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Friday, January 13, 2023

Dear David, Nick, Iosif...let's set the record straight


Almost a decade ago scientists at the David Reich Lab extracted DNA from the remains of three men from the Khvalynsk II cemetery at the northern end of the Pontic-Caspian (PC) steppe.

These Eneolithic Eastern Europeans showed significant genetic heterogeneity, with highly variable levels of Eastern Hunter-Gatherer (EHG) and Near Eastern-related ancestry components.

As a result, the people at the David Reich Lab concluded that the Eneolithic populations of the PC steppe formed from a relatively recent admixture between local hunter-gatherers and Near Eastern migrants.

Unfortunately, this view has since become the consensus among scientists working with ancient DNA.

I say unfortunately because there's a more straightforward and indeed obvious explanation for the genetic heterogeneity among the samples from Khvalynsk II. It's also the only correct explanation, and it doesn't involve any recent gene flow from the Near East.

Here it is, in point form, as simply as I can put it:

- EHG is best represented by samples from Karelia and Lebyazhinka, which are modern-day Russian localities in the forest zone and on the border between the steppe and the forest-steppe, respectively

- Khvalynsk II is also located on the boundary between the steppe and the forest-steppe, and very far from the Near East

- so the genetic structure of the people buried at Khvalynsk II does represent an admixture event

- however, this admixture event simply involved an EHG population from the forest-steppe and a very distantly Near Eastern-related group native to the steppe (that is, two different Eastern European populations).

I've written this blog post because I think David Reich, Nick Patterson, Iosif Lazaridis and colleagues should finally admit that they didn't quite get this right. And it'd be nice if they could put out a paper sometime soon in which they set the record straight.

See also...


450 comments:

1 – 200 of 450   Newer›   Newest»
Davidski said...

Samara_HG is from Lebyazhinka. That's not really the steppe. I'm surprised that no one's noticed this before.

Btw, that new paper about Khvalynsk II should be out soon. Let's see if they get this whole thing right.

They probably won't.

Copper Axe said...

You are either quite hopeful or being a bit cheeky.

I brought up this exact question with Reich personally at Leiden "how can you make inferences about when ancestry entered and spread in the steppes when we dont have mesolithic or neolithic samples published (publically) yet?" and he aknowledged that this was the case and that they were working on it, but in terms of sampling it isn't the easiest region. In terms of archaeology and skeletal data this is also the case btw when comparing it to let's say the forest zone, so it doesnt surprise me that in terms of sampling data there are some hicccups there. That said it also seemed a bit of an easy non-answer because limited =/= non-existent and they made some really big claims based on their data.

I've said it before and I'll say it again but they really need to investigate how the Khvalynian deluge played into all of this. For a while a large portion of European steppe was under water (if you look at a vegetation or relief map you can still see this), Eastern Europe and West-Siberia were separated and there was a big spillway from the Caspian into the Azov sea which would've separated the areas north of the Caucasus from the russian forest-zone. This went on for a few thousand years and then the area transformed into what we know it as nowadays. Naturally as these barriers were gone people were moving about. In this region I think this post-LGM event was one of the most important in determining genetic structures in the region yet in academia this hasnt been brought up much beyond the context of geological and archaeological research.

Davidski said...

@Copper Axe

Yep, the availability of remains is a problem here. But it's actually a very simple issue.

EHG isn't really a steppe marker. It's a forest marker. And Khvalynsk II isn't really on the steppe.

So the admixture we see at Khvalynsk II is between forest people and steppe people, and nothing to do with any Iranian-related migrants.

The penny should drop for David Reich at some point soon, no?

gamerz_J said...

@Davidski

Over the past few months we've seen quite a few models in papers and blogposts where Progress_En type pops (and Khvalynsk) are alleged to have recent Iran_N-like or Hotu-like ancestry, the CHG of the foragers there not being enough to cover the "Near Eastern shift"(most recently with the Southern Arc series). I know of some posters here who have used Sarazm and related pops to model that ancestry also.

However I remember you saying that actually what these models are showing is "a shift away from CHG" so I was wondering, do you still subscribe to that idea?

That instead of recent admixture you by and large have an earlier CHG-like pop moving into the Steppe but not quite like CHG itself? And if my memory serves me well, you had also brought up eastern affinities of Iran_N not found in the CHG-related side of Steppe and related pops in an earlier post.

Davidski said...

The foragers with CHG are from the Middle Don, which is in the forest steppe.

So it's exactly the same situation as at Khvalynsk II, with forest people mixing with steppe people.

The steppe is huge, so we should expect some diversity in the hunter-gatherers there, especially in border areas like in the North Caucasus and the Caspian.

The people claiming that Iranian or Tajik foragers migrated thousands of miles to the steppe (for no apparent reason) are total morons, but unfortunately they're being encouraged by people like Iosif, Nick, David, etc.

Rob said...

I dont think Khvalynsk needs anything over EHG + CHG, does it ?

RUS_Khvalynsk_Eneol
CHG
RUS_Karelia_HG
best coefficients: 0.215 0.785
TP 0.174

Other models replacing CHG with Hajji Firuz, Iran_N, SehGabi, South Caucasus Neolithic, etc failed


The Progress_En aren't identical, but both need extra WSHG
One of them does need something more proximally West Asian, but that is taken up by Meshoko-Darkveti, which makes historical sense given the neighbourly relations.

RUS_Eneol_Piedmont2
RUS_Khvalynsk_Eneol
CHG
RUS_Tyumen_HG
best coefficients: 0.529 0.353 0.118
TP 0.131

RUS_Eneol_Piedmont1
RUS_Khvalynsk_Eneol
CHG
RUS_Eneol_Mountains
RUS_Tyumen_HG

best coefficients: 0.408 0.195 0.282 0.115
std. errors: 0.061 0.109 0.115 0.047
(bit borderline with the SEs, there, but fine IMO)
TP 0.072

Come Yamnaya, as we know, things shift westward, with need for Ukraine_N and EEF-type admixture.


Rotating set of PRights
CMR_SMA_published
MAR_Taforalt_EpiP
BRA_LapaDoSanto_9600BP
CHN_Tianyuan
RUS_MA1_HG
Indian_GreatAndaman_100BP.SG
RUS_DevilsCave_N
ITA_Villabruna
ESP_LaBrana1_HG
SRB_Iron_Gates_HG
TUR_Marmara_Barcın_N
RUS_Karelia_HG
HUN_Vinca_MN
UKR_N
AZE_N
TUR_C_Tepecik-Çiftlik_N
IRN_Ganj_Dareh_N
CHG



(what's with Vonuchka being re-labelled as Kura Araxces outlier but being 4000 BC? )

Matt said...

Didn't Iosif's recent paper argue that there were two layers of migration, and earlier of these (timed with Early Neolithic developments, but not necessarily at all neolithic in subsistence) ultimately lacked Anatolian/Levant related ancestry?

I think it's quite hard to work out when in the time-frame from 8000BCE (approximately Kotias) to 5000 BCE (approximately Progress), that layer of admixture happened. Middle Don people are 5500 BCE and Khvalynsk approximately 5000 BCE. The two Progress samples for example still show some fair amount of dispersal on PCA, at approximately this time, so there is probably not really evening of admixture out, by that time: https://imgur.com/a/sjsoHRi

Also hard to work out if the CHG bearing proxy was richer in CHG type ancestry than PG2001, or just the same.

Davidski said...

@Matt

Yes, according to Iosif there were two migration "waves".

The Khvalynsk data have been used by the David Reich Lab as evidence of the first so called wave.

My point is that the Khvalynsk samples don't provide any evidence for a migration wave from the Near East. All we have there, really, are forest people mixing with steppe people.

IMO the so called first migration wave is just an illusion created by the fact that the PC steppe shares a very long border with West Asia, so we should expect to see allele/component sharing between populations in this part of Eastern Europe and northern West Asia.

The so called second migration wave is a different issue which I talked about already here.

https://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2022/09/dear-iosifyamnaya.html

That is, I can't see any Armenian-related ancestry in Yamnaya. Models that do show such ancestry are very weak. It's more likely that Yamnaya has Euro farmer ancestry from the western part of the forest steppe.

Davidski said...

By the way, the substructures we see in the Progress/Vonyuchka samples are obviously due to admix from the steppe to the north, and not from the Near East.

Otherwise, we should see a clear signal of Anatolian admix in Progress, no?

Kavkasi said...

The Near Eastern-related population we´re searching for isn't just CHG, its somewhat shifted towards Iran_N: https://anthrogenica.com/showthread.php?27297-qpAdm-Neolithic-admix-chart-for-West-Eurasians-ANF-Natufian-CHG-Iran-N-EHG-WHG-etc

How likely is it a population "native" to the steppe is shifted towards Iran_N? Also, what's the exact definition for native? 10000BC?

Davidski said...

@Kavkasi

How likely is it a population "native" to the steppe is shifted towards Iran_N?

This is actually very likely in the area along the Caspian coast. Have a look at a map.

Apparently there's even a Tajik hunter-gatherer coming in a paper soon that has Iran_N ancestry. So what's the problem?

Also, what's the exact definition for native? 10000BC?

All European Hunter-gatherers are indigenous to Europe. That's the normally accepted definition of indigenous that is applied to peoples worldwide.

Rob said...

Small groups of people did move from/ via Caucasus & assimilate into western steppe society, however doesn’t mean Yamnaya comes from Iran or Armenia. That’s just twisting reality
The route might have been Iran N related as an admixture in ShuvaleriShomu (+ eastern ANF) , which then mixed with CHG to give Meshoko and Majkop, and some of these mixed into steppe

Kavkasi said...

@Davidski

"This is actually very likely in the area along the Caspian coast. Have a look at a map.

Apparently there's even a Tajik hunter-gatherer coming in a paper soon that has Iran_N ancestry. So what's the problem?"

Yeah, you mean TKK01 but that's deep down in Central Asian and you're not really implying a HG population migrated from east of the Caspian Sea to the PC steppe, are you? There is only the Caucasus left for the CHG/Iran ghost and because of the shift towards Iran_N I would even say south of the Caucasus.

"All European Hunter-gatherers are indigenous to Europe. That's the normally accepted definition of indigenous that is applied to peoples worldwide."

A HG lifestlye is not the definition for indigenous or native. Particularly in ancient DNA where most populations were HGs. We're talking about semantics anyway.

If I recall correctly a user on AG calculated the mixing event of EHG and CHG/Iran_N ghost pop to about 7000-6500BC. That's roughly the same time period when Anatolian farmers entered Europe.

Davidski said...

I don't think any Near Eastern population, or even Maykop, had any real impact on Yamnaya genetics.

The Yamnaya gene pool basically already existed during the Sredny Stog period.

Sredny Stog people were like Progress with some Ukraine N admix, and maybe a bit of farmer input from the forest steppe around Moldova.

Davidski said...

@Kavkasi

Only people who are at least seriously obsessive compulsive would question whether a population present in an area for thousands of years and practicing a forager lifestyle was native to that area.

Take from that what you will.

Also, admixture dates are crap. They don't provide any real context or even an accurate date.

People were always mixing on the steppe, and if they just happened to have clearly different ratios of some broad components, this will register as a major admixture event.

That is, there's no guarantee from this sort of output that there even was an admixture event between EHG and CHG on the steppe.

gamerz_J said...

@Davidski

"The steppe is huge, so we should expect some diversity in the hunter-gatherers there, especially in border areas like in the North Caucasus and the Caspian.

The people claiming that Iranian or Tajik foragers migrated thousands of miles to the steppe (for no apparent reason) are total morons, but unfortunately they're being encouraged by people like Iosif, Nick, David, etc."

Right, but the people claiming that do so because apparently in most models (including qpAdm and G25) Progress itself (not Yamnaya who can fit fine with additional ANF from what I've seen-rather than Iran_N-related stuff) is shifted towards Iran_N in ways that the CHG samples cannot explain, nor the Don foragers with CHG admixture.

So to better rephrase my question I guess, does Progress itself have Iranian forager admixture? Lazaridis has mentioned that neither CHG nor Iran_N create good enough models for Steppe_En on their own.

The argument I think is that this admixture is "recent" and arrived after the formation of the CHG samples, that is around 7000 BC.

Andrzejewski said...

What strikes me lately is how PIE could be a much later language than I’d imagined; in a recent thread posted on this blog it turned out that Anatolian languages lacked a cognate for “milk” or had a different root for this term. Many items had words which greatly diverged between Hittite and the “core PIE”. What this fact indicates to me is that what we used to regard as primordial “IE” words like “milk” are either a newer invention or it may have originated in one of the neighboring farmer or forager languages in proximity to and contact with the Sredny Stog or Yamnaya communities, and thus not a direct descendant of any predecessor one. It then pushes forwards the timeline for Indo-European linguistic beginning from 8000BCE to maybe 6000BCE.

gamerz_J said...

Although for what it's worth Hotu is preferred to Iran_N for Progress...Here are some quick G25 runs:

Target: RUS_Progress_En
Distance: 4.7518% / 0.04751805
44.0 RUS_Karelia_HG
40.4 GEO_CHG
8.4 IRN_HotuIIIb_Meso
7.2 RUS_AfontovaGora3
0.0 IRN_Ganj_Dareh_N
0.0 RUS_Sidelkino_HG
0.0 RUS_Tyumen_HG
0.0 UKR_Meso
0.0 UKR_N

Target: RUS_Progress_En
Distance: 4.7894% / 0.04789411
43.8 RUS_Karelia_HG
41.4 GEO_CHG
8.6 RUS_AfontovaGora3
6.2 IRN_Ganj_Dareh_N
0.0 RUS_Sidelkino_HG
0.0 RUS_Tyumen_HG
0.0 TUR_Marmara_Barcin_N
0.0 UKR_Meso
0.0 UKR_N

They need excess ANE but perhaps not WSHG, the combination of that and the Iran_N/Meso affinity might be the reason why Sarazm and that Tajik HG might make for good fits. But it might as well be a cline of ANE ancestry in the PC Steppe or someplace west of the Urals.

John Smith said...

@Davidski

Please correct me if I am wrong. Couldn't Yamnaya_Samara also be partly modeled (8%) with an Armenian source? The ancestral breakdown of "ARM_Aknashen_N:I3931" is: 31-32% EEF, 27-30% CHG, 29-31% Iran_N, 10-13% Middle Eastern.

Target: Yamnaya_RUS_Samara
Distance: 0.0562% / 0.05616197
30.9 GEO_CHG:KK1__BC_7728__Coverage_99.59%
18.0 RUS_Karelia_HG:UzOO77__BC_5250__Coverage_46.32%
12.4 RUS_Karelia_HG:I0211__BC_6500__Coverage_12.48%
11.0 RUS_Karelia_HG:I0061__BC_6500__Coverage_87.22%
9.0 RUS_Samara_HG:I0124__BC_5594__Coverage_40.60%
7.8 ARM_Aknashen_N:I3931__BC_5908__Coverage_22.04%
5.7 UKR_Meso:I1763__BC_8131__Coverage_70.72%
5.2 BGR_MP_N:I1297__BC_5600__Coverage_10.30%

Some Iran_N (1%) also pops up in Yamnaya_Samara.

Target: Yamnaya_RUS_Samara
Distance: 0.0579% / 0.05786538
36.6 GEO_CHG:KK1__BC_7728__Coverage_99.59%
20.2 RUS_Karelia_HG:I0211__BC_6500__Coverage_12.48%
17.4 UKR_Meso:I1763__BC_8131__Coverage_70.72%
11.3 RUS_Karelia_HG:I0061__BC_6500__Coverage_87.22%
5.7 BGR_Yabalkovo_N:I0698__BC_5950__Coverage_61.96%
5.3 RUS_AfontovaGora3:AfontovaGora3__BC_16086__Coverage_23.09%
2.6 RUS_Sidelkino_HG:Sidelkino__BC_9371__Coverage_84.56%
0.9 IRN_Ganj_Dareh_N:I1945__BC_7850__Coverage_20.90%

Samples used: https://pastebin.com/raw/k42PSNLu

Kavkasi said...

"Yeah, you mean TKK01 but that's deep down in Central Asian..."

Two typos...I have to correct myself the sample is called TTK001 and its Central Asia but I guess you already get which sample I meant.

Rob said...

@ Kavkasi
It's difficult to understand what point your trying to make

Do you suggest that because some bloke on AG - with very distally formulated qpAdm runs - found 10% Iran admixture in Yamnaya, that Yamnaya comes from an exotic location outside the western steppe ?

Davidski said...

@John Smith

I can't see anything Armenian-like about Yamnaya.

https://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2022/09/dear-iosifyamnaya.html

Davidski said...

@gamerz_J

CHG is represented by Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic genomes from Georgia, not the PC steppe.

The PC steppe extends east of Georgia, right up to the Caspian Sea.

So there's no reason to assume that CHG should be the perfect proxy for the CHG-related ancestry on the PC steppe.

The Middle Don samples are from the forest steppe (not the PC steppe) quite far to the west of the Caspian Sea. Have a look at a map.

Rob said...

Volga -Caspian pottery is said to have Kelteminar inspiration
These lower caspian groups are the source of of WSHG-like admixture in Progress EN, and even more in Kumsay & steppe Majkop
I don’t see a need for ghost ANE groups, perhaps apart from the fact that some like to spin a good yarn

vAsiSTha said...

@davidski
"That is, there's no guarantee from this sort of output that there even was an admixture event between EHG and CHG on the steppe."

Lol.

Davidski said...

@vAsiSTha

Email Nick Patterson and ask him.

He used Steppe Maykop in his test to represent EHG, which is obviously nuts.

But it doesn't matter, because Nick was just looking for a major admixture event, and not admixture specifically between CHG and EHG.

That major admixture event was dated to ~4,100 BCE, so obviously it had to represent mixture between Progress-like people and Ukraine N, because Progress is dated to ~4,200 BCE.

Ask Nick about how specific these sorts of estimates are in regards to the population sources and let us know what he said.

vAsiSTha said...

@Davidski

I have no reason to mail Patterson, I am perfectly capable of evaluating the data myself. Following Chintalapati et al, I have also extensively tested DATES on simulated data and verified that it gives correct output for the simulations whose admixture times are known.


Now, to recreate a 'more palatable' DATES model and test for the CHG/Iran admixture date.
EHG - 11 samples (Karelia, SamaraHG, Popovo, Khvalynsk, Sidelkino, KAR001 and PES001 from NW Russia_Meso)
CHG/Iran - 47 samples (CHG, Ganj_Dareh_N, and SC Asian chalc samples like Geoksyur, parkhai, sarazm, shahrsokhta_BA1 etc)

Target - Yamnaya_Samara + Russia_Afanasievo - 33 samples.

DATES output (in no of gens ago)
"mean: 55.614 std error: 4.620 Z: 12.037 nrmsd: 0.074"


The Z-Score is fantastic, ie. std error is low. nrmsd is low as well.
With assumption of 3000bce as mean Yamnaya/Afan date, @28 yrs per gen, this translates to admixture date of 4816 - 4299 BCE, 95% Confidence Interval range

Khvalynsk samples lie in the middle of this range (4500bce - reservoir effect corrected), and progress/vonyuchka samples post date it (4200bce - RE corrected). This result does not preclude minor iran/chg ancestry entering the region prior to 4800bce. So all of it makes complete sense, except to you.

Result files available here, including parameter files.

Copper Axe said...

@Davidski

The admixture dates more likely represents the admixing event between steppe herders/fishermen and ANF carrying populations, because similar dates are acquired when using EHG and ANF. See Altvred's output in this old post of mine:
https://musaeumscythia.blogspot.com/2022/01/when-did-western-steppe-herder-genetic.html

@Rob

It isn't exactly diffucult to imagine a scenario where you have a significant dropoff of WHG ancestry as you get past the Don in the neolithic. This doesnt mean you need a 100% ANE population in the neolithic to explain progress, you just need an "EHG" source with less WHG than currently sampled EHGs. If Progress has WSHG (and the east asian ancestry that comes with it) then Yamnaya and Corded Ware do too btw.

Davidski said...

@vAsiSTha

This CHG-related admixture was already in the forest steppe in the Middle Don and at Khvalynsk well before 5,000 BCE.

So it had to have entered the steppe much earlier, because it didn't fly to the forest steppe.

Grow a brain.

vAsiSTha said...

@Davidski

There is a difference between 10% and the ~50% external ancestry present in Progress/vonyuchka folks.

Only a person without a brain will suggest that the older samples with 10% chg/iran ancestry are responsible for the 50% chg/iran ancestry in progress like folks. Progress samples are also the ones which fit best as the Yamnaya source. It is a no brainer that there was additional inflow post 5000bce, as DATES suggests.

Grow a pair, accept it and stop misinforming your readers.

Davidski said...

@vAsiSTha

You're a total moron.

Progress is just a proxy for Yamnaya. Sredny Stog is the real ancestral source.

Sredny Stog is as old as Progress as it was located in Ukraine.

Rob said...

inferencing with DATES, and other fancy methodologies for other topics is obvoiusly worthwhile - as the frosting on the cake, or a probative assessment. Same goes with our educated guesses.
But we is obvously needed aDNA ver a long period analysed really well using a fairly basic approach, PCA, stats, an admixture method and uniparentals linked into an archaeological frameowrk.

To begin to understand 'the steppe', we need to separate
a) the formative phase 11,000 - 4,000 BC. When the steppe consisted of forming, shifting & heterogenous social networks
b) 4000 - 3000 BC : the homogenization, lineage bottlenecking and outward expansion


vAsiSTha said...

"Sredny Stog is the real ancestral source".

Do you live in a fantasy world? Anyway, my last comment on this post. I rather hit my head on the wall than this.

G25 using sources averages on 3 relevant samples from Dereivka (Sredny Stog site). These are rough models only, meant to check broad affinities.

Target: UKR_N:I4111 (4700-4500bce)
Distance: 1.9399% / 0.01939924
90.4 UKR_N
4.8 HUN_Vinca_MN
4.6 RUS_Karelia_HG
0.2 GEO_CHG
0.0 ARM_Aknashen_N
0.0 AZE_Caucasus_lowlands_LN
0.0 RUS_Khvalynsk_En
0.0 RUS_Progress_En

Target: UKR_Dereivka_I_En2:I4110 (3500-3300bce)
Distance: 3.4323% / 0.03432311
47.4 UKR_N
31.6 HUN_Vinca_MN
17.8 RUS_Progress_En
3.2 RUS_Karelia_HG
0.0 ARM_Aknashen_N
0.0 AZE_Caucasus_lowlands_LN
0.0 GEO_CHG
0.0 RUS_Khvalynsk_En

Target: UKR_Dereivka_I_En1:I5882 (3300-2900bce)
Distance: 2.6975% / 0.02697542
72.8 UKR_N
15.6 HUN_Vinca_MN
7.4 ARM_Aknashen_N
4.2 GEO_CHG
0.0 AZE_Caucasus_lowlands_LN
0.0 RUS_Karelia_HG
0.0 RUS_Khvalynsk_En
0.0 RUS_Progress_En

Meanwhile, Yamnaya just loves Progress. Dereivka, not so much.


Target: Yamnaya_RUS_Samara
Distance: 3.0118% / 0.03011787
65.0 RUS_Progress_En
20.0 RUS_Khvalynsk_En
10.2 UKR_Dereivka_I_En1
4.8 HUN_Vinca_MN
0.0 ARM_Aknashen_N
0.0 AZE_Caucasus_lowlands_LN
0.0 GEO_CHG
0.0 RUS_Karelia_HG
0.0 TJK_Sarazm_En
0.0 TTK
0.0 UKR_Dereivka_I_En2
0.0 UKR_N
0.0 UKR_N_I4111

Which sredny stog samples are the ancestors of Yamnaya?

Rob said...

@ Copper Axe

“ This doesnt mean you need a 100% ANE population in the neolithic to explain progress, you just need an "EHG" source with less WHG than currently sampled EHGs.”

Why is that ? I’ve been using Peachanitsa , Karelia and Sidelkino, not Dnieper HG
What evidence is there for a “more eastern EHG”, why is it needed and where should it be found lest we are simply straying into WSHGs , which were already in the Volga Ural

gamerz_J said...

@Davidski

"So there's no reason to assume that CHG should be the perfect proxy for the CHG-related ancestry on the PC steppe.

The Middle Don samples are from the forest steppe (not the PC steppe) quite far to the west of the Caspian Sea. Have a look at a map."

Yes, no question but what I am trying to figure out is whether this CHG-Iran_N-related pop moved to the PC Steppe as is (which is what you seemed to suggest in your earlier blog entries) or in 2 steps, 1 CHG and another that shifted away from it towards the direction of Iran_N.

In any case, if it is the former, then the CHG-related pop might have arrived in the steppe quite early.

Matt said...

@Davidski: It's possible both that CHG like ancestry lived north of Georgia or even north of the Caucasus at the time of Kotias, or it may not have until after the time of Kotias.

We really don't have much evidence either way unfortunately. We're lucky to even have Kotias really - or otherwise we'd be gesticulating at the NW Iranian samples.

Regarding why foragers would trek so far to the north, it seems not much more or less likely than the suggestion that foragers would trek far south to Areni Cave...

epoch said...

That is why the X/autosomes ratio that Iosif lazaridis posted on Twitter is so highly interesting. It basically *proofs* that while the admixture event was very recent it involved an EHG population and a mixed CHG/EHG population. Not a 100% CHG population.

epoch said...

The Arc paper modeled Yamnaya having some Levant ancestry. We do have three early Baltic CWC samples that show no EEF admixture. If these are pooled and put through exactly the same modeling the Arc paper does, do they also show the same ancestry?

I do understand that Lazaridis modeling is questioned, but if these samples do show *different* outcome it shows that whatever it is that the paper found is Yamnaya-specific and not typical for IE, *even* with the models used in the Arc paper.

These three:
https://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2018/02/early-baltic-corded-ware-form-genetic.html

Rami said...

PG2001: 4994-4802 calBCE
PG2004: 4240-4047 calBCE
VJ1001: 4337-4177 calBCE

Khvalnysk dates to 5000 BCE, so clearly the admixing had to occur prior to 5000 BC, looking at PG2.

Vashista's model is incorrect he is using populations with ANF/EEF , so the date he is arriving is the admixture of ANF not CHG in Yamnaya, if you look at the Eneolithic Steppe samples the DATES admixture are at least 2500-3000 years before they lived, which is closer to the Mesolithic/early Neolithic. The Caucasus by the Neolithic had huge amounts of ANF , look at those samples from the Shulavari culture which predate Eneolithic Steppe.
So what David is saying makes perfect sense, these late Mesolithic CHG related pop fanned out early
on to the Forest Steppe.

a Gorilla said...

@Kavkasi i made that post and my models do not imply direct ancestry, they simply check for "shifts".

@Rob
I literally wrote on my post that my models do not imply direct ancestry but simply check for shifty and they are still completely ignoring that. Next time i will write that on top with the biggest letters possible.

Davidski said...

@vAsiSTha

Yamnaya is derived from Sredny Stog you dickhead.

Like I said, talk to Nick Patterson and he'll confirm this too.

Davidski said...

@epoch

I've lost hope for Iosif. He sort of reminds me of Eran Elhaik now. And that's not a compliment.

Of course the Progress people can't be the result of a mixture between CHG males and EHG females.

These people are obviously derived from populations that already had both CHG and EHG related ancestries, but probably in very different ratios.

The peculiar X chromosomes of the Progress samples are easily explained by males in the North Caucasus (already with EHG ancestry) bringing in females from the north with much higher levels of EHG ancestry.

That's why the Progress males belong to R1b-V1636.

Rob said...

@ Varkoume Ipervolika


There’s no issues with your models. So when I said that they were distally based, that wasn’t a criticism. That’s how analysis should begin, to understand broad currents. And I know that wasn’t even purpose of your investigation. So my comment was directed to Kavkas’ interpretation of your model.

Rob said...

@ vasistha

What in your opinion are the differences between “CHG” & “IranN” ?

Davidski said...

vAsiSTha is obviously mentally deranged, so his opinions are only useful for their comedic value

Sam Elliott said...

Does anyone know when we’re going to get any ancient samples (Eneolithic) from the western steppe and in the vicinity of Sredny Stog? One of the authors from the Southern Arc study singled out some specific samples from Moldova that were supposed to be in that study, but they were never published. At the same time, I noticed that Razib Khan recently had David Anthony on his podcast and Anthony had mentioned they’re (Harvard?) working on some sort of “Yamnaya Origins Project”. He had mentioned that they have many Yamnaya samples from 4000 BC (I’m assuming western steppe) and none of these samples yielded any R1b Z2103 at the time of the podcast. Why not publish these samples from the western steppe?

It seems like one of the big problems has been this reliance on very limited samples like Vonyuchka and from Khvalynsk. These seem overrated. Where are the samples from the western steppe (Ukraine/Moldova area)?

Davidski said...

@Sam Elliott

I noticed that Razib Khan recently had David Anthony on his podcast and Anthony had mentioned they’re (Harvard?) working on some sort of “Yamnaya Origins Project”.

I'm willing to bet they'll screw this up.

But when the data are finally released we'll have a lot of fun here.

vAsiSTha said...

@rami

"PG2001: 4994-4802 calBCE
PG2004: 4240-4047 calBCE
VJ1001: 4337-4177 calBCE

Khvalnysk dates to 5000 BCE, so clearly the admixing had to occur prior to 5000 BC, looking at PG2."

Eh? Don't start this nonsense again. PG2001 is not corrected for reservoir effect, don't rely on Harvard anno file for the dates. Check Wang et al for reservoir effect corrected date for PG2001 which is around 4200bce.

Khvalynsk II samples are not from 4500bce, more like 4500-4400bce. Check Wilkin et al 2021.

@Rob
Chg is more ehg shifted than IranN is in Fstats.

@davidski
Why don't you show which dereivka sample is the ancestor of yamnaya via g25 or qpAdm?

What is deranged about this is your desperation to relabel iranian related ancestry into native european. Quite pathetic.

Davidski said...

@vAsiSTha

That Dereivka sample isn't Sredny Stog.

You'll shit yourself when you see proper Sredny Stog samples, and it'll be fun to watch the meltdown.

vAsiSTha said...

Yes, just like I shat myself with laughter after seeing the 'steppe ancestry' in Anatolia like you promised.

vAsiSTha said...

Btw, i have seen the 'sredni stog' samples you speak of, they are just like yamnaya. They don't have the high chg/iran needed for the formation of yamnaya. Especially in the absence of significant yamnaya related ancestry at Dereivka between 4500 and 3000bce, those samples seem like migrants from somewhere else.

Waiting for that paper.

Davidski said...

This is an example of what I'm talking about, except this is from just before Yamnaya.

Ukraine_EN,0.118376,0.093429,0.036204,0.105622,-0.032929,0.044344,0.003055,0.001154,-0.05563,-0.073441,-0.004709,0.004946,-0.00892,-0.026561,0.03488,0.019623,0.000391,0.002534,0.002388,0.011005,-0.003369,0.004822,0.008504,0.022292,0.000599

Nothing like Dereivka, because this sample is from the steppe right near the Black Sea coast.

That's where the CHG-rich pops were from about 4,500 BCE (Sredny Stog, Usatovo).

vAsiSTha said...

Yeah well, its similar to Yamnaya, Progress is the ancestor. What's the exact date and site name?

Target: Ukraine_EN
Distance: 3.6713% / 0.03671321
73.4 RUS_Progress_En
12.2 RUS_Khvalynsk_En
7.4 HUN_Vinca_MN
7.0 UKR_Dereivka_I_En1
0.0 ARM_Aknashen_N
0.0 AZE_Caucasus_lowlands_LN
0.0 GEO_CHG
0.0 ROU_Iron_Gates_HG
0.0 RUS_Karelia_HG
0.0 RUS_Samara_HG
0.0 SRB_Iron_Gates_HG
0.0 SRB_Iron_Gates_HG_o
0.0 TJK_Sarazm_En
0.0 TTK
0.0 UKR_Dereivka_I_En2
0.0 UKR_N
0.0 UKR_N_I4111

Davidski said...

Wait for the publication. Then you can revise your excuses.

Vladimir said...

David, is it possible to get G25 coordinates from these files of the early Neolithic genotype of Azerbaijan, or are they bad?

https://drive.google.com/drive/mobile/folders/0B_5kZ1kxzaC7flJXNmxSODNhNl90OGd6Mm1zY2VrNzlSUGhSNTFVNHVTWTVSanVLeXA0dVE?resourcekey=0-qQ2xwiGYregOH38C1fKNmA

vAsiSTha said...

Again, this sample is almost same as Yamnaya_samara. yamnaya itself can't be the source of CHG/Iran in yamnaya right? lol.

Using this sample, how do you prove that Progress like people are not the source of Yamnaya-like people in Samara as well as Black sea coast? Specifically, how do you prove using this ~3500bce sample that a 'native' high chgiran component (40-50%) already existed in the region millennia before 5000bce?


Distance to: Ukraine_EN
0.02248805 Yamnaya_RUS_Samara
0.02408773 Yamnaya_RUS_Kalmykia
0.03376841 Yamnaya_RUS_Caucasus
0.05338141 RUS_Progress_En
0.09666415 RUS_Khvalynsk_En
0.14924594 UKR_Dereivka_I_En2:I4110
0.16404643 UKR_Dereivka_I_En1:I5882
0.16568786 RUS_Samara_HG:I0124
0.17820059 RUS_Karelia_HG:UzOO77
0.18327143 RUS_Karelia_HG:I0061
0.18454480 RUS_Karelia_HG
0.19195230 TJK_Sarazm_En:I4290
0.19266331 TTK:TTK001.C0101
0.20099050 RUS_Karelia_HG:I0211
0.20380584 UKR_N_I4111:I4111
0.20574716 TJK_Sarazm_En:I4910
0.21374763 UKR_N
0.21953430 GEO_CHG:KK1
0.21953430 GEO_CHG
0.22987843 ARM_Aknashen_N
0.24695267 AZE_Caucasus_lowlands_LN:POT002
0.24796146 AZE_Caucasus_lowlands_LN
0.25054585 AZE_Caucasus_lowlands_LN:MTT001
0.26025063 SRB_Iron_Gates_HG_o
0.30619005 HUN_Vinca_MN:I1895

Davidski said...

@vAsiSTha

There are Usatovo and Sredny Stog samples with more CHG-like ancestry.

Progress is irrelevant.

Davidski said...

@Vladimir

I'll have a look tomorrow.

Vladimir said...

@ Davidski

thank you, and then there are three more studies without G25 coordinates:
The genetic history of Scandinavia from the Roman Iron Age to the present https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867422014684#mmc1
Middle Holocene Siberian genomes reveal highly connected gene pools throughout North Asia
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(22)01892-9?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0960982222018929%3Fshowall%3Dtrue
Kinship practices in Early Iron Age southeast Europe: genetic and isotopic analysis of burials from the Dolge njive barrow cemetery, Dolenjska, Slovenia
https://bradscholars.brad.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/10454/19104/Buckberry_J_2022_Accepted_Manuscript.pdf?sequence=11&isAllowed=y

Copper Axe said...

@Rob
"Why is that ? I’ve been using Peachanitsa , Karelia and Sidelkino, not Dnieper HG
What evidence is there for a “more eastern EHG”, why is it needed and where should it be found lest we are simply straying into WSHGs , which were already in the Volga Ural"

I think its less about west>east clines but more about habitation patterns in different climates. All of these are still from the forest zone region and we have no ancient DNA to infer WHG to ANE ratios for the meso/neolithic inhabitants of the (russian) steppes yet. In your model you are assuming the WHG to ANE ratio is the same as those EHG samples, which might not be the case. Whether its Progress vs Samara_HG or Kumsay vs Tyumen the pattern is that the samples from that area of the steppes have less WHG ancestry than to the north.

I think genuine WSHG ancestry should lead to more detectable east asian affinities relative to EHG or Ukr_N that as far as I know isn't there.

Rob said...

@ Copper Axe

It all sounds a bit theoretical, though, and somewhat inconsequential in reality. Just working with the data we have, WSHG is required.

But now Im curious, what stats have you seen supporting this 'hyper-EHG' proposal ?

At face value, there apparently is quite a bit of Y-hg Q1 in Khvalynsk, and although some of it might be related to 'old ANE', some must be Siberian related.
Recalling Fu et al, ''within the Villabruna Cluster, some, but not all, individuals have an affinity to east Asians.'' . So if it made it to central-western Europe, it would be odd to bypass the steppe.

vAsiSTha said...

As far as G25 is concerned, Tajik TTK/Sarazm labels are chosen over Tyumen or Sosnivoy (WSHG) for Steppe_en and khvalynsk. Will test with qpAdm if I get time. TTK itself has 20% IranN (but no CHG) as per qpAdm.


Target: RUS_Vonyuchka_En:VJ1001
Distance: 3.8292% / 0.03829238
37.0 RUS_Karelia_HG
30.4 GEO_CHG
29.0 TJK_Sarazm_En
3.6 UKR_N
0.0 ARM_Aknashen_N
0.0 CHN_Tarim_EMBA1
0.0 CHN_Tarim_EMBA2
0.0 HUN_Vinca_MN
0.0 IRN_Ganj_Dareh_N
0.0 IRN_Seh_Gabi_C
0.0 IRN_Seh_Gabi_LN
0.0 RUS_Sosonivoy_HG
0.0 RUS_Tyumen_HG
0.0 TTK


Target: RUS_Progress_En:PG2004
Distance: 4.4668% / 0.04466758
37.6 RUS_Karelia_HG
29.0 GEO_CHG
14.8 TTK
12.8 TJK_Sarazm_En
5.8 UKR_N
0.0 ARM_Aknashen_N
0.0 CHN_Tarim_EMBA1
0.0 CHN_Tarim_EMBA2
0.0 HUN_Vinca_MN
0.0 IRN_Ganj_Dareh_N
0.0 IRN_Seh_Gabi_C
0.0 IRN_Seh_Gabi_LN
0.0 RUS_Sosonivoy_HG
0.0 RUS_Tyumen_HG


Target: RUS_Progress_En:PG2001
Distance: 4.1116% / 0.04111611
36.2 GEO_CHG
31.0 RUS_Karelia_HG
18.0 TTK
7.8 TJK_Sarazm_En
4.6 HUN_Vinca_MN
2.0 UKR_N
0.4 ARM_Aknashen_N
0.0 CHN_Tarim_EMBA1
0.0 CHN_Tarim_EMBA2
0.0 IRN_Ganj_Dareh_N
0.0 IRN_Seh_Gabi_C
0.0 IRN_Seh_Gabi_LN
0.0 RUS_Sosonivoy_HG
0.0 RUS_Tyumen_HG


Target: RUS_Khvalynsk_En:I0434
Distance: 3.3673% / 0.03367258
48.6 RUS_Karelia_HG
21.8 TTK
20.8 GEO_CHG
6.2 ARM_Aknashen_N
2.6 UKR_N
0.0 CHN_Tarim_EMBA1
0.0 CHN_Tarim_EMBA2
0.0 HUN_Vinca_MN
0.0 IRN_Ganj_Dareh_N
0.0 IRN_Seh_Gabi_C
0.0 IRN_Seh_Gabi_LN
0.0 RUS_Sosonivoy_HG
0.0 RUS_Tyumen_HG
0.0 TJK_Sarazm_En


Target: RUS_Khvalynsk_En:I0433
Distance: 4.0142% / 0.04014249
56.6 RUS_Karelia_HG
14.0 UKR_N
9.8 GEO_CHG
9.0 RUS_Sosonivoy_HG
7.2 TTK
2.4 HUN_Vinca_MN
1.0 ARM_Aknashen_N
0.0 CHN_Tarim_EMBA1
0.0 CHN_Tarim_EMBA2
0.0 IRN_Ganj_Dareh_N
0.0 IRN_Seh_Gabi_C
0.0 IRN_Seh_Gabi_LN
0.0 RUS_Tyumen_HG
0.0 TJK_Sarazm_En


Target: RUS_Khvalynsk_En:I0122
Distance: 3.6627% / 0.03662708
67.2 RUS_Karelia_HG
16.6 GEO_CHG
8.4 UKR_N
6.6 TTK
1.2 HUN_Vinca_MN
0.0 ARM_Aknashen_N
0.0 CHN_Tarim_EMBA1
0.0 CHN_Tarim_EMBA2
0.0 IRN_Ganj_Dareh_N
0.0 IRN_Seh_Gabi_C
0.0 IRN_Seh_Gabi_LN
0.0 RUS_Sosonivoy_HG
0.0 RUS_Tyumen_HG
0.0 TJK_Sarazm_En

Target: Yamnaya_RUS_Samara
Distance: 5.5283% / 0.05528257
27.0 RUS_Karelia_HG
22.6 GEO_CHG
20.4 UKR_N
15.2 ARM_Aknashen_N
14.8 TTK
0.0 CHN_Tarim_EMBA1
0.0 CHN_Tarim_EMBA2
0.0 HUN_Vinca_MN
0.0 IRN_Ganj_Dareh_N
0.0 IRN_Seh_Gabi_C
0.0 IRN_Seh_Gabi_LN
0.0 RUS_Sosonivoy_HG
0.0 RUS_Tyumen_HG
0.0 TJK_Sarazm_En

Davidski said...

@Matt

Regarding why foragers would trek so far to the north, it seems not much more or less likely than the suggestion that foragers would trek far south to Areni Cave...

I don't know where you're getting this, but there's no way that Kotias-related foragers flooded the steppe and raced as far as the forest steppe around 5,500 BCE.

This must have been a long process, with a contact zone or contact zones somewhere along the Caucasus and/or the Caspian coastline.

The CHG in the Middle Don at 5,300 BCE is heavily diluted, as it should be in a secondary contact zone like this.

And the people in the Areni Cave have Steppe Eneolithic ancestry, not EHG.

There's actually no direct evidence yet that EHG per se, like we see in the forest zone, ever existed on the steppe.

Let's get real with our assumptions and analyses here, or we'll end up like you know who at you know what lab.

Kavkasi said...

@Rob

"Do you suggest that because some bloke on AG - with very distally formulated qpAdm runs - found 10% Iran admixture in Yamnaya, that Yamnaya comes from an exotic location outside the western steppe ?"

I didn´t even once use the word Yamnaya. Reread my posts, I am talking about the Near Eastern-related ancestry we see in populations in the steppe starting with the Middle Don foragers.

@Varkoume Ipervolika

"i made that post and my models do not imply direct ancestry, they simply check for "shifts"."

I´ve never talked about direct ancestry. In all of my posts I talked about a ghost population that is "shifted" towards Iran_N compared to CHG (Kotias). Your models confirm it and so does G25 and other models with qpAdm, it´s consistent.

Davidski said...

The Middle Don foragers are north of the steppe and they're already mixed at 5,300 BCE.

So when do you think this type of ancestry was on the steppe just north of the Caucasus?

5,500 BCE? Haha.

Davidski said...

@Vladimir

Scaled

Mentesh_En:MT23,0.099026,0.132019,-0.050157,-0.068799,-0.026159,-0.026495,0.00658,0.006923,-0.030065,0.00893,0.019811,0.001499,-0.00669,-0.000275,-0.0095,0.001326,0.019427,0.011275,-0.004022,0.001,-0.007237,0.005935,0.006286,-0.008314,0.004431

Raw

Mentesh_En:MT23,0.0087,0.013,-0.0133,-0.0213,-0.0085,-0.0095,0.0028,0.003,-0.0147,0.0049,0.0122,0.001,-0.0045,-0.0002,-0.007,0.001,0.0149,0.0089,-0.0032,0.0008,-0.0058,0.0048,0.0051,-0.0069,0.0037

Kavkasi said...

@Davidski

Based on the admixture event (DATES) output Altvred calculated, my guess is 6500BC.

Davidski said...

Like I already said, DATES won't tell you when EHG met CHG.

It'll just cough up a date of some sort of admixture, like between Pop A with 80/20 CHG/EHG and Pop B with 40/60 CHG/EHG, depending on how you design the test.

In other words, big caveats apply to these sorts of tests.

Like I also already said, currently there's no real evidence of EHG per se even being present on the steppe ever.

Try and get your head around that.

EastPole said...

@Andrzejewski

“What strikes me lately is how PIE could be a much later language than I’d imagined”

And I on the contrary have a hunch that it was much older. In my opinion Y-DNA, culture and religion (and therefore language) of pre-Indo-Europeans comes from EHG.
Gradually they mixed with CHG women on the steppe which introduced some minor modification to their religion and culture and finally with EEF/WHG women from Tripolye/GA/TRB with substantial change in their culture, religion and language and thus forming CWC and Indo-Slavic. But the core was EHG and can be very old. It is all speculation but how do you explain the separation of R1a and R1b in IE populations? Should be very old.

vAsiSTha said...

"Like I already said, DATES won't tell you when EHG met CHG.

It'll just cough up a date of some sort of admixture, like between Pop A with 80/20 CHG/EHG and Pop B with 40/60 CHG/EHG, depending on how you design the test.

In other words, big caveats apply to these sorts of tests."

It literally tells you when EHG admixes with the CHG/Iran components. Its not some random result. The people who made the tool tested it under various simulated scenarios of multiple waves and continuous admixture as well. And the 95% CI results of those simulations are almost always correct (in case of single admixture).

As with all tests, caveats apply and most have been covered by Chintalapati et al 2022.

1. In case of continuous admixture or multiple waves, an intermediate date will be provided. There are other ways to determine if there was a single shot admixture or multiple shot. Example, the fit of the covariance decay chart will be better if expressed as a sum of two exponential decays rather than 1 in the case of dual wave admixture.

2. When references are changed (but still broadly represent the same 2 components each), it could shift output by few generations up or down but the broad meaning of the result doesn't change. 50 gens could become 60, but won't become 150.

In the specific case of yamnaya/afanasievo, a result of around 4500bce means either

1. the direct date of admixture is around 4500bce in case of 1 wave.
2. An intermediate date in case of continuous admixture or 2 or more waves, in which case certainly there was a later wave than 4500bce and an earlier wave than 4500bce - say 4200bce and 5500bce. or a continuous increase on iranN/chg from 5500bce to 4200bce (for eg). We have good reason to assume that this option 2 is the correct one.

In either of the 2 options, a post 5000bce addition of chg/iran ancestry is guaranteed.


"The Middle Don foragers are north of the steppe and they're already mixed at 5,300 BCE.

So when do you think this type of ancestry was on the steppe just north of the Caucasus?

5,500 BCE? Haha."

10-15% chg/iran ancestry from 5300bce is not a problem at all. It actually confirms that there was additional inflow into steppe post this date. The scientists are clear when they talk about 2 waves into steppe. Its either that or there was continuous admixture with increasing IranN %.

Davidski said...

Unfortunately, the scientists that we're dealing with here have lost the plot.

They don't know how to interpret the data they are generating. At least in this case anyway.

There weren't any waves into the steppe. That is a fantasy.

And like I've already pointed out, the authors of that DATES paper used Steppe Maykop to represent EHG, which should tell you how precise DATES really is.

Ric Hern said...

Yes even with a 50/50% admixture within a population it does not necessarily mean that it is a first generation admixture. You will have to find for example a 100 % EHG Father and a 100% CHG Mother with the 50/50% Child to be certain.

Ric Hern said...

We can see this in Cattle breeding with the creation of Composite Breeds. Eg. The Bonsmara Breed. 5/8 Afrikaner and 3/8 Shorthorn/Hereford. This breed is about 70 years old therefore about 35 generations and their percentage of admixture didn't change. In Human terms that will be almost a Thousand years....

Rob said...

i added TTK to a quick screen with g25 for the Volga-Caucasus cluster, didnt seem to contribute anything
Same old EHG, CHG, with a touch of Iran N & WSHG

Will need to check formally to be sure

'Target Distance AZE_Caucasus_lowlands_LN GEO_CHG IRN_Ganj_Dareh_N MDA_Trypillia_Late RUS_Darkveti-Meshoko_En RUS_Karelia_HG RUS_Tyumen_HG TTK UKR_Trypillia
RUS_Khvalynsk_En:I0122 0.03748263 0.0 19.4 0.0 1.2 0.0 79.4 0.0 0.0 0.0
RUS_Khvalynsk_En:I0433 0.04134486 0.0 7.4 0.0 0.0 9.4 80.2 3.0 0.0 0.0
RUS_Khvalynsk_En:I0434 0.04121188 0.0 29.6 3.0 0.0 0.0 54.2 13.2 0.0 0.0
RUS_Progress_En:PG2001 0.04867542 0.0 37.6 7.4 0.0 7.0 41.8 6.2 0.0 0.0
RUS_Progress_En:PG2004 0.05243351 0.0 38.0 6.0 0.0 0.0 49.4 6.6 0.0 0.0
RUS_Vonyuchka_En:VJ1001 0.04375267 0.0 40.6 14.0 0.0 0.0 45.4 0.0 0.0 0.0
Average 0.04415016 0.0 28.8 5.1 0.2 2.7 58.4 4.8 0.0 0.0

vAsiSTha said...

@Davidski

"And like I've already pointed out, the authors of that DATES paper used Steppe Maykop to represent EHG, which should tell you how precise DATES really is."

Stop misrepresenting. In the Chintalapati supplement, there are 28 samples under EHG_Pooled of which 5 are from maikop. You make it seem like only maikop represented the EHG ancestry.

In any case, I pasted my DATES result in this thread above. 11 EHG like samples of which only Khvalynsk ones had minor extra component apart from EHG. Rest were from Karelia, samara, arkhangel, popovo, sidelkino - almost pure EHG. Maikop etc were not used. The result is not that different.

Rob said...

4100 bc is probably when the Dniper-Donets guys bearing the founder lineages (on the Dnieper _N_ Mes spectrum) mass-acquired ''Volga-Caucasus wives'', rich in EHG/CHG.

Prior to this, e.g. the Smyadovo R1b-M269 outlier had little if any CHG, but has Ukr_N, EHG, large amounts of EEF (? a hint of Cernavoda and other early barrow-builders from the western steppe). The 2 Dereivka females are similar, although I5882 is very poor in EHG.
A remnant of this pool is still present ~ 3000 BC, ''Ukr_EBA'' I5884 (also R1b-M269).

As for CHG-> steppe, the North caucasian open sites and caves shows an episodic habitation between the the Late Paleolithic and ~ 5500 BC. Probably 'pulses' of migration or intermixture between Volga-Don groups acquiring Caucasian obsidian, or CHG gorups leap-frogging to the Volga estuary, over a long time, even if not all encounters led to a tangible pulse of CHG admixture.

Vladimir said...

Davidski's hypothesis is very interesting, but to substantiate it, we need samples of the final Paleolithic and Mesolithic from the North Caucasian/Azov steppes. From what we have at the moment - on the Lower Don in the final Paleolithic there was the most famous culture of the period 15000-10000 BC Kamennaya balka. Archaeologists believe that this culture comes from a layer of Caucasian cultures of the final Paleolithic, called the Imereti culture, which also includes the layer of the Satsurblia cave from which the sample was taken - Satsurblia CHG. The problem is that it is difficult to make an archaeological connection between the final Paleolithic culture of Kamennaya balka and the Eneolithic of the steppe. One of the archaeologists, describing the process of formation of Mesolithic cultures on the Don, calls the culture of the final Paleolithic of the forest-steppe Borschevo and the culture of the final Paleolithic of the steppe Kamennaya balka, but cannot establish an unambiguous continuity.

Davidski said...

@Vladimir

My hypothesis is already a proven fact thanks to the samples from Khvalynsk, the Middle Don and Progress.

These sorts of populations were already mixing with EHG forest foragers well before 5,000 BCE and they never existed in the Near East, not even in the Caucasus.

So they obviously are the native steppe population.

More samples would be nice, but just to clarify the details.

vAsiSTha said...

"The David Reich Lab hypothesis about the peopling of the PC steppe doesn't make any sense.

There's obviously a problem with the DATES output or its interpretation, because the date of 4,100 BCE is way too conservative compared to the steppe samples rich in CHG that have been published or are soon to be published (they are much older)."

You are using this date as a strawman. Anyway, the actual result from Chintalapati et al is 4169 BCE +- 168 years (for 95% CI). I personally believe that my 4800-4300bce result is more acceptable as the mean period for iranN - ehg admixture. The two ranges overlap slightly, but the difference doesn't drastically alter anything about the basic theory.

Furthermore, Lazaridis et al posit both Anatolian and Levantine admixture in Yamnaya cluster, something which could only have come from the south of caucasus. Let me rehash what the supplement says about the successful qpAdm models for yamnaya cluster.

3 source - only 1 successful model
CHG 0.181; EHG 0.419; Arm_Aknashen_N 0.399

4 source - 3 successful models
CHG 0.060; EHG 0.424; Arm_Aknashen_N 0.462; Ganj_Dareh 0.054
CHG 0.126; EHG 0.435; Arm_Masis_blur_N 0.361; Ganj_Dareh 0.079
CHG 0.142; EHG 0.514; AZE_N 0.286; Ganj_Dareh 0.058

In proximal modeling, their best p-value model for yamnaya cluster is
Aze_Chl 0.259; Progress 0.510; EHG 0.231

3 other models work as well - either with Meshoko, and 2 anatolian labels as source instead of Aze_chl.

So, they are suggesting a large inflow of anatolian/levantine mixed southern arc ancestry (between 25% - 46%) in the yamnaya cluster. This was clearly not present anywhere in the steppe before. Their DATES timing also suggests to them that this was a later inflow (not seen in progress, or khvalynsk or anything else).

So I fear that maybe you have not comprehended their argument properly. This is not just about CHG/Iran, but also about the additional anatolian/levantine mix ancestry in yamnaya. To disprove this, you have to

a) disprove levantine ancestry in Yamnaya or
b) Show steppe source of the same anatolian/levantine mix ancestry.

Rob said...

@ Vladimir

Although we know that EHG = ANE + WHG (roughly speaking), we dont know where & when that mixture occured.
Kamennaya Balka isn't Imeratian derived, but shows some connections with it (Golomolova), and it doesnt extend into 10000 bc, thats for certain (seems to fall c 15,000 calBP).
In fact, there is no simple, linear continuity in most sub-regions of the East European plain. It;s full of sub-regional discontinuity, hence the question of EHG genesis is a difficult one

Rob said...

@ Vladimir

Further - but that’s not really relevant to the point being made here

Davidski said...

@vAsiSTha

Congratulations moron, you finally worked it out.

Nick Patterson's date represents the formation of Yamnaya in Ukraine from the mixing of steppe and forest steppe populations.

You know, like Ukraine N and Danubian farmers.

Here's some basic archeological background to that, if you can actually read.

Ornaments from the child's burial in the shape of copper pendants-shells represent long-distance relations of the population from the Northern Caucasus with Eneolithic cultures of the Danube region and can be considered as symbols of the cult of the goddess of fertility.

https://www.e-anthropology.com/English/Catalog/Archaeology/STM_DWL_Hyex_NWHe6wSMUxoD.aspx

vAsiSTha said...

@Davidski

The presence of armenia/azerbaijan neolithic ancestry in Yamnaya is unassailable. No qpAdm model works when they are in the outgroup, they have to be included as source.

Lazaridis et al are also quite clear of the need of a southern source for the Yamnaya cluster. Huge Z score of 5.6 for PPN when a CHG + EHG+ Anatolian+ WHG model is used.

"The CHG/EHG combination is invariant in the fitting models, with the EHG proportion in the ~40-50% range in all of them. We note parenthetically that the model of (17) that includes CHG/EHG/WHG/Anatolian Neolithic ancestry fails in our framework (p<1e-10), and inspection of outlier f4-statistics indicates that it underestimates (Z<-3) shared drift with Levant_PPN (Z=-
5.6)
, Natufians, Azerbaijan Neolithic, and Ganj Dareh outgroups. We note that Levant_PPN was not used in the set of outgroups of (17) which might be one reason why a successful fit was possible."

This excludes UKR_N related pops as a major source, some minor ancestry is possible.

So rather than abuse me, take some time and work out the rotating qpAdm models for steppe samples with these southern neolithic labels and PPN as part of the sources/references.

They wrote a paper with a 379 page supplement to explore this very topic in quite a lot of detail. I don't think your desperate pleading here is going to make them overturn their own recent published work.

Vladimir said...

@Rob

"The question of the origin of the Kamennaya balka culture is very interesting. The first researcher of these monuments, M.D. Gvozdover, convincingly pointed out their close similarity with the monuments of the Imeretian culture of the Caucasus at the second and third stages of its development [Gvozdover, 1967]. Further long-term studies of the rich stone inventory of Kamennaya balka monuments confirmed this position. " (Kamennaya balka Upper Paleolithic Sites - Research and Prospects), 2013. N.B. Leonova, E.A. Vinogradova, S.P. Medvedev, N.A. Haikunova.

"It is worth adding that the time interval of settlement of this area by the carriers of the Kamennaya balka culture is long — from 20-21 to 12-13 thousand years ago." N. B. Leonova. The Kamennaya balka culture is one of the reference monuments of the Upper Paleolithic in the northern part of the Black Sea region., 2015

Ric Hern said...

I think EHG originated somewhere near the Upper Kama River looking at the Late Upper Paleolithic 19 000 ybp to 16 000 ybp in that area. Perm/Yekaterinburg. Villabruna ancestors could have migrated earlier from that area leaving their EHG to be Cousins behind...?

Michalis Moriopoulos said...

It'd be nice if they could get us some samples from the steppe much older than what we already have, so as to help constrain the possibilities here.

Also, Dave:
there's a figshare link for the Skourtanioti paper Aegean samples which includes an IA sample from Tiryns (TIR008). He didn't make it in the first data release for the paper (I guess he was a last minute addition) so we didn't get coords for him. I think he's good enough coverage for G25:

https://figshare.com/projects/Genotype_data_for_103_individuals_from_study_Ancient_DNA_reveals_admixture_history_and_endogamy_in_the_prehistoric_Aegean_/156152

Thanks as always! There's lots of stuff coming out all at once.

Matt said...

Off-topic, but physical stature for Mesolithic, EEF vs Europe_LNBA comes up often, and also trends for India vs Europe, etc, so thought I'd mention this study - https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2209482119 : "Long-term trends in human body size track regional variation in subsistence transitions and growth acceleration linked to dairying" - which came out today and has a really big reference set of samples, so you can get a pretty solid idea of how much physical stature did change at the times of the various migrations.
("We investigate long-term trends in human stature and body mass of 3,507 skeletons from 366 archaeological sites in seven regions with varying trajectories of Holocene subsistence change.")

Davidski said...

@vAsiSTha

You're naive and stupid.

Distal models can't contradict proximate models, because no models are perfect so each model is its own reality.

Yamnaya doesn't need any Armenian-related ancestry when its modeled with the most proximate sources.

Davidski said...

In fact, there are some serious problems with Iosif Lazaridis' models showing Armenian-related ancestry in Yamnaya.

One of these problems is the use of EHG from the forest zone to model Yamnaya ancestry.

Yamnaya doesn't actually have EHG ancestry, not forest zone EHG per se anyway, because it's a steppe population.

And because this is wrong, it throws off the entire model.

Vladimir said...

Allentoft in his preprint, too, does not model the Neolithic Don from EHG, but from DonHG, which in his model are more UKRmeso than EHG

Davidski said...

Yes, that's the correct thing to do.

And the EHG in Progress/Vonyuchka is different from both the forest EHG and Middle Don EHG.

It might not even be close enough to EHG to call it EHG.

Michalis Moriopoulos said...

@Dave

The former, of course. I believe the CHG-like element on the steppe is very old and hunter-gatherer-mediated; it's not from Near Eastern farmers or pastoralists. I'm just interested in HOW far back this EHG+CHG-like proto-steppe profile goes. Are we talking 10,000 BCE? 8,000? No idea. If they published a steppe sample from ~8000 BCE that had as much or even more CHG than Progress, that would just wrap everything up right there. One would hope. But you're right, you don't even need something that old to make your point. But it sure would be nice.

And thanks for the update!

Davidski said...

@All

The situation with Yamnaya is similar to the situation with South Asia a few years back.

Recall that the people at the David Reich Lab were modeling South Asians without any Sintashta ancestry, because they didn't have the right local reference population.

Once they got those Indus Periphery samples the Sintashta ancestry in South Asians suddenly became obvious.

Likewise, Yamnaya needs to be modeled with a Progress-like population, otherwise its European farmer admixture doesn't show up.

Instead, when using EHG and CHG, it becomes possible to model Yamnaya with Armenian-related ancestry, which it doesn't actually have.

vAsiSTha said...

"Likewise, Yamnaya needs to be modeled with a Progress-like population, otherwise its European farmer admixture doesn't show up.

Instead, when using EHG and CHG, it becomes possible to model Yamnaya with Armenian-related ancestry, which it doesn't actually have."

Yeah, they did model yamnaya with progress, you would know if you read it properly. In prior comment, I also pasted their proximal models with progress as source. Armenian source is needed anyway.

I also have myself also modeled yamnaya proximally. Progress and armenian sources are both needed. Although like you said, I do detect some need for WHG (<5%) from a Ukr_N related pop.

Rob said...

@ Vlad

As I mentioned, KB certainly had contacts with the Imeretian, but it’s not a widespread view to include it within. The Imeretian is in the Caucasus, and scholars like Stepanchuk, Kitagawa & Kiosak, Golomavola, Gorelik, Olenkowsky describe KB as eastern Epigravettian.

The second point is the more proximal ancestor of southern EHG element is probably within the Zimonivki complex, or whatever its predecessor in turn was

Davidski said...

@vAsiSTha

No Armemian source is needed in Yamnaya.

Yamnaya's Anatolian-related ancestry is via a Danubian source, like Vinca.

https://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2022/09/dear-iosifyamnaya.html

This agrees well with archeological data.

https://www.e-anthropology.com/English/Catalog/Archaeology/STM_DWL_Hyex_NWHe6wSMUxoD.aspx

Gaska said...

Kurganists shouldn't be angry with Harvard, Lazaridis and company, they have done more than anyone to prove that the Indo-European homeland is on the steppes. The problem is not in the second wave (which can be perfectly linked to Maykop) but the complete non-existence of steppe genetic markers in Anatolia.

One of the fundamental linguistic principles is that the common homeland has to be the origin of ALL, absolutely ALL branches of a language, and unfortunately for Harvard they have not been able to prove the genetic links between the Anatolian Indo-European languages and the Yamnaya culture. Acknowledging failure and proposing IE's origin in the southern arc, they are only trying to save Yamnaya culture even if it is as IE's secondary homeland.

So David, in my opinion, since you seem willing to defend to the death the origin of all branches of the IE in the Pontic steppes (or now in the forest steppe) even if with the help of Patterson you managed to prove that Yamnaya originated in Sredni Stog (4,200 BC) and destroy the theory that the second wave of Lazaridis brought the IE to the steppes, you would still have to prove how the hell you can genetically link Sredni Stog (which on the other hand is super heterogeneous culturally and genetically speaking) with the Balkans and Anatolia.

Of course, everything will depend on the scientific method and the criteria that you consider important. On the one hand, you can agree with Lazaridis joke and think that three or four cases of R1b-PF7562 when the Mycenaean culture had already collapsed is enough proof to link the Mycenaean with the steppes, and at the same time you can disagree with him thinking that Anatolia has not been sufficiently analyzed or that a 3% steppe ancestry or a V1636 in the Anatolian chalcolithic are sufficient evidence to affirm that the Hittites were people from the steppes. In this case, we have nothing to discuss, the Yamnaya culture originated in Sredni Stog (4,200 BC), there were no migrations originating in Armenia or Iran that brought the IE to the north of the Caucasus, CHG is a fully European component and the available genetic evidence is sufficient to demonstrate that all branches of IE originated in the forest steppe.

Has anyone taken a look at the new Greek paper? -As in Anatolia there is not a single steppe uniparental marker until the late Bronze Age and the genetic connection to Anatolia is evident even to a blind person, of course if you have to defend a dogma of faith these are minor matters. Who remembers those times when Haak and colleagues defended that the IE languages reached mainland Europe thanks to the MASSIVE migrations of R1a and R1b?, In those times, demonstrating mass migrations was considered the only convincing argument to liquidate the Anatolian theory (which was based on ANF massive migrations), 8 years later, it is not even necessary to demonstrate population movements, less than 10% of steppe autosomal markers are enough to consider the Mycenaeans genetically Indo-European.

Davidski said...

@Gaska

You're full of shit, as usual.

Mycenaeans have more than 10% steppe ancestry.

And some pre-Mycenaean samples have a lot more. That's when Indo-Europeans arrived in Greece.

Steppe genes were then diluted, but I don't care.

vAsiSTha said...

4/56 new Aegean samples are R1b. 26/56 samples are J2a/J2b (iranian/anatolian connection). The 3 neolithic males from Crete are all Yhg G.

The R1bs are from the following dates:
-1300
-1361
-913
-1275

It would seem that if steppe was the source of Greek, the migration was largely female mediated (haven't looked at mtdna markers though). On the other hand, anatolian connections are huge.

Davidski said...

Great theory.

No one cares.

Orpheus said...

@Gaska Personally I'm fine with the proto-Greek language arriving in Greece from either the Southeast Balkans or Anatolia via Phrygians. The lineages are indeed Anatolia/Iran-related, even in the newer steppe-harboring samples. What's more interesting is to see when Yamnaya steppe admixture arrived in Greece since so far all the steppe in pre-Mycenaean people seems to derive from CWC (thus eliminating them as Balkanic* speakers). This gets even more interesting in the light of elites (e.g. Griffin Warrior) having no steppe, the Mycenaean steppe average being 8% (4% EHG) and Mycenaeans having a bigger Levantine influence than Minoans (seen in Clemente er al 2021 with huge pValues, Lazaridis et al 2022).
* as per Olander, 2022

@Davidski Interesting thread, are there any papers on the way arguing for what you argue? I'd like to see your position addressed by the major labs. Cant say I don't enjoy the drama but neither Lazaridis nor anyone else is going to read blogposts, only studies are getting addressed (as happened with Wang et al).

Davidski said...

@Orpheus

My position is just what the ancient DNA clearly shows.

So if this doesn't get addressed at some point, then it would appear that we've got a bunch of crazy people in charge of the ancient DNA business.

Don't worry, though, I'll make sure Lazaridis, Reich and Patterson take notice.

By the way, Greek obviously came from the steppe via the Balkans.

Your attempts to underestimate the steppe impact on the Aegean are somewhat amusing, but pointless.

Orpheus said...

@Davidski Cool, I hope I see them addressing it sooner or later as you promise. Lazaridis has perhaps already found a CHG-related sample from the population you and Anthony have mentioned, I6661 in 5500-4300 BCE Romania. 100% CHG with some possibility of Anatolian but no Levantine, which is found in all CHG-related samples after the Neolithic as per the same paper, thus making its source population a pre-Neolithic one. Testing it to see if it's the best available source of additional CHG in Yamnaya compared to the 20% or so in pre-Yamnaya pops is another matter though.

"By the way, Greek obviously came from the steppe via the Balkans."
No shit, the Balkanic group derives from the steppe. Who would have guessed lmao

"Your attempts to underestimate the steppe impact on the Aegean are somewhat amusing, but pointless."
Nobody gives a shit about the general Aegean so I'm not sure what you're on about. Greek, Phrygian, Albanian, Armenian etc have nothing to do with CWC-derived languages, which renders virtually all steppe in non-Mycenaeans in Greece a dead end. Doesn't matter if they were 4% or 40% CWC, as long as they are CWC-related and not Yamnaya-related, regardless of lineages (all J/G), they aren't proto-Greek speakers. In fact considering there's no CWC-related substratum in Greek they most likely didn't even speak an IE language by the time they arrived in Greece. A Balkans > Anatolia (Phrygians or related) > Greece route seems much more likely, coinciding with the general pattern of Near Eastern influence in BA Greece, unless a Yamnaya-related steppe source is discovered or some of the stepppe-harboring samples in pre-Mycenaean times end up being Yamnaya-related. Then sure, if they're pre-Mycenaean they could very well be Greek speakers who were absorbed and passed on their language, possibly before the Near Eastern influence.
We aren't even disagreeing on the bigger picture (steppe origin of Balkanic languages as the most likely scenario) you schizo. And I don't think anyone else is, since Greek, Albanian etc aren't related to Anatolian languages so there's no other place they could have come from besides the steppe or a nearby area

Davidski said...

@Orpheus

I'm guessing by pre-Yamnaya you mean the Middle Don foragers?

They're not pre-Yamnaya and not even on the steppe. They're forest-steppe people.

Pre-Yamnaya are steppe groups like Vonyuchka, Progress and soon to be published Sredny Stog from Ukraine. Many of these samples have more CHG than Yamnaya.

And are you sure you're not overestimating the likeliness of CWC derived people in pre-Mycenaean Greece?

Wouldn't these people be more like Bulgaria Yamnaya? You know, sort of CWC-like, but only by coincidence?

Here's a blog post I did ages ago about Greek coming from Bulgaria Yamnaya...

https://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2018/03/main-candidates-for-precursors-of-proto.html

Davidski said...

By the way, I6661 isn't CHG.

It's low coverage garbage.

Orpheus said...

@Davidski Kind of, yeah. Our terminology differs a bit but we're talking about similar things. Khvalynsk, Sredny etc Then taking the (presumably) CHG-rich samples and modeling Yamnaya with them competing against Lazaridis' models. IBD could be useful as well. Will such a paper appear at some point? Guess we'll see.

"Wouldn't these people be more like Bulgaria Yamnaya? You know, sort of CWC-like, but only by coincidence?"
Could be. If that's the case then many of the steppe-harboring samples will be re-evaluated as Yamnaya-related in the future instead od CWC-related. Maybe some (like Logkas) were CWC-related while some others were Yamnaya-related, with their lineages coming from northern Greece/south Balkans but without changing the language. Given the date, they would be strong candidates for the proto-Greek language and would also predate the Near Eastern influence in Mycenaeans.

Kavkasi said...

Never heard of I6661 being 100% CHG-related, in what paper was it published? Does it have G25 coordinates?

alex said...

@vAsiSTha

"4/56 new Aegean samples are R1b. 26/56 samples are J2a/J2b (iranian/anatolian connection)."

The paper did the same mistake, assuming proto-Greeks (or early Greek-speakers in general) would only carry R1b haplogroups and trying to draw a simplistic correlation. J2b in Mycenaean Greece obviously has a northern origin from somewhere in the Balkans and almost certainly some of the J2a/C/G2a we've seen in Greeks was also picked up from the Balkans or northern Greece (the J2a/C/G2a we already saw in Iron Age North Macedonians gives us a hint).

pnuadha said...

@orpheus This gets even more interesting in the light of elites (e.g. Griffin Warrior) having no steppe, the Mycenaean steppe average being 8% (4% EHG) and Mycenaeans having a bigger Levantine influence than Minoans (seen in Clemente er al 2021 with huge pValues, Lazaridis et al 2022).

This thread is interesting. Im still trying to wrap my head around it.

It seems that daviski is saying that Steppe is its own component from much prior to Yamnaya and/or the components that created steppe have not been properly referenced ('EHG' on steppe =/= proper EHG of the forest and 'CHG' on steppe =/= Proper CHG of the caucasus. I think he is saying that using true EHG and true CHG to model Steppe/Yamnaya, when they werent truly formed that way, is why yamnaya were erroneously being modeled with n. levant. Furthermore, using proper EHG as a way to measure Steppe in both Turkey and Greece (based on the formula Steppe% = 2 x EHG%) will result in underestimating steppe ancestry since the 'EHG' in steppe is not exactly the same as proper EHG.

Davidski, is this an accurate summary of what you have said?

If so, its shows the flaws in some of the recent papers. But can you remind me why you think steppe was formed well before yamnaya? It also seems like you suspect that the southern related component in yamnaya was on the steppe much much earlier than the yamnaya and maybe well before it mixed with the more northerly component to create steppe? How do you think progress formed? (Id guess samples from the stredny stog push back the formation of steppe and uni parental markers in the yamnaya dont support recent migration from south of the N caucausus.

I asked a lot but there is a lot to unpack with this thread.

pnuadha said...

@vAsiSTha

someone asked what admixture date you would get if you assumed that EHG was a simple mix of WHG and ANE. No papers have come out confirm how exactly EHG formed much less the date it formed.

You kind of just assume that steppe is a mixture of forrest EHG and CHG/C. Iran/N. Levant.

Rob said...

Back to basic geography & genetics

Myceneans in southern Greece represent one dialect or cline of Greek speakers (Arcado-Cypriot) which otherwsie extended to Macedonia, and even further still if we consider Greek-related languages such as Phrygian or even Paeonian. So Myceneans aren't proto-Greeks

Secondly, in Theopetra, Thessaly, there is a male a Yamnaya-related I-L68 (? Doric-related). The individuals from Theopetra Logkas, and Sarakenos have 30-40% steppe related admixture and they broadly represent proto-Greeks arriving ~ 2300 BC.

I dont know what Orpheus pulled out of his behind to claim that the steppe in Myceneans is CWC derived. Aside from usual low-bar recitation of EHG p-values, I'm in fact surprised he didnt claim they're time-travelleing Dzudzuanians

J2b2 didn't come via Anatolia, there's not a single Anatolian sample with J2b2. The closest parental J2b2 is in Serbia, Maros culture, then moved down the Adriatic and some made it as far as southern Greece via the Ioanian, to be incorporated into Mycenean society. There is J2a already in Neolithic Balkans, so Id like to see your fine-res. phylogenetic tree showing that all this J2a recently came from Iran or wherever.

Gaska said...

No David, I am not full of shit, I am simply commenting data that for me are evident because in the Peloponnese some pre-Mycenaeans (Perachora cave-2,000 BC) and even some Mycenaeans (Griffin warrior) have zero steppe ancestry

You may be right that the Proto-Greeks (originating in Thessaly, Macedonia, Bulgaria or even the Western Balkans) brought the Mycenaean to the Peloponnese in the early Bronze Age and culturally Indo-Europeanized the local population even though they were not able to do so genetically. Perhaps that is the explanation for the complete absence of uniparental steppe markers (I2a-L699, R1b-Z2103, R1a-M417, R1b-V1636, R1b-L51) in the region, but not even the theory of Indo-European elites fits what we are seeing

@Orpheus-I am not an expert in Greek prehistory, but I do know that the earliest Mycenaean writings we have are from around 1,600-1,500 BC, and that the Mycenaean culture originated in the Peloponnese. The steppe ancestry did not reach the cradle of Greek-Indo-European until the Bronze Age and we also know that the Mycenaean elites had zero steppe ancestry.

What do the Mycenaean markers have to do with the CWC?, which region of the Balkans is the origin of the Mycenaean? which markers brought the IE to Greece? Where did the Proto-Greeks live? IMO, the Balkans and Greece are the last nail in the coffin of the steppe theory.

On the other hand, many mitochondrial (and male) markers of the Mycenaean culture have their origin in Anatolia which together with the autosomal composition show migrations with origin in Asia Minor. This is an example;

X2d-Anatolia, Tell Atchana-ALA011 (1.682 BC)-Skourtanioti, 2.020
X2d-Grecia, Agya Kiriaki, Salami, Mycenean culture-I9006 (1.336 BC)

What male or female steppe markers have been found in Greece? Even PF7562 may have originated in the Balkans (Smyadovo-R1b-M269, 4,500 BC).

Davidski said...

@pnuadha

Something like that. Can't add much to what I've already said here.

But I will also say that distal models are inherently unreliable as a means to analyze fine scale ancestry, and should only be used for broad inferences.

The reason being is that there's always more complexity than what is represented in the available ancient DNA, so often in these admixture tests results will shift to compensate for this and either miss something that should be there or show something that isn't.

This should be obvious to any seasoned users of qpAdm, especially Iosif Lazaridis.

Orpheus said...

@Gaska I know, which is why I have (for now) changed my opinion for a Balkans > W Anatolia > Greece route into Greece, instead of the typical Balkans > Greece one. Per data available, it makes the most sense and Mycenaean writing in Linear A coincides chronologically with the steppe-less elites, possibly bringing the new language. Linear A existed for centuries before that and was obviously known in the mainland, especially Peloponnese But since new studies can show new stuff, I'm favorable of an eastern route but not 100% convinced.

As for a balkan route, it depends on the new samples. If they are CWC-related like they appear then they didn't leave a mark. If they are Yamnaya-related then they simply got assimilated by other populations, possibly only keeping the language that remained as Minoan-like populations absorbed them, presumably before the Near Eastern influence arrived in the mainland. Any steppe lineages were long gone before they entered Greece. Not sure why the steppe-carrying males of the original higher steppe % population weren't that good at reproducing (or staying alive), we can only guess.
Their culture is farming-related from what I saw, they lived in their own sedentary communities presumably for a few centuries.
Steppe-less Mycenaeans could however represent a scenario where the NE influence arrived before steppe did, or they arrived simultaneously, or they existed in separate populations. Honestly I have no idea about the timeline this happened, so I'm just expecting new papers to come out. If Lazaridis' calculations of the steppe in Mycenaeans coming directly from Yamnaya at a 1:10 ratio to Minoan-like without any intermediate proxies is correct, then things get even weirder.

Orpheus said...

@pnuadha steppe in Mycenaeans was around 10-12% average when modeled with Yamnaya so not really a big difference, and that was before the 0-2% EHG samples were added to the average.

@Kavkasi Lazaridis et al 2022, supplementals. Neolithic Romania

@Gaska P.S. I've went trough the 2021 paper again and left a summary of Logkas and the other samples looking so far like CWC is in Vasistha's blog. Just the autosomal average, if one sample out of the bunch is Yamnaya-related then it got counted as CWC. But then again if it belonged to a CWC-derived community then it probably spoke whatever language they did too.

Davidski said...

@alex

The paper did the same mistake, assuming proto-Greeks (or early Greek-speakers in general) would only carry R1b haplogroups and trying to draw a simplistic correlation.

Haha.

I'll have to do a blog post about this soon.

Simon Stevin said...

@Davidksi

Thoughts on Kale’s EHG models? Says he found “para-American” (tops 3-4%) ancestry in various EHG samples (Murzikhinsky, Minino, and samples such as KVH002). Not sure what that even means, he says it’s something like Kolyma, but doesn’t Kolyma have ANE? He runs qpAdm models right? Kind of skeptical of these to be honest, not sure how many amateurs are running them properly, considering the moderate coverage some of these guys have (100-400k snps)?

WSH said...

@Davidski

Is there any info you can give us on this upcoming Khvalynsk study?

Davidski said...

@Simon

I don't have much interest in deep ancestry, because it's so theoretical, so I don't know what Kale is doing and whether his results make sense.

They might make sense at some level, but probably shouldn't be taken too literally.

Davidski said...

@WSH

There are new Khvalynsk samples on the way, many of them, but they're just like the old samples.

They basically show two populations: an EHG population from the forest, and a Progress-like population from the steppe.

There's absolutely no evidence in the new data that Khvalynsk included any migrants from the Caucasus or Iran, or even people with ancestry from there.

I don't know when the paper will be published.

But I'm going to react very badly if there's any suggestion in this paper that a migration from Iran or even the Caucasus is the reason for the admixture process at Khvalynsk, and the genetic heterogeneity in the Khvalynsk samples.

I'll call out the lead authors on their stupidity if they decide to exaggerate the Caucasus/Iran links, and I'll be very aggressive about it.

WSH said...

@Davidsky
Are there any who are like the Khvalynsk samples we have now? Where they are in between EHG and Progress? Also, when are these dated to? Is there any info on when this study may come out?

@Simon
I think that is probably not true for the same reasons the alleged "Kennewick" in Steppe Maykop is not true. David made a post on that a while back. There might be trace East Eurasian (excluding that from ANE) in some EHGs, I think some have hypothesized that pottery was introduced to the Elshanka Culture from the east.

Wise dragon said...

@Davidski

"I'll call out the lead authors on their stupidity if they decide to exaggerate the Caucasus/Iran links, and I'll be very aggressive about it."

When you do this, be prepared to be mocked as an anti-scientist and a lunatic conspiracy theorist.

Davidski said...

@WSH

Most of the new Khvalynsk samples cluster with the three that have been published already. Some are very close to Progress PG2004.

They're dated to around 4,000-5,000 BCE. A few are clearly older, like over 5,000 BCE.

No idea when the paper will be out.

StP said...

@Dear David,
We note that the discussion of the PIE-family's cradle is now a hoot on the spot...
But in October 2022 a paper appeared on the expansion of the COVID-19 heavy gene LZTFL1 marker-rich, linked to the Vindija-Cave Neanderthal haplotype, 3rd chromosome, 3p21 .31 (about it: Zeberg and Paabo 2020)
Work unfortunately - in Russian.
Balanovskaya E.V et al. 2022, Gene Geography in Russia and in the World of SNP-markers of LZTFL1.
Heavy Current//Bulletin of RSMU, #5,
https://vestnik.rsmu.press/archive/2022/5/4/abstract?lang=ru
Interestingly, the analysis confirmed the assumption that the main source of the expansion of markers of this gene from Central Europe was the early Proto-Indo-European community.
The PCA chart shows two directions of migration. One east (later south) towards India. The second direction - to Pakistan through the Balkans and the Middle East. They were probably the Dravidians (Brahui, Telugu and Tamil; probably also originating from Central Europe, see E.Kaja et al. 2020, Fig. S8-A).
Do these observations make sense and contribute something wise to the discussion here?

StP said...

Sorry, all,
Here I forgot to include a link to the PCA about diversity of the LZTFL1 gene (i.a. in the PIE family)
http://www.tropie.tarnow.opoka.org.pl/images/covid-gene-lztfl1-in-world.jpg

gamerz_J said...

@Davidski

So does Yamnaya/Progress after all have Khvalynsk ancestry or not? I am a bit confused because it takes it in both G25 and qpAdm but is it not the case that Khvalynsk has WSHG ancestry Yamnaya lacks? Or does it not lack it? Rob's models seem to suggest there might be some of that too.

@Simon Stevin

I think EHG has some low Kolymma-related ancestry, Lazaridis had talked about it in 2018 as well.

But perhaps not all EHGs show this.

Davidski said...

@gamerz_J

It's difficult for me to talk about this stuff now without revealing too many details. We'll have to wait for the new data to come out.

Rob said...

@ GamerzJ

“ So does Yamnaya/Progress after all have Khvalynsk ancestry or not? I am a bit confused because it takes it in both G25 and qpAdm but is it not the case that Khvalynsk has WSHG ancestry Yamnaya lacks? Or does it not lack it? Rob's models seem to suggest there might be some of that too.”

samara HG also works, but that’s a singleton sample, which already has a bit of CHG
But using the Karelia HG group failed (perhaps not too surprising)
Khvakysnk definitely works as an EHG source
So I don’t know what Davidski has seen, but IMO Khvalynsk & the piedmont Steppe En definitely share ancestry. They are culturally linked, share uniparentals, etc

vAsiSTha said...

@pnuadha

"someone asked what admixture date you would get if you assumed that EHG was a simple mix of WHG and ANE. No papers have come out confirm how exactly EHG formed much less the date it formed.

You kind of just assume that steppe is a mixture of forrest EHG and CHG/C. Iran/N. Levant."

There are very good reasons to assume that steppe_en and yamnaya etc. are formed from admixture between ehg and chg/iranN.

f4(mbuti, GanjDareh, samara_ehg, sidelkino) is slightly significant with zscore -2.1
f4(mbuti, ANE, samara_ehg, sidelkino) is not significant with zscore -0.73

Samara is of our interest, because later khvalynsk and yamnaya samples are from the same region. ANE affinity is similar in Samara_EHG and sidelkino. However, minor additional affinity to IranN is seen (z of -2.1). Suggests additional inflow of IranN related ancestry from somewhere.

f4(mbuti, ganjdareh, samara_ehg, Khvalynsk) is +2.16
f4(mbuti, ANE, samara_ehg, Khvalynsk) is -3.07

Reduction in ANE affinity in Khvalynsk and addition of GanjDareh affinity is indicative of excess IranN related inflow post 5600bce and before 4500bce (between samara_ehg and khvalynsk sample date) in the khvalynsk samples.

With inbreed=true,
f3 (Samara_ehg, GanjDareh, Khvalynsk) is significantly -ve with zscore of -4.56. This is the formal proof of admixture between IranN related and samara_ehg related ancestry in the khvalynsk samples.

The steppe eneolithic samples from Progress and Vonyuchka.

f4(Mbuti, ANE, Samara_EHG, steppe_en) has zscore of -12.
f4(Mbuti, GanjDareh, Samara_EHG, steppe_en) has zscore of +5.87.

The steep drop in ANE affinity in the progress/vonyuchka samples are indicative of a drop in EHG ancestry. The 5.87 z-score is indicative of addition of IranN related ancestry in steppe_en, more than what is seen in the khvalynsk samples (z of 2.16 vs 5.87).

Furthermore, with inbreed=TRUE
f3(GanjDareh,Samara_EHG, Steppe_en) has z-score of -2.4
f3(GanjDareh, Karelia_EHG, Steppe_en) has z-score of -3.1
Again, a formal proof of admixture between EHG and IranN related components in steppe_en. CHG instead of IranN might give even more -ve zscores.

Now that admixture has been formally established, using G25 and distal models of steppe_en = CHG + IranN + Karelia_EHG, we get between 44 and 55% of chg+iranN in the 3 steppe_en samples.

where did this 50% iranN related ancestry come from? Assuming liberally that 25% was already existing in the Don-Volga region, where did the excess 30% come from?
If you assume a 50/50 mix, a population with 80% chg/iranN is required to get the offspring to 50% chg/iran. 0.5*25 + 0.5*80 = 52.5. So where did this 80% iranN ancestry come from? Ukraine?


"@vAsiSTha
No Armemian source is needed in Yamnaya.
Yamnaya's Anatolian-related ancestry is via a Danubian source, like Vinca.
https://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2022/09/dear-iosifyamnaya.html"

In all the models presented in this post by Davidski, Yamnaya and Afanasievo are modeled as 75-85% Progress_en. No other source works (precisely because of the high IranN/Chg content). This makes sense because these 3 samples are basically from the Caucasus in location, just north of the mountain range.

Davidski may claim that Progress is just a proxy and that the true source lies in Sredny stog etc etc, but I can guarantee you that you will not find any sample from that far north with 50% iran/chg ancestry prior to 5000bce. The DATES results also make it clear that there was an inflow of IranN ancestry post 5000bce.

Wrt to the anatolian/levantine admixture in Yamnaya as claimed by Lazaridis to be from Arm_N, and claimed by Davidski to be from HUN_Vinca_MN; I find Arm_N ancestry to be the source and have already written a post about it months back. At the same time, I also find WHG ancestry in yamnaya (which Lazaridis does not). That probably came from UKR_N.

There is also another matter of Sarazm and CHG-related ancestry both being present in Steppe_en, but I will leave that for later as Davidski might get an aneurysm.

Davidski said...

Steppe Eneolithic is not a recent mixture, except for some EHG ancestry from the forest zone.

It's an ancient Mesolithic population, so there's no need to break it down into basic components.

Samuel Andrews said...

@Davidski,

I agree that Progress Eneolithic is the continuation of Mesolithic Steppe people.

But, ultimately it is a mixture between people from Europe & Southwest Asia who were similar to what we call EHG and CHG.

Imo, it is not that this admixture event between "EHG" and "CHG" never happened. It is just that it happened much longer ago than Harvard claims. So long ago it has nor relevance to Indo-European language origins.



Samuel Andrews said...

@Davidski,

Also, imo, this "CHG" ancestry on the Steppe, imo, certainly is ultimately from south of the Caucasus.

The mtDNA H, T2, N1a1b2 (I) in the Steppe Eneolithic are rooted south of the Caucasus. They definitely originated down there.

At some point people in Asia south of the Caucasus moved north of the Caucasus into Europe.

gamerz_J said...

@Rob

Well, I guess a good way is to see if Khvalynsk and Progress have extra East Asian affinity not covered by ANE. Probably miniscule in any case.

Simon Stevin said...

@WSH

"I think that is probably not true for the same reasons the alleged "Kennewick" in Steppe Maykop is not true. David made a post on that a while back. There might be trace East Eurasian (excluding that from ANE) in some EHGs, I think some have hypothesized that pottery was introduced to the Elshanka Culture from the east."

Interesting, but even if there is no "Kennewick" in Steppe Maykop, isn't there still something Kolyma/NEA/East Asian in them? I remember Dave posting on AG that he couldn't find anything ENA/East Asian related (outside of the ENA/proto-East Eurasian baked into ANE/ANS) in any EHG samples; all of this changed once Siberian related, BOO types arrived during the late Bronze Age and early Iron Age. Mnemonics and Pegasus over at AG, have come to the conclusion--via qpAdm--that there isn't any real WSHG ancestry in Karelia, Khvalynsk, Vonyuchka or Progress (the steppe eneolithic samples), just excess AG3 type ANE admixture.

Rob said...

@ vasistha

“ Yamnaya as claimed by Lazaridis to be from Arm_N, and claimed by Davidski to be from HUN_Vinca_MN”

Yamnaya must have EEF admixture . The Yamnaya -related lineages often have large amounts of EEF admixture in early pre-Yamnaya finds . It was gradually diluted as they took over the Volga-Caucasus network

Davidski said...

@Samuel

If we go back far enough everyone comes from East Africa. But that's not the point here.

The point is that Progress was a local East Euro population, and Khvalynsk was a mix between two local East Euro populations.

Rob said...

@ Gamerz_J

''Well, I guess a good way is to see if Khvalynsk and Progress have extra East Asian affinity not covered by ANE. Probably miniscule in any case.''

They don't, at least with G25 (using Afontova, Tagliente, Amur basin, Kolyma)
The highest ANE populations are Karelia_HG
The WSHGs have modest (10-15%) Kolyma-related admixture, which is not typically East Asian, and is probably that 'para-American' stuff people coloquially refer to.

But what does that tell us about the relationship between Khvalynsk & Piedmont En ?

Andrzejewski said...

@Samuel Andrews “ The mtDNA H, T2, N1a1b2 (I) in the Steppe Eneolithic are rooted south of the Caucasus. They definitely originated down there.

At some point people in Asia south of the Caucasus moved north of the Caucasus into Europe.”

These are all ANF, Anatolian Neolithic farmers’ markers.

Andrzejewski said...

@Rob “ The WSHGs have modest (10-15%) Kolyma-related admixture, which is not typically East Asian, and is probably that 'para-American' stuff people coloquially refer to.

But what does that tell us about the relationship between Khvalynsk & Piedmont En ?”

WSHG is more relevant to Steppe Maykop’s ethnogenesis

Rob said...

@ Steven

''Mnemonics and Pegasus over at AG, have come to the conclusion--via qpAdm--that there isn't any real WSHG ancestry in Karelia, Khvalynsk, Vonyuchka or Progress (the steppe eneolithic samples), just excess AG3 type ANE admixture.''


I'd say that's more speculation than conclusion. A fit in qpADm doesn't mean the results are historically realistic

But of course, anyone is free to demonstate where such 'ghost ANE' populations existed ?

Altai ? Nope. By 5000 BC - there is plenty of East Asian admixture
TTK ? nope

The only place which fits the bill is Western Siberia. In other words, it is WSHG.


btw, there is mtDNA C in Karelia and other east European Meso-Neo individuals, meaning that neo-Siberian groups with minor East Asian ancestry made it to East Europe by 6000 bc



@ Andrze

''WSHG is more relevant to Steppe Maykop’s ethnogenesis''

Yeah but there was additional / post-Afontova flow from Siberia as well. IMO it'll be apparent in Volga-Caspian samples

StP said...

@Rob et al., reading Russian
https://vestnik.rsmu.press/archive/2022/5/4/media?lang=ru
here in fig 2, we have the PCA of LZTFL1 gene markers for severe COVID-19, a gift from the Neanderthal, among others for the PIE community and early Indo-Europeans. There, Russia and the Eastern Slavs were located together with Central Europe, and the closest to them from the east are India (Aryans) and only behind them - the Eastern Balts. From the south, Pakistan is closest (I'm guessing the Dravidians), followed by the Balkans, etc.
What is your opinion about it?

Simon_W said...

@StP
The idea that Dravidian is from central Europe, or even from Europe in general, is about as outlandish as the proposal that Afro-Asiatic comes from WHG. Even if that single gene was ultimately from Europe, the Dravidian language family needn't have had the same origin.

StP said...

@Simon_W said... The idea that Dravidian is from central Europe, or even from Europe in general, is about as outlandish as the proposal that Afro-Asiatic comes from WHG /.../.

There are many scientific publications on the European origin of the Dravids and the Indo-Iranian Aryans. Here is one of the oldest, WS Waitkins, 2008, Genetic variation in South Indian castes: evidence from Y-chromosome, mitochondrial, and autosomal polymorphisms, which few Europeans know!
https://bmcgenomdata.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2156-9-86

gimby20 said...

"If we go back far enough everyone comes from East Africa. But that's not the point here.

The point is that Progress was a local East Euro population, and Khvalynsk was a mix between two local East Euro populations."

@Davidski,

Sam is just talking about genetics. Pretend these CHG that contributed half to what became 'Western Steppe Herders' were genetically like Nigerians, but those Nigerians that contributed to Yamnaya/WSH or whatever had lived in Eastern Europe for 2,000 or even 20,000 years, what difference would it make?

Is all of this just about geography? Not racial / genetic differences? Seems really pedantic and tedious to me.

Basically, a Middle Eastern population lived in Eastern Europe for thousands of years and was therefore native to Eastern Europe? I don't think anyone minds this lol.

Davidski said...

@gimby20

Basically, a Middle Eastern population lived in Eastern Europe for thousands of years and was therefore native to Eastern Europe? I don't think anyone minds this lol.

This is a really dumb comment.

There was no Middle Eastern population living in Eastern Europe for thousands of years. Are you seeing CHG or Iran_N people on the steppe? Where are they then?

Or maybe you think that Progress or Khvalynsk people were Middle Eastern people?

Then how come people like this only ever existed in Eastern Europe and never in the Middle East?

Andrzejewski said...

@StP “ There are many scientific publications on the European origin of the Dravids and the Indo-Iranian Aryans. Here is one of the oldest, WS Waitkins, 2008, Genetic variation in South Indian castes: evidence from Y-chromosome, mitochondrial, and autosomal polymorphisms, which few Europeans know!
https://bmcgenomdata.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2156-9-86”

Dravidians are from Iran_HG/Iran_N admixed with Onge-related authocthones. Only the gods know if their languages came from the former or from the latter ones.

I would be much more curious to figure out who are the Burusho (and to a lesser extent, the genetic origin and linguistic affiliations of the other 2 isolates- Nihali and Kusunda).

Otanes said...

I have a naive question as a long-time lurker:
What are the barriers to sequencing more samples from remains that might disambiguate current disagreements? Kelteminar doesn't have any samples, and they are seen as hard/pure-WSHG, no? Wouldn't it be helpful to get a better picture of their ancestry, to explain this potential source of something steppe-native and CHG-like in Yamnaya as David describes?

Russia and other former Soviet countries must have collections of all sorts of remains that are poorly documented in English. When I was trying to learn the language, I was surprised to discover the amount of scholarship on [recent] Siberian HG's that no one ever bothered to translate. Anthropology in the Soviet Union seems to be one of the domains with little exposure amongst anglophone audiences. Are there helpful souls on Anthrogenica or other places of note that do the grunt work of combing over old studies for things like this?

Samuel Andrews said...

@Everyone,

Can you guys link me to to the recent study that found Y DNA I2a2 in the Bronze age Aegean. Thanks.

Davidski said...

@Otanes

Obviously you're aware that CHG means Caucasus ancestry, and the steppe shares a long border with the Caucasus.

So can you explain to me the logic of sourcing the CHG-related ancestry on the steppe from Central Asia and not the Caucasus?

Have you seen this post and the map I did for it?

https://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2020/02/ancient-dna-vs-ex-oriente-lux.html

Just looking at that map, I'd say it'd be pretty hard to come up with a scenario in which Caucasus ancestry diffused into Eastern Europe from the Caucasus via Central Asia.

gimby20 said...

"This is a really dumb comment.

There was no Middle Eastern population living in Eastern Europe for thousands of years. Are you seeing CHG or Iran_N people on the steppe? Where are they then?"

Damn your disposition is extremely volatile and disrespectful. I don't care one way or the other if CHG was of 100% Nordic Alien stock living in Europe since the Triassic Age. I've noticed you get furious over comments that aren't even vindictive or assertive. It's clear the exact geographic location of these people is really personal to whatever ethnonationalist insecurities you have regarding the purity of your ancestry. If they lived 1 mile south of the subjectively defined borders of Europe THATS CRAZY, if they were 1 mile above then that puts your heart at ease. Crazy.

I think it's clear what I meant. Are CHG genetically Middle Eastern or European? Is this question discomforting? Oh, there is no pure sample of CHG on the steppe? Ok, but there is a mixed population of EHG+CHG of varying proportions in Eastern Europe.. so a population that is of mixed Middle Eastern and European ancestry? Or am I wrong again?

Again, no one minds this. Not even Samuel Andrews who loves talking about how white everything is lol. No one except you.

vAsiSTha said...

@rob

To the question of iranN vs CHG

I modeled CHG as 66% GanjDareh + 19% Pinarbasi + 13% Sidelkino. p-value 0.21, std errors 3-4%. Needed both pinarbasi and sidelkino to pass.

So there's extra west eurasian which mimics anatolian, WHG as well as ANE. Probably from dzudzuana like population?

Funnily enough, CHG also mimics GanjDareh + yamnaya/sintashta is distal qpAdm.


Rightpops:
Cameroon_SMA.DG
Luxembourg_Loschbour.DG
Russia_MA1_HG.SG
China_Tianyuan
Israel_Natufian
Morocco_Iberomaurusian
Russia_Kolyma_M.SG
Russia_Kostenki14

Otanes said...

@Davidski
I haven't read all your content religiously and appear to have misunderstood your argument. This doesn't answer my question. Would it not be helpful to show that Kelteminar and relatively close contemporary neighbouring cultures to the East have no significant sharing of ancestry? I'm curious as to what the process of getting samples tested is like, and whether there are under-discussed complexes outside of the anglophone analysis which may yield more informative samples in the future.

Davidski said...

@gimby20

Ok, but there is a mixed population of EHG+CHG of varying proportions in Eastern Europe.. so a population that is of mixed Middle Eastern and European ancestry? Or am I wrong again?

Wrong again.

The EHG+CHG mixture model is just an abstract concept that describes the genetic character of these ancient Eastern Europeans.

If they are a mixture, then they're a mixture of populations that are near or far related to EHG and CHG per se that we know nothing about at this stage.

Another option, a very likely one, is that they formed out of a genetic continuum between EHG, CHG, Iran_N and groups in Central Asia or even Siberia.

But I guess that this must read like science fiction to a gimby head like you.

Rob said...

@ Vasistha

They come up almost identical with qpGraph
And the EHG input appears Iron Gates mediated , in addition straight ANE + AHG
Can you model Iran with CHG + whatever needed ?

gimby20 said...

No, not science fiction, just wishful thinking that they are going to be so distant from being CHG-like that you can classify them as genetically too diverged to be Middle Eastern related instead of European related (the closest modern-day population to that ancient one is Georgians, which are very far from being European-like, and no I'm not talking about geography LOL).

"Another option, a very likely one, is that they formed out of a genetic continuum between EHG, CHG, Iran_N and groups in Central Asia or even Siberia."

Well, that's new, don't think you've mentioned this before. So now this CHG contribution into these steppe herders might have additional affinities to Iran_N *in excess* of their already high similarities? I don't see how this helps your case.

Davidski said...

@gimby20

That's correct gimby head, all that shit you're spouting here is wishful thinking.

Well done gimby head, at least you're honest.

AR said...

@gimby20

No it could well be true, and WSH having a near-eastern component does not make it not a european related population as modern europeans are part near eastern.

It's unlikely, but could you imagine the seething it would cause if WSH turned out to not even have a proper near eastern related component?

Davidski said...

@Otanes

You're asking about the practical things that affect the collection of any kind of scientific material for study, such as availability, quality, political or social obstacles etc.

So even if available, ancient remains might be too degraded to be useful due to poor preservation, or it might not be possible to collect them legally for study.

Kelteminar is very interesting, and it may have contributed some ancestry to ancient Eastern Europeans. But by and large it can't be the source of the Caucasus-related ancestry on the steppe bordering the Caucasus. That's just not practical.

I think everyone who has followed this topic closely for the last few years knows that the peculiar type of ancestry that is seen in Yamnaya, Khvalynsk and other Neolithic and Eneolithic peoples of the Pontic-Caspian steppe is peculiar to this region and native to it. It's just that some people don't want to admit it yet.

VerdianoBR said...

Hi there, people! Dear Davidski (or other regular readers of this post), could you please clear up some issues about the terminology used in the Global25 database to me?

First and foremost, I'd like to understand the chronology, i.e. the timeframes that pertain to the use of the "_Anc", "_H" and "_MA" labels, especially what differentiates them and what exactly are the time boundaries between them.

Besides, I'm still at a loss about when exactly the "_IA" samples should best be described as "_Anc", considering that there is no fully agreed upon end for the Iron Age.

Finally, in some of the samples, I find it hard to determine whether the "_IA", "_BA", "_CA/Chl" and "_N" are basically just chronological timeframes based on the usual West Eurasian (e.g. CA/Chl from ~3000-4000 B.C., BA from ~3000 B.C., IA from ~1000 B.C.), or they just refer to the local chronology of the archaeological site in which the sample was found (e.g. the IA in East Africa differs from the IA in Europe, and the BA in East Asia differs from the BA in West Asia).

Thanks in advance for any enlightening comments that you can provide. ;-)

LivoniaG said...

Davidski said
"Steppe Eneolithic is not a recent mixture, except for some EHG ancestry from the forest zone. It's an ancient Mesolithic population, so there's no need to break it down into basic components."

David - no challenge in this at all.
you are saying IE languages originated in that Mesolithic population?
And that IE languages therefore were not culturally transferred to these steppes people as they changed from hunter-gatherer (mesolithic) to neolithic? They were speaking some flavor of IE or pre-IE the whole time. And that language did not come from the south.

You don't have that same genetic isolate in Anatolia. So there do you accept culturally transferred IE languages because steppes ancestry is hardly dominant in neolithic/bronze age Anatolia -- not close to how it is in the north?

So, without any kind of emotion, is it possible that pre-IE/IE languages were being spoken around Anatolia before the neolithic came to the steppes or forest steppes, and that the neolithic (including domesticated animals and pasturalism) culturally transferred pre-IE/IE languages? Not a genetic transfer?






AWood said...

J2b2 absolutely came from Anatolia or the Levant and is related to the increase in SE Europe of the Iran_Neo component in the Bronze Age. This has nothing to do with "Steppe" ancestry. There is no way in hell, J2b2 came from the steppe. Only 3-4 male ancestries lived on the western steppes during the Bronze Age - R1b, R1a, I2a2, and lastly Q1 which was a minority in CWC apparently.

Please prove otherwise.

It's funny to keep seeing these posts assuming all these people came from the steppes.

Rob said...

@ AWood


I’m not sure how you’re imagining that J2b2 came from Anatolia and the Levant, when it’s missing in hundreds of samples there
J2b is present in northern Iran and Azerbajan, but these arent the Levant
In Europe, it then spread from the carpathian basin south , and is associated with EEF and steppe components
So connected the dots..

You should at least make some attempt to follow the evidence

Otanes said...

How far apart are Iran_N and CHG? Am I wrong to remember that both have substantial ANE contributions, not unlike EHG? This continuum you speak of, Davidski, where are the poles? I was under the impression that CHG and Iran_N were quite close to each other. Is that not true? What differentiates them, modeled Basal Eurasian admixture? While I'm at it, I'd like to ask about AEA, which I assume stands for "Ancient East Asian". How are they separate from later East Asians? Are they the principal component of Neosiberians, or are Neosiberians simply modern East Asians with Paleo-Siberian admixture? I've read that AEA are partially present in ANE, as well as in WSHG. I had thought WSHG was more Iran_N-like. Or is that only through shared ANE heritage?

I'm not familiar with exactly which forums to trawl for this information. No need to spoonfeed me, but if someone could direct me to where I could find more, it would be much appreciated. I'm trying to build a better picture as an occasional and casual reader.

Gaska said...

J2b-L283 is an interesting case because although it is true that it appears in the Balkans at the beginning of the Bronze Age, it is also in the Caucasus at that time-KDC001-Kabardino-Balkaria, MBA Caucasus-HapY-J2b2a-L283 (1.864 BC) and Armenia (LBA). If it had followed a northern route to Serbia it would have had to appear in Yamnaya or any other steppe culture, Moldavia, Romania, Bulgaria or Carpathian Basin, but it did not. It is also not in the CWC, the BBC and the rest of European Bronze Age cultures, so it is most likely that the Maros culture and Mygdalia samples arrived following the Anatolian route.

BTW, Geoffrey Caveney's latest paper “Indo-Aryan etymologies of 16 Greek words” (2.022) is very interesting. “A syllabic signs are quite strictly limited by the faithfulness to the basic phonetic values of the signs established for Linear B, as well asto the basic principles of the representation of the language by the script established for Linear B. If the resemblance were due to pure random chance coincidence alone, the Linear A words would not correspond with the Sanskrit forms as closely as they clearly do. It is clear that the language of the 10 Linear A inscriptions presented and analyzed in this paper must represent some dialect of an Indo-Aryan language” If it is confirmed that the language of Crete (1700 BC) was also a form of Indo-European, then the Anatolian origin cannot be denied by anyone.The Anatolian-Levantine connection in mainland Greece & Crete is overwhelming-J2a, J1-P58, L2-L595, T1a2b/1-S27463….

Davidski said...

@LivoniaG

PIE is a Copper Age language, so we can't trace it back to the Mesolithic.

Davidski said...

@Otanes

How far apart are Iran_N and CHG?

Distinct enough.

https://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2019/12/a-final-note-for-year.html

Rob said...

''I’m not sure how you’re imagining that J2b2 came from Anatolia and the Levant, when it’s missing in hundreds of samples there''

as in PPN/ Neolithic samples, even in Bronze Age, its absent in Anatolia

Rob said...

@ Daviski

''
PIE is a Copper Age language, so we can't trace it back to the Mesolithic.''


I'd say that it was an idiom, probably from a dialect chain, spoken since Mesolithic across. Had more survived, there would be additional languages between proto-Anatolian and 'nuclear' IE

vAsiSTha said...

@Rob

Ganj_Dareh:


CHG:76%
Morocco_Iberomaurisian: 11%
Onge: 13%
std errors: 2-3%
P-val: 0.12056


Right pops:
Cameroon_SMA.DG
Russia_Sidelkino_HG.SG
Italy_North_Villabruna_HG
Russia_MA1_HG.SG
China_Tianyuan
Israel_Natufian
Russia_Kostenki14
Russia_Kolyma_M.SG
Turkey_Epipaleolithic
Mbuti.DG

Orpheus said...

@Otanes They are similar enough for Mesolithic/Neolithic Iran to score 100% CHG in Lazaridis et al 2022. Component-wise they do have some differences. Lazaridis et al 2018 (Dzudzuana paper) has the best model for CHG at 0.685 with 64,3% Dzudzuana, 22,2% ANE, 5,4% Mbuti and 8,1% Tianyuan. Iran_N (no Meoslithic samples tested) at 0.129 has 57,7% Dzudzuana, 21,8% ANE, 10,9% Onge and 9,7% Mbuti.

@AWood Looked up the Southern Arc paper supplementals, HajjiFiruz_ChL x2, Turkey Alalakh MLBA x1 for j2b2
Oldest ones seem to be a Near Eastern development. Many of the Bronze Age j2b2 samples in Europe have excess CHG-related ancestry compared to their EHG-related so this would point to an eastern source that moved into the Balkans sometime after the Chalcolithic.

@Gaska Interesting paper, if it's confirmed then the attestation of Indo-Aryan would be pushed further back to 1700-1800BCE.
No official analysis has been done to look for potential BMAC/IVC ancestry in related samples (e.g. Thera, where apparently there are some Indian monkeys on some murals). The ChL Anatolian admixture in Minoans has been dated to ~4000BCE which seems a bit early for Indo-Iranian, let alone Indo-Aryan, but the geneflow could be continuous. Perhaps if Minoan is an Anatolian language, it retained some I-A words from before it reached Crete. I find a later influence more possible though, mediated through BMAC influences. Sariyannidis (Sarianidi) points at similarities between Minoan (Knossos, Phaistos), Anatolian/Alalakh, Ugarit and BMAC temples. Could be something pre-BMAC that existed in East Anatolia/West Iran. The bull and griffin are also common symbols after 3000BCE.

Sam Elliott said...

The phylogeny of J2b L283 is such that a steppe migration BEFORE Yamnaya is what likely delivered this lineage to the Balkans. All of the old branches under J2b L283 (7 branches total) oscillate between 4200 BC and 3500 BC on their formation dates. There’s no way that this could be a migration from Anatolia. This is a classic steppe migration sort of phylogeny. The only possible options are:

1.) Novodanilovka
2.) Cernavoda
3.) Usatovo

All 3 represent an early steppe migration across southern Ukraine and Moldova into the Balkans with possible origins in Sredny Stog. Novodanilovka is generally accepted as a component of SSC. However, Telegin later considered it a separate cultural complex. This is why L283 is less likely to be found amongst conventional Yamnaya burials that started around 3300 BC. J2b L283 had already moved west ahead of this later wave (Z2103). Either way, an east —-> west migration across the dry steppe along or near the Black Sea shoreline seems to be the most likely route. David Anthony has already hinted that something big is going on in his interview with Razib Khan where he mentioned they have many “Yamnaya” samples from 4000 BC, none belonging to R1b Z2103.

No ancient L283 has ever been discovered in Anatolia, even after the Southern Arc publication.

J2b L283 is one of the only European male lineages never discovered anywhere in Europe during the Neolithic.

pnuadha said...

@ Otanes
Here is a really good summary of the development of east asian and related people. https://genetichistoryofeastasians.quora.com/

@ davidski
You say there might have been a continuum between EHG, CHG, N Iran, and possibly ANE? But we do know that ANE itself must have contributed greatly to EHG since the latter bares an East Eurasian signature. In other words, any EHG ANE continuum must partially be the result of a significant migration from siberia into eastern europe rather than diverging branches and low level contact?

Can we estimate the contribution of ANE to EHG based on this East Eurasian signature? Ive seen estimates on wikipedia ranging from 9% up to 75%.

I cant believe we still dont know how WHG was formed or where it was prior to 20kya.

Gaska said...

Ok Sam, let's imagine that you are right and that L283 appeared in those Pre-Yamnaya cultures (4.200-3.500 BC) but then how did it get there? - All the J marker branches (J1, J2a, J2b) have their origin in the South Caucasus-Iran, so then it has to be related to some migration from the Caucasus to the steppes (5,000-4,000 BC)

Do you think it is a marker related to EHGs? This hypothesis don't seem very credible indeed.

How do you explain its appearance in Kabardino-Balkaria? BA-Migrations back to the Caucasus from the Balkans?

Until we find samples in the steppes or Anatolia we will not know the route it followed, but what is certain is that its origin is neither in Western Europe nor in the steppes.

Yamnaya samples 4.000 BC, you mean Proto-Yamnaya or Yamnaya like samples in Sredni Stog? We already know some leaks and I have not heard anything about L283, in any case if it were true, Lazaridis would have another argument for his theory of the second wave of Caucasian migrations

Copper Axe said...

@Orpheus

The oldest attestation of Indo-Aryan is in one of the letters of Zimri-lim from 1761 bc or so, it mentions Maryannu forces.

Andrzejewski said...

@Davidski @Rob “ PIE is a Copper Age language, so we can't trace it back to the Mesolithic.''


I'd say that it was an idiom, probably from a dialect chain, spoken since Mesolithic across. Had more survived, there would be additional languages between proto-Anatolian and 'nuclear' IE”

I tend to agree with Rob: PIE and other pops carrying similar WSH components- CWC, Anatolian, Tocharian(?) and maybe even Khvalynsk (might be a stretch) were dialect continuum of language spoken by whoever/whatever created its unique autosomal markers.

epoch said...

@Samuel Andrews

"Can you guys link me to to the recent study that found Y DNA I2a2 in the Bronze age Aegean. Thanks."

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-022-01952-3

Rob said...

J2b2 is probably the male-equivalent of Ukraine-EBA_Ozera. Suggesting limited amount of male movement onto steppe via southern Caucasus. However, they weren't able to make much gains there, so rapidly moved toward the western edge of the Carpathian basin.
At some point in the Carpathian basin, or perhaps much lataer in the Adriatic, they were assimilated by IE-speaking western Yamnaya groups characterised by R1b-Z2103 and I2a-L68


@ Orpheus
Your claims are characteristically erroneous. Moreover, you have no insight into your poor grasp of reality

Rob said...

@ Vasistha

yep, But I recall you originally didnt belive me when I said there is ancient 'north African'' in Iran_N.
Is Onge similar to Laos_Haobinhian ? If so, Iran_N didnt seem to need it much over ANE plus perhaps something a touch more eastern

Steppisch said...

I'd be interested in opinions regarding the topic of the genesis of proto-Greeks and the possible involvement of CWC, specifically Southern Unetice impulses to the steppe to form or integrate into Babyno Culture around 2200BC which we know has long been suspected to be involved in the formation of proto-Greeks, ie, funeral masks, chariots, etc. This intriguing hypothesis comes from archaeological comparisons in papers by Grigoriev and Lytvynenko and I initially came across it in Volker Heyd's 'Yamnaya, Corded Wares, and Bell Beakers on the move' from 2019; an excellent paper btw.

Could CWC have seeded yet another IE language?

Obviously the genesis of the Proto-Greeks is not so simple as a direct migration of Yamnaya out of the steppes and into the Greek Peninsula. I believe Davidsky predicted in a previous blog post that Sintashta (R1a) will be eventually found to be a source of the proto-Greeks which makes a lot of sense.




gimby20 said...

@AR,


"No it could well be true, and WSH having a near-eastern component does not make it not a european related population as modern europeans are part near eastern."

I never said otherwise. All I said was that the CHG part of these WSH is a Middle Eastern component genetically. Davidski likes to focus on the geographical aspect since the genetic aspect is out of his hands.

"It's unlikely, but could you imagine the seething it would cause if WSH turned out to not even have a proper near eastern related component?"

Seething from whom? The only people that seem to be interested in this stuff are Europeans and South Asians. Middle Eaterners are nowhere to be seen, they probably don't Yamnaya can be modeled as half Middle Eastern (again GENETICALLY, not talking about geography).

But what does proper even mean here? That maybe it was mediated by a population that was half or less Middle Eastern related? Well, that's fine, but what's the end result? That WSH people and their relatives all had significant (roughly 50%) of their genome being closer related to modern-day Georgians than any European population.

gimby20 said...

"Eneolithic peoples of the Pontic-Caspian steppe is peculiar to this region and native to it. It's just that some people don't want to admit it yet."

Davidski,

Well it looks more likely than not that this CHG-like component was present in the Pontic-Caspian steppe for a long time, but it doesn't change what this component represents, which is Middle Eastern affinities, not European affinities. Again, I'm talking genetics here not geography.

A mixed-race Nigerian-Swedish hybrid living in Sweden for 3 billion years does not change the fact that this hybrid is of mixed descent...

Rob said...

@ Gimby
No CHG is not “middle eastern” by a long shot . Ie it has nothing to do with Lebanon, Syria or Jordan

Not that I care about labels, although you obviously do

Rob said...

@ Steppisch

“ by Grigoriev and Lytvynenko ”

But Grigoriev doesn’t have a handle on reality. He thinks Sintashta comes directly from Western Asia



“ Obviously the genesis of the Proto-Greeks is not so simple as a direct migration of Yamnaya out of the steppes and into the Greek Peninsula.”

Actually that’s more or less it
Well they stopped in Bulgaria and Macedonia first, and admixed with locals and Aegeans once they got there, but proto- Greeks are Yamnaya derived

There’s R1a-Z93 in proto-Thracians, but that’s as far south as it reaches

vAsiSTha said...

@rob

"yep, But I recall you originally didnt belive me when I said there is ancient 'north African'' in Iran_N.
Is Onge similar to Laos_Haobinhian ? If so, Iran_N didnt seem to need it much over ANE plus perhaps something a touch more eastern"

I still don't believe it. qpAdm cannot give us a ghost population as the source, it has to pick some real population that we provide it. The real basal eurasian source in IranN is not Iberomaurisian, qpgraph can be used to verify that.

IIRC, Onge is almost the same as Hoabinhian as per G25 at least.

Imo, The best conclusions we can make:

CHG is more west eurasian shifted than Ganj Dareh - towards Anatolian and ANE ancestry. Also WHG to some extent, which means towards EHG as well.
Ganj Dareh is more basal eurasian as well as east eurasian shifted than CHG.


vAsiSTha said...

"The oldest attestation of Indo-Aryan is in one of the letters of Zimri-lim from 1761 bc or so, it mentions Maryannu forces."

Lol, at this time the Sintashta ancestry was having trouble crossing even the BMAC region.

Rob said...

@ Vas

It comes up in qpGraph too. That’s how I noticed it
It’s probably some yet to be determined link via the Gulf region

Raka1100 said...

@Vladimir
There is also this study without coordinates.

A genomic snapshot of demographic and cultural dynamism in Upper Mesopotamia during the Neolithic Transition
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abo3609

Orpheus said...

@Copper Axe Interesting, noted. That would make them contemporaneous.

@Steppisch Greek out of CWC-related groups is virtually impossible because this would mean that the entire Balkanic group (Greek, Albanian, Armenian, Phrygian, Thracian, Messapic etc. Olander 2022) are from CWC. Greek isn't a standalone language like Tocharian.

Multi-cordoned ware is also most likely not the source of chariots in Mycenaeans. From a quick search, their chariots had spoked wheels while Greek did not originally have a word for spoked wheel does not have a word for spoked wheel. Anthony (2007) had noted that this means that when proto-Greek arrived in Greece, it did not have a word for spoked wheel. But that's the icing on the cake more or less. Bronze Age Italy archaeological influences have been found in BA Greece, in the area of a group that was now analyzed to most likely derive a lot of ancestry from a BA Italy-related source. (Skourtanioti et al 2023) The steppe-harboring samples in BA Greece are also older than previously thought, some are from ~2400BCE. (Koptekin et al 2022)
On top of that Greek, alongside the Balkanic languages, are not related to CWC-derived languages of the time and they have no substratum of them either (which would point to CWC-derived languages being spoken in Greece in the Bronze Age).

"Obviously the genesis of the Proto-Greeks is not so simple as a direct migration of Yamnaya out of the steppes and into the Greek Peninsula."
Apparently it is, or that's how it looks like so far. Mycenaeans have a 1:10 Yamnaya:Minoan-like ratio as per Lazaridis et al 2022 and the previous study (2017 also points to EMBA Yamnaya). Not sure if that's how the language arrived in Greece but when it comes to steppe ancestry that's what we got in every study that has analyzed confirmed Greek speakers (Mycenaeans).

@The Rudism EEF as a term does not imply hat EEFs are "native Europeans" especially when it's established that 85%+ of their ancestry originated in the Near East. I haven't seen anyone refer to them as such.
I can understand his objection, considering that in a few centuries or millennia the various North African, Middle Eastern, Sub-Saharan African, South Asian etc immigrants residing now in various European countries would get labeled as "native European" using the same argument, especially if they would have undergone some drift or/and slight ancestry change.

@vAsiSTha Pull toward WHG could come from the higher Dzudzuana CHG has, since WHG descends from a common ancestor with Dzudzuana.

StP said...

@Andrzejewski said: Dravidians are from Iran_HG/Iran_N admixed with Onge-related authocthones. Only the gods know if their languages came from the former or from the latter ones.

Do you have any reliable PCA or f3 analyzes of haplogroup R1a samples from the higher Dravidian groups/castes handy?

gamerz_J said...

@Rob

What do you think is the "touch more eastern" in Iran_N? More eastern compared to ANE as in Onge-like or East Asian-like?

@Vasistha

You think there is any relationship between the eastern shift of ANE and that of Iran_N? I do recall Lazaridis talking of an ANE shift in Iran_N greater than CHG, which also correlated with ENA affinities.

Matt said...

Out of the following date ranges, when would we think that the CHG related ancestry got north of the Caucasus?:

1) Pre-Satsurblia: >11300 BCE

If this is true then we should get Z score for f4(Mbuti,Progress_EN)(Kotias,Satsurblia) = 0, although there may not be enough statistical power in two samples.

2) Post-Satsurblia but pre-Kotias: 11000-7700 BCE.
3) Post-Kotias but before the movement of neolithisation farmers from NW Anatolia into Europe: 7700 BCE to 6500 BCE
4) Post-neolithisation of Europe, constrained by the Middle Don group with CHG: 6500 to 5500 BCE

All the examples from 2-4, would find a significantly negative Z on f4(Mbuti,Progress_EN)(Kotias,Satsurblia), although subject to the same caveat around statistical power.

There could be more complicated ways to explain f4 stat outcomes though! (Population structure, etc where Satsurblia is representative of some substructure that still existed in Caucasus but isn't obvious through Kotias). Drawback of having only two samples...

For some examples of those f4 stats: https://imgur.com/a/ZHv1i2r (Green Z: 1-2, Amber: 2-3, Red: >3)

Populations generally do share more drift with Kotias than Satsurblia, but it's not actually clear why this is, because it's the case for EHG and the earliest EHG sample too. There's a strong link between Kotias relative to Satsurblia, and the Caucasus_Eneolithic.

Wee e said...

@Rob” I'd say that it was an idiom, probably from a dialect chain, spoken since Mesolithic across. Had more survived, there would be additional languages between proto-Anatolian and 'nuclear' IE”
Hoping this isn’t too off-topic.
I wonder if another survival would be recognised as such. If one or two far flung groups survived in comparative isolation for a while, then their speech may not have been mutually intelligible with IE languages more recently arrived. If it had developed over time in its own way (borrowing, or not, from a non-IE grammar or syntax, or sound-change rules we haven’t accounted for) then we might just assume it was fundamentally a non-IE language that borrowed from IE.

Eg, Etruscan (as far as it’s known) has always seemed to me like a mad mashup of everything up and down Europe's western fringe — Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, quite apart from obvious connections with Latin. (Those who know Greek see connections there) yet it’s said to be non-IE.

Moesan said...

@Gimby20
CHG is not closely related to Levant and Anatolia even less before Chalco).
And speaking of your Nigerians-Swedes crossings, I think after bilions of years with drift + selection as it has always occurred in ancient times, this mix would have created a new population genetically speaking!

H₂ŕ̥ḱtos said...

@Gaska

'Ok Sam, let's imagine that you are right and that L283 appeared in those Pre-Yamnaya cultures (4.200-3.500 BC) but then how did it get there? - All the J marker branches (J1, J2a, J2b) have their origin in the South Caucasus-Iran, so then it has to be related to some migration from the Caucasus to the steppes (5,000-4,000 BC)

Do you think it is a marker related to EHGs? This hypothesis don't seem very credible indeed.'

Bear in mind that we have:

-J1a-J-BY90328 in Afanasievo (I6221) ca. 3000 BCE.

-J1*-something in Khvalynsk ca. 4500 BCE.

-J2a-Z36829 in two guys Croatian Sopot culture (POP04 and I5078) ca. 4600 BCE.

-J2a-J2-Z6061 in Hungarian Lengyel culture (I1902) ca. 4600 BCE.

-J2a-Z6048 in two guys from Austrian LBK (I5207 and I5068) ca. 5000 BCE.

-J2a-Y29673 in Neolithic Italy (R17) ca. 5300 BCE.

-J2*-something in a Barcin farmer (I0708) ca. 6100 BCE.

-J1*-something in two mesolithic Karelian hunter-gatherers (I0211 and Popovo2) ca. 6300 BCE.

I may well be missing more; I'm unsure!

Now, what we don't see is any J2b samples, and L283 is indeed under J2b. However, my point is that your assertion seems to be, "J1, J2a and J2b all originate in South Caucasus-Iran, therefore any J1, J2a and J2b lines in Europe must derive from a Caucasus->steppe migration ca. 5000-4000 BCE". Clearly, this line of reasoning doesn't hold, because we have mesolithic hunter-gatherers in Karelia with J1*-something, and several European neolithic farmers with J2a, with a J2*-something Anatolian neolithic farmer representing a very feasible related sample.

We can't rule out that Khvalynsk and Afanesievo J1 is downstream of the J1 of our Karelian hunter-gatherers, or some relatives of theirs. We can't rule out that there is unsampled J2b in neolithic Europe. I'm not necessarily saying that I think positively that there is likely to be unsampled J2b in neolithic Europe, but certainly, a distant origin of J1, J2a and J2b south of the Caucasus doesn't preclude it.

With regards to J2b-L283 specifically, it looks like we have:

-MOK15 - J2b-Z615* - Serbia, ca. 1900 BCE.

-KDC001 - J2b-L283 - North Caucasus, ca. 1800 BCE.

-I4331 - J2b-Z38240 - Croatia, ca. 1550 BCE.

-I26726 - J2b-Z1297 - Croatia, ca. 1400 BCE.

-I5074 - J2b-Z38240 - Croatia, ca. 1350 BCE.

-ORC007 - J2b-YP91 - Sardinia, ca. 1200 BCE.

-ORC007 - J2b-Z600 - Sardinia, ca. 1200 BCE.

-ORC003 - J2b-YP157* - Sardinia, ca. 1200 BCE.

-I13167 - J2b-Y21878 - Montenegro, ca. 1100 BCE.

-I10553 - J2b-YP157* - Sardinia, ca. 900 BCE.

-I26742 - J2b-Z38241 - Croatia, ca. 650 BCE.

-I23911 - J2b-FT115799 - Croatia, ca. 650 BCE.

-I24639 - J2b-Y86930 - Croatia, ca. 550 BCE.

-I23995 - J2b-Y86930 - Croatia, ca. 550 BCE.

-I24882 - J2b-Y86930* - Croatia, ca. 500 BCE.

-I24638 - J2b-FT115799 - Croatia, ca. 550 BCE.

It certainly can't be ruled out that there's unsampled J2b-L283 in neolithic South Caucasus-Iran, and we can't rule out that these European samples aren't paternally descended from such unsampled individuals, but it does look... kind of EEFy? Particularly given that there's actually quite a bit in Western Europe in modern samples. It's not conclusive but we have to recognise that there have been branches of J in Europe for quite some time.


gimby20 said...

@Moesan

"CHG is not closely related to Levant and Anatolia even less before Chalco"

Last I checked modern Middle Eastern populations are not just Natufian + ANF. The closest population to CHG are... Georgians... which are... I guess European? Lol

vAsiSTha said...

"@Vasistha

You think there is any relationship between the eastern shift of ANE and that of Iran_N? I do recall Lazaridis talking of an ANE shift in Iran_N greater than CHG, which also correlated with ENA affinities."

Both ANE and IranN have East Eurasian ancestry. Don't know how both the EE sources are related in terms of shared drift. It would make sense if the EE component in IranN/HotuBelt_Meso is somehow related to the Indian AASI to their east.

f4(Mbuti, MA1, CHG, IranN) is significantly negative. So CHG has more affinity with MA1 than IranN.

Orpheus said...

@Matt Lazaridis gives a pre-Neolithic date (but not specific, just "before the Neolithic") due to the absence of Anatolian-Levantine ancestry in it. His reasoning is that after the Neolithic all CHG-rich populations harbor these two ancestries in small percentages, so it happened before that.

Gaska said...

@H₂ŕ̥ḱtos

1-Everybody knows that J and its main subclades J1, J2a and J2b have their origin in Caucasus-Iran

2-Everybody knows that there is J1 in EHGS (Karelia etc) and some branches of J2a in the european neolithic

3-After thousands of samples analyzed, J2b-L283 has not been found in the steppe eneolithic, Sredni Stog, Khvalynsk, Yamnaya, CWC, BBC or any European culture. That is why I was saying that even if Sam is right and L283 appears in one of these cultures, it is clear that its origin would still be in the Caucasus (5,000-4,000BC), not in the steppes or in mainland Europe. Sam's theory that we will find it in the Novodanilovka, Cernavoda or Usatovo cultures seems to me to be wishful thinking.

On the other hand, it is true that except for the case in Kabardino Balkaria and another sample in LBA_Armenia no L283 has been found in Anatolia, so the mystery remains to explain where this lineage was located between 4,500-2,000 BC and to show which was its way to reach the Balkans.

And finally, its link with Indo-European languages has already been demonstrated, (Mycenean-Mygdalia) so I think it is more likely to have arrived in Serbia in the early Bronze Age from the Caucasus than from the Pre-Yamnaya cultures mentioned by Sam.

Sam Elliott said...

@Gaska

I’ve transcribed David Anthony’s recent comments from his interview with Razib Khan. Khan basically asks him to describe the ethnogenesis of the Yamnaya. Anthony states:


“Um, so, the question though is you can see people who look kind of like Yamnaya in terms of their autosomal genetics, their nuclear DNA, uh, a thousand years before Yamnaya in the steppes, but so far we haven’t got the patriline, the specific patriline that is the Yamnaya Y haplogroup in those pre Yamnaya populations. We have populations that are dated to 4,000 BC, long before Yamnaya, that are EHG, CHG, and Anatolian Farmer…just the exact formula that you would want for Yamnaya…but, uh, so that’s the kind of general population Yamnaya merged from…I think we’re going to understand that pretty well. We still haven’t identified the specific Y haplogroup, uh, pre Yamnaya Y haplogroup that looks like Yamnaya. There’s a lot different Y haplogroups out there and, uh, pre Yamnaya, so far, (almost nervous laughter from Anthony) NONE OF THEM ARE THE TYPICAL YAMNAYA Y HAPLOGROUP.”

Here’s the link to the discussion. Part above starts at about 52:00 mark. Seems like a big deal to me, but maybe I’m misinterpreting Anthony here.

https://youtu.be/NtcjMS2AvKA

As far as J2b L283 is concerned, I have no idea where it originated. Upstream from L283 there is a 10,000 year old J2b from Kotias Klde, Georgia. He was 100% CHG. So I could easily see L283 forming in the general vicinity and moving along the Black Sea coast to the Kuban region of Russia (or crossing the Caucasus) or even taking the Kerch Bridge route to Crimea and up to Kherson and Mykolaiv and across southern Ukraine into the Balkans. Or they could have headed north around the Sea of Azov and then across through Mariupol enroute to SE Europe. Or it could have been an upstream branch that made it to the steppe north of the Black Sea taking one of the aforementioned routes and L283 could have been born right there. As far as the theoretical migration path and possible cultural affiliations, I just look at the dates of the oldest L283 branches and add about 500 years to each to account for potential underestimates and then look at the various archeological complexes mentioned by Kotova, Telegin, Manzura, and Anthony that are close to the coast moving east—->west. It’s primitive, but that’s how I roll.

You say that we have many samples (thousands) from these European cultures, and no J2b L283s. But of course, as you know, we have many J2b L283s all along the eastern Adriatic and even the western Adriatic coastline in Italy who belong to this Cetina Culture. Maybe they weren’t as prestigious as the Bell Beaker and Corded Ware groups you mention, but they definitely had an impact there throughout SE Europe and even North Africa where they’ve found some ancient L283s. Many of these burials along the Western Balkan coastline and hinterland were tumulus burials. You even mentioned the Mycenaean shaft grave burials from Mygdalia who descend from the same branch as the Mokrin sample (Z615), which had a formation date of around 3100 BC. All of these samples are typically 30-40% Yamnaya, the rest is EEF with a splash of WHG or Iron Gates. So not exactly the genetic profile one would expect if they had recently arrived from Anatolia or even had deep ties to an ANF community in SE Europe. Again, many Neolithic samples from across Europe, L283 stands out as one of the only remaining European male lineages with no ancient Neolithic samples. Lots of Bronze Age/Iron Age samples, but nothing before that. Seems peculiar.

The big problem, in my opinion, is that all these years later, we really don’t have many publicly available samples from across the steppe spanning from the LDC to Romania/Moldova. So that results in a lot of speculation. Obviously this isn’t a problem unique to J2b L283 as even R1b M269’s origins are shrouded in mystery, as you’re well aware. Same deal with R1a M417, too.

gamerz_J said...

@Vasistha

Would not this stat simply be due to higher basal Eurasian in Iran_N relative to CHG?

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