Ancient genomes from Caucasus inc. Maykop

Lol their chart shows CHG in Motala, CWC more CHG than EHG please... here we going away of PIE, we are reconstructd the genetic prehistory of europe with CHG in is core.

Excuse me, are you the poster who says he doesn't know very much about genetics? Pretty amazing certitude in that case. :)

Maybe, just maybe, statisticians who created these programs know more than you do?

Also, did you forget about J1 in the mesolithic far northeast? I think you did.
 
Amazing how they are evading altogether Shulaveri Shomu both in time and geography. I am expectant! they have something!
 
This admixture graph is weird

Screenshot-2018-05-16-21.55.15.png


Do the EHG only have 9% ANE ?

Steppe Eneolithic is EHG + Basal Eurasian. and it is from the basal part of CHG.

CHG is Basal Eurasian + West Eurasian lineage that separated from the line contributing to WHG, EHG, and EEF. Where is ANE ? there is a lot of it in CHG based on the modelling of Lazaridis 2016.
 
The authors say there IS autosomal Anatolian farmer in the steppe.

yes, in the steppe Maykop outliers and the late north Caucasus
and there was a little seeping in maybe from the west, maybe from the south, maybe from Globular amphora,

but if the bride swap brought so much CHG/Iran Neo, there should have been more Anatolian Farmer have come along
 
Excuse me, are you the poster who says he doesn't know very much about genetics? Pretty amazing certitude in that case. :)

Maybe, just maybe, statisticians who created these programs know more than you do?

Also, did you forget about J1 in the mesolithic far northeast? I think you did.
That J was 100% EHG, they knew about teal even before CHG was conceputalized. So how most of ancient samples turn CHG now ? Because CHG came from the north ?
 
Their Eneolithic steppe sample in Admixture is far more than 50% CHG. In Samara Eneolithic, the CHG gets cut down a bit by WHG and, what, East Asian? Still, more than 50%.

CHG was on the steppe very early indeed. Perhaps that's why they put in all that language about pre-existing clines.

in his book David Reich says CHG admixture in the steppe started ca 7 ka, but nobody knows exactly when
it is observed in Khvalynsk, that is the earliest afaik
 
yes, in the steppe Maykop outliers and the late north Caucasus
and there was a little seeping in maybe from the west, maybe from the south, maybe from Globular amphora,

but if the bride swap brought so much CHG/Iran Neo, there should have been more Anatolian Farmer have come along

Yes, if most of it was relatively late in the day.



So, are we looking at a very early movement of a "CHG" heavy population north onto the steppe which is responsible for the majority of the "CHG" signal?

This might tie in with their speculation of a mixed EHG/CHG cline running north to south through the Caucasus, which ties in with how they model EHG in that Admixture chart. Of course, Admixture is not the be all and end all. I'm still going through the Supplement results for the other analyses.

The fact remains that the mtDna in this new cluster of samples shows mtDna usually associated with northern groups in the Caucasus and vice versa.

You might want to read the Razib Khan opinion piece I just posted.

@halfalp,

I know. That ONE sample was 100% EHG. The point is that "J", an unambiguously "Caucasus" clade, made it all the way up there, so SOME samples might have retained a trace of CHG, although that one sample did not.

Yes?
 
Lol their chart shows CHG in Motala, CWC more CHG than EHG please... here we going away of PIE, we are reconstructd the genetic prehistory of europe with CHG in is core.

seems like these admixture % are varying from study to study. first it was 50-60% EHG in yamnas. now its more like 30%. or the 50-60% were not saying how much was "actual" EHG admixture but how much was contributed by EHG populations including CHG like ancestry already present in these EHG's.
 
yes, in the steppe Maykop outliers and the late north Caucasus
and there was a little seeping in maybe from the west, maybe from the south, maybe from Globular amphora,
but if the bride swap brought so much CHG/Iran Neo, there should have been more Anatolian Farmer have come along

You talk about that region? Because Sintashta samples (those labeled Sintashta_MBA_RISE.SG in that study) appear close to 30% Anatolian Neolithic. If someone modeled them as partly Globula Amphora Culture related they would appear ~40% GAC like.
Srubnaya a little less.


--edit--
Btw, as I wrote we have Y-DNA from only two 'Maykop-steppe' samples. Both of them are near Kalmykia. The 'outlier' is R1, the other Q1a2.
 
Excuse me, are you the poster who says he doesn't know very much about genetics? Pretty amazing certitude in that case. :)

Maybe, just maybe, statisticians who created these programs know more than you do?

Also, did you forget about J1 in the mesolithic far northeast? I think you did.


this J1 would have been from the isolated Y6304 branch, which split from Satsurblia 14.5 ka, he was EHG

https://www.yfull.com/tree/J1/
 
You talk about that region? Because Sintashta samples (those labeled Sintashta_MBA_RISE.SG in that study) appear close to 30% Anatolian Neolithic. If someone modeled them as partly Globula Amphora Culture related they would appear ~40% GAC like.
Srubnaya a little less.


--edit--
Btw, as I wrote we have Y-DNA from only two 'Maykop-steppe' samples. Both of them are near Kalmykia. The 'outlier' is R1, the other Q1a2.

yes, both CWC and Sintashta had EEF admixture, and the source was very very likely West-European
 
Excuse me, are you the poster who says he doesn't know very much about genetics? Pretty amazing certitude in that case. :)

Maybe, just maybe, statisticians who created these programs know more than you do?

Also, did you forget about J1 in the mesolithic far northeast? I think you did.

Yes, if most of it was relatively late in the day.



So, are we looking at a very early movement of a "CHG" heavy population north onto the steppe which is responsible for the majority of the "CHG" signal?

This might tie in with their speculation of a mixed EHG/CHG cline running north to south through the Caucasus, which ties in with how they model EHG in that Admixture chart. Of course, Admixture is not the be all and end all. I'm still going through the Supplement results for the other analyses.

The fact remains that the mtDna in this new cluster of samples shows mtDna usually associated with northern groups in the Caucasus and vice versa.

You might want to read the Razib Khan opinion piece I just posted.

@halfalp,

I know. That ONE sample was 100% EHG. The point is that "J", an unambiguously "Caucasus" clade, made it all the way up there, so SOME samples might have retained a trace of CHG, although that one sample did not.

Yes?
Actually, a south caucasus clade until 12’000 BC. It might originate somewhere else further we explore the true genetic meaning of CHG. Because no way CHG were in Motala or CHG is a strange brother of EHG.
 
in his book David Reich says CHG admixture in the steppe started ca 7 ka, but nobody knows exactly when
it is observed in Khvalynsk, that is the earliest afaik

I think that Eneolithic steppe sample is 4300 BC, so that's about right. However, it's already there in really big percentages by that time, so it must have come earlier. The other hint, as you said, is lack of ANF at that point.

Maykop is just too young for most of it.

This is why they're saying they can't be more definitive. They don't have, or don't want to publish samples old enough to know for certain whether it's really old on the steppe, or a bit more recent but from an as yet unsampled population.

Since I've always thought that Basal may have moved in from the Mesopotamia region, I'd love to see some ancient genomes from there.
 
The haplogroups in this set of Chalcolithic/Bronze Age South Caucasus correspond to the haplogroups that I have associated with the Kura-Araxes expansion (J2a, J1-Z1828, L1b, T1a-P77 and G2a-L293) except that they didn't find any T1a among those 12 samples (but it's not surprisingly considering the low frequency of this haplogroup in any region today).

The Bronze Age admixture from the South Caucasus that they detect in Greece is obviously from the Kura-Araxes expansion (just look at the haplogroups found in Minoan Greece or modern Crete), not from the Anatolian branch of IE. I completely agree that Proto-Indo-European descend from a language spoken by R1b-L23 in the South Caucasus, but that group of R1b-L23 wasn't related to Kura-Araxes (Georgia, Armenia), but to a distinct population apparently more concentrated around Azerbaijan and NW Iran, where R1b-L23 is still found today at reasonable frequencies.

I have only very briefly browsed the paper, but from the admixtures posted above it is startling to see just how different Steppe Maykop (almost pure EHG) is from core Maykop (CHG + Anatolian Chalcolithic).

there are many y haplogroups missing when you compare with this paper below....figure 2................
https://www.nature.com/articles/ejhg2011192
 
Yes, if most of it was relatively late in the day.



So, are we looking at a very early movement of a "CHG" heavy population north onto the steppe which is responsible for the majority of the "CHG" signal?

This might tie in with their speculation of a mixed EHG/CHG cline running north to south through the Caucasus, which ties in with how they model EHG in that Admixture chart. Of course, Admixture is not the be all and end all. I'm still going through the Supplement results for the other analyses.

The fact remains that the mtDna in this new cluster of samples shows mtDna usually associated with northern groups in the Caucasus and vice versa.

You might want to read the Razib Khan opinion piece I just posted.

@halfalp,

I know. That ONE sample was 100% EHG. The point is that "J", an unambiguously "Caucasus" clade, made it all the way up there, so SOME samples might have retained a trace of CHG, although that one sample did not.

Yes?

My thoughts are that EHG and CHG are mostly linked to J in origin. J is very diverse in the Caucasus, So CHG doesn't needs to belong to only one J or to the whole J lineages.

When R1a arrived to the western steppes, this should be populated mostly with J and I individuals (not necessarily only IJ lineages but not P(xV88) lineages).

Also CHG doesn't need to be made only of J-linked components but also could be involved other lineages like LT (as could work for some EHG components)
 
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I think that Eneolithic steppe sample is 4300 BC, so that's about right. However, it's already there in really big percentages by that time, so it must have come earlier. The other hint, as you said, is lack of ANF at that point.

Maykop is just too young for most of it.

This is why they're saying they can't be more definitive. They don't have, or don't want to publish samples old enough to know for certain whether it's really old on the steppe, or a bit more recent but from an as yet unsampled population.

Since I've always thought that Basal may have moved in from the Mesopotamia region, I'd love to see some ancient genomes from there.

This is one thing that is bothering me in this whole "Transcaucasia vs. Steppes" discussion. I mean, if the bulk of the CHG in the Pontic-Caspian steppe populations is very ancient, having being absorbed in high proportions before 5000 BC (the lack of ANF in the steppes also indicate that early introgression), then it is, from a linguistic point of view, very hard to accept the possibility that Early PIE was a "CHG language" from the southern slopes of the Caucasus, because that would imply that Anatolian IE (or also possibly, according to this study, even much less diverged languages like Armenian and especially Greek) and the Pontic-Caspian steppe IE would've split in the 6th millennium BC. Either scientists assumed a much faster pace of linguistic evolution, or it is just impossible that the initial split of PIE happened so early.

Now, if we could demonstrate that there was a significant amount of extra CHG in the Chalcolithic Pontic-Caspian region, that could suggest a new demographic and presumably linguistic layer onto the older ethnic makeup.

As for the lack of EHG in those few "Hittite" (or at least "near to the Hittite") samples, I was thinking (okay, speculating) a bit about it from the assumption (pretty much mainstream among linguists) that Anatolian IE split much earlier than the others and probably in a very different historic context (certainly not the mobile horse-driven pastoralism of Yamnaya and descendants). It also seems from this paper that the North Caucasus, right next to the steppes, had a very different genetic structure with a much higher CHG and ANF, so I'd think it is plausible that the southernmost portions of Sredny-Stog and/or Khvalynsk in direct contact with the North Caucasus could have some substructure in a transition zone to the steppes. We know now that Maykop had EHG, which is not found further to the south, so there was some cline. If the ancestors Hittites came from this region and expanded more or less in the fashion of later IE branches into regions that were already very populated (like Greece and South Asia), then they could've migrated south becoming a relevant and dominant minority with an increasingly diluted DNA makeup, and given their very early separation from the steppe or North Caucasus populations it's probable that by the time they established in former Hattic-speaking lands to form their kingdom and empire their EHG portion was just too small to make a significant presence in the genomic makeup of the region's average inhabitant. Mere genetic drift and regional substructure could make EHG virtually invisible after a few centuries unless we had many more samples. Doesn't this type of thing happen when migrations were not that powerful to trigger an appreciable population replacement? Just playing a bit with this speculation, let's imagine this totally hypothetical (and admittedly baseless for now) scenario:

From CHG-enriched southern steppes just north of the North Caucasus (South_Steppe): 40% EHG, 55% CHG, 5% ANF
Admixture with (north or south?) Caucasians during the Proto-Anatolian phase: 25% South_Steppe + 75% Local Caucasians (5% EHG, 70% CHG, 25% ANF) >>> 13% EHG, 66% CHG, 8% ANF.
Admixture with North-Central Anatolians during the Hittite phase: 20% Proto-Anatolian + 80% Hatti and other natives (0% EHG, 30% CHG, 70% ANF) >>> 2.5% EHG, 37% CHG, 60.5% (2.5% EHG - and that's assuming that the Caucasians already had some EHG even before Maykop and that the Proto-Anatolians still made a reasonable demographic impact of ~25% and the Hittites one of ~20%, not too shabby)

I'm just entertaining all the possibilities, especially considering that apparently the CHG component in the steppes is MUCH older than even the 1st Indo-European split around ~4000 BC, and not just some Late Neolithic/Chalcolithic influx bringing not just a new (presumably more advanced) people but potentially a new language family.
 
Considering Sabine Reinhold et al, the results we have are actually not surprising.

Have a read, I think it will do a lot to clear confusion and focus things:

"At the community level, bioarchaeological investigations seriously challenge the hypothesis of large-scale mobility both in piedmont and in steppe environments. Given this background, intensification of contact through a greater volume of trade promoted by wheeled transport (Sherratt 1981) is rather unlikely. Other mechanisms for the transfer of knowledge need to be considered (Frachetti 2012). The small number of non-local individuals in the North Caucasian sample suggest an isolated exchange of individuals and the knowledge they brought with them."

"If strontium and carbon or nitrogen isotope data are combined, sufficiently variegated data clusters emerge for the sites in the steppe zone and the piedmont areas. This is an argument against highly mobile groups with home ranges covering a number of environmental and geological zones. However, each site also featured a few individuals whose stable isotope data were more similar to those of the majority of one of the other burial communities. Some burials, e.g. the oldest of the North Caucasian culture in mound Mar’inskaya 5 including grave 23 with a pair of bucrania, revealed noteworthy differences between early and late-developing teeth. These findings suggest deviant dietary habits and/or origin from another area and community. As we have seen earlier, such individuals may have been driving forces in the exchange of knowledge and a precondition for the spread of innovations. The home ranges of the local communities were spatially distinct, so frequent contacts did not occur naturally between the investigated groups. Accordingly, these individuals were certainly of special relevance."

There was no large influx of Maykop people into the steppe or vice versa, hence why they do not share any y-haplogroups or much EEF/Anatolia_N ancestry until contact with Cucuteni–Trypillia. Wagons did not help facilitate transportation on a macro-level scale and were rather a novel invention that was quickly adopted over much of the old world. As we already know CHG ancestry entered the steppe much earlier than Maykop and if one believes this was a male dominated migration the same is then true for R1b as well. By this period in time though there was no massive genetic exchange occuring between the Caucusus and the steppe (it if occured it was centuries before this period) and knowledge was instead being transported by only a small number of individuals whose lineages may have gone extinct millenia ago. What this all means for the genesis and spread of IE is up for debate.

"Burials and the transportation involved need not necessarily imply mobile individuals or mobile communities. While the usefulness of wheeled transport for pastoral communities living in steppe environments is indisputable, this need not entail large-scale mobility or long-distance migrations. In fact, the bioarchaeological data currently available from the North Caucasus suggest that the opposite was the case. We should thus focus our attention on the symbolism of the objects related to early transport or animal labour. The appropriation of traction discussed here as a social act in two different symbolic traditions did not tremendously change the normal lifestyle of the communities involved. However, it does reveal a sharp difference between the communities that emphasised social difference and power relations in their societies, e.g. Maikop, and those that did not, e.g. Yamnaya. It is most probably the symbolic aspect of the activities for which draught animals were employed that prompt different representations of traction in the two symbolic systems."

What were some of these sharp cultural differences between the Maykop and Steppe communities? Both societies performed kurgan burials, but whereas Maykop burials focused on the engine of this new invention, the cattle, the Steppe communities focused on the actual vehicles, the wagons themselves. The study also mentions that burial with a cart was not stratified among gender or age with infants and women frequently being buried with carts and that there didn't seem to be any ritualization to the process yet. What is also interesting is that neither being buried with cattle nor a cart in Maykop or Steppe communities was a symbol of status. If we can infer from dietary consumption and physical stress those buried with cattle or carts had the same levels of physical stress and no better diets.

"All isotope data on the individuals buried with wagons or pairs of cattle skulls plot among those buried without. As indicated by the physical anthropological analyses, the stable isotope data displayed no evidence that inhumation with a wagon or with cattle offerings marks a distinct social group with access to certain kinds of higher-quality food (Knipper et al. 2015). These observations also apply to the Maikop individuals, who lived in a society that used grave goods to emphasise social status. Moreover, the strontium isotope data from the wagon burials were indistinguishable from those of the other individuals and do not indicate any differences in mobility. Overall, the isotope data of the skeletal remains did not provide any evidence that the presence of wagons or cattle offerings as grave goods indicates membership of some kind of social elite characterised by regular access to certain types of food or by special mobility patterns...Only in the following late 3rd and early 2nd millennia BC in the South Caucasus, Eastern Anatolia and Mesopotamia did wagon burials become formalised status markers for elite burials (Sagona 2013)."

Btw this study is directly referencing specimens we now have genetic data for, including Sharakhalsun 6, kurgan 2, grave 23 who is mentioned here in Sabine Reinhold et al:
"It would indeed be tempting to see the male from Sharakhalsun 2/6, grave 18 not only as the driver of the oldest wooden vehicle dated so far but also as the trainer and master of the animals that once pulled his cart. Despite his frequent serious fractures, an anthropological examination cannot confirm or refute this hypothesis beyond all doubt. At the time, all individuals were very muscular due to constant heavy work and walking long distances."
And also in the supplements of this study:
"The second mound-shell was also built by early Steppe Maykop groups and graves 12 and 15 date to this period40. The third Maykop cluster dates to the second half of the 4th millennium BC. It includes grave 6, 11 and the atypical grave 18, which are among those that produced genome-wide data. This grave belongs to a specific group, with influences from Maykop and Yamnaya traditions3. During the 3rd millennium, Yamnaya groups used the Maykop mound and added several graves in central positions and on the periphery as well as at least one new mound-shell. The last interments (graves 1, 2, 7,8 and wagon grave 9) belong to the late Bronze Age Catacomb period. Empty grave 10 can only roughly be dated to the Middle Bronze Age. Mound 6 in Sharakhalsun revealed four complexes with remains of wooden wagons belonging to different cultural formations. It is one of few places with a concentration of wagon burials among the hundreds of excavated mounds in the vicinity and yielded the oldest dated wooden wagon so far in grave 186. This individual probably was one of the first that adopted this new technology in the North Caucasian and Caspian steppe41. The complexes of Sharakhalsun are part of a larger bioarchaeological study and are scheduled for full publication in 2019."


They also have dna from Marinskaya 5, but unfortunately it doesn't look like it includes grave 23... one of the individuals thought to be an "innovator" who helped spread the technology/knowledge and originated from someplace foreign.
 
This is one thing that is bothering me in this whole "Transcaucasia vs. Steppes" discussion. I mean, if the bulk of the CHG in the Pontic-Caspian steppe populations is very ancient, having being absorbed in high proportions before 5000 BC (the lack of ANF in the steppes also indicate that early introgression), then it is, from a linguistic point of view, very hard to accept the possibility that Early PIE was a "CHG language" from the southern slopes of the Caucasus, because that would imply that Anatolian IE (or also possibly, according to this study, even much less diverged languages like Armenian and especially Greek) and the Pontic-Caspian steppe IE would've split in the 6th millennium BC. Either scientists assumed a much faster pace of linguistic evolution, or it is just impossible that the initial split of PIE happened so early.

Now, if we could demonstrate that there was a significant amount of extra CHG in the Chalcolithic Pontic-Caspian region, that could suggest a new demographic and presumably linguistic layer onto the older ethnic makeup.

As for the lack of EHG in those few "Hittite" (or at least "near to the Hittite") samples, I was thinking (okay, speculating) a bit about it from the assumption (pretty much mainstream among linguists) that Anatolian IE split much earlier than the others and probably in a very different historic context (certainly not the mobile horse-driven pastoralism of Yamnaya and descendants). It also seems from this paper that the North Caucasus, right next to the steppes, had a very different genetic structure with a much higher CHG and ANF, so I'd think it is plausible that the southernmost portions of Sredny-Stog and/or Khvalynsk in direct contact with the North Caucasus could have some substructure in a transition zone to the steppes. We know now that Maykop had EHG, which is not found further to the south, so there was some cline. If the ancestors Hittites came from this region and expanded more or less in the fashion of later IE branches into regions that were already very populated (like Greece and South Asia), then they could've migrated south becoming a relevant and dominant minority with an increasingly diluted DNA makeup, and given their very early separation from the steppe or North Caucasus populations it's probable that by the time they established in former Hattic-speaking lands to form their kingdom and empire their EHG portion was just too small to make a significant presence in the genomic makeup of the region's average inhabitant. Mere genetic drift and regional substructure could make EHG virtually invisible after a few centuries unless we had many more samples. Doesn't this type of thing happen when migrations were not that powerful to trigger an appreciable population replacement? Just playing a bit with this speculation, let's imagine this totally hypothetical (and admittedly baseless for now) scenario:

From CHG-enriched southern steppes just north of the North Caucasus (South_Steppe): 40% EHG, 55% CHG, 5% ANF
Admixture with (north or south?) Caucasians during the Proto-Anatolian phase: 25% South_Steppe + 75% Local Caucasians (5% EHG, 70% CHG, 25% ANF) >>> 13% EHG, 66% CHG, 8% ANF.
Admixture with North-Central Anatolians during the Hittite phase: 20% Proto-Anatolian + 80% Hatti and other natives (0% EHG, 30% CHG, 70% ANF) >>> 2.5% EHG, 37% CHG, 60.5% (2.5% EHG - and that's assuming that the Caucasians already had some EHG even before Maykop and that the Proto-Anatolians still made a reasonable demographic impact of ~25% and the Hittites one of ~20%, not too shabby)

I'm just entertaining all the possibilities, especially considering that apparently the CHG component in the steppes is MUCH older than even the 1st Indo-European split around ~4000 BC, and not just some Late Neolithic/Chalcolithic influx bringing not just a new (presumably more advanced) people but potentially a new language family.

Two questions : Do you mean, as I seem to understand, that the Proto-IE/Anatolian ancestor language was initially EHG ? What is your estimate of the time span between the departure of the Anatolians and the emergence of Yamna ?
 
This is one thing that is bothering me in this whole "Transcaucasia vs. Steppes" discussion. I mean, if the bulk of the CHG in the Pontic-Caspian steppe populations is very ancient, having being absorbed in high proportions before 5000 BC (the lack of ANF in the steppes also indicate that early introgression), then it is, from a linguistic point of view, very hard to accept the possibility that Early PIE was a "CHG language" from the southern slopes of the Caucasus, because that would imply that Anatolian IE (or also possibly, according to this study, even much less diverged languages like Armenian and especially Greek) and the Pontic-Caspian steppe IE would've split in the 6th millennium BC. Either scientists assumed a much faster pace of linguistic evolution, or it is just impossible that the initial split of PIE happened so early.

nature.jpg
 

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