Happy new year 2019…and enjoy our new books!

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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:

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Corded Ware—Uralic (II): Finno-Permic and the expansion of N-L392/Siberian ancestry

finno-ugric-samoyedic

This is the second of four posts on the Corded Ware—Uralic identification:

I read from time to time that “we have not sampled Uralic speakers yet”, and “we are waiting to see when Uralic-speaking peoples are sampled”. Are we, though?

Proto-language homelands are based on linguistic data, such as guesstimates for dialectal evolution, loanwords and phonetic changes for language contacts, toponymy … Read the rest “Corded Ware—Uralic (II): Finno-Permic and the expansion of N-L392/Siberian ancestry”

Scythians in Ukraine, Natufian and sub-Saharan ancestry in North Africa (ISBA 8, 21st Sep)

jena-isba8

Interesting information from ISBA 8 sesions today, as seen on Twitter (see programme in PDF, and sessions from the 19th and the 20th september).

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

Scythian population genetics and settlement patterns

Genetic continuity in the western Eurasian Steppe broken not due to Scythian dominance, Read the rest “Scythians in Ukraine, Natufian and sub-Saharan ancestry in North Africa (ISBA 8, 21st Sep)”

Early Medieval Alemannic graveyard shows diverse cultural and genetic makeup

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Open access Ancient genome-wide analyses infer kinship structure in an Early Medieval Alemannic graveyard, by O’Sullivan et al., Science (2018) 4(9):eaao1262

Interesting excerpts:

Introduction

The Alemanni were a confederation of Germanic tribes that inhabited the eastern Upper Rhine basin and surrounding region (Fig. 1) (1). Roman ethnographers mentioned the Alemanni, but historical records from the 3rd to the 6th century CE contain no regular description of these tribes (2). The upheaval that occurred during the European Migration Period (Völkerwanderung) partly explains the interchangeability of nomenclature with the contemporaneous Suebi people of the same region and periods of geographic discontinuity

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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

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Mitogenomes show Longobard migration was socially stratified and included females

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New bioRxiv preprint A genetic perspective on Longobard-Era migrations, by Vai et al. (2018).

Interesting excerpts (emphasis mine):

In this study we sequenced complete mitochondrial genomes from nine early-medieval cemeteries located in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Italy, for a total of 87 individuals. In some of these cemeteries, a portion of the individuals are buried with cultural markers in these areas traditionally associated with the Longobard culture (hereby we refer to these cemeteries as LC), as opposed to burial communities in which no artifacts or rituals associated by archaeologists to Longobard culture have been found in any graves.

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When Bell Beakers mixed with Eneolithic Europeans: Pömmelte and the Europe-wide concept of sanctuary

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Recent open access paper The ring sanctuary of Pömmelte, Germany: a monumental, multi-layered metaphor of the late third millennium BC, by Spatzier and Bertemes, Antiquity (2018) 92(363):655-673.

Interesting excerpts (emphasis mine):

In recent decades, evidence has accumulated for comparable enclosures of later dates, including the Early Bronze Age Únětice Culture between 2200 and 1600 BC, and thus into the chronological and cultural context of the Nebra sky disc. Based on the analysis of one of these enclosure sites, recently excavated at Pömmelte on the flood plain of the Elbe River near Magdeburg, Saxony-Anhalt, and dating to the late third

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Mitogenomes from the middle of the Merovingian period in the Lorraine region

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Investigating the kinship between individuals deposited in exceptional Merovingian multiple burials through aDNA analysis: The case of Hérange burial 41 (Northeast France), by Deguilloux et al. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports (2018) 20:784-790.

Interesting excerpts (emphasis mine):

The Merovingian period in Northeast France (developing from 440/450 to 700/710 CE; Legoux et al., 2004) represents [a case of multiple burial], where a large majority of the types of deposits encountered consists of individual burials. In this context, whereas hundreds of individual burials are known, the syntheses recently conducted have enabled the inventory of only six multiple burials (Lefebvre and Lafosse,

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Kortlandt: West Indo-Europeans along the Danube, Germanic and Balto-Slavic share a Corded Ware substrate

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New paper (behind paywall) The Expansion of the Indo-European Languages, by Frederik Kortlandt, JIES (2018) 46(1 & 2):219-231.

Abstract:

When considering the way the Indo-Europeans took to the west, it is important to realize that mountains, forests and marshlands were prohibitive impediments. Moreover, people need fresh water, all the more so when traveling with horses. The natural way from the Russian steppe to the west is therefore along the northern bank of the river Danube. This leads to the hypothesis that the western Indo-Europeans represent successive waves of migration along the Danube and its tributaries. The Celts evidently followed

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