Very interesting: "both individuals fall within the range of modern variability found in populations from the Amur Basin, the geographic region where Devil’s Gate is located (Fig. 1), and which is today inhabited by speakers from a single language family (Tungusic). This result contrasts with observations in western Eurasia, where, because of a number of major intervening migration waves, hunter-gatherers of a similar age fall outside modern genetic variation.... The Ulchi, traditionally fishermen who live geographically very close to Devil’s Gate and are the only Tungusic-speaking population from the Amur Basin sampled in Russia (all other Tungusic speakers in our panel are from China), are genetically the most similar population in our panel. . The Ulchi, traditionally fishermen who live geographically very close to Devil’s Gate and are the only Tungusic-speaking population from the Amur Basin sampled in Russia (all other Tungusic speakers in our panel are from China), are genetically the most similar population in our panel."
The Han, on the other hand, don't show such affinities. I'm not surprised. I think the Han are the most genetically and culturally "farmer" population on earth.
"No previously published ancient genome shows marked genetic affinity to Devil’s Gate: The top 50 populations in our outgroup f3 statistic were all modern, an expected result given that all other ancient genomes are either geographically or temporally very distant from Devil’s Gate. Among these ancient genomes, the closest to Devil’s Gate are those from Steppe populations dating from the Bronze Age onward and Mesolithic hunter-gatherers from Europe, but these genomes are no closer to the Devil’s Gate genomes than to genomes of modern populations from the same regions (for example, Tuvinian, Kalmyk, Russian, or Finnish). The two ancient genomes geographically closest to Devil’s Gate, Ust’-Ishim (~45 ka) and Mal’ta (MA1, 24 ka), also do not show high genetic affinity, probably because they both date to a much earlier time period."
Also, on the phenotype front:
"DevilsGate1 likely had brown eyes (rs12913832 on HERC2; GP, 0.905) and, where it could be determined, had pigmentation-associated variants that are common in East Asia (see section S11) (32). She appears to have at least one copy of the derived mutation on the EDAR gene, encoding the Ectodysplasin A receptor (rs3827760; GP, 0.865), which gives increased odds of straight, thick hair (33), as well as shovel-shaped incisors (34). She almost certainly lacked the most common Eurasian mutation for lactose tolerance (rs4988235, LCT gene; GP > 0.999) (35) and was unlikely to have suffered from alcohol flush (rs671, ALDH2 gene; GP, 0.847) (36). Thus, at least with regard to those phenotypic traits for which the genetic basis is known, there also seems to have been some degree of phenotypic continuity in this region for the last 7.7 ky."