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Northwest Europeans didn't exist during his time. He didn't have a combination of Neolithic, western hunter gatherer and indo European that all northwestern Europeans have.
I am completely aware that Scotland is not a genetic unit unto itself. Hence why I put "Scottish" in quotes. Northwestern Europeans, on the other hand, are their own genetic grouping, with many subgroups therein of course.
The main point of confusion for me is the fact that the mtDNA results for the Megalithic peoples are incredibly mixed and have a very high frequency of H, which one might expect to be accompanied by on the of Indo-European haplogroups, as well as J, K, and U, which are to be expected from Neolithic farmers. On this website, for example, the only directly referenced tests and diggings in regard to the Megalithic peoples were that done with female subjects, and I just want to pinpoint the source of all this talk I hear of the studies on the ancient males.
That's really a risk, no doubt about that... unless we have literally dozens and dozens of different ancient DNA samples to analyze and make sure that we're not dealing with a clear outlier and what the average genetic makeup of that ancient population was like. That's precisely what scientists have already done to describe ANF and EEF people genetically.My point was not that northwestern Europeans would have more of an effect, but that the individual sources for our knowledge, like the sample from the Siberian man, might well have had, as a random example, 20% of their ancestors coming from northwestern Europe. Thus it makes sense that he is related to people from a region to far from him: he is not just descended from one group alone.
For example, it's kind of like having a man who is 75% European and 25% African and saying that Europeans have 25% autosomal similarity with Africans as a result.
So I've done some looking, and I've found that the finding at Saint-Jean-et-Saint-Paul of G2a individuals is one of the strongest sources for the concept of G2a and the megaliths. This is interesting to me because this seems to fall within the borderland of influence between Atlantic Megalithic and Cardium Pottery, which was undoubtably G2a in the north. Was this perhaps why there seems to be some hesitancy on making firm conclusions about the Megalithic people - because this was a bit of a debatable area?
I'm not going to use this as an excuse to dismiss claims against the original point of this post, but I would like to know others' opinions if they have them.
Were there to be some equal-sized finding deep within the Atlantic Megalithic sphere of influence, I would have to make a more major reconsideration, and if such a thing exists, I'd like to know of it, if anyone is willing to share information.
Why do you think H would be necessarily expected to be accompanied by one of the Indo-European-related haplogroup subclades? H is literally dozens of thousands of years earlier as a haplogroup than any of the specifically IE-related subclades (e.g. not R1b, not R1a as a whole, but R1b-Z2103, R1b-L51 etc.), and H is in fact very common throughout all of Europe and also found in high frequency (~20%) even in the Near East and North Africa. Early European farmers not only did come from Anatolia and the Aegean region (Southeast Europe), but also had absorbed WHG along the way as they colonized the rest of the continent. They would've carried a lot of H too. I'm pretty sure H was just too old and too widespread to be anything, unless you mean some very specific downstream subclades of H (even subclades like H1 and H3 are too old and expansive to be Indo-European-like).
I am completely aware that Scotland is not a genetic unit unto itself. Hence why I put "Scottish" in quotes. Northwestern Europeans, on the other hand, are their own genetic grouping, with many subgroups therein of course.
As for the comment on Mexicans and Spaniards, I was implying that the two have ~50% continuity of lineage between them. So, using sample of Mexican DNA, one might then create a "Mexican" autosomal grouping and find, to their great surprise, that Spaniards are 50% Mexican, or 25% Mesoamerican.
That's really a risk, no doubt about that... unless we have literally dozens and dozens of different ancient DNA samples to analyze and make sure that we're not dealing with a clear outlier and what the average genetic makeup of that ancient population was like. That's precisely what scientists have already done to describe ANF and EEF people genetically.
In the specific case you're talking about, we know that he did not have "20% of his ancestors coming from northwestern Europe" because we fortunately also have Mesolithic DNA from Northwestern European individuals - and they were not nearly as much related to that Siberian man as present-day Northwestern Europeans, and from their genetic data we can try to fit them as a people related to a possible source of ancestry to that Siberian mammoth hunter, but the thing is that it doesn't work, the results will clearly show that there was no (non-negligible) gene flow from Mesolithic Northwestern Europeans into Siberian people at that time, and that the ANE affinity in Northwestern Europeans came later.
No, I'm pretty sure that would not happen at all, because if you ran the results of Spaniards comparing them to that "Mexican" autosomal admixture based on Mexican individuals you would never ever get "50% Mexican" or "25% Mesoamerican", simply because the Mexican autosomal admixture, having ~50% Amerindian components not found in Spaniards, would not be a good fit at all, the error margins would be too high and indicate there's something wrong in using Mexican admixture as a proxy for ancient ancestry in Spaniards. For Spaniards to be reliably modeled as "50% Mexican", they'd have to have some 20-25% of Amerindian ancestry too, which they don't. At best what an expert geneticist would find out is that the Mexican autosomal admixture does not fit the Spaniard samples, but that admixture does have a high ancestral affinity with that different genetic structure found in Spaniards. And they would be totally right: the Mexican admixture would have strong affinities to the Spaniard one, but it was different enough to be confidently demonstrated as not being a source of ancestry into the Spaniard admixture.
What about all the I2a, which was regularly found in areas associated with Megalithism and we know it became a very important Early European Farmer lineage in the Late Neolithic after the "WHG revival"? It's not like there is a "G2a or R1b" situation here. It in fact looks likely to me that the Atlantic Megalithic was an autosomally EEF population with I2 as its main Y-DNA haplogroup, but of course also other less prevalent ones.
For your comments on the Siberian man himself, I'd have to investigate that further myself to really come to understand how thoroughly he differs from northwestern Europeans. I do have my doubts. For instance, parts of Britannia are more than 60% "Northwest European" as well as being a large percent many other things, so it seems almost a necessity to have a good degree of overlap with the Siberian man, whose similarity is at at 30-40% throughout Britannia. And seeing as R1b is so strong in Tataria, I would not strike out the potential for early mixture in Siberia from that source.
Well, I have finished my latest research expedition and have changed my mind completely.
I was of the assumption when I first posted this that the issue of the Megalithic Culture was one of G2a or R1b. To my mind, the former was impossible, and I still believe it to likely not be the case.
However, upon seeing the findings of I2 among samples from this culture, with none from R1b, I have come to the conclusion that this was indeed dominant.
This also solves my own personal mystery of why I2b is so prominent in the lowlands of Scotland and Ulster and why I2a is as strong as it is in Iberia.
It also makes sense in regard to other predominantly I2 civilizations, as the Sardinian Nuragics too had megaliths and it would seem that this might be a common theme.
Anyway, I've done my research, compared results, spent a while thinking, and have some to this conclusion at last.
I still disagree with the notion that G2a was most prominent among the megalith builders, as it is not as prominent as I2 and certainly not prominent enough in samples west of the Rhone in my own opinion.
That said, I think I'll leave it here, admittedly embarrassed but still firm in my original rejection of the G2a hypothesis.
I'm at least glad that I learned as much as I did from putting my hypothesis forward and learning about all the evidence against it.
You're mixing things up. You can't compare proportions calculated on the basis of ancient admixtures (in the case of that "Siberian man", a Paleolithic one from ~20-25 kya) with a Northwestern European admixture that is based on the genetic architecture of present-day people inhabiting Northwest Europe nowadays, in our contemporary era. Those are totally different things and are not necessarily directly correlated. Northwest European is the final outcome of thousands of years of admixture events, it's like an umbrella term that includes a bit of everything, including ANE-derived ancestry, and then underwent its own genetic drift, making it slightly distinctive in relation to other European admixtures. That "chronological mess" in your analysis is probably what's leading you to wrong impressions about this issue. You're deducing that a Northwest European admixture in the present-day sense, referring to the modern Europeans, already existed somewhere even thousands of years ago, but, no, probably no ancient population had an admixture even similar to that of Northwest Europeans now. This is like a "new race" if you wish. Northwest European in Neolithic and, even more strongly, in Mesolithic times would refer to a completely different population structure, which does not exist nowadays because it's been heavily diluted among other ancestries.
I'm glad you reached your own rational conclusions and was willing to rethink and improve on your previous ideas, with no fears to change them as you learned about new information and evidences. That's nice to read.![]()
My main disagreement is that R1b is incredibly dense along the coast, and that the people to whom it belongs have not changed so drastically, as "northwest Europeans" or any group for that matter, have not evolved a whole lot recently.
Thus I would think that Britannia being 40% Neolithic farmer would be incredibly unlikely, if not impossible. There would be very little room whatsoever for other groups to exist which do exist in force in that region.
And on a phenotypic level, let us remember that light eyes are generally a recessive trait and to be 40% descending from a near 100% dark-eyed people would be nigh-impossible for a 70-80% light-eyed region.
I still think you're mixing some things up. When genetic calculators estimate British to be ~40% EEF that does not mean that ~40% of their direct ancestors were pre-IE Neolithic farmers. It's a genetic admixture, not a coherent ethnic group per se. People's ethnicity and culture are not transmitted through it, especially if you consider how common female exogamy, conquest (assimilating the remnant population) and migration was back then. The Bell Beaker people who probably brought lighter hair/eye features and IE languages to Britain was already heavily admixed with EEF (even the Late PIE peoples in Yamnaya already had at least ~10% EEF-related ancestry, Bell Beaker had much more than that), so they themselves contributed to that ~40% EEF proportion, they didn't need to be non-IE Neolithic farmers to do that. Also, the Bell Beakers had a lot of EHG-derived ancestry that may have contributed to their graduall increasing rate of blondism. None of those factors depend on Neolithic Northwestern Europeans having mostly light eyes (well, they, the WHG, did, but their admixture became a definite minority by the mid/late Neolithic) and light hair unlike the EEF.
Also, on a phenotypic level, I think you're overlooking some details of this story. Lighter hair/eye are a combination of features that were not found in high frequency simply anywhere before the Late Neolithic/Copper Age era. This phenotype is the result of, firstly, a massive migration from people who already had a higher frequency of those traits (Central European BB), as well as a gradual but definite positive selection for those traits in Northern Europe in the last ~6000 years, and genetic drift.
We know that the pre-IE EEF (rich in haplogroups like G2a, T1a and I2) and even, in a tiny minority, their Anatolian Farmer (ANF) forebears did have those genes for blue eyes and blonde hair. Those genes just had to slowly but firmly rise in frequency along hundreds of generations. It's not that difficult. It'd be improbable (but not nigh impossible, because there has been later massive introgression into the local EEF population) if that people did not have those mutations to be selected for in the first place.
The first culture where light hair + light eye are predicted to have existed in high frequency was actually one that was mostly Early Europen Farmer (EEF) autosomally - that was Globular Amphora Culture -, so it's totally possible and even probable that a largely EEF population may have undergone strong positive selection (and maybe some random genetic drift too) for light eyes and light hair along the milennia.
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