Angela, I just viewed thing diagonal, correct me if I'm wrong.
I see Paschou et al compare modern populations and don't use ancient DNA
according to Dienekes it proposes that the Neolithic followed an island-hopping migration into Europe
IMO correlations among modern populations in the Levant and Cyprus/Greece could be due to arrival of the Minoans and early bronze age expansions (Y-DNA J2)
there is no mention of a non-PPB southwestern Anatolia population (G2a2, F*, C-V20 ?), maybe this is extinct in Anatolia now but it would have made a better fit with early neolithic Hungary?
Yes, that's right, it's based on modern populations. If you take a look at the Supplementary Info it explains the methodology and modeling. I found it to be very impressive. Of course, ancient dna would be better.
I think they were basically trying to determine which of three possible routes for the Neolithic correlate with European genetic variation.
http://www.pnas.org/lens/pnas/111/25/9211
"The Neolithic farmers could have taken three migration routes to Europe. One was by land to North-Eastern Anatolia and from there, through Bosporus and the Dardanelles, to Thrace and the Balkans (
14,
15). A second route was a maritime route from the Aegean Anatolian coast to the Mediterranean islands and the coast of Southern Europe (
12,
14–
18). The third was from the Levantine coast to the Aegean islands and Greece (
19). Navigation across the Mediterranean was active during the Early Neolithic and Upper Paleolithic (
16–
18) as illustrated by the finding of obsidian from the island of Milos in Paleolithic sites of the Greek mainland (
19,
20) and the early colonization of Sardinia, Corsica, and Cyprus (
18,
21–
23). If a maritime route was used by the Neolithic farmers who settled Europe, their first stepping stones into Europe were the islands of Dodecanese and Crete. The Dodecanese is very close to the Aegean coast of Anatolia, whereas the west-most Dodecanesean islands are very close to Crete. Crete hosts one of the oldest Neolithic settlements of Europe in the site of Knossos, established ∼8,500–9,000 y BPE (
24,
25), and the inhabitants of the island established the first advanced European civilization starting approximately 5,000 BPE."
Their modeling purports to show that a maritime route was used, with an embarkation point somewhere around the Syria/Anatolia border from what I can gather. The next stop seems to be Anatolia. (Their samples were taken from around Cappadoccia in order to incorporate as much of Anatolia as possible, perhaps?) So, would the southwestern part of Anatolia be much different?
As for G2a, most of the EEF farmers were G2a, as you know, and the others so far are one E-V13 lineage and some I2a and I1 incorporated lineages. So, wouldn't it make sense that the earliest farmers who set sail around the coast of Anatolia and into the island stepping stones were also G2a? One could speculate that by the time of the move to Europe the G2a and E-V13, if one thinks the Natufians carried this lineage, (something of which I'm not sure) could already have been mixed, or, perhaps one could speculate that the E-V13 people picked up G2a as they rounded the Anatolian coast. I think we need ancient DNA to answer these kinds of questions. I do think that the ancient dna will show that subsequent expansions by J1 and J2, both perhaps during the Copper and Bronze Age, overwhelmed the G2a
and E-V13 lineages, while not changing the autosomal signature to the same extent.
You probably have already read these, but perhaps others haven't yet seen them.
This is Dienekes' take on the paper on ancient mtDna from Crete. (The link to the actual paper can be found there.)
http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2013/05/mtdna-from-minoan-crete-hughey-et-al.html
You can see how the "Hungarian" mtDna differs from the others. Did that group have "N" mtdna as well, and do they cluster differently because of the fact that they have it but most other early European sites (and modern areas) do not?
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-IfZnfTnes-o/UZJ-mw1j9AI/AAAAAAAAIyo/0PXUc3LlVzk/s1600/ncomms2871-f6.jpg
This is the paper positing that Cretan mtDna is very similar to overall European mtDNA:
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v4/n5/full/ncomms2871.html
This is the paper on ancient Middle Eastern mtDna which purports to show the same island trail into Europe:
http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1004401
This one shows the strong relationship between the mtDna of Lebanon and that of Europe:
http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2013/01/y-chromosome-and-mtdna-study-of-modern.html
Of course, given the leaks from Reich et al, it remains to be seen whether all this "Near Eastern" mtDna entered Europe solely through the south east, or whether some of it came from the Caucasus/Turkmenistan direction by way of the steppe.
In that regard, I just recently came across this article about the spread of the Neolithic to the Transcaucasus:
On the trail of Neolithic mice and men towards the transcaucasia:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bij.12004/fu
Unfortunately, most of the paper is behind a paywall, but the abstract is pretty clear, and there's this nice graphic from it:
If someone has access to this paper I'd love to know what c,d and m mean. Interestingly, the trail starts near Syria according to the authors.
Everything I know from archaeology seems to support the Paschou et al analysis that the first "outposts" of the Neolithic were often in the islands, and earlier than we see them on the Anatolian coast near the Bosporous. Is that your understanding as well?
This is a paper that charts the Neolithic trail toward India by means of carbon dating and archaeology. Table 1 in the supplement has dates by site for most of the Neolithic sites in the Near East from 10,000 BCE to 3800 BCE.
The Near Eastern Routes of the Neolithic in South Asia
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4012948/
It's helpful in showing all the Neolithic settlements, actually.
It's also true that there was gene flow into Crete from Anatolia post the Neolithic in the Bronze Age, and from there on into southern Europe, (and there are the Sea Peoples incursions to consider) and like you I think this might have been how some J2a made it into Europe, although the J2a sample found in central Europe leaves open the possibility, or perhaps even the probability that some of it entered Europe directly from the steppes.
However, the way I look at it, these people would still have been majority "EEF" or "ENF" if you prefer, so not all that different from the first farmers. The difference would have been their minority ANE component, which was also coming into Europe via another route. The SSA that made it into the Levant was not yet present probably. That the trail they followed was the same as that followed by the first farmers shouldn't be all that surprising should it? The wind and water currents in the Mediterranean hadn't changed, and sea travel was easier than overland slogging in many cases. Even in the Roman Era, with all the roads they built, it was still faster to travel by water. So, it's just a doubling down to me, in a way, of a certain ancestry that had long been present in these places.
In general terms, in Europe, unlike in more complicated places like the Indian subcontinent, it seems to me that all migrations after the Neolithic are made up of the three basic ancestral components in slightly different proportions, and some routes are used again and again from the time of the obsidian trade to the Iron Age and into the modern era...island hopping or coastal travel along the northern Mediterranean coast, across the steppe, or up major rivers like the Danube, the Rhone etc.
Perhaps most importantly, the trail doesn't stop in Crete, but continues on into the rest of Europe, while the J2a trail generally does not.
On balance, I find their conclusions pretty sound, but I'm certainly willing to be persuaded otherwise.
