Potential Afroasiatic Urheimat near Lake Megachad

The publication of new ancient DNA samples from Africa is near, according to people at the SMBE meeting. As reported by Anthropology.net, a group by Pontus Skoglund has analysed new samples (complementing the study made by Carina Schlebusch), so we will have ancient samples of Africans from 300 to 6,000 years ago. They have been compared to the data of modern African populations, and among their likely conclusions (to be published):

Several thousand years ago, likely Tanzanian herders migrated far and wide, reaching Southern Africa centuries before the first farmers.

West Africans were likely early contributors to the

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My European Family: The First 54,000 years, by Karin Bojs

I have recently read the book My European Family: The First 54,000 years (2015), by Karin Bojs, a known Swedish scientific journalist, former science editor of the Dagens Nyheter.

It is written in a fresh, dynamic style, and contains general introductory knowledge to Genetics, Archaeology, and their relation to language, and is written in a time of great change (2015) for the disciplines involved.

The book is informed, it shows a balanced exercise between responsible science journalism and entertaining content, and it is at times nuanced, going beyond the limits of popular science books. It is not written for … Read the rest “My European Family: The First 54,000 years, by Karin Bojs”

Collapse of the European ice sheet caused chaos in northern and eastern Europe until about 8000 BC

A new paper with open access has appeared in Quaternary Science Reviews, authored by Patton et al.: Deglaciation of the Eurasian ice sheet complex, which offers a new model investigating the retreat of this ice sheet and its many impacts.

According to the comments of professor Alun Hubbard, the paper’s second author and a leading glaciologist:

To place it in context, this is almost 10 times the current rates of ice lost from Greenland and Antarctica today. What’s fascinating is that not all Eurasian ice retreat was from surface melting alone. Its northern and western sectors across the

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The over-simplistic “Kossinnian Model”: homogeneous peoples speaking a common language within clearly delimited cultures

There seems to be a growing trend to over-simplistic assumptions in archaeology and linguistics, led by amateur and professional geneticists alike, due to the recent (only partially deserved) popularity of Human Evolutionary Biology.

These studies are offering ancient DNA samples, whose Y-DNA and mtDNA haplogroups and admixture analyses are showing some new valuable information on ancient cultures and peoples. However, their authors are constantly giving uninformed conclusions.

I have read a good, simple description of the Kossinnian model in the book Balkan Dialogues (Routledge, 2017), which has been shared to be fully read online by co-editor Maria Ivanova.… Read the rest “The over-simplistic “Kossinnian Model”: homogeneous peoples speaking a common language within clearly delimited cultures”

Preprint paper: Estimating genetic kin relationships in prehistoric populations, by Monroy Kuhn, Jakobsson, and Günther

A new preprint paper appeared some days ago in BioRxiv, Estimating genetic kin relationships in prehistoric populations, by researchers of the Uppsala University Jose Manuel Monroy Kuhn, Mattias Jakobsson, and Torsten Günther. Jakobsson and Günther. You might remember the last two from their work Ancient X chromosomes reveal contrasting sex bias in Neolithic and Bronze Age Eurasian migrations, whose results were said not to be replicable by Lazaridis and Reich (PNAS), something they denied pointing to the limitations of the current aDNA data (PNAS).

They propose a new, more conservative method to infer close … Read the rest “Preprint paper: Estimating genetic kin relationships in prehistoric populations, by Monroy Kuhn, Jakobsson, and Günther”

Wiik’s theory about the spread of Uralic into east and central Europe, and the Uralic substrate in Germanic and Balto-Slavic

I recently wrote about how Wiik’s model was wrong in supporting a Mesolithic European Vasconic-Uralic harmony – genetically based on the modern distribution of R1b vs. N1c haplogroups -, and thus also the disruption of this harmony by Indo-Europeans (supposedly a population of R1a-lineages invading central Europe from a Balkan homeland).

Romanticism does this quite frequently: it makes us believe in some esoteric fantasy, like the ethnic continuity of our ancestors in the region we live (and a far, far greater original territory that has been unfairly diminished by invaders), providing us with strong links to support our artificial … Read the rest “Wiik’s theory about the spread of Uralic into east and central Europe, and the Uralic substrate in Germanic and Balto-Slavic”

Heyd, Mallory, and Prescott were right about Bell Beakers

Sometimes it is fun to read certain “old” papers. I have recently re-read some important papers that predicted what we are seeing now in aDNA analysis with surprising accuracy:

– Harrison & Heyd (2007): “We predict that future stable isotope and ancientDNA analyses of Beaker skeletal material will support our view that immigration played an important role in the Europe-wide Bell Beaker phenomenon”. – Duh, obvious, right? Wrong. Read the whole paper. It was already becoming a classic in the study of the Bell Beaker culture before the latest research on Bell Beaker aDNA, and it will be … Read the rest “Heyd, Mallory, and Prescott were right about Bell Beakers”

The Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa (EAMENA) Database

A recent online database catalogues 20,000 threatened archaeological sites: The Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa (EAMENA) Database.

Researchers at the Universities of Oxford, Leicester and Durham created the database in 2015 with support from the Arcadia Fund, a non-profit that seeks to preserve endangered heritage sites. The EAMENA team wanted to build a uniform catalogue of historic locations that are facing a growing onslaught of threats, according to a University of Oxford press statement. The resource was only recently made available to the public.

Not all damage and threats to the archaeology can be prevented,

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Indo-European Demic Diffusion – The expansion of Proto-Indo-Europeans potentially explained as the expansion of R1b subclades

I published an essay (or “dissertation”) some weeks ago, about what seems to me one of the most likely models of expansion of Indo-European-speaking peoples, based on Y-DNA haplogroups. Recently J.P. Mallory had proposed* (although he was not the first) that North-West Indo-European (the ancestor of Italo-Celtic and Germanic, and Balto-Slavic**) expanded with the Bell Beaker culture, a hypothesis that is supported by the most recent radiocarbon data (and subsequent proposal of an eastern origin of the pre-Bell Beaker culture, linked to the Yamna expansion, by Volker and Heyd). As I outline in the paper, ancient DNA samples and … Read the rest “Indo-European Demic Diffusion – The expansion of Proto-Indo-Europeans potentially explained as the expansion of R1b subclades”