Did Caucasus hunter-gatherers ever live in what is now Iran?

Nope, they only lived in the Caucasus Mountains. See that's probably why they're called Caucasus hunter-gatherers, or CHG for short.

But what about the hunter-gatherers from the Belt and Hotu caves in northern Iran, you might ask? Well, what about them? They're not CHG, nor are they significantly more CHG-like than the early farmers of the Zagros Mountains.

To illustrate the point, below are a couple of TreeMix graphs. I'd say they're rather straightforward and self-explanatory.

However, please note that I combined the Belt and Hotu individuals into one sample to help keep the marker count at over 100K. Also keep in mind that CHG is represented by Kotias_HG.

See also...

A final note for the year

A note on Steppe Maykop

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...