More Old Bones.

September 22, 2024 by 5 Comments

At the request of Yamnaya fans, herewith a new catchall everything-paleogenetic thread! Have at it, DNA lovers…

Comments

  1. Y says
    September 22, 2024 at 10:05 pm

    All right then. From (the formidable) Guillaume Jacques and Chris Stevens, “Linguistic, archaeological and genetic evidence suggests multiple agriculture-driven migrations of Sino-Tibetan speakers from Northern China to the Indian subcontinent”, in Quaternary International, here (Open Access). VL, but WR.

  2. Dmitry Pruss says
    September 22, 2024 at 10:07 pm

    OK, just not to leave it uncommented – here is a paper we didn’t discuss at LH:
    10 thousand years of genetic continuity in old South Africa.
    https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-024-02532-3
    The Khoe-San peoples today differ from their ancestors before the Iron Age migrations from the East, but it’s easy to see that they local ancestral DNA isn’t the same across the regions. There are significant differences in the old local DNA between the Northern, Central, and Southern Khoe-San.
    The new paper adds ancient DNAs from the Southern region, as old as 10,000 years, and, much to everyone’s surprise, it’s very much the same as the Southern Khoe-San “local DNA component” today! Not much North-South or even Center-South population mixing.
    In contrast, DNA from outside of the region start appearing in more recent centuries, first from Iron Age East African peoples ~1200 years ago, and then from the originally West African Bantu peoples ~800 years ago, with additional waves. And after the colonization, more DNA from even more far-flug regions, of course.

  3. David Marjanović says
    September 23, 2024 at 5:39 pm

    From the previous thread:

    And the substrate hunters can work out how the defining soundlaws of Common Turkic are due to a Scythian substrate.

    …Now that I think of it, I certainly expect /ʃ/ and /z/ from an Iranian language… together with absence of /ɬ/ and /rʲ/ or whatever it was… but the same holds for Samoyedic for example.

    AFAIK basically that MCh phonetics are sufficiently well attested (from rhyme books and the like) that the reconstruction (modulo transliteration standard, I guess) is considered to be firm enough to not require an asterisk.

    The MCh transcription simply uses a letter (or two or three) to represent each of the onsets, “nuclei”, medials and finals described in the contemporary rhyme books/tables and dictionaries (where the pronunciation of each character was given with two characters, of which one shared the onset and the other the rhyme). OCh, in contrast, is reconstructed (in part by the comparative method from MCh and the reconstructed Proto-Min, in part from the phonetic parts of the characters, the rhymes, various loans and so on).

  4. David Marjanović says
    September 23, 2024 at 8:50 pm

    but the same holds for Samoyedic

    Definitely no /z/ in Samoyedic…

  5. Hippophlebotomist says
    September 24, 2024 at 8:44 pm

    The DNA samples for the upcoming Ghalichi et al paper “The rise and transformation of Bronze Age pastoralists in the Caucasus”, have been released on the European Nucleotide Archive. Hopefully the publication itself is soon to follow. The amateur genetics community has had a lot of fun playing with these already. https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/browser/view/PRJEB73987

    The work was previewed by Sabine Reinhold at the Budapest conference, which was also where the two upcoming papers led by the Harvard team (the Genetic Origins of the Indo-Europeans & A genomic history of the North Pontic Region from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age). Her talk is available here:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UC5_h_qIDaU

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