I just emailed this to the authors of High-resolution genomic ancestry reveals mobility in early medieval Europe, a new preprint at bioRxiv [LINK]. I appreciate that Polish population history is not the main focus of your preprint, and also that you're constrained by the lack of relevant and suitably high quality ancient genomes from East-Central and Eastern Europe. However, I must say that your ..read more

It's always amusing to see some random Jovan or Dimitar arguing online that Slavic speakers have been in the Balkans since at least the Neolithic. Obviously, Slavic peoples only turned up in the Balkans during the early Middle Ages. It's just that their linguistic and genetic impact on the region was so profound that it may seem like they've been there forever. A new paper at Cell by Olalde et ..read more

The ancIBD method paper from the David Reich Lab was just published in Nature (open access here). It's a very useful effort, but the authors are still somewhat confused about the origin of the Corded Ware culture (CWC) population. From the paper (emphasis is mine): This direct evidence that most Corded Ware ancestry must have genealogical links to people associated with Yamnaya culture spanning ..read more

When used properly, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is an extraordinarily powerful tool and one of the best ways to study fine-scale genetic substructures within Europe. The PCA plot below is based on Global25 data and focuses on the genetic relationship between Wielbark Goths and Medieval Poles, including from the Viking Age, in the context of present-day European genetic variation. I'd ..read more

Here's an abstract of a new study from the David Reich Lab about ancient Slavs, titled "Genetic identification of Slavs in Migration Period Europe using an IBD sharing graph". Emphasis is mine: Popular methods of genetic analysis relying on allele frequencies such as PCA, ADMIXTURE and qpAdm are not suitable for distinguishing many populations that were important historical actors in the ..read more

The scientists at the David Reich Lab are a clever bunch. But they're not always on top of things. And this can be a problem. For instance, they fail to understand that the Caucasus is a semipermeable genetic barrier that has effectively stymied gene flow between Eastern Europe and West Asia across the ages. Until they accept and understand this fact, they won't be able to accurately ..read more

I'm totally serious when I say that this video is more informative, objective and accurate than any peer-reviewed paper published to date when it comes to the genetic origins of the Khvalynsk people. However, that's not to say it's perfect. I think it misses some important details. But I'll have a lot more to say about that here in a few weeks. So please stay tuned. See also... Dear David ..read more

I've now had the chance to read and digest the following two papers in Science about the origin of Indo-European languages: Language trees with sampled ancestors support a hybrid model for the origin of Indo-European languages, Heggarty et al. The genetic history of the Southern Arc: A bridge between West Asia and Europe, Lazaridis, Alpaslan-Roodenberg et al. The Heggarty et al. paper is pure ..read more

In their recent paper, titled Early contact between late farming and pastoralist societies in southeastern Europe, Penske et al. make the following claim: By contrast, Yamnaya Caucasus individuals from the southern steppe can be modelled as a two-way model of around 76% Steppe Eneolithic and 26% Caucasus Eneolithic/Maykop, confirming the findings of Lazaridis and colleagues 47. This two-way mix ..read more

I can't wait to get stuck into the data from the new Penske et al. paper. This is likely to be the main topic on this blog for the next few weeks, or perhaps even months. Early contact between late farming and pastoralist societies in southeastern Europe By the way, I think it's hilarious how the authors totally ignored the fact that the North Pontic region is located in Eastern Europe. Instead ..read more