Originally Posted by
Angela
I'm sorry to revive an old thread, but questions were raised once again in the ancient British genomes threads about the three ancestral populations of Europe. I think to get into a detailed discussion there about this topic would have been hijacking those threads, so I am posting my thoughts here.
Questions concerning the amount of "WHG" in EEF keep being asked and again. For suggesting that it is a distraction in terms of the discussion of the peopling of Europe, a respected, published author has been attacked on another forum.
I will here speak only for myself. I get the distinct feeling at times that this obsession with quantifying the amount of "WHG" in EEF may, in some people, stem from an attempt to nail down exactly how "European" a group or a person is by taking that figure and adding it to the "regular" WHG in the figures given for modern populations in Lazaridis et al. Apparently, ANE is considered "European" enough not to raise concern, despite its eastern affinities. The short answer is that we are all 100% European, whether we come from France, or Finland, or southern Italy, and whether we can be modeled best with two or three of these ancestral EEF/WHG/ANE populations.
That undertone also is present, imo, in many of these discussions about how much hunter-gatherer is present in groups or individuals. This reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of human history. Everyone is 100% descended from hunter-gatherers as I've said repeatedly on many threads for many years, because all of those groups, Basal Eurasian, UHG, WHG, ANE, and all the others were hunter gatherers before they learned how to farm.
It seems to me that some people obsessed with these questions (of course, not those who merely seek to understand the issues), who are constantly, to use a phrase I'd like to borrow, "massaging" the data through calculators etc. are merely concerned with minimizing, as much as possible, any "Near Eastern" element in them or their groups.
I'm afraid that like it or not, most of EEF was Near Eastern.
Since apparently people forget it, here is the appropriate excerpt, I think, from Lazaridis et al.
"The amount of Near Eastern admixture estimated for Stuttgart can be seen in Table S10.2 and range between 61-98% with estimates increasing as the amount of estimated African admixture in BedouinBincreases.There are reasons to doubt both the lower estimates (near60%), since ALDER provides only a lower bound on African ancestry, but also the )higher estimates (near 100%) since there is direct evidence that Stuttgart has European hunter-gatherer ancestry (Fig. 1B and Table S10.1
Determining the precise levels of Near Eastern admixture in Stuttgart must await further ancient DNA studies from both Europe and the Near East, but we can at least reasonably claim that most of the sample’s ancestry was Near Eastern, consistent with the mtDNA evidence for the Linearbandkeramik, which demonstrated a strong Near Eastern influence3-5"
(So, in Stuttgart, the Near Eastern admixture, according to this excerpt , is somewhere between 60 and 98%. I may have erred in using the 25% figure for the non Near Eastern admixture in Stuttgart (whether you call it UHG or WHG or a combination or anything else) I believe that is the figure for Oetzi. Anyone is free to correct the percentage from the academic literature, not if you please, from amateur "calculators", some of which have already been proved to be unreliable. Regardless, that is why I stated elsewhere that the majority of EEF’s ancestry is from the Middle East.
If any of this is incorrect, in fact, please direct me to a quote from the paper to that effect.
If someone wants to dispute the general statement, then I would suggest that they contact Lazaridis and Reich and point out how their statistical ability is superior to that of the authors. Or, they might want to write a paper and submit it for peer review. )
I also want to make sure that we are comparing similar things. The calculations that were made in the paper as to EEF/WHG/ANE in modern populations were based, to the best of my recollection, on Stuttgart. They certainly were not based on the Gok farmer results. Therefore, it's irrelevant for this purpose that Gok farmers had more WHG than did Stuttgar. The calculator used in the paper is comparing the genomes of modern Europeans to Stuttgart. That is the source of the 50% figure that is used for the EEF level in English people. They are not being compared to the Gok famers Again, if I'm wrong, and the paper is using both Stuttgart and Oetzi, for example, please correctt the record. This shouldn't be all about ego; it should be about getting it right.
Perhaps I am, knowing the history of certain segments of the amateur community, seeing a problem where none exists, and if that is the case, I apologize, and I certainly don't mean to tar all people who ask these questions or discuss them with the same brush, but it seems to me that a related issue involves all of the discussions and data analysis around how much total UHG/WHG is present in certain populations and people. It sometimes seems to me that the underlying concern for some people is not to have Basal Eurasian. If that's the case, I don't even have the words to express how pathetic I think that is...
In terms of the Near Eastern farmers, I do not recollect that the authors of Lazaridis et al provided a figure for the BE in them. There is a figure for the amount of Basal Eurasian in Stuttgart of 44% plus or minus 10%. So, if anyone wants to figure out their percentage of Basal Eurasian, just, for a rough estimate, take 44% of your group's EEF and there you have it. Now, for those so inclined, you can have a contest over who has the least amount of it. Mazel Tov in advance.
As to the "source" of Basal Eurasian, this is what the authors of the paper have to say:
" The Near East was the staging point for the peopling of Eurasia by anatomicallymodern humans. As a result, it is entirely plausible that it harbored deep Eurasian ancestry which did not initially participate in the northward colonization of Europe, but was later brought into Europe by Near Eastern farmers. More speculatively, some basal Eurasian admixture in the Near East may reflect the early presence of anatomically modern humans7in the Levant, or the populations responsible for the appearance ofthe Nubian Complex in Arabia8, both of which date much earlier than the widespread dissemination of modern humans across Eurasia. Finally, it could reflect continuing more recent gene flows between the Near East and nearby Africa after the initial out-of-Africa dispersal, perhaps associated with the spread of Y-chromosome haplogroup E subclades from eastern Africa 9, 10into the Near East, which appeared at least 7,000 years ago into Neolithic Europe11. "
So far as I can see, the question is still open, and the answers must await further ancient dna and responsible modeling by academics.
To conclude, Jean Manco posted a synopsis of the peopling of Europe which is a model of clearsightedness and logic. I hope she doesn't mind my posting it here for those who don't check in to Anthrogenica occasionally.
"The import of the Lazaridis paper is that there were three migrations into Europe [my notes in brackets]:
1. From the Asian crossroads/Middle East in the Palaeolithic. [mtDNA U and Y-DNA IJ and F]
2. From the Middle Eastern Neolithic heartland in the Neolithic. [mtDNA U3, H, I, J, V etc and Y-DNA G, with a bit of E]
3. From the Asian steppe in the Copper Age. [Y-DNA R]
As each of the waves reached Europe it mixed with descendants of the previous wave(s). "
All of the other comments in this post are my own and not to be attributed to her.
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