Ancient DNA from India’s Rakhigarhi archaeological site is telling volumes about the destiny of the mysterious Indus Valley Civilization.
Yamnaya Culture
Late last fall, I reported that scientists had discovered a European ghost population. This group of people then referred to as the ANE, Ancient Northern Europeans, was a previously unknown popula…
The origins of modern Europeans are shrouded in mystery and wracked by controversy. Archaeologists and linguists have long debated the origins of the Indo-European language family as well as the origins of civilization and settled life in Europe.
Migration in Prehistory
Article of general knowledge in Der Spiegel, Invasion from the Steppe, with comments from Willerslev and Kristiansen, appeared roughly at the same time as the Damgaard et al. Nature (2018) and Science (2018) papers were published. NOTE. You can read the article (in German) from Kristiansen’s Academia.edu account. Excerpts translated from German (emphasis mine): On … Continue reading Copenhagen group: Germanic and Balto-Slavic from Bell Beaker; Indo-Anatolian homeland in the Caucasus →
Late last fall, I reported that scientists had discovered a European ghost population. This group of people then referred to as the ANE, Ancient Northern Europeans, was a previously unknown popula…
The origins of modern Europeans are shrouded in mystery and wracked by controversy. Archaeologists and linguists have long debated the origins of the Indo-European language family as well as the origins of civilization and settled life in Europe.
Science is proving India's incredible diversity. But this clashes directly with Hindutva’s racially nativist understanding of the subcontinent.
Ancient steppe herders traveled into Europe and Asia, leaving their molecular mark and building Bronze Age cultures.
A TRIBE who swept into Europe thousands of years ago and whose descendants wiped out ancient Britons could be the most violent and aggressive society ever, it was claimed. The Yamnaya were a group …
I've made a discovery. The Near Eastern-related ancestors of the Yamnaya steppe pastoralists were also the ancestors of present-day Georgian Mingrelians, or their very close relatives, and in all likelihood speakers of Kartvelian, which has a long history in the Caucasus. Here's a nice map from Wikipedia and a pic of some Mingrelians. Check out the impressive headware. TreeMix is very specific and precise about this. In my analyses, based on a couple of different methods, the Mingrelians are the only population chosen as a source for the Near Eastern-related ancestry in the Yamnaya. Keep in mind, this is an unsupervised test and the algorithm has an infinite number of choices, because migration edges can run from any part of the tree, and yet it chooses the Mingrelians. By the way, if anyone's wondering, I did also try the Bronze Age Armenians, to no avail. This outcome is also more or less reproducible with more complex topologies that include samples from Central Asia. In the graph below the Georgian Mingrelians form a clade with the Near Eastern-related ancestry of the Yamnaya. It'd be interesting to see if other Georgian groups, like the Svans, do even better, if that's actually possible, but they're not available at the moment. I actually came up with basically the same result earlier this year using qpAdm (see here). But at the time I was skeptical of its usefulness because qpAdm only offers a supervised test, so picking Georgians as a reference population and getting a good statistical fit doesn't mean as much as a reproducible unsupervised migration edge. Now, judging by their ADMIXTURE results, these Georgian Mingrelians do carry some Early European farmer-related ancestry, which is missing in the Yamnaya (see here). Therefore, it's likely that ancient samples from the west or northwest Caucasus will prove to be even better proxies for the Near Eastern-related ancestry in the Yamnaya. The samples used to produce the above TreeMix graphs are listed here. They're sourced from the Allentoft et al., Haak et al., and Lazaridis et al. datasets. I limited the markers to ~65K transversion (high confidence) SNPs that overlap between these datasets. Updates... Caucasus hunter-gatherers (CHG) and the Indo-European question 'Fourth strand' of European ancestry originated with (Caucasus) hunter-gatherers isolated by Ice Age Mixed marriages on the early Eneolithic steppe
A new study indicates long journeys and unexpected genetic links in Bronze Age Eurasian cultures.
The origins of modern Europeans are shrouded in mystery and wracked by controversy. Archaeologists and linguists have long debated the origins of the Indo-European language family as well as the origins of civilization and settled life in Europe.
Study sheds light on how have traits that were rare in African ancestors became common in Europe.
Scientists once could reconstruct humanity's distant past only from the mute testimony of ancient settlements, bones, and artifacts.
DNA analysis has revealed evidence for a massive migration into the heartland of Europe 4,500 years ago.
A TRIBE who swept into Europe thousands of years ago and whose descendants wiped out ancient Britons could be the most violent and aggressive society ever, it was claimed. The Yamnaya were a group …
Maps of ancient and modern distribution and chronological evolution of Yamnaya or Steppe ancestry, using data reported in peer-reviewed papers.
When present day European genetics was formed during the beginning of the Bronze Age 5,000 years ago it was a result of migrating Yamnaya pastoralists from the Caspian steppe encountering Stone Age farmers in northern and eastern Europe. A grand synthesis article argues that young Yamnaya warriors belonging to raiding parties married local Stone Age women, settling and adopting a more agrarian lifestyle. During this process, where the Corded Ware Culture was formed, a new Proto-Germanic dialect appeared.
