In the comments below there was a mention of the fact that East Eurasians are less genetically varied than people to their west. The main reason for this is probably the serial bottleneck of modern people as they left Africa/Near East ~50,000 years ago. Similarly, people of the New World and Oceania are also less genetically diverse, because they’re at the “end of the line.”
But, that doesn’t mean that East Asian populations were particularly small after the founding compared to West Eurasians. It’s simply that genetic diversity over the long term is sensitive to bottlenecks, rather than rolling census counts (long term effective population is a harmonic mean).
With that taken care of, I think we need to be open to the possibility that the peculiar patterns of population expansion in East Asia could be a function of its Pleistocene paleoecology. From what I know in biogeography temperate China is more speciose in trees than temperate Europe. The reason offered is that China had more “ecological depth” due to its geographic configure. During the “Last Glacial Maximum” areas of Europe suitable for forests retreated and disappeared as the Mediterranean blocked further progress. In contrast, China expands in a continuous zone far to the south and east.
European hunter-gatherers have noticeably low genetic diversity and repeated population turnovers. The Mesolithic peoples of Europe were themselves the product of a late Pleistocene expansion, and quite genetically homogeneous (these groups “break” the iron correlation between distance from Africa and homozygosity). It seems plausible that European Pleistocene populations drew from a much shallower demographic reservoir than East Asian ones. This, to me, may explain why population turnover and lineage expansions were a more common feature of the West Eurasian landscape than in East Asia, where the local hunter-gather cultures came through the Ice Age with more robustness and deeper roots.
Well, at least part of the reason. I doubt it explains everything…
Note: You may wonder why I posted a photo of David Epstein’s Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. I’m to a great extent generalist. I know enough pop-gen to have an intuition about effective populations and genetic diversity, as well as enough human genomics background and experience to know the empirical distributions. When I was eight I spent a fair amount of time reading about climate science, and so know the Koppen system to this day and the differences between temperate Europe and East Asia (maritime vs continental as well as huge latitudinal difference and why). Finally, at some point in college, I was interested in biogeography and read a paper that explained why species richness varies across the two temperate (non-boreal) zones of Eurasia.
And that’s how this post came about.
That might explain pre-neolithic differences, but the trend continues later than that. I think it’s mostly a matter of isolation. It’s quite easy for population reservoirs in the Middle East to spill over into Europe, and the Indo-Europeans had no problems reaching it from the Pontic steppe.
But in the pre-neolithic, China was isolated from western hunter-gatherer reservoirs by mountains and deserts, and there would probably have been a soft gradient of population density from north-south throughout China and SE Asia (less sure on this one, but there was no glaciation to thin out the north, and the climate shifts from tropical to temperate gradually). Not a conducive situation for big sweeping waves of population replacement by small founding populations.
In the neolithic, China is still isolated, this time from any other cradles of agriculture. Before any distant demographic wave could have reached China, it had a dense agricultural population of its own.
In the Bronze Age, pastoral nomadism had yet to reach the steppe east of the Altai, so the old barriers to the west spared China from the great R1a/R1b deluge.
And this also follows the general themes of later history. Europe and the Middle East and Central Eurasia blend into each other, South Asia is moderately connected to West/Central Eurasia, and China is off in its own geopolitical world, except for incursions from its north.
Like I said about the Chinese ethnicity and Sino-Tibetan language group, or the Mongoloid core group as such, it is absolutely clear we deal with extreme cold adaptation.
And the reason for this seems to have been that a Proto-Mongoloid group was cut of from other populations and habitats during periods of extreme cold and adapted to the conditions because they couldn’t evade them. A lot of other populations died out or evaded the extreme conditions, they did not, they stayed and adapted successfully.
This is evident from a variety of traits, which wouldn’t have evolved, spread or being reduced respectively, without a prolonged period of cold climate adaptation. Its impossible to explain otherwise.
Now this traits are now very widely distributed, far beyond the original habitat of the Mongoloid core type and this can only mean that there were massive expansions from this core zone of survival during the LGM. But not necessarily 100 percent replacement, but rather a population standard which spread even in mixed populations, because some traits were favoured (social and sexual selection outside of the core zone?).
But the main factor was population replacement and we can this for China and South East Asia even for prehistoric and historical times. The main languages now spoken in Southern China and South Eastern Asia all seem to have had their origin in Northern and Central China. There is very little ethnocultural continuity at all the whole of East and South East Asia!
This means we have to events: First the emergence of the Mongoloid core type, finalised during the LGM. Than subsequent mixture in China of this core type with Southern migrants, producing the typical populations of the Yellow River (old Chinese) and the Yangtse (related people). From these two rivers they expanded Southwards and making the region more homogenous than it was before. Because it is absolutely clear that e.g. Sino-Tibetan and Tai-Kadai come from the North for sure and the same can be said about Austronesian and Austro-Asiatic with high probability.
So before the LGM and before these East Asian expansions, I’d assume completely different populations lived in many regions which now seem to be fairly homogeneous. The Ainu and Negritos are just hints, but there was much more. We know this from the physical remains already, of which some were not even remotely Mongoloid but rather Austro-Melanesian even.
But other populations didn’t survive in the East Asia context, there was just one winner (Mongoloid core type) which did well and replaced the surviving remnants of other groups and additional influx came only from one direction (Southern China/South East Asis) of at that time probably already related people.
Conversely the zones of Europe with a similar habitat during the LGM were not continiously populated at all. People moved in and out and those in a similarly extreme position just died out or were after the LGM no demographic match for the neighbours. Which means there was a lower selective pressure for cold adaptation and the re-colonisation happened from the strongest neighbours initially. The original hunter gatherer homogeneity is just the result of such a re-population event from a fairly small and homogeneous neighbouring group.
Europe became more diverse when different populations moved into the continent from different directions, different refuge areas, in later stages.
China had therefore the peculiar situation of having an isolated position and fairly extreme habitat during the LGM with a very limited number of access points. The modern population has a great deal of continuity to the LGM inhabitants which even spread far beyond their original homelands. So the story of East Asia and South East Asia is the opposite of Europe, where the LGM populations of the continent survived only in low numbers and were largely replaced afterwards. In East Asia the survivors of the LGM could defend highly important and favourable habitats (Yellow and Yangtse River), even develop and adopt civilisational and technological innovations and standards, partly introduced from the West, but with limited gene flow, and use their advantages to replace people in the South.
I have heard a lot about the east Asian cold adaptation theory however based on recent genetic evidence, the far north was inhabited in 3 phases: First by ANS/ANE, then by Paleo-Siberians who were ANE + a certain east Eurasian population which was similar to east Asians and finally by Neo-Siberians (modern east Asians).
We all know about the ANS-ANE. So I will skip that part.
The PaeloSiberians/Ancient PaleoSiberians would represent the ancestors of native Americans, Eskimos and some isolated Siberian populations like the Kets. I think that there would be some connection between yDNA Q and these guys. The ANE Q carriers mixed with the first of the new east Eurasian wave to make PaleoSiberians. This first wave of east Eurasians migrated to northern Eurasia sometime after the LGM/the worst part of the ice age and mixed with the ANE, and ANE would have basically been the most cold adapted homo sapiens sapiens population ever.
Then during the Holocene/after the ice age ended, there was a new wave of east Asian migration into northern Eurasia which would have mixed with the existing PaleoSiberian population to result in the NeoSiberians. Out of ANE, PaleoSiberians and NeoSiberians, the NeoSiberians would be most similar to modern east/northeast Asians.
Notice how the east Asian waves appear in northern Eurasia after the LGM while the wave which most contributes to modern Siberians comes during the Holocene once the ice age is over. This means that native Americans would be much more cold adapted than east Asians due to their massive ANE ancestry.
If this isn’t true and if east Asians are just as cold adapted as native Americans, then the only other place where they could have adapted to the cold during the ice age outside of north Eurasia is around ice age Tibet which had north Eurasia-like climate conditions during the LGM.
As a final point I have also heard about some claims of brachycephaly being associated with cold adaptation, and while this may be one of the ways of adapting to the cold, it isn’t the only one. EHGs, who were mainly ANE, were dolichocephalic, and today the most cold adapted living population (the north American eskimos) are dolichocephalic as well. On the other hand, negrito populations that live near the equator tend to be brachycephalic.
@DaThang: I explained my view on the issue in this posts:
https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2019/11/17/open-thread-11-17-2019/#comment-15419
https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2019/11/17/open-thread-11-17-2019/#comment-15423
https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2019/11/17/open-thread-11-17-2019/#comment-15433
The Proto-Caucasoid ANE population had a much wider territory, the whole Western steppe-tundra, which was isolated by uninhabitable deserts from the Eastern habitable regions. They could evade the most extreme weather conditions and were specialised big game hunters, which might have given them high energy food and general resources.
The Proto-Mongoloid Eastern sphere was much more fragmented and isolated in comparison and it seems that, although we don’t know the exact place, the Mongoloid core type evolved in a pocked in which the people couldn’t evade the extreme conditions.
“Notice how the east Asian waves appear in northern Eurasia after the LGM while the wave which most contributes to modern Siberians comes during the Holocene once the ice age is over.”
That’s easy to explain by the isolation between the Western and Eastern steppe-tundra inhabitants due to the uninhabitable desert regions in between. But this says zero about who was more cold adapted, especially biologically. Compare with this map:
https://canadianmuseumofnature.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/map.jpg
The American Indians descent from a mixture of Proto-Mongoloid with Proto-Caucasoid (ANE), that’s clearly visible in their physique too.
Dolichocephaly and brachycephaly have little to nothing to do with cold or heat adaptation. One factor might have been dentition, size and strengths of the teeth and mastication muscles among others, at least if dealing with similar sized and proportioned specimen.
But there is still a lot to investigate on the issue.
@Obs
The only other place for cold adaptation in east Asia is Tibet. Regarding dentition, what exactly are you looking for?
As far as east Asian geography is concerned, the populations could have easily retreated to the dry steppe and forest steppe regions of southern China during the LGM to avoid the glaciers.
The Proto-Caucasoid ANE population had a much wider territory, the whole Western steppe-tundra, which was isolated by uninhabitable deserts from the Eastern habitable regions. They could evade the most extreme weather conditions and were specialised big game hunters, which might have given them high energy food and general resources.
The Proto-Mongoloid Eastern sphere was much more fragmented and isolated in comparison and it seems that, although we don’t know the exact place, the Mongoloid core type evolved in a pocked in which the people couldn’t evade the extreme conditions.
these ‘proto’ terms make no sense in light of the complexity and details of real phylogeny. leaves your comments more obstruse and unintelligible than they would be otherwise.
@DaThang: Its not necessarily about glaciers, they had to retreat from those anyway. But they must have landed in a fairly isolated pocket with extreme cold for a prolonged period of time.
Because some combinations of traits and their rapid emergence and spread is not explainable otherwise.
They don’t come up that fast or in many different places independently, thats not possible or at least very unlikely.
But the expansion from the core zone seems to have started much before the Neolithic age.
When the Neolithic innovations spread in the region, there were already different physical and linguistic groups which all came from the same Mongoloid core type primarily.
Just consider the intensity of the necessary selection and the proven fact that variation was much wider before the LGM.
We just don’t have the smoking gun yet, the genealogy in detail. Ancient DNA might deliver it and in the end all ethnolinguistic groups in East and South East Asia I mentioned will be proven to come from the North. And that there was one wave after another coming from this core region. The biggest split was between the Northern steppe people, which stayed foragers for much longer and became pastoralists later, some of which moved to America mixed with ANE (others earlier with less Mongoloid features), and the Yellow and Yangtse river people which adopted farming early on. By yDNA the split is obvious too (the Southern group is dominated by O).
Playing off something Matt alluded to in the previous thread, but it always struck me as somewhat incongruous that East Eurasians could be both A.) Less autosomally diverse than West Eurasians and B.) Have such a staggering array of basal uniparental branches (mostly in mtDNA) relative to WEs. I mean there’s like 50+ basal branches of M alone, all of them solidy EE except for the African M1, and EEs likewise “own” more branches of N and R than do WEs. If the serial bottlenecking post-OoA can account for greater automosal homozygosity in EEs, how is it possible they still have so much more basal mtDNA variation? Shouldn’t serial-bottlenecking have caused a concomitant pruning in uniparentals as well?
The main reason is that when the Mongoloid core expanded, they assimilated older layers on the way which were from different human groups.
That’s why the Mongoloid traits get weaker if one moves South, unless there was massive replacement with little assimilation taking place. That happened too with some ethnicities being clearly Northern derived and others mixed or even local survivors.
If some studies argued that higher diversity in mtDNA and autosomal would be a proof for a strict South to North expansion, its like a joke.
In reality the successful core group first populated the North, outcompeting other, genetically related but different groups and then this fairly homogeneous people moved South and mixed on the way. Genetic diversity in modern humans is, as a rule, the result of admixture events. Old diversity, deeply rooted and preserved for ages is rather exceptional everywhere.
@DaThang: If this isn’t true and if east Asians are just as cold adapted as native Americans, then the only other place where they could have adapted to the cold during the ice age outside of north Eurasia is around ice age Tibet which had north Eurasia-like climate conditions during the LGM.
Though the problem with that is the evidence that suggests that Tibet was inhabited by very different people during the LGM, who have contributed only to present day Tibetan / Sherpa populations (High Altitude Adapted) and probably derived advantageous variants from a pre-Out of Africa population, and this contribution happened after the expansion from a northern China Sino-Tibetan homeland about 6-8kya which was probably associated with farming.
I think your summary of the more general evidence on this topic is pretty consistent with what I know. Agree that the patterns re; bracycephaly seem more complex than a linear pattern of populations that have likely adapted for longer in cooler climates being more brachycephalic. In addition to the patterns you mention, I believe MSEA tends to be slightly more brachycranial than the China-Korean-Japan region.
Some other cold-adapted features of shared East Asian anthropometry also seem a bit questionable. Relatively short limbs tend to be proposed as a feature of cold-adaptation as per Allen’s rule. But we find in Ruff’s big dataset of ancient European skeletal data that Early Neolithic farmers and Mesolithic Europeans both had about the same relative leg lengths, which were both short for height and this probably mainly related to stunting. (Contra the expectation that EN people whose ancestors evolving in Anatolia should have had longer legs relative to height). I’m also not sure if this is actually a true feature in Han Chinese, Korean, etc anyway. (Again with Allen’s rule, another pattern where cold-adapted populations would be expected to have a relatively broad torso doesn’t seem find East Asian populations with proportionately broader torsos relative to Europeans).
It doesn’t seem doubtful that Siberian populations, Tibetan populations and Andean populations are the most cold climate adapted populations *today*. I think this probably is a phenomenon of their ancestors (who were probably mostly previously in temperate continental climates) moving into in very cold, dry climates since the end of the LGM, (which is no short time for adaptation and by itself in the range of a good 10-20% of the time our species has been Out Of Africa), often helped by introgression from previous populations, not a deep shared adaptation to the ancestors shared by all “Mongoloid” populations evolving in a very cold climate they were in for 20k or something (and which they’ve retained and others have lost).
@Matt: The full cold adaptation is clearly present in Northern steppe and Sibirian Mongoloid while some typical cold adapted forager traits being somewhat diluted and reduced in the river people already.
They are still clearly present and led to a long list of traits, but since LGM there was mixture and New selective trends as well.
Its not like the Chinese are unchanged cold adapted core Mongoloids. That’s why I used Proto-Mongoloid (before the full package for cold adaptation was present), core Mongoloid (all traits present, which spread from this root) and (modern) Mongoloid due to mixture and new regional adaptive strategies of the core types descendents.
Obviously the Balinese, to be concrete, show direct influence from the core type but are quite different nevertheless and are not adapted for East Asian LGM conditions like Mongols are.
I saw by myself how the classic core type looks with a large head, big, strong torso and relatively short legs. Impressive is the overall size too, not small at all. In Europe those fitting best I saw were most of the time Mongols and related people, almost never Chinese. Mongols were Northern foragers not that long ago, CJK are mixed and have now thousands of years of facing new challenges.
For the CJK people its more like a heritage which was either useful or at least no burden and became transformed if it was. But like I said, a long list of traits was transmitted from the core group and can be best explained by cold adaptation. Europeans changed since the LGM too, not just because of mixture, but recent evolution as well.
With ancient DNA coming in, the full scale of the North -> South expansion since the LGM will become evident. For both South and South East Asia the steppe was a constant push factor, even before the Indo-Europeans.
@Obs
In all of this, is there any direct skeletal and genetic proof of proto-Mongoloids existing in these Siberian regions since the LGM? Based on my knowledge of direct evidence ANE was the only population known to have lived in Siberia through the worst part of the ice age. The Siberian tundra to polar-alpine desert region where their Mal’ta Buret’ site was found was very cold (-30 Celsius vs -40 Celsius based on this https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/97/Lgm_ccsm4_temperature_january.png) while modern day Irkutsk is -17.8 C on average in January for some comparison. On the other hand, I do not know of any direct evidence proving that neosiberian/proto-Mongoloid/Devil’s Gate Cave population lived in -30 C Siberia as far back as 20,000 years ago. What if they just lived around what is now the yellow river region which during the LGM was as cold as Irkutsk is today? That could be an alternate explanation. Any reason as to why they couldn’t have lived in ~-20 C northern China instead of -30 C Siberia or -40 C northern Siberia? However, I do realize that the current genetic picture is incomplete so I will change my mind once new evidence is presented but for now I only see speculations here of how long it might have taken to adapt.
As a note, it would be better to refer to the east Asian population in question as Devil’s Gate Cave type instead of proto-mongoloid since the latter seems to be too broad of a classification. This would also go with your claim that Mongols are a better representation than Chinese because Mongolic people have a much higher amount of DGC type ancestry than the Han do, meanwhile Han have plenty of Ami type ancestry. Overall; Mongolic, northern Turkic and Tungusic type people have the highest amount of DGC ancestry.
>With ancient DNA coming in, the full scale of the North -> South expansion since the LGM will become evident.
If this is based on anticipated evidence then I am willing to put the conversation off until the evidence comes in. In conclusion, the east Asian LGM cold adaptation (sans ANE input) theory hinges on the presence of a DGC type of population being present in Siberia since the LGM. Alternatively they could have just adapted in -20 C northern China if we are purely speaking of this in speculations.
“Any reason as to why they couldn’t have lived in ~-20 C northern China instead of -30 C Siberia or -40 C northern Siberia?”
No, they could have lived more Southern too. People can survive extreme cold without physical adaptation too, they just need better means and circumstances than with the adaptations. Why the pressure for extreme cold adaptation was so high there is not for sure, but the most common explanation is a sort of geographical trap for a time, from which no retreat was possible or feasible. The evidence is inconclusive in some respects. But the result is a clear cut thing.
As for Northern vs Southern Mongoloid in the core zone, there might have been for the most time different variants and regional types early on, but they must have been interconnected at least as a metapopulation and they must all have lived in a cold habitat for a longer period of time, so that the new traits could spread from the original core when they were still foragers.
From a certain point they had general advantages even beyond their original habitat. That too before the Neolithic.
As for ANE, they were following big game and evaded the most extreme places. They were not like Inuits at all, even if they were living under fairly extreme conditions for sure.
“because Mongolic people have a much higher amount of DGC type ancestry than the Han do, meanwhile Han have plenty of Ami type ancestry.”
Not that the Ami are really outside of what I meant. They are just an earlier wave from the North, probably with Premongoloid admixture.
The core group of the Ainu is not of the same root and the Negritos to name Dome examples.
Austronesians are just an earlier and more mixed expansion wave and branch, but for sure from the same root as Sino-Tibetans and Tai-Kadai people originally.
DGC is late and remote btw. After many splits from the root.
@Obs
I only know of one ANE site and that was from southern Siberia. Any direct proof of ANE related big game hunting populations being present outside of southern Siberia, specifically in mild conditions? Based on what I know, the mammoth occupation would have been quite diverse https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/82/Woolly_Mammoth_Climatic_Suitability_-_Nogu%C3%A9s-Bravo_2008.png/1280px-Woolly_Mammoth_Climatic_Suitability_-_Nogu%C3%A9s-Bravo_2008.png (plucked it from here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammoth_steppe#Biota).
As you can see there is a small spot far up north in the coldest region -40 C, but there is no sign of ANE presence there 21,000 years ago so I will ignore it. A big chunk of the rest of the range is in the -30 C to the -20 C region. However a big chunk of that -20 C region is in northern China where there is no report of ANE presence (yet) and so I will ignore that as well. Lastly there is a large strip leading to eastern Europe, but just as in other cases, there is no indication (yet) of ANE presence in eastern Europe as far back as 21000 BP. A subset of the remaining range intersects with the MA site in a place which had a -30 C temperature during the January period. There are other potential places where ANE might have lived like the milder northern China and eastern Europe or the more extreme northeast Russia, however I currently know of no evidence of ANE habitation in these places, so that only leaves us with the -30 C region. If you have evidence of ANE living in milder places than Malta Buret then do share the info. This means that based on both speculatory herd presence and definitive archaeological evidence, ANE ere living at least in a single -30 C region with no direct evidence of them (ANE specifically) living in a milder or a more extreme place than that. You could argue that they might have also lived in milder northern China due to herd presence there, but then by the same logic they could also also at the same time been following herds into -40 C northern Siberia.
Sure, they most likely didn’t live in the most extreme -40 C place but the region where they did inhabit was in the second coldest zone in LGM Eurasia, and they were living there for quite a long time as the ANS (ancient north Siberian) discoveries prove.
IDK if they have any connections with the Inuit, someone with f4 could check it if they wanted to and then use qpAdm to find the amount of ANE in the Inuit. As far as I know, most Inuit are yDNA Q so they might have substantial ANE ancestry. I remember reading that northern Siberians today have the most ANE. I guess the populations that moved in to the region found it advantageous to mix with ANE which was already cold adapted instead of needlessly going thought the same painful process themselves. Though at this point I am wandering into the very same pure speculation that I am accusing others of here, so I will stop.
How exactly the mixture took place i don’t know, but it seems that after the LGM ANE groups migrated in virtually all directions (Europe, West and South Asia), some met with Mongoloid and these formed some of todays Siberians and especially the American Indians. I would even relate at least some of these ANE expansion waves with the end of the steppe fauna, like the decrease of available mammoth herds.
During the LGM the borderline was quite Eastern, so you should not wonder about finding ANE remains and genetic signals in Sibiria, yet Sibiria could be easily accessed from the West, at least in the warmer months of the year, for big game hunting. While there was a large and practically uninhabitable zone between the Western and Eastern steppe-tundra, that’s decisive. West you find mainly West Eurasians, even quite far to the East, but in the Eastern steppe tundra the East Asian spectrum had its homeland. Actually its the Eastern Hwangho region once more which is in the focus.
Tianyuan/Zhoukoudian is already differentiated, but related (Proto-) Mongoloid groups became the core type during the LGM. This happened exactly because of the isolation during the last Ice Age which allowed quite different specialisations in the West and the East to take place without significant gene flow in the crucial phase of the development.
ANE in the East was simply not successful, wasn’t able to secure central regions for a demographical expansion. They were pushed aside from the South together with older Siberian East Asians, which kept a similar way of life as in the Ice Age, whereas the steppe groups and river people moved on and began to expand South first, up North again second. That’s when they pushed one wave after another from the steppe and river centers in all directions, leading to American Indians, Na-Dené, Paleo-Eskimos, Inuits in the North East, and the successive colonisation waves South of Austroasiatic, Austronesian, Tai-Kadai, Sino-Tibetan and Old Chinese.
So in a way you can limit where they lived after the LGM at least by looking at whom they pushed away from where, where was the push coming from. And this is probably even during the LGM the area between the Eastern Hwangho and the Yangtse, and later the Mongolian steppe (North) and the Hwangho-Yangtse (South) area. These are always the centers and the pushes from the steppe caused the strongest group at the Hwangho to reorganise themselves and push South once they had the demographic and cultural momentum on their side as well. Which is basically how all of Eastern and South Eastern Asia emerged as modern people and the Chinese people in particular.
I wouldn’t say that the ANE in the east wasn’t successful. They just got mixed entirely with the first major wave of east Asian ancestry to result in ancient Paleosiberians. This is probably how the eastern ANE populations ‘came to an end’- they gave rise to mixed successors so I wouldn’t say that they really came to an end especially considering how much yDNA Q they passed along.
>During the LGM the borderline was quite Eastern, so you should not wonder about finding ANE remains and genetic signals in Sibiria, yet Sibiria could be easily accessed from the West, at least in the warmer months of the year, for big game hunting.
This seems to imply a highly mobile culture moving all across Siberia. As far as I know, Mal’Ta Buret’ was one of a kind and different from other Siberian stone age cultures. If they were mobile or highly, then you would expect to find them in other places, do you know of other Mal-Ta like sites that are contemporary to it? And its not like as if they need to keep hunting mammoths all of the time. Typically a few successful mammoth kills would last a long time, long enough to survive the winter.
>but it seems that after the LGM ANE groups migrated in virtually all directions (Europe, West and South Asia)
What makes you think so? Are there examples of European HGs from just after the LGM with NE ancestry? The oldest one that I know of which fits the bill is Villabruna 1 from 14,000 years ago, quite a bit after the LGM. As stated before, feel free to post evidence of this.
Lastly, when exactly are you dating the rest of the movements and pushes that you propose? Because if they don’t fit the ANS/ANE era -> ancient paleosiberian era (sometime after LGM) -> neosiberian era (holocene) then you are making a claim which doesn’t fit well with the current, all be it incomplete picture. Sure as time goes on, your hypothesis might be validated with new discoveries, as I have stated before. But for now you will have to follow the trend present in the ancient north siberian paper https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/448829v1.
So using this timeline, where do you place your own descriptions of east Asian population movements in and around northern Asia? try to elaborate as much as possible with respect to the dates.
ANE failed in the East, because they made no significant impact. Successful in this context means dominance in genetic ancestry and distinct features. But they made no lasting impression, their genetic contribution is very low and mostly restricted to fringe groups and the same can be said for their traits.
First of all, with “after the LGM” I meant rather a terminus post quem. Obviously the flora and fauna didnt changed from one day to another and humans too, even the successful groups, started to expand step by step.
My proposition was about the relative chronology and general events, I’m in no position to question the paper. However, everything I said seems to be in accordance with the data provided by the paper.
E.g. “The arrival of peoples carrying ancestry from East Asia, and their admixture after the LGM with descendants of the ANS lineage ~20-18 kya, led to the replacement of the Yana population and the rise of the AP and Native American lineages. In the archaeological record this is demonstrated by the spread of microblade technology that accompanies the shrinkage of the mammoth habitat area in a northerly direction.”
So ANE/ANS were big game hunters, going after mammoths in particular. In the West they could follow the retreating Ice and occupy strategically important positions, resulting in a significant impact on West Eurasians and on the Americas. In Eastern Asia they failed and were blocked by the other inland hunters, the Mongoloid core groups descendents.
These seem to have lived further inland, while the ancestors of Amerindians and Paleosiberians were rather coastal inhabitants.
This relates to two issues:
– They split from Mongoloid proper and branched from the common Proto-Mongoloid core (Tianyuan). TheY lived on the milder sea shores, living from marine food, also sealed Hunt.
This is why their adaptation was different and the path to the North easy. The Mongoloid core types, like in Devils Gate Cave, followed in their footsteps later, always pushing the competitors North and South respectively, later on the Sea (Austronesians) and West (Uralics first) too.
– During the LGM the Mongoloid core type developed advantageous traits they probably didnt have before, both genetically and culturally (like microblades and larger, closer knit social groups). Originally trapped in one of the worst places of the LGM, they came out hardened. But most important, they were save from competitors to build up the demographic momentum, again for two reasons:
First the West Eurasians still had troubles to move East directly. Like I said, the landscape was still changing. So they were save from this side until they were able to fully exploit the new opportunities and become numerous and strong enough to resist or swallow what came in.
Second, like explained before, the whole range to the East might have lived primarily from the sea. They expanded to America, pushed North and started to settle islands. But they were not yet focused on settling the inland, for which they lacked experience too, but which became more favourable every year after the LGM.
So the steppe was colonised by the Northern, the Hwangho by the Southern core groups flank.
That way the core group occupied the two single most important central strategic places in all of East Asia.
With the demographic build up there, they had an excellent starting point even before the Neolithic revolution!
They started to move out of these centers and replacIng all the fringe groups of formerly competitive fishers and seal hunters. But no more. That’s Devils Gate Cave and what they called in the paper “Neosiberian”.
When the Neolithic innovations reached the Hwangho without a massive colonisation, it was a done deal that the people which occupied this strategic position, if they made no grave mistakes, would be a major force and expansive population in humanitys future. The Northern flank (best Mongol) pushed South on the rivers, while conquering Siberia and Central Asia from the Eastern steppe, the Southern one from the Hwangho (best Han) the South and South East.
So one factor contributing could have been that the Mongoloid core group developed in the interior rather, while Paleosiberians, ANS remains and Ainu ancestors all seem to have survived the LGM rather in coastal regions or ANE as seasonal big game hunters.
@Obs
>So ANE/ANS were big game hunters, going after mammoths in particular. In the West they could follow the retreating Ice and occupy strategically important positions, resulting in a significant impact on West Eurasians and on the Americas. In Eastern Asia they failed and were blocked by the other inland hunters, the Mongoloid core groups descendents.
I wouldn’t say that ANE failed in the east. ANE contribution which resulted in the mixed ancient PaleoSiberian population came from Q carriers which wouldn’t have been “in the west”. I know that there isn’t enough direct evidence for this just yet, but it seems to be pretty clear that the western ANE would be predominantly R while the eastern ANE would be predominantly Q. Sure they might not have extended into east Asia (which is something that I have noted in a previous post due to no known ANE presence in east Asia), but given that they are ancestral to ancient paleosiberians and how their descendants today peak in the eastern + northern part of Siberia along with the Americas and the Arctic in general, it would be hard to argue that they didn’t do well in the east. Indeed, the people with the most ANE ancestry today are in the (north) east and the far east (Americas) so it looks like they did better in the east than in the west as far as general geographical terms are concerned.
Furthermore, I wouldn’t say that you are wrong with your relative chronology in the rest of your post, but given the basic restrictions that exist, it would have to fit in the late ancient paleosiberian (perhaps after the half of the 20 K to 11K year ago) period to the neosiberian period. Who knows, new discoveries might lax the limitations on your relative chronology (like giving more time for a neosiberian type expansion north) thus making your hypothesis closer to the truth.
@Obs
I have just noticed something.
>They split from Mongoloid proper and branched from the common Proto-Mongoloid core (Tianyuan)
I was looking through a 2007 Tianyuan paper (https://www.pnas.org/content/104/16/6573) and I came across this:
“Although morphologically modern, it appears to have close affinities with Late Pleistocene Chinese and recent Australomelanesian populations ”
A few mentions of the remains being similar to Australomelnesians, 2 in total and one pertaining to Tianyuan man.
Looking at their wikipedia page, I find this:
“In physical anthropology, forensic anthropology and archaeogenetics, Australo-Melanesians (also Australasian, Australomelanesoid or Australoid)[1] form a large group of populations indigenous to Maritime Southeast Asia and Oceania.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australo-Melanesian
So that paper suggests that Tianyuan man was still Australoid in morphology 40,000 years ago, and you have claimed that he is proto-mongoloid. Does that mean that protomongoloids were pretty much the same thing as Australoids 40,000 years ago? Looks like he was a part of the northern Australoid extension before the mongoloid-australoid distinction. His yDNA is apparently K2b based on his wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianyuan_man).
Makes sense since M and S (subclades of K2b) are common among modern Australoids and Melanesians.
Wait uh did my most recent comment get deleted or does the blog not accept comments after a few days?
Yes, ANE did just fine in America and still has its legacy in Asia. But as I pointed out before, they are still fringe groups and weren’t able to make an impression of significance on East Asia proper. At least not by overall ancestry. Probably some lineages and traits nevertheless.
My most important argument was that there was an East Asian/Mongoloid core type which came out of cold adaptation, presumably because they were in a geographically constricted position in the interior of the continent. That explains why other groups made it to the islands and America first, simply because they were continental people which managed to get their grip on the geostrategical center of the Hwangho and the Eastern steppe. Only at later stages they began to expand beyond that habitat and thats particularly interesting, they were very successful with it.
Its definitely wrong to say Devils Gate Cave is the source, its an expansive branch already and the real source should be sought more to the West.
The final development of the core type happened during the LGM. Interestingly the microblade technology might have evolved in Northern China too, at the start of this phase.
And the physical features long known being accompanied by frequency changes for presumably adaptive variants unknown before, detected by genetic research in recent years. Like the peak frequencies for EDAR, ABCC11 and OXTR/rs53576 etc. and I expect much more to come.
Now while EDAR is obviously older (Proto- or general Mongoloid), the core type evolved on with higher frequencies of the other two (ABCC11 and OXTR). Though one could attribute some of the deviation in Sibiria and America to ANS/ANE influences too probably, that’s not all of it. The last steps were done by the core and not the whole periphery of the East Asian metapopulation. Rather it spread from the core after the LGM.
EDAR variant is interesting in that ancient dna has suggested that it was not at fixture in the ancient population that gave rise to Native Americans (though certainly present):
Posth 2018: The patterns of variation at phenotypically significant variants are also notable. Our data show that a variant in EDAR that affects tooth shape, hair follicles and thickness, sweat, and mammary gland ductal branching and that occurs at nearly 100% frequency in present day Native Americans and East Asians (Kamberov et al., 2013) was not fixed in USR1 (11400 BP), Anzick-1 (12800BP), a Brazil_LapaDoSanto_9600BP individual and a Brazil_Laranjal_ 6700BP individual, all of whom carry the ancestral allele (Table S7). Thus, the derived allele rose in frequency in parallel in both East Asians and in Native Americans. In contrast at FADS2, one of the variants at a polymorphism (rs174570) associated with fatty acid desaturase 2 levels is derived in all the ancient individuals, supporting the hypothesis that the selective sweep that drove it to near fixation was complete prior to the peopling of the Americas (Amorim et al., 2017).
It will be interesting to see what the frequencies are in East Asia, going further and further beyond the sort of 7700 BP / 5500 BCE barriers (Devil’s Gate) into the late Upper Paleolithic.
>they are still fringe groups and weren’t able to make an impression of significance on East Asia proper. At least not by overall ancestry. Probably some lineages and traits nevertheless.
True.
As far as the protomongoloid core is concerned, you have said this about it earlier:
>They split from Mongoloid proper and branched from the common Proto-Mongoloid core (Tianyuan).
What is the argument for Tianyuan being a part of the protomongoloid core? They only have its jaw as far as the head is concerned, so its not possible to make inferences from craniofacial features. Tianyuan man’s wikipedia page lists him as being yDNA K2b, but they don’t mention the subclade, so he could be within K2b2 or K2b1. Neither of these are found in Mongoloid populations that don’t have ANE ancestry, however K2b1 subclades are quite common among Australoid and Melanesians, who as far as I know, don’t have ANE ancestry. Though they do have extra Denisovan not found in Tianyuan.
You have also mentioned a blade technology, is it the same blade technology that is traced back to the western side of Tibet? I have seen some people on Anthrogenica (specifically Ren I think) who have mentioned that the blade technology of the region can be traced to the western side of Tibet. In the light of this, it seems like a migration of an equatorial population, upwards into north Asia via western Tibet with Tianyuan 1 being one sample of this population. Equatorial because of the high crurual index/long limbs. Given how his yDNA seems to be phylogenetically closer to Australomelanesin Australoids than it is to east Asian Mongoloids, the migration was that of some equatorial Australoid population or at least an Australoid population without the extra Denisovan input seen in Papuans. So, I think that you would have to modify your definition of the proto-Mongoloid core. Do you know of when the ancestors of native Americans separated from ancestors of east Asians? That could give an ad-hoc date for it.
@DaThang: “Core” was wrong in this context, should have been just “Proto-Mongoloid” because that’s what it is about, specimen like Tianyuan who are already closer to Mongoloid proper than anything else, but still “not there yet”.
Concerning the microblades, I came across this paper:
“The lithic assemblage from Shizitan 29, a late Upper Paleolithic open-air site in Shanxi, China, provides evidence for the earliest, well-dated microblade production in East Asia, ca. 26/24 Ka cal BP.”
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0212643
The dating and region is highly interesting for the debate obviously. Its fascinating that the much later Yangshao culture was in the very same regions as the Paleolithic innovators.
We really just need more ancient DNA from these places, without its a lot of conjecture, even if the circumstantial evidence seems to be fairly conclusive, the gaps are too large.
Contrary to the Northern group (Mongol) the Southern (Han) can have more Southern influences from pre-LGM times which could have been melted down during LGM and brought into the modern Mongoloid shape. I think that’s possible, because the clear North -> South push starts rather after the LGM. Before that, we can see South -> North migrations as well. But I doubt “very Southern” influences being of any significance for that period and the core East Asians at all.
But whether they have a legacy in later East Asians is again something for aDNA to prove/disprove. But I guess their impact was very limited and we rather might explain the possible Austro-Melanesian influences in American Indians like the Surui with “very Southern” elements which were “swept away” so to say when the core groups began to push.
Generally the split between the East Asian core and American Indians is supposed to be pretty old, predating the LGM (so rather 30.000-25.000 years ago or more), but then again, think about what we could read about European prehistory before the actual data came out and there are still surprises around the corner.
Also, I don’t think that American Indians were and even are that homogenous at all. There seems to have been more waves too, with the first being more distant, the latest closer. Like from Surui to Inuit if talking about the modern survivors.
Actually ignore the part about the mandible being not enough, the mandible could give some hints for dental traits. Does anyone have a dental comparison of Tianyuan with various populations? Like is it a Sinodont or a Sundadont or just something else?
@Obs
>@DaThang: “Core” was wrong in this context, should have been just “Proto-Mongoloid” because that’s what it is about, specimen like Tianyuan who are already closer to Mongoloid proper than anything else, but still “not there yet”.
https://www.pnas.org/content/110/6/2223
“To more accurately gauge how the population from which the Tianyuan individual is derived was related to Eurasian populations, while taking gene flow between populations into account, we used a recent approach (29) that estimates a maximum-likelihood tree of populations and then identifies relationships between populations that are a poor fit to the tree model and that may be due to gene flow. As suggested by the nucleotide differences (Table 1), the maximum-likelihood tree (Fig. S6A) shows that the branch leading to the Tianyuan individual is long, due to its lower sequence quality. However, among Eurasian populations, Tianyuan clearly falls with Asian rather than European populations (bootstrap support 100%). The strongest signal not compatible with a bifurcating tree (Fig. S6B) is an inferred gene-flow event that suggests that 6.7% of chromosome 21 in the Papuan individual is derived from Denisovans, in agreement with previous findings (28, 30). When this is taken into account, the Tianyuan individual appears ancestral to all Asian individuals studied (Fig. 2). We note, however, that the relationship of the Tianyuan and Papuan individuals is not resolved (bootstrap support 31%). Further work is necessary to clarify whether this reflects the age of the Tianyuan individual relative to the divergence between modern human populations.”
A big difference between Tianyuan and Papuans is that Papuans are more Denisovan admixed, so there obviously isn’t a proto-Papuan -> Tianyuan direction, but these 2 could have a common origin, and by that I don’t mean something like a common east Eurasian, rather an early split just after the common east Eurasian period… or at least that is what I was thinking at first. This conjecture of mine might have already been shot down in 2013.
https://imgur.com/a/ZdDNTnk
A chromosome 21 maximum-likelihood tree from the same paper. Makes it look like Tianyuan is more divergent to east Asians than Papuans are. Though this is only one chromosome. Does anyone have a similar analysis for the whole DNA?
As far as the blade technology part is concerned, is that the only blade technology in east Asia or is the western Tibetan technology different?
The deeper I dig into the Tianyuan discussions posted online, the less I seem to understand… seriously, we NEED more samples from east Asia, specifically China to piece together the east Eurasian developments and to understand where Tianyuan fits in all of this. Is it even more divergent than Papuans and Onge? Is it somewhere between them and east Asians in a very broad term (this includes east, southeast Asians and native Americans) or is it in the broad east Asian ‘protomongoloid’ nest…. I have no clue at this point.
@DaThang: Indeed, much needs to be clarified. But remember the age of the sample and the more undifferentiated character.
Yet I think the core type had its own, already differentiated main source population at this point in time. We just lack the samples.