Reconstructing Genetic History of Siberian and Northeastern European Populations

Abstract

Siberia and Western Russia are home to over 40 culturally and linguistically diverse indigenous ethnic groups. Yet, genetic variation of peoples from this region is largely uncharacterized. We present whole-genome sequencing data from 28 individuals belonging to 14 distinct indigenous populations from that region. We combine these datasets with additional 32 modern-day and 15 ancient human genomes to build and compare autosomal, Y-DNA and mtDNA trees. Our results provide new links between modern and ancient inhabitants of Eurasia. Siberians share 38% of ancestry with descendants of the 45,000-year-old Ust-Ishim people, who were previously believed to have no modern-day descendants. Western Siberians trace 57% of their ancestry to the Ancient North Eurasians, represented by the 24,000-year-old Siberian Malta boy. In addition, Siberians admixtures are present in lineages represented by Eastern European hunter-gatherers from Samara, Karelia, Hungary and Sweden (from 8,000-6,600 years ago), as well as Yamnaya culture people (5,300-4,700 years ago) and modern-day northeastern Europeans. These results provide new evidence of ancient gene flow from Siberia into Europe.

Detecting Polygenic Adaptation in Admixture Graphs

“…However, we caution that this pends further verification via more GWAS on the same trait. Our modeling framework suggests that, if selection truly operated on these variants, it must have done so before or early in the process of divergence among East Asian populations -at least as far back as 5 thousand years ago (Stoneking and Delfin 2010;Fu et al 2013;Wong et al 2017;Lu et al 2016) -because the signal is common to different East Asian populations (Han Chinese, Dai Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, etc.). The signal seems only very weakly present in some Siberian populations -like the Even and Nganasan -and some Native American populations -like the Mixe and Pima, and not present at all in other Native American populations -like the Surui, Quechua and Karitiana.…”

Fine-grained habitat-associated genetic connectivity in an admixed population of mussels in the small isolated Kerguelen Islands

“…TreeMix jointly estimates population splits and subsequent admixture events based on the Fstatistics introduced by Reich et al (2009), and commonly recognised as a valid support for admixture (e.g., in humans: Pickrell & Pritchard 2012, Wong et al 2017. A maximum-likelihood population tree was estimated based on the matrix of GBS allele frequency covariance between population pairs, and admixture events were sequentially added.…”

“…Kerguelen population was performed with TreeMix v.1.1(Pickrell & Pritchard 2012).TreeMix jointly estimates population splits and subsequent admixture events based on the Fstatistics introduced by Reich et al(2009), and commonly recognised as a valid support for admixture (e.g., in humans:Pickrell & Pritchard 2012, Wong et al 2017. A maximum-likelihood…”

Mitogenomic data indicate admixture components of Asian Hun and Srubnaya origin in the Hungarian Conquerors

“…The same inference can be drawn from phylogenetic data, as only two Mansi samples appeared in our phylogenetic trees on the side branches (S1 Figure, Networks 1, 4) suggesting that ancestors of the Mansis separated from Asian ancestors of the Conquerors a long time ago. This inference is also supported by genomic Admixture analysis of Siberian and Northeastern European populations [90], which revealed that Mansis have very ancient North Eurasian ancestry, who in addition received a significant (43%) Eastern Siberian genetic component approximately 5-7 thousand years ago from ancestors of modern Even and Evenki people. Most likely the same explanation applies to the Y-chromosome N-Tat marker which originated from China [91], [92] and its subclades are widespread between various language groups of North Asia and Eastern Europe [93].…”