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Neolithic Refuge and Continuity in Transylvania

Paleo, asking directly for your take and opinion.

I vouch for a V13 origin in Southern Carpathians, they migrated/invaded during LBA South mainly, North, East and occasionally West but mostly focused on South/East due to better prospects and richer plunder regions.

I think it matches with Psenicevo being a southern extension of Insula Banului and Babadag being an eastern extension, and many other spinoffs like Belegis II as well. Stamped-Ware occasionally switched to inhumation in lower tumuli but the Belegis II related practiced mostly cremations exhibited by historical Dacians and Mysians and Triballi who largely cremated their death.

It might be Eastern Rhodopes or Northern Carpathians, but for me Southern Carpathians and Haemus Mons makes sense.

I've said before the Danube bent is not a center of anything, nor is there in archeology a record of a cultural complex being centered there. If southern Carpathians were proto-Thracian then the entire Transylvania was. If another people lived north of the southern Carpathians (Transylvania I suppose) who were they and who uprooted them? It's very hard to uproot a people from such a location. brumi implies Thracians just moved there, reality does not work that way. One does just invade a mountainous area and replace the local population. Illyrian J2b proves that, where they established on of the most stable y-haplogroup presence for almost three thousand years, despite the nearby regions experiencing constant turnovers.

I am convinced a high EEF population recovery from Transylvania and adjacent regions. And from there they expand in all directions, but mostly southward and south-east. The Babadag are Thracian-like plus local IE admixture from the Ukranian plain. Dacians as a bulk will likely be like I18832, while some frontier Dacians being like the Vekerzug. The Himera's are likely from Ukraine/norther Moldova.

All E-V13s were originally south Thracian like, you can see the Babadag plot like I18832 but they are actually a bit different in profile. And always refer back to the Germanic IBD clusters, at the end of the day all Daco-Thracians will form a joint cluster. I even wen through the trouble to plot them on PCA. I think these samples when mapped represent the ethnic frontier of the profiles future samples will provide. The new Babadag samples arlready fall under this very same zone and cline.

 
I wanted to clarify one misconception being thrown in internet

This is the Illyricum province

1280px-Illyricum_SPQR.png



And this is the Praetorian Prefectum of Illyricum

Prefecture_of_Illyricum_map.png




I think it should have been short-lived in general since Byzantine Empire included everything under its wing.

And it was not formed by proper Romans but ironically by sons of Constantine the Great who from first hand record we know he was Moesian-Thracian paternally. Julian the Apostle emperor of Western Roman Empire in his letter specifically mentions his Thracian ancestry and that his father and Constantine's father were brothers.
 
Since I think visualisations and maps help to understand patterns, here is a map which is strictly based on ancient DNA samples available to us up to this point - I used all samples which date to before 1.000 AD and marked two additional samples/one cluster of samples which come from around 1.000 AD, since they underscore the general trend for Z5018.

Europe-Google1-E-V13-main-branches.jpg


Note where the main branches do in fact overlap the most in the current ancient DNA record: Along the Hungarian-Serbian Danube.
Of course, that's also due to the testing intensity, South Eastern Hungary is one of the best tested regions in ancient DNA world, but keep in mind that we still have a solid number of ancient DNA samples from other regions as well, and while we find Z5018 there, we don't find the other branches any more.
At the same time, we don't find Z5018 in the more Southern regions any more. So there is a pretty hard stop in both directions: The Southern and Central branches don't cross the Upper Tisza, the Northern Z5018 branche doesn't cross into the Balkans (early).

The main Daco-Thracian/E-V13 communication route, along which all 3 main branches seem to have spread, is clearly the Danube. Z5018 moved down towards the Serbian Danube, BY5022 moved along the Danube-Tisza up to Eastern Hungary. This points to exchange in both directions along this main river, just like expected from the archaeological record (Dacians moved into Bulgaria, Thracian influences were felt up to the Upper Danube).

What we can also see is how the main South Thracian branch of E-BY5022 expanded into two directions: West (along the Danube) and East (up to Moldova-Ukraine).

Z5018 clearly spread North, more than all the other branches, into South Eastern Poland-Czechia-Slovakia and Ukraine from Transcarpathia outward.

With better sampling, surely splinters will appear here and there, since there was, quite obviously, some exchange in all directions between the E-V13 blocks and potentially even mixed colonisation events, of various branches combined, but my expectation is that the bulk of the respective branches will continue to follow that pattern, by and large.

It is also pretty obvious that Z5018 and Z5017 have a much stronger overlap, as do BY5022 and PH1246, showing the early split of North (Dacian) vs. South Thracians.
 
I wonder if upcoming the Kristianson paper will have some borrowed samples from Transylvania, that would be a nice gift. I had an idea about Vatin lately, I wonder if their cremation right is due from exposure to E-V13. Could Vatin represent the Yamnaya branch that tried to colonize Transylvania? They ultimately failed and were expelled. Such movement towards the northern Carpathians would explain the parallel Slavic branches of R-Y18959.

 
We basically have 3 big players: Vucedol Cotofeni and Kisapostag.
Northern Vucedol was likely similar to Maros I guess, Cotofeni the most EEF people and Kisapostag the WHG-rich.
The Yamnaya branches are most likely in the Vucedol group.
All three Blocks interacted, like Nyírség had
I Vucedol influences. But the even stronger tradition from Vucedol I would see in Vatin.

I had similar thoughts since cremation spread to both Kisapostag and Vucedol descendants, presumably due to the mixture with local groups from Baden-Cotofeni etc.
 
I came across an interesting fact. The Thracian Hallstatt individual was found beside rather Southern European haplogroups. One of them being:
UKR005 Kartal Thracian Hallstatt 900-700 BC G-PF3239 [Z6476+, Z6492+]
The other being https://discover.familytreedna.com/y-dna/C-PH428/tree or alternatively
C-F15182
And now we get confirmed that the Bilsk lineage was E-L618.
What this pattern has in common is a diversity we find in Greece, in the Helladic periods. Now we do know based on the modern phylogeny that the main E-V13 Bronze into Iron Age population had none of these haplogroups among it. Not even E-L618, because there is no parallel founder event in those branches.
So what this suggests to me, instead, is that this might be the first evidence we got for South Thracians of Post-Psenichevo having mixed with some sort of an Aegean, Para-Greek, Pre-Greek or Early Greek population. Probably its not just in the mtDNA, but the yDNA also.
This is just an idea and it might be wrong, but I find the overlap of diversity of the Helladic sampels and what we got from the South Thracian zone of expansion remarkable. It doesn't look like its going to be local, but rather that it was brought there from the South.
Remember, that the main expansion into South Moldova-Southern Western Ukraine (not Northern!) was coming from the Southern Thracian core population, from a population like Kapitan Andreevo and dominated by E-BY5022:

Europe-Google1-E-V13-main-branches.jpg


That makes it possible that they did pick some other haplogroups up in the South, representing the earlier inhabitants of the regions of Bulgaria-Northern Greece, and that those became part of the Psenichevo-Babadag population - but not the main/remaining E-V13 population to their North-North West (dominated by Z5018/Z5017).
Since the South Thracian population was overall not as successful, with fewer big, surviving founder events which dominate moderns, its also more likely that minor lineages present among them didn't make it at all.
I did notice before, when seeing the E-L618 and a couple of other lineages in Cretans, that I thought they were swept down by the Greeks, rather. Like they might have lived in Bulgaria-Northern Greece before, but were pushed-taken with South. Now we might have evidence of them being pushed, taken with - by South Thracians - North/North East also.
This could indeed be the first hint for a major mix of incoming South Thracians (dominated by groups like E-BY5022 and E-PH1246) having mixed with a local, even more EEF-shifted population.
https://discover.familytreedna.com/y-dna/G-PF3239/tree was found in Kydonia, Greece, and has modern Greek members, plus it expanded into Croatia.
By the looks of it, it is a Mycenaean Greek lineage. Amazingly, from the same site on Crete a branch member of this G lineage is from, we get E-L618 from as well, its the site of Kydonia.
That's the branch of E-L618 found in Kydonia:
It split from the branch leading to E-V13 about 7.000 years BC, just like the Varna branch: https://discover.familytreedna.com/y-dna/E-BY28614/tree
On the Bilsk individuals:
Pribislav
UKR089 & UKR090 & UKR091; 500-300 BC; Bilsk hillfort, Poltava, Ukraine; Scythian_IA; E-L618>Y271618
I couldn't find anything about this branch. On YFull it exists without any samples: https://www.yfull.com/tree/E-Y271618/
Coudln't even find it on FTDNA?

Anyway, we already found R-Z93 individuals in the midst of the South Thracians before, now it looks like they got Southern C and a Mycenaean G branch too in their ranks. I guess the South Thracians might turn out to be more mixed, with other haplogroups of Southern origin, than initially anticipated. Considering that even their biggest branch of E-BY5022, which was very widespread in the Iron Age, is not super big in moderns, many small lineages might have gone extinct.
This further strengthens the idea of a Northern origin of E-V13 population as a whole and the remaining core being more isolated from this Southern Thracians overall. Because we have many big founder events postdating Channelled Ware/Stamped Pottery for the Northern groups, but no parallel haplogroup branch of importance, suggesting they were remaining nearly fully E-V13 or at least more than 90 % so.

Therefore my new best prediction, based on the currently available data, is that the South Thracians will turn out to be more heavily mixed with a population related to Mycenaean Greeks and this population element will show up not just in the autosomals and mtDNA, but also in the yDNA variation. Contrary to that, the Northern main branches of E-V13 will be in a population with little to no other haplogroups being present.
What this also suggests is that the Thracian Hallstatt population from Bilsk was the result of a direct South to North migration, from the already formed South Thracian groups, because they seem to have brought those lineages with them, after having mixed in the South.
 
There was a discussion in an Albanian channel and a Kosovo archaeologist Milot Berisha mentioned that Dardania during VII-XI century is quite blank due to the dark ages, and he mentioned that (saying that: we have informations that) the population of Dardania moved initially southwards toward Thessaloniki and Chalcidice and then West toward Albanian mountains, the haplogroup he associated with it is E-V13.
 
There was a discussion in an Albanian channel and a Kosovo archaeologist Milot Berisha mentioned that Dardania during VII-XI century is quite blank due to the dark ages, and he mentioned that (saying that: we have informations that) the population of Dardania moved initially southwards toward Thessaloniki and Chalcidice and then West toward Albanian mountains, the haplogroup he associated with it is E-V13.

Interesting, I think the E-V13 is pure speculation on his part because they heard from groups like rrenjet which associate E-V13 with Dardania. What he is describing is the Glasinac conquest/expansion and subsequent defeat. Dardanians did initially move towards Thesaloniki(refer to Hammonds detailed reconstruction of events). Cimmerians with Thracians intervene, or the Bassarabi, which Riverman says were also Cimmerian led. This event struck a heavy blow and the Dardani did retreat to Albania and regrouped in western Kosovo.

In Iron Age Macedonia, the earliest sample is Thracian in profile, right in the middle of the country on the Vardar River. Next samples are two Illyrian profiles(dates range during Illyrian reign 750-600 BC), they are I think admixed with local Paeonian, but have a clear Illyrian input(their WHG mixture is higher than Cinamak).

There is no doubt the Kamenica samples from 750 BC are same wave as these Dardanians, and we know from leaks they were dominated by R-BY250.
 
Just to explain it a bit, I don't think that Basarabi people were actually led by ethnic Cimmerians necessarily, but they kind of adopted a lot from the Cimmerians, after having been defeated and when they had to reorganise themselves. Like you even see that many lowland settlements were destroyed or given up.
Basically, the very successful strategy of the LBA-EIA the Channelled Ware people had adopted, with the slashing Naue II swords, larger shields, long lances with casted spearheads etc. didn't work against the Cimmerians. This kind of caused the whole sphere to call everything into question, their worldview was shattered.

What they did was therefore to rebuild themselves from scratch, to adopt the most useful innovations from the newcomers, and even change their rituals and beliefs for a time - as long as the Cimmerians were the dominant force in the region.

This was an ongoing process, and as soon as they had re-established themselves, the Scythians came in and the whole game started anew, which created the Daco-Thracian adaptions of Sanislau group of Vekerzug and Ferigile, which again started to copy and adopt Scythian customs which they deemed useful.

Basically the Daco-Thracians were in a constant boom - bust cycle, with the next steppe invasion causing a bust, but at the same time forcing them to adopt new customs, re-inventing themselves to survive and outliving the invaders (ever since Yamnaya).

How the Cimmerian core group around Mezocsat, where there was a real Cimmerian elite, but even there they were a small minority in a sea of Kyjatice-Gáva people, did interact with Basarabi is an interesting question. They surely did, because like I said many of their settlements were raided or burnt to the ground and at the same time innovations and new customs came in, but I'm not really sure. Probably in a similar way as Slavs and Avars, just more independent? I don't know for sure.

Genetically, the actual Cimmerians were pretty rare, in any case, even much rarer than Yamnaya or Scythians later. But they were there, individuals at least, in the Alföld, in the Mezocsat group.
 
Just saw the interview on twitter, it is only two minutes. The full interview is here, which I have yet to watch.

But in the two minute interview, I can tell you he is hallucinating, he links this Illyrian migration to an exodus, which is untrue. And he believes this is the origin of Cam Albanians and all Albanians in general. They migrated toward Thesaloniki, had to retreat to modern Albania(and probably Epirus) and eventually circled back to Kosovo. That is why he thinks these people had to have been E-V13.

This is pretty common mindset, they personalize everything. No different than rrenjet.
 
Just saw most of the interview. Milot is talking about 6th century AD not BC. He even refers to gjergj bojaxhi, so that's how he links E-V13 with Dardania. There are no ancient samples for this conclusions, just some guy personalizing a theory that was aired on TV(bojaxhi) to his own haplogroup.
 
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Haplogroups changed from preprint.

DuYKBNB.png



No E-V13 in Romania, a big increase in E-V13 in Sarmatian Hungary, I think this paper has 8 new ones? But more importantly this paper claims there are 11 E-V13s in Iron Age Carpathian Basin. It has to be from unpublished data, is the upcoming Iron Age Transylvania paper a Hungarian project as well?

Note that E-V13 is almost equal to R-L51 in the Sarmatian period.


88ClQbU.png
 
There are 3 published E-V13s from the IA Carpathian basin, that leaves 8 mystery ones. The number is coincidentally the same as the one I backed into the presentation by Fox's graph in Belgrade.


J2b is also extremely high in BA and IA. Where are these samples from?

Edit: They have a strange definition of Carpathian Basin, these are the mystery samples.
71WuNwQ.png
 
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Interesting, I think the E-V13 is pure speculation on his part because they heard from groups like rrenjet which associate E-V13 with Dardania. What he is describing is the Glasinac conquest/expansion and subsequent defeat. Dardanians did initially move towards Thesaloniki(refer to Hammonds detailed reconstruction of events). Cimmerians with Thracians intervene, or the Bassarabi, which Riverman says were also Cimmerian led. This event struck a heavy blow and the Dardani did retreat to Albania and regrouped in western Kosovo.

In Iron Age Macedonia, the earliest sample is Thracian in profile, right in the middle of the country on the Vardar River. Next samples are two Illyrian profiles(dates range during Illyrian reign 750-600 BC), they are I think admixed with local Paeonian, but have a clear Illyrian input(their WHG mixture is higher than Cinamak).

There is no doubt the Kamenica samples from 750 BC are same wave as these Dardanians, and we know from leaks they were dominated by R-BY250.

That's A.D not B.C. And we shall see about Dardanians, i don't think Cinamak samples are Dardanian proper at all. Doesn't match archaeological material culture to be properly defined as Dardanian proper. It is disputed yet what Dardanians were, arguably the name Dardani appears consistently among Geto-Mysian world yet completely absent among Illyrians proper with the name Dardani getting from Gava-Medias/Belegis people.
 
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By the way, we got better assignments for the Ukrainian paper



The Thracian Hallstatt E-V13 (UKR007) can be, probably, assigned to:


This looks decisively like a Southern/Central/Eastern Thracian branch, similar to E-BY5022 and E-PH1246. It is very notable for having one of the earliest V13 splits in Sardinians and is generally well-represented around the Mediterranean. Being also found in Naissus sample from Antiquity.

I wouldn't wonder if it was a Babadag branch, rather, because while rather Southern and Eastern, probably not as much as E-BY5022, like closer to the Danube and bleeding into the East Mediterranean, probably.

The Hellenistic era UKR152 is FGC44169>S7461>BY5022>FGC57496>pre-FGC68920
Very clearly a South Thracian descendant: https://discover.familytreedna.com/y-dna/E-FGC57496/tree

UKR102 from Chernyakhіv_LIA - Cheranyakhiv is clearly Dacian influenced, no doubt about that, is downstream of E-Z5017: V13>Z1057>CTS1273>BY3880>Z5017>Y18556

For E-Z5017, this branch has a rather Southern distribution overall, it has at least one major Vlach subclade, but is very widespread. It very clearly has branches which spread within the Greco-Roman sphere, like E-FGC71980.

Also worth to pointing out: It left no big impression on the Slavic sphere, unlike some big Z5018 branches did.

Looking at these three samples with a good downstream assignment, and the only Sarmatian era one with a usable downstream assignment, up to this point its just one, it is amazing that even that late, like in the historical period of Central-Eastern Europe, the majority of samples we get are still decisively Southern oriented (South Thracian and Southern-Central branches).

The big players of Z5017 and Z5018 we still mostly know from later samples and from areas to the North of the Danube, especially true for the main Z5018 branches. Cremation bias must be considered, since the Dacians were the most strict about cremation throughout all times, but still its remarkable. Even from already rather Northern areas, we primarily get Southern lineages.

I think this will completely shift with the samples from Transylvania. Completely so.
 
rafc With the confirmation that the haplogroups are correct, we can delve a bit deeper in the Sarmatian V13s.

-DSZ 3 and 5 are related. They are from an Early Sarmatian cemetery in North-East Slovakia (correction North East Hungary). Unfortunately they are not carbon dated, but two other samples from the cemetery were carbon dated to 20-150CE. Only one of the V13s is included in the ancestry table, he has high WHG, and nearly no Sarmatian admixture. I suspect he will look like the Sarmatian V13 we already have (I20802). Two other samples there look like him, one R1b-Z2106. One woman looks extremely WHG, three others look like 'real Sarmatians' (the two men are R1a).

-MIJ 3 is early-middle Sarmatian period (32-16 BCE; 7-120 CE), he is from near Szeged, so not far from Roman territory. He looks very Sarmatian admixed, so very hard to say what his non-Sarmatian part looked like.

-MDH 444 and 462 are from the same site in SW Hungary, but are apparently not related. They date from the middle to late Sarmatian period (not carbon dated). The site is nearly on the Serbian border, and so again not far from Roman territory. Both not se clear to me, although MDH462 looks like he could be East Med admixed and so come from Roman empire. Would need raw data or a decent PCA to be sure.

-CSO 502 is late Sarmatian (236-343 CE), also from the very south of Hungary. He seems much less steppe-shifted than the other two samples from that site, so again possible that he is from Roman area.

-TIV 17 is also late Sarmatian, from NE-Hungary. He is an outlier at the site, with more ANF and less steppe, but he also has sizable WHG, so not sure he is a Roman, could also be Dacian or something else.

-OFU-422 is from the Hun-period (261-278 CE; 341-415 CE), although his dating appears early for that. Again from Southern Hungary. Remarkably no R1a (or other obvious nomadic) Y-DNA was found on this site, and the autosomals also don't look Sarmatian or Hunnic. He is not one of the more Southern looking ones here. (there is a bit confusion here, he is also referred to as OFU-176).


I looked up some of the individuals and the DSZ 3 and 5 seem to be from comitate Heves, Central-Eastern Hungary, not Slovakia:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dormánd

TIV-17: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiszavalk

These two areas are definitely in the sphere of Vekerzug, especially more Eastern Vekerzug already, but not truly in the heart of it. In any case nice to see such a North Eastern Hungarian specific cluster, as well as a Southern shifted one - essentially two E-V13 (sub-) populations.

In the Southern cluster was yet another South Thracian (BY5022) branch member:

E1b1b1a1b1a15b~
https://www.yfull.com/tree/E-S7461/

Unfortunately, for the Northern E-V13ers we got no subclades.

Paper: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.10.04.616652v1
 
Hun Period Elite Burial from Budapest, in the shadow of a Late Roman fort wall: Bioarchaeological Data on the Early Phase of Hun Occupation in the Carpathian Basin

The Budapest History Museum has been investigating the plot under 47 Népfürdő Street in the Vizafogó part of District 13 in Budapest since 2018. The site on the left bank of the Danube was first excavated by Antal Haliczky in 1815, unravelling the Roman Period fort by the confluence of the Rákos Stream opposite the legionary camp of Aquincum.

This paper presents two Early Migration Period burials discovered in the southern foregrounds of the Roman fort in the summer of 2020. In the past decades, several field campaigns have been carried out in the immediate vicinity of the site (Fig. 1. 3), but neither of these yielded any other Early Migration Period finds or features.

The bioarchaeological samples taken from the two skeletons for aDNA analysis were processed in the sterile laboratory of the Institute of Archaeogenomics of the HUN-REN Research Centre for the Humanities. The results made it clear that the two persons investigated were not biologically related and were both biologically male (with XY chromosomes). A comprehensive evaluation was performed by integrating published genomics data into the analyses. The first two main principal components in the PCA (principal component analysis) plot clearly show a significant genetic difference between the two men unearthed at Népfürdő Street, as well as between both of them and the 4th–5th century AD and modern reference pools from the Carpathian Basin (Fig. 13). The results of the non-supervised ADMIXTURE analysis (Fig. 14) were consistent with those obtained from the PCA, suggesting a mainly Central European genetic composition of the local Sarmatian population. However, the two men's genomes indicate their different origins, adding a new colour to the genetic palette of the Hun Period Carpathian Basin. The genetic profile of the individual in SE146 [Haplogroup E-M78] has the highest similarity with some reference genomes from the Balkans, pointing towards southern Europe. In contrast, the genetic profile of the warrior in SE172 features close similarity with that of some Caucasian peoples, which makes him comparable with the Alan genetic cluster in the northern Caucasus. The comparison of the two genomes has revealed that the genome of the man in SE 172 included a particularly prominent genomic component typical of the Iranian Neolithic (more precisely, the pre-Neolithic period in the Caucasus), which in his case was paired with some local eastern/central European ones. Thus, both the G-Z6653 paternal line and autosomal SNP composition analyses corroborated his Caucasian origin; however, whether he was a descendant of Alans or some other people genetically connected with them has remained a question. The full genetic analysis will be published in Gnecchi-Ruscone et al. (in preparation).

https://akjournals.com/view/journals/020....00077.xml


1728843731522.png
 
I saw that too. Rather disappointing, that they couldn't provide a better yDNA assignment, especially since this is a fairly young sample.
 
I saw that too. Rather disappointing, that they couldn't provide a better yDNA assignment, especially since this is a fairly young sample.

also this unpublished paper
Files already out
Large number of samples
i guess some e-m78>v13 will show up

Ancient DNA reveals reproductive barrier despite shared Avar-period culture

After a long-distance migration from the East, Avar people of Eastern Asian ancestry arrived in Eastern Central Europe in 567/568 CE and encountered groups with very different, European ancestry. We used ancient genome-wide data of 722 individuals and fine-grained interdisciplinary analysis of large 7th-8th c. CE neighboring cemeteries south of Vienna (Austria) to address the centuries-long impact of this encounter. We found that the ancestry at one site (Leobersdorf) was and remained dominantly East-Asian-like, even 200 years after the Avar immigration, while the other site (Mödling) displays local, European-like ancestry. These two nearby sites exhibit very few links of direct biological relatedness, despite sharing a distinctive late-Avar culture. We reconstructed 6-generation pedigrees at both sites linking together up to 450 closely-related individuals, allowing per-generation demographic profiling of the communities. Despite different ancestry, these pedigrees together with large networks of distant relatedness display an absence of consanguinity, a strong patrilineal pattern with female exogamy, multiple reproductive partnerships (e.g. levirate) and direct correlation of social status to biological connectivity through markers of high social status in the archaeological material. The generation-long genetic barrier was maintained by systematically choosing partners with similar ancestry from other sites in the Avar realm. Leobersdorf had more biological connections with the Avar heartlands than Mödling, which is instead linked to another site from the Vienna Basin with European-like ancestry. Mobility between sites was mostly due to female exogamy pointing to different marriage networks as the main driver of the maintenance of the genetic barrier.

https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/browser/view/PRJEB76548
 
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