At least four individuals from the Late Chalcolithic (LC) burial site of Arslantepe show ancestry typical of the population associated with the contemporaneous Maykop culture in the North Caucasus. They are ART018, ART020, ART027 and ART039 from the recent
Skourtanioti et al. paper. I've labeled them
TUR_Arslantepe_LC_Maykop in my qpAdm mixture model below:
TUR_Arslantepe_LC_Maykop
RUS_Maykop_Novosvobodnaya 0.318±0.041
TUR_Arslantepe_LC 0.682±0.041
chisq 9.969
tail prob 0.533159
Full output
Considering the tight statistical fit, I think it's even possible that some of these people harbor direct ancestry from Maykop Novosvobodnaya. Here's a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) showing why my qpAdm model works so well. It was produced with the data in the text file
here and the Vahaduo PCA tools
here.
Moreover, one of the Arslantepe males, ART038, belongs to Y-haplogroup R1b-V1636 (R1b1a2). This is clearly a marker of paternal steppe ancestry, because it's been reported in two Eneolithic samples from the southernmost part of the Pontic-Caspian steppe near the North Caucasus foothills (see
here). These individuals are dated to ~4,200 calBCE, so they lived about a thousand years earlier than ART038.
ART038 probably lacks steppe and Maykop-related ancestries on his autosomes. Nevertheless, my point about his Y-haplogroup stands, because autosomal admixture can be bred out and disappear completely within a couple hundred years, or about 6 to 8 generations.
Interestingly, Skourtanioti et al. argued against the possibility of significant steppe and Maykop-related ancestries in the Arslantepe LC samples. They also didn't see R1b-V1636 as an obvious signal of paternal steppe ancestry. I find this very puzzling indeed, because to me it seems way off the mark. From the paper:
However, R1b-V1636 and R1b-Z2103 lineages split long before (~17 kya) and therefore there is no direct evidence for an early incursion from the Pontic steppe during the main era of Arslantepe. Lineage L2-L595 found in ALA084 (Alalakh) has previously been reported in one individual from Chalcolithic Northern Iran (Narasimhan et al., 2019) and in three males from the Late Maykop phase in the North Caucasus (Wang et al., 2019). These three share ancestry from the common Anatolian/Iranian ancestry cline described here, which indicates a widespread distribution that also reached the southern margins of the steppe zone north of the Caucasus mountain range.
See also...
Perhaps a hint of things to come
An early Mitanni?
How relevant is Arslantepe to the PIE homeland debate?
