Multidimensional scaling and ADMIXTURE across Northern Eurasia corresponds to geography and language

Here is a multi-dimensional scaling plot of a number of North Eurasian populations. In comparison to my previous post, I have excluded Americans and Greenlanders, and added several other populations from Central Asia and West Eurasia.

Population labels have been printed in the co-ordinates of the population averages; these largely correspond with identifiable blobs of colored points, but note that some populations have several outliers, so labels appear in white space. Most notable in that respect are the Koryak, Chukchi, and the Nganasan, all of whom have some apparently European-admixed individuals.

"Mongol" corresponds to Rasmussen et al. (2010) Mongol sample, while "Mongola" to the HGDP-CEPH one. The population codes on the left may not be clearly visible as they overlap with each other and are CEU, LT, HU (relatively unadmixed Caucasoids), FI/RU (Uralian-admixed northern Caucasoids), IR/TR (Altaic-admixed southern Caucasoids). The West Eurasian part of the plot can be seen blown up on the right.

The correspondence with geography and language is striking. Siberian isolates from the extreme north and east, Koryak and Chuckhi are on top; HapMap Chinese at the bottom. Between them are Uralians (Selkup, Yukagir, Nganassan) and Altaics (Mongol-Tungus-Turkic people).

Below is ADMIXTURE analysis for the same set of populations, for K=7:

Finns and Russians seem to have an excess of the "Nganasan" component over the Altaic, while Turks have the opposite. Below is a table of Fst distances between components:

The close relationship between the two Caucasoid components is apparent (Fst=0.033), but note fairly large Fst divergences between the morphologically Mongoloid groups. I attribute this mostly to the very low population sizes of these groups, which have probably affected them by drift. For the less demographically constrained Altaic and East Asian components, Fst=0.044.

If you are not familiar with these ethnic groups, the Red Book of the Peoples of the Russian Empire and the Ethnologue indexes on Altaic and Uralic are invaluable, as are the portraits of ethnic groups of China. On the right a picture of a Nganasan.

UPDATE: Also, a past post from the blog, collating Y-haplogroup N frequencies with anthropological descriptions. Nganasans apparently belong to haplogroup N at a frequency of 92.1%!