Corded Ware and Bell Beaker related groups defined by patrilocality and female exogamy

tumulus-culture-eba-danube

Two new interesting papers concerning Corded Ware and Bell Beaker peoples appeared last week, supporting yet again what is already well-known since 2015 about West Uralic and North-West Indo-European speakers and their expansion.

Below are relevant excerpts (emphasis mine) and comments.

#UPDATE (27 OCT 2019): I have updated Y-DNA and mtDNA maps of Corded Ware, Bell Beaker, EBA, MBA, and LBA migrations. I have also updated PCA plots, which now include the newly reported samples and those from the Tollense valley, and I have tried some qpAdm models (see below).

I. Corded Ware and

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The father tongue and mother tongue hypotheses in Indo-European populations

New paper (behind paywall) Reconciling the father tongue and mother tongue hypotheses in Indo-European populations, by Zhang et al. National Science Review (2018) nwy083.

Interesting excerpts:

Here, we reassessed the correlation between genetic and linguistic characteristics in 34 modern IE populations (Fig. 1a), for which all four types of datasets (lexicon, phonemes, Y-chromosomal composition, and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) composition) are available. We assembled compositions of the Y-chromosomal and mtDNA haplogroups or paragroups from the corresponding IE populations, which reflect paternal and maternal lines, respectively (…)

Neighbour-Nets were constructed to delineate the differences between 34 IE population groups clustering at

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Polygyny as a potential reason for Y-DNA bottlenecks among agropastoralists

polygyny-estimates

Open access Greater wealth inequality, less polygyny: rethinking the polygyny threshold model by Ross et al. Journal of the Royal Society Interface (2018).

Interesting excerpts, from the discussion (emphasis mine):

We use cross-cultural data and a new mutual mate choice model to propose a resolution to the polygyny paradox. Following Oh et al. [17], we extend the standard polygyny threshold model to a mutual mate choice model that accounts for both female supply to, and male demand for, polygynous matchings, in the light of the importance of, and inequality in, rival and non-rival forms of wealth. The empirical results presented

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Modern Hungarian mtDNA more similar to ancient Europeans than to Hungarian conquerors

middle-ages-europe

New preprint at BioRxiv, MITOMIX, an Algorithm to Reconstruct Population Admixture Histories Indicates Ancient European Ancestry of Modern Hungarians, by Maroti et al. (2018).

Abstract (emphasis mine)

By making use of the increasing number of available mitogenomes we propose a novel population genetic distance metric, named Shared Haplogroup Distance (SHD). Unlike FST, SHD is a true mathematical distance that complies with all metric axioms, which enables our new algorithm (MITOMIX) to detect population-level admixture based on SHD minimum optimization. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of our methodology we analyzed the relation of 62 modern and 25 ancient Eurasian

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