Men of the North
Region I1 I2*/I2a I2b R1a R1b G J2 J*/J1 E1b1b T Q N Russia 5 10.5 0 46 6 1 3 0 2.5 1.5 1.5 23 Lithuania 6 6 1 […]
How the Irish became white
There is more than some truth to the country’s folklore
How the Irish became white
There is more than some truth to the country’s folklore
How the Irish became white
There is more than some truth to the country’s folklore
How the Irish became white
There is more than some truth to the country’s folklore
Steppe lineages in northern Pakisan
This is not the most important paper, but it is a contribution: Complete mitogenomes document substantial genetic contribution from the Eurasian Steppe into northern Pakistani Indo-Iranian speakers. Abstract: To elucidate whether Bronze Age population dispersals from the Eurasian Steppe to South Asia contributed to the gene pool of Indo-Iranian-speaking groups, we analyzed 19,568 mitochondrial DNA …
The Genetics of India Cloubhouse Event – Friday 9 PM CDT
I am hosting a Clubhouse room this Friday, 9 PM CDT (8:30 AM in India on Saturday). The topic will be the genetics of India, and I’ll be talking about my two posts on Substack: – The Stark Truth About Aryans – The Stark Truth About Humans It’s basically going to be an interactive discussion. …
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Why Scythians, Sakas, and Kushanas, are NOT the source of “steppe” ancestry
This is a common question/assertion in the comments pretty much every other week: why couldn’t the documented incursions of nomadic people in the first millennium A.D. be responsible for the steppe ancestry? There is actually a good explanation in The formation of human populations in South and Central Asia, so I’ll quote it: By the …
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Stark Truth About Aryans: a story of India (part 1)
My Substack piece is up, Stark Truth About Aryans: a story of India. I’m pretty proud of this, as it wasn’t a single-sitting blog post, but something I worked over several times. Since it’s for paid subscribers I’ll post the first few paragraphs below, with an infographic that I think illustrates a lot of what’s …
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The massive Indian migration to Southeast Asian
Over at my other weblog I put up a post, Indian Ancestry In Southeast Asia Is Older Than Statistical Genetic Tests Suggest. If you look at two populations in Southeast Asia and find one has Indian ancestry you often can’t find the admixture older than 1000 A.D. (in peninsular Malaysia there is more recent intermarriage …
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How much “steppe” ancestry is there in South Asia? (Indian subcontinent)
Since this question always comes up at some point, I decided to do a rough back-of-the-envelope calculation of the % steppe across the Indian subcontinent. The way I did it was by taking Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India, and estimating the average percentage from the caste breakdowns (e.g., UP is 20% “upper caste” and 20% “Dalit” …
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The Evolutionary History of Man’s Best Friend Revealed
Man and dog share a long history. In much of the world, a history as old as humanity. The latest genetic evidence now tells us that the emergence of the domestic dog lineage occurred soon after the human expansion out of Africa 50,000 years ago, in the depths of the last Ice Age. We came. We saw. And we befriended. This we knew, but now we can closely examine how. A paper out today in Science uses 27 ancient dog genomes from the past 11,000 years to construct an evolutionary history nearly as rich as that produced by human population geneticists over the last decade. The authors found five lineages of ancient dogs that were present at the end of the last Ice Age. These were the dogs that interacted with human migrations during the rise of agriculture and the fall of civilizations to produce the riotous dog diversity that we know today. Familiar breeds like the Pekingese and the St. Bernard, as well as stray Asian village mutts, they’re all the products of a …
Tibeto-Burmans, Munda, and Bengalis
I’m pretty sure I posted this Chaubey lab work as a preprint, but it’s now a published paper. For those who can’t understand the table, it illustrates a big difference between Tibeto-Burmans and Munda. The samples from Bangladesh look to be generic Bangladeshis, the 10% frequency for O2a seems to match the other data I’ve …
The rise of Indicus!
A few years ago an ancient DNA paper on cattle was published, Ancient cattle genomics, origins, and rapid turnover in the Fertile Crescent. It’s a pretty good paper with interesting results. The paper confirmed pretty strikingly that there was a punctuated and massive expansion of indicus ancestry across the Near East between 3,500 and 4,000 …
Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkey, and genetics
Recently a few people have been asking me about Armenian, Turks, and genetics. Mostly because I’ve written about this topic before. Unless you’ve been asleep you know that there is […]
Population structure in West Bengal and Bangladesh
The Genomes Asia 100K has put their Indian paper out. It’s OK, and mostly focuses on the fact that Indians are enriched for inbreeding vis-a-vis other world populations. There are several layers to this. In some cases, as among South Indian Hindus and Muslims, there is cousin-marriage. But, in other cases, for example, Scheduled Castes …
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Ancient Pakistanis were Hindu
Over at my other blog, Pakistani British Are Very Much Like Indians Genetically. The title doesn’t refer to genome-wide worldwide affinities. Rather, the preprint looks at British Pakistanis, and finds a pattern that is not going to surprise Indians: endogamy seems to have kicked in for these groups starting 1,500 to 2,000 years ago. This …
Pakistani British are very much like Indians genetically
I talked to Joe Henrich this week for The Insight about his book, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous (the episode is going life next week). Obviously much of the discussion hinged around relatedness, kinship, and how that impacted the arc of history (we also talked […]
20th century genetics as basic science and 21st century genetics as basic and applied
There was an offhand comment on Twitter that in the 1970s genetics was barely a field because we’ve made so much progress since then. For obvious reasons, many scientists took umbrage at this. I think it’s wrong and gives the lay public the incorrect impression. But, the reality is that I do think that the […]
Who do the English think they are?
For centuries, debate has raged about whether England’s population is largely descended from German immigrants. Now, we have answers