Around a third of the ancient individuals in my dataset associated with East Germanic-speaking cultures show obvious ancestry from Central and/or West Asia.
This shouldn't be too surprising, considering, for instance, the well documented contacts between East Germanic tribes and the Avars, Huns, Sarmatians and other nomadic groups that streamed into Europe from the Asian steppes during the Migration Period. It's a topic that I've raised before at this blog (see
here).
But the curious thing is that very little, if any, of this ancestry has percolated down to present-day Europeans.
The easiest way to show this is with a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) based on my
Global25 data. The relevant PCA datasheet can be downloaded
here. Basic details about the ancient samples in the analysis are available
here.
Some of the Northeastern European populations, particularly the Uralic speakers, appear to be attracted to the Hunnic cluster. However, this is mostly an artifact of pre-Migration Period east to west population expansions in the far north of Europe, probably including those of the Proto-Uralians (see
here).
So how is it that, despite ruling over vast areas of Europe for hundreds of years, the East Germanics appear not to have contributed significantly to the present-day European gene pool? My theory is that, much like the Avars and Huns, they were militarily and demographically overwhelmed by the ascending groups around them, such as the Slavs, and they simply went extinct.
To wrap things up, here's a basic qpAdm mixture model designed to test for Hunnic-related ancestry in a few Eastern and Northern European populations of interest. Note the significant slice of this type of ancestry in the likely early Goths of the Chernyakhiv culture. Is it real? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below.
UKR_Chernyakhiv
DEU_MA 0.863±0.038
Hun_Tian_Shan 0.137±0.038
chisq 12.525
tail prob 0.325466
Full output
Swedish
Baltic_EST_IA 0.126±0.078
DEU_MA 0.849±0.073
Hun_Tian_Shan 0.025±0.020
chisq 8.338
tail prob 0.595877
Full output
Ukrainian
Baltic_EST_IA 0.121±0.064
DEU_MA 0.857±0.060
Hun_Tian_Shan 0.022±0.017
chisq 11.458
tail prob 0.322956
Full output
Estonian
Baltic_EST_IA 0.597±0.069
DEU_MA 0.373±0.064
Hun_Tian_Shan 0.030±0.017
chisq 15.739
tail prob 0.107361
Full output
See also...
Conan the Barbarian probably belonged to Y-haplogroup R1a
More on the association between Uralic expansions and Y-haplogroup N
Uralic-specific genome-wide ancestry did make a signifcant impact in the East Baltic
