Eurogenes Blog

A new dataset has appeared online from a yet to be published paper titled Cosmopolitanism in the depths of Barbaricum evidenced by archaeogenomic data from the Late Iron Age Goth community of the Masłomęcz group [Update: the paper is now available at this Link].

Most of these Gothic samples are clearly of Scandinavian origin, and very similar to present-day Swedes. Overall, however, they create a somewhat heterogeneous cluster that also overlaps with present-day Poles thanks to the presence of a few Balto-Slavic-related and possibly Roman-related individuals.

The Principal Component Analysis (PCA) plots below were produced with the excellent Vahaduo G25 Global Views tool using the data here.

Their Y-haplogroups more or less reflect the PCA results:

PL046 R-YP6228
PL048 I-PH833
PL049 I-A11537
PL052 R-Y48961
PL059 I-PH833
PL062 I-S15301
PL065 I-Y294193
PL066 R-FGC2555
PL067 R-S7759
PL070 I-CTS10028
PL071 I-BY316
PL076 I-S9318
PL082 I-Z2041
PL085 J-Z38241
PL086 I-FT29339

See also...

Early Slavs from Tribal Period Poland

Wielbark Goths were overwhelmingly of Scandinavian origin

High-resolution stuff

A paper dealing with the origin of Slavic speakers, titled Ancient DNA connects large-scale migration with the spread of Slavs, was just published at Nature by Gretzinger et al. (see here).

The dataset from the paper includes eight fascinating ancient samples from Gródek upon the Bug River in Southeastern Poland. These individuals are dated to the so called Tribal Period (8th –9th centuries), and, as far as I know, they represent the earliest Slavic speakers in the ancient DNA record.

The really interesting thing about these early Slavs is that they already show some Germanic and other Western European-related ancestries.

In the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) plots below, three of them cluster near present-day Ukrainians, while the rest are shifted towards present-day Northwestern, Western and Southern Europeans. The plots were produced with the excellent Vahaduo G25 Global Views tool using the data here.


These results aren't exactly shocking, because the people who preceded the early Slavs in the Gródek region were Scandinavian-like and associated with the Wielbark archeological culture. In other words, they were probably Goths who also had significant contacts with the Roman Empire.

However, it's not a given that the ancestors of the Tribal Period Slavs mixed with local Goths. It's also possible that they brought the western admixture, or at least some of it, from the Slavic homeland, wherever that may have been.

That's because the early Slavs who migrated deep into what is now Russia also showed Western European-related admixture. This is what Gretzinger et al. say on page 74 of their supplementary info (emphasis is mine):

The only deviation from this pattern is observed for ancient samples from the Russian Volga-Oka region, where we measure higher genetic affinity between present-day Southern/Western Europeans and the SP population compared to the pre-SP population (Fig. S17). This agrees with the pattern observed in PCA and ADMIXTURE that, in contrast to the Northwestern Balkan, Eastern Germany, and Poland-Northwestern Ukraine, the arrival of Slavic-associated culture in Northwestern Russia was associated with a shift in PCA space to the West, a decrease of BAL [Baltic] ancestry, and the introduction of Western European ancestries such as CNE [Continental North European] and CWE [Continental Western European].

Thus, it's highly plausible that the Tribal Period Slavs from Gródek were very similar, perhaps even practically identical, to the proto-Slavs who lived in the original Slavic homeland. Hopefully we won't have to wait too long to discover whether that's true or not. More Migration period and Slavic period samples from the border regions of Belarus, Poland and Ukraine are needed to sort that out.

On the other hand, most of the post-1000 CE individuals from Gródek are shifted closer to present-day Balts. This is probably due to admixture from nearby Baltic-speaking populations. At the time, Baltic speakers still occupied much of northern and eastern Poland.

I'm still going through the Gretzinger et al. paper and I'll probably have a lot more to say about it in the near future.

However, unfortunately, I've already spotted a silly mistake in the supplementary info that will probably have some very annoying consequences for us on this blog. On page 109 the authors make the false claim that South Asian ancestry is present in a wide range of ancient Eastern European and Central Asian populations from the Bronze Age to the Scythian period.

Furthermore, Sycthian groups from Ukraine show varying fractions of South Asian ancestry (between 5% and 12%), a component present in many ancient individuals from Moldova (e.g. Moldova_IA, Moldova_LBA and Moldova_MBA), Ukraine (Ukraine_Alexandria_MBA and Ukraine_BA_Catacomb.SG), Western Russia (e.g. Russia_EarlySarmatian.SG, Russia_MLBA_Potapovka, or Russia_MLBA_Sintashta) and the Caucasus (Russia_Caucasus_LBA_Dolmen and Russia_North_Caucasus_MBA) but (nearly) absent in the SP genomes from Central and East-Central Europe (<5%) (Fig. S42b).

All ancient and present-day South Asian populations carry what is commonly known as Ancestral South Indian (ASI) ancestry, while all of the above mentioned ancient groups lack it. Ergo, it's impossible for these ancients to have actual South Asian ancestry.

What happened is that Gretzinger et al. created a genetic component in ADMIXTURE based on present-day South Asians. However, South Asians today have very complex ancestry from several different sources, including early pastoralists from the North-Pontic steppe in Eastern Europe and early farmers from Central Asia and what is now Iran. As a result, the groups that share significant amounts of alleles with South Asians via these sources also show so called South Asian ancestry in the Gretzinger et al. analysis.

Unless this problem is corrected we're likely to see some nutjobs online using this paper to claim all sorts of nonsense about the origins of ancient Eastern Europeans and Central Asians, especially the Sintashta people and Scythians.

See also...

High-resolution stuff

Leo Speidel & Pontus Skoglund

This is another guest post by an anonymous contributor. Again, I don't necessarily agree with the author, but is he wrong? Feel free to let me know in the comments below.

The definition of Sredni Stog phenomenon (SSP) varies and is often a loosely applied term to refer to pretty much any individual in the Dnieper and Don regions between the ‘Neolithic’ and Yamnaya periods.

In order to elucidate the SSP, some brief remarks on the preceding Mariupol phenomenon are warranted. Understanding the Mariupol horizon is fairly straightforward – its development was catalysed by an intrusion of groups from somewhere west of the Dnieper, ~ 5500BC. The ‘proto-Mariupol’ group were genomic and economic ‘hunter-gatherers’, lacking any discernible EEF admixture, and with Y-hg I-L702 uniparental ‘trace-dye’. The Mariupol phenomenon predominantly impacted the lower reaches of the Dnieper and Azov steppe (Lower Dnieper- Azov group, ‘LDA’), but extended toward the Don, Volga and even the Kuban steppe in an attenuated form. The elevated levels of “Ukr N’ in Golubaya Krinitsa and the Y-hg I2a-L702 individual at Berezhnovka attest to this movement. The Mariupol phenomenon is associated with the development of formal cemeteries, linking them with Late Neolithic mixed farmer/HG groups in the northeast Balkans. Individuals were buried in a ‘supine straight-legged’ inhumation, with grave goods such as boar-tusk pendants for select males and adorning shell beads for females. This might signal the emergence of gender-differentiation in burials and the rise of local leaders or ‘chiefs’.

Data sets treat the ‘Neolithic’ in Ukraine as a monolithic phenomenon, however it is important to note that Dereivka stands apart – it is 200km north of other “Ukraine_N” sites such as Volnienski, Igren and Vovnigi, beyond the ‘Dnipro bend’. Moreover, male individuals from Dereivka are overwhelmingly assigned to Y-hg R1b-V88 and the burial pose (N-S) at Dereivka deviates from the more common E-W orientation seen elsewhere. Quite a few of the published ‘Sredni Stog’ individuals are from Dereivka, and often earlier than 4500BC, and N. Kotova assigns them to the Dnieper-Donets culture. Moreover, the recently published middle Don individuals, such as those from Golubaya Krinitsa and Vasilyevsky Cordon -17, are also not Sredni Stog, but can be thought of as ‘partially Mariupolised hunter-gatherers’. In another example, the (undated) ‘Sredni Stog’ individual I27930 from Igren was assigned to Y-hg Q and he can be modelled as a 2-way mix of EHG & WHG. This individual is actually from the Mesolithic.

So what occurred during the Sredni Stog period? In contrast to the Mariupol phase, the population dynamics associated with SSP are complex: at least three external flows can be highlighted (i) the advance of Tripolje communities from the Carpathians to the Dnieper (ii) arrival of South-Caucasian/CHG agro-pastoralists in the north Caucasus, and (iii) arrival of ‘central Asian’ populations in Volga-Caspian region (represented by “TTK individual’); in addition to intra-steppe shifts and flows. Notwithstanding, the ‘ideological background’ of SSP is rooted in the Mariupol horizon. The stereotypical SSP burials features individuals buried on their back, but increasingly with legs up-flexed. And we see the beginnings of kurgan constructions, which vary from stone cairns to soil-thrown barrows. Most are buried in simple pits, however some have more complex ‘catacomb’ pits.

What happened in the Dniester-Dnieper-Don region during the SSP? We can begin by orientating ourselves with a PCA to observe two main clines developing. One cline develops between ‘Ukr_N and EEF and a second cline pulls toward Lower-Volga Caucasus groups. The first cline mostly comprises of ‘Farmers’ from Tipolje and ‘hunter-gatherers’ from Dereivka. The second cline consists of individuals from Dereivka and the lower Dnieper-Azov group pulling toward Lower Volga-Caucasus groups.

Admixture analysis with qpAdm reveals 3 groups within the 2 broad clines. The first group can be thought of as ‘core Sredni Stog’. These individuals are 2-way mixes of ‘Ukr_N’ and ‘Steppe Eneolithic’ (sometimes Progress works, sometimes Remontoye or Berezhnovka). They are both males and females. In our examples, the females are from Kopachiv Yar (4000 BC) and Dereivka (3500BC). The males come from Dereivka (4300BC), Moluykhiv Bugor (4000BC), Vynohrado (4000BC); they are all derived for Y-hg I2a-L703+. These results represent a blending of social networks between the LDA and various lower Volga-Caucasus groups, and the subsequent expansion by LDA further West. The terminus ante quem of 4300 BC matches the corrected dating of the Kuban steppe sites such as Progress & Vojnuchka.

Another subset comprises of individuals from Dereivka and Verteba cave who situated on an ‘Ukr-N’ < - - > EEF cline. Many of the earlier Dereivka individuals are almost 100% Ukr_N. Verteba cave Tripolje can be modelled as 80% EEF + 20% Ukr_N. One individual from Dereikva (I3719) falls outside the Dereivka <-> Tripolje clin, as he plots further ‘south’ with Balkan-LBK farmers. Consistently, he comes out as ~100% EEF with qpAdm. Dating to ~4700BC, he precedes the arrival of Tipolje groups to the region by hundreds of years. FtDNA have assigned him to I2-Z161- FTH81, which is distinctive to the LDA haplotypes and is phylogenetically linked to a Czech LBK individual.

A third group consists of individuals with more complex 3-way ancestries, consisting of EEF, Ukr-N and Steppe_En and/or Maikop. These come from late Dereivka and late Tripolje groups, in archaeological literature often termed as ‘Soldanesti’, ‘Zhivotilovksa-Volchansk’, Cernavoda (Kartal). Once again, the males from Soldanesti and Cernavoda derive from LDA-related Y-hg I2a-L703 in some shape or form.

Conclusions:

1) Firstly, we note that the Dereivka group was subject to early EEF influence, as soon as eastern LBK groups reached Ukraine after 5000BC. However, their main interaction occurred with the younger, Tripolje group, which expanded toward the Dnieper after ~ 4300 BC.

2) In the LDA group we observe patrilineal continuity. These clans created expansive social-networks. They initially mixed with groups from the lower Volga-Caucasus area. Some then moved west, and ‘took over’ the Tripolje region and acquired high levels of EEF.

3) As a third conclusion, we can reject the commonly held notion that Tripolje was ‘conquered by Yamnaya pastoralists’. Our analysis instead highlights that their core structure fragmented as they became intertwined with powerful networks to their west (Trpolje) and east (Sredni Stog). The ‘take-over’ was due to the expansion of LDA/ SS groups. Mixed groups emerged such as Cernavoda and Soldanesti, which retained Tripolje ancestry and some cultural traditions. By the time Yamnaya groups reached the Dniester forest steppe, Tripolje had been long gone.

See also...

‘Proto-Yamnaya’ Eneolithic individuals from Kuban steppe c. 3700 BC ? (guest post)

This is a guest post by an anonymous contributor. I don't necessarily agree with its findings, but I think it's a good way to get the ball rolling here again. Feel free to let me know what you think. Please note, however, that any comments that show mental instability will be blocked. No more crazy talk on this blog.

In order to understand who Yamnaya people were, one must first define ‘Yamnaya’. We will adopt a strictu sensu view (e.g. Anthony, Heyd) encompassing burials dating 3200-2600 BC, with a characteristic body position, mound construction, and copper artefacts. These complexes can be linked to a core group of people whose autosomal make-up is quite homogeneous throughout their wide geographic range. Moreover, almost all males belong to Y-haplogroup R1b-M269-Z2103. In this light, ‘core Yamnaya’ does not represent a ‘proto-Indo-European’ population, as commonly proclaimed, but a group which contributed to several post-PIE population-language complexes, such as Tocharian, Armenian and some Paleo-Balkan languages. However, historical linguistics is not the focus of this post.

Archeologists had linked Yamnaya to earlier complexes such as Khvalynsk, Repin and/or Mikhalivka. Given that cultural markers such as pottery and burial customs can be borrowed and copied, ancient DNA can offer a more objective assessment of population origins. However, the cacophony of clusters, clines and other statistical constructs in publications can be confusing. A more rationalized approach is required, and one way is to co-analyse phylogenetically linked individuals across space and time. Apart from a lower-quality individual from Smyadovo (Bulgaria c. 4300 BC), the earliest attestation of R1b-M269 is in two individuals from the Kuban steppe (Stavropol region) c. 3700 BC -NV3003 and KST001 (Ghaliachi et al 2024). However, Y-hg R1b-M269 is missing in currently sampled Kuban steppe and north Caucasian males from the preceding period (5000-4000 BC). Males of the ‘Kuban steppe 4500bc’ group (Progress, Vojnucka, Sengeleevskiy, etc) are instead derived for the phylogenetically divergent Y-hg Rb-V1636. Males from the Nalchik cemetery are also derived for Y-hg R1b-V1636, or related haplotypes, although they were buried in a ‘Caucasian Farmer’ pose and heavily infused with such ancestry, but probably also had a burial mound thrown above. We do not know when the R1b-V1636 clans entered the northern Caucasus region, or from where, but they appear to have been attracted by trade with North Caucasian Famer (~Eneolithic) groups- termed as ‘Meshoko-Zamok’, ‘Chokh’, etc, in literature. Curiously the Nalchik group has minimal Central Asian (“TTK-related”) ancestry, whilst the Kuban steppe group has high levels. This suggests that TTK-related ancestry arrived after R1b-V1636 dominant EHG clans entered the North Caucasus region, but other scenarios are possible. Lastly, two ‘Meshoko culture’ males from Unakozovskaya have been assigned to Y-hg J2a-L26.

A shake-up occurred in the north Caucasus after 4000 BC. As we know, this corresponds to the emergence of the Majkop phenomenon, catalysed by renewed migrations from the south. These were not ‘Uruk migrants’ as sometimes proposed - the Uruk phenomenon occurred several hundred years later and was a south Mesopotamian phenomenon. Instead, these newcomers emerge from southern Caucasus- north Mesopotamian ‘Late Chalcolithic’ groups. They brought with them multiple West Asian lineages, such as Y-hg T, L2, J2a-, J2b, G2. Over time they mixed with preceding north Caucasian Eneolithic groups, culminating in the Novosvobodnaja phenomenon.

The emergence of Majkop as a new socio-cultural complex broke down the previous system dominated by Y-hg R1b-V1636 clans. The Majkop sphere consisted of a ‘core’ of heterarchical chiefs buried in elaborate kurgans near the Mountains, and a dynamic northern ‘frontier’ in the steppe lands (as far as the lower Don) between 4000 and 3000 BC. At least 3 ‘‘Majkop periphery’ genetic groups can be defined; in fact all these groups can be termed ‘steppe Majkop’:

1- Group with western Siberian/ north central Asian ancestry (the ‘genetic steppe Majkop’ as defined in Wang et al, 2023)
2- The South Caucasian/north Iranian ‘Zolotarevka’ group
3- The R1b-M269 duo.

Regardless of their lineages and genomic affinities, these individuals were often buried in kurgans which over time formed groups. These were not continuations of pre-4000 BC kurgans, but the communities instead made a conscious choice to build new kurgans after 4000 BC, adding to the idea of discontinuity. But once built, these kurgan clusters continued to be developed for hundreds of years, into the Yamnaya period. This does imply ethnic homogeneity or continuity, just a ‘continuity of place’. Without a direct attestation of a phylogenetic ancestor, and guestimating from their (non-identical) genomic profile, we are left to speculate that Y-hg R1b-M269 individuals moved down from somewhere in the Volga-Don interfluve. Perhaps amongst groups utilizing Repin pottery, but if so, they did not continue its use in their new contexts. By 3000 BC, the Majkop system collapsed. Yamnaya groups and their ‘Catacomb’ descendants took control of the north Caucasus region, having benefitted from years of trade/ exchange and knowledge gathering. Whether Yamnaya actually descend from individuals like KST-1 or NV3003 remains to be seen, however these are the closest leads we have. Certainly, we can model Yamnaya as deriving from KST-1 (88%) + Dnieper_N (12%), but we should be cautious when using singular individuals as ‘sources’.

See also...

The PIE homeland controversy: December 2024 open thread

To get your Global25 coords, please use the app HERE. The whole process usually takes a couple of days. Feel free to spread the word.


Please don't order the Global25 unless you have experience in modeling Global25 data with the Vahaduo analysis tools.

Note that the conversion of VCF, BAM, CRAM and/or fastq files is 30 to 50€ extra depending on the case. For enquiries please email teepean47 on g25requests@gmail.com.

This quote, from a new paper at Nature, High-resolution genomic history of early medieval Europe by Speidel et al., is the most idiotic take on the ancestry of present-day Hungarians that I've ever read.

Present-day populations of Hungary do not appear to derive detectable ancestry from early medieval individuals from Longobard contexts, and are instead more similar to Scythian-related ancestry sources (Extended Data Fig. 6), consistent with the later impact of Avars, Magyars and other eastern groups.

In fact, present-day Hungarians are overwhelmingly derived from West Slavic and German peasants, showing only minor ancestry from early Magyars (or rather Hungarian Conquerors). So in terms of genetic ancestry they're basically typical East Central Europeans.

Scythians and Avars don't even deserve a mention in this context.

The reason that Speidel et al. found present-day Hungarians to be broadly similar to Scythians is because they used so called Hungarian Scythians in their analysis.

It's important to understand that these Hungarian Scythians are genetically fairly typical Central Europeans for their time, and, by and large, don't show any significant genetic relationship to Asian Scythians, Avars or early Magyars. So they're mostly either just acculturated Scythians or wrongly classified as Scythians by archeologists.

That is, the broad similarity that Speidel et al. found between present-day Hungarians and Hungarian Scythians derives from the fact that both of these populations are genetically Central Europeans, rather than the ridiculously false idea that they show strong genetic links to Avars, Hungarian Conquerors and other eastern groups.

Here's a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) of West Eurasian genetic variation, courtesy of the excellent Vahaduo:Global25 Views, that perfectly illustrates my point.

If Speidel et al. were correct about the genetic origin of present-day Hungarians, then the Hungarian_Modern and Hungary_Scythian samples would be shifted away from other Europeans, much like many of the Hungary_Avar and Hungary_Conqueror individuals. But that's obviously not the case, and instead they cluster strongly with, say, present-day Germans from Hamburg.

I emailed two of the authors of this paper, Leo Speidel and Pontus Skoglund, when they posted the preprint of the paper at bioRxiv to cordially discuss this issue (see here). But they totally ignored me.

Citation...

Speidel et al., High-resolution genomic history of early medieval Europe, Published online: 1 January 2025, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08275-2

It seems like we're getting close to the moment when Iosif Lazaridis has to finally admit that the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) homeland was located in Eastern Europe, and also that the ancestors of the Hittites and other Anatolian speakers entered Anatolia via the Balkans.

Let's discuss.


However, please note that comments from total morons, trolls and/or mentally unstable people will not be approved.

See also...

Indo-European crackpottery

I just emailed this to the authors of High-resolution genomic ancestry reveals mobility in early medieval Europe, a new preprint at bioRxiv [LINK].

I appreciate that Polish population history is not the main focus of your preprint, and also that you're constrained by the lack of relevant and suitably high quality ancient genomes from East-Central and Eastern Europe. However, I must say that your analysis of the Medieval Polish population and resulting conclusions about Polish population history don't reflect reality.

Your Poland_Middle_Ages genomic cluster is made up of just six samples that don't fully represent the genetic complexity of the core population of Medieval Poland.

As a result, you classified PCA0148 as one of the Poland_Middle_Ages outliers, even though this sample isn't an outlier when analyzed within the context of the full set of published Polish Medieval genomes.

Moreover, PCA0148 is very similar to several Polish Viking Age samples that show Scandinavian-specific genome-wide and Y-chromosome haplotypes, and probably likewise shows some Scandinavian-related ancestry.

This is important to note when attempting to recapitulate Polish population history, because it suggests that Scandinavian-related ancestry played a formative role in the shaping of the core Polish Medieval genetic cluster.

Thus, you might be correct when you claim that the six samples in your Poland_Middle_Ages cluster don't show any "detectable" Scandinavian-related ancestry, but this doesn't necessarily mean that this type of ancestry isn't a key part of the post-Iron Age Polish population history.

Below is a self-explanatory Principal Component Analysis (PCA) plot that illustrates my points. Interestingly, Figure 3c in your preprint shows very similar outcomes in regards to the post-Iron Age Polish population history. But the style and scale of your figure makes it difficult to spot the subtle but likely genuine Northwest European-related genetic shifts shown by PCA0148, the Viking context samples and present-day Poles relative to the Poland_Middle_Ages cluster.

However, I'm also skeptical that your Poland_Middle_Ages cluster doesn't carry any detectable or even significant Scandinavian-related ancestry. That's because I suspect that there might be some technical issues with your analysis that are masking this type of ancestry in the Polish samples.

Your top mixture model for the Poland_Middle_Ages cluster is, in all likelihood, an extreme statistical abstraction of reality, rather than a close reflection of it. That's because, due to a combination of historical, geographical and genetic factors, neither Italy.Imperial(I).SG nor Lithuania.IronRoman.SG are realistic formative source populations for the Medieval Polish gene pool.

One of the reasons why you ended up with such a surprising result is probably the lack of suitable samples from East-Central and Eastern Europe, especially those associated with plausibly the earliest Slavic-speaking populations.

It's also possible that basing your mixture model on formal statistics played a key part.

Formal statistics-based mixture models are known to be biased towards outcomes involving mixture sources from the extremes of mixture clines. If your analysis is affected by this problem, then this would help to explain why you characterized the Poland_Middle_Ages cluster as simply a two-way mixture between a Middle Eastern-related group from Imperial Rome and a Baltic population with a very high cut of European hunter-gatherer ancestry.

I do note that on page 6 of your manuscript you consider the possibility that the Southern European-related signal in the Poland_Middle_Ages cluster might only be very distantly related to Italy.Imperial(I).SG, and that it may even have spread across Poland with early Slavic speakers. This is a great point, and I think it should be emphasized and expanded upon, because I suspect that the problem runs deeper than this.

For instance, if the early Slavic ancestors of Poles carried substantially more Southern European-related ancestry than Lithuania.IronRoman.SG, and this ancestry was, say, more Balkan-related than Italian-related, then this might radically change your modeling of the Poland_Middle_Ages cluster. That's because these early Slavs would be positioned in a very different genetic space than Lithuania.IronRoman.SG, which could potentially require a significant signal of Scandinavian-related ancestry to get a robust mixture model.

Finally, it might be useful to consider Isolation-by-Distance as a partial vector for the Italy.Imperial(I).SG-related signal in Medieval Poland.

The full set of published Polish Medieval genomes includes a number of outliers with obvious ancestry from Western Europe and the Balkans. These people probably don't represent any large-scale migrations into Poland, but rather the movements of individuals and small groups. Over time, such small-scale mobility may have had a fairly significant impact on the genetic character of the Polish population.

Update 26/03/2024: I sent another email to Speidel et al., this time in regards to their analysis of present-day Hungarians.

Your preprint also claims that present-day Hungarians are genetically similar to Scythians, and that this is consistent with the arrival of Magyars, Avars and other eastern groups in this part of Europe.

However, present-day Hungarians are overwhelmingly derived from Slavic and German peasants from near Hungary. This is not a controversial claim on my part; it's backed up by historical sources and a wide range of genetic analyses.

Hungarians still show some minor ancestry from Hungarian Conquerors (early Magyars), but this signal only reliably shows up in large surveys of Y-chromosome samples.

The Scythians that you used to model the ancestry of present-day Hungarians are of local, Pannonian origin, and they don't show any eastern nomad ancestry. So they're either acculturated Scythians, or, more likely, wrongly classified as Scythians by archeologists.

And since these so-called Scythians lack eastern nomad ancestry, the similarity between them and present-day Hungarians is not a sign of the impact from Avars, Hungarian Conquerors and the like, but rather a lack of significant input from such groups in present-day Hungarians.

Citation...

Speidel et al., High-resolution genomic ancestry reveals mobility in early medieval Europe, bioRxiv, Posted March 19, 2024, doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.03.15.585102

See also...

Wielbark Goths were overwhelmingly of Scandinavian origin

A new preprint at bioRxiv by Kerdoncuff et al. makes the following, somewhat surprising, claim:

One of the individuals, referred to Sarazm_EN_1 (I4290) described above that was discovered with shell bangles showing affiliation with South Asia, has significant amount AHG-related ancestry, while a model without AHG-related ancestry provides the best fit for Sarazm_EN_2 (I4210) (Table S4.5).

First of all, the authors are actually referring to sample ID I4910 not I4210.

The aforementioned table, based on qpAdm output, shows that I4290 has 15.9% AHG-related ancestry and basically no Anatolian farmer-related ancestry. It also shows that I4910 has no AHG-related ancestry but 17.9% Anatolian farmer-related ancestry.

AHG stands for Andaman hunter-gatherer. The authors are using it as a proxy for South Asian hunter-gatherer ancestry.

However, I've looked at I4290 and I4910 in great detail over the years using ADMIXTURE, Principal Component Analysis (PCA), and qpAdm. And I'm quite certain that they do not show any obvious, above noise level South Asian ancestry. Indeed, I'd say that if they do have some minor South Asian ancestry, then I4910 probably has more of it than I4290.

Kerdoncuff et al. used the following "right pops" or outgroups: Ethiopia_4500BP.SG, WEHG, EEHG, ESHG, Dai.DG, Russia_Ust_Ishim_HG.DG, Iran_Mesolithic_BeltCave and Israel_Natufian.

This means they mixed data that were generated in very different ways (DG, SG and capture) and included some poor quality samples. For instance, the highest coverage version of Iran_Mesolithic_BeltCave offers just ~50K SNPs.

Mixing different types of data and relying on low coverage samples, even in part, often has negative consequences when using qpAdm. So I suspect that the above mentioned mixture results for I4290 are skewed by a poor choice of outgroups.

When I run qpAdm I try to stick to one type of data and avoid low quality singletons in the outgroups. This is the best qpAdm model that I can find for Sarazm_EN:

right pops:
Cameroon_SMA
Morocco_Iberomaurusian
Israel_Natufian
Levant_N
Iran_GanjDareh_N
Turkey_N
Russia_Karelia_HG
Russia_WestSiberia_HG
Mongolia_North_N
Brazil_LapaDoSanto_9600BP

Sarazm_EN
Kazakhstan_Botai_Eneolithic 0.113±0.017
Turkmenistan_C_Geoksyur_subset 0.887±0.017
P-value 0.06392

Sarazm_EN_1 (I4290)
Kazakhstan_Botai_Eneolithic 0.129±0.021
Turkmenistan_C_Geoksyur_subset 0.871±0.021
P-value 0.11019

Sarazm_EN_2 (I4910)
Kazakhstan_Botai_Eneolithic 0.104±0.021
Turkmenistan_C_Geoksyur_subset 0.896±0.021
P-value 0.07427

Also...

Sarazm_EN
Andaman_hunter-gatherer -0.018±0.020
Kazakhstan_Botai_Eneolithic 0.123±0.019
Turkmenistan_C_Geoksyur_subset 0.895±0.020
P-value 0.0298403
(Infeasible model)

Please note that Turkmenistan_C_Geoksyur_subset is made up of just three relatively high quality individuals: I8504, I12483 and I12487. That's because it's not possible to model the ancestry of Sarazm_EN using the full Geoksyur set, probably due to subtle genetic substructures within the latter.

Below is a PCA plot that, more or less, reflects my qpAdm model. I4290 and I4910 are sitting right next to each other in a cluster of ancient Central and Western Asians, and it's actually I4910 that is shifted slightly towards the South Asian pole of the PCA. Indeed, I can confidently say that there's no way to design a PCA in which I4290 is shifted significantly towards South Asia relative to I4910.

Citation...

Kerdoncuff et al., 50,000 years of Evolutionary History of India: Insights from ∼2,700 Whole Genome Sequences, bioRxiv, posted February 20, 2024, doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.02.15.580575

See also...

The Nalchik surprise

A comedy of errors

If, like Iosif Lazaridis, you subscribe to the idea that the Yamnaya people carry early Anatolian farmer-related admixture that spread into Eastern Europe via the Caucasus, then I've got great news for you.

We now have a human sample from the Eneolithic site of Nalchik in the North Caucasus, labeled NL122, that packs well over a quarter of this type of ancestry (see here). Below is a quick G25/Vahaduo model to illustrate the point (please note that Turkey_N = early Anatolian farmers).

Target: Nalchik_Eneolithic:NL122
Distance: 2.1934% / 0.02193447
60.8 Russia_Steppe_Eneolithic
26.2 Turkey_N
13.0 Georgia_Kotias

On the other hand, if, again like Iosif Lazaridis, you subscribe to the idea that the Indo-European language spread into Eastern Europe via the Caucasus in association with this early Anatolian farmer-related admixture, then I've got terrible news for you.

That's because NL122 is apparently dated to a whopping 5197-4850 BCE (see here). This dating might be somewhat bloated, possibly due to what's known as the reservoir effect, because the Nalchik archeological site is generally carbon dated to 4840–4820 BCE.

However, even with the younger dating, this would still mean that early Anatolian farmer-related ancestry arrived in the North Caucasus, and thus in Eastern Europe, around 4,800 BCE at the latest. That's surprisingly early, and just too early to be relevant to any sort of Indo-European expansion from a necessarily even earlier Proto-Indo-Anatolian homeland somewhere south of the Caucasus.

This means that NL122 effectively debunks Iosif Lazaridis' Indo-Anatolian hypothesis. Unless, that is, Iosif can provide evidence for a more convoluted scenario, in which there are at least two early Anatolian farmer-related expansions into Eastern Europe via the Caucasus, and the expansion relevant to the arrival of Indo-European speech came well after 5,000 BCE.

I haven't done any detailed analyses of NL122 with formal stats and qpAdm. But my G25/Vahaduo runs suggest that it might be possible to model the ancestry of the Yamnaya people with around 10% admixture from a population similar to NL122.

Target: Russia_Samara_EBA_Yamnaya
Distance: 3.4123% / 0.03412328
72.6 Russia_Progress_Eneolithic
18.2 Ukraine_N
9.2 Nalchik_Eneolithic

However, I don't subscribe to the idea that the Yamnaya people carry early Anatolian farmer-related admixture that spread into Eastern Europe via the Caucasus (on top of what is already found in Progress Eneolithic). Based on basic logic and a wide range of my own analyses, I believe that they acquired this type of ancestry from early European farmers, probably associated with the Trypillia culture. For instance...

Target: Russia_Samara_EBA_Yamnaya
Distance: 3.2481% / 0.03248061
80.2 Russia_Progress_Eneolithic
13.6 Ukraine_Neolithic
6.2 Ukraine_VertebaCave_MLTrypillia
0.0 Nalchik_Eneolithic

Another way to show this is with a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) that highlights a Yamnaya cline made up of the Yamnaya, Steppe Eneolithic and Ukraine Neolithic samples. As you can see, dear reader, there's no special relationship between the Yamnaya cline and Nalchik_Eneolithic. The Yamnaya samples, which are sitting near the eastern end of the Yamnaya cline, instead seem to show a subtle shift towards the Trypillian farmers.

Indeed, I also don't exactly understand the recent infatuation among many academics, especially Iosif Lazaridis and his colleagues, with trying to put the Proto-Indo-Anatolian homeland somewhere south of the Caucasus. Considering all of the available multidisciplinary data, I'd say it still makes perfect sense to put it in the Sredny Stog culture of the North Pontic steppe, in what is now Ukraine.

Please note that all of the G25 coordinates used in my models and the PCA are available HERE.

See also...

The Caucasus is a semipermeable barrier to gene flow

It's always amusing to see some random Jovan or Dimitar arguing online that Slavic speakers have been in the Balkans since at least the Neolithic.

Obviously, Slavic peoples only turned up in the Balkans during the early Middle Ages. It's just that their linguistic and genetic impact on the region was so profound that it may seem like they've been there forever.

A new paper at Cell by Olalde et al. makes this point well. See here.

That's not to say, however, that it's an ideal effort. The paper's qpAdm mixture models probably could've been more precise and realistic. Genes of the Ancients has a useful discussion on the topic here.

Interestingly, Olalde et al. admit that they can't detect much, if any, admixture from the Italian Peninsula in the Balkans, even in samples dating to the Roman period. And yet, this doesn't stop them from accepting that the Roman Empire had a massive cultural and demographic impact on the Balkans.

I also assume that, by extension, they don't deny that Latin was introduced into the Balkans from the Italian Peninsula.

That is, Latin spread into the Balkans without any noticeable genetic tracer dye, and it eventually gave rise to modern Romanian spoken by millions of people today in the eastern Balkans. This might be a useful data point to keep in mind when discussing the spread of Indo-European languages into Anatolia.

See also...

Dear Iosif, about that ~2%

The ancIBD method paper from the David Reich Lab was just published in Nature (open access here). It's a very useful effort, but the authors are still somewhat confused about the origin of the Corded Ware culture (CWC) population. From the paper (emphasis is mine):

This direct evidence that most Corded Ware ancestry must have genealogical links to people associated with Yamnaya culture spanning on the order of at most a few hundred years is inconsistent with the hypothesis that the Steppe-like ancestry in the Corded Ware primarily reflects an origin in as-of-now unsampled cultures genetically similar to the Yamnaya but related to them only a millennium earlier.

This is basically a straw man argument, because it's easy to debunk. So why put it in the paper? Well, as far as I can see, to make the idea that the CWC is derived from Yamnaya look more plausible.

This idea, that the CWC is an offshoot of Yamnaya, seems to be the favorite explanation for the appearance of the CWC among the scientists at the David Reich Lab.

However, I'd say they're facing a major problem with that, because the CWC and Yamnaya populations have largely different paternal origins. That is, CWC males mostly belong to Y-haplogroups R1a-M417 and R1b-L51, while Yamnaya males almost exclusively belong to Y-haplogroup R1b-Z2103.

Indeed, as far as I know, there are no reliable instances of R1a-M417 or R1b-L51 in any published or yet to be published Yamnaya samples.

But it is possible to reconcile the Y-haplogroup data with the ancIBD results if we assume that the peoples associated with the Corded Ware, Yamnaya and also Afanasievo cultures expanded from a genetically more diverse ancestral gene pool, each taking a specific subset of the variation with them.

This gene pool would've existed somewhere in Eastern Europe, probably at the western end of the Pontic-Caspian steppe, at most a few hundred years before the appearance of the earliest CWC burials in what is now Poland.

Moreover, the split between the CWC and Yamnaya populations need not have been a clean one, with long-range contacts and largely female-mediated mixing maintained for generations, adding to the already close genealogical links between them.

Citation...

Ringbauer, H., Huang, Y., Akbari, A. et al. Accurate detection of identity-by-descent segments in human ancient DNA. Nat Genet (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41588-023-01582-w

See also...

On the origin of the Corded Ware people

A few weeks ago bioRxiv published two preprints on the Seima-Turbino Phenomenon (see here and here).

I can't say much about these manuscripts until I see the relevant ancient DNA samples, and that might take some time.

However, for now, I will say that both preprints really need to emphasize the profound impact that the Sintashta-related early Indo-Iranian speakers had on the Seima-Turbino Phenomenon. This, of course, would require Wolfgang Haak and friends to pull their heads out of their behinds and admit that the proto-Indo-Iranian homeland was in Eastern Europe, not in Iran.

At the same time, it's likely that the Seima-Turbino Phenomenon originated deep in Siberia, and its inception was probably most closely associated with the West Siberian Hunter-Gatherer (WSHG) genetic component. It's important that the preprints emphasize this too.

Moreover, I can't see any convincing arguments in either preprint that the Seima-Turbino Phenomenon was mainly associated with proto-Uralic speakers, or even that it was an important vector for the spread of proto-Uralic. So there's not much point in forcing the Uralic angle on studies focused on the Seima-Turbino Phenomenon. Indeed, what we also need is an archaeogenetics paper dealing specifically with the proto-Uralic expansion.

Apart from that, I'd like to direct your attention to the fact that Musaeum Scythia has already written a fine blog post about these preprints:

Genomic insights into the Seima-Turbino Phenomenon

See also...

Finally, a proto-Uralic genome

The Uralic cline with kra001 - no projection this time

Slavs have little, if any, Scytho-Sarmatian ancestry

When used properly, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is an extraordinarily powerful tool and one of the best ways to study fine-scale genetic substructures within Europe.

The PCA plot below is based on Global25 data and focuses on the genetic relationship between Wielbark Goths and Medieval Poles, including from the Viking Age, in the context of present-day European genetic variation.


I'd say that it's a wonderfully self-explanatory plot, but here are some key observations:

- the Wielbark Goths (Poland_Wielbark_IA) and Medieval Poles (Poland_Middle_Ages) are two distinct populations

- moreover, the Wielbark Goths form a relatively compact Scandinavian-related cluster and must surely represent a homogenous population overwhelmingly of Scandinavian origin

- on the other hand, the Medieval Poles form a more extensive and heterogeneous cluster that overlaps with present-day groups all the way from Central Europe to the East Baltic, and that's because they are likely to be in large part of mixed origin

- I know for a fact that at least some of these early Poles harbor recent admixture, because their burials are similar to those of Vikings and their haplotypes have been shown to be partly of Scandinavian origin (see here)

- one of the Wielbark females is an obvious genetic outlier (Poland_Wielbark_IA_outlier), and basically looks like a first generation mixture between a Goth and a Balt.

Please note that the PCA is only based on relatively high quality genomes, so as not to confuse the picture with spurious results and noise. Also, all outliers with potentially significant ancestry from outside of Central, Eastern and Northern Europe were removed from the analysis. The relevant datasheet is available here.

However, sanity checks are always important when studying complex topics like fine-scale genetic ancestry. To that end I've prepared a graph based on f3-statistics of the form f3(X,Cameroon_SMA,Estonia_BA)/(X,Cameroon_SMA,Ireland_Megalithic), that reproduces the key features of my PCA. The relevant datasheet is available here.

Polish groups from the Middle Ages are marked with the MA suffix, while the Iron Age Wielbark Goths are marked with the IA suffix.

If you're wondering why I plotted the f3-statistics that I did, take a look at this (all groups largely of Scandinavian origin are emboldened):

f3(X,Estonia_BA,Cameroon_SMA)
Poland_Legowo_MA 0.226406
Poland_Ostrow_Lednicki_MA 0.225996
Poland_Plonsk_MA 0.225017
Poland_Trzciniec_Culture 0.224215
Poland_Lad_MA 0.224142
Poland_Viking 0.223838
Poland_Niemcza_MA 0.223659
Poland_Weklice_IA 0.223549
Poland_Kowalewko_IA 0.222584
Poland_Pruszcz_Gdanski_IA 0.222324
Sweden_Viking 0.222091
Russia_Viking 0.222042
Poland_Maslomecz_IA 0.221914
Norway_Viking 0.221825
Denmark_EarlyViking 0.221257
Denmark_Viking 0.221174
England_Viking 0.220979

f3(X,Ireland_Megalithic,Cameroon_SMA)
Poland_Maslomecz_IA 0.219816
Poland_Weklice_IA 0.219501
Denmark_Viking 0.2192
Poland_Kowalewko_IA 0.219176
Poland_Ostrow_Lednicki_MA 0.218916
Norway_Viking 0.218854
Poland_Pruszcz_Gdanski_IA 0.218684
Sweden_Viking 0.218626
Denmark_EarlyViking 0.218529
England_Viking 0.218308
Russia_Viking 0.217999
Poland_Viking 0.217914
Poland_Plonsk_MA 0.217756
Poland_Lad_MA 0.217719
Poland_Legowo_MA 0.21765
Poland_Niemcza_MA 0.217001
Poland_Trzciniec_Culture 0.216551

Interestingly, the Middle Bronze Age samples associated with the Trzciniec Culture (Poland_Trzciniec_Culture) show a closer genetic relationship to Medieval Poles than to Wielbark Goths or Northwestern Europeans. This is indeed the case both in terms of genome-wide and uniparental markers, including some very specific lineages under Y-chromosome haplogroup R1a.

But that's a much more complex issue that I'll leave for another time. So please stay tuned.

See also...

Slavs have little, if any, Scytho-Sarmatian ancestry

Here's an abstract of a new study from the David Reich Lab about ancient Slavs, titled "Genetic identification of Slavs in Migration Period Europe using an IBD sharing graph". Emphasis is mine:

Popular methods of genetic analysis relying on allele frequencies such as PCA, ADMIXTURE and qpAdm are not suitable for distinguishing many populations that were important historical actors in the Migration Period Europe. For instance, differentiating Slavic, Germanic, and Celtic people is very difficult relying on these methods, but very helpful for archaeologists given a large proportion of graves with no inventory and frequent adoption of a different culture. To overcome these problems, we applied a method based on autosomal haplotypes. Imputation of missing genotypes and phasing was performed according to a protocol by Rubinacci et al. (2021), and IBD inference was done for ancient Eurasian individuals with data available at >600,000 1240K sites. IBD links for a subset of these individuals were represented as a graph, visualized with a force-directed layout algorithm, and clusters in this graph are inferred with the Leiden algorithm. One of the clusters in the IBD graph emerged that includes nearly all individuals in the dataset annotated archaeologically as “Slavic”. According to PCA a hypothesis for the origin of this population can be proposed: it was formed by admixture of a Baltic-related group with East Germanic people and Sarmatians or Scythians. The individuals belonging to the “Slavic” IBD sharing cluster form a chronological gradient on the PCA plot, with the earliest samples close to the Baltic LBA/EIA group. Later “Slavic” individuals are shifted to the right, closer to Central and Southern Europeans and probably reflecting further admixture of Slavs with local populations during the Migration Period.

Apparently this abstract is causing a bit of confusion online because of the mention of possible Sarmatian or Scythian ancestry in Slavs.

However, it's important to understand that the authors are referring to certain Slavic or even just Slavic-related individuals, usually from culturally heterogeneous frontier settlements deep in what is now Russia.

So yes, it's possible that some of these individuals carry Sarmatian, Scythian or other exotic eastern ancestry. But even if this is true, then obviously we can't extend this inference to all ancient and modern-day Slavs.

Indeed, below is a G25/Vahaduo Principal Component Analysis (PCA) that shows why modern-day Slavic speakers can't be linked genetically to Sarmatians or Scythians. To experience a more detailed version of the PCA paste the data here into the relevant field here.

As you can see, dear reader, most of the Slavs (Belarusians, Poles, Ukrainians and many Russians) cluster with the Irish near the western end of the plot.

Some Russians are shifted significantly east of them along the "Uralic cline" and, as a result, they cluster with various Uralic speakers such as Mordovians. That's because when Slavs migrated deep into what is now northern Russia they mixed with Uralic speakers who were there before them.

Most of the Sarmatians and Scythians form a cluster southeast of the Slavs and Irish because they carry significant levels of East Asian ancestry. This type of eastern ancestry is basically missing in modern-day Slavs (see here).

Several of the Scythians cluster among the Slavs and Irish, but that's because they're genetic outliers, whose existence, if anything, suggests that some Scythians had significant Slavic-related and/or Irish-related ancestry.

Now, even though most of the Slavs do cluster with the Irish in the above PCA plot, I strongly disagree with the authors of the abstract when they claim that "differentiating Slavic, Germanic, and Celtic people is very difficult" with PCA. It's actually pretty damn easy and I've been doing it successfully for many years. For instance, see here.

See also...

Wielbark Goths were overwhelmingly of Scandinavian origin

The Caucasus is a semipermeable barrier to gene flow

The scientists at the David Reich Lab are a clever bunch. But they're not always on top of things, and this can be a problem.

For instance, they fail to understand that the Caucasus has effectively stymied human gene flow between Eastern Europe and West Asia through the ages. That is, the Caucasus is a semipermeable barrier to human gene flow.


Until they accept and understand this fact, they won't be able to accurately characterize the ancestry of the ancient human populations of the Pontic-Caspian (PC) steppe, including the Yamnaya people.

In turn, they also won't be able to locate the Indo-Anatolian homeland.

Now, the Caucasus isn't a barrier to gene flow because it's difficult to cross, and, indeed, many human populations have managed to cross it since the Upper Palaeolithic. As a result, the peoples of the North Caucasus are today genetically more similar to the populations of the Near East than Europe.

In fact, the clear genetic gap between most West Asian and Eastern European populations through the ages is actually caused by the extreme differentiation between the mountain ecology of the Caucasus and the steppe ecology of the PC steppe.

That is, the Caucasus is ecologically so different from the PC steppe that it has been practically impossible for human populations to make the transition from one to the other.

Indeed, it's important to understand that there's no reliable record of any prehistoric human population successfully making the transition from the mountain ecology to the steppe ecology in this part of the world.

In other words, contrary to claims by people like David Reich and David Anthony, there's no solid evidence of any significant prehistoric human migration from the Caucasus, or from south of the Caucasus, to Eastern Europe by hunter-gatherers, farmers or pastoralists.

But, you might ask, how on earth did the Yamnaya people get their significant Caucasus/Iranian-related admixture if not via a mass migration from the Caucasus and/or the Iranian Plateau, as is often argued by the above mentioned scholars and their many colleagues?

Well, obviously, the diffusion of alleles from one population to another can happen without migration. All that is needed is a contact zone between them.

The ancient DNA and archeological data currently available from the Caucasus and the PC steppe suggest to me that there was at least one such contact zone in this area bringing together the peoples of the mountain and steppe ecoregions. This allowed them to mix, probably gradually and over a long period of time, by and large without leaving their ecoregions.

Once the Caucasus alleles entered the steppe, they were spread around by local hunter-gatherers and pastoralists who were highly mobile and well adapted to the steppe ecology.

Someone should write a paper about this.

See also...

The Nalchik surprise

Understanding the Eneolithic steppe

Matters of geography

I'm totally serious when I say that this video is more objective, informative and accurate than any peer-reviewed paper published to date when it comes to the genetic origins of the Khvalynsk people.


However, that's not to say it's perfect. I think it misses some important details. See here...

The Caucasus is a semipermeable barrier to gene flow

Dear David, Nick, Iosif...let's set the record straight

Understanding the Eneolithic steppe

I've now had the chance to read and digest the following two papers in Science about the origin of Indo-European languages:

Language trees with sampled ancestors support a hybrid model for the origin of Indo-European languages, Heggarty et al.

The genetic history of the Southern Arc: A bridge between West Asia and Europe, Lazaridis, Alpaslan-Roodenberg et al.

The Heggarty et al. paper is pure fluff. It offers nothing useful or even remotely interesting.

For instance, the authors derive some Indo-European languages in Europe from Anatolian farmers and others from Caucasus hunter-gatherers (see here). This is not just exceedingly far fetched, but also obviously forced.

Wolfgang Haak and Johannes Krause, you should be deeply ashamed of yourselves.

I've already commented extensively about the Lazaridis, Alpaslan-Roodenberg et al. paper (for example, see here). But the one thing I need to add is that this paper is what it is due to the inherent bias of some of the lead authors to push the Indo-Anatolian homeland into West Asia. I won't even bother mentioning their names, because we all know who they are.

See also...

Crazy stuff

Dear David, Nick, Iosif...let's set the record straight

The story of R-V1636

In their recent paper, titled Early contact between late farming and pastoralist societies in southeastern Europe, Penske et al. make the following claim:

By contrast, Yamnaya Caucasus individuals from the southern steppe can be modelled as a two-way model of around 76% Steppe Eneolithic and 26% Caucasus Eneolithic/Maykop, confirming the findings of Lazaridis and colleagues 47. This two-way mix (40% + 60%, respectively) also provides a well-fit model (P = 0.09) for the Ozera outlier individual, consistent with the position in PCA and corroborating an influence from the Caucasus.

Err, nope.

The Ozera Yamnaya outlier, a female dated to 3096-2913 calBCE, is, in fact, a ~50/50 mix between standard Yamnaya and Late Maykop. It's a result that is totally unambiguous.

There are a number of ways to demonstrate this fact. For example, with the qpAdm software that was also used by Penske et al., except with different outgroups or right pops. Please note that in my dataset the Ozera outlier is labeled Ukraine_Ozera_EBA_Yamnaya_o.

right pops:
Cameroon_SMA
Levant_N
Iran_GanjDareh_N
Iran_C_SehGabi
Georgia_HG
Turkey_N
Serbia_IronGates_Mesolithic
Russia_WestSiberia_HG
Russia_Karelia_HG
Latvia_HG
Russia_Boisman_MN
Brazil_LapaDoSanto_9600BP

Ukraine_Ozera_EBA_Yamnaya_o
Russia_Caucasus_EneolithicMaykop 0.554±0.031
Russia_Steppe_Eneolithic 0.446±0.031
P-value 0.00109868 (FAIL)

Ukraine_Ozera_EBA_Yamnaya_o
Russia_LateMaykop 0.512±0.035
Russia_Samara_EBA_Yamnaya 0.488±0.035
P-value 0.462447 (PASS)

I can also do it with the Global25/Vahaduo method. And you, dear reader, can too, by putting the Target and Source Global25 coords from the text file here into the relevant fields here.

Target: Ukraine_Ozera_EBA_Yamnaya_o
Distance: 2.9292% / 0.02929202
50.6 Russia_Samara_EBA_Yamnaya
49.4 Russia_Caucasus_LateMaykop
0.0 Russia_Caucasus_EneolithicMaykop
0.0 Russia_Steppe_Eneolithic

Moreover, here's a self-explanatory Principal Component Analysis (PCA) plot that illustrates why my Late Maykop/Samara Yamnaya combo is much better than the reference populations used by Penske and colleagues. It was done with the PCA tools here. I'm pointing this out for two main reasons. First of all, this is a fairly obvious mistake that should've been avoided, especially considering the level of expertise and experience among the authors (such as Wolfgang Haak and Johannes Krause).

Secondly, it's important to understand that the Ozera outlier comes out almost exactly 50% Samara Yamnaya because the standard Yamnaya genotype already existed well before she was alive, and thus she cannot be used to corroborate any sort of influence from the Caucasus in the formation of the mainstream Yamnaya population.

As for the Yamnaya Caucasus individuals, I don't know why Penske et al. attempted to model their ancestry as a group, because they don't form a coherent genetic cluster. RK1001 and ZO2002 are fairly similar to standard Yamnaya samples, while RK1007 and SA6010 resemble Eneolithic steppe samples from the Progress burial site. This is what happens when I try to reproduce the Penske et al. model with my outgroups.

Russia_Caucasus_EBA_Yamnaya
Russia_Caucasus_EneolithicMaykop 0.187±0.019
Russia_Steppe_Eneolithic 0.813±0.019
P-value 4.15842e-06 (HARD FAIL)

Oh, and Penske et al. modeled the ancestry of mainstream Yamnaya as a three-way mixture with Steppe Eneolithic, Caucasus Eneolithic/Maykop and Ukraine Neolithic (or Ukraine N). They succeeded, but with my outgroups it's another hard fail.

Russia_Samara_EBA_Yamnaya
Russia_Caucasus_EneolithicMaykop 0.177±0.017
Russia_Steppe_Eneolithic 0.706±0.026
Ukraine_N 0.116±0.014
P-value 4.73919e-07 (HARD FAIL)

Admittedly, proximal models aren't easy to get right. And if you throw enough outgroups into a model, a large proportion of plausible models will fail. But I'm somewhat taken aback by these poor statistical fits.

In my opinion, mainstream Yamnaya doesn't harbor any Caucasus ancestry that wasn't already present on the Pontic-Caspian steppe during the Eneolithic or even much earlier (see here). But ultimately this problem can only be solved with direct evidence from ancient DNA, so let's now wait patiently for the right samples.

Citation...

Penske et al., Early contact between late farming and pastoralist societies in southeastern Europe, Nature, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06334-8

See also...

Understanding the Eneolithic steppe

I can't wait to get stuck into the data from the new Penske et al. paper. This is likely to be the main topic on this blog for the next few weeks, or perhaps even months.

Early contact between late farming and pastoralist societies in southeastern Europe

By the way, I think it's hilarious how the authors totally ignored the fact that the North Pontic region is located in Eastern Europe. Instead they used the term Eurasian steppes, suggesting that Western Steppe Herders (WSH) may have come not from Eastern Europe but from some part of Asia. Haha.

See also...

Dear Sandra, Wolfgang...we have a problem