The peopling of Europe

[laetoli]

I'm trying to tell the story of my ancestry. I've followed all my genealogical lines back to the 18th century but I've hit a brick wall on all of them (of course.) Now I'm trying to stretch them out into deeper time and I've been reading some journal articles and other literature about the peopling of Europe to go with my DNA test results. I am a complete novice and am struggling to resolve certain issues, so I could use some help, please.



There appears to be a major dichotomy: on the one hand, you have people saying that the British population is made up of three population groups - late glacial hunter-gatherers, neolithic farmers migrating from Anatolia and late neolithic/early bronze age migrants from the Pontic Steppe. On the other hand, some people maintain Britain is largely homogenous though reflecting substantial Saxon invasions, which did not include much ethnic cleansing.


Advocates of the former seem to follow Marija Gimbutas' Kurgan hypothesis as described by David Anthony in The Horse, The Wheel and Language and genetically by Jean Marco's Ancestral Journeys. Important papers supporting this account come from Allentoft et al - Population genomics of Bronze Age Eurasia (2015), Busby et al - A Cautionary Tale of Y Chromosome Lineage R-M269 (2011), Cassidy et al - Neolithic and Bronze Age migration to Ireland and establishment of the insular Atlantic genome (2015), Haak et al - Massive migration from the steppe is a source for Indo-European languages in Europe (2015) and Lazaridis et al - Ancient human genomes suggest three ancestral populations for present-day Europeans (2014). There also seems to be a lot of support for this account on this website and in this forum.


However, there does seem to be contradicting data or at least interpretation from several sources. The recent Celts exhibition at The British Museum disputed that there was such a people as the celts at all (which you would have thought rendered their exhibition pointless.) They quoted Leslie et al - The fine-scale genetic structure of the British population (2015) as failing to find the Celts. It seems to me that the study failed to find anything at all really. The authors seemed to ignore their own cladogram, which showed the three Welsh population subgroups on a separate lineage to the rest of mainland Britain. It also showed Northern England and Scotland on a separate line from Southern England. The paper didn't look at Irish DNA nor at ancient DNA and seemed (to me) to be perversely structured. It was however drawn from a very large modern population dataset.


Myres et al - A major Y-chromosome haplogroup R1b Holocene era founder effect in Central and Western Europe (2011). This paper attributes the spread of the y-chromosome haplogroup in Europe to the spread of the neolithic. I found this quite troubling and in direct contradiction to the aforementioned Busby et al paper. Myres' neolithic R1b story is supported by Balaresque et al - A Predominantly Neolithic Origin for European Paternal Lineages (2010). If R1b did spread through Europe in the Neolithic, how come most of us all speak Indo-European languages?



Archaeologist, Francis Pryor and the recent BBC TV program, The Celts, both fail to have much time for population replacement in the UK at least.


I recently got my DNA tested by DNAWorldwide, who ascribed a Beaker People source for my R1b-L21/DF21 y-chromosome. Are they wrong?

Thanks for taking the trouble to read my jumbled mutterings,
Paul

 

[sparkey]

There appears to be a major dichotomy: on the one hand, you have people saying that the British population is made up of three population groups - late glacial hunter-gatherers, neolithic farmers migrating from Anatolia and late neolithic/early bronze age migrants from the Pontic Steppe. On the other hand, some people maintain Britain is largely homogenous though reflecting substantial Saxon invasions, which did not include much ethnic cleansing.

There's no dichotomy here. Both native Britons and Anglo-Saxons were made up of the hunter-gatherer/farmer/steppe mix that is characteristic of European populations. Separating the genetic impact of the two populations has been a major challenge, largely because they were too alike.

However, there does seem to be contradicting data or at least interpretation from several sources. The recent Celts exhibition at The British Museum disputed that there was such a people as the celts at all (which you would have thought rendered their exhibition pointless.) They quoted Leslie et al - The fine-scale genetic structure of the British population (2015) as failing to find the Celts. It seems to me that the study failed to find anything at all really. The authors seemed to ignore their own cladogram, which showed the three Welsh population subgroups on a separate lineage to the rest of mainland Britain. It also showed Northern England and Scotland on a separate line from Southern England. The paper didn't look at Irish DNA nor at ancient DNA and seemed (to me) to be perversely structured. It was however drawn from a very large modern population dataset.

"Failing to find the Celts" is a somewhat misleading way to say that there's no uniformity in Celtic genetics, and indeed there was almost certainly more variety within all Celtic peoples than there was between certain Celtic peoples and certain other populations.

Your observations that there are local patterns, like in Wales, that could be used to distinguish certain ancient Celtic groups is correct, and IMHO more helpful than declaring that the Celts can't be found.

Myres et al - A major Y-chromosome haplogroup R1b Holocene era founder effect in Central and Western Europe (2011). This paper attributes the spread of the y-chromosome haplogroup in Europe to the spread of the neolithic. I found this quite troubling and in direct contradiction to the aforementioned Busby et al paper. Myres' neolithic R1b story is supported by Balaresque et al - A Predominantly Neolithic Origin for European Paternal Lineages (2010). If R1b did spread through Europe in the Neolithic, how come most of us all speak Indo-European languages?

I don't think that the Neolithic farmer = R1b theory holds much ground in light of recent discoveries. Look for ancient DNA tests that have been taken since 2011--an eternity ago in this field.

 

[RobertColumbia]

...I don't think that the Neolithic farmer = R1b theory holds much ground in light of recent discoveries. Look for ancient DNA tests that have been taken since 2011--an eternity ago in this field.

Yes. The older theory was that R1b men were mostly speakers of Basque (or a closely related language) and were Indo-Europeanized (or Celticized) by PIE-speaking R1a men in the Bronze Age, leaving only a small community of Basque-speakers in remote communities. The average age of R1b in Western Europe has been significantly shortened since 2010 or so.