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
This Olalde et al. 2019 was a long awaited paper of which we had some glimpses over the past few months, and now it’s finally here with the full details. In fact, too many details to address in this quick post, so I’ll comment on just a few of them here and will continue with… Continue Reading
As a brief fill-in, I will look at what the recent data adds to our understanding of the 4000 – 3000 BC period in northwestern Eurasia, which corresponds to the critical ‘’transition’’ period between the collapse of ‘’Old Europe’’ and arrival of steppe migrants. In reality, events are of course more complex, if one understands… Continue Reading
Introduction of pottery signifies massive cultural change. Beyond the introduction of a new technology, pottery provides additional possibilities for food storage and preparation (e.g. fish / vegetable soups, extracting animal lipids, brewing, pickling). Appearance of larger, heavy vessels implies conversion to a more sedentary lifestyle. Such major cultural shift may have autochtonous origins, but more likely is external… Continue Reading