The waiting game

By all accounts we’ll soon be inundated with a smörgåsbord of new ancient samples. But let’s be honest, this wait is a major pain in the proverbial. If nothing happens before the middle of next month, someone here should check out the talk below by Daniel Bradley at the upcoming Plant and Animal Genome (PAG XXV) conference in San Diego. It seems like Bradley et al. from Trinity College, Dublin, have sequenced a whole bunch of ancient (Neolithic + Bronze Age?) genomes from Eastern Europe, and they’ll be using them to look at the Indo-European homeland question. From my past reading, I’d say the Dublin team members have a habit of overplaying somewhat the role of Caucasus Hunter-Gatherers (CHG) in the population history of Europe and South Asia, probably because they were the first to sequence CHG genomes, which is understandable. But I hope they don’t fall into the trap of proclaiming CHG as the Indo-European genetic component without very solid evidence.

Abstract: Large longitudinal surveys of genomic diversity have uncovered two significant shifts in ancestry components in European samples. The first of these coincided with the onset of Neolithic culture and the second occurred in the third Millennium BC around the transition from the Late Neolithic to the Bronze Age. The scale of these changes imply massive population movements which may have coincided with the spread of new languages. However, whether genome change was universally associated with these cultural horizons is not yet known. This talk will present ancient genome data from southwest and eastern Europe, will contrast their patterns of longitudinal change and speculate about language origins.

Bradley, Daniel G., Ancient Human Genomes, Transitions, Farmers and Language at the Edge of Europe, PAG XXV talk, Number W258, San Diego, January 15, 2:42 PM. Source Eurogenes Blog