East Baltic DNA Coming Soon

arvistro

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From Eurogenes:
http://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2016/08/eaa-2016-abstracts.html
Recent studies of ancient genomes have revealed two large-scale prehistoric population movements into Europe after the initial settlement by modern humans: A first expansion from the Near East that brought agricultural practices, also known as the Neolithic revolution; and a second migration from the East that was seen in a genetic component related to the Yamnaya pastoralists of the Pontic Steppe, which appears in Central Europe in people of the Late Neolithic Corded Ware and has been present in Europeans since then in a decreasing North-East to South-West gradient. This migration has been proposed to be the source of the majority of today’s Indo-European languages within Europe.

In this paper we aim to show how these processes affected the Eastern Baltic region where the archeological record shows a drastically different picture than Central and Southern Europe. While agricultural subsistence strategies were commonplace in most of the latter by the Middle Neolithic, ceramic-producing hunter-gatherer cultures still persisted in the Eastern Baltic up until around 4000 BP and only adopted domesticated plants and animals at a late stage after which they disappeared into the widespread Corded Ware culture.

We present the results of ancient DNA analyses of 81 individuals from the territory of today’s Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia that span from the Mesolithic to Bronze Age. Through study of the uniparentally inherited mtDNA and Y-chromosome as well as positions across the entire genome that are informative about ancient ancestry we reveal the dynamics of prehistoric population continuity and change within this understudied region and how they are reflected in today’s Baltic populations.

Mittnik et al., A genetic perspective on population dynamics of the pre-historic Eastern Baltic region, EAA 2016 presentation, TH4-11 Abstract 06

Conference is end of August.
 
So, anyone in for good speculation?
"While agricultural subsistence strategies were commonplace in most of the latter by the Middle Neolithic, ceramic-producing hunter-gatherer cultures still persisted in the Eastern Baltic up until around 4000 BP and only adopted domesticated plants and animals at a late stage after which they disappeared into the widespread Corded Ware culture."
Apparently I can read this that farming appeared in Baltics just before IEs? "at a late stage after which they disappeared into the widespread Corded Ware"

"We present the results of ancient DNA analyses of 81 individuals from the territory of today’s Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia that span from the Mesolithic to Bronze Age. Through study of the uniparentally inherited mtDNA and Y-chromosome as well as positions across the entire genome"
So, I will be very conservative in my guesses
Mesolithic: in Baltics either WHG or EHG. The WHG ones would be mostly I1 or I2. The EHG ones would be R1a extinct clades. Js are also possible, since they were captured in Karelia. Did N1c arrive to Baltic back then? There was N1c in Belarus 4000 years ago, so yes, it is possible to catch some now extinct N1c in Baltics too.
Just before Bronze Age: if farming managed to get there before CW, then maybe some I2.
Bronze Age: standard R1a Corded Ware people. But perhaps early ones (Battle Axe) did not carry modern Balto-Slavic lines.

In bigger lines I see Baltics (Lat, Lit, Est) as a genetic sink or more like a screen where electrons from different sides arrive and leave their print.
 
So, anyone in for good speculation?
"While agricultural subsistence strategies were commonplace in most of the latter by the Middle Neolithic, ceramic-producing hunter-gatherer cultures still persisted in the Eastern Baltic up until around 4000 BP and only adopted domesticated plants and animals at a late stage after which they disappeared into the widespread Corded Ware culture."
Apparently I can read this that farming appeared in Baltics just before IEs? "at a late stage after which they disappeared into the widespread Corded Ware"

"We present the results of ancient DNA analyses of 81 individuals from the territory of today’s Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia that span from the Mesolithic to Bronze Age. Through study of the uniparentally inherited mtDNA and Y-chromosome as well as positions across the entire genome"
So, I will be very conservative in my guesses
Mesolithic: in Baltics either WHG or EHG. The WHG ones would be mostly I1 or I2. The EHG ones would be R1a extinct clades. Js are also possible, since they were captured in Karelia. Did N1c arrive to Baltic back then? There was N1c in Belarus 4000 years ago, so yes, it is possible to catch some now extinct N1c in Baltics too.
Just before Bronze Age: if farming managed to get there before CW, then maybe some I2.
Bronze Age: standard R1a Corded Ware people. But perhaps early ones (Battle Axe) did not carry modern Balto-Slavic lines.

In bigger lines I see Baltics (Lat, Lit, Est) as a genetic sink or more like a screen where electrons from different sides arrive and leave their print.
I agree to all your speculation, except that HGs haplogroups not necessarily went extinct. We've seen it many times, they passed their haplos to farmers.

Can't wait for this 81 genomes!
 
I agree to all your speculation, except that HGs haplogroups not necessarily went extinct. We've seen it many times, they passed their haplos to farmers.

Can't wait for this 81 genomes!
Extinct in modern Baltic, because modern Baltic States (Balts + Estonia) are R1a lines brought in by Corded Ware, and N1c lines (in Latvia, Lithuania from clade born 600 BCE; in Estonia more subclades) brought in most likely after 1000 BCE by Net Ware or related phenomenon. That would cover for 80%+ of our Y.
The rest is
I1 - most likely Scandinavian or offshoots of Scandinavian branch, peaks in former Liivi territories in Latvia and Estonia. So, comes from Germanic substrate in Baltic Finns.
I2 - most likely of Slavic clades. Present near Slavic borders. Unlikely from local Baltic hunters.
R1b - unlikely from local Baltic hunters.
..that would be it.

If someone survived then in very little frequencies.
 
I'm sure some of the specifics are more well known to you than to me, but I'm not sure if they mean farming arrived right before Corded Ware or through Corded Ware.

If right before Corded Ware, are there indications in the archaeology of a movement from, say, northern Germany or southern Scandinavia right around that time?

I tried to see if I could quickly locate something in the literature but I couldn't find much, or much that was really recent.

You might want to take a look at this if you haven't seen it:
https://books.google.com/books?id=R...olithic first appear in the Baltics?&f=false
 
There's also a EEA abstract about Estonian mtDNA.
Mitochondrial DNA Analysis of Human Remains from Estonia – Insights and Challenges
"Here we reconstructed the complete mitochondrial DNA of 20 individuals from different archaeological sites of Estonia
covering the timespan from the Late Mesolithic to the Late Neolithic. By determining the haplogroups of the individuals, we show
that the typical European hunter-gatherer maternal lineages are represented exclusively in all individuals from all sites until the
Middle Neolithic. From the Late Neolithic on we see the inclusion of haplogroups that are linked to the Neolithic farming cultures
in Central and South Eastern Europe. The results indicate a late arrival of people genetically associated to other early European
farmers in Estonia with the Corded Ware culture."

The abstract with ancient genomes from the East Baltic didn't directly say anything about what they learned but the wording they used in their abstract gives clues to what they learned. Below is its second paragraph.

In this paper we aim to show how these processes affected the Eastern Baltic region where the archeological record shows a drastically different picture than Central and Southern Europe. While agricultural subsistence strategies were commonplace in most of the latter by the Middle Neolithic, ceramic-producing hunter-gatherer cultures still persisted in the Eastern Baltic up until around 4000 BP and only adopted domesticated plants and animals at a late stage after which they disappeared into the widespread Corded Ware culture.

They're stating archaeological fact here, however if they found that Middle Neolithic hunter gatherers in Estonia were largely of farmer decent I doubt they would put so much emphasis on this archaeological fact. Combined with the insights from the abstract about ancient Estonian mtDNA, we should expect WHG/EHG people living in the East Baltic till Corded Ware arrived.

Allentoft 2015 sampled a genome from a Corded Ware male from Estonia. He had R1a Y DNA and mtDNA H5a. In terms of genome-wide affinity he was the same as GErman Corded Ware except he had extra Middle Neolithic farmer admixture. I saw him modeled using one method as 80% German Corded Ware, 14% Middle Neolithic farmer, 3% WHG, and 3% SHG. Using the same model Lithuanians come out as 55% German Corded Ware, 20% Middle Neolithic farmer, and 25% SHG. When SHG is removed Lithuanians come out as 70% German Corded Ware, 11% Middle Neolithic Farmer, and 19% WHG.

That method was oracles in an ADMIXTURE test which give much higher WHG levels than D-Stats. Both models agree though that there's excess WHG/SHG in Balts, that can't be explained by Middle Neolithic farmers. There could have been a series of migration into the East Baltic from the South after Corded Ware. I think it is immature to view them as a Corded Ware and hunter gatherer. However I do think the hunter gatherer s of the East Baltic did contribute ancestry to them.

Saami(based on one indvidual from Finland) so far are the most hunter gatherer shifted EUropeans known. The hunter gatherers of NOrthEast Europe, who survived intact till 4,0000 years ago, definitly didn't go completly extinct. However they were certainly mostly replaced by Corded Ware-like newcomers from the South.
 
The processes leading to the peopling of northern Europe in the Bronze Age give quite a muddled picture still. The elephant in the room, of course, are the hunter gatherers that preceded Corded Ware who seem to have been comparatively diverse. One sample that immediately comes to mind is the Stora Förvar forager that already carried a significant amount of West-Asian-like ancestry and was situated in the right place & time to have affected both the Baltics and Scandinavia. With the Sami and by extension the Finns who seem to be relatively unaffected by the farmers and later Balto-Slavic and and Germanic migrations from the south we have good candidates for rough modern day descendants of the aforementioned hunter-forager cultures. What complicates the study of these populations however is the increasingly common practice of cremation in northern Europe from Ertebølle onwards, spreading south as well as east and persisting within the same framework of material culture well into historic times.

The other riddle is Corded Ware itself: how significant was the demic impact of the initial wave of Corded Ware migrants relative to the local foragers and what did the populations of northern Europe look like before the arrival of the Balto-Slavs and the Germanics from the south? Also - albeit being more contentious - what was the socio-linguistic landscape of far northern Europe like after initial arrival of Corded Ware? This essentially mirrors the conundrum encountered in Britain and Ireland, where a relatively recent language from Central Europe was established as the only language of isles even though the genetic ancestors of the modern day inhabitants were already present more than a thousand years before the arrival of the Celts.
 
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@MarkoZ,

Finns are very affected by Neolithic European farmers geneticaly. All estimates I've seen model them as at least 30%. Finns and Saami have decent from Northern hunter gatherers but it's important to remeber it represents a minority of their ancestry. Most of the European hunter gatherer ancestry in Northern Europeans arrived with people like Corded Ware from the south.

aDNA from Sweden has demonstrated that the local hunter gatherers left a very small imprint on n modern inhabitants and that the Neolithic farmers were mostly replaced by newcomers from Central Europe during the Late Neolithic/Bronze age. It'll be more or less the same for the East Baltic except there'll be more local hunter gatherer ancestry than Sweden.
 
@MarkoZ,

Finns are very affected by Neolithic European farmers geneticaly. All estimates I've seen model them as at least 30%. Finns and Saami have decent from Northern hunter gatherers but it's important to remeber it represents a minority of their ancestry. Most of the European hunter gatherer ancestry in Northern Europeans arrived with people like Corded Ware from the south.

aDNA from Sweden has demonstrated that the local hunter gatherers left a very small imprint on n modern inhabitants and that the Neolithic farmers were mostly replaced by newcomers from Central Europe during the Late Neolithic/Bronze age. It'll be more or less the same for the East Baltic except there'll be more local hunter gatherer ancestry than Sweden.

Unless you have data about the relative population sizes, this is mere speculation. Unfortunately for us, the forager cultures developed cremation at the crucial point in time. We do know however that both the West Asian and something related to MA1 was already present in Scandinavia.
 
Unless you have data about the relative population sizes, this is mere speculation. Unfortunately for us, the forager cultures developed cremation at the crucial point in time. We do know however that both the West Asian and something related to MA1 was already present in Scandinavia.

Population size and archaeology are irrelevant. DNA doesn't lie. We know from DNA that a huge chunk of the ancestry of modern day Finns and Balts is from Neolithic Anatolia. There was no West Asian ancestry in Northern Europe before the Neolithic. There was MA1-related ancestry but 90% of MA1-related ancestry in modern Northern Europeans is from Corded Ware-like people. The similarity between Corded Ware and present day Finns and Balts can only be explained by Balts and Finns being of mostly Corded Ware/Corded Ware-like decent.
 
Population size and archaeology are irrelevant. DNA doesn't lie. We know from DNA that a huge chunk of the ancestry of modern day Finns and Balts is from Neolithic Anatolia. There was no West Asian ancestry in Northern Europe before the Neolithic. There was MA1-related ancestry but 90% of MA1-related ancestry in modern Northern Europeans is from Corded Ware-like people. The similarity between Corded Ware and present day Finns and Balts can only be explained by Balts and Finns being of mostly Corded Ware/Corded Ware-like decent.

The mesolithic Stora Förvar 11 definitely has the West Asian component.

You don't really seem to understand that Northern and Eastern Europe belonged to the same Epi-Gravettian techno-cultural complex and boasted populations that were very similar to each other. Surely you'll admit that the Sami could not have come from Corded Ware?

At least you already conceded the possibility of a Corded-Ware-like descent!
 
I'm sure some of the specifics are more well known to you than to me, but I'm not sure if they mean farming arrived right before Corded Ware or through Corded Ware.

If right before Corded Ware, are there indications in the archaeology of a movement from, say, northern Germany or southern Scandinavia right around that time?

I tried to see if I could quickly locate something in the literature but I couldn't find much, or much that was really recent.

You might want to take a look at this if you haven't seen it:
https://books.google.com/books?id=R...olithic first appear in the Baltics?&f=false
Another abstract from same conference mentions Funnel Beaker pottery in Baltics. But I do not know. Could as well be some farmer groups retreated into Baltics at time of IE expansion:
TH4-06 Abstract 03
Neolithic Cultural Encounters in the Territory of the South Lithuania (4200-2000 BC)
"Archaeological material of Dubičiai, Nemunas, Narva and maybe Comb-Ware cultures also pottery of Funnel Beakers, Globular Amphora, Corded Ware cultures was found in this territory"
 
The mesolithic Stora Förvar 11 definitely has the West Asian component.

You don't really seem to understand that Northern and Eastern Europe belonged to the same Epi-Gravettian techno-cultural complex and boasted populations that were very similar to each other. Surely you'll admit that the Sami could not have come from Corded Ware?

At least you already conceded the possibility of a Corded-Ware-like descent!
Saami actually have quite decent affinity to Yamna. Among best in Europe. I remember being surprised how they were among top matches.
That is unless memory fails me.

Anyway Balts of today have extra WHG and EEF to compare with known CW, even with CW from Baltics.
Maybe CW from Middle Dnieper had those, and it replaced CW in Baltics later. Without dna is hard to tell due to continuity vs non-continuity disputes, in our science there are arguments for everything :)
 
Look at this presentation, too
TH4-07 Abstract 07
Deconstructing the conception of pre-Neolithic farming in SE Baltic
This paper is a critical evaluation of zooarchaeological, macrobotanical, palynological and archaeological data and their earlier interpretation in Lithuania, which served as the basis for constructing the concept of pre-Neolithic or Subneolithic low intensity agriculture and/or animal husbandry in the Eastern Baltic region. (..) According to the latest research, the substantial part of, or even the whole of the earlier “evidence“ was wrongly forged because of the mistakes in the identification of plant and animal species and imprecise dating. The mistakes in dating were largely due to the ignored fresh water reservoir effect when dating bulk samples of lacustrine sediments, unrecognition of the impacts of bioturbation and palimpsest on the formation of the archaeological strata, and low attention paid to stratigraphic and spatial documentation during very extensive excavations carried out in the second half of the 20th century. So far, there is no reliable evidence that domestic plants and animals were adopted in Lithuania prior to the appearance of the Globular Amphora and Corded Ware cultures in 3200/2700 cal BC.
 
@MarkoZ,

I'm not making claims about percentages of ancestry from actual Corded Ware people, I am only referring to Corded Ware-like people. There's no easy way to distinguish Corded Ware ancestry from other EEF/WHG/Steppe hyprids of Late Neolithic Central Europe. They're all made up of the same ancestral components just at slightly differnt proportions. But there's definitly plenty of legitmate Corded Ware ancestry in Europe. A Corded Ware genome from Sweden for example belonged to a R1a subclade that is only popular in Scandinavia today.
 
I'm sure some of the specifics are more well known to you than to me, but I'm not sure if they mean farming arrived right before Corded Ware or through Corded Ware.

If right before Corded Ware, are there indications in the archaeology of a movement from, say, northern Germany or southern Scandinavia right around that time?

I tried to see if I could quickly locate something in the literature but I couldn't find much, or much that was really recent.

You might want to take a look at this if you haven't seen it:
https://books.google.com/books?id=R...olithic first appear in the Baltics?&f=false

there is something strange with TRB and megalithic dolmen burrials
dolmen burrials didn't exist in early or middle TRB, it suddenly appeared in late TRB
as if there was some elite intrusion from outside

this text suggests TRB arrived very late in the eastern Baltic
'after about 4000 BC' may actually be almost 3000 BC
I guess these dolmens are hard to date
 
Allentoft 2015 sampled a genome from a Corded Ware male from Estonia. He had R1a Y DNA and mtDNA H5a.

Where do you get this information? When I look at the table in Allentoft et altri supplementary material, they say that RISE00 from Estonia is female and I cannot find any other samples from Estonia.

RISE00.jpg
 
The processes leading to the peopling of northern Europe in the Bronze Age give quite a muddled picture still. The elephant in the room, of course, are the hunter gatherers that preceded Corded Ware who seem to have been comparatively diverse. One sample that immediately comes to mind is the Stora Förvar forager that already carried a significant amount of West-Asian-like ancestry and was situated in the right place & time to have affected both the Baltics and Scandinavia. With the Sami and by extension the Finns who seem to be relatively unaffected by the farmers and later Balto-Slavic and and Germanic migrations from the south we have good candidates for rough modern day descendants of the aforementioned hunter-forager cultures. What complicates the study of these populations however is the increasingly common practice of cremation in northern Europe from Ertebølle onwards, spreading south as well as east and persisting within the same framework of material culture well into historic times.

The other riddle is Corded Ware itself: how significant was the demic impact of the initial wave of Corded Ware migrants relative to the local foragers and what did the populations of northern Europe look like before the arrival of the Balto-Slavs and the Germanics from the south? Also - albeit being more contentious - what was the socio-linguistic landscape of far northern Europe like after initial arrival of Corded Ware? This essentially mirrors the conundrum encountered in Britain and Ireland, where a relatively recent language from Central Europe was established as the only language of isles even though the genetic ancestors of the modern day inhabitants were already present more than a thousand years before the arrival of the Celts.

Uralic is the last language to hit the Baltic shores so you can start adjusting your speculations based on that fact.
 

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