I have discovered a great dataset from Rasmussen et al. (2010). The data had been used before in conjunction with an ancient DNA sequence, but for me it is invaluable, as it fills up one of the major holes in Eurasia, namely Siberia, and includes a number of Altaic, Uralic, and other North Eurasian people. I suspect that this will be invaluable in fine-tuning the Northeast Asian ancestry of Dodecad Project members.
To begin with, after I processed the data, I ran ADMIXTURE on it up to K=7. Below you can see the results for K=7:
I'm no expert in linguistics, but it's clear to me that the light blue component corresponds to Altaic speakers. It will be extremely interesting to see what the analysis including other Altaic speakers from my other datasets as well as West Eurasians of Uralic/Altaic language or with "Northeast Asian" admixture will show.
The table below has sample sizes and admixture proportions.
Stay tuned. More to come.
Great work!
ReplyDeleteYour results seems pretty consistent with known anthropological and linguistic data.
Buryats are indeed suggested to represent "pure mongols".
Kets, Selkups, Nganasans are relicts of indigeneous Sibireans, while Selkups and Nganasan are linguistically related. Selkups are thought to have common roots with Kets, but went through "uralization". Your analysis suggest it was rather cultural than by interbreeding.
It would be interesting to check "Nganasan" component in North-Eastern Europe, namely Saami, Komi and other Uralic groups.
Interestingly, no special relationship between Athabascan and Ket, despite the fact that linguistically Vajda proved that Na-Dene and Ket are related. This may mean that the linguistic connection is very old and its genetic counterpart got washed out in a series of waves of gene flow between Ket and its neighbors.
ReplyDeleteGreat work!
ReplyDelete"This may mean that the linguistic connection is very old and its genetic counterpart got washed out in a series of waves of gene flow between Ket and its neighbors".
ReplyDeleteVery likely.
"Buryats are indeed suggested to represent 'pure mongols'".
Interesting. I've long assumed that the Mongolian phenotype developed in the far north. Buryats fit perfectly.