The genetic prehistory of the Greater Caucasus

Abstract

Archaeogenetic studies have described the formation of Eurasian ‘steppe ancestry’ as a mixture of Eastern and Caucasus hunter-gatherers. However, it remains unclear when and where this ancestry arose and whether it was related to a horizon of cultural innovations in the 4th millennium BCE that subsequently facilitated the advance of pastoral societies likely linked to the dispersal of Indo-European languages. To address this, we generated genome-wide SNP data from 45 prehistoric individuals along a 3000-year temporal transect in the North Caucasus. We observe a genetic separation between the groups of the Caucasus and those of the adjacent steppe. The Caucasus groups are genetically similar to contemporaneous populations south of it, suggesting that – unlike today – the Caucasus acted as a bridge rather than an insurmountable barrier to human movement. The steppe groups from Yamnaya and subsequent pastoralist cultures show evidence for previously undetected farmer-related ancestry from different contact zones, while Steppe Maykop individuals harbour additional Upper Palaeolithic Siberian and Native American related ancestry.

Skin colour and vitamin D: An update

“…[ 56,57 ] These migrants were associated with the Yamnaya culture and emerged out of a mixture between light‐skinned Caucasus and eastern hunter‐gatherers. [ 58,59 ] In addition, north‐eastern speakers of Uralic languages, such as Estonians, Finns and most notably Saami, have a genetic component most similar to modern Siberians who arrived 3500 years ago. [ 56,60 ] Thus, Siberians and Yamnayas had a large impact on the phenotype of today’s northern Europeans.…”

Isotopic reconstruction of human diet in the Ji'erzankale site, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, China

“…The Pamir Plateau was likely a key route in this extensive transcontinental network of cultural exchange across Eurasia. Its importance has been previously investigated by archaeological, anthropological, and ancient DNA analysis in this region as well as in the southern part of the Tarim Basin (Cui et al, ; Cui, Li, Gao, Xie, & Zhou, ; Gao et al, ; Han, ; Hollard et al, ; Li et al, , ; Liu, ; Ning et al, ; Oskar et al, ; Wang et al, ; Wei, ; Xie et al, ). Since at least the second millennium BC, most of the Bronze Age cemeteries in the Pamir region were mainly attributed to the Afanasievo and Andronovo populations which could be classified as “Proto‐European type.” These populations have broad faces and are found in sites such as Vakhsh (Tajikistan), Sapali (Uzbekistan), and the Xiaohe and Gumugou sites (Xinjiang Province, China) (Ning et al, ; Xinjiang Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, ).…”

Untangling Neolithic and Bronze Age mitochondrial lineages in South Asia

“…We used a total dataset of 621 (H2) and 326 (H13) modern sequences, and applied the HKY85 (Hasegawa, Kishino and Yano, 1995) (Lazaridis et al 2016;Mathieson et al 2018). A basal H2 was also found in the Russian Steppe Eneolithic (Wang et al 2018). H2a is by far the largest and most complex branch, comprising ~95% of the modern H2 mitogenome sequences in our dataset.…”