I remember that somewhere on Dienekes' site there is a thread(s) which discusses the fact that a few Armenians plot pretty far away from the
mass of Armenians, and there was some speculation that perhaps it was because of Russian admixture. (I just spent a half hour trying to find it, but I couldn't. If I have time later, I'll try again.) I'm just suggesting that those may be the few Armenians among whom IR plots. If you look closely at the mass of samples in the Near East you'll find that most of the Armenians plot down there somewhere around eastern Turkey, which makes sense.)
However, given the tweets from Razib Khan about the upcoming Lazaridis paper on Samarra, I don't see why the fact that IR plots near a "possibly" mixed Armenian/Russian sample is either surprising or upsetting.
#ASHG14 eastern hg from Karelia and sammara. ANE related to Eastern hg. yamnaya had near East and Caucasus
#ASHG14 ANE in Europe from eastern hg groups? (via yamnaya)
#ASHG14 yamnaya better source for intrusive group into north Europe late Neolithic bronze age
#ASHG14 corded ware 36% nonlocal ancestry. Karelian. low bound
#ASHG14 yamnaya modeled as 50/50 Armenian Karelian. corded ware 75% yamnaya
#ASHG14 yamnaya % peaks in north Europe. lower in south Europe. lowest in Sardinia
#ASHG14 yamnaya = proto-indoeuropean
Perhaps there was Caucasus influence even back in the Bronze Age. much less the Iron Age. I'm told there is now a mad scramble to analyze his data. Of course, I don't know what he'll turn out to be...I'm willing to wait for analyses to be done, and I have no personal stake in the outcome. Anyway, I'm not going to get into speculating based on fragmentary results or rumors posted by people on other sites. I had enough of that. I'll wait for the paper. All I'm saying is that the plotting of IR shouldn't be a total surprise.
I don't think we can make any judgments about the I2a or the C6 because the subclades aren't resolved enough for either the Mesolithic samples or the ones under discussion. We don't even know if all the I2a in these samples is the same one.
Epoch:One interesting thing is that KO2 seems less WHG admixted than the other, later neolithic samples.
We don't know if the y dna of the two samples, K01 and K02, are the same.
Koros 1: I2a subclade unknown
Koros 2: Y dna unknown
What we do know is that Koros 1 looks like a Mesolithic hunter/fisher-gatherer. I'm leaning toward LeBrok's speculation that he was either a hunter-gatherer trying to learn how to farm, or a local absorbed into a very early attempt at settlement by Neolithic farmers. Koros2 is a
very southward plotting Neolithic farmer. He looks to me like an example of what these people were like when they first arrived.
Also, take a look at the dates:
Koros 1:5,650–5,780
Koros 2: 5,570–5,710
They're also two different sites.
The rest of the Neolithic samples are from a later time period. Enough time to have absorbed a little hunter gatherer. However, it's not as much as was absorbed apparently by the farmers in the west, because quite a few of them plot south of Otzi. Or maybe it was just a little bit over the centuries? Otzi and the Copper Age sample from this study plot at about the same latitude don't they? Also, can anybody find Stuttgart on there? Even my bifocals aren't working that well.
Oh, and of the NE 1-7, two of them are C6, and 1 is I2a, but who knows of what variety. Four of them are missing Y dna.
Ed. to remove some rumour mongering of my own. Also, thanks to Epoch for checking the gender identification of these Neolithic samples, and catching that Koros 2 was female, as were NE 1-4. Thanks to Arvisto as well.
We don't know what the ydna of their fathers might have been.