Celtic A few months after I published the article “Origins and spread of Indo-European languages: an alternative view“, a new study was published (still as a preprint, now at version 3) about the spread of Celtic languages that is the most important one on the subject published up to this date: Tracing the Spread of… Continue Reading
A few years ago I briefly wrote about the relationship of Basque and Iberian in order to introduce some of the recent research to English readers, since most of the research on the subject is being published in Spanish. I did expand in the comments on that post about the background and quoted (and translated)… Continue Reading
The Narasimhan et al. paper disproved the predictions of “Swat Aryans and Achaemenids being 70% like Sintashta”. The original conclusion of the paper was that while the steppe ancestry in Swat was mostly mediated by females there was a high steppe migration into the Punjab that brought Indo-European languages. On the other hand, there was… Continue Reading
The origin and spread of Indo-European languages should be relevant to the origin of Uralic languages too, so in order to asses how the proposal of the former in the main article affects the latter, we’ll look at it in this appendix. The origin of Uralic languages has been traditionally thought to be either around… Continue Reading
After over 5 years of being away without officially leaving, I’ve finally got around to write a closing post for this blog. And unsurprisingly, it deals with the Indo-European (IE) question which has been the main focus of ancient DNA studies and the subject that has brought the most interest to the people who followed… Continue Reading
As you all know, there have been two aDNA papers released recently about Central Asia to North India. I didn’t dedicate a post to them (there are comments in the previous thread about them, though), mostly because the first one (The formation of human populations in South and Central Asia, Narasimhan el al. 2019) had… Continue Reading
After a rather long hiatus, and while we wait for the long anticipated final version of Narasimhan et al. (hopefully out very soon), here’s a quick post commenting on a few things that have been published lately. Tracking Five Millennia of Horse Management with Extensive Ancient Genome Time Series Fages et al. 2019 A… Continue Reading
A new paper has been published recently with some new samples from Estonia: The Arrival of Siberian Ancestry Connecting the Eastern Baltic to Uralic Speakers further East Saag et al. 2019 As can be seen already from the title, the paper references the Uralic language as an important part of it. From the highlights: Arrival… Continue Reading
The following post is written with two main purposes: The first one is to explain some of the problematic when dealing with substrates in a way that is accessible for anyone to understand and get a better perspective about this complicated subject. The second one is to take a look at how ancient DNA (aDNA)… Continue Reading
Thanks to a series of papers (Haak 2015, Gunther 2015, Martiniano 2017, Lipson 2017, Valdiosera 2018, Olalde 2018) in addition to the three recent papers by Olalde et al., Marcus et al. and Villalba-Mouco et al., we have a fascinating collection of samples for southwestern Europe which span the series of transitions occurring between Late… Continue Reading