@BoNe
I add let's not confuse paternal genealogy and population genetic and ethno-cultural groups. An unique Y terminal of linage, even if it's easy to trace his ancestors, cannot tell us by itself if the last bearer has/had kept on living with his brethren in their original culture or has/had switched culture, drown in another ethny. This kind of change can be more or less approached by autosomal composition even if we can often mistake.
You don't contradict me in fact. Not 100%, only if you consider some targeted and dominant visible traits in the case of your dogs. But human pop's are not dogs with strict breeding-selection process, if selection exists, is not so systhematic, so it demands more generations even if not by force a lot. Do notice I don't contradict you completely either. To date I'm not aware of an ancient pop where dominant male elite mated only with submitted female pop. But I dont' deny some washing occurred, maybe the case for Mycenians or Basques by instance.
What we absolutely cannot do is classify L151 as “Steppe” when its most directly documented empirical ancestors are a cousin of the Samara clade, separated by around 1000 years from the branch from which modern Europeans descend.
And yet that’s the damn consensus everyone takes for granted.
From the Atlantic Bronze Age and the Bell Beaker period emerged hundreds of hyper-dominant L151 lines, and most of them probably went extinct killing each other.
It’s well known that they sailed across the Mediterranean and the Atlantic a thousand years before the Phoenicians, but only certain elite lineages would have done so. That’s why we haven’t found ships from that period. They spread out across the Mediterranean mainly between 3000–2500 BC. It’s not surprising that some lineage reached the Balkans around 2000 BC and became isolated among the Mycenaeans > Heracleidae > Dorians > Argeads.
It’s also known that today there are basal L2 branches in that area.
There’s a lot of biological illiteracy in these matters — and I don’t mean that as an insult to anyone — but rather, people cling to technicalities they don’t really understand.
Most people I’ve seen debating this topic elsewhere rely on raw BAM file comparisons and then say dumb things like “they were Vikings” because of PCA proximity, when it’s crystal clear that the only valid thing that can be inferred from that sample is that it’s R1b — and L151 has been detected. With manual refinement we could probably go further, but that depends on the limitations of the software and the skill of the person operating it. What suffers the most are the autosomes used for PCA readings.
It’s like telling someone, “Don’t press that doorbell, it’s broken and will electrocute you” — and they go and press it anyway, then get mad that they were electrocuted. If the BAM file hasn’t been refined by someone well-regarded in bioinformatics, what the hell do they expect?
PCA by itself is virtually useless for anything serious, because it’s tied to biases already established by other authors, and on top of that, sample coverage is always inconsistent. So you can never truly determine the origin of a genetic mix with that method, because it will always lump samples into one cluster or another. If the sample has 20% coverage, the other 80% is fantasy, filled in by a calculator and overestimation.
Genetics isn’t about seeking “mixes” — it’s about cataloguing specific allelic mutations as references to know where and when they first truly appeared. Not whether they were the result of some endogamous transfer, which, as I’ve explained, can be forced in just four generations — even two sibling pairings can completely mess with someone relying on PCA.
Investigating these issues through PCA is utterly impossible. Only Y-DNA refinement of ancient samples will illuminate the path. PCA is, in fact, the worst tool because it doesn’t tell you if genes are going or coming — only Y-DNA and mtDNA chronologies can do that.
The latest study on the Punics and Phoenicians is another example where, based on how they present the data, they clarify absolutely nothing. The moment I saw the PCA charts, I thought, “Damn, the Sea Peoples.”
Since they don’t refine the Y trees, we can’t know anything — not even the order.
I’ve spent hours and hours analyzing pedigrees, and I can mentally calculate inbreeding levels. That’s essentially what these ancestry calculators do — estimating based on what kind of mix would’ve been born in a given time frame.
When I apply those same criteria to L151 populations, they make up 50% of all Europeans. That’s why we are European — especially Western Europeans. The Eastern part, as you know, has other founding males. We are, ancestrally, very inbred — like all peoples, really.
Any Spaniard who tells me they belong to haplogroup E or T — they don’t even have to say it — I already know that 4 to 6 of their great-great-grandfathers were DF27. So I can predict their autosomes with pretty good accuracy. It’s impossible to reproduce with a Spanish woman and not have your descendants “catch the virus.” And this applies to any population where R1b exceeds 50%. You just have to know when those minority Y haplogroups were introduced.
A Basque person? 7–8 of their great-great-grandfathers will be DF27; 5–8 of those will be Z278.
An Irish person? 7 out of 8 will be DF13.
PCA does the same thing but with 1000 more mathematical variables.
All those paths go through proto-Celtic cultures of transhumant cattle herders around 3000–2500 BC — which were basically the Bell Beakers.
What connects all noteworthy L151 lineages, regardless of where they migrated or whom they mixed with, is that they were breeding horses and bulls without interruption since 3500 BC in Iberia, France, Germany, Italy, the Danube zone, and the Aegean. Even today, horses with DA1-U, DA1-N, and DA1-R haplogroups still survive — remnants from before the massive DAC replacement (formerly called DOM2).
It’s also extremely curious that when they compare bulls using PCA, they end up ordered almost exactly like L151, which shows they exchanged livestock — or stole it — just as their own myths recount.
So the Argeads and Mycenaeans surely had something to do with maintaining horse breeding in that region. That’s why today we still find around 10% of Pf7562 and P312 in that area — which many assume are from later migrations, but they could date back to 2000 BC. This L151 found in the Argead dynasty is proof of that, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out to fall under U152.
