Something is very wrong with models based on the so-called ‘Yamnaya admixture’ – and archaeologists are catching up (II)

A new article by Leo S. Klejn tries to improve the Northern Mesolithic Proto-Indo-European homeland model of the Russian school of thought: The Steppe hypothesis of Indo-European origins remains to be proven, Acta Archaeologica, 88:1, 193–204.

Abstract:

Recent genetic studies have claimed to reveal a massive migration of the bearers of the Yamnaya culture (Pit-grave culture) to the Central and Northern Europe. This migration has supposedly lead to the formation of the Corded Ware cultures and thereby to the dispersal of Indo-European languages in Europe. The article is a summary presentation of available archaeological, linguistic, genetic and cultural data

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Modern Hungarian mtDNA more similar to ancient Europeans than to Hungarian conquerors

New preprint at BioRxiv, MITOMIX, an Algorithm to Reconstruct Population Admixture Histories Indicates Ancient European Ancestry of Modern Hungarians, by Maroti et al. (2018).

Abstract (emphasis mine)

By making use of the increasing number of available mitogenomes we propose a novel population genetic distance metric, named Shared Haplogroup Distance (SHD). Unlike FST, SHD is a true mathematical distance that complies with all metric axioms, which enables our new algorithm (MITOMIX) to detect population-level admixture based on SHD minimum optimization. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of our methodology we analyzed the relation of 62 modern and 25 ancient Eurasian

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Ancient Phoenician mtDNA from Sardinia, Lebanon reflects settlement, genetic diversity, and female mobility

New article at PLOS One, Ancient mitogenomes of Phoenicians from Sardinia and Lebanon: A story of settlement, integration, and female mobility, by Matisoo-Smith et al. (2018).

Abstract:

The Phoenicians emerged in the Northern Levant around 1800 BCE and by the 9th century BCE had spread their culture across the Mediterranean Basin, establishing trading posts, and settlements in various European Mediterranean and North African locations. Despite their widespread influence, what is known of the Phoenicians comes from what was written about them by the Greeks and Egyptians. In this study, we investigate the extent of Phoenician integration with the Sardinian

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We are all special, which also means that none of us is

Adam Rutherford writes You’re Descended from Royalty and So Is Everybody Else – Anybody you can name from ancient history is in your family tree, which I discovered via John Hawks’ new post The surprising connectedness of human genealogies over centuries.

Excerpt:

One way to think of it is to accept that everyone of European descent should have billions of ancestors at a time in the 10th century, but there weren’t billions of people around then, so try to cram them into the number of people that actually were. The math that falls out of that apparent impasse

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Long-term genetic structure in ancestral Native Americans, consistent with the Beringian ‘standstill model’

New article, Terminal Pleistocene Alaskan genome reveals first founding population of Native Americans, by Moreno-Mayar et al.

Abstract:

Despite broad agreement that the Americas were initially populated via Beringia, the land bridge that connected far northeast Asia with northwestern North America during the Pleistocene epoch, when and how the peopling of the Americas occurred remains unresolved. Analyses of human remains from Late Pleistocene Alaska are important to resolving the timing and dispersal of these populations. The remains of two infants were recovered at Upward Sun River (USR), and have been dated to around 11.5 thousand years ago (ka). Here,

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Archaeological origins of Early Proto-Indo-European in the Baltic during the Mesolithic

New article by Leonid Zaliznyak, Mesolithic origins of the first Indo-European cultures in Europe according to the archaeological data (also available in Russian).

The article refers to the common Meso-Neolithic basis of Ukrainian ancient Indo-European cultures (Mariupol, Serednii Stih) and Central Europe (Funnel Beaker and Globular Amphorae cultures) of the fourth millennium BC. Archaeological materials show that the common cultural and genetic substrate of the earliest Indo-Europeans in Europe was forming from the sixth to the fourth millennia BC due to migration of the Western Baltic Mesolithic population to the east through Poland and Polissia to the Dnipro … Read the rest “Archaeological origins of Early Proto-Indo-European in the Baltic during the Mesolithic”

Luwians: the missing link with the Aegean Bronze Age, including Troy and the Sea Peoples

A very interesting monograph on the Luwian Civilization, and its potential connection with Wilusa (Troy) from the end of the third millennium and throughout the Bronze Age: The Luwian Civilization – The Missing Link in the Aegean Bronze Age, by Eberhard Zangger (also available in German: Die luwische Kultur – Das fehlende Element in der Ägäischen Bronzezeit).

Abstract:

Aegean prehistory suffered from a bias when the field was conceived 100 years ago and subsequent research has never questioned the fundamental paradigms of the discipline. As a consequence, only one third of the Aegean coasts have thus far

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Storytelling was a source for cooperation in hunter-gatherer societies before religion

A new article, Cooperation and the evolution of hunter-gatherer storytelling, by Smith et al., Nature Communications (2017).

Storytelling is a human universal. From gathering around the camp-fire telling tales of ancestors to watching the latest television box-set, humans are inveterate producers and consumers of stories. Despite its ubiquity, little attention has been given to understanding the function and evolution of storytelling. Here we explore the impact of storytelling on hunter-gatherer cooperative behaviour and the individual-level fitness benefits to being a skilled storyteller. Stories told by the Agta, a Filipino hunter-gatherer population, convey messages relevant to coordinating behaviour in a

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Migrations painted by Irish and Scottish genetic clusters, and their relationship with British and European ones

Interesting and related publications, now appearing in pairs…

1. The Irish DNA Atlas: Revealing Fine-Scale Population Structure and History within Ireland, by Gilbert et al., in Scientific Reports (2017).

Abstract:

The extent of population structure within Ireland is largely unknown, as is the impact of historical migrations. Here we illustrate fine-scale genetic structure across Ireland that follows geographic boundaries and present evidence of admixture events into Ireland. Utilising the ‘Irish DNA Atlas’, a cohort (n = 194) of Irish individuals with four generations of ancestry linked to specific regions in Ireland, in combination with 2,039 individuals from the

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