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.