05.15.491973v1.article-metrics

Dave the Slothtopus said...

Mapped reads: https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/browser/view/PRJEB53564
Raw reads: https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/browser/view/PRJEB53565

Matt said...

@David, could you put these genotypes on G25 please? - https://reich.hms.harvard.edu/sites/reich.hms.harvard.edu/files/inline-files/Tiesler%20et%20al%202022%20Data.zip

From - https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/life-and-death-in-early-colonial-campeche-new-insights-from-ancient-dna/1E92D867436AD6C150B52FC46A0915F1

It's early modern era post-Columbian Mexico so not likely to have anything too much of interest, but I'd be interested to see where the European colonist among the 10 samples lies, as there have been some claims in the past that the early Spanish Conquistadors might have included more individuals who had unusual ancestry within Spain.

Gaska said...


@Matt "early Spanish conquistadors, who had unusual ancestry within Spain?

Why are you interested in these early conquerors and settlers? Are you looking for Marrano-Conversos-Crypto-Jews?

90% of the sailors, conquistadors and settlers were natives of the kingdom of Castile (including the Basque Country, Galicia, Extremadura and Andalusia)-the rest were foreigners born in European territories controlled by the Hispanic Monarchy (many Portuguese, Italians, Sicilians, Greeks and Flemish).

As it belongs to the early colonial times it is still an unadmixed individual, buried in a catholic cemetery with 8 Indians and an African slave, which means that the Spanish priests did not make distinctions between races when burying the deceased. That is to say, they were segregated in castes while they lived but at the time of death they were all equal. This individual is a typical Spaniard.

The results of that work reached Spain months ago because one of the samples analyzed turned out to be a Spaniard. They are also analyzing 8 other conquistadors sacrificed in Tenochtitlan, one of them Captain Juan de Yuste, who left a farewell message written on a wall of the prison where he was captive. The Spanish authorities have claimed the remains of Spaniards from the Mexican authorities, or at least participate in the genetic analysis and repatriate the remains of our soldiers.The indigenist policies of Latin American countries are not respectful of our dead, despite the fact that many political leaders are of Spanish descent.


Davidski said...

@Matt

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BB9m_FPBS0fG9PYnLfbE4VzXc7xzVigE/view?usp=sharing

Looks southern Spanish based on the G25 European plots.

Gaska said...


life-and-death-in-early-colonial-campeche-new-insights-from-ancient-dna

"Additionally, we are using ‘he’ and ‘she’ only in reference to measured X and Y-chromosome ratios, and recognise that the individuals may not have identified themselves in these gendered binaries while alive five centuries ago"

What? can someone explain to me what prof Vera Tiesler means?

Matt said...

@Gaska, not so much Jewish necessarily but yes to test - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-07748-z - "Latin Americans show wide-spread Converso ancestry and imprint of local Native ancestry on physical appearance"

The PCA in the source paper shows the sample a little projected towards south/east, so I was wondering if this was projection or due to not fitting as a one-population model with Spain as the source, or more like projection bias in the paper.

@Davidski, yes that seems correct, looks specifically both south and west when I do the population distance in Vahaduo, with Portuguese and Galicia as the lowest overall distance - https://imgur.com/a/MejW3Jq . The individual is within the range of normal people from Spain and Portugal.

This best overall match and the sample's position seems related to the finding here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-08272-w - "Patterns of genetic differentiation and the footprints of historical migrations in the Iberian Peninsula" - "We identify a major east-west axis of genetic differentiation, and evidence of historical north to south population movement. We find regionally varying fractions of north-west African ancestry (0–11%) in modern-day Iberians, related to an admixture event involving European-like and north-west African-like source populations ... Perhaps surprisingly, north African ancestry does not reflect proximity to north Africa, or even regions under more extended Muslim control. The highest amounts of north African ancestry found within Iberia are in the west (11%) including in Galicia, despite the fact that the region of Galicia as it is defined today (north of the Miño river), was never under Muslim rule and Berber settlements north of the Douro river were abandoned by 741. This observation is consistent with previous work using Y-chromosome data. We speculate that the pattern we see is driven by later internal migratory flows, such as between Portugal and Galicia, and this would also explain why Galicia and Portugal show indistinguishable ancestry sharing with non-Spanish groups more generally. Alternatively, it might be that these patterns reflect regional differences in patterns of settlement and integration with local peoples of north African immigrants themselves, or varying extents of the large-scale expulsion of Muslim people, which occurred post-Reconquista and especially in towns and cities"

(In this paper the donations into the Castille group are not far off what is typical for Galician-Portuguese, so I definitely wouldn't too stress the difference).

I don't think there's any preference for a top-up of Near Eastern/North African ancestry for this individual than you need for Portuguese/Galician/Baleares/Mallorca (latter two I'd also expect to have a little more North African ancestry than Spanish average).

Matt said...

The African person from that paper seems to match best to Angola and Cameroon populations. I guess that's not surprising, but seems to fit with the activities of Portuguese traders in those regions. Nice to see that Global 25 may be relatively specific at different regional West African related ancestries for people in early modern?

Matt said...

Not sure about the Native Mexican samples; some come closest to Bolivian native people, some to Mixe from Mexico. Not sure if that's real or due to G25 design to avoid lots of dimensionality separating native american populations?

Gaska said...

@Matt

The emigration of crypto-Jews to the American colonies can only be demonstrated by analyzing samples of Spanish colonists and conquistadors. Keep in mind that the discovery and conquest of America began at the same time as the expulsion and the vast majority of Jews who kept their religion went to Portugal, Morocco and Italy (Holland etc). The laws of the Indies expressly prohibited the migration of Jews. Then perhaps they find some Levantine blood in those first Spanish settlers but considering that this component is much smaller in Spain than in the rest of the Mediterranean (including the Balkans) it will be very difficult to find Jewish blood in the early days of colonization (Jews had already been in Spain for 1,000 years and were very mixed with the population)In any case, it would be interesting to check the blood cleanliness of the Castilian hidalgos.

Regarding the paper you mention you have to take into account that America is a multiracial continent with multiple migrations throughout history (including the 20th century) that originated in all European regions including Italy, France, Germany, Greece, Syria, Armenia, Turkey, North Africa, Canary Islands etc., so the existence of Levantine or Jewish blood will surely be related to other migrations (its origin will not be Spain where the Levantine Jewish trace is practically nonexistent).

In fact,J Chacón said-"We also detect South/East Mediterranean ancestry across Latin America, probably stemming from the clandestine colonial migration of Christian converts of non-European origin (Conversos)"

"The estimates of North and East Mediterranean (including Sephardic) ancestry in Latin Americans obtained here represent values over and above those present in our sampled present-day Spanish individuals, suggesting migration of individuals with higher levels of such ancestry to Latin America"

Gaska said...


@Matt

Galicia is a mystery because it was never occupied by the Moors, so the explanation of this North African ancestry has more to do with population movements during the Roman Empire and later during the advance of the Reconquista. As territories were occupied to the south (better climate and more fertile lands) the north was becoming unpopulated so the kings and nobles encouraged the migration to the north of Moors, Jews, Mozarabs to repopulate their lordships. In any case, this paper is not very reliable with respect to percentages that are always inflated.I don't know if you know this one

Genetic origins, singularity, and heterogeneity of Basques-A.Flores Bello (2.021)-"Nevertheless, our analyses support the notion that the genetic uniqueness of Basques cannot be attributed to a different origin relative to other Iberian populations but instead to a reduced and irregular external gene flow since the Iron Age as suggested by Olalde et al."

*Admixture models tested with qpAdm for the Basques, Peri-Basques and Spanish groups as target populations-There is no trace of North African blood in the north and east-Vasconia, Navarra, Aragon, Cantabria, La Rioja, Old Castile (Burgos, Palencia, Soria, Segovia), Catalonia-the percentages are very small in other regions-Alicante-0.9%, Valencia-0.4%, Castilla la Mancha-1.5%, Barcelonés-0.3%

Western regions have higher percentages but they are much lower than those traditionally handled by other types of tools-Castilla y León-3.5%, Andalucia-3.8%, Galicia-5.8%, Extremadura-5.9% (It is historically proven that in Extremadura is where most of the Berbers settled)

Regarding the Balearic Islands-Ibiza-0,5%, Menorca-0.2%

People from Ibiza: an unexpected isolate in the Western Mediterranean-Simone Andrea Biagini "Furthermore, our results exclude any major Middle Eastern specific component in modern Ibizans, or any other Spanish population"

Also, a greater similarity to the rest of the Iberians rather than to Levantines in this analysis suggests that the modern Ibizan differentiation is not caused by any other Ibizan-specific external admixture contribution. In support of this observation, our results also exclude any major North African component in modern Ibizans, as well in the rest of the Spanish subjects.

I don't know what are the samples you use in your models, but surely they are not representative of the regions to which they supposedly belong.





ph2ter said...

Mexico_Colonial_oEuropean__I8558 (looks Galician/Portuguese):
https://i.imgur.com/ddx7vZN.png

Matt said...

@ph2tr, thanks for the map. Just a quick comparison of the Spanish of this side by side with the North Moroccan donation in the "Footprints" paper - (some correlation, some difference; e.g. Balaeres has little/no Moroccan donation in that model).

@Gaska, they are the same data from the published Global25 datasheets. You may discuss with Davidski the source references if you wish to dispute them I suppose, and he may engage you or not.

Regarding https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(21)00349-3 - "Genetic origins, singularity, and heterogeneity of Basques", this has little North African ancestry by presenting 3-way model of Spanish populations involving the Imperial Roman sample, which is substantially Near Eastern, with proportions at a minimum of 40% in non-Basque Iberians and a maximum of 60%.

I think this is likely implausible in a better qpAdm setup with specific reference populations for Iberian neolithic farmers (none such here).

If I can be bothered I might do a qpAdm model.

If you wish to argue for Iberians to be approximately 50% Imperial Roman though with their extensive Near Eastern ancestry, perhaps you can use this paper for an example.

Likewise this paper https://www.nature.com/articles/s41431-019-0361-1 - "People from Ibiza: an unexpected isolate in the Western Mediterranean" - has no explicit admixture modelling other than an f3 statistic, which is unlikely to yield strong evidence in this case (since any elevation of North African ancestry would be minimal).

André de Vasconcelos said...

They don't mention what the "North African" reference actually is...in fact they don't even mention what the Iberia IA nor the Roman samples are, since neither were homogenous anyway - certainly not the Roman ones. Those Romans in Iberia already had North African ancestry, for example (18.8% using Guanches). In any case the study from Bycroft isn't the only one, others have also pointed to ~10% Moroccan-like ancestry in Galicia and Portugal, you can even get the same result with G25.

Urki said...

The most parsimonious explanation for northafrican ancestry in Nw Spain and northern Portugal has already been published. Not all berbers retreated to the south and left the Duero basin during the big berber antiarab revolt of 750. At this early date Berbers were not yes completely arabised nor islamised. So they were integrated easily in the very early Christian polities as soon as they started to spread to the Duero valley.

Gaska said...

@Matt

I do not know which samples are used in G25, but I am perfectly familiar with the databases used in Spain. As you can understand they are much bigger and also to prove the origin of a person you have to know at least 4 generations back. When background is checked it has been found that more than 70% of Spaniards have ancestors in at least 5 different regions so it is very difficult to assign a sample to a particular region (except in the Basque Country, Aragon, Catalonia, Navarre and Galicia)>>>> The models are practically the same because there are people with similar percentages of ancestries in all regions-However, if you think that your models clearly reflect the autosomal composition of the different Spanish regions, I am not going to try to convince you otherwise.

@Matt said-"I think this is likely implausible in a better qpAdm setup with specific reference populations for Iberian neolithic farmers (none such here).

I think you are wrong, the North African percentages will not vary at all. In any case, as you know, the best way to know the genetic relationships are the IBD fragments, and this places Spain far far away from the Levant, so I don't think the Romans Levantinized us.

Gaska said...

@André

10% of north African blood in Portugal? Good for you-I have read a study years ago that said that the Algarve had more than 20% (maybe you can confirm it, although to be honest I didn't believe it) Western Iberia is much more genetically different from the rest of Iberia than we thought a few years ago.

Maybe you know a Portuguese weasel who "works" in anthrogenica as a moderator, please give him my regards, I suppose he will continue trying to Africanize his country, giving his opinion on Spanish genetics as if he were a true expert, and boring people with all kinds of Africanizing models-It seems that he is very happy with his paternal lineage.

Regarding Galicia I have already said that for me it is a mystery, maybe Urki is right and it is a matter of Berbers who rebelled and stayed there after 750 AD.

Urki said...

Please see Peterson, 2020, "Historical Explanations of Northafrican Genetic Traces in Northwestern Iberia"

Ariel said...

What happened with Anthrogenica???? Anybody knows?

Gaska said...

@Urki

Thanks, I did not know the paper, it is certainly a possible explanation but the Berbers were always a very small minority (about 20.000), I doubt they had much influence on Galician genetics. In my opinion, there are other important factors to take into account.

Please see-

Late Roman tombs at Sanxo Llop (Gandia, Valencia): exogamy and kinship in a particular funerary structure-L.Alapont (2.021)-North African percentages-GOG34 (660 AD) R1b-Df27-mtDNA HV@16311 (10%), GOG35-mtDNA-H2a1e1a (5%)-These percentages are much higher than those of the current population of that region (<1%).

There are two interesting doctoral theses that reach the same conclusions. Anyone will be able to understand that;

1-The levels of North African in Hispano-Roman-Goths are in some cases much higher than the present ones.
2-The migrations during the Roman empire were much more numerous than those of the Berbers.
3-We do not need the Muslim invasions (8th century) to explain the genetics of Spain
4-Except in the case of Galicia, old kingdom of Leon, Extremadura and Huelva the levels of North African detected in Hispano-Roman and Visigoths have been diluted until disappearing in many regions.
5-I do not know Portuguese studies in this respect, but the samples published recently (Conimbriga and Miroico) also point in that direction, that is to say, crossbreeding during the Roman Empire, although in the case of Portugal these levels seem to be lower than the present ones.


ambron said...

Gaska, genetic studies of burials from the times of Germanic Iberia were announced a few years ago. Do you have any information on this?

I am asking because I expect bit Slavic genetics there, judging by the presence of a certain number of Slavic names from church documents and tombstone inscriptions.

Moreover, today's Galicia has an increased level of Slavic paternal lines.

ambron said...

There is also my paternal line in Portugal (S18681), which, according to the genealogical tradition there, was to arrive with Germans.

rozbójnik said...

@Ariel

The domain expired on July 14. The owner must renew it or else I think the site is lost. That would be terrible news.

Gaska said...

AG and Eupedia are BS

Simon Stevens said...

@Davidski

Hey David, how strong is the freshwater reservoir effect/reservoir effect on the Khvalynsk samples? Khvalynsk_Eneolithic I0434 directly dates to 5198-4853 calBCE, but Anthony has the cemetery dated to 4500-4300 BCE, via contemporaneous animals bones located in the graves. Does that mean all the Khvalynsk individuals date to roughly the same time (4500-4200 BCE)? Can reservoir effects be countered, or are they simply overstated/overestimated (this surely would effect many of our dated ancient DNA samples such as the Iron Gates HGs)? Should we still use the direct calBCE dates too, all things considered?

Matt said...

@Gaska: I highly doubt there is no autosomal population structure in Spain and Portugal, which seems to be your claim here.

"I think you are wrong, the North African percentages will not vary at all. In any case, as you know, the best way to know the genetic relationships are the IBD fragments, and this places Spain far far away from the Levant, so I don't think the Romans Levantinized us."

So are you supporting the model of the paper you cited as evidence of low North Africa ancestry, which has Iberians as 50% descended from the Imperial Rome, which is largely descended from Anatolia and the Levant? Or are you not?

I mean, tell me you didn't just quote that to take the North African percentage out and you did understand the whole model, right? I would assume that it you cite the North African percentage as authoritative, you support the whole model? Surely no picking and choosing going on here?

Gaska said...

@Ambron

The Goths who arrived in Spain have their distant origin in Poland. The definitive proof of their origin is the sample PCA0100-mtDNA-HV0f (Stolarek 2.019) belonging to the culture of Wielbark (Goths-Poland) and located later in Montefrío (Granada), which until its discovery in the Gothic cemetery of El Castillón had never been documented in the Iberian Peninsula. Surprisingly, some of the Hispanic Goths are EV13, I suppose because of their migration from Poland to the Balkans. When they arrived to the peninsula they were already mixed with other peoples. It also seems evident that the small percentage of R1a in Spain is thanks to the Goths. Besides Olalde's work I know some studies and thesis made in goths cemeteries but they are old and focused on mitochondrial DNA, so at the moment nothing new.I'll see if there's anything you might be interested in.

Gaska said...

@ Matt

There is some genetic isolation of the Galician population with respect to the other populations of the Iberian Peninsula, as well as a genetic isolation of populations of the Basque region (Basque Country, La Rioja and Navarre). The remaining Spanish populations (Northern, Central and Mediterranean) presented close genetic proximity, suggesting a high genetic similarity among them. The existence of regional structures is very difficult to prove, but I repeat I am not trying to convince you of anything. If you think your models are correct, you are free to continue to be wrong (as you have done regarding the North African percentage in the Balearic Islands).Portugal is another story

I think you should stop doing gymnastic mental exercises. They have taken three references-Iron Age Iberia-related, Roman-related and Mozabite, and the result are ridiculous percentages of this last component in much of Spain.

Have you checked which are the Roman samples used in this work?

Matt said...

@Gaska, the sample IDs are not stated in the supplement but it is stated to be the entire Rome Imperial and Late Imperial set, which we know the average of.

ambron said...

Gaska, thanks!

Apparently this research is stuck somewhere. A few years ago, I saw information that geneticists were to examine several thousand Germanic graves from the Iberian Peninsula.

StP said...

I have a question /for....?/
In PCA, ADMIXTURE, Fst and similar diagrams for different comparisons there are e.g. old populations - as if isolates, e.g. European: CEU, GBR, TSI, IBS, FIN or American (African American): CLM, MXL, PUR, PEL.
These American isolates also appear on the map of Zeberg & Paabo 2020 with populations with an overestimated frequency of the Neanderthal haplotype from Vindija (Croatia).
This haplotype causes a higher susceptibility to infection and a greater risk of severe or fatal COVID-19 survival (up to 2.9 times in total) - in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the Indo-European and Dravidian countries in South Asia. At the head of this unfortunate European group of COVIDA deaths since the beginning of the pandemic, there is ... Peru, and then Bulgaria, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Hungary, Macedonia, Croatia, Czechia, Slovakia, Poland and others.
So where do Peruvians derive their roots from; why is this Vindija haplotype tormenting them so much? When could they emigrate from here, from Central-South Europe?

Gaska said...

No Matt, we do not know the average because we do not know what exactly are the samples used, so you are only speculating with a hypothetical high percentage of Levantine, which, if it exists, could (or could not) hide the percentage of North African. Instead of clarifying doubts you create confusion, because there are imperial samples with very different origins. I certainly agree with the paper because I have seen other similar ones where Spanish geneticists try to clarify the situation.

And remember that "genes mirror geography within Europe", and that populations geographically separated from each other (i.e., lived on different continents) frequently share ≤1 IBD fragments per pair, while geographically neighboring populations often share 10–50 IBD fragments per pair. Nobody doubts that Spain is the European country with more IBD segments shared with North Africa, that the Greeks, Albanians, Italians or Romanians share more IBD with the Levant, or that the Russians and Finns are the most Asian of the Europeans and no one doubts that all these components are shared by all European countries to a greater or lesser extent.These issues were settled many years ago and except for a few knuckleheads no one gives a damn about them.

BTW you can continue to think that Mallorca have more North African ancestry than Spanish average but you are wrong.

Matt said...

Gaska, Italy_LA+Italy_Imperial is 73 samples. They would only drop low coverage samples and coverage is uncorrelated with ancestry in this set. So dropping some lower coverage samples will not affect the level of East Mediterranean shift to any great degree. In a population of this size, the contribution of any one sample or even any small subset, will not create any great differences in they are excluded. You have to have a basic statistical understanding here.

alex said...

"StP said...

This haplotype causes a higher susceptibility to infection and a greater risk of severe or fatal COVID-19 survival (up to 2.9 times in total) - in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the Indo-European and Dravidian countries in South Asia. At the head of this unfortunate European group of COVIDA deaths since the beginning of the pandemic, there is ... Peru, and then Bulgaria, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Hungary, Macedonia, Croatia, Czechia, Slovakia, Poland and others.
So where do Peruvians derive their roots from; why is this Vindija haplotype tormenting them so much? When could they emigrate from here, from Central-South Europe?"

You don't need genetics to explain excess deaths in Eastern Europe, just look at their vaccination rates.

Rob said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
StP said...

@alex said...
You don't need genetics to explain excess deaths in Eastern Europe, just look at their vaccination rates.
July 17, 2022 at 11:19 AM
.
No, The Vindija haplotype is stronger than anti-COVID vaccines!
In the 180-country world vaccinator table (in the 20 rows of this table), the top 20 countries that die the most are located around the middle of the table (rows 8, 9, 10 and following).
In addition, Peru, a leader in dying, is among the most vaccinated !!
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/world/covid-vaccinations-tracker.html

Davidski said...

@Gaska

Duet to potential legal issues in this country, you can't post defamatory stuff here, like accusing people affiliated with a certain company of a conspiracy.

Gaska said...

Matt, maybe I have to learn statistics, but you have to recognize when you are wrong, and in the case of the Roman Imperial samples neither you nor I know which samples were used and therefore we have no idea what the hypothetical Levantine contribution is. In any case, this will never affect the basic debate which is simply the variation of percentages between Spanish regions (0-6%) lower than the percentages obtained when you use certain tools. It is amusing when I see many people trying to inflate our North African percentages using the Canary Islands, when it is evident that these islands are not Iberia but African territory colonized by Europeans.

It seems that many people have been annoyed and surprised that Iberia (considering our geographical position and history) is so "northern" and European. Maybe they expected us to be half Moorish and that's why they try to Africanize us. They don't really understand that the vast majority of Spaniards don't give a shit about genetics and that people are delighted to think that we have much more exotic origins than what we really have. The funny thing is that the Basque supremacists deny the Yamnaya component because they think it is impure, i.e. the more steppe signal the more south asian blood. Everyone has gone crazy.

Gaska said...

Ok my apologies, I will tell them my opinion personally.

Suevi said...

Project: PRJEB51515
The Árpád dynasty member Saint Ladislaus was one of the most prominent rulers of Medieval Europe. Due to his exemplarily faithful Christian manner of life, greater than life personality and battlefield heroism, he was regarded as "the incarnation of the late-medieval ideal of chivalry" and after his death, he was canonized at the initiative of Béla III, by Pope Caelestinus III. Here we present the validation of the skull relic inside the herm of Saint Ladislaus using comparative whole genome analysis with the remains of Béla III.

https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/browser/view/PRJEB51515?show=reads

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