Updates to ASoSaH: new maps, updated PCA, and added newest research papers

steppe-ancestry-cut

The title says it all. I have used some free time to update the series A Song of Sheep and Horses:

I basically added information from the latest papers published, which (luckily enough for me) haven’t been too … Read the rest “Updates to ASoSaH: new maps, updated PCA, and added newest research papers”

Corded Ware culture origins: The Final Frontier

corded-ware-yamna-bell-beaker

As you can imagine from my latest posts (on kurgan origins and on Sredni Stog), I am right now in the middle of a revision of the Corded Ware culture for my Indo-European demic diffusion model, to see if I can add something new to the draft. And, as you can see, even with ancient DNA on the table, the precise origin of the Corded Ware migrants – in spite of the imaginative efforts of the Copenhagen group to control the narrative – are still unknown.

Corded Ware origins

The main objects of study in Corded Ware … Read the rest “Corded Ware culture origins: The Final Frontier”

East Bell Beakers, an in situ admixture of Yamna settlers and GAC-like groups in Hungary

indo-european-yamnaya-corded-ware

I wanted to repeat what I said last week in two different posts (see on the new Caucasus and Yamna Hungary samples, and on local groups in contact with Yamna settlers).

We already knew that expanding East Bell Beakers had received influence from a population similar to the available Globular Amphorae culture samples.

  1. Without Yamna settlers, but with Yamna Ukraine and East Bell Beaker samples, including an admixed Yamna Bulgaria sample (from Olalde & Mathieson 2017, and then with their Nature 2018 papers), the most likely interpretation was that Yamna settlers had received GAC ancestry probably during
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The Great Hungarian Plain in a time of change in the Balkans – Neolithic, Chalcolithic, and Bronze Age

hungary-yamna-burials-map

I wrote recently about Anthony’s new model of Corded Ware culture expansion from Yamna settlements of Hungary. I am extremely sceptic about it in terms of current genetic finds, and suspicious of the real reasons behind it – probably misinterpretations of the so-called ‘Yamnaya ancestral component’ in recent genetic papers, rather than archaeological finds.

Nevertheless, it means a definitive rejection by Anthony of:

  • The multiple patron-client relationships he proposed to justify a cultural diffusion of Late Indo-European dialects from Yamna into different Corded Ware cultures in the forest-steppe and Forest Zone (see one of his latest summaries of the
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