Maykop culture's people: The source of the Caucasian-like ancestry in the Yamnaya?

As David mentioned over at Eurogenes, we'll be seeing what some peoples of the Maykop culture   looked like genomically as Oxford University recently donated Maykop samples to the Reich lab.

As has been stated in the past on the Anthromadness blog; Haak et al. 2015 found what looked to be a West Asian ancestry carrying element in the Yamnaya Pontic-Caspian Steppe pastoralists and characterized it as Armenian/Cacuasian-like.

From what I understand, some in the genome blogging world have connected this element to the illusive "Teal component" which looks be a mixture between Ancient North Eurasian-related ancestry and West Asian / Near Eastern ancestry.

I'm no expert on the archaeological nature of these cultures (the Yamnaya and Maykop) but there seems to have definitely been some rather deep interactions between them whilst the Maykop culture geographically sat between the Yamnaya and West Asia to the south which has led some to believe that the Maykop are the source of the West Asian-esque input in the Yamnaya.

Only time will tell...

Link

New Human species discovered

National Geographic & Science Magazine

"Delezene’s own fossil pile contained 190 teeth—a critical part of any analysis, since teeth alone are

often enough to identify a species. But these teeth weren’t like anything the scientists in the “tooth booth” had ever seen. Some features were astonishingly humanlike—the molar crowns were small, for instance, with five cusps like ours. But the premolar roots were weirdly primitive. “We’re not sure what to make of these,” Delezene said. “It’s crazy.”he same schizoid pattern was popping up at the other tables. A fully modern hand sported wackily curved fingers, fit for a creature climbing trees. The shoulders were apish too, and the widely flaring blades of the pelvis were as primitive as Lucy’s—but the bottom of the same pelvis looked like a modern human’s. The leg bones started out shaped like an australopithecine’s but gathered modernity as they descended toward the ground. The feet were virtually indistinguishable from our own.

“You could almost draw a line through the hips—primitive above, modern below,” said Steve Churchill, a paleontologist from Duke University. “If you’d found the foot by itself, you’d think some Bushman had died.”

But then there was the head. Four partial skulls had been found—two were likely male, two female. In their general morphology they clearly looked advanced enough to be called Homo. But the

braincases were tiny—a mere 560 cubic centimeters for the males and 465 for the females, far less than H. erectus’s average of 900 cubic centimeters, and well under half the size of our own. A large brain is the sine qua non of humanness, the hallmark of a species that has evolved to live by its wits. These were not human beings. These were pinheads, with some humanlike body parts.

Berger himself thinks the right metaphor for human evolution, instead of a tree branching from a single root, is a braided stream: a river that divides into channels, only to merge again downstream. Similarly, the various hominin types that inhabited the landscapes of Africa must at some point have diverged from a common ancestor. But then farther down the river of time they may have coalesced again, so that we, at the river’s mouth, carry in us today a bit of East Africa, a bit of South Africa, and a whole lot of history we have no notion of whatsoever. Because one thing is for sure: If we learned about a completely new form of hominin only because a couple of cavers were skinny enough to fit through a crack in a well-explored South African cave, we really don’t have a clue what else might be out there."


Link 1 & Link 2

Notes:

1. The above text isn't a pristine excerpt and a good amount of text here and there was skipped. I of course emphasize reading the articles I've linked to. 

DNA from Neandertal relative may shake up human family tree

Ann Gibbons, Science Magazine News

"The close affinity with Neandertals, but not with Denisovans or modern humans, suggests that the lineage leading to Neandertals was separate from other archaic humans earlier than most researchers have thought. That means that the ancestors of modern humans also had to split earlier than expected from the population that gave rise to Neandertals and Denisovans, who were more closely related to each other than they were to modern humans. (Although all three groups interbred at low levels after their evolutionary paths diverged—and such interbreeding may have been the source of the Denisovan mtDNA in the first Sima fossil whose DNA was sequenced.) Indeed, Meyer suggested in his talk that the ancestors of H. sapiens may have diverged from the branch leading to Neandertals and Denisovans as early as 550,000 to 765,000 years ago, although those results depend on different mutation rates in humans and are still unpublished.

That would mean that the ancestors of humans were already wandering down a solitary path apart from the other kinds of archaic humans on the planet 100,000 to 400,000 years earlier than expected. “It resolves one controversy—that they’re in the Neandertal clade,” says paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London. “But it’s not all good news: From my point of view, it pushes back the origin of H. sapiens from the Neandertals and Denisovans.” The possibility that humans were a distinct group so early shakes up the human family tree, promising to lead to new debate about when and where the branches belong."

Link

There are populations in West Asia seemingly more Basal Eurasian than Early European Farmers

Upon encountering that tweet by Iosif Lazaridis of Harvard Med I figured I'd drop him the following email:

Where he promptly replied with:

It ultimately seems as though there are groups in West Asia like Negev Bedouin Bs (who will show more of "Near Eastern" ancestry like what shows up in David over at Eurogenes' K=8 ADMIXTURE analysis than Early European Farmers) seemingly richer in Basal Eurasian ancestry than Early European Farmers.

The issue though is quite simply that many or most of these groups tend to have African ancestry (tends to be East African-related) and that ultimately makes whether or not they are more Basal Eurasian an iffy matter complicated by their African admixture even if it is accounted for as best as possible.

My personal opinion is that populations richer in "Near Eastern/ENF" will prove to be more Basal Eurasian than Early European Farmers but something's surely needed in order to be sure here; more ancient DNA data from West Asia. 

Notes:

1. The West Asian / Near Eastern populations less rich in Basal Eurasian that Lazaridis noticed are probably ones like Anatolians, Caucasians and Iranians whom are all rich in MA-1 ("Ancient North Eurasian") related ancestry and will even show some notable Western European Hunter-Gatherer-related ancestry like the case is with various Anatolian Turks. These groups will actually show less of "Near Eastern/ENF" than Early European Farmers so it would make sense. I can't be sure about them being the particular groups that seem to be less Basal Eurasian than Early European Farmers but it's just an educated guess...

West Asians have less Basal Eurasian than Early European Farmers

Iosif Lazaridis of Lazaridis et al. 2013-2014

"EEF=WHG+Near East. To account for BE in EEF, Near East must have even more. But (Non-African admixed) modern Near East has less"

Interesting words from Iosif Lazaridis where he said via a recent tweet that Early European Farmers whom as I've often said in some manner or other are "Western European Hunter-Gatherer-related ancestry + West Asian/Near Eastern", according to him have more Basal Eurasian (BE) ancestry than non-African admixed West Asians. It's an interesting revelation on his part to say the least.

As a friend of mine states:

"He also points out that the divergent element in EEF and modern Europeans is absent not only in WHG, ANE and ENA, but also the ancient Ust'-Ishim, Oase and EHG genomes."