When Surya left Olga of the Birch Forest
In the recent film The Northman the protagonist, Amleth, has a romantic relationship with a woman, “Olga of the Birch Forest.” Amleth was a Viking who raided Kievan Rus, and […]
Avars were Rourans
genomes reveal origin and rapid trans-Eurasian migration of 7th century Avar elites: The Avars settled the Carpathian Basin in 567/68 CE, establishing an empire lasting over 200 years. Who they […]
The Afanesievo live!
Bronze and Iron Age population movements underlie Xinjiang population history: The Xinjiang region in northwest China is a historically important geographical passage between East and West Eurasia. By sequencing 201 […]
The face of Agamemnon
The genomic history of the Aegean palatial civilizations: The Cycladic, the Minoan, and the Helladic (Mycenaean) cultures define the Bronze Age (BA) of Greece. Urbanism, complex social structures, craft and […]
Thor Herydhal was right!
Native American gene flow into Polynesia predating Easter Island settlement: The possibility of voyaging contact between prehistoric Polynesian and Native American populations has long intrigued researchers. Proponents have pointed to the existence of New World crops, such as the sweet potato and bottle gourd, in the Polynesian archaeological record, but nowhere else outside the pre-Columbian […]
Version alpha of trying to understand East Asian population history is now out!
We’ve been waiting for ancient DNA to answer some questions about Eastern Eurasia for a while. I always thought Qiaomei Fu would spearhead it, but it doesn’t seem like it worked out that way. That’s bcause she’s not on a new preprint, The Genomic Formation of Human Populations in East Asia, which fills in a […]
Why Bronze Age steppe people replaced the farmers they conquered
One of the major revisions in my own mind about the demographic and historical processes of the Holocene in relation to humans has been the reality that large and dense agglomerations of agriculturalists could be marginalized by later peoples, to the point of having a smaller genetic footprint in the future than anyone might have […]
Ancient Egyptians: black or white?
One of the most fascinating things about ancient Egypt is its continuity, and our granular and detailed knowledge of that continuity. We can thank in part the dry climate, as well as the Egyptian penchant for putting their hieroglyphs on walls and monuments (as well as graffiti!). And we can also thank the fact that […]
The biocultural frog and tortoise
As many of you know when you have two adjacent demes, breeding populations, they often rapidly equilibrate in gene frequencies if they were originally distinct. There are plenty of good concrete examples of this. The Hui of China are Muslims who speak…
15 ancestral components to bind them all
Dienekes Pontikos keeps chugging along, and has cranked out a new bar plot from the ADMIXTURE program with 15 putative ancestral components. He has “69 populations, and 1,189 individuals in total.” Most of these were assembled from public data, but some of them are particular to the Dodecad Ancestry Project. He contends:
In comparison to the […]
The genetic heritage of Europe’s north
If you haven’t, you should keep an eye on Dienekes‘ Dodecad Ancestry Project (RSS). The pilot phase of data collection is over, and the first population level statistics are now coming out. Of particular interest to me is a new analysis of various northern European ethnicities just published.
The samples used in this analysis are:
– 25 […]
Gypsies on a genetic island
If you live in the States one of the things you hear a lot about Europe in regards to its relationship to its ethno-religious minorities are the problems with Muslims. This is probably an Americo-centric perspective shaped by 9/11, when many of the hijackers had turned out to have spent time in Germany. Additionally, […]
Where writing is silent
In my post on Empires of the Word I observed that quite often the written record is silent on many matters which only language or genes tell us must have occurred. The Indo-Aryan character of the dominant language on the island of Sri Lanka seems to be a geographical anomaly in the least, but perhaps […]
Jews and genetics
Over at Discover Blogs I have a very long post up on Jews & Genetics. In particular the recent paper in AJHG. One observation I have to make about Jewish genetics: when it comes to PCA plots which illustrate the relationship of Jews, in particular Ashkenazi Jews, to other populations I’ve noticed that two different […]
Armenian genetics
Armenian genes: Scientist in Yerevan launches a project to reveal genetic history of the nation. The description of the science in the piece is very garbled. But, it would be nice to elucidate the genetics of Armenians in more detail. Their language, l…
Armenian genetics
Armenian genes: Scientist in Yerevan launches a project to reveal genetic history of the nation. The description of the science in the piece is very garbled. But, it would be nice to elucidate the genetics of Armenians in more detail. Their language, like Greek and Albanian, is a singleton in the Indo-European family tree. Additionally, […]
Roman Britain to Anglo-Saxon Britain
Peter Frost on Roman Britain:Historians often assume that the Romans changed Britain politically but not demographically. The indigenous elites adopted Roman culture while the mass of the population remained Celtic. When the Anglo-Saxons arrived in the…