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