Ancestry and demography and descendants of Iron Age nomads of the Eurasian Steppe, Martina Unterländer, et al
"Our genomic analyses reveal that western and eastern steppe inhabitants possess east Eurasian ancestry to varying degrees. In our ADMIXTURE analyses we find an East Asian ancestry component at K=15 in all Iron Age samples that has not been detected in preceding Bronze Age populations in either western or eastern parts of the Eurasian Steppe. Another ancestral component that is maximized in the north Siberian Nganasan population becomes visible from the 2nd millennium BCE onwards in the eastern steppe (Okunevo, Karasuk, Mezhovskaya). This component appears later in all Iron Age populations but with significantly higher levels in the eastern steppe zone than in the West. These findings are consistent with the appearance of east Eurasian mitochondrial lineages in the western Scythians during the Iron Age, and imply gene-flow or migration over the Eurasian Steppe belt carrying East Asian/North Siberian ancestry from the East to the West as far as the Don-Volga region in southern Russia. In general, gene-flow between eastern and western Eurasia seems to have been more intense during the Iron Age than in modern times, which is congruent with the view of the Iron Age populations of the Eurasian Steppe being highly mobile semi-nomadic horse-riding groups.
In the East, we find a balanced mixture of mitochondrial lineages found today predominantly in west Eurasians, including a significant proportion of prehistoric hunter-gatherer lineages, and lineages that are at high frequency in modern Central and East Asians already in the earliest Iron Age individuals dating to the ninth to seventh century BCE and an even earlier mtDNA sample from Bronze Age Mongolia. Typical west Eurasian mtDNA lineages are also present in the Tarim Basin and Kazakhstan and were even predominant in the Krasnoyarsk area during the 2nd millennium BCE. This pattern points to an admixture process between west and east Eurasian populations that began in earlier periods, certainly before the 1st millennium BCE, a finding consistent with a recent study suggesting the carriers of the Yamnaya culture are genetically indistinguishable from the Afanasievo culture peoples of the Altai-Sayan region. This further implies that carriers of the Yamnaya culture migrated not only into Europe but also eastward, carrying west Eurasian genes—and potentially also Indo-European languages—to this region. All of these observations provide evidence that the prevalent genetic pattern does not simply follow an isolation-by-distance model but involves significant gene flow over large distances.
All Iron Age individuals investigated in this study show genomic evidence for Caucasus hunter-gatherer and Eastern European hunter-gatherer ancestry. This is consistent with the idea that the blend of EHG and Caucasian elements in carriers of the Yamnaya culture was formed on the European steppe and exported into Central Asia and Siberia. All of our analyses support the hypothesis that the genetic composition of the Scythians can best be described as a mixture of Yamnaya-related ancestry and East Asian/north Siberian elements."
-Martina Unterländer, et al: Ancestry and demography and descendants of Iron Age nomads of the Eurasian Steppe.
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