Central and South Asian DNA Paper

[Angela]

I don't completely agree with this post from Anthrogenica, but it's thought provoking:
"

Originally Posted by homosapien There is no backbone to these discussions.

A year back all these discussions centered around R1a and how it came from steppe. Now that it is evident all the malta boys and poltavka's turn out to be not relevant to the south asian R1a (L657) the discussions are turning into a autosomal discussion.

Ofcourse it goes without saying the leaders on the steppe studies are themselves to blame for the turn.

L657 is 5500 to 6000 years old. Show L657 in large numbers and entering into South Asia and the discussion is closed, but that seems impossible because after combing through all the samples in the north none has been found. So what does this say about where L657 originated is unknown as of now.


Regarding autosomal studies if they are honest they should estimate the effective population size of the so called MLBA_East and also estimate the population size of IVC and then proceed to show how there is steppe found even in Mala and some tribals.

JUst saying "oh we found steppe in MLBA_East which is the closest and the right fit based on our statistics" and all south asians also have it. So steppe came here. That just sound nuts. This makes one think are there guys really biologists or just statisticians.


Personally i feel the autosomal based conclusion which is again based on just 3 outliers is going to be untenable. Even if the IPE outliers are the real represenation of IVC which spanned half of modern India they have been UNABLE to show how it spread through the whole of the population and the percentage of the steppe component is more or less the same (factoring in strict or loose endogamy depending on their caste).

Sooner or later the conclusion of this paper is going to fall."

Where indeed is the proper clade of R1a?

 

[bicicleur 2]

I don't completely agree with this post from Anthrogenica, but it's thought provoking:
"

Originally Posted by homosapien There is no backbone to these discussions.

A year back all these discussions centered around R1a and how it came from steppe. Now that it is evident all the malta boys and poltavka's turn out to be not relevant to the south asian R1a (L657) the discussions are turning into a autosomal discussion.

Ofcourse it goes without saying the leaders on the steppe studies are themselves to blame for the turn.

L657 is 5500 to 6000 years old. Show L657 in large numbers and entering into South Asia and the discussion is closed, but that seems impossible because after combing through all the samples in the north none has been found. So what does this say about where L657 originated is unknown as of now.


Regarding autosomal studies if they are honest they should estimate the effective population size of the so called MLBA_East and also estimate the population size of IVC and then proceed to show how there is steppe found even in Mala and some tribals.

JUst saying "oh we found steppe in MLBA_East which is the closest and the right fit based on our statistics" and all south asians also have it. So steppe came here. That just sound nuts. This makes one think are there guys really biologists or just statisticians.


Personally i feel the autosomal based conclusion which is again based on just 3 outliers is going to be untenable. Even if the IPE outliers are the real represenation of IVC which spanned half of modern India they have been UNABLE to show how it spread through the whole of the population and the percentage of the steppe component is more or less the same (factoring in strict or loose endogamy depending on their caste).

Sooner or later the conclusion of this paper is going to fall."

Where indeed is the proper clade of R1a?

L657 is indeed an almost exclusive South Asian subclade of R1a-Z93
but according to YFull both R1a-Z93 and R1a-L657 have TMRCA 4.7 ka
https://www.yfull.com/tree/R-Z93/

the South Asian samples are from a very small area, some 15 km in radius
nevertheless it is very curious not to have found the R1a there

the authors said they tried to get proper IVC DNA, but they failed
hopefully better techniques will allow to retrieve some in the future

 

[Ygorcs]

Regarding autosomal studies if they are honest they should estimate the effective population size of the so called MLBA_East and also estimate the population size of IVC and then proceed to show how there is steppe found even in Mala and some tribals.

My main quibble with this - very common, as I've seen - argument about South Asian tribal populations is that they seem to assume that tribals are just some sort of completely isolated, primordial "relic" of a population as if it'd been transplated right from thousands of years ago to the present age. I doubt a lot that ancestors of those tribes managed to avoid any intermixing with other surrounding peoples during thousands of years in an absurdly populated region like South Asia (as a whole the world's most populated region, and even in the Antiquity most estimates also confirm that was already the case). These tribal populations aren't simply a "window into the past", they also are historical agents.

 

[markozd]

L657 is indeed an almost exclusive South Asian subclade of R1a-Z93
but according to YFull both R1a-Z93 and R1a-L657 have TMRCA 4.7 ka
https://www.yfull.com/tree/R-Z93/

the South Asian samples are from a very small area, some 15 km in radius
nevertheless it is very curious not to have found the R1a there

the authors said they tried to get proper IVC DNA, but they failed
hopefully better techniques will allow to retrieve some in the future

I wonder if steppe-admixed groups with R1a-L657 could have come to India-Pakistan from Afghanistan via a more southern route after coming down from the steppe, explaining the lack of L657 further north until the Iron Age. Could Indo-Aryan & Dardic speakers have arrived in their respective regions independently of each other? In such a scenario those Swat samples could still have spoken a non-IE language.

This is a bit off-topic, but it's a bit frustrating how many of the recent papers tend to be rather inconclusive with regionally confined samples. I have been reading David Reich's book over the last couple of days, and some of his conclusions seem rather preliminary based only on published data. I am sure by now he has many more samples from Anatolians, the metal age Caucasus, Mycenae. But did he take those into consideration when writing his book? If not, why publish a book at this point in time?

 

[Angela]

I wonder if steppe-admixed groups with R1a-L657 could have come to India-Pakistan from Afghanistan via a more southern route after coming down from the steppe, explaining the lack of L657 further north until the Iron Age. Could Indo-Aryan & Dardic speakers have arrived in their respective regions independently of each other? In such a scenario those Swat samples could still have spoken a non-IE language.

This is a bit off-topic, but it's a bit frustrating how many of the recent papers tend to be rather inconclusive with regionally confined samples. I have been reading David Reich's book over the last couple of days, and some of his conclusions seem rather preliminary based only on published data. I am sure by now he has many more samples from Anatolians, the metal age Caucasus, Mycenae. But did he take those into consideration when writing his book? If not, why publish a book at this point in time?

I can't really answer that, but I highly doubt he'd speculate in contradiction to data of which he's aware.

 

[markozd]

Someone on athrogenica dug this up from Lazaridis et al. . I had never noticed this:

Extended Data Table 2: Admixture f3-statistics. We show the lowest Z-score of the statistic f3(Test; Reference1, Refrence2) for every ancient Test population with at least 2 individuals and every pair (Reference1, Refrence2) of ancient or present-day source populations. Z-scores lower than -3 are highlighted and indicate that the Test population is admixed from sources related to (but not identical to) the reference populations. Z-scores greater than -3 are consistent with the population either being admixed or not.

f3(WHG; Switzerland_HG, Saudi) = -0.01562 Z-score = -7.7

I had said earlier in the thread that it is my belief that basal diversity under R1 is concentrated in the populations west of the Persian Gulf. This suggests that the best proxy for the near eastern admixture that is observed in Europe with beginning with the emergence of the Villabruna cluster is most closely related to Saudi Arabs, not to Iranians, Caucasians or Levantines.

There must in any case be complex layers of ancestry in the Middle East, that we cannot make sense of yet due to a lack of UP/Mesolithic samples.

 

[IronSide]

Someone on athrogenica dug this up from Lazaridis et al. . I had never noticed this:



I had said earlier in the thread that it is my belief that basal diversity under R1 is concentrated in the populations west of the Persian Gulf. This suggests that the best proxy for the near eastern admixture that is observed in Europe with beginning with the emergence of the Villabruna cluster is most closely related to Saudi Arabs, not to Iranians, Caucasians or Levantines.

There must in any case be complex layers of ancestry in the Middle East, that we cannot make sense of yet due to a lack of UP/Mesolithic samples.

Some say that "someone" is a really talented individual ... full of charisma and intellect.

I posted something similar here in Eupedia, he must have copied me

https://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads/32371-The-genetic-structure-of-the-world%E2%80%99s-first-farmers/page16?p=538682&viewfull=1#post538682

 

[johen]

Modern north west people in china have tons of R1a-m17. I think they knew lake baikal R1a, even if they didnot know the west siberian HG gene is closed related with lake baikal pottery. I really don't understand why they didnot use the sample, but west siberian women.

In Eurogenes:

Open Genomes said...
Here's a total shocker for one of the "coolest" pre-Sintashta Balto-Slavic-Indo-Iranians ... if you think the Manchusare "totally cool!"

DA39: Y: R-L645 mtDNA: N9a2'4'5'11 Gedmatch: Z780597

1240k SNPs in 23andMe format:
http://www.open-genomes.org/genomes/Eurasian Steppe/DA39/genome_DA39_1240k.zip
SNPs read: 927452 percent covered: 77.39%

Yes, R-L645 is the immediate parent of R-Z93. DA39 has no reads for the two R-Z93 SNPs, bue's not either R-Z283 or R-Z94, and is ancestral for most of the R-Z93 subclades.

His mtDNA is N9a2'4'5'11, which is found in Japan and China.

What's really unbelievable is his K15 Oracle4 results:

He's a Jurchen, from the ancestors of the Manchus!


Y'all do know that there's plenty of "R1a1*" all over Northern China, among Han Chinese, right?
Zhong et al. (2010) R1a-M17 in China

Basically, if these were Proto Balto-Slavic Indo-Iranians descended from the Corded Ware, they just got on their horses and rode east till they hit the Pacific Ocean!

 

[markozd]

Some say that "someone" is a really talented individual ... full of charisma and intellect.
I posted something similar here in Eupedia, he must have copied me
https://www.eupedia.com/forum/threa...farmers/page16?p=538682&viewfull=1#post538682

Now that you mention it, the usernames are quite similar too. I totally didn't make the connection

Good analysis by the way, I was thinking along those lines as well. I wonder if the Swiss HG population extended into Anatolia & surroundings as well before mixing with those other HGs, whatever they were.

The point about the 'North African' morphology is interesting.

 

[IronSide]

Now that you mention it, the usernames are quite similar too. I totally didn't make the connection

Good analysis by the way, I was thinking along those lines as well. I wonder if the Swiss HG population extended into Anatolia & surroundings as well before mixing with those other HGs, whatever they were.

The point about the 'North African' morphology is interesting.

The North African morphology, if taken as a sign of an adaptation to a warm climate, would mean the Villabruna had ancestry from some part in the Middle East, objection to this points to the fact that there is no Basal Eurasian in Villabruna.

But what if it happened before Basal Eurasians appeared? what do you think, who appeared first in the Middle East, Basal or the non-Basal ancestry?

 

[Alan]

As Angela predicted, a certain blogger "managed" to squeeze some Steppe admixture from Hajji Firuz sample and declared him as Yamnaya individual. If he tries hard enough he might be able to squeeze some Steppe admixture out of the Hausa People with their dubious R1b-V88.

If I remember correctly there has been no sample from that region from which this certain blogger wasn't able to squeeze any "Steppe" admixture. This blogger should re-think his ideas and take into consideration the possibility that this "Steppe" affinity might be something that existed in the very region for longer than the Bronze Age.

 

[Alan]

And I sure took loads of bullshit in those forums. I am starting to feel vindicated.

Not only you.... keep in mind I was banned from there for calling out a blogger as "biased" and nothing more.

 

[MOESAN]

I wonder if steppe-admixed groups with R1a-L657 could have come to India-Pakistan from Afghanistan via a more southern route after coming down from the steppe, explaining the lack of L657 further north until the Iron Age. Could Indo-Aryan & Dardic speakers have arrived in their respective regions independently of each other? In such a scenario those Swat samples could still have spoken a non-IE language.



This is a bit off-topic, but it's a bit frustrating how many of the recent papers tend to be rather inconclusive with regionally confined samples. I have been reading David Reich's book over the last couple of days, and some of his conclusions seem rather preliminary based only on published data. I am sure by now he has many more samples from Anatolians, the metal age Caucasus, Mycenae. But did he take those into consideration when writing his book? If not, why publish a book at this point in time?

I red somewhere a theory which proposes the R1a-L657 bearers come with ancestors of Goud Sarawat Brahmins (found in North Punjab about 1000 BC) through the mythic Sarasvati River (proposed today Helmand river in S-E Afghanistan) around the end of the Fourth Millenarium, bearing whelled transports, agriculture, metallurgy, from somewhere between Transcaucasy and BMAC region (supposed akin to ura-Araxes!).
I don't know what credit to accord to this indeed, and I have to find the full abstract; just to answer to the geographic aspect of your post (the route)

 

[Olympus Mons]

Not only you.... keep in mind I was banned from there for calling out a blogger as "biased" and nothing more.

Its fascinating how gang up, group thinking, motivational reasoning, etc., forms so fast and well structured. We humans seem designed to it.

 

[Silesian]

As Angela predicted, a certain blogger "managed" to squeeze some Steppe admixture from Hajji Firuz sample and declared him as Yamnaya individual. If he tries hard enough he might be able to squeeze some Steppe admixture out of the Hausa People with their dubious R1b-V88.

If I remember correctly there has been no sample from that region from which this certain blogger wasn't able to squeeze any "Steppe" admixture. This blogger should re-think his ideas and take into consideration the possibility that this "Steppe" affinity might be something that existed in the very region for longer than the Bronze Age.

There are two sides to a coin; and prediction depending on context. Do you know what real genetic affinity sets the "Steppe" apart from other populations[Olympus Mons might know ]?

 

[Alan]

There are two sides to a coin; and prediction depending on context. Do you know what real genetic affinity sets the "Steppe" apart from other populations[Olympus Mons might know ]?

If all samples from Bronze Age to Calcolthic from certain area can be modeled to have "some Steppe" admixture. And you find "Steppe" admixture in form of EHG in CHG samples and even some Iran_Mesolithic samples. As well some EHG individuals showing signs of CHG affinity you should start looking for other explanations than "Steppe" admixture. A explanation for that could be ANE or WHG affinity shared between two groups. Or possibly (and even more likely) CHG admixture in early EHG groups. Since archeological that makes more sense.

 

[Silesian]

If all samples from Bronze Age to Calcolthic from certain area can be modeled to have "some Steppe" admixture. And you find "Steppe" admixture in form of EHG in CHG samples and even some Iran_Mesolithic samples. As well some EHG individuals showing signs of CHG affinity you should start looking for other explanations than "Steppe" admixture. A explanation for that could be ANE or WHG affinity shared between two groups. Or possibly (and even more likely) CHG admixture in early EHG groups. Since archeological that makes more sense.

Nice try. However before we had all those fancy names we used blood group mutations.
For example. One of the very first ancient samples that people took an interest in was King Tut[whose official ydna results from2011 were never made public]. Way back in 1969 a couple of bright guys took some samples and -- came up with this connection between family[A1 versus A2 mn and rh values].

https://www.nature.com/articles/224325b0
"Kinship of Smenkhkare and Tutankhamen affirmed by Serological Micromethod :
Kinship of Smenkhkare and Tutankhamen demonstrated Serologically.


Now you are probably wondering what this has to do with the " Steppe". Well 48+/- years later another bright chap compared specific mutation component found in "Steppe" people compared to Farmers who migrated from various regions.

Iain Mathieson used the same principle mutations used by Cavalli-Sforza-and colleagues; to deduce the origin of European populations[although this time he had ancient populations genomes to compare with .
http://mathii.github.io/2017/09/21/blood-groups-in-ancient-europe

 

[Cpluskx]

https://twitter.com/iosif_lazaridis/status/992384766799380480

Lazaridis' view on PIE origin:

 

[MOESAN]

In Europe, there is some Communists / Socialists / Anarchists, that doesn't care about history, but if history can help them to push a certain agenda, they gonna use it.

Sorry, but could you seriously think that 'rightsiders' don't? Seriously? And all politically oriented people would be as you describe it, really? A lot do, in every kind of political side -
personnaly, I think knowing/science has no side.

 

[halfalp]

In Europe, there is some Communists / Socialists / Anarchists, that doesn't care about history, but if history can help them to push a certain agenda, they gonna use it.

Sorry, but could you seriously think that 'rightsiders' don't? Seriously? And all politically oriented people would be as you describe it, really? A lot do, in every kind of political side -
personnaly, I think knowing/science has no side.

Yes they do, but rightwingers are generally taken for nostalgics of an idealized past, when lefts no.