Looking forward to a post-Covid world

I was hoping that the Covid-19 pandemic wouldn't have an immediate impact on the publication of ancient DNA papers and new data, but considering how much things have slowed down in this respect, it seems that I was fooling myself.

So let's take a break until early next year, and then see what happens.

Trust me, we've got a lot to look forward to in the post-Covid-19 world. Based on what I've heard from various sources, here are some predictions about what we might see:

- the search for the Proto-Indo-European homeland will shift west to the North Pontic steppe

- on the other hand, the search for the Proto-Uralic homeland will move deep into Siberia

- the key role of the Single Grave (westernmost Corded Ware) culture in the population history of Western Europe will finally get some attention

- following on from the above, Y-haplogroup R1b-L51 will be revealed as a Single Grave marker

- the idea that the Pontic-Caspian steppe was colonized by migrants from Mesopotamia during the Bronze Age will be forgotten, and, ironically, we'll instead learn that there was a significant influx of steppe ancestry into ancient Mesopotamia

- Old Kingdom Egyptians will come out less Sub-Saharan African than present-day Egyptians.

I probably shouldn't blab everything out, so that's all you're getting from me for now. You'll just have to wait for the rest until next year, or perhaps even the year after that.

See also...

The precursor of the Trojans

Who remembers kum4 from Omrak et al. 2016? I'm pretty sure now that this individual packs a lot of ancestry from the Pontic-Caspian (PC) steppe.

If so, that's a big deal, because her Chalcolithic (or Late Neolithic?) burial was located at Kumtepe. That is, in the same part of Anatolia as the later settlement of Troy, which may have been founded by early Anatolian speakers from Eastern Europe (see here).

The qpAdm mixture models below, featuring kum4 and the likely older kum6, also from Kumtepe, are based on qpfstats output. qpfstats is a new program from the David Reich Lab specifically designed to help analyze low coverage ancients (see here). And kum4 is certainly that.

TUR_Kumtepe_N_kum4
RUS_Progress_En 0.383±0.114
TUR_Barcin_N 0.617±0.114
chisq 7.868
tail prob 0.247957
Full output

TUR_Kumtepe_N_kum4
IRN_Seh_Gabi_C 0.325±0.150
TUR_Barcin_N 0.675±0.150
chisq 14.736
tail prob 0.0224096
Full output

TUR_Kumtepe_N_kum6
RUS_Progress_En 0.121±0.042
TUR_Barcin_N 0.879±0.042
chisq 21.790
tail prob 0.00132149
Full output

TUR_Kumtepe_N_kum6
IRN_Seh_Gabi_C 0.283±0.059
TUR_Barcin_N 0.717±0.059
chisq 6.289
tail prob 0.391566
Full output

Indeed, kum4 and kum6 offer just ~10,000 and ~100,000 "valid SNPs", respectively (see here). However, if nothing else, the results are clearly not random.

For one, because they fit the expected pattern, with the likely older individual lacking ancestry from the PC steppe (her model with RUS_Progress_En shows a weak statistical fit). Moreover, the qpAdm mixture ratios align almost perfectly with the results in my Principal Component Analysis (PCA) of ancient West Eurasian genetic variation. Coincidence?

See also...

Perhaps a hint of things to come