All I've had time to do is read the text in the Supplementary Info and look at a few of the admixture chars and the yDna, so maybe that's why I'm confused, but
Using the same "WHG" samples and early farmer samples as Lazaridis and Haak, how do they get to the fact that even early European Neolithic farmers are 50% WHG? I know Lazaridis said the "WHG/UHG" in these people could range from a few percent to 45% but they said any exact figure would have to wait for a Near Eastern early Neolithic farmer. This group doesn't have one does it? So, how do they model that? Is it in the formal stats section? It looks like they just decided to use the Bedouin. I know Lazardis struggled with whether the Bedouin (and which group of Bedouin, with what % of SSA) were a good proxy.
The same thing applies to the "southern" component in Yamnaya. Do they attempt to define it anywhere? I also don't get how the Yamnaya can be half "
modern Armenian like" in Lazaridis terms but have no Near Eastern farmer ancestry. Even according to this group's own admixture chart modern Armenians have Yamnaya ancestry
and the Neolithic farmer ancestry that went to Europe.
If these "Caucasus" people who mixed with the more northern "steppe" like people (?) to create Yamnaya weren't farmers, were they still of the same general type of ancestry, .i.e. largely of this type of "Basal" Ancestry mixed with some sort of South Eurasian, but weren't part of the Neolithic revolution? But then how does Maykop fit into all of this?
In order to make sense of this doesn't it seem that we really need a Maykop genome? I mean, they talk about all the culture coming through Maykop, the kurgans, the metallurgy, I think they even said the wheel and wagons if I remember correctly, but who were the Maykop people? Are we meant to assume they were the same as the people on the steppe or different? Did they mix?
I'm also confused by their references to CT spreading east onto the steppe. Wouldn't the people of the CT have been European Neolithic farmers? So, why is there no signal of them in Yamnaya? Is it because most of the Yamnaya samples are from the eastern areas? Was it different in the western areas?
I also don't get why they keep talking about this massive influx of genes at least into certain places in Europe when at the most the admixture charts show about, what, 20%?
It doesn't seem to hang together, but maybe it's because I just skimmed it. When I get up tomorrow, all our European members will have figured it all out, yes?
Oh, and why did they pick Remedello for the first appearance of the Indo-Europeans in Italy? Ever since it turned out that Oetzi, who was from a related culture, was G2a, it seemed pretty clear, I thought, that Remedello wouldn't be it. The only reason it used to be mentioned as such, I think, is because there was an attempt to link all metallurgy with the Indo-Europeans. Well, maybe they didn't have samples from a later period. Maybe it will turn out that the older scholars were right, and the Italic languages came to Italy from the Balkans, and via the Adriatic.