Perhaps a hint of things to come

It's still a mystery how the Hittites and other Anatolian speakers ended up in the Near East. However, the leading theory is that their ancestors migrated from the steppes of Eastern Europe to western Anatolia via the Balkans sometime during the Copper Age.

Consider the qpAdm mixture models below, made possible thanks to some of the ancient samples published recently along with Skourtanioti et al. 2020. The key ancients are described in a text file available here.

TUR_Barcin_C
AZE_Caucasus_lowlands_LN 0.471±0.094
RUS_Vonyuchka_En 0.148±0.040
TUR_Barcin_N 0.381±0.069
chisq 12.874
tail prob 0.116261
Full output

TUR_Barcin_C
RUS_Vonyuchka_En 0.107±0.029
TUR_Buyukkaya_EC 0.893±0.029
chisq 12.107
tail prob 0.207331
Full output

I'd say it's quite clear now that TUR_Barcin_C harbors minor ancestry from the Pontic-Caspian (PC) steppe. The reason this isn't widely accepted yet is because demonstrating it convincingly hasn't been possible without a proximate Anatolian ancestry source for TUR_Barcin_C, precisely like TUR_Buyukkaya_EC.

Admittedly, though, the statistical fits in my models aren't all that great. I suspect the problem lies with RUS_Vonyuchka_En, which is likely to be a rather poor stand in for the people who brought steppe ancestry, and possibly early Anatolian speech, to western Anatolia.

So let's see what happens when I try a more proximate reference for the steppe ancestry in TUR_Barcin_C. How about Yamnaya_BGR, an individual of mixed Balkan and steppe origin from what is now Bulgaria?

TUR_Barcin_C
AZE_Caucasus_lowlands_LN 0.518±0.075
TUR_Barcin_N 0.203±0.056
Yamnaya_BGR 0.279±0.067
chisq 10.602
tail prob 0.225269
Full output

TUR_Barcin_C
TUR_Buyukkaya_EC 0.749±0.058
Yamnaya_BGR 0.251±0.058
chisq 9.687
tail prob 0.376414
Full output

That's a little better. Unfortunately, the problem now is that the models are anachronistic, because TUR_Barcin_C is about a thousand years older than Yamnaya_BGR. Clearly, we need more Copper Age samples from the western edge of the PC steppe, the eastern Balkans, and especially northwestern Anatolia.

The Principal Component Analysis (PCA) below effectively illustrates why my qpAdm models work. It was produced with Global25 data using the Vahaduo PCA tools freely available here. Note that TUR_Barcin_C is shifted away from the essentially perfect cline formed by AZE_Caucasus_lowlands_LN, TUR_Barcin_N and TUR_Buyukkaya_EC towards samples from ancient Eastern Europe, including Yamnaya_BGR.

See also...

Steppe invaders in the Bronze Age Balkans

Warlike herders and their weapons

Who had the best gear? The Yamnaya guys? And if it came down to it, who would've won an all out rumble? Let me know your thoughts after reading this paper...

The weaponry of the pastoral societies in the context of the weaponry of the steppe/forest-steppe communities: 5000-2350 BC

See also...

Is Yamnaya overrated?

Four years after the publication of the seminal ancient DNA paper Massive migration from the steppe is a source for Indo-European languages in Europe by Haak et al., we're still waiting for some of its loose ends to be finally tied up with new samples. In particular...

- if the men of the Corded Ware culture (CWC) were, by and large, derived from the population of the Yamnaya culture, then where are the Yamnaya samples with R1a-M417, the main CWC Y-haplogroup?

- if the men of the Bell Beaker culture (BBC) were also, by and large, derived from the population of the Yamnaya culture, then where are the Yamnaya samples with R1b-P312, the main BBC Y-haplogroup?

- and, most crucially, if R1b-L51, which includes R1b-P312, and is nowadays by far the most important Y-haplogroup in Western Europe, arrived there from the Pontic-Caspian steppe, then why hasn't it yet appeared in any of the ancient DNA from this part of Eastern Europe or surrounds, except of course in samples that are too young to be relevant?

I'm certainly not suggesting that, in hindsight, the said paper now looks fundamentally flawed. In fact, I'd say that it has aged remarkably well, especially considering how fast things are moving in the field of ancient genomics.

But those loose ends really need tying up, one way or another. It's now time.

So someone out there, please, let us know finally if you have the relevant Yamnaya samples. And if you don't, that's OK too, just tell us what you do have. Indeed, it'd be nice know a few basic details about the thousands of samples that have been successfully sequenced in various labs and are waiting to be published. A lot of people would appreciate it.

See also...

Corded Ware as an offshoot of Hungarian Yamnaya (Anthony 2017)

Hungarian Yamnaya > Bell Beakers?

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