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

Population structure in Argentina shows most European sources of South European origin

Open access Population structure in Argentina, by Muzzio et al., PLOS One (2018).

Abstract (emphasis mine):

We analyzed 391 samples from 12 Argentinian populations from the Center-West, East and North-West regions with the Illumina Human Exome Beadchip v1.0 (HumanExome-12v1-A). We did Principal Components analysis to infer patterns of populational divergence and migrations. We identified proportions and patterns of European, African and Native American ancestry and found a correlation between distance to Buenos Aires and proportion of Native American ancestry, where the highest proportion corresponds to the Northernmost populations, which is also the furthest from the Argentinian capital. Most of

… Read the rest

Iberian prehistoric migrations in Genomics from Neolithic, Chalcolithic, and Bronze Age

New open access paper Four millennia of Iberian biomolecular prehistory illustrate the impact of prehistoric migrations at the far end of Eurasia, by Valdiosera, Günther, Vera-Rodríguez, et al. PNAS (2018) published ahead of print.

Abstract (emphasis mine)

Population genomic studies of ancient human remains have shown how modern-day European population structure has been shaped by a number of prehistoric migrations. The Neolithization of Europe has been associated with large-scale migrations from Anatolia, which was followed by migrations of herders from the Pontic steppe at the onset of the Bronze Age. Southwestern Europe was one of the last parts of

… Read the rest

Population substructure in Iberia, highest in the north-west territory (to appear in Nature)

A manuscript co-authored by Angel Carracedo, from the University of Santiago de Compostela, and (always according to him) pre-accepted in Nature, will offer more insight into the population substructure of Spain, based on autosomal DNA.

Carracedo’s lecture about DNA (in Galician), including his summary of the paper (from december 2017):

Some of the points made in the video:

The study shows a situation parallelling – as expected – the expansion of Spanish Medieval kingdoms during the Reconquista (and subsequent repopulation).
In it, the biggest surprise seems to be the greater substructure found in Galicia, the north-western Spanish

… Read the rest

Iberian Peninsula: Discontinuity in mtDNA between hunter-gatherers and farmers, not so much during the Chalcolithic and EBA

A new preprint paper at BioRxiv, The maternal genetic make-up of the Iberian Peninsula between the Neolithic and the Early Bronze Age, by Szécsényi-Nagy et al. (2017).

Abstract:

Agriculture first reached the Iberian Peninsula around 5700 BCE. However, little is known about the genetic structure and changes of prehistoric populations in different geographic areas of Iberia. In our study, we focused on the maternal genetic makeup of the Neolithic (~ 5500-3000 BCE), Chalcolithic (~ 3000-2200 BCE) and Early Bronze Age (~ 2200-1500 BCE). We report ancient mitochondrial DNA results of 213 individuals (151 HVS-I sequences) from the northeast, central,

… Read the rest

Analysis of R1b-DF27 haplogroups in modern populations adds new information that contrasts with ‘steppe admixture’ results

New open access article published in Scientific Reports, Analysis of the R1b-DF27 haplogroup shows that a large fraction of Iberian Y-chromosome lineages originated recently in situ, by Solé-Morata et al. (2017).

Abstract

Haplogroup R1b-M269 comprises most Western European Y chromosomes; of its main branches, R1b-DF27 is by far the least known, and it appears to be highly prevalent only in Iberia. We have genotyped 1072 R1b-DF27 chromosomes for six additional SNPs and 17 Y-STRs in population samples from Spain, Portugal and France in order to further characterize this lineage and, in particular, to ascertain the time and place where

… Read the rest