Mycenaean mummy

Kristina Killgrove links to an article on Schliemann's Mycenaean mummy. The mummy hasn't actually been unknown, and I had seen a picture of it (presumably Schliemann's engraving?) in Louise Schofield's the Mycenaeans (2007) where it was said to be under study.

But, the new article does include a very good reproduction of the painting that looks a little Giger-esque to me. Perhaps there's room here for some National Geographic-style documentary; after all, mummies seem to be quite popular, and this ought to be a very interesting one, assuming 19th century attempts at preservation stood the test of time, and there's something to show.

From the paper:

Plate 203 is not a photograph but an oil-painting (Fig. 6). This is the painting made of the supposed ‘mummy’ burial in Shaft Grave I (now V) which formed the basis for the published engraving (Schliemann 1878, 297 no. 454). It is on stiff card, measuring some 585 mm in length and 382 mm in width, and shows the corpse about three-quarters life size in sombre shades of brown against a lighter yellowish brown background. The engraving omits the lower part of it in which the region of the pelvis and the tops of the femurs are visible. The painting had been folded in half to fit it into the Album, but I had it removed and framed behind glass for its better conservation.
 Schliemann gives a long and highly dramatized account of the uncovering of this burial. ‘The round face, with all its flesh, had been wonderfully preserved under its ponderous golden mask; there was no vestige of hair, but both eyes were perfectly visible, also the mouth, which, owing to the enormous weight that had pressed upon it, was wide open, and showed thirty-two beautiful teeth. From these, all the physicians who came to see the body were led to believe that the man must have died at the early age of thirty-five. The nose was entirely gone’. 16 In his initial enthusiasm Schliemann even claimed that ‘the corpse very much resembles the image which my imagination formed long ago of wide-ruling Agamemnon’. 17
 ‘The news that the tolerably well preserved body of a man of the mythic heroic age had been found, covered with golden ornaments, spread like wildfire through the Argolid, and people came by thousands from Argos, Nauplia, and the villages to see the wonder. But, nobody being able to give advice how to preserve the body,’ Schliemann telegraphed to Nauplion for an artist ‘to get at least an oil-painting made, for I was afraid that the body would crumble to pieces. Thus I am able to give a faithful likeness of the body, as it looked after all the golden ornaments had been removed’. 18
 Schliemann does not give the name of the artist; but he describes how ‘to my great joy’ the body ‘held out for two days, when a druggist from Argos, Spiridon Nicolaou by name, rendered it hard and solid by pouring on it alcohol, in which he had dissolved gumsandarac’. 19 It was then lifted with some difficulty and transported to Athens, where I can remember seeing it on the bottom shelf of a glass case in the Mycenaean room of the National Museum on my first visit to Greece shortly before the Second World War. Schliemann duly acknowledges that ‘all the trouble and expense of drugging the body so as to render it hard and solid, and raising it from the sepulchre’ and transporting it, were incurred by the Archaeological Society at Athens.20 

I'm no biochemist, but alcohol and gumsandarac doesn't sound good with respect to any potential DNA preservation.

Schliemann’s Mycenae Albums


Sinclair Hood

Link

Related:

• The face of Agamemnon
• mtDNA from Grave Circle B in Mycenae

Extraterrestrial impact caused Younger Dryas 12,900 years ago

PNAS doi: 10.1073/pnas.1204453109

Very high-temperature impact melt products as evidence for cosmic airbursts and impacts 12,900 years ago

Ted E. Bunch et al.

It has been proposed that fragments of an asteroid or comet impacted Earth, deposited silica-and iron-rich microspherules and other proxies across several continents, and triggered the Younger Dryas cooling episode 12,900 years ago. Although many independent groups have confirmed the impact evidence, the hypothesis remains controversial because some groups have failed to do so. We examined sediment sequences from 18 dated Younger Dryas boundary (YDB) sites across three continents (North America, Europe, and Asia), spanning 12,000 km around nearly one-third of the planet. All sites display abundant microspherules in the YDB with none or few above and below. In addition, three sites (Abu Hureyra, Syria; Melrose, Pennsylvania; and Blackville, South Carolina) display vesicular, high-temperature, siliceous scoria-like objects, or SLOs, that match the spherules geochemically. We compared YDB objects with melt products from a known cosmic impact (Meteor Crater, Arizona) and from the 1945 Trinity nuclear airburst in Socorro, New Mexico, and found that all of these high-energy events produced material that is geochemically and morphologically comparable, including: (i) high-temperature, rapidly quenched microspherules and SLOs; (ii) corundum, mullite, and suessite (Fe3Si), a rare meteoritic mineral that forms under high temperatures; (iii) melted SiO2 glass, or lechatelierite, with flow textures (or schlieren) that form at > 2,200 °C; and (iv) particles with features indicative of high-energy interparticle collisions. These results are inconsistent with anthropogenic, volcanic, authigenic, and cosmic materials, yet consistent with cosmic ejecta, supporting the hypothesis of extraterrestrial airbursts/impacts 12,900 years ago. The wide geographic distribution of SLOs is consistent with multiple impactors.

Link

Oldest dairying in Sweden from Mälardalen (Funnelbeaker)

Journal of Archaeological Science Available online 5 July 2012

Lipid residue analyses of Early Neolithic funnel-beaker pottery from Skogsmossen, eastern Central Sweden, and the earliest evidence of dairying in Sweden

Sven Isaksson, , Fredrik Hallgren

This study address the question of the use and function of Early Neolithic (4000-3000 cal. BC) funnel-beaker pots from Mälardalen in eastern Central Sweden. The material studied is pottery from a wetland offering at the site Skogsmossen in the province of Västmanland. While deposited under ritual circumstances in a fen, the pots were likely used in a domestic domain on the settlement adjacent to the offering fen, prior to final deposition. The lipid analysis indicate a varied vessel use, there are traces of aquatic resources, plants, terrestrial animals and milk. The identification of milk residue is the oldest so far from Sweden.

Link

Can we retire the 60,000-year old coastal Out of Africa?

A widely popularized story has become part of the mainstream view of modern human origins. I have seen it repeated countless times in print, and it has been picked up and repeated in popular magazines and documentaries. One day, it may be worth for someone to chart how this idea came to prominence and wide acceptance, despite having very little in its favor. You can read the final death cries of its supporters in a recent Nature special issue.

The idea can be expressed as follows:

"A very small group of humans left Africa 60 thousand years ago; they were on the brink of extinction, but they managed to follow the coastline of Asia, eventually reaching Australia, and subsequently expanding to colonize the interior of the Eurasian landmass"

I have recently become aware of several new papers that directly challenge this view. Instead of writing a new post about each of them, I've decided to combine them all in one post.

The first one by Delagnes et al. in the Journal of Human Evolution describes Shi’bat Dihya 1 and 2, a couple of ~55,000-year old inland human settlements in the Wadi Surdud basin (Yemen). 


From the paper:

Our fieldwork at the Wadi Surdud in Yemen demonstrates that during the period of the supposed expansion of modern humans out of Africa ca. 60-50 ka, and their rapid dispersal toward southeastern Asia along the western and southern Arabian coastlines, the interior of this region was, in fact, occupied by well-adapted human groups who developed their own local technological tradition, deeply rooted in the Middle Paleolithic. Future research will likely reveal whether the archaeological assemblages recovered from the Wadi Surdud can be associated with the descendents of anatomically modern human groups who occupied the Arabian Peninsula during MIS 5 or the southernmost expansion of the Neanderthals.

There is a paucity of old human remains from Arabia due to local conditions, so we cannot know for sure what morphology was associated with these archaeological cultures. If we take the finds that we do have at face value, we would conclude that the Neandertal range did not reach much to the south of Israel, since (i) no Neandertal remains have been found there, while (ii) modern human remains have.

This is further reinforced by the discovery of the Nubian Complex in southern Arabia with its clear African links; it is extremely difficult to assign that to Neandertals, because that would strongly imply presence of Neandertals in Africa for which there is also no evidence.

But, I think we can infer at least three things:

• People thrived inland during the supposed Out of Africa; if there were any Out-of-Africans around this time did not have to "follow the coast".
• It is becoming increasingly difficult to discount the pre-100ka Mt. Carmel (Qafzeh/Skhul) modern humans as the Out-of-Africa that failed: together with Jebel Faya, and the Nubian Complex we are now getting a picture of thriving populations in the Near East and Arabia prior to 60ka. There is every reason to believe that pre-100ka modern humans in the Levant and probably elsewhere did not disappear to make way for the hypothesized second 60ka Out-of-Africa wave.
• If people without a modern technological package were living in the Wadi Surdud, the idea that they are descended from recent Out-of-Africans with all the technological bells and whistles of modernity disappears: these are people rooted in the local traditions, without any signs of recent African descent.

The second article is a review of the prehistory of the Arabian peninsula by Groucutt and Petraglia in Evolutionary Anthropology. One of the points made by the author, quite often forgotten in recent attempts to discover patterns of human dispersals from modern populations, is that populations don't stay put for tens of thousands of years:

As genetic studies of Arabian populations have increased in scale, they reveal a complex pattern.22–25 Such studies show that modern Arabian populations are mostly derived from Western Asia, reflecting dispersals since the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). In some areas, however, there are relatively high levels of ‘‘African’’ lineages, which have generally been attributed to historical processes such as slavery.26,27 Genetic evidence, then, is poorly placed to elucidate the position of Arabia in the dispersal of hominin populations. Likewise, the extinction of regional populations means they will not be represented in contemporary genetic structure. In this situation, archeology, in the context of paleoenvironmental fluctuation, offers a key way to elucidate the dispersal of hominin populations into Arabia and their subsequent evolutionary and cultural trajectories.

In Europe where we have the best ancient DNA record, there is substantial evidence for major genetic change over the span of a few thousand years. We have evidence of substantial gene flow into East Africa over the last few thousand years. And, of course, in Africa itself we have substantial evidence for gene flow whether it is related to Bantu farmers or Nilo-Saharan pastoralists.

The authors' overall conclusion:

In general, indications of possible population connections to surrounding regions remain rather speculative, and this is compounded by the absence of fossil evidence. We suggest, however, that the emerging picture suggests a general lack of connections between Africa and Arabia after MIS 5, the last interglacial. Instead, there are perhaps indications that Arabia sometimes saw connections to the Levant.

The third paper is a book chapter by Petraglia, Groucutt, and Blinkhorn. There is plenty of interest here, but what caught my attention is this map of paleorivers in the Arabian and Thar deserts. We so often think of deserts as eternal entitities, and looking at the present-day landscape one would of course conclude that migrating humans would be stark mad to venture far from the coast.

An interesting bit from the paper:

Upper Palaeolithic stone tool industries (typified by the production of long,thin ‘blades’ as well as, often, evidence of ‘art’ and symbolism), appear in the Levant at about 47–45 ka but seem to be rare to absent in Arabia. Maher (2009) comprehensively discusses potentially later Pleistocene sites in Arabia, most of which she identifies as being located in the north-west and south-west of the peninsula. The Qaryat al-Faw site is a possible Late Pleistocene locality, containing laminar technology reminiscent of Levantine Upper and Epi-Palaeolithic assemblages (Edens 2001). The overall lack of Upper Palaeolithic technologies either suggests that human populations were not presentin MIS 3, or that Middle Palaeolithic technologies were used until more sophisticatedtechnologies were developed in the Holocene (Crassardet al.2006, Crassard 2007). Ineither case, the nature of environmental conditions is a critical factor in determining the character of human occupations and material culture. 

and:

Upper Palaeolithic industries are present in the Thar but the ages of many of these sites remain unknown. An assemblage dated to ca. 26 ka has been identified as UpperPalaeolithic at 16R Dune, although the sample size is too low for easy technological comparisons to be made (Achyuthanet al.2007). It can be reasonably hypothesised thatmany Upper Palaeolithic assemblages, containing blade and microblade technologies,date to ca. 35 ka and after (Petraglia et al.2009). Microblade innovations have beentied to more efficient hunting strategies in the face of environmental deterioration andpopulation increase at ca. 35 ka (Petraglia et al.2009). 

There is a widespread belief in the simultaneous spread of Upper Paleolithic technology and modern human populations in Eurasia. But, this is not what the actual evidence shows us. However, the evidence for an earlier appearance of UP industries in the Levant than either Arabia or India makes this hypothesis problematic. It renders the coastal migration hypothesis doubly so, because if modern humans with new technology followed the coast all the way to Australia then it is troublesome that the MP stone tools persist in the regions most adjacent to this migration route. A better explanation may be that the UP revolution should be decoupled from the migration paths of modern humans, and that it was a cultural phenomenon which originated probably in the Levant, rather than being part and parcel of the early migrating humans wherever they were found.

The final article by Dennell and Petraglia argues that the modern humans appear in South Asia long before the conventional 60-40ky time frame. A quote from the paper is useful to remember, and echoes the above discussion:

In the Levant, both Neanderthals and H.sapiens used Mousterian stone-tool assemblages, and in East and North Africa, early H. sapiens used the same lithic tool-kits as their predecessors. This indicates that stone tools are a poor indicator of the species of the hominin that made them: changes in hominin type did not necessarily result in changes in lithic technology. Conversely, unchanging lithic traditions need not imply that the type of hom-inin that used them remained the same. As example, in mainland and island Southeast Asia, there is no equivalent of the Upper Palaeolithic, and“Mode 1”, technologically-simpleflake and core assemblages persist into the late Pleistocene and even inplaces the Holocene, even though the species of hominin that made them changed from H. erectus to H. sapiens. This is in sharp contrast to a region such as western Europe, where the shift from the Middle to Upper Palaeolithic was associated with the replacement of Neanderthals by H. sapiens, leaving aside a much-contested debate over the status of so-called “transitional industries” that could have been made by either. Changes in lithic technology in southern Asia are likely to have been more subtle, and discernible only through more rigorous quantitative analysis than merely noting the size andfrequency of a few common elements

I would say that "Mode 4-5 => Modern human" is quite probably true, but "Mode 1-3 => Not modern human" is not. In a sense, this is a little sad, because the more advanced modes appear much later than the hypothesized appearance of modern humans in most places of the world, so they are not of actually much use in determining when they arrived. The paleoanthropological record is a better guide, but, it is also quite sparse or hotly contested in many areas of Eurasia.

To conclude a long post: the evidence for 60,000 year old Out-of-Africa is weak:

• No specific ties with Africa at this or later times
• Clearest evidence of ties between Arabia and Africa during MIS5
• Evidence for strong populations in Asia at this time, inconsistent with the failure of the modern humans sampled at Mt. Carmel in the Levant prior to 100,000 years
• Presence of primitive stone tools does not necessarily indicate absence of modern humans
• Genetic studies of modern populations should not be used as if these populations are direct descendants of first modern humans in same locales

All in all, I'd say that my "two deserts" theory whereby a Green Sahara pumped early modern humans to Asia prior to 100,000 years ago and then a deteriorating Arabian desert pumped them out post-70,000 years ago is not obviously wrong. Perhaps the pre-100ky wave went much further to the east, to India and Southeast Asia.

But, early modern humans may not have been as dominant as we often think, irrespective of when they dispersed: evidence of archaic humans persists in parts of the world down to the Holocene, and so do the simple stone tools of the Middle Paleolithic. Plus the fact that 2/2 of archaic hominins sampled so far show differential relationships to modern human groups, some of them quite unexpected (Denisova with Melanesians) ought to clue us in to the very real possibility that our distant past was quite more complex than we could ever imagine.

Journal of Human Evolution http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhevol.2012.03.008

Inland human settlement in southern Arabia 55,000 years ago. New evidence from the Wadi Surdud Middle Paleolithic site complex, western Yemen

Anne Delagnes et al.

The recovery at Shi’bat Dihya 1 (SD1) of a dense Middle Paleolithic human occupation dated to 55 ka BP sheds new light on the role of the Arabian Peninsula at the time of the alleged expansion of modern humans out of Africa. SD1 is part of a complex of Middle Paleolithic sites cut by the Wadi Surdud and interstratified within an alluvial sedimentary basin in the foothills that connect the Yemeni highlands with the Tihama coastal plain. A number of environmental proxies indicate arid conditions throughout a sequence that extends between 63 and 42 ka BP. The lithic industry is geared toward the production of a variety of end products: blades, pointed blades, pointed flakes and Levallois-like flakes with long unmodified cutting edges, made from locally available rhyolite. The occasional exploitation of other local raw materials, that fulfill distinct complementary needs, highlights the multi-functional nature of the occupation. The slightly younger Shi’bat Dihya 2 (SD2) site is characterized by a less elaborate production of flakes, together with some elements (blades and pointed flakes) similar to those found at SD1, and may indicate a cultural continuity between the two sites. The technological behaviors of the SD1 toolmakers present similarities with those documented from a number of nearly contemporaneous assemblages from southern Arabia, the Levant, the Horn of Africa and North Africa. However, they do not directly conform to any of the techno-complexes typical of the late Middle Paleolithic or late Middle Stone Age from these regions. This period would have witnessed the development of local Middle Paleolithic traditions in the Arabian Peninsula, which suggests more complex settlement dynamics and possible population interactions than commonly inferred by the current models of modern human expansion out of Africa.

Link

Evolutionary Anthropology DOI: 10.1002/evan.21308

The prehistory of the Arabian peninsula: Deserts, dispersals, and demography

Huw S. Groucutt, Michael D. Petraglia

As a geographic connection between Africa and the rest of Eurasia, the Arabian Peninsula occupies a central position in elucidating hominin evolution and dispersals. Arabia has been characterized by extreme environmental fluctuation in the Quaternary, with profound evolutionary and demographic consequences. Despite the importance of the region, Arabia remains understudied. Recent years, however, have seen major developments in environmental studies and archeology, revealing that the region contains important records that should play a significant role in future paleoanthropological narratives.1–3 The emerging picture of Arabia suggests that numerous dispersals of hominin populations into the region occurred. Populations subsequently followed autochthonous trajectories, creating a distinctive regional archeological record. Debates continue on the respective roles of regional hominin extinctions and population continuity, with the latter suggesting adaptation to arid conditions.

Link

HOMININ EVOLUTIONARY HISTORY IN THE ARABIAN DESERT AND THE THAR DESERT

Michael D. Petraglia, Huw Groucutt and James Blinkhorn

Link

Quaternary Science Reviews Volume 47, 30 July 2012, Pages 15–22

The dispersal of Homo sapiens across southern Asia: how early, how often, how complex?

Robin Dennell, Michael D. Petraglia


The timing and the paths of colonization of southern Asia by Homo sapiens are poorly known, though many population geneticists, paleoanthropologists, and archaeologists have contended that this process began with dispersal from East Africa, and occurred between 60,000 and 40,000 years ago. However, the evidence for this scenario is very weak, particularly the lack of human skeletal evidence between the Levant and Borneo before 40 ka, and other explanations are possible. Here we argue that environmental and archaeological information is increasingly indicating the likelihood that H. sapiens exited Africa much earlier than commonly thought, and may have colonized much of southern Asia well before 60,000 years ago. Additionally, we cannot exclude the possibility that several dispersal events occurred, from both North and East Africa, nor the likelihood that early populations of H. sapiens in southern Asia interbred with indigenous populations of Neanderthals, Denisovans and Homoerectus. The population history of southern Asia during the Upper Pleistocene is likely far more complex than currently envisaged.


Link

Indo-European genetic signatures in an Orcadian and a Lithuanian

In the Bronze Age Indo-European invasion of Europe, I argued that:

• A West_Asian genetic component is missing from ancient DNA sampled from Europe as recently as ~5,000 years ago.
• This component exists at appreciable frequencies in modern Europeans, reaching minima in non-Indo-European Basques and Finns.
• It is likely that the West_Asian component manifested itself in Europe post-5kya, during the Copper and Bronze Ages, and was associated with the bearers of Indo-European languages.

Of course, the West_Asian component is an abstraction created from a study of modern populations. To better understand the identity of this component, I undertook a simple experiment using the (not yet released) K5c and K8c calculators of the Dodecad Project. The are equivalent to the weac2 and K7b calculators released so far by the Project, but make use of the new Pagani et al. (2012) data on East Africa, hence the appearance of an "East_African" component at K=7 pushing back the appearance of the West_Asian component to K=8.

K5c captures the "West Eurasian cline" between the Near East and Europe, and includes the following components:

• East_Eurasian
• South_Asian
• Atlantic_Baltic
• Near_East
• African

We can say that the Atlantic_Baltic corresponds to northern Caucasoids, while the Near_East one to southern Caucasoids.

K8c includes the following components:

• Atlantic_Baltic
• West_Asian
• Siberian
• Southern
• South_Asian
• West_African
• East_Asian
• East_African

This differs from the previous one in the appearance of the Siberian and East_African components, as well as the aforementioned West_Asian one within West Eurasia.

Naturally the question arises: what can we say about the origin of West_Asian ancestry in modern Europeans? How is it related to other populations? How is it related to the northern and southern Caucasoids?

To answer these questions, I isolated an Orcadian individual (HGDP00794) and used the DIYDodecad byseg mode to construct a local ancestry map of this individual with sliding windows 500 SNP long, advanced by 50 SNPs.

In essence, this procedure assigns ancestry to local regions of the genome, and can hence be used to identify, e.g., regions with an excess of West_Asian or any other component.

I decided to use an Orcadian for this purpose, since Orcadians are Indo-European speakers from northwestern-most Europe who can be reasonably thought to have minimum admixture in historical times from groups other than (i) the pre-Indo-European substratum, (ii) Celto-Germanic superstratum which dominates western Europe.

Over 3,126 total segments, I calculated the correlation between the K5c and the K8c components:

It is clear that the K=8 West_Asian segments of the Orcadian individual correspond to the K=5 South_Asian (+0.36) and Near_East (+0.29) segments. 

The negative correlation with the K=5 Atlantic_Baltic (-0.4) component further indicates that in genomic regions where the Orcadian has West_Asian segments, there is a deficiency of Atlantic_Baltic ancestry; we can be fairly sure that these segments are not the result of common partial descent of Orcadians and West Asians from a northern Caucasoid population.

I have also repeated the above experiment, but with a Lithuanian individual (GSM536635). Lithuanians are surrounded by Indo-European and Finno-Ugric speakers, and are also relatively unlikely to have experienced other gene flow in more recent times:

The same general pattern emerges, with the K=8 West_Asian segments corresponding to K=5 Near Eastern and South Asian segments.

CONCLUSION

Chunks of DNA in an Orcadian and a Lithuanian that are labelled West_Asian tend to be related to populations of the Near East and South Asia. 

It seems fairly clear that a post-5kya link between the North Atlantic and the Indian subcontinent admits to a single parsimonious explanation: the expansion of the Indo-Europeans out of their West Asian homeland during the Copper and Bronze Ages.

Ancient European DNA using DIYHarappaWorld and MDLP5

In the Bronze Indo-European invasion of Europe I compiled the assessment of different ancient autosomal DNA data from Europe using tools developed by the Dodecad Project. I thought it might be a good idea to do the same using a different calculator, the DIYHarappaWorld.

The results are shown on the left, and should be compared against the HarrapaWorld Admixture spreadsheet. I am not very familiar with the HW components, and you should not assume that similarly named Dodecad and HarappaWorld components reflect the same entities. This is probably due to probable differences in data (e.g. lots more West Eurasian vs. South Asian participants) and methodology between the two projects.

Nonetheless, I would say that these results largely confirm the "Mediterranean" character of the "farmers" Gok4 and Oetzi from Italy and Sweden and the "North European" character of the hunter-gatherers Ajv52, Ajv70, and Bra from Sweden and Iberia. I glanced through the the HW spreadsheet, and it seems that even small discrepancies, e.g., Oetzi's 12% NE_Euro from DIYHarappaWorld vs. the 0% North_European from Dodecad K12b are consistent: note that Sardinians, the most Oetzi-like population have a similar 12% NE_Euro in the HarappaWorld spreadsheet, and 0% in the Dodecad K12b one. Hence, this is probably a case of different anchoring of the similarly named components in the two projects, rather than a manifestation of different results of the ancient samples vis a vis modern populations.

DIYHarappaWorld, like K12b, is a high-resolution calculator, and hence does not show the clear absence of the West_Asian component in prehistoric Europeans; this component spans the West Asian highlands, and is replaced in both calculators by the twin Caucasus and Gedrosia/Baloch component that are much more localized in their respective areas. Even though both Caucasus and Gedrosia/Baloch are related to-, the are not  equivalent to the West_Asian component; for example, the K12b Caucasus component includes both the K7b West_Asian and Southern in the local blend of the Caucasus, and this explains the paradox that Oetzi has no West_Asian but 1/5 Caucasus.

Nonetheless, even using the DIYHarappaWorld and K12b, we can intuit that something did change in Europe in the last 5,000 years ago. This is most evident in the levels of the "Baloch" component (=Gedrosia of Dodecad Project) which is near zero in all individuals but reaches levels of ~10% in West European populations today. Certainly, the interesting fact that the rather uniform West_Asian Indo-European adstratum in Europe is transformed (at a higher resolution) into Gedrosia in the West (e.g., Irish) and Caucasus in the East (e.g. Russians) of the continent merits further investigation

I have also tried the MDLP5 calculator on the same data (on the right). I was not able to find population average data for this calculator, but it seems that the difference between farmers and hunter-gatherers is captured by  the "Paleo-mediterranean" vs. "West-Eurasian" dichotomy.

Overall, I think this was a worthy exercise which largely confirmed the picture drawn from the original papers and my application of the Dodecad calculators over their data. It certainly seems now that a Mesolithic, North-European-like substratum experienced gene flow from a Mediterranean, South-European-like population that conveyed the new agricultural way of life during the Neolithic. Hopefully, we will get new data from the last 4-5 thousand years before too long, so that my hypothesis about the Indo-European mediated final formation of the European population during that period can be tested.

Proto-Indo-European and North Caucasian

Quite consistent with my idea that Proto-Indo-European is related to the West_Asian autosomal component.  This component occurs at a a level  greater than 50% level in modern North Caucasian speakers, is absent in Europe prior to 5,000 years ago, and occurs at levels greater or equal to 10% in most present-day Indo-European speakers from Europe.

Transactions of the Philological Society DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-968X.2012.01309.x

Areal Typology of Proto-Indo-European: The Case for Caucasian Connections

Ranko Matasović

This paper re-examines the evidence for early contacts between Proto-Indo-European (PIE) and the languages of the Caucasus. Although we were not able to find certain proofs of lexical borrowing between PIE and North Caucasian, there are a few undeniable areal-typological parallels in phonology and grammar. Some features generally attributed to PIE are not found in the majority of languages of North and Northeastern Eurasia, while they are common, or universally present, in the languages of the Caucasus (especially North Caucasus). Those features include the high consonant-to-vowel ratio, tonal accent, number suppletion in personal pronouns, the presence of gender and the morphological optative and, possibly, the presence of glottalized consonants and ergativity.

Link

Craniological and dental signatures of Out-of-Armenia

From the paper on the craniological results:

One can see a clear link between the Armenian highlands samples and the Western Europe samples (the Arcvakar sample - 17 close phenetic links are revealed). The samples from the Georgia (Samtavro /Late Bronze Age - II period) and Iran (Tepe Gissar III), Uzbekistan (Sapallitepe) are identified as the samples with closest affinities samples from Ukraine (Shirochanski) and Poland, Germany (Corded Ware culture) in particular (figure 3). This suggests that some of the European genes do actually stem from this area. So, mediterranean connections from Armenian highlands, Georgia and Central Asia are distinctly fixed in Western Europe and in the Middle-Late Bronze Age. 

... 

If true, it is suggested that the dispersal of the Indo-European languages have been accompanied by migration and some gene flow from the Armenian highlands homeland to the various historical seats of the Indo-European languages. The different rates of genetic drift and external gene flow may have contributed to the morphological differentiation and diversification amongst the different Eurasian populations. Cluster analysis has revealed a craniological series having analogies (on a complex of craniometric, odontologic characters) with representatives of the population of the Armenian highlands, the Caucasus, the Near East and Central Asia. The initial starting area (or one of the intermediate areas), as indicated by the anthropological data, would seem to be the Armenian highlands, and the Caucasus as a whole (Figure 7).

Asian Culture and History Vol. 4, No. 2; July 2012
doi:10.5539/ach.v4n2p48


Bioarchaeological Analysis Mutual Relations of Populations Armenian Highlands and Eurasia Using Craniological and Dental Nonmetric Traits

Anahit Yu. Khudaverdyan1 Institute of Archaeology and Еthnography National Academy of Science, Republic of Armenia

Abstract

Undertaken here is a multidimensional craniometric analysis of more than 254 ethnic groups of the Neolithic and Bronze Ages from the territory of Eurasia. On the basis of the received information, cluster analysis was done and has shown the genetic condensations of ethnoses and vectors of relatives or, conversely, distinctions between them. Craniometric and odontologic investigation of the Bronze Age is interesting and in connection with discussion about the origin of Indo-Europeans and about the place of their ancestral home. Different aspects of the problem of the ancestral home of Indo-Europeans are far from completely resolved and generate lively debate in the pages of scientific publications. New anthropological data allowed identification of alien Mediterranean characteristics influencing various ethnic Eurasian groups and revealed evidence of a migratory stream from the Armenian highlands and the Caucasus. This research provided new evidence of patterns of ethnic contact and intermixture in Western Eurasia

Link

The Bronze Age Indo-European invasion of Europe

Last summer, I was eagerly awaiting the publication of the genome of the Tyrolean Iceman. It is quite remarkable that only a year later, there is now autosomal DNA from half a dozen prehistoric Europeans. By comparing their DNA to that of modern populations, we are beginning to understand how the current mosaic of European peoples was formed.

The ancient samples vary greatly in the number of SNPs tested, and we cannot be sure how well they map to the restricted range of modern populations. Nonetheless, a crystal clear general pattern seems to emerge, at least in its broadest outlines (Sources: Oetzi the Iceman, Neolithic Swedes, Mesolithic Iberians):

We can plainly see that European hunter-gatherers best map to the modern Atlantic_Baltic population component. This is well represented in the remotest areas of Europe, the ones most distant from the Near Eastern womb of nations. It can be reasonably supposed that the modern Atlantic_Baltic component partially captures alleles present in the ancient European hunter-gatherers, the mtDNA haplogroup U population that seems to stretch from Iberia to Siberia. (However, note, that this does not mean that the Atlantic_Baltic component represents hunter-gatherer ancestry only.)

Conversely, ancient European farmers also possess a large chunk of the Southern component which is absent in the hunter-gatherers. This occurs at high frequencies today around the Mediterranean and reaches its maximum in the Near East. It is clear that there is direct evidence that farming came to Europe not as an idea, but as a people, just as archaeology and physical anthropology had always indicated -- until the rather modern distaste for migration set in.

But there is another component present in modern Europe, the West_Asian which is conspicuous in its absence in all the ancient samples so far. This component reaches its highest occurrence in the highlands of West Asia, from Anatolia and the Caucasus all the way to the Indian subcontinent. It is well represented in modern Europeans, reaching its minima in the Iberian peninsula, Sardinia, and Finland. A sampling of populations, including those closest geographically to the ancient samples:

There are several observations we can make:

• The West_Asian component has a pan-European distribution: it must have been involved in a pan-European process rather than a more localized historical phenomenon.
• Its absence from prehistoric individuals down to ~5ky ago suggests that it may have been added to the European population at a later date, although it may already have been present in currently unsampled areas (e.g., the Balkans) prior to 5kya.
• It reaches its lowest occurrence in areas where non-Indo-European languages have been spoken (Basques and Iberia in general, Sardinia, and Finland)

The post-5kya timeframe is also conventionally accepted by linguists for either the dispersal of Indo-European languages, or at least of a significant subset thereof.

In that respect, it is important to note the correspondence between the West_Asian autosomal component and the k5 component of Metspalu et al. (2011): the latter is the major West Eurasian element in the Indian subcontinent. If a major episode of West Eurasian admixture took place in India 1,200-4,000 years ago, and keeping in mind uncertainties about dating, it may very well be that this corresponds, at least in part, to the eastern manifestation of the same phenomenon.

The Bronze Age is an important transitional phase in European archaeology: distinctive archaeological cultures with distinctive physical types make their appearance across the continent. There appears to be substantial innovation in metallurgy, weapons and transportation, increase in raiding, abandonment of settlements, and formation of broad-range confederacies with distinctive archaeological markers.

I propose that a quantum leap in social complexity occurred during this period. Remarkably, after ~4,000YBP, there are no longer farmers and hunter-gatherers as distinct cultures anywhere in Europe, and their mtDNA gene pools begin to expand in synch with each other. It may very well be that climatic upheavals framing this period may have triggered population movements, both Indo-European and Semitic.


Perhaps, through a combination of better technology and social organization, the Indo-European speaking nucleus, originally one among many linguistic groups of the prehistoric Near East were able to transmit their language, culture, and ideology to much larger populations, by alternatively subjugating or incorporating them. We can thus view the Indo-European bearers as "creative destructors", upsetting the balance of established societies and re-creating them in their own image.

Both the wide differences in genetic composition among present-day Indo-European speakers, and their early-attested physical contrasts testify to the fact that the original IE nucleus did not maintain itself apart --at least not for long!-- from the populations they encountered; in this they appear different from the earlier farmers who apparently kept their Mediterranean affinity even in the northernmost edge of their expansion, thousands of years after their entry into Europe.

Nonetheless, some of the legacy of the earliest Indo-European speakers does appear to persist down to the present day in the genomes of their linguistic descendants, and I predict that when we sample later (post 5-4kya) individuals we will finally find the West_Asian piece that is missing from the European puzzle.

* * *

ADDENDUM:

On the right are the K12b results for the ancient individuals, which further suggest that the Mesolithic Europeans possessed a Northern European affinity that is lacking in the farmer individuals. Conversely, farmer individuals have an excess of the Atlantic_Med component, and also a presence of the Southwest_Asian one.

These results are compatible with the above discussion, as well as the observation by Sánchez-Quinto et al. (2012) that:

the position of La Braña individuals in the 1000 Genomes Project data and the 1KGPomnichip PCAs suggests that the uniform Mesolithic substrate could be related to modern Northern European populations but may represent a gene pool that is no longer present in contemporary Southern European populations.

I wrote a small survey a couple years ago, in which I argued that:

I will simply say that the recent results of Bramanti et al. for a U-dominated older mtDNA stratum in Central/North-eastern Europe can be reasonably extended to cover both North-western Europe and northern Eurasia up to Lake Baikal, the prehistoric limit between Caucasoids and Mongoloids.

The extension of U dominance to Iberia, as well as the detection of the North European autosomal signal in both Iberia as well as, presumably, Siberia, seems to make the case for the existence of this postulated zone pretty clear.

One could very well call this boreal population Ancestral Northwest Eurasians (ANWEA) and parallelize it with the Ancestral South Indians (ASI). These Paleolithic substrata frame the Eurasian landmass on opposite latitudinal ends, and were the receptacles of the great chain of migrations which began in the Neolithic womb of nations. One of the final episodes of this process was the dispersal of the Indo-European languages during the Copper and Bronze Ages.

UPDATE (July 3): Indo-European genetic signatures in an Orcadian genome and a Lithuanian and Ancient European DNA using DIYHarappaWorld and MDLP5

20,000-year old pottery from China

From NYTimes:

The ceramics probably consisted of simple concave vessels that were likely used for cooking food, said Ofer Bar-Yosef, an archaeologist at Harvard and an author of the study, which appears in the journal Science. 

“What it seems is that in China, the making of pottery started 20,000 years ago and never stopped,” he said. “The Chinese kitchen was always based on cooking and steaming; they never made, as in other parts of Asia, breads.”

Science 29 June 2012:

Vol. 336 no. 6089 pp. 1696-1700

DOI: 10.1126/science.1218643

Early Pottery at 20,000 Years Ago in Xianrendong Cave, China

Xiaohong Wu et al.

ABSTRACT

The invention of pottery introduced fundamental shifts in human subsistence practices and sociosymbolic behaviors. Here, we describe the dating of the early pottery from Xianrendong Cave, Jiangxi Province, China, and the micromorphology of the stratigraphic contexts of the pottery sherds and radiocarbon samples. The radiocarbon ages of the archaeological contexts of the earliest sherds are 20,000 to 19,000 calendar years before the present, 2000 to 3000 years older than other pottery found in East Asia and elsewhere. The occupations in the cave demonstrate that pottery was produced by mobile foragers who hunted and gathered during the Late Glacial Maximum. These vessels may have served as cooking devices. The early date shows that pottery was first made and used 10 millennia or more before the emergence of agriculture.

Link

Mesolithic Iberians (La Braña-Arintero) not ancestors of modern ones

From the press release:

A team of scientists, led by researcher Carles Lalueza-Fox from CSIC (Spanish National Research Council), has recovered - for the first time in history - part of the genome of two individuals living in the Mesolithic Period, 7000 years ago. Remains have been found at La Braña-Arintero site, located at Valdelugueros (León), Spain. The study results, published in the Current Biology magazine, indicate that current Iberian populations don't come from these groups genetically.

This appears quite consistent with my model of mostly recent origins of European populations from a West Asian womb of nations. I can't wait to get my hands on this new data.

From the paper:

In the genomic analysis, it is interesting to see that the La Braña individuals do not cluster with modern populations from Southern Europe, including those from the Iberian Peninsula. The first PC separates a north-south distribution, whereas the second follows a general east-west pattern in modern Europeans. The position of La Braña individuals in the 1000 Genomes Project data and the 1KGPomnichip PCAs suggests that the uniform Mesolithic substrate could be related to modern Northern European populations but may represent a gene pool that is no longer present in contemporary Southern European populations. In the latter PCA, where the origin of each Iberian sample is known, it is possible to see that the Mesolithic specimens are not related to modern Basques, contrary to what has been previously suggested in some recent studies [39].

The global PCA of the two individuals shows a clear shift relative to extant Europeans.

So while they are more related to Northern than to Southern Europeans, they are well outside the range of modern European variation. Indeed, there is a strong hint of "Asian-shift" to these individuals. This is completely consistent with the pattern in modern West Eurasian populations. As I noted:

With respect to the Asian- and African- shift of West Eurasian populations, I note that northern Europeans (and Basques) are less African-shifted than southern Europeans, and, at the same time they are more Asian-shifted: the 16 least Asian-shifted populations have a coastline in the Mediterranean (excluding the Portuguese), while the 16 least African-shifted populations do not (excluding the French).

It now appears clear that the Mesolithic substratum in Europe was:

1. Well outside the modern range, contributing a little to extant populations
2. Its contribution in northern populations was higher than in southern ones
3. It may be responsible for the pattern of Asian-shift observed for non-Mediterranean European populations

Related: Coverage in Science.


UPDATE: Due to the small number of SNPs, I pooled the two Mesolithic individuals into a single composite one; the K7b admixture proportions are: 9.3% African and 90.7% Atlantic_Baltic, which appears consistent with the position of the individuals in the European PCA plot. The sub-1,000 SNPs in common with the K7b do not give me a lot of confidence in the minority element, but, in any case, the high Atlantic_Baltic figure is what I would expect and appears consistent with the similarly high Atlantic_Baltic figure of the Swedish Neolithic hunter-gatherers.


UPDATE II: Using the K12b, the results are: 45% Atlantic_Med, 41.6% North_European, 10.3% East_African, 1% Sub_Saharan.


UPDATE III: In terms of the euro7 calculator, the results are: 89.6% Northwestern, 1.6% Southeastern, and 8.7% Far_Asian.

Current Biology, 28 June 2012 doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2012.06.005

Genomic Affinities of Two 7,000-Year-Old Iberian Hunter-Gatherers

Federico Sánchez-Quinto, Hannes Schroeder, Oscar Ramirez, María C. Ávila-Arcos, Marc Pybus, Iñigo Olalde, Amhed M.V. Velazquez, María Encina Prada Marcos, Julio Manuel Vidal Encinas, Jaume Bertranpetit, Ludovic Orlando, M. Thomas P. Gilbert, Carles Lalueza-Fox


Highlights

• The first complete Mesolithic mtDNA genome retrieved 
• There is a remarkable genetic uniformity in Europe during the Mesolithic period 
• Modern Iberians are not direct descendants of the 7,000-year-old hunter-gatherers 
• Genetic discontinuity between Mesolithic/Neolithic populations supported by simulations 

Summary The genetic background of the European Mesolithic and the extent of population replacement during the Neolithic [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10] is poorly understood, both due to the scarcity of human remains from that period [11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18] and the inherent methodological difficulties of ancient DNA research. However, advances in sequencing technologies are both increasing data yields and providing supporting evidence for data authenticity, such as nucleotide misincorporation patterns [19,20,21,22]. We use these methods to characterize both the mitochondrial DNA genome and generate shotgun genomic data from two exceptionally well-preserved 7,000-year-old Mesolithic individuals from La Braña-Arintero site in León (Northwestern Spain) [23]. The mitochondria of both individuals are assigned to U5b2c1, a haplotype common among the small number of other previously studied Mesolithic individuals from Northern and Central Europe. This suggests a remarkable genetic uniformity and little phylogeographic structure over a large geographic area of the pre-Neolithic populations. Using Approximate Bayesian Computation, a model of genetic continuity from Mesolithic to Neolithic populations is poorly supported. Furthermore, analyses of 1.34% and 0.53% of their nuclear genomes, containing about 50,000 and 20,000 ancestry informative SNPs, respectively, show that these two Mesolithic individuals are not related to current populations from either the Iberian Peninsula or Southern Europe. 

Link

Mapping Stereotypes

If you're in need of a good belly laugh, I'm sure you'll find something in the Mapping Stereotypes site to suit you.

BEAN – Bridging the European and Anatolian Neolithic

The BEAN project has been on my radar for a while now, and it's great that it seems to be alive and well. Hopefully it won't be too long until it starts producing results.

The origins of human settlement: Mainz University coordinates a new EU project for young researchers

Junior researcher Zuzana Fajkošová passes international selection procedure and begins her doctorate in the Palaeogenetics Group at the JGU Institute of Anthropology

27.06.2012

"BEAN – Bridging the European and Anatolian Neolithic" is the name of a new multinational educational network which has received funding from the European Commission for the next four years. It is classified as a so-called Initial Training Network (ITN) in the EU Marie Curie Actions program, which allows young scientists early access to research activity at top international institutions. A basic requirement for funding is that the researchers involved leave their home country and conduct their research in another European country.

The BEAN Network consists of several European partners in England, Switzerland, France, Germany, Serbia, and Turkey, and has set itself the goal of enhancing the skills of a new generation of researchers in the subjects of anthropology, pre-history, population genetics, computer modeling, and demography. Many different disciplines are participating in the initiative. An important associate partner on the German side is the German Federal Statistical Office in Wiesbaden. The common focus of the project partners centers around questions associated with the origin of first farmer settlements, which were established some 8,000 years ago in West Anatolia and the Balkans. Where did they come from? Were they migrants from the Middle East? Are they our ancestors?

Anthropologists at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) have been meticulous in their preparation of the project over the last years and have entered into various cooperations to underpin it. Seven research institutions and two commercial companies are now working together on the BEAN project. Two leading researchers serve the network in an advisory capacity. These are archaeologist Ian Hodder from Stanford, who established his reputation with his excavations in Catal Höyük, and Hermann Parzinger, President of the Prussian Cultural History Foundation, who spent many years excavating and researching in European Turkey.

As of July 2012, doctoral candidate Zuzana Fajkošová, who completed her undergraduate studies at Masaryk University in Brno and at Charles University in Prague in the Czech Republic, will be the first of two BEAN researchers to start work at JGU's Institute of Anthropology and in the new palaeogenetic laboratory, which is currently in the final stages of construction on the edges of the university's Botanic Garden. She will analyze DNA from the bones of the last hunter-gatherers and the first settled farmers in the region between West Anatolia and the Balkans using the new cutting-edge technology of Next Generation Sequencing (NGS). Together with her colleagues in Dublin, London, and Geneva, she will use the genomic data to compile a model for the settlement of Europe.

"It is both a great honor and a huge opportunity for me that I can work together with such renowned researchers. I'm looking forward to Mainz, the university and the institute's new building," comments Fajkošová, who turned down a number of other offers in order to work at JGU. "A major factor leading to her appointment was the fact that besides mastering biomolecular techniques she also has good programming skills,” explains Professor Dr. Joachim Burger, the Network Coordinator. "A few years ago we more or less founded the discipline of Neolithic Palaeogenetics single-handedly. However, undertaking genomic projects is possible only with the help of international colleagues. That is why we are so pleased that such networks give us and our colleagues the chance to train young research talents."

Besides academic training, the young researchers will be able to do practical work for the two commercial companies within the network and thereby gain work experience in a non-university environment. "This is important as not all of the candidates will opt for a pure research career," explains Karola Kirsanow, who moved from Harvard to Mainz last year and now administrates the network together with Burger. "Our young colleagues have to attend many workshops, courses, and internships, most of them abroad. While this makes for a very tough program, we believe that it significantly enhances the quality of the training and similarly enhances candidates' career prospects."

Population structure in Qatar

The recent publication of Omberg et al. (2012) has reminded me of the data of Henn et al. (2012) on Qatar which I don't believe I've used yet. I used the K12b calculator on ~20,000 SNPs that are common between it and the Affymetrix chip used.

Below is the population portrait of the Qatari population:

Obviously this isn't a homogeneous population. In order to figure out which ancestral groups are present there, I ran MCLUST over the admixture proportions, which resulted in individuals assigned to five different clusters. Here are the average admixture proportions of these five clusters:

On the basis of the above, I conclude that there are several different groups represented in the Qatari population. I have absolutely no knowledge about the Qatari population, so it would be interesting to see if readers find correspondences between these and known social divisions in Qatar.

For example, I could wager that #5 which is a "Southwest Asian"+"Caucasus" mix represents a pure Arabian group with little outside influences. #1 and #2 are also Arab-like but with various degrees of admixture. #3 appears to include substantial African descendants and #4 a clear Iranian signal due to the high "Gedrosia" component. Of interest is that the "African" group #3 also scores high in the "South Asian" component.

SupportMix

This sounds amazing, hopefully I can give it a try before not too long. Software link.

BMC Genetics 2012, 13:49 doi:10.1186/1471-2156-13-49

Inferring genome-wide patterns of admixture in Qataris using fifty-five ancestral populations

Larsson Omberg et al.

Abstract (provisional)

Background

Populations of the Arabian Peninsula have a complex genetic structure that reflects waves of migrations including the earliest human migrations from Africa and eastern Asia, migrations along ancient civilization trading routes and colonization history of recent centuries. 1

Results

Here, we present a study of genome-wide admixture in this region, using 156 genotyped individuals from Qatar, a country located at the crossroads of these migration patterns. Since haplotypes of these individuals could have originated from many different populations across the world, we have developed a machine learning method "SupportMix" to infer loci-specific genomic ancestry when simultaneously analyzing many possible ancestral populations. Simulations show that SupportMix is not only more accurate than other popular admixture discovery tools but is the first admixture inference method that can efficiently scale for simultaneous analysis of 50-100 putative ancestral populations while being independent of prior demographic information.

Conclusions

By simultaneously using the 55 world populations from the Human Genome Diversity Panel, SupportMix was able to extract the fine-scale ancestry of the Qatar population, providing many new observations concerning the ancestry of the region. For example, as well as recapitulating the three major sub-populations in Qatar, composed of mainly Arabic, Persian, and African ancestry, SupportMix additionally identifies the specific ancestry of the Persian group to populations sampled in Greater Persia rather than from China and the ancestry of the African group to sub-Saharan origin and not Southern African Bantu origin as previously thought.

Link

Evolutionary history of continental South East Asians (Jinam et al. 2012)

Mol Biol Evol (2012) doi: 10.1093/molbev/mss169

Evolutionary history of continental South East Asians: “early train” hypothesis based on genetic analysis of mitochondrial and autosomal DNA data

Timothy A. Jinam et al.

The population history of the indigenous populations in island Southeast Asia is generally accepted to have been shaped by two major migrations; the ancient ‘Out of Africa’ migration ∼50,000 years before present (YBP) and the relatively recent ‘Out of Taiwan’ expansion of Austronesian agriculturalists approximately 5,000 YBP. The Negritos are believed to have originated from the ancient migration whereas the majority of island Southeast Asians are associated with the Austronesian expansion. We determined 86 mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) complete genome sequences in four indigenous Malaysian populations, together with a reanalysis of published autosomal single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) data of Southeast Asians to test the plausibility and impact of those migration models. The three Austronesian groups (Bidayuh, Selatar and Temuan) showed high frequencies of mtDNA haplogroups which originated from the Asian mainland ∼30,000 to 10,000 YBP while showing low frequencies of ‘Out of Taiwan’ markers. Principal Component Analysis and phylogenetic analysis using autosomal SNP data indicate a dichotomy between continental and island Austronesian groups. We argue that both the mtDNA and autosomal data suggest an ‘Early Train’ migration originating from Indochina or South China around the late-Pleistocene to early Holocene period which predates, but may not necessarily exclude, the Austronesian expansion.

Link