R1b in Eastern Arabia Late Neolithic / Bronze Age

A reader asked my opinion about my reported R1b subclade of one low quality sample from Ra’s Al-Ḥamrāʾ 5 necropolis, Muscat (Oman), published (without Y-DNA) in Harney et al. (2020). For those interested, here are the relevant calls, with information on the graves taken from Salvatori (2007):

I11919_I11920_I11921: Grave 221 (ca. 3700-3200 BC), mtDNA H2a2a1, Y-DNA R1bL754 (xPH155; xL389P297M269; xPF6323PF6292).
* The samples show a straightforward path (but full of deamination question marks): CT (with 1 ancestral call M5813 1x C-A) -PP295M45P284P226 -KM526YSC0000186 … Read the rest “R1b in Eastern Arabia Late Neolithic / Bronze Age”

Yamnaya ancestry: mapping the Proto-Indo-European expansions

The latest papers from Ning et al. Cell (2019) and Anthony JIES (2019) have offered some interesting new data, supporting once more what could be inferred since 2015, and what was evident in population genomics since 2017: that Proto-Indo-Europeans expanded under R1b bottlenecks, and that the so-called “Steppe ancestry” referred to two different components, one – Yamnaya or Steppe_EMBA ancestry – expanding with Proto-Indo-Europeans, and the other one – Corded Ware or Steppe_MLBA ancestry – expanding with Uralic speakers.

The following maps are based on formal stats published in the papers and supplementary materials from 2015 until today, mainly on … Read the rest “Yamnaya ancestry: mapping the Proto-Indo-European expansions”

Palaeolithic and Mesolithic connections between Italy and the Balkans, and the potential expansion of the Villabruna cluster and haplogroup R1b in Europe

My speculative bet on the arrival of haplogroup R1b to Europe (and the expansion of R1b-V88 to Africa through southern Italy) was based initially entirely on genomic (especially phylogeographic) finds, but judging by data on the latest papers on south-eastern Europe it seems to have been the right choice.

Archaeological information on these prehistoric periods is scarce – compared to more recent times -, and anthropological models of migration are therefore speculative. Some information on the potential periods for its expansion are contained in the chapter Social Networks and Connectivity among the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic Foragers of the … Read the rest “Palaeolithic and Mesolithic connections between Italy and the Balkans, and the potential expansion of the Villabruna cluster and haplogroup R1b in Europe”