A tantalizing link

A new paper at PLoS ONE reports on the first human genomes reliably associated with the Single Grave culture (SGC). They were sequenced from remains in a burial at Gjerrild, Denmark, roughly dating to 2,500 BCE.

Surprisingly, one of the male genomes belongs to Y-haplogroup R1b-V1636, which is an exceedingly rare marker both in ancient and present-day populations.

However, the results do make sense, because the earliest instances of R1b-V1636 are in three Eneolithic males from burial sites on the Pontic-Caspian (PC) steppe in Eastern Europe, which is precisely where one would expect to find the paternal ancestors of the SGC population. The SGC, of course, is the westernmost variant of the Corded Ware culture (CWC), and there's very little doubt nowadays that the CWC had its roots on the PC steppe.

A Copper Age individual from Arslantepe in central Anatolia also belongs to R1b-V1636, which suggests that Northern Europe shared a very specific link with Anatolia via Eastern Europe during a period generally regarded to have been the time of early Indo-European dispersals.

Numerous SGC barrows or kurgans dot the landscape in what are now the Netherlands, northwestern Germany and Denmark. Unfortunately, most SGC human remains have been eaten up by the acidic soils that exist in this area.

Citation: Egfjord AF-H, Margaryan A, Fischer A, Sjögren K-G, Price TD, Johannsen NN, et al. (2021) Genomic Steppe ancestry in skeletons from the Neolithic Single Grave Culture in Denmark. PLoS ONE 16(1): e0244872. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0244872

See also...

Maykop ancestry in Copper Age Arslantepe

Graphing the truth

I haven't used TreeMix since qpGraph became freely available for Linux. Among other things, the latter offers greater control, reproducibility and transparency.

However, I'd say that in its current form qpGraph is not the most objective way to analyze data. That's because if you're really good with it, and you want a graph to work, then often you can make it work by tweaking whatever it is that needs to be tweaked.

It's not possible to do a lot of tweaking with TreeMix. Indeed, once the user picks the samples for the TreeMix run, the rest of the process can be totally unsupervised, and thus free from human interference. Obviously, that's not a guarantee of accuracy, but it can be useful.

I feel I need to run more unsupervised analyses, especially when exploring new data. So to that end, I've dusted off TreeMix and will be using it regularly again.

There's been some talk lately online about migrations from Central Asia giving rise to the Eneolithic populations of the North Caucasus Piedmont steppe. In my opinion, that sounds like nonsense. But let's see what TreeMix has to say on the matter. In the graphs below look for the samples labeled Progress_En and Vonyuchka_En, respectively.

As far as I can tell, both of these graphs essentially corroborate the results from my recent Principal Component Analyses (PCA) with many of the same ancients (see here). In other words, Progress_En and Vonyuchka_En can be described as mixtures of populations closely related to the hunter-gatherers of the Caucasus on one hand, and those of Eastern Europe on the other. How does Central Asia fit into this, you might ask? It doesn't, unless you really want it to.

See also...

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

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

The idea that most of the Near Eastern-related ancestry in the ancient populations of the Pontic-Caspian (PC) steppe is, one way or another, sourced from the territory of present-day Iran is a fairly popular one nowadays (for instance, see here). It might turn out to be correct, once there are enough relevant samples to test it properly, but in my opinion the chances of this are slim.

My skepticism is based on literally hours of analyses with the currently available ancients from the Caucaso-Caspian region, like, for instance, the admixture graphs below featuring foragers and early farmers from Russia, Georgia and Iran. The relevant qpGraph and dot files are available here.

Note that the further I move away from Eastern Europe in these graphs when looking for the source of the southern ancestry in the Eneolithic population from the southernmost part of the PC steppe (Piedmont_En), the more difficult it is for me to create a statistically sound model. What might this tell us about the provenance of this so called southern ancestry?

See also...

The PIE homeland controversy: August 2019 status report

Some myths die hard

Late PIE ground zero now obvious; location of PIE homeland still uncertain, but...

An exceptional burial indeed, but not that of an Indo-European

Not too many people have been buried sitting on wagons. The most famous case is that of an Early Bronze Age man who, considering his injuries, may have died in a high-speed crash - high-speed for its time anyway - on the Pontic-Caspian steppe in Eastern Europe.

It's likely that this guy was one of the very first wagon-drivers in human history, because his four-wheeled wooden model is dated to 3336-3105 calBCE, which makes it the oldest wagon discovered thus far. His genotype data, under the label Steppe Maykop SA6004, were published recently along with Wang et al. 2019.

Early wagons are very important for a couple of reasons: they revolutionized human transport and warfare, and they're often closely associated with the prehistoric expansions of Indo-European languages.

So I'm pretty sure that many of you must be thinking right now that wagon-driver SA6004 was an early Indo-European, or even a Proto-Indo-European! I bet that's what Wang et al. thought too, considering the conclusion in their paper. But, alas, the chances of this are slim to none.

Steppe Maykop samples show rather peculiar genetic structure considering their geographic origin, with a large proportion of their ancestry deriving from a source closely related to western Siberian hunter-gatherers (aka West_Siberia_N in the ancient DNA record). Indeed, SA6004 basically looks like a 50/50 mix between West_Siberia_N and Piedmont_Eneolithic. Here's a map with all of the relevant details.

Thus, clearly, the Steppe Maykop population wasn't ancestral or even directly related to the steppe and steppe-derived groups generally regarded to have been Indo-European speaking, such as those associated with the Yamnaya, Corded Ware, and Bell Beaker cultures. That's because these groups lack any discernible West_Siberia_N-related ancestry.

It also wasn't ancestral or directly related to any present-day or currently sampled ancient Indo-European speaking populations, again because these populations basically lack West_Siberia_N-related ancestry.

On the other hand, Yamnaya, Corded Ware and other closely related groups show an exceptionally strong genetic relationship with Indo-European speakers, especially those from across Northern Europe, which experienced massive migrations from the Pontic-Caspian steppe during the late Neolithic period, and hardly anything from elsewhere since then.

Case in point, the samples from Wang et al. labeled Yamnaya Caucasus were recovered from the same area of the Pontic-Caspian as their Steppe Maykop samples, and yet, take a look at this linear model based on outgroup f3-statistics. Steppe Maykop does show high genetic affinity to Indo-European speakers (no doubt mediated via its Piedmont_Eneolithic-related ancestry), but, unlike Yamnaya Caucasus, it also shows unusually high affinity for a West Eurasian population to Native Americans and Siberians. The relevant datasheet is available here.

So the only way that the Steppe Maykop population was Indo-European-speaking, was if it inherited its Indo-European speech from its Piedmont_Eneolithic-related ancestors. And even if it was Indo-European-speaking, it probably spoke an extinct Indo-European language not closely related to any extant Indo-European languages. In other words, the possibility that Steppe Maykop passed on its language to Yamnaya, along with its wagons, is close to zero. More likely, Yamnaya stole a few wagons from Steppe Maykop, and the rest is history.

See also...

The Steppe Maykop enigma

On Maykop ancestry in Yamnaya

Late PIE ground zero now obvious; location of PIE homeland still uncertain, but...

The Steppe Maykop enigma

Who were the Steppe Maykop people exactly? Their ancestry must surely rank as one of the biggest surprises served up by ancient DNA to date.

I always thought that they'd turn out roughly like a mixture between populations associated with the Kura-Araxes and Yamnaya cultures (mostly because their territory was located sort of in between them). Nope, that wasn't even close. This is where they cluster compared to Kura-Araxes and Yamnaya samples in my Principal Component Analysis (PCA) of world-wide genetic variation: the Global25.

To explore the ancestry of the Steppe Maykop people in more detail I ran a couple of unsupervised Global25/nMonte tests, using basically every ancient population in the (scaled) Global25 datasheet that seemed chronologically sensible and even remotely relevant. I narrowed things down to these two mixture models.

Steppe_Maykop
Geoksiur_Eneolithic,11.2
Piedmont_Eneolithic,44.4
West_Siberia_N,44.4
distance%=1.5161

Steppe_Maykop
Piedmont_Eneolithic,46.6
Sarazm_Eneolithic,10.4
West_Siberia_N,43
distance%=1.6408

But, you might say, Global25/nMonte isn't a published analytical method and it doesn't run on formal statistics, the meat and potatoes of ancient DNA papers. OK then, let's try the same models with the qpAdm software, which is a published method and does run on formal statistics, using exactly the same samples.

Steppe_Maykop
Geoksiur_Eneolithic 0.100±0.032
Piedmont_Eneolithic 0.433±0.053
West_Siberia_N 0.467±0.028
chisq 19.155
tail prob 0.159096
Full output

Steppe_Maykop
Piedmont_Eneolithic 0.429±0.051
Sarazm_Eneolithic 0.119±0.033
West_Siberia_N 0.452±0.026
chisq 18.090
tail prob 0.202699
Full output

They're basically identical. Importantly, my models must reflect reality at some level, because otherwise I wouldn't be able to produce a pair of essentially identical results using such vastly different statistical methods. So the pertinent question is what do these results actually mean?

It seems unlikely to me that we're dealing here with a highly complex three-way mixture process, involving populations from such far flung locations as western Siberia and southern Central Asia. Rather, I suspect that Steppe Maykop was the result of a two-way mixture between Piedmont_Eneolithic (the population that lived before it on the steppe north of the Caucasus) and someone just a little bit more easterly. I'm guessing that the latter was the (as yet unsampled) population associated with the Kelteminar archeological culture.

By the way, please note that Piedmont_Eneolithic is made up of samples from two different locations on the Piedmont steppe, and I occasionally treat them as separate populations labeled Progress_Eneolithic and Vonyuchka_Eneolithic (for instance, see here).

Update 28/02/2019: Below is a PCA focusing on West Eurasian genetic variation. Overall, the position of Steppe Maykop relative to Geoksiur_Eneolithic, Piedmont_Eneolithic and West_Siberia_N appears to reflect my nMonte and qpAdm models. However, as per our discussion in the comments, one of the Steppe Maykop individuals (the most southerly one in the PCA) probably also has recent ancestry from the Caucasus.

See also...

An exceptional burial indeed, but not that of an Indo-European

Maykop: a multi-ethnic layer cake?

Late PIE ground zero now obvious; location of PIE homeland still uncertain, but...