3D model of a Bronze Age Irishman’s skull

Rathlin 1 buried in supine position c.1906BC
The foetal like position is thought to symbolise
rebirth.
Sloan et al 2006

While this blog certainly isn’t one dedicated to 20th century anthropology, (there are plenty of Facebook groups for that) I quite recently came across this rather excellent specimen on sketchfab and felt I just had to post it here. The crania appears to be in excellent condition, although a piece of the maxilla is missing. Along with pieces of the parietal bone, perhaps being caved in by a cudgel like implement? Was this man murdered? Interestingly Rathlin island was a rich source of porcellanite, used for making stone axe heads which were exported to Britain. Despite being technically the Bronze Age stone tools and weaponry did not immediately fall out of fashion. As late as 1200BC men were still wielding cudgels as evidenced by the Tollense river valley battle site. Only local elites would’ve had the knowledge to smelt bronze. 

The skull appears to be that of Rathlin 1, the oldest and best preserved of the three food vessel culture men uncovered in 2006 and sequenced later by trinity college geneticists. He recently made a cameo appearance in part 1 of an Irish language documentary series which I was pleasantly surprised by, having been quite interested in this individual myself. Unlike most present day Irish his craniometric measurements appears to be brachycephalic as was that of most bell beaker people. He also has the stereotypical flat occiput which is not common in Irish skulls of today which tend to be rounded.

Although I am not particularly knowledgable in the field of anthropology, I would personally classify him as a Dinarised Borreby, using Carleton Coon’s own classification system. 

All credit of course goes to the centre of archaeological fieldwork for this great upload.

Are Irish the most Indo-European Europeans?

 

Migration route of R1b-L51 men with single grave culture. By 2800BCE these communities
had already established themselves in the Rhineland, assimilating the local funnelbeaker population. 
From here their mixed descendants overwhelm the western remnants of “old Europe”. 

Knowing that this post will illicit some controversy and probably various accusations of racism,  I am going to just get it out of the way that I am in no part making this post out of some weird sense of ethno-chauvinism, but rather out of curiousity in exploring the genetic makeup of the Irish genotype as this blog’s name would suggest. This is the elephant in the room that needs to be addressed as I feel it has gone ignored for far too long now.

Are the Irish the genetically purest Indo-European ethnic group in terms of WSH/Steppe_EMBA ancestry?

I believe the answer is yes, and I’ll be exploring why with various Global 25 models you will see below. Does that mean Irish are the closest living breathing ethnic group to the earliest Corded ware population that are more than likely responsible for spreading Indo-European languages across Eurasia?

No. 

As confusing as that might sound to some of you as it did to me at one point in time. All homogenous populations are drifted from one another, but some are more drifted than others. The higher EEF affinity of NW Europeans relative to the more farmer devoid, hunter gatherer rich ancestry of Balto-Slavic  speakers. 

qpAdmixture stats revealing ancient ancestry
proportions of Northern and Eastern Europeans 
The green “eneolithic steppe” component represents
early proto-Indo-European input. Irish outscore all but Latvians and certain Russians. 
But what about just WSH/Steppe_EMBA itself? Who will come out on top?

Globular amphora from Poland represents EEF. Though I must caution

some of this “yellow” component is not from GAC itself, but darker farmer 

women of neolithic western Europe who were somewhat more devoid of the

high WHG signal found in GAC samples. I will perhaps address in a later

post whether our farmer ancestry is mostly Danubian (LBK) or Mediterranean

(Impresso-Cardial) derived. GAC being mostly derived from the former. 

Overall they were around 70% ANF, 30% WHG. Hence the drift with Basques. 

My contention is that while the steppe component of Balto-Slavs is indeed high. The higher drift these populations show with early corded samples may very well be inflated by this higher forager signal. Of which we know was a homogenised blend of mostly western but also eastern European foragers. The latter already making up at least half of the genome of proto Indo-Europeans the other half coming from from forager women of the Caucasus mountains that were present in the north Caucasus piedmont just south of where this admixture event took place. Possibly the initial mixing between the two as early as 5000BC. Two millennia before the formation of the corded ware horizon. I believe this EHG rich baltic forager admixture inflates the drift modern Eastern Europeans have with these earliest Indo-European speakers. Due to hunter gatherer populations living in relatively small numbers, higher genetic drift is observed. A similar phenomenon is observed in the Basque population. The mountainous region providing a refugium for these WHG survivors. Basques possess levels of WHG on par with Balts. 

To illustrate this drift. Look carefully. These samples came from roughly the same time period.

What happened here?

Oh so that’s what happened.
By subtracting CWC_Baltic from the Bronze Age Lithuanian I was able to create a ghost proxy for
baltic hunter gatherers that mixed with the corded ware agropastoralists. 

Ghosts are not as reliable as the real thing however so do not take these results too literally.

I have yet to see any convincing evidence outlining why this drift occurs with NE Europeans, but not with NW Europeans. The Global 25 is extremely sensitive to this drift and cannot simply be chalked up as noise or whatever some other copes I’ve seen online claim. The NE cluster does certainly harbour more EHG but not WSH. 

I can think of other examples other than just Balto-Slavs, such as Dagestani Avars and Tajiks. Neither of whom posses any amount of steppe ancestry higher than that of NW/NE European cluster. But ultimately they are closer than we are due to their zagrosian neolithic component being much closer to that of the CHG like signal found in Yamnaya related groups than that of our anatolian neolithic component which lacks the Ancient North Eurasian ancestry that CHG/Iran_N possesses.  

For the first model I included more or less every population from the northern half of Europe, for the first run I use Yamnaya for steppe, globular amphora for farmer, and the ghost Balt hunter subtracted from Baltic_LTU_BA. I also decided to include Scandinavian hunter gatherers from Norway, whose EHG rich base elevate the drift Scandinavians have with the main CWC cluster, though SHG played nowhere near as a significant a role in the ethnogenesis of Scandinavians as the BHG did with Balts and to a lesser extent Slavs. It is also plausible this SHG like component is actually just BHG that arrived later on into Scandinavia due to Viking raids in the Baltic. Sweden in particular being affected. 

I expect the upcoming SGC samples to be not too different from this.
Essentially the locus of a good chunk of European genetic intra variation.

I then decided to use other samples as a stand in for WSH and was able to obtain a slightly improved fit using Afanasievo herders who appear to be closer to proto-CWC than Yamanya. Irish again come out on top.

Rus_Ust_Ida_EBA represents east asian admixture from 
various Turkic and Uralic groups that affected mostly just Russia.

I went for one last run using the Poltavka volga-ural successor culture to yamnaya and again Irish come out once more on top of the rest of Europe in terms of Indo-European. I invite anyone capable of a more fine scale analyses to debunk my own using formal stats or otherwise. 

A Genomic Compendium of an Island

Y-haplogroup R1b and mental health

"Hurrrr but it's most common there so it must be from there
hurrddddurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr"

In light of recent publications over the past couple of months of studies featuring genotyped male individuals mostly of WSH origin bearing R1b-M269 markers from across Bronze Age Eurasia, it is time we ask ourselves why is it the same usual suspects continue to hold the now increasingly untenable position that the widespread haplogroup, in this case R1b-L51 did not spread with late eneolithic migrations out of the pontic steppe, despite spreading both west AND as it turns out east with kurgan bell beaker and afanasievo horizons respectively. 

In a post back in October of last year, I discussed the find of a male individual found buried within the context of a corded ware associated burial (there are those who dispute this but they are of course wrong) belonging to a paternal haplotype (R1b-L151) unusual amongst men of that culture (typically various subclades of R1a-M417).

He was of course not the first CWC man found belonging to this lineage (RISE 1) though he was the first to be of reasonably high coverage and with an identical autosomal profile to other corded samples. But of course, absolutely nothing to do with corded ware. 

At all.

Whatsoever.

Not only do they deny its western distribution had anything to do with kurgan related expansions, but some of the even more mentally unstable clowns amongst them deny any involvement of R1b-L51 with yamnaya like groups at all and that its phylogeny came about from local founder effects with traditions native to neolithic Western Europe and that the simultaneous spread of steppe ancestry across the region at the exact same time as this rapidly expanding lineage was merely coincidental, and that it only underwent this massive founder effect with the arrival of said steppe ancestry. But not because of it. (Yeah seriously)

Unfortunately for these individuals who frequent certain genomics blogs spreading this somewhat unlikely theory. The past couple of months has not been very kind to them with several new ancient DNA samples from Afanasievo and Corded ware sites in Mongolia and Poland respectively.

As you can see nothing to do with the steppe.
Yamnaya and Bell beakers were definitely not related.
It’s all a big coincidence they share a clade together.
It’s what the kurganists want you to believe.

With the recent release of the preprint entitled The Genomic Formation of Human Populations in East Asia and the surprising (albeit pleasantly surprising) discovery of a male individual of the Afansievo “Chermuchek” culture now confirmed to have belonged to the R1b-L52 Y-SNP found so far to the east in Mongolia of all places, the eneolithic steppe pre-Yamnaya origin of the up until now elusive haplotype ancestral to the lineages that swept across Western Europe with bell beaker migrations is now looking like a pretty done deal. The Palaeolithic continuity nonsense is dead and it needs to stay this way. A few dead end extinct subclades of R1b turning up in the occasional epigravettian or cardial sample isn’t going to save you. It’s not 2008 anymore.

No doubt a proto-Tocharian speaker living this close to the Altai will cause
conniptions amongst turanist LARPers.

And of course the bell beaker phenomenon is largely yet to be fully answered by mainstream academia with regards to its ultimate origins but with the recent publication of several more corded ware individuals in the recently published “Corded Ware cultural complexity uncovered using genomic and isotopic analysis from south-eastern Poland” from Łubcze, Mirocin and Święte confirmed to belong to derived R1b-L51 associated calls, it’s now looking to be pretty much a done deal at this point. Any denial of BBC spreading with single grave migrations across the north Central European would take a very special sort of mental gymnastics to pull off the logic on how it arrived in our part of Europe simultaneously with steppe atDNA. And if that wasn’t bad enough.

Another R1b-L151 confirmed sample then turned up in a late neolithic male individual labelled “Aesch 25” published in “Ancient genomes reveal social and genetic structure of late neolithic Switzerland”  buried in a dolmen in Switzerland. Unfortunately for the steppe naysayers he wasn’t a neolithic farmer, take a look at who and where he plots with below. 

The nail in the coffin.

A single grave pioneer in the flesh. Dating to roughly 2854-2501 BC. Just before the BBC expansions which swept across Western, and to a lesser extent Eastern Europe as well replacing the CWC which was driven further to the east across the middle Dnieper.

From Ireland to Poland a relatively uniform homogenous population spanned across Europe. 

And over the next several centuries, Eurasia.  

Pcw 160, polish CWC man deemed to be R1b-M269, Mirocin, Malopolska c.2459-2352 BC

A look at some new neolithic Irish genomes

Main passage tomb Listoghil, Carrowmore.

Samples were taken from 2km away in Primrose grange dolmens.
The individual buried here at Carrowmore 4 was deemed to be
the father of one of the Primrose males. 

With the recent publication of genotypes on the Reich lab’s Harvard website featured in last year’s paper on several neolithic samples from megalithic tombs across Northern Europe including several from Primrose and Carrowmore in County Sligo (you can read it here), I decided to take a look at some of them using the Global 25 tool courtesy of the eurogenes blog.

By far the best for modelling ancient populations.

Due to the lack of autosomal DNA samples from ancient sites in Ireland in the past few years, and with the Genomic Compendium of an Island embargoed for another two months. I decided to pass the time and boredom by playing around with a few of the Neolithic genomes featured in last year’s paper whose genotypes were only released quite recently. They’re not as high quality as the one shotgun sequenced ballynahatty sample from the 2015 Cassidy et al paper.

But beggars cannot be choosers I suppose.

In line with recent genetic findings the neolithization of Ireland was a demic event carried out predominantly by cardial agriculturalists spreading from the Aegean via a Mediterranean route eventually reaching the North Atlantic as opposed to the Danubian pioneer populations moving from a more direct Central European route. I wrote an article about which route Ireland was populated from last year concluding with the evidence it was the former and not the latter. The Danubian farmers were generally more devoid of WHG related ancestry as opposed to the cardial populations who assimilated the various Epigravettian and Magdalenian offshoot groups that lived across Southern Europe. The presence of mtDNA haplogroups in Irish neolithic samples that were common in cardial Iberian mitogenomes also provides further evidence (K1a,HV0,H1,T2)

Even more significantly all of the male samples belong to the same Y-DNA haplotype (I2a2a1a1) snowing evidence of patrilineality. The researchers came to the conclusion that these individuals all belonged to the same kindred that lived over the course of twelve generations, allowing thirty years per generation.

D-stats from Cassidy et al 2015 showing Irish neolithic samples sharing
 more drift with cardial related farmers

But how do we know Ireland was populated from the so called Atlantic facade for certain? How can we be sure this drift isn’t just some artefact from similar ratios of WHG admixture to cardial groups rather than actually coming from them? How do we know Ballynahatty’s population didn’t come from a Danubian route and assimilated some hunter gatherer bands along their way?

We know by taking a closer look at the HG component of the Neolithic Irish genomes, which seems to possess ancestry related to Magdalenian complex samples from Iberia rather than just plain old WHG from Central Europe. Magdalenian related ancestry provides a tracer dye for movement of Neolithic groups. They were the descendants of the first modern humans to reach Europe 40kya and sought refuge in Iberia during the LGM before eventually being assimilated by incoming WHG foragers towards the end of the Pleistocene. Both eventually being assimilated by anatolian farmers. 

Looking each of the six samples available to me this type of ancestry is self evident, for my model I will use early neolithic samples from Atapuerca (Iberia_N) and Stuttgart (DEU_LBK) respectively.

For their HG ancestry I will use the 19kya Magdalenian from El Miron.

Starting off with the most high resolution sample from dolmen 002,
the presence of Danubian farmer ancestry could be an artefact or
perhaps real authentic introgression from them did occur with
cardial groups in the Paris basin.

At least three of the Primrose grange samples can be feasibly modelled
sans any Danubian farmer ancestry and are completely Iberian derived
Iberia_N = 90% ANF + 10% WHG

Primrose 016 appears to be an outlier as he harbours roughly one third
of his genome from Danubian EEF, it is difficult to distinguish
such autosomally similar populations so I decided to make another
model just for him.

Despite the improved fit with samples from the Michelsburg culture in

the Paris basin he still requires the same proportion of Danubian
making him the purest Neolithic sample from this site.

Average of all six samples.

PCA revealing variation between Irish neolithic samples and contemporary populations from
across Europe at the time.
Primrose 12 appears to be equidistant between Sardinian and Basque clusters respectively.

A review of Irish DNA findings this past decade

As we move onto the new year we look back at the past decade which saw significant progress within the field of population genomics.

At the beginning of the decade the field was practically non existent. Stuck in the mire of old Palaeolithic continuity nonsense espoused by the likes of Stephen Oppenheimer and his colleague Brian Sykes. Similar sentiments existed in the archaeological community, and had done since WWII.

Without any ancient samples as a point of reference, these ‘experts’ based their theories near exclusively on uniparental markers, claiming that haplogroup R1b the dominant lineage of Western Europe was an old Palaeolithic lineage that spread in post-LGM migrations from the Franco Cantabrian refuge, due to it being most prevalent there, so it must’ve come from there.

Right?

Wrong. As it turns out basing one’s finding on just FOUR short tandem repeat Y-chromosomal markers doesn’t really tell you all that much about one’s own genome. Actually looking at the genome tells us more about the genome. There were plenty of burials to plunder for samples. There was just one problem. 

The cost. To sequence a single sample would cost tens of thousands of dollars and the finished product was always vulnerable to contamination, ala Mr.David Reich (pbuh) of Harvard university steps in and completely changes everything with his groundbreaking work. The revolutionary NGS (Next Gen Sequencing) illumina SNP array utilised in UDG (Uracil DNA Glycosylase) treated labs were able to sequence these ancient samples at relatively low cost (under $200 same price for most consumer kits) and to relatively high coverage depending on the quality. By 2013 the genomic revolution had already gone well underway, and it was discovered that Europeans form a genetic cline between three modal “ghost” populations. Geneticists were perplexed by this.

The only thing to do was dig up more samples from various sites across the continent. Since 2013 up until now close to two thousand samples have been sequenced with many more well on the way.

Eventually that year a team of archaeologists dug up the remains of a four year old child buried in the permafrost in a site located in central Siberia associated with the Mal’ta Buret culture. The child had been frozen for close to twenty four thousand years. Reich’s team managed to get their hands on a sample from the petrous bone where the DNA is best preserved and it was revealed this child belonged to a population (dubbed Ancient North Eurasians) that made up one of the particular “ghost” populations ancestral to modern Europeans, as well as to middle easterners and even more so in Native American populations. The boy’s paternal haplogroup was found out to be R* basal to the vast majority of paternal lineages found in European men today (R1a and R1b).

With regards to the autosomes, his DNA was found to be higher in present day Northern and Eastern Europeans (15-25%) and Southern Europeans (5-15%) to a lesser degree, and in Sardinians almost totally absent.

Why was this? Surely these Siberian ice age mammoth hunters had nothing to do with us? How did their DNA get all the way over here in Ireland, and for that matter why are nearly all Irishmen directly descended from them? This is when population genetics really starts to get intriguing. And somewhat also confusing.

Basal rich K7 graph revealing three fold ancient ancestry
in modern Europeans who form a cline closest to the
WHG-UHG/Villabruna related cluster.
The basal rich component refers to the eponymous “Basal Eurasian”
ghost signal, the as of yet to be physically discovered population
diverged from the main Eurasian clade 50-60kya their descendants
subsisting in the middle east somewhere before eventually mixing
with WHG like UHG (Unknown Hunter Gatherers) to form the nucleus of the
Dzuduana/Anatolian cluster, the basal Eurasian signal then eventually made
it’s way into Europe with farming 8,500kya.
As for the Basal Eurasians themselves we still do no know if they even existed,
perhaps this signal being an “artefact” of geneflow back and forth from
the Middle East and North Africa.
Irish are represented by the cross.

Obviously these ANE foragers had no presence in our part of Eurasia, so as always there had to have been a middle man which brought this type of ancestry to Europe. In 2015 a study headed by a team of Irish geneticists at trinity college sequenced four samples from the Neolithic and later Bronze Age. The neolithic woman from Ballynahatty was found to totally lack this ANE component and thus resembled present day Sardinians, whilst the three Bronze Age men that replaced her population scored a significant amount. Even more than modern Irish people as a matter of fact.

Where did these Bronze Age Irish inherit this from you ask? In steppes the Yamnaya culture. (See what I did there?)

Almost no continuity with neolithic Irish.

Strong continuity with Bronze Age Irish.

Amongst the vast majority of archeologists and geneticists. The Yamnaya (Pit-Grave in Russian) herders of southern Russia are the best candidate for spreading Proto-Indo-European dialects into Europe and subsequently after mixing with local farmer populations, bringing proto-Indo-Aryan dialects to central and Southern Asia too, along with their genes. They lived in a predominantly pastoral economy though they occasionally cultivated grains to bolster their food supply. They were a brutal and aggressive people whom championed violence above all things as evidenced by their remains frequently showing signs of blunt force trauma from cudgel like weapons. They buried their dead individually in burial mounds known as “kurgans” and judging from the lack of females found they were likely a patriarchal society, as all subsequent Indo-European cultures were. This is also further evidenced in phylogenetic findings showing these men to belong to the same terminal Y-SNP, implying patrilineality similar to the clan systems of Gaelic Ireland which placed a strong emphasis on a common male ancestor. As it turns out 84% Irishmen also share a common male ancestor with the yamnaya men going back some six millennia ago to somewhere in the pontic steppe region. 

These late PIE populations were themselves roughly 40-50% ANE, and formed a cline between Eastern European hunter gatherers (70% ANE+ 25% WHG+ 5% CHG) and Caucasus hunter gatherers (50% ANE + 50% Dzuaduana like population). Predominantly made up of the former rather than the latter. Men from EHG tribes interbred with women from CHG tribes and resulting meta population expanded into the Don-Kuban region assimilating the EHG rich forager groups there. The ethnogenesis of yamnaya related populations likely occurred like this. 

PCA revealing averages of Yamnaya samples from eastern
Ukraine and southern Russia forming a cline in between
EHG and CHG clusters, notice that the yamnaya samples
are shifted somewhat “southward” due to harbouring
some EEF ancestry from local neighbouring Triploye
agriculturalists.

I, for one, welcome our new steppe overlords.

The first academic to hypothesise these people for being responsible for spreading Indo-European language was ironically feminist Lithuanian scholar Marija Gimbutas, who contrasted them with the opposing “old European” populations of neolithic Europe whom lived in sedentary and agricultural societies counter to the more on the go Yamnaya.

She saw the neolithic farming populations as pacifistic, gynocentric and egalitarian, more sophisticated than the vicious steppe warlords to the east. Despite some evidence to the contrary. 

Even more ironic being that Lithuanians like her are one of the closest modern populations to the yamnayans. Perhaps explaining why they speak one of the most archaic Indo-European languages? 

No wonder Khabib defeated McGregor!

In a massive multidisciplinary study headed by lead geneticist Wolfgang Haak in 2015 entitled “Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe” (you can read it here) the authors concluded that a majority of Northern/Eastern European DNA derived from these herders, along with Indo-European speech as evidenced by the presence of farmer enriched steppe admixture in Indo-Aryan speakers. The kurgan model of Gimbutas had been vindicated. 

In 2018 a study headed by Iñigo Olalde discovered the middle man for this steppe ancestry found in present day northwest Europeans were bell beaker cultures of Central Europe.

By 2400BC there was at least 90% turnover from local megalithic builders who left little to no introgression into the modern Irish genome. 

My models more or less falling in line
with señor Olade’s findings. 

We have learned a lot in the previous decade of population genomics research and we hope to discover even more about ourselves in this one. 

With the thesis of Lara Cassidy’s “A Genomic Compendium of an Island:Documenting continuity and change across Irish human prehistory” under embargo until May of this year, we will not have to wait long until we get our filthy hands on close to one HUNDRED samples from the mesolithic right up into the medieval period. 

With this publication of so many samples my work on Ireland’s various genomic transitions will be more or less complete. 

Previously Irish scholars maintained that we are Atlantean, when in reality we are Hyperborean. And always have been, whether or not we remain so remains to be seen.