Two more studies on the genetic history of East Asia: Han Chinese and Thailand

A comprehensive map of genetic variation in the world’s largest ethnic group – Han Chinese, by Charleston et al. (2017).

It is believed – based on uniparental markers from modern and ancient DNA samples and array-based genome-wide data – that Han Chinese originated in the Central Plain region of China during prehistoric times, expanding with agriculture and technology northward and southward, to become the largest Chinese ethnic group.

Abstract:

As are most non-European populations around the globe, the Han Chinese are relatively understudied in population and medical genetics studies. From low-coverage whole-genome sequencing of 11,670 Han Chinese women we

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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”

Effective migration in Western Eurasia reveals fine-scale migration surface features

Interesting poster from SMBE 2017, Maps of effective migration as a summary of global human genetic diversity, by Benjamin Peter, Desislava Petkova, Matthew Stephens & John Novembre, of the JNPopGen group of the University of Chicago.

You can read the full poster in the original PDF, or in compressed image. The following are important excerpts:

Aim: To answer the following questions:

Which regions have high/low effective migration?

How well is human genetic diversity explained by this pure isolation-by-distance model?

How does the explanatory performance of EEMS compare to PCA?

Method: It uses 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”

Another nail in the coffin for the Anatolian hypothesis: continuity and isolation in the Caucasus during the Neolithic and Calcholithic, in mtDNA samples

A new paper appeared on Current Biology, by Margaryan et al. (including Morten E. Allentoft): Eight Millennia of Matrilineal Genetic Continuity in the South Caucasus.

Among its conclusions:

The plot clearly shows the clustering of the ancient group together with the modern European, Armenian, and Caucasian populations. We observe none of the typical East Eurasian mtDNA lineages (A, C, D, F, G, and M) among the ancient individuals, and only one individual with haplogroup D is present in the modern Armenian maternal gene pool (Artsakh). As such, the archaeologically and historically attested migrations of Central Asian groups (e.g., Turks

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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”

The Aryan migration debate, the Out of India models, and the modern “indigenous Indo-Aryan” sectarianism

The Proto-Indo-European Urheimat

Not long ago, the Proto-Indo-European language Urheimat problem used to be cyclic in nature: linguistic and archaeological publications appeared supporting a Copper Age migration from the steppe proposed by Marija Gimbutas, or a Neolithic expansion from Anatolia (or Armenia) proposed by Colin Renfrew, and back again.

I have always supported the simpler, more recent Chalcolithic migration of Late Indo-Europeans from the Pontic-Caspian steppe over an older Neolithic expansion from Anatolia with agriculture. The latter model implied a complex cultural diffusion over a greater span of time than is warranted by linguistic guesstimates, understood as the … Read the rest “The Aryan migration debate, the Out of India models, and the modern “indigenous Indo-Aryan” sectarianism”

On the origin of R1a and R1b subclades in Greece

An article published in PLoS ONE, Y-chromosomal analysis of Greek Cypriots reveals a primarily common pre-Ottoman paternal ancestry with Turkish Cypriots, by Alexandros Heraclides and colleagues, insists on the potential origin of R1b and R1a lineages in Greece from Indo-European migrations, albeit with strong regional (and thus most likely temporal) differences. From the article’s discussion:

Although the exact origins and migratory patterns of R1a and R1b are still under rigorous investigation, it seems that they are linked to Bronze Age migrations from the Western Eurasian Steppe and Eastern Europe into Southern (including Greece) and Western Europe[61]. Apparently, such

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