The enormous demographic impact of the Indo-Europeans
When I was a kid I remember seeing a map of the distribution of Indo-European languages, and being perplexed by their spread and distribution, from the North Sea to the Bay of Bengal. Later, I learned and understood that language families can spread by diffusion and cultural assimilation. In The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: […]
Afrikaner genetics shows how unique New England culture is
There’s a new paper in BMC Biology, Patterns of African and Asian admixture in the Afrikaner population of South Africa, which confirms some of what I found years ago with a much smaller data set, The Genetics Of Afrikaners (Again). The PCA above and Treemix to the right I generated from the data in the […]
Eurasia became a melting pot during the Holocene
One of the things you notice when you look at genome-wide data are peculiar populations that seem to be shifted on PCA and other metrics in relation to exotic genetic affinities. For example, Sardinians, Japanese, and Taiwanese aborigines exhibit this pattern. When looking at Han Chinese data, many of the southern samples seem a bit […]
The Pleistocene roots of East Asian genetic variation
In the comments below there was a mention of the fact that East Eurasians are less genetically varied than people to their west. The main reason for this is probably the serial bottleneck of modern people as they left Africa/Near East ~50,000 years ago. Similarly, people of the New World and Oceania are also less […]
Patterns in the Y chromosome and Holocene expansion
I’ve been looking at uniparental lineages recently. That is, direct maternal and paternal lineages. The mtDNA and Y chromosomal phylogenies. Between the late 1990s and 2000s phylogenetic reconstructions of these lineages dominated historical population genetic inference. Today with ancient DNA and genomewide SNP analysis, and now even whole-genome analysis, there isn’t nearly as much focus […]
The Aryan Integration Theory (AIT)
Over the past week, there have been lots of reactions to the two papers which came out last week, The formation of human populations in South and Central Asia and An Ancient Harappan Genome Lacks Ancestry from Steppe Pastoralists or Iranian Farmers. The Insight is still on hiatus, but I managed to interview Vagheesh Narasimhan […]
The day of the Dasa
Unless you have been sleeping today you may have noticed two important papers on South Asian historical population genetics have been published. The simple and short paper is An Ancient Harappan Genome Lacks Ancestry from Steppe Pastoralists or Iranian Farmers. The longer paper, which is basically a book if you read the supplements, is The […]
Population genetic structure of the Italian peninsula
A new open-access paper on Italian genetics, Population structure of modern-day Italians reveals patterns of ancient and archaic ancestries in Southern Europe: European populations display low genetic differentiation as the result of long-term blending of their ancient founding ancestries. However, it is unclear how the combination of ancient ancestries related to early foragers, Neolithic farmers, […]
Cryptic Ashkenazi ancestry across Eastern Europe
One of the great things about the spread of ‘direct to consumer’ genomics is that it’s increasing sample size in countries where for various reasons there isn’t much coverage. It was brought to my attention that My Heritage DNA results have been analyzed by the company, and yielded the surprising result that Hungary has been […]
The origins of “Lucky Arabia”
One of the benefits of reading Arabs is that the author is an expert on Yemen, which often gets short-shrift in works focused on the Arab peoples. As noted in the book itself this is not entirely unfair, insofar as until the past thousand years or so the peoples of Yemen did not even speak […]
The Neolithic roots of modern East Asian human geography
Because of the long and thorough tradition of Chinese historiography, we have a good and deep chronological record of East Asia going back two to three thousand years ago. Chinese records also help illuminate and clarify aspects of Japanese, Korean, and Southeast Asian, history. For example, what we know about the Indianized kingdom of Funan […]
The Yamnaya origins of the Tocharian?
Eurogenes points me to a new paper in Current Biology, Ancient Genomes Reveal Yamnaya-Related Ancestry and a Potential Source of Indo-European Speakers in Iron Age Tianshan. The conclusion: Combining both the genetic and archaeological evidence, we here provide the first direct evidence of an early stage of population admixture around 2,100 BP in Xinjiang in […]
Hungarian nationalism and the ghosts of Turan
In Harper’s, The Call of the Drums Hungary’s far right discovers its inner barbarian: The Great Kurultáj, an event held annually outside the town of Bugac, Hungary, is billed as both the “Tribal Assembly of the Hun-Turkic Nations” and “Europe’s Largest Equestrian Event.” When I arrived last August, I was fittingly greeted by a variety […]
The late emergence of Semitic Ethiopia
Some of you have asked me about a new paper on East Africa, Ancient DNA reveals a multistep spread of the first herders into sub-Saharan Africa.The reality is some of you know this topic better than I, so I don’t have much original to add. But, I was curious today when a preprint dropped, West […]
Ten individuals give you the history of whole populations – yes they do!
In the recent paper on the genetics of Philistines they had good quality DNA from 10 individuals. Some archaeologists have criticized over-generalizing from such a small dataset. Naively I think this is a good caution. But we have many many ancient DNA results from humans now, and I think this naive objection needs to be […]
The genetic origins of the Philistines
A week ago I connected the origins of Islam to genetics. By coincidence, an ancient DNA paper came out yesterday which speaks to particular historical points in the Hew Bible. Ancient DNA sheds light on the genetic origins of early Iron Age Philistines: The ancient Mediterranean port city of Ashkelon, identified as “Philistine” during the […]
The Jomon contributed little to the Japanese
A few months ago there was a preprint with an ancient Japanese genome, Jomon genome sheds light on East Asian population history. I read it but didn’t say anything at the time. I read it again, partly because I’m reading a history of Korea where the Wa, the early Japanese, show up to intervene in […]
What might have happened to earlier modern humans
A few years ago a paper came out, Ancient gene flow from early modern humans into Eastern Neanderthals, which recorded evidence of ancestry related to modern humans which evolved in Africa in the Altai Neanderthal genome. There has also been evidence that ancestral Neanderthals had their mtDNA lineages replaced by African lineages more than 200,000 […]
The emergence of Han identity as autochthonous
Reader Matt points me to two new papers on the linguistic phylogenetics of the Sino-Tibetan language families, Dated language phylogenies shed light on the ancestry of Sino-Tibetan and Phylogenetic evidence for Sino-Tibetan origin in northern China in the Late Neolithic. You should read Matt’s whole comment, but one thing he mentions is that by ~3,000 […]
The population turnover in westernmost Europe over the last 8,000 years
The figure above is from The genomic history of the Iberian Peninsula over the past 8000 years. If you had seen something like this five years ago, you’d be gobsmacked. But today this is not atypical, especially in light of the fact that Spain seems to harbor many good sites in relation to the preservation […]