Upcoming guest posts

I’m glad to announce that this blog will be hosting some guest posts in the near future. I think that these contributions will greatly enhance the quality of the original content posted here and will also offer a greater diversity in both scope and perspective. And of course, it will help to keep this place… Continue reading



The Genomic Formation of South and Central Asia – Some thoughts, Part 2

Continuing with some thoughts about Narisimhan et al 2018 (preprint) from the previous post… The steppe people going south Now turning our attention to how the steppe people interacted, influenced or migrated to SC Asia, let’s first look at the Andronovo-BMAC interactions and then we’ll move further south onto the Indus Valley. I will follow… Continue reading


The Genomic Formation of South and Central Asia – Some thoughts, Part 1

While we await a new preprint (or the final version) of Narasimhan et al. 2018 I’d like to comment on several random things related to it. Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC) When Victor Sarianidi first excavated the BMAC sites, his hypothesis was that it represented a migration from Syro-Anatolia to the east. Then, as in the… Continue reading


So what was going on around the Caucasus?

Thanks to the preprint discussed in the previous post, we now have a good amount of aDNA from around the Caucasus that can help us understand what was going on in this key region. The answers are still not clear, but we can take a look at what we have and see what we have… Continue reading