Tag: bell beaker

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”

Happy new year 2019…and enjoy our new books!

song-sheep-horses-header

Sorry for the last weeks of silence, I have been rather busy lately. I am having more projects going on, and (because of that) I also wanted to finish a project I have been working on for many months already.

I have therefore decided to publish a provisional version of the text, in the hope that it will be useful in the following months, when I won’t be able to update it as often as I would like to:

… Read the rest “Happy new year 2019…and enjoy our new books!”

A very “Yamnaya-like” East Bell Beaker from France, probably R1b-L151

bell-beaker-expansion

Interesting report by Bernard Sécher on Anthrogenica, about the Ph.D. thesis of Samantha Brunel from Institut Jacques Monod, Paris, Paléogénomique des dynamiques des populations humaines sur le territoire Français entre 7000 et 2000 (2018).

NOTE. You can visit Bernard Sécher’s blog on genetic genealogy.

A summary from user Jool, who was there, translated into English by Sécher (slight changes to translation, and emphasis mine):

They have a good hundred samples from the North, Alsace and the Mediterranean coast, from the Mesolithic to the Iron Age.

There is no major surprise compared to the rest of Europe. On the PCA

… Read the rest “A very “Yamnaya-like” East Bell Beaker from France, probably R1b-L151”

Early Iranian steppe nomadic pastoralists also show Y-DNA bottlenecks and R1b-L23

New paper (behind paywall) Ancient genomes suggest the eastern Pontic-Caspian steppe as the source of western Iron Age nomads, by Krzewińska et al. Science (2018) 4(10):eaat4457.

Interesting excerpts (emphasis mine, some links to images and tables deleted for clarity):

Late Bronze Age (LBA) Srubnaya-Alakulskaya individuals carried mtDNA haplogroups associated with Europeans or West Eurasians (17) including H, J1, K1, T2, U2, U4, and U5 (table S3). In contrast, the Iron Age nomads (Cimmerians, Scythians, and Sarmatians) additionally carried mtDNA haplogroups associated with Central Asia and the Far East (A, C, D, and M). The absence of East Asian mitochondrial

… Read the rest “Early Iranian steppe nomadic pastoralists also show Y-DNA bottlenecks and R1b-L23”

Evolution of Steppe, Neolithic, and Siberian ancestry in Eurasia (ISBA 8, 19th Sep)

jena-isba8

Some information is already available from ISBA 8 (see programme in PDF), thanks to the tweets from Alexander M. Kim.

Official abstracts are listed first (emphasis mine), then reports and images with link to Kim’s tweets. Here is the list for quick access:

Updates (17:00 CET):

Turkic and Hunnic expansions

Tracing the origin and expansion of the Turkic and … Read the rest “Evolution of Steppe, Neolithic, and Siberian ancestry in Eurasia (ISBA 8, 19th Sep)”

Common pitfalls in human genomics and bioinformatics: ADMIXTURE, PCA, and the ‘Yamnaya’ ancestral component

invasion-from-the-steppe-yamnaya

Good timing for the publication of two interesting papers, that a lot of people should read very carefully:

ADMIXTURE

Open access A tutorial on how not to over-interpret STRUCTURE and ADMIXTURE bar plots, by Daniel J. Lawson, Lucy van Dorp & Daniel Falush, Nature Communications (2018).

Interesting excerpts (emphasis mine):

Experienced researchers, particularly those interested in population structure and historical inference, typically present STRUCTURE results alongside other methods that make different modelling assumptions. These include TreeMix, ADMIXTUREGRAPH, fineSTRUCTURE, GLOBETROTTER, f3 and D statistics, amongst many others. These models can be used both to probe whether assumptions of the model

… Read the rest “Common pitfalls in human genomics and bioinformatics: ADMIXTURE, PCA, and the ‘Yamnaya’ ancestral component”

Cystic fibrosis probably spread with expanding Bell Beakers

indo-european-uralic-bell-beaker-corded-ware-migrations

New paper (behind paywall) Estimating the age of p.(Phe508del) with family studies of geographically distinct European populations and the early spread of cystic fibrosis, by Farrell et al., European Journal of Human Genetics (2018).

Interesting excerpts (emphasis mine):

Our results revealed tMRCA average values ranging from 4725 to 1175 years ago and support the estimates of Serre et al. (3000–6000 years ago) [11], rather than Morral et al. (52,000 years ago) [6], but the latter figure was challenged by Kaplan et al. [26] because of disagreement with assumptions used in their calculations. In addition, the tMRCA values from western

… Read the rest “Cystic fibrosis probably spread with expanding Bell Beakers”

The importance of fine-scale studies for integrating palaeogenomics and archaeology

eurasian-genomes-published

Short review (behind paywall) The importance of fine-scale studies for integrating paleogenomics and archaeology, by Krishna R. Veeramah, Current Opinion in Genetics & Development (2018) 53:83-89.

Abstract (emphasis mine):

There has been an undercurrent of intellectual tension between geneticists studying human population history and archaeologists for almost 40 years. The rapid development of paleogenomics, with geneticists working on the very material discovered by archaeologists, appears to have recently heightened this tension. The relationship between these two fields thus far has largely been of a multidisciplinary nature, with archaeologists providing the raw materials for sequencing, as well as a scaffold

… Read the rest “The importance of fine-scale studies for integrating palaeogenomics and archaeology”

Origin of horse domestication likely on the North Caspian steppes

Open access Late Quaternary horses in Eurasia in the face of climate and vegetation change, by Leonardi et al. Science Advances (2018) 4(7):eaar5589.

Interesting excerpts (emphasis mine):

Here, we compiled an extensive continental-scale database, consisting of 3070 radiocarbon dates associated to horse paleontological and archeological finds across the whole of Eurasia, that has been analyzed in association with coarse-scale paleoclimatic reconstructions. We further collected the number of identified specimens (NISP) frequency data for horses versus other ungulates in 1120 archeological layers in Europe (…) This ma.ssive amount of data allowed us to track,with unprecedented details, how the geographic

… Read the rest “Origin of horse domestication likely on the North Caspian steppes”