ISBA 2018 abstracts

The ISBA 2018 conference is in a couple of weeks and the abstract book is now available here. Below are a few examples of what’s on offer this year. Admittedly, the Scythian abstract looks a bit weird to me, because we know for a fact that the Scythians who lived in the Pontic-Caspian steppe harbored Siberian genome-wide and maternal admixture (see here and here). The abstract about the horses and mules looks like it’s from the major horse paper that I blogged about a few days ago (see here).

Genetic continuity in the western Eurasian Steppe broken not due to Scythian dominance, but rather at the transition to the Chernyakhov culture (Ostrogoths)
Jarve et al.
The long-held archaeological view sees the Early Iron Age nomadic Scythians expanding west from their Altai region homeland across the Eurasian Steppe until they reached the Ponto-Caspian region north of the Black and Caspian Seas by around 2,900 BP. However, the migration theory has not found support from ancient DNA evidence, and it is still unclear how much of the Scythian dominance in the Eurasian Steppe was due to movements of people and how much reflected cultural diffusion and elite dominance. We present new whole-genome results of 31 ancient Western and Eastern Scythians as well as samples pre- and postdating them that allow us to set the Scythians in a temporal context by comparing the Western Scythians to samples before and after within the Ponto-Caspian region. We detect no significant contribution of the Scythians to the Early Iron Age Ponto-Caspian gene pool, inferring instead a genetic continuity in the western Eurasian Steppe that persisted from at least 4,800–4,400 cal BP to 2,700–2,100 cal BP (based on our radiocarbon dated samples), i.e. from the Yamnaya through the Scythian period.
However, the transition from the Scythian to the Chernyakhov culture between 2,100 and 1,700 cal BP does mark a shift in the Ponto-Caspian genetic landscape, with various analyses showing that Chernyakhov culture samples share more drift and derived alleles with Bronze/Iron Age and modern Europeans, while the Scythians position outside modern European variation. Our results agree well with the Ostrogothic origins of the Chernyakhov culture and support the hypothesis that the Scythian dominance was cultural rather than achieved through population replacement.
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Unveiling early horse domestication and mule production with ancient genome-scale data
Fages et al.
Despite being one of the last large herbivores to be domesticated, the horse has deeply transformed human civilizations. It provided not only important primary domestication products including both meat and milk, but also invaluable secondary products, such as fast transportation, which impacted patterns of human movements and facilitated the spread of vast cultural and political units across the Old World. The steps underpinning early horse domestication are, however, difficult to track in the archaeological record, especially due to (1) the relative scarcity of horse bone assemblages until the Neolithic and Bronze Age transition, and (2) the absence of clear patterns of size differentiation prior to the Iron Age. Some of the more recent steps accompanying horse domestication, and in particular how it was transformed to fit a range of utilizations in different human groups, are also poorly documented. One such step pertains to the development of mules, and other kinds of F1-hybrids, which are difficult to identify on fragmentary remains using morphology alone. Within the course of the ERC PEGASUS project, we have generated genome-scale sequence information from hundreds of equine archaeological remains spread across Eurasia and spanning the last ~40,000 years. These data helped us test the extent to which candidate domestication centres in Central Asia and Europe contributed to the genetic makeup of the modern domestic horse and propose a minimal time boundary for the earliest utilization of mules by mankind.
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The genetic history of the Iberian Peninsula over the last 8000 years
Olalde et al.
The Iberian Peninsula, lying on the southwestern corner of Europe, provides an excellent opportunity to assess the final impact of population movements entering the continent from the east and to study prehistoric and historic connections with North Africa. Previous studies have addressed the population history of Iberia using ancient genomes, but the final steps leading to the formation of the modern Iberian gene pool during the last 4000 years remain largely unexplored. Here we report genome-wide data from 153 ancient individuals from Iberia, more than doubling the number of available genomes from this region and providing the most comprehensive genetic transect of any region in the world during the last 8000 years. We find that Mesolithic hunter-gatherers dated to the last centuries before the arrival of farmers showed an increased genetic affinity to central European hunter-gatherers, as compared to earlier individuals. During the third millennium BCE, Iberia received newcomers from south and north. The presence of one individual with a North African origin in central Iberia demonstrates early sporadic contacts across the strait of Gibraltar. Beginning ~2500 BCE, the arrival of individuals with steppe-related ancestry had a rapid and widespread genetic impact, with Bronze Age populations deriving ~40% of their autosomal ancestry and 100% of their Y-chromosomes from these migrants. During the later Iron Age, the first genome-wide data from ancient non-Indo-European speakers showed that they were similar to contemporaneous Indo-European speakers and derived most of their ancestry from the earlier Bronze Age substratum. With the exception of Basques, who remain broadly similar to Iron Age populations, during the last 2500 years Iberian populations were affected by additional gene-flow from the Central/Eastern Mediterranean region, probably associated to the Roman conquest, and from North Africa during the Moorish conquest but also in earlier periods, probably related to the Phoenician-Punic colonization of Southern Iberia.

See also…
How relevant is Arslantepe to the PIE homeland debate?

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