An early Mitanni?

I've updated my Global25 datasheets with most of the ancients from the new Skourtanioti et al. paper. Here's a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) based on the data. It was produced with the Vahaduo PCA tools freely available here and the text file here.

Note that one of the Bronze Age females from Alalakh, labeled ALA019, appears to have ancestry from Turan and the Eurasian steppe. She may well have been a Mitanni of Indo-Aryan origin.

Interestingly, a Copper Age male from Arslantepe, ART038, belongs to Y-haplogroup R1b1a2 aka R1b-V1636. This is an unusual find, because R1b hasn't yet been reported in any Copper Age or earlier samples from outside of Europe and the Eurasian steppe.

As far as I can tell, this individual doesn't harbor any genome-wide ancestry from north of the Caucasus. However, R1b-V1636 is a rare lineage that is first attested in Eneolithic samples from the North Caucasus Piedmont steppe, so ART038's Y-chromosome might be the first evidence of the presence of steppe ancestry in Copper Age Anatolia.

I've also added most of the ancients from the new Agranat-Tamir et al. paper to the Gobal25 datasheets. The PCA below is based on the text file available here.

The Megiddo samples include a trio of interesting outliers dated to 1600-1500 BCE with significant ancestry from the steppe. One of these individuals is a male, I2189, who belongs to Y-haplogroup R and probably R1a. So he might also be of Indo-Aryan origin.

Another Megiddo male, S10768, belongs to R1b-M269 and probably shows a few per cent of steppe ancestry. I've already discussed how R1b and steppe ancestry may have ended up in the Bronze Age Near East in a couple of my previous posts:

R1b-M269 in the Bronze Age Levant

How did steppe ancestry spread into the Biblical-era Levant?

R-V1636: Eneolithic steppe > Kura-Araxes?

Understanding the Eneolithic steppe

Archeologist David Anthony has teamed up with Harvard's David Reich Lab to work on a paper about the Eneolithic period on the Pontic-Caspian steppe.

A couple of other labs are also preparing papers on similar topics, and they've already sequenced and analyzed many of their ancient samples (for instance, see here). However, I don't have a clue when these papers will be published. My guess is that we'll have to wait a year or so.

Needless to say, knowing what happened on the Pontic-Caspian (PC) steppe and surrounds during the Eneolithic is crucial to understanding the origins of the present-day European gene pool. It's also likely to be highly relevant to the debate about the location of the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) homeland.

In this blog post I'll explain what I've learned about the Eneolithic peoples of the PC steppe based on already published data.

If we ignore Steppe Maykop samples, the currently available Eneolithic individuals from the eastern part of the PC steppe form an essentially perfect cline in my Principal Component Analysis (PCA) of ancient West Eurasian genetic variation.

The cline runs from the Mesolithic hunter-fishers of the Eastern European forest zone to those of the Eneolithic sites of Progress 2 and Vonyuchka in the North Caucasus foothills. Let's call this the Khvalynsk cline, because three of the samples are from a burial site in the Volga River valley associated with the Khvalynsk culture. The relevant datasheet is available here.

The reason that these samples form the cline is because they carry different ratios of admixture related to Caucasus hunter-gatherers (CHG) from what is now Georgia. Moreover, the Khvalynsk individuals appear to be relatively recent mixtures between sources rich and poor in this type of ancestry.

I also marked a Maykop cline on the plot. This cline is made up of individuals associated with the Maykop and Steppe Maykop cultures from the Caucasus Mountains and nearby parts of the PC steppe, respectively. The Maykop culture is dated to the Early Bronze Age (EBA) period, but the PC steppe was still part of the Eneolithic world at the time.

The Maykop cline is more complicated than the Khvalynsk cline, because some of the Maykop individuals carry genetic components that the others lack. These genetic components are closely related to the aforementioned CHG, as well as Anatolian Neolithic farmers (ANF) and Western Siberian hunter-gatherers (WSHG).

Note that the two clines intersect, but this isn't because any of the Khvalynsk cline samples harbor Maykop-related ancestry. It's largely because the Steppe Maykop individuals carry high levels of Vonyuchka-related ancestry.

So unless we're dealing here with a remarkable string of coincidences, then the Vonyuchka hunter-fisher must be a decent proxy for the people who spread significant levels of CHG-related ancestry north of the Caucasus.

The important question, therefore, is where and when exactly did this population form? And it's a question that the authors of the aforementioned upcoming papers should be aiming to answer comprehensively.

In my view, it was the result of interactions between the hunter-fishers of the North Caucasus and the southernmost parts of the PC steppe during the Neolithic period, perhaps around 6,000 BCE, just before significant ANF-related ancestry spread across the Caucasus during the Eneolithic. That's because the Progress 2/Vonyuchka samples lack ANF-related ancestry, or at least an obvious signal of it, and are dated to ~4,200 BCE. And when I say Neolithic in this context, I don't mean the Near Eastern type of Neolithic with well developed farming, but rather the local type of Neolithic still based on hunting and fishing.

Now, obviously, the people of the Corded Ware and Yamnaya cultures were the children of the Eneolithic PC steppe. So you might be wondering how they fit into all of this. I still don't know, and apparently neither do the scientists at Harvard (see here). However, I'd say that the Maykop cline isn't relevant to this question. The Khvalynsk cline might be relevant, but even if it is, this doesn't necessarily mean that the Yamnaya people are by and large derived from the Khvalynsk people.

Here's the same PCA plot as above, but this time with early Corded Ware and Yamnaya samples also highlighted. Note that, apart from a few outliers, they form a rather tight cluster that is shifted slightly away from the Khvalynsk cline, but probably not in the direction of the Maykop cline.

A couple of the Yamnaya outliers are shifted towards the "eastern" end of the Khvalynsk cline, and thus near the Progress 2/Vonyuchka samples. This isn't surprising because these Yamnaya individuals are from burial sites close to the North Caucasus and probably harbor significant levels of local ancestry.

The most extreme Yamnaya outlier, from a site in what is now Ukraine, is clearly shifted towards the Maykop cline, and even towards the Caucasus Maykop cluster. However, this is a female with no grave goods and she may have been a foreign bride or captive, possibly from a late Maykop settlement. It's also possible that her 3095-2915 calBCE dating is wrong.

I'm pretty sure that when we find out why the Yamnaya cluster is so deliberately shifted away from the Khvalynsk cline, we'll also discover how the early Corded Ware and Yamnaya populations formed. For now, I strongly suspect that this has something to do with gene flow from the western edge of the PC steppe and the ethnogenesis of the Sredny Stog culture, which was located just west of the Khvalynsk culture.

By and large, the PC steppe is still seen by historical linguists and archeologists as the most sensible place to put the PIE homeland.

However, a theory that the PIE homeland was located somewhere south of the Caucasus, and that instead the PC steppe was the late or nuclear PIE dispersal point, has gained popularity in recent years, largely thanks to the apparent lack of PC steppe ancestry in a handful of samples from Hittite era Anatolia. In this scheme, the Maykop culture took PIE into Eastern Europe and the Yamnaya culture subsequently spread late/nuclear PIE from the PC steppe, while Proto-Anatolian, the ancestor of Hittite, was introduced into Anatolia from the east along with Maykop-related ancestry.

This is possible, in the sense that almost anything is possible, but it doesn't strike me as the most parsimonious interpretation of the facts.

Even before ancient DNA, it was known that the Maykop culture colonized parts of the PC steppe, at least for a short time, and probably had contacts with the Yamnaya people and/or their antecedents. But it was generally seen as the vector for Caucasian and other non-Indo-European influences in PIE.

Moreover, not only were the Maykop and Yamnaya populations of fundamentally different genetic origins, but apparently the Yamnaya people didn't absorb any perceptible Maykop ancestry as they expanded into the North Caucasus region at the tail end of the Maykop period.

That's really difficult to explain if we assume that these groups were close linguistic relatives, and much easier to reconcile with the assumption that they were derived from different worlds culturally and linguistically.

Another important question is what happened to the Steppe Maykop people, because right now it looks like they vanished almost without a trace, essentially as if they were pushed out or even erased by the Yamnaya expansion. If they were indeed pushed out or erased, then it's likely that their language was as well.

As for the lack of PC steppe ancestry in Hittite era Anatolians, I honestly can't see this is as a significant obstacle to a PIE homeland on the steppe, especially if we consider that the most widely accepted Indo-European phylogenies show the Anatolian family as the most basal node.

In the opinion of the vast majority of experts, it's the most basal node because the Proto-Anatolian speakers were the first to leave the PIE homeland. And if they were indeed the first to leave the homeland, then why should we expect their descendants to harbor significant ancestry from the homeland? In my view, such an assumption would contradict the most widely accepted Indo-European phylogenies.

See also...

The Caucasus is a semipermeable barrier to gene flow

Aesch25

During the early 3rd Millennium BC much of Central and Northern Europe was being infiltrated by pioneer herders, often young men, from the east associated with the Corded Ware culture (CWC).

In some important ways, this expansion may have been very similar to the European colonization of the more remote parts of the Americas during the 16th and 17th centuries.

For instance, the European newcomers weren't always able to dominate the indigenous peoples, and, sometimes, instead of trying to impose their culture on them, they accepted theirs.

I suspect that Aesch25, an ancient sample from the recent Furtwängler et al. paper on the social and genetic structure of the prehistoric populations of the Swiss Plateau, represents a similar case.

Aesch25 wasn't buried with grave goods so he wasn't given a cultural context in the said paper. However, dated to 2864-2501 calBC, he's the earliest individual in this part of Europe with the originally Eastern European Y-haplogroup R1b-M269 and a CWC-like genome-wide genetic structure.

Indeed, the other fourteen samples from the same burial site, dated to more or less the same period as Aesch25, are overwhelmingly of local Neolithic farmer origin.

In any case, irrespective of his cultural affiliation and life story, Aesch25 represents an important data point in the search for the homeland of the so called Bell Beakers who spread across much of Europe during the Copper Age. That's because most Bell Beaker males belong to R1b-M269 and are very similar to Aesch25 in terms of overall genetic structure, apart from an excess of Neolithic farmer ancestry.

My view is that the Bell Beakers were an offshoot of the Single Grave culture (SGC), the westernmost variant of CWC. Of course, the SGC was centered on what is now northwestern Germany and surrounds, and didn't reach into the Swiss Plateau. However, in all likelihood it was founded by men closely related to Aesch25.

Below is a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) based on Global25 data featuring Aesch25 and several other individuals from the Furtwängler et al. paper. To view an interactive version of the plot, copy paste the data from the text file here into the relevant field here, then press Add to PCA. Also, you should copy paste each population separately to make sure that they don't form one grouping in the PCA key.

Aesch25 can easily pass for a CWC individual from what is now Germany (DEU_CWC_LN). On the other hand, the CWC samples from the Swiss Plateau (CHE_CWC_LN) are clearly shifted "south" relative to the German CWC cluster, which suggests that they harbor more Neolithic farmer ancestry. Indeed, they all belong to Y-haplogroup I2, which is especially closely associated with Middle Neolithic European farmers.

MX265, from Singen in southwest Germany, is the only sample in the Furtwängler et al. dataset that belongs to Y-haplogroup R1a. This is a somewhat unexpected outcome, because R1a is, overall, the most common Y-haplogroup in CWC males (see here).

Another surprise is that this individual is dated to just 763-431 calBC, which is a period that overlaps with the Hallstatt and La Tene cultures in Central Europe. Considering that these cultures are often associated with early Celts, was this person perhaps the speaker of a long lost Celtic language?

See also...

Single Grave > Bell Beakers

Dutch Beakers: like no other Beakers

Hungarian Yamnaya > Bell Beakers?

Hungarian Yamnaya predictions

The Battle Axe people came from the steppe

Ancient DNA vs Ex Oriente Lux

In recent years you may have read academic papers, books and press articles claiming that the Early Bronze Age Yamnaya culture of the Pontic-Caspian steppe was founded by migrants from the Caucasus, Mesopotamia or even Central Asia.

Of course, none of this is true.

The Yamnaya herders and closely related groups, such as the people associated with the Corded Ware culture, expanded from the steppe between the Black and Caspian seas, and, thanks to ancient DNA, it's now certain that they were overwhelmingly derived from a population that had existed in this region since at least the mid-5th millennium BCE (see here).

So rather than being culturally advanced colonists from some Near Eastern civilization, the ancestors of the Yamnaya herders were a relatively primitive local people who still largely relied on hunting and fishing for their subsistence. They also sometimes buried their dead with flint blades and adzes, but hardly ever with metal objects, despite living in the Eneolithic epoch or the Copper Age.

As far as I know, this group doesn't have a specific name. But in recent scientific literature it's referred to as Eneolithic steppe, so let's use that.

It's not yet clear how the Yamnaya people became pastoralists. Some scholars believe that they were basically an offshoot of the cattle herding Maykop culture of the North Caucasus. However, the obvious problem with this idea is that the Yamnaya and Maykop populations probably didn't share any recent ancestry. In fact, ancient DNA shows that the former wasn't derived from the latter in any important or even discernible way (see here).

On the other hand, Yamnaya samples do harbor a subtle signal of recent gene flow from the west that appears to be most closely associated with Middle to Late Neolithic European agropastoralists (see here). Therefore, it's possible that herding was adopted by the ancestors of the Yamnaya people as a result of their sporadic contacts with populations living on the western edge of the Pontic-Caspian steppe.

Eneolithic steppe is currently represented by just three samples in the ancient DNA record, and all of these individuals are from sites on the North Caucasus Piedmont steppe (two from Progress 2 and one from Vonyuchka 1).

As a result, it might be tempting to argue that cultural, if not genetic, impulses from the Caucasus did play an important role in the formation of the Yamnaya and related peoples. However, it's important to note that the North Caucasus Piedmont steppe was the southern periphery of Eneolithic steppe territory.

Below is a map of Eneolithic steppe burial sites featured in recent scientific literature. It's based on data from Gresky et al. 2016, a paper that focused on a specific and complex type of cranial surgery or trepanation often practiced by groups associated with this archeological culture (see here).

Incredibly, one of the skeletons from Vertoletnoe pole has been radiocarbon dated to the mid-6th millennium BCE. My suspicion, however, is that this result was blown out by the so called reservoir effect (see here). In any case, the academic consensus seems to be that the roots of Eneolithic steppe should be sought in the Lower Don region, rather than in the Caucasus foothills (see page 36 here).

Considering that nine Eneolithic steppe skulls from the Lower Don were analyzed by Gresky et al., I'd say it's only a matter of time before we see the publication of genome-wide data for at least of couple of these samples. Indeed, the paper's lead author is from the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, which is currently involved in a major archaeogenetic project on the ancient Caucasus and surrounds. Unfortunately, the study is scheduled to be completed in about four years (see here).

But whatever happens, the story of Eneolithic steppe deserves to be investigated in as much detail as possible, because it obviously had a profound impact on Europe and its people.

In my estimation, at least a third of the ancestry of present-day Northern Europeans, all the way from Ireland to the Ural Mountains in Russia, is ultimately derived from Eneolithic steppe groups. It's also possible that R1a-M417 and R1b-L51, the two most frequent Y-chromosome haplogroups in European males today, derive from a couple of Eneolithic steppe founders. If so, that's a very impressive effort for such an obscure archeological culture from what is generally regarded as a peripheral part of Europe.

See also...

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?

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?

A final note for the year

I feel like I've spent a good part of 2019 banging my head against a thicker than average brick wall.

Much of this feeling is tied to the controversy over the ethnogenesis of the Yamnaya people, and my often futile attempts to explain that their origin cannot be sought in what is now Iran, or, indeed, anywhere outside of Eastern Europe.

This post is my final attempt to lay out the facts in regards to this topic. Next year I'll have better things to do than to argue the bleeding obvious.

Below are two graphs from a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) based on relatively high quality ancient human genotype data from the Caucasus and surrounds. They include two typical Yamnaya individuals from burial sites north of the Caspian Sea. I made the graphs with the Vahaduo Custom PCA tool here. The relevant datasheet can be downloaded here.

Here's what I'm seeing:

- the Yamnaya individuals sit on genetic clines made up of hunter-gatherers native to the Caucasus and various parts of Eastern Europe, including a trio from the southernmost part of the Pontic-Caspian steppe (labeled Steppe_Eneolithic), with whom they form a distinct cluster

- the samples from the Caucasus and the Iranian Plateau form very different clusters, so there's no support here for the ancient Caucasus/Iranian grouping that is often haphazardly invoked in scientific literature

- there's no indication that the Yamnaya and/or Steppe_Eneolithic groups experienced recent gene flow, or, for that matter, any gene flow whatsoever, from what is now Iran.

Of course, analyses based on formal statistics suggest that the Yamnaya population harbors minor western ancestry that is missing in Steppe_Eneolithic. In fact, I was first to argue this point (see here). So let's add a couple of ancient farmers from Western Europe to my PCA to see how they affect the graphs. The relevant datasheet is available here.

Yep, the Yamnaya pair appears to be peeling away very slightly, but deliberately, from the Steppe_Eneolithic individuals towards the part of the plot occupied by the farmers.

Admittedly, I'm no Sherlock Holmes, but even with my fairly average sleuthing abilities, I'm pretty sure I know how the Yamnaya people came to be. They formed largely on the base of a population very much like Steppe_Eneolithic somewhere deep in Eastern Europe, well to the north of the Caucasus, and nowhere near the Iranian Plateau.

See also...

A note on Steppe Maykop

A note on Steppe Maykop

I'm reading a new book titled Dispersals and Diversification: Linguistic and Archaeological Perspectives on the Early Stages of Indo-European (see here). One of the chapters is authored by archeologist David Anthony, in which he makes the following claims:

A previously unknown genetic population actually was identified in Wang et al. (2019), but it was a peculiar relict-seeming group related to Paleo Siberians and American Indians (Kennewick) that had survived isolated somewhere in the Caspian steppes or perhaps in the North Caucasus Mountains. The Maykop people did admix with this previously isolated Siberian/Kennewick population in graves labeled "Steppe Maykop" in Wang et al. (2019).

But this just makes it clearer that a cultural choice motivated the Maykop people to exclude marriages with Yamnaya and pre-Yamnaya people specifically, even while exchanges of material goods, ideas, technologies continued. Neither the Maykop nor the North Caucasus/Siberian/Kennewick population can be the source of most of the CHG [Caucasus hunter-gatherer] ancestry in Yamnaya. In order to narrow down when and where CHG ancestry entered the steppes, we must widen our geographic frame beyond the Caucasus.

Unfortunately, this is way off the mark. Especially unsound is his inference that the CHG-related ancestry in the Yamnaya population may have come from beyond the Caucasus.

In fact, the chances that the Steppe Maykop people were derived from a relict Siberian/Kennewick-related group that survived into the Maykop era in the Caspian steppes or the North Caucasus are exactly zero.

The real story was surely more complicated. In my opinion, it initially involved the migration during the Eneolithic or earlier of a people rich in CHG ancestry from the southernmost steppes into the Volga Delta and surrounds, and then the back-migration during the Early Bronze Age (EBA) of their descendants with around 50% admixture from Central Asian foragers. If so, these foragers were very similar to indigenous West Siberians and also relatively closely related to Native Americans.

I don't know why such an exotic people migrated into the North Caucasus steppes to form the bulk of the Steppe Maykop population, but I'm certain they did, and one interesting possibility is that they were recruited by Maykop chiefs to create a buffer zone against hostile Yamnaya-related groups trying to push into the Caucasus, possibly from the lower Don region.

Of course, the same ancient northward migration of the CHG-rich population that may have eventually given rise to the Steppe Maykop people might also explain the deep origins of the Yamnaya people.

The key sample in all of this is VJ1001 from the Wang et al. paper. This female comes from an Eneolithic (4332-4238 calBCE) kurgan burial in the North Caucasus steppes. But despite her early date, she's genetically very similar to most Yamnaya individuals. And she's also a perfect proxy for half of the ancestry of three out of the six Steppe Maykop individuals. Here's a mixture model that I put together using the Broad MIT/Harvard software qpAdm:

RUS_Steppe_Maykop (3/6)
RUS_Eneolithic_steppe_VJ1001 0.452±0.023
RUS_Tyumen_HG 0.548±0.023
chisq 7.494
tail prob 0.874914
Full output

Indeed, these Steppe Maykop samples don't harbor any Maykop ancestry. They're simply a two-way mixture between a population closely resembling VJ1001 and another one similar to hunter-gatherers from Tyumen, West Siberia.

Importantly, a couple of Steppe Maykop-related populations were inadvertently discovered by Narasimhan et al. northeast of the Caspian Sea in what is now Kazakhstan. One of these groups is labeled Kumsay_EBA, after the location of its cemetery. It's roughly contemporaneous with Steppe Maykop and basically identical to the aforementioned Steppe Maykop trio.

KAZ_Kumsay_EBA
RUS_Eneolithic_steppe_VJ1001 0.440±0.022
RUS_Tyumen_HG 0.560±0.022
chisq 10.573
tail prob 0.646513
Full output

I suppose it's possible that Kumsay_EBA represents the migration of Steppe Maykop people into the Kazakh steppes. But even if this is true, then there had to have been an earlier migration of a group from the Kazakh steppes or West Siberia that mixed with the VJ1001-related natives of the North Caucasus steppes to give rise to Steppe Maykop.

I'm assuming that the Yamnaya-like VJ1001 and her people were the indigenous population of the North Caucasus steppes because there are no indications that they or their ancestors migrated there within any reasonable time frame from anywhere else, and certainly not from as far afield as, say, what is now Iran.

The other three Steppe Maykop individuals, who are genetic outliers in varying degrees from the main Steppe Makyop cluster, show variable levels of Maykop ancestry, with an average of about 50%. But they too harbor significant VJ1001-related ancestry. So despite the fact that there was some irregular mixing between the Maykop and Steppe Maykop peoples, this is not what created the typical Steppe Maykop genetic profile.

RUS_Steppe_Maykop_o
RUS_Eneolithic_steppe_VJ1001 0.234±0.074
RUS_Maykop_Novosvobodnaya 0.461±0.046
RUS_Tyumen_HG 0.305±0.033
chisq 7.378
tail prob 0.831667
Full output

And, of course, it should be obvious by now that the ancestry of the vast majority of Yamnaya individuals is better modeled without any input whatsoever from the Maykop or Steppe Maykop samples.

In fact, early indications are that the Yamnaya people flooded into Steppe Maykop territory from the north and completely replaced its population (see here). Despite this, in Dispersals and Diversification archeologist Kristian Kristiansen makes the following claim: "steppe Maykop expanded north, leading to the formation of the Yamnaya Culture and Proto-Indo-European". Not a chance in hell Professor.

See also...

A final note for the year

The PIE homeland controversy: August 2019 status report

Some myths die hard

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

Avalon vs Valhalla revisited

Pictured below is a new version of my Celtic vs Germanic genetic map. It's based on the same Principal Component Analysis (PCA) as the original (which can be seen here), but more focused on Northwestern Europe and produced with a different program.

To see the interactive online version, navigate to Vahaduo Custom PCA and copy paste the text from here into the empty space under the PCA DATA tab. Then press the PLOT PCA button under the PCA PLOT tab. For more guidance, refer to the screen caps here and here.

To include a wider range of populations in the key, just edit the data accordingly. For instance, to break up the ancient grouping into more specific populations, delete the Ancient: prefix in all of the relevant rows. This is what you should see:

Conversely, you can leave the ancient sample set intact and instead reorder the present-day linguistic groupings into, say, geographic groupings. To achieve this just delete all of the linguistic prefixes, such as Celtic:, Germanic:, and so on. You should end up with a datasheet like this and plot like this.

Of course, you can design your own plot by using any combination of the ancient and present-day individuals and populations that I've already run in this PCA. Their coordinates are listed here. Indeed, if you're in the possession of your own Celtic vs Germanic PCA coordinates, you can add yourself to the plot. And if you're not, see here.

It's also possible to re-process PCA data via the SOURCE tab. But I don't recommend doing this with the Celtic vs Germanic data, which are derived from a fine scale analysis and don't pack much variation. On the other hand, Global25 data are ideal for such re-processing. I made the plots below from subsets of Global25 coordinates available in a zip file here. To see how, refer to the screen caps here and here.

See also...

Modeling your ancestry has never been easier

Getting the most out of the Global25

Modeling genetic ancestry with Davidski: step by step

Big deal of 2019: ancient DNA confirms the link between Y-haplogroup N and Uralic expansions

The academic consensus is that Indo-European languages first spread into the Baltic region from the Eastern European steppes along with the Corded Ware culture (CWC) and its people during the Late Neolithic, well before the expansion of Uralic speakers into Fennoscandia and surrounds, probably from somewhere around the Ural Mountains.

On the other hand, the views that the Uralic language family is native to Northern Europe and/or closely associated with the CWC are fringe theories usually espoused by people not familiar with the topic or, unfortunately it has to be said, mentally unstable trolls.

The likely close relationship between the CWC expansion and the early spread of Indo-European languages was discussed in several papers in recent years (for instance, see here). This year, we saw the first ancient DNA paper focusing on the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age in the East Baltic, including the likely first arrival of Uralic speech in what is now Estonia.

Published in Current Biology courtesy of Saag et al., the paper showed that the genetic structure of present-day East Baltic populations largely formed in the Iron Age (see here). It was during this time, the authors revealed, that the region experienced a sudden influx of Y-chromosome haplogroup N, which is today common in many Uralic speaking populations and often referred to as a Proto-Uralic marker. Little wonder then that Saag et al. linked this genetic shift in the East Baltic to the westward migrations of early Uralic speakers.

The table below, based on data from the Saag et al. paper, surely doesn't leave much to the imagination about what happened.

Unfortunately, I have to say that the genome-wide analysis in the paper was less informative than it could have been. The authors focused their attention on rather broad genetic components, and, as a result, missed an interesting fine scale distinction between their Bronze Age and Iron Age samples. The spatial maps below, based on my Global25 data for most of the ancients from Saag et al., show what I mean. The hotter the color the higher the genetic similarity between them and present-day West Eurasian populations.

Note that the Bronze Age (Baltic_EST_BA) samples are most similar to the Baltic-speaking, and thus also Indo-European-speaking, Latvians and Lithuanians, rather than the Uralic-speaking Estonians, even though they're from burial sites in Estonia. On the other hand, the Iron Age (Baltic_EST_IA) samples show strong similarity to a wider range of populations, including Estonians and many other Uralic-speaking groups.

See also...

It was always going to be this way

Fresh off the sledge

More on the association between Uralic expansions and Y-haplogroup N