R1b-V88 migration through Southern Italy into Green Sahara corridor, and the Afroasiatic connection

Open access article The peopling of the last Green Sahara revealed by high-coverage resequencing of trans-Saharan patrilineages, by D’Atanasio, Trombetta, Bonito, et al., Genome Biology (2018) 19:20.

Abstract:

Background
Little is known about the peopling of the Sahara during the Holocene climatic optimum, when the desert was replaced by a fertile environment.

Results
In order to investigate the role of the last Green Sahara in the peopling of Africa, we deep-sequence the whole non-repetitive portion of the Y chromosome in 104 males selected as representative of haplogroups which are currently found to the north and to the south of

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Differences in ADMIXTURE between Khvalynsk/Yamna and Sredni Stog/Corded Ware

Looking for differences among steppe cultures in Genomics is like looking for a needle in a haystack.

It means, after all, looking for differences among closely related cultures, such as between South-Western and North-Western Anatolian Neolithic cultures, or among Old European cultures (such as Vinča or Cucuteni–Trypillia), or between Iberian cultures after the arrival of steppe-related populations.

These differences between closely related regions, in all these cases and especially among steppe cultures, even when they are supported by Archaeology and anthropological models of migration (and compatible with linguistic models), are expected to be minimal.

Fortunately, we have … Read the rest “Differences in ADMIXTURE between Khvalynsk/Yamna and Sredni Stog/Corded Ware”

The Great Hungarian Plain in a time of change in the Balkans – Neolithic, Chalcolithic, and Bronze Age

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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The concept of “Outlier” in Human Ancestry (II): Early Khvalynsk, Sredni Stog, West Yamna, Iron Age Bulgaria, Potapovka, Andronovo…

I already wrote about the concept of outlier in Human Ancestry, so I am not going to repeat myself. This is just an update of “outliers” in recent studies, and their potential origins (here I will repeat some of the examples):

Early Khvalynsk: the three samples from the Samara region have quite different positions in PCA, from nearest to EHG (of Y-DNA haplogroup R1a) to nearest to ANE ancestry (of Y-DNA haplogroup Q). This could represent the initial consequences of the second wave of ANE ancestry – as found later in Yamna samples from a neighbouring region -, … Read the rest “The concept of “Outlier” in Human Ancestry (II): Early Khvalynsk, Sredni Stog, West Yamna, Iron Age Bulgaria, Potapovka, Andronovo…”