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Has Dienekes Pontikos found the signature of the Indo-Europeans?

I don’t know the answer to the question posted in title above, and I’m moderately skeptical that he has. But I wanted to give him full credit in the public record if researchers confirm his findings in the next few years. You can read the full post at his weblog, but basically he found that a West Asian modal element in a north British (Orkney) and Lithuanian individual seems to be negatively correlated with a Northwest European modal element and positively correlated with Near Eastern and South Asian components on a genomic level across different models in ADMIXTURE (e.g., does “South Asian” at K = 5 tend to match “West Asian” at K = 8).

Two major concerns:


– I don’t have a good intuition for this method. Could this be an artifact of the algorithm?

When you have a hypothesis in mind you can unconsciously seek out confirmatory points. As you can see in the comments below Dienekes and his interlocutors have given this issue much thought. Frankly, I found it difficult to follow a lot of the dialogue, and I follow this topic more than most.

It seems that at this point someone should do follow up analyses with other populations, assuming that the method is informative.

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