Haplogroup R1b-M167/SRY2627 linked to Celts expanding with the Urnfield culture

As you can see from my interest in the recently published Olalde et al. (2019) Iberia paper, once you accept that East Bell Beakers expanded North-West Indo-European, the most important question becomes how did its known dialects spread to their known historic areas.

We already had a good idea about the expansion of Celts, based on proto-historical accounts, fragmentary languages, and linguistic guesstimates, but the connection of Celtic with either Urnfield or slightly later Hallstatt/La Tène was always blurred, due to the lack of precise data on population movements.

The latest paper on Iberia is interesting for many … Read the rest “Haplogroup R1b-M167/SRY2627 linked to Celts expanding with the Urnfield culture”

Iberia: East Bell Beakers spread Indo-European languages; Celts expanded later

New paper (behind paywall), The genomic history of the Iberian Peninsula over the past 8000 years, by Olalde et al. Science (2019).

NOTE. Access to article from Reich Lab: main paper and supplementary materials.

Abstract:

We assembled genome-wide data from 271 ancient Iberians, of whom 176 are from the largely unsampled period after 2000 BCE, thereby providing a high-resolution time transect of the Iberian Peninsula. We document high genetic substructure between northwestern and southeastern hunter-gatherers before the spread of farming. We reveal sporadic contacts between Iberia and North Africa by ~2500 BCE and, by ~2000 BCE, the replacement

… Read the rest

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

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)”

Neolithic and Bronze Age Anatolia, Urals, Fennoscandia, Italy, and Hungary (ISBA 8, 20th Sep)

I will post information on ISBA 8 sesions today as I see them on Twitter (see programme in PDF, and sessions from yesterday).

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

Russian colonization in Yakutia

Exploring the genomic impact of colonization in north-eastern Siberia… Read the rest “Neolithic and Bronze Age Anatolia, Urals, Fennoscandia, Italy, and Hungary (ISBA 8, 20th Sep)”

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

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)”

Y-chromosome mixture in the modern Corsican population shows different migration layers

Open access Prehistoric migrations through the Mediterranean basin shaped Corsican Y-chromosome diversity, by Di Cristofaro et al. PLOS One (2018).

Interesting excerpts:

This study included 321 samples from men throughout Corsica; samples from Provence and Tuscany were added to the cohort. All samples were typed for 92 Y-SNPs, and Y-STRs were also analyzed.

Haplogroup R represented approximately half of the lineages in both Corsican and Tuscan samples (respectively 51.8% and 45.3%) whereas it reached 90% in Provence. Sub-clade R1b1a1a2a1a2b-U152 predominated in North Corsica whereas R1b1a1a2a1a1-U106 was present in South Corsica. Both SNPs display clinal distributions of frequency variation in

… Read the rest

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

Ancient genomes from North Africa evidence Neolithic migrations to the Maghreb

BioRxiv preprint now published (behind paywall) Ancient genomes from North Africa evidence prehistoric migrations to the Maghreb from both the Levant and Europe, by Fregel et al., PNAS (2018).

NOTE. I think one of the important changes in this version compared to the preprint is the addition of the recent Iberomaurusian samples.

Abstract (emphasis mine):

The extent to which prehistoric migrations of farmers influenced the genetic pool of western North Africans remains unclear. Archaeological evidence suggests that the Neolithization process may have happened through the adoption of innovations by local Epipaleolithic communities or by demic diffusion from the

… Read the rest

The Proto-Indo-European – Euskarian hypothesis

Another short communication by Juliette Blevins has just been posted, A single sibilant in Proto-Basque: *s, *Rs, *sT and the phonetic basis of the sibilant split:

Blevins (to appear) presents a new reconstruction of Proto-Basque, the mother of Basque and Aquitanian, based on standard methods in historical linguistics: the comparative method and the method of internal reconstruction. Where all previous reconstructions of Proto-Basque assume a contrast between two sibilants, *s, a voiceless apical sibilant, and *z a voiceless laminal sibilant (Martinet 1955; Michelena 1977; Lakarra 1995; Trask 1997), this proposal is unique in positing only a single sibilant *s.

… Read the rest