Genetic history

So... I have a blog that I usually forget about all about archaeology, history and archaeogenetics. Sadly, my own genetic profile didn't give me my haplogroup, and I'd have to have paid quite a bit extra to get my ancient genetic contribution, so I have to guess. But here's some graphs.

This first one is a simplified Mesolithic Europe. The yellow part is where Scandinavian Hunter Gatherers were found, the green hatching is the spread of farming... which in Europe came later when the EEF ancestry, or Anatolian Neolithic farmers, as they are labeled here, started to spread through Europe. There aren't any yet, except some small contributions in the Balkans and north of the Black Sea.

The classic WHG ancestry is here called the Oberkassel cluster, or also the Villabruna cluster. This is the source of "native" Mesolithic people, and their ancestors come from further East, it is believed, in the Paleolithic. There were actually other Paoleolithic peoples here earlier, in two clusters, the Fournal and Věstonice clusters, who were themselves distantly related. The last lingering impact of that population is shown in the map below as the Goyet Q2 ancestry (the orange), also known as El Mirón, or the Fournal Cluster. Ancient paleolithic populations like the Solutreans or Aurignacian Cro-Magnon populations, but they are essentially gone now, with only trace amounts in the DNA of modern Europeans. Even in the Mesolithic, nobody has more than half of this ancestry of those plotted here.

The blue, then, is the WHG Mesolithic population, which as the Paleolithic turned into the Mesolithic, they kind of took over. Much hay is made by diversitarians of the apparent lack of light-skinned alelles in the WHG population; they appear to have been relatively dark-skinned and blue-eyed, unlike any population today. The modern populations that have the highest concentration of their ancestry, however, are the whitest people in the world; from Scandinavia and the Baltic shore. I kind of like the idea of a population of blue-eyed, but slightly brown-skinned people with brown hair that look like a long lost ancestor of modern white people without being really white people themselves, but I'm a little skeptical of the narrative. Some bad faith actors have seized upon the flimsiest of evidence to suggest that they were as dark as Africans, in an attempt to delegitimize the claims of Europeans to their own ancestral lands. 

The red is the Eastern Hunter Gatherer ancestry, which probably shouldn't be seen so much as a separate ancestry, but as a cline of sorts, separated by distance, but ultimate from the same origin. T EHG ancestry came to central and western Europe early in mixed form in the Scandinavian Hunter-gatherers, and later as a large component of the Western Steppe Herder ancestry, i.e. with the Indo-Europeanization of Europe. Of course, prior to that, the Neolithic Revolution saw the spread of a vast population of farmers out of Anatolia through the Balkans in two trajectories; one that went northwards and one that went westwards and then much later, came back east bringing WHG genetics with it that were otherwise mostly missing from the Balkans and Central/Eastern Europe. 

This later map is the end of the Mesolithic and start of the Neolithic. The Green Cross-hatching is, again, where EEF populations essentially took over. Most of the population is considerably more mixed, as you can see, and the Goyet Q2 cluster is mostly bred out. Samples from within the green cross-hatch would be mostly green, with a relatively small sliver of blue. But, as you can see, the more western portion of the Neolithic area always had a fair bit of blue, and there was a resurgence of sorts of "blue" ancestry which moved eastwards. We tend to see the Neolithic as a big wave, but in reality, there were always much smaller waves as a closely related people mostly replaced another; we now have high enough resolution to recognize the waves that came with the Funnelbeaker culture, for instance which replaced the Linear Pottery Culture before it, or the next wave that came with the Globular Amphora in the eve of the Indo-Europeanization of western and Central Europe as the earliest Corded Ware burst out of the eastern forest steppes across the entire continent. 

I strongly suspect that the history of Europe... and probably everywhere else too... has much more population replacement and waves of migration than we suspect. It does take high enough resolution to see it, though; not every wave of new population is genetically super distinct from the one that it's primarily replacing. This is why the Celtic and Anglo-Saxon migrations into Britain were both invisible to genetics until higher resolution sampling became available; they were simply too similar to the earlier Bell Beaker migration to show up. Now we can tell that they were a significant population movement, but from a low resolution genetic profile, the invaders were very similar to the people already there, so the movement wasn't transparent. 

Of course, when the Bell Beakers showed up, that was easier to see. They were more significantly different than the Neolithic megalith builders that they mostly replaced, so the population movement was easier to see. 

This PCA also shows the clusters of the older groups, and how far apart they are. Interesting stuff.

Its discouraging to think of all of these genetic clusters that, as far as we can tell, just completely disappeared. Whomever the original Paleolithic people of Europe would have been, it looks like their genetics were completely swamped or replaced; at most there is a small percentage of El Mirón ancestry in the Basques, for instance. Heck, even the WHG Villabruna and Oberkassel clusters are pretty dilute in modern Europeans. I think it'd be fascinating if there were a population that resembled them and were closely genetically affiliated with them still, like the Sardinians are to the original EEF people, for instance. Especially as they appear to have likely been visually fairly distinct. 

As a purely cosmetic aside, my original SWTOR character, Graggory is deliberately designed on similar principles; fairly dark skin, brown (but not dark/black hair) and blue eyes. At the time, my thought was more along the old sci-fi chestnut of the "spacer's tan" but more and more I was drawn to the idea of him being an example of the alleged WHF phenotype.