Paleolithic DNA from the Caucasus

EDIT: But I think Villabruna is a mixture with a lot of Vestonice as it simply makes more sense. The culture was called Epigravettian for a reason.

That would mean that due to its absence in WHG the Basal Eurasian (rather than the Ancient North African) component is either a relic or greatly inflated, wouldn't it?

Going back to the assumption that Villabruna descends from a rather unmixed population, is it possible that there was a super isolated Paleolithic population somewhere in Europe or the Middle East (on islands, in mountains or something)? Sounds stupid I know, but as it stands I find it difficult to imagine that the Proto-Villabrunans would have been freely roaming the Balkans and Anatolia without acquiring either Basal Eurasian or Sungir-Vestonice admixture.

I'm thinking of something like the Corbeddu cave of Sardinia perhaps. Although it's much more likely that those hunters were similar to those on the mainland of course.
 
That would mean that due to its absence in WHG the Basal Eurasian (rather than the Ancient North African) component is either a relic or greatly inflated, wouldn't it?

Going back to the assumption that Villabruna descends from a rather unmixed population, is it possible that there was a super isolated Paleolithic population somewhere in Europe or the Middle East (on islands, in mountains or something)? Sounds stupid I know, but as it stands I find it difficult to imagine that the Proto-Villabrunans would have been freely roaming the Balkans and Anatolia without acquiring either Basal Eurasian or Sungir-Vestonice admixture.

I'm thinking of something like the Corbeddu cave of Sardinia perhaps. Although it's much more likely that those hunters were similar to those on the mainland of course.

There is plenty of place in modern era that weren't water in those times. Adriatic Sea didn't exist, Persian Gulf didn't exist. If i remember correctly a very old post of Eurogenes, were he even detected minor Kotias ( Dzudzuana likely ), Villabruna was calculated as Vestonice + Afontova Gora 3. I think the problem we have here is the same we have with Eastern Europe in the metal ages, more we are west of it, less CHG, more we are close of Caucasus, more CHG. We probably just didn't found the good pops yet, the pops that was WHG / Villabruna, but a little bit more Dzudzuana Basal Eurasian shifted and that give birth to Anatolian Neolithic. Iron_Gates HG for exemple, are maybe more northern reason why EHG is here and not Basal Eurasian. But i'm confident from Paleolithic Anatolia or even Paleolithic Greece, we might found some pop more middle-eastern shifted than the northern ones.
 
Another reason why for Iron_Gates HG dont seem to show some Basal Eurasian is that maybe the Villabruna ancestry was way more further east of Anatolia in the Paleolithic and Mesolithic, and that they were replaced by Dzudzuana ancestry in the name of Anatolian_Neolithic and Levante_Neolithic in very early Neolithic with the expansion of lineages like F,G,H,E,J,T. Maybe even link with the change of mindset at Gobekli Tepe. This latter hypothesis could also explain some basal form of R1b in Anatolia.

Edit. I just reread the paper and i read the following. " It has been suggested that there is an Anatolia Neolithic-related affinity in hunter-gatherers from the Iron Gates. Our analysis confirms this by showing that this population has Dzudzuana-related ancestry as do many hunter-gatherer populations from southeastern Europe, eastern Europe and Scandinavia. " Wich as i was saying few times, sound like the CHG found in Motala or Baltic HG as well as Iron Gates HG might be in fact Dzudzuana and not Kotias. The question is, is CHG in chalcolithic eastern europe Dzudzuana or Kotias?

Also, in the admixture table, Sidelkino wich is our oldest EHG sample to date, have more Dzudzuana ancestry than any other hunter gatherer until the CHG in Yamnaya. There is a sort of picture that start to show.
 
14000-12000 BC:

Khvalynian Sea separated the already noticeably different late-glacial forager cultures that prospered east and west of the Ural Mountains. Around 11,000-9,000 BCE the water finally rose high enough to overflow catastrophically through a southwestern outlet, the Manych Depression north of the North Caucasus Mountains, and a violent flood poured into the Black Sea...But, by the time the sea receded, they [hunter bands] had become very different culturally and probably linguistically on the eastern and western sides of the Ural-Caspian frontier. When domesticated cattle were accepted by societies west of the Urals, they were rejected by those east of the Urals, who remained foragers for thousands of years.
(Anthony, HWL, p. 136-7)

In the case of the Ural frontier, the Khvalynian Sea separated the populations east and west of the Ural Mountains for millennia, and the saline desert-steppe that replaced it...probably remained a significant ecological barrier for pedestrian foragers.
(Ibid, p. 463)

https://www.researchgate.net/figure...sins-Modified-after-Chepalyga_fig17_318199054

Dates would correspond to the formation of the Villabruna cluster. This could have caused the split between WHG and EHG. In addition, the Manych-Kerch Spillway could have blocked passage, north and south, between the Caucasus and the Pontic-Steppes (splitting CHG from WHG?).
 
That would mean that due to its absence in WHG the Basal Eurasian (rather than the Ancient North African) component is either a relic or greatly inflated, wouldn't it?

Going back to the assumption that Villabruna descends from a rather unmixed population, is it possible that there was a super isolated Paleolithic population somewhere in Europe or the Middle East (on islands, in mountains or something)? Sounds stupid I know, but as it stands I find it difficult to imagine that the Proto-Villabrunans would have been freely roaming the Balkans and Anatolia without acquiring either Basal Eurasian or Sungir-Vestonice admixture.

I think the fact that Dzudzuana already had Basal Eurasian, but apparently the difference from Dzuduzana to Anatolia_Neolithic (mostly Central-Western Anatolia, I presume) was that the latter was more WHG-like (UHG?) possibly indicates that Western & Central Anatolia had little if any influence from Basal Eurasian-enriched people until much later, certainly later than the traversal of the proto-WHG people to Southeast Europe. But what I find particularly hard to believe is that the WHG wouldn't have mixed extensively with the earlier Gravettian (and contemporaneous Epigravettian) populations. Have scientists really insisted on this notion of WHG as "pure"? I find that absolutely unlikely, all the other ancient populations have been found to be mixed, in some cases heavily so.
 
14000-12000 BC:

(Anthony, HWL, p. 136-7)

(Ibid, p. 463)

https://www.researchgate.net/figure...sins-Modified-after-Chepalyga_fig17_318199054

Dates would correspond to the formation of the Villabruna cluster. This could have caused the split between WHG and EHG. In addition, the Manych-Kerch Spillway could have blocked passage, north and south, between the Caucasus and the Pontic-Steppes (splitting CHG from WHG?).

Lazaridis and his colleagues reject an Eastern European origin because they see Villabruna as a unique population which split very early from the Kostenki-Sungir clade. This split predates Goyet116, so we're talking about ~40k BP the latest.
 
14000-12000 BC:

(Anthony, HWL, p. 136-7)

(Ibid, p. 463)

https://www.researchgate.net/figure...sins-Modified-after-Chepalyga_fig17_318199054

Dates would correspond to the formation of the Villabruna cluster. This could have caused the split between WHG and EHG. In addition, the Manych-Kerch Spillway could have blocked passage, north and south, between the Caucasus and the Pontic-Steppes (splitting CHG from WHG?).

How would this have caused the split between WHG and EHG? EHG were located mainly west of the Urals, so they would've been on the same "side" of the Kvalynian Sea as the WHG. Or do you suggest the EHG were east of the Urals and of the Caucasus and only migrated westward later, replacing the WHG there?
 
Lazaridis and his colleagues reject an Eastern European origin because they see Villabruna as a unique population which split very early from the Kostenki-Sungir clade. This split predates Goyet116, so we're talking about ~40k BP the latest.

Where do I say Villabruna/WHG has "an Eastern European origin"????

By ~14kya a third group, the Villabruna cluster, appeared throughout mainland Europe, coinciding with the Bølling-Allerød warming period. Members of this cluster, which has also been called western European hunter-gatherers (WHG), were found across Europe during Late Upper Paleolithic-to-Mesolithic times, and were the main pre-agricultural Europeans prior to the Neolithic ~8kya.
 
How would this have caused the split between WHG and EHG? EHG were located mainly west of the Urals, so they would've been on the same "side" of the Kvalynian Sea as the WHG. Or do you suggest the EHG were east of the Urals and of the Caucasus and only migrated westward later, replacing the WHG there?

It turned what would have been a zone of cultural interpenetration and exchange into a frontier separating radically different ways of life/language families.
 
It turned what would have been a zone of cultural interpenetration and exchange into a frontier separating radically different ways of life/language families.

So you think the EHG appeared east of the Urals and basically in modern Kazakhstan/Siberia/North Central Asia? Because the Khvalynian Sea created a barrier only between the Pontic-Caspian region and Central Asia, so if EHG lived in Eastern Europe they wouldn't be separated from the WHG in the rest of Europe. Also, that Khvalynian Sea basically receded and started to dry up during the Mesolithic after these floods into the Black Sea, so the barrier would've been very weakened even by Early Mesolithic times.
 
So you think the EHG appeared east of the Urals and basically in modern Kazakhstan/Siberia/North Central Asia? Because the Khvalynian Sea created a barrier only between the Pontic-Caspian region and Central Asia, so if EHG lived in Eastern Europe they wouldn't be separated from the WHG in the rest of Europe. Also, that Khvalynian Sea basically receded and started to dry up during the Mesolithic after these floods into the Black Sea, so the barrier would've been very weakened even by Early Mesolithic times.

Weakened, but not removed:

In the case of the Ural frontier, the Khvalynian Sea separated the populations east and west of the Ural Mountains for millennia, and the saline desert-steppe that replaced it...probably remained a significant ecological barrier for pedestrian foragers. (Anthony)

Where you have a persistent barrier, populations diverge. The spill-way from the Khvalynian Sea to the Black Sea would have dried up post-flood (~11,000-9,000 BCE), however, no longer blocking north-south movement between the Caucacus and the Pontic-Steppes. The receding of the northern ice sheets would have allowed greater east-west movement across the steppes and over the Urals. Where WHG, CHG, and EHG fit into this is an open question.
 
The most disturbing think about this study, is how it makes its brash conclusion, based on a few samples from W. Georgia, dated to the upper palelithic, without samples from the same or earlier time period in iran or anatolia. Especially considering, so called, 'chg' samples, to date, are all j bearers, strongly suggesting they are products of west asian population expansions beginning from the last glacial maximum, up until the neolithic.
 
Indeed, IJ linker was found in iran, some years ago. That's why I have suggested such conclusions of the paper are not only wrong, but backwards. Caucaus groups , as early as the late upper paleolithic (Satp and kk1), seem much more likely to be the descendants of population movements from the south, in west asia. But the authors dont have samples that date to that period from iran/anatolia, but are surprisingly eager to draw there conclusions. So essentially, the results of these types of studies are better to materbaute to, then to take seriously.
 
Given the high temporal divergence of caucasoud y-haogroups, but the relatively low adna genetic distance between modern caucasoid populations which bear them, it is clear that the earlier populations which these haplogroups (r1a, r1b, j, i) were found, had been considerable homogenized. Given the types of ultra rare, basal haplogroups found in Iran (ij, r1b*, j2a, r2) and Turkey, there is no more obvious region for the nexus of this homogenization.
 
@Epoch
you wrote: EDIT: I don't think this is accurate anymore. Drift is by far a bigger changer of DNA than mutations.

could you explain how drift occurs without mutations? Or it implies crossings with other pops, or "loosing of genes" so reduced DNA (!?!)

 
Welcome it's an exciting place to grow and learn. There are always many people to help you and please Never hesitate to ask me. I hope these words that are being shared help you to answer some of your questions
Eduardo Moreno
IZB; University of Bern; Bern, Switzerland
Key words: out of Africa, human evolution, human genetics, ritual fights, human behavior, super-competitors, warfare,
haplotypes, hunter

The “out of Africa” hypothesis proposes that a small group of Homo sapiens left Africa 80,000 years ago, spreading
the mitochondrial haplotype L3 throughout the Earth.1-10 Little effort has been made to try to reconstruct the society
and culture of the tribe that left Africa to populate the rest of the world.1 Here, I find that hunter-gatherers that belong
to mitochondrial haplotypes L0, L1 and L2 do not have a culture of ritualized fights. In contrast to this, almost all L3
derived hunter-gatherers have a more belligerent culture that includes ritualized fights such as wrestling, stick fights
or headhunting expeditions. This appears to be independent of their environment because ritualized fights occur in
all climates, from the tropics to the arctic. There is also a correlation between mitochondrial haplotypes and warfare
propensity or the use of murder and suicide to resolve conflicts. The data implicate that the original human population
outside Africa is descended from only two closely related sub-branches that practiced ritual fighting and had a higher
propensity towards warfare and the use of murder for conflict resolution. This warfare culture may have given the out of
Africa migrants a competitive advantage to colonize the world. But it could also have crucially influenced the subsequent
history of The Earth. In the future, it would be interesting to see how we could further reconstruct the society and culture
of the “Out of Africa Tribe.”
 
Welcome it's an exciting place to grow and learn. There are always many people to help you and please Never hesitate to ask me. I hope these words that are being shared help you to answer some of your questions
Eduardo Moreno
IZB; University of Bern; Bern, Switzerland
Key words: out of Africa, human evolution, human genetics, ritual fights, human behavior, super-competitors, warfare,
haplotypes, hunter

The “out of Africa” hypothesis proposes that a small group of Homo sapiens left Africa 80,000 years ago, spreading
the mitochondrial haplotype L3 throughout the Earth.1-10 Little effort has been made to try to reconstruct the society
and culture of the tribe that left Africa to populate the rest of the world.1 Here, I find that hunter-gatherers that belong
to mitochondrial haplotypes L0, L1 and L2 do not have a culture of ritualized fights. In contrast to this, almost all L3
derived hunter-gatherers have a more belligerent culture that includes ritualized fights such as wrestling, stick fights
or headhunting expeditions. This appears to be independent of their environment because ritualized fights occur in
all climates, from the tropics to the arctic. There is also a correlation between mitochondrial haplotypes and warfare
propensity or the use of murder and suicide to resolve conflicts. The data implicate that the original human population
outside Africa is descended from only two closely related sub-branches that practiced ritual fighting and had a higher
propensity towards warfare and the use of murder for conflict resolution. This warfare culture may have given the out of
Africa migrants a competitive advantage to colonize the world. But it could also have crucially influenced the subsequent
history of The Earth. In the future, it would be interesting to see how we could further reconstruct the society and culture
of the “Out of Africa Tribe.”

The current data does not support the idea that the human race evolved from a single tribe in Africa. Rather, it supports multi-regionalism within Africa.

It is discussed in this thread:

https://www.eupedia.com/forum/threa...-Populations-across-Africa-Why-Does-It-Matter
 
My understanding of this paper is shaky at best, but would it be correct to say that there are two main scenarios that would explain these results?

1) In 26,000bp there was a small Dzudzuana population in the Caucasus that migrated and expanded between 26,000 and 13,000bp, leaving the Caucasus and becoming dominant in West Asia and after 13,000bp expanding further to become dominant throughout West Eurasia and North Africa.

2) In 26,000bp the Dzudzuana population, which might be called Ancestral West Asian, was already widespread across Anatolia and perhaps the Levant. Dzudzuana Cave was near the eastern edge of this population. After 13,000bp it became more widespread because it was the main ancestral component of both WHG and West Asian neolithic populations, including the West Anatolian neolithic population that spread into Europe.
In 26,000bp this large Dzudzuana population was contemporaneous with the Gravettian in Europe, ANE in Siberia, an Iranian HG population, and other HG populations further east. Because the Caucasus was the eastern fringe of the Dzudzuana population, over the next 10-12,000 years the Caucasian sub-population inter-mixed with their neighbours, ANE coming from the north east and Iranian HGs from the south east. By around 13,000bp, CHG combined admixture from these three populations, with Dzudzuana reduced to a minor component.

The second hypothesis seems more plausible to me, but the answer will come when there are more Paleolithic aDNA samples from West Asia and North Africa.
 
F is in fact ancestor of GHIJK. https://www.yfull.com/tree/CF/
As for G route, there is indeed a huge gap between the time of G formation and its TMRCA. GHIJK first split could have happened around the area you mentioned, or close to it, indeed. In the case of G, ok, it could have been a route from east to west, till the first split of G itself around Armenia. HIJK from west to east doesn't seem to work, since the clades involved don't present such gap, as you suggested. No time to HIJK "jump" from the area around Caucasus to South Asia.
Anyway, I guess I got your hypothesis. Correct me if I'm wrong. You speculate people related to an older wave from Africa, with a now extinct Y-DNA lineage(?), would have lived in South Asia and would have been the original Basal Eurasians. Then GHIJK - related to another wave - came without this component. Already separated, G and H would have gone south and mixed with this older pop, whereas IJK took another route. Later, G and H would have migrated west bringing BE. Is that right?

Seems unlikely to me. WOuldn't AASI have been first that east?
 

This thread has been viewed 69157 times.

Back
Top