The paper that reported on the data from the famous “Tarim Mummies” is out. If you don’t have a good grasp of the alphabet soup of ancient early Holocene populations, the results are going to be hard to parse. So I’ll make it simple for you: it now looks that the Tarim populations from 4,000 years ago are among the last people who were mostly “Ancestral North Eurasian” (ANE), and, they had no connection to populations in Europe. The second part is important because Victor Mair and others who have examined the mummies are wont to proclaim that the “Loulan Beauty” and her peers were “Caucasoid” due to their physical features. This may still be technically true, but the inference that this has to do with migration from the west of a European-origin population turns out to be false.
Being wrong is not a big deal. My own suspicion and assumption that these were part of the early movement of Iranian people eastward also turned out to have been wrong too. This is clear because the Tarim population from 4,000 years ago didn’t have any gene flow from the eastern Yamnaya, the Afansievo, let alone the larger Corded Ware reflux to the steppe (Iranian people did move into the Tarim zone later; the languages of the southern rim of the basin in historic times were East Iranian, and Iranians seem to have arrived in the north in Mongolia late in the Bronze Age).
I’ve added some stuff to the plot below to make it clear:
The PCA above is consistent with the Tarim mummies being mostly descended from ANE, though they have a minority of northern East Asian ancestry.
Interestingly, the earlier remains from Dzungaria are mostly descended from Afanasievo populations with a minority of ANE ancestry. The authors conclude, correctly I think, that this points to the likely origins of the Tocharian languages from the Afanasievo, and the possibility (I bet) that the ancient Yamnaya language was similar to that of the Tocharians. The fact that the Tarim people seem to have been mostly very distant branches of R1b illustrates the origin of the R lineage deep in Siberia during the Pleistocene. R and Q are clearly from the Paleo-Siberians.
Finally, let’s talk about the famous “European” or “white” Buddhist monks depicted at Tufan:
The Chinese describe some of these people as having light hair and eyes. In other words, they looked like Europeans. Previous work had argued that this was due to the Tocharians being descended from European-like people. But we now have enough evidence from the Yamnaya to know that very few were pale-eyed or light-haired. Rather, they were a dark-haired and dark-eyed population with olive skin. Unless there was later natural selection for these characteristics, this isn’t due to the Afanasievo ancestry of the Tocharians (who by the period 500-1000 AD were mostly localized to the northeast of the modern Tarim basin, around Turfan). Rather, the Tocharians were themselves a mix of people, and I believe those with Europoid physical appearance had those because they were heavily Iranianized in ancestry.
Today most people associate “Iranian” with Iran, and Persia, but Persians emerged on the southwestern frontier of the Iranian world, as heirs of Anshan and Elam (these were non-Indo-European societies). For much of history, Iranian-speaking people spanned the zone between Hungary and Mongolia and were much more physically and culturally diverse. To this day many Tajiks could pass for European, and these people have some of the highest fractions of “steppe herder” ancestry in the world. A minority of the Sintashta likely had blue eyes going by their genomes, so I think the origin of these “Europoid” people has to be interactions with the expanding Andronovo-horizon in the latter period of the Bronze Age.
These results in this paper show that the core population 4,000 years ago in the region of the Tarim that was later home to the Tocharians was inhabited by an ANE/Paleo-Siberian population, with a minority component of ancestry derived from northern East Asians. This ancestry dates to the early Holocene, 10,000 years ago. The later Tocharians probably absorbed these people, but I believe they were a mix of post-Afanasievo populations and Iranians. The former gave the Tocharians their unique and very basal Indo-European language, and the latter were responsible for “European” physical features so noted by the Han Chinese chroniclers in the 1st millennium A.D.
Note: the ANE are closer to West Eurasians than East Eurasians, but they are very distantly related to the former. Their ancestors seem to have diverged from European and West Asian hunter-gatherers 35,000 to 40,000 years ago.
This is amazing! Does this mean we now have a proxy population for ANE?
Also, in terms of ANE, would they be the West Siberian Hunter Gatherers mentioned in previous papers on Subcontinental genetics, or are there other ANE descended groups?
What Aditya said.
And drunkenly careening further down the road of wild and crazy speculation, does this hint that Pre-Proto-Indo-European was an ANE language?
If I understood well what you say, you think that the genetic data demonstrate an origin of Indo-Europeans (people and languages) not in eastern Europe (Yamnaya) and less westernmost, close to central Europe and the Alps as I suppose, but in Siberia, but how do you explain that, even though the origin of hgs Q and R are oldest in Siberia, the oldest hg R1b1 is Villabruna (Italy) 14000 years ago, the oldest R-V88 (central Europe, but the oldest actual hpts in Italy and the British Isles), the oldest R-M73 (xM478) is in the Baltic countries, the oldest R-L388, at least the 5 known hpts are in Italy, and only some of them elsewhere etc?. Do you agree that yours, as an Indian of the extreme east, isn’t an “Out of India” but an “Out of Siberia”, and not only in old times, that it could be true, but also in more recent ones? Of course that my hg R-Z2110 did come from the hunter-gatherers of the Siberian corridor is thought by me too, but about all the rest? The only hg R that could have got the oldest hpts in central Asia is R-PH155, all the others have the oldest aDNA in Europe, included R1a. This could demonstrate that what you find in Siberia was a back mutation of about 8000 years ago from west, and before, I think, from the region around the Alps in the Younger Dryas.
“a back migration” of course.
R is oldest in mal’ta in siberia
@Aditya, in terms of that question, what I found with the Eurogenes Global 25 was:
For what I’d call ‘contributing ANE’ (the ANE group that seems to contribute to all later groups that seem ANE rich), the best reference is still the AG3 (Afontova-Gora3) woman from 16,000 BCE. (AG3 location – https://imgur.com/a/oIifCTI ).
She seems to have the maximal level of ANE related drift among samples that aren’t precluded from being an ancestor by having too much East Asian related ancestry.
These Tarim early-middle BA samples seem to slightly have more of a pattern of ANE related drift, but also a lot more East Asian related ancestry, so are precluded from being as good a proxy for the ancestor of EHG as AG3. The EHG groups from at least 8,000 BCE (think there might be older samples now) look more like being between AG3 and late Upper Paleolithic/Mesolithic groups like Iron Gates from SE Europe, but don’t quite fit as being between these guys and Iron Gates HG.
The WSHG (West Siberian Hunter Gatherers) from 6000-4000 BCE look between EHG (Eastern Hunter Gatherers from Western Russia, a bit of an odd name now but the standard) and these Tarim EMBA samples. The Botai then look like WSHG with extra East Asian ancestry. The Botai and Tarim EMBA look to me to have similar amounts of East Asian ancestry overall, while the WSHG have less (in my view due to ancestry from EHG); so these samples don’t look like “Botai+more East Asian”. (The Steppe_Maykop people who have ancestry from the steppe along with extra ANE look to me to get that from the WSHG, not from either Botai / Tarim EMBA, as that would give too much East Asian ancestry).
It’s a bit of difficult question to what samples could totally represent a proxy population for ANE, since the different ANE groups seem to be interacting on a low level constantly with different East Asian populations. The main root of their ancestry is this ancestry that is a parallel to the main trunk of Upper Paleolithic European ancestry, but they all from Yana to MA-1 seem to have some interactions with different groups that are common in Northern East Asia, which varies from the Tianyuan type people who were there up to 33,000 YBP (and probably later going by the Salkhit sample) to the more typically East Asian like people who are there at least along the coast by 19,000 YBP.
Ideally I think a better proxy for ANE would be if there were lots more samples from Afontova-Gora at this time, but she’s the only usable one right now, so the Tarim EMBA might be more useful for qpGraphs that look for high coverage etc, as long as their East Asian ancestry can be controlled for.
I’ve restricted this to the northern populations – what’s going on with the ANE-like contributions to early Southern Central Asian groups (like the Sarazm Copper Age samples in Tajikstan) is a bit more of another question that due to the ancestral complexity, I want to wait and see what (if any) early samples turn up from the region.
Looks like their closest relatives are the Botai, which isn’t surprising, considering they only lived around 1,000 years prior and not far away.
I do have to say though, my understanding of their material culture really did suggest a strong percieved connection to Europe manifested in articles like textiles. Of course, good textile records from thousands of years ago are sparse, and a lot may have been spreading from neolithic sites via diffusion for millennia.
@Philip Edwin, quite circumstantial, I’ve noticed several linguists remark that if you had a scenario where a Uralic language was in intensive contact with a northern Caucasian language, the result might look a lot like Proto-Indo-European. Opinions seem to vary on whether Northeast Caucasian or Northwest Caucasian would be a better candidate for the Caucasian side.
Now, we know that the Yamnaya population was a mix of Eastern Hunter Gatherer (mostly ANE) and Caucasian Hunter Gatherer. Logically, the CHGs might have spoken something typologically north Caucasian. By process of elimination, this implies that the EHGs and perhaps their ANE ancestors might have spoken some common ancestor of Uralic and Indo-European.
By the way, people often note that Tocharian seems like it might have had significant Uralic influence. I wonder if it could actually have been influence from a Para-Uralic language spoken by the Tarim mummymen.
Sort of a tangential musing: One idea in the literature about the steppe genetic expansion is that it was a resurgence of European Upper Paleolithic related ancestry (ANE and Euro HGs) – that kind of comes from the earliest papers on this, where Reich and Patterson (I think) identified that there was a resurgence of Ancient North Eurasian ancestry in Europeans (by comparing Sardinians and first early farming and HG dna to present day Europeans), then validated by direct adna.
But on the other hand, in some regions, particularly after late Neolithic collapse in Europe, it does seem like Indo-European groups often replaced previous populations who were richer in ANE and/or WHG related ancestry. Example here might be Andronovo / Sintashta groups replacing groups like Dzungaria_EBA and the Tarim_EMBA (and there’s the example of them succeeding the Aigyrzhal group in C Asia, although they’re less ANE rich than more populations to the north).
While in Europe there are things like the Pitted Ware Culture who succeeded Funnelbeaker in Scandinavia and have around 75% SHG ancestry, and there are hints that some other HG rich people who around too (perhaps in Central Europe as suggested by this abstract – https://slavicorigins.blogspot.com/2021/10/uncanny-genetic-proportions-from.html – and we do know that some of the female individuals absorbed by the early CWC were much richer in HG than the Globular Amphora).
So maybe another idea about the Indo-European mobility revolutions (wheels and wagons, then perhaps the improved and domesticated horse?) is these also led to the invasions of the spaces where hunter-gatherers were adapting and were resurgent in the face of often somewhat failed agricultural or pastoral colonisations. Then perhaps rather than IE expansions being a pure resurgence of Euro HG+ANE ancestry, perhaps in a sense they were a thwarting of that kind of resurgence and an expansion of Near East related ancestry (Caucasus/Iran and Anatolian type).
In our world, IE expansions were kind of a resurgence of ANE+Euro HG like ancestries, but maybe in the parallel world where the same technologies diffused culturally to a greater extent (maybe one where people have a slightly different culture of trade and IE groups had some random plagues or something?), then the overall ANE+Euro HG resurgence might possibly have been somewhat comparable (not a lot less).
@Razib Khan
Is the Beauty of Loulan one of the mummies tested?
She has auburn hair color, which means her DNA has the mutation for red hair.
Does that mean the red hair SNP arose among ANE?
I think whoever read this article did not realize what was said: The mummies of Tarim Basin were not proto-Indo-Europeans! The link with an hypothetical Norse Indo-European people is proven false! Lol, it seems there are still a lot of people in denial…
Sorry to ask but what are the differences between west and east eurasian? Also would these Eurasian populations initially have looked like Australian Aborigines/Papuans? Or more like Native Americans?
@Jason, there is a chronology of the mummies here and some pictures – https://www.penn.museum/sites/expedition/ancient-mummies-of-the-tarim-basin/
The Tarim mummies sampled here who they good got quality adna from have dates of which vary from 2000 BCE to the latest potential date of 1664 BCE, with main average date clustering around 1850 BCE considering the date ranges of all of them together. The photos of the “Loulan Beauty” and “Xiaohe Beauty” from my above link (most genetic samples from Xiaohe) are probably reasonably secure as representative then.
The later samples are less secure and many be from other and later migrations and the general opinion is the other people from the first millennium (like the big, tall Charchen Man and so on) are fairly likely to be genetically distinct and probably reflect the expansions of Andronovo/Scythian etc cultures.
In terms of phenotypes, the only information on height I could find was on “Loulan Beauty”, who was said to be about 152cm, which is about the same as the average for EEF (Early European Farmer) females from Europe. (In a file of ancient height phenotypes I have from another study, a set of 14 genetically securely EEF women I checked in a file came to an average of 154cm tall, while a set of about 8 women from Europe at the late Neolithic to early Bronze Age with 50% Yamnaya/Steppe ancestry came out at 158cm tall, about one-and-a-half inches taller). The climatic conditions have done very variable and different things to the soft tissue of the face that survives. It seems reasonably secure that they had orthognatic faces, fairly narrow noses (possibly at a more extreme end of that, which seems like a reasonably likely cold climate adaptation), straight hair, and look like they had strong chin and cheekbones. I think it’s fairly secure that they probably would’ve looked to us in the flesh more like Europeans than like Australian Aborigines, and it’s quite possible they would’ve looked to us more like Europeans than like Native Americans but that seems harder to estimate from the material that survives.
Physical description of the early mummies beyond Loulan and Xiaohe woman seems to be hard to find! It seems like these two women are the sensational or well-preserved mummies and most resources just talk about them and handwave at a much bigger set of other mummies.
Another comment around my admixture modelling above, I think the models I did with the preliminary data that was put on Eurogenes G25 before the paper came out hold up pretty well with their qpAdm results:
“Interestingly, we observe that most Bronze Age and pre-Bronze Age populations with substantial ANE ancestry, such as Botai_CA from Eneolithic northern Kazakhstan” (full list in the supplement) “show the highest outgroup-f3 value with Tarim_EMBA1, suggesting that the Tarim mummies are currently the best representative of the pre-pastoralist ANE-related population that once inhabited Central Asia and southern Siberia (Extended Data Fig. 2A), even though Tarim_EMBA1 postdates these populations in time. This calls for a revision of previous admixture models of these populations, which were based on Botai_CA or West_Siberia_N, to include Tarim_EMBA1 as their ANE source (Supplementary Data S1F-H,I). “
“Applying qpAdm, we successfully modeled the high-ANE group West_Siberia_N as a mixture of Tarim_EMBA1 (67%) and Eastern European Hunter-Gatherers (EHG) (Supplementary Data S1I). Botai _CA shows a similar profile but requires an additional Eastern Eurasian contribution (5-12%) (Supplementary Data S1I; Extended Data Table 3).”
E.g. like I thought WSHG is like Tarim+EHG, and Botai then like WSHG+East Asian (and the East Asian influence actually seems non-evenly distribute among the Botai sample, so possibly not that old). Not Tarim_EMBA like Botai+additional East Asian, as some on Eurogenes comments were arguing for! Of course its possible there may have been some Botai-like flow to Tarim_EMBA (to go with material culture) but it seems like there must have been a strong “late ANE” element to the population and they’re not just Botai+East Asian.
The models of post-Afanasievo populations are interesting too and worth looking at the supplement for.
Also on y-dna, one male from the set of samples the paper calls Dzungaria_EBA (from Xinjiang) and attributes to the Afanasievo culture, is R1b1a1a2a2 (R1b-Z2103), which is a pretty secure link to other Afanasievo and to Yamnaya. Two other males are Q1b with no downstream haplogroup assigment which is less securely linked to Afanasievo, though I’d note that Q1b2a1a~ was found in a big Afanasievo family at a site on the Yenisey river. (There are actually almost as many Afanasievo samples now with Q1b2a1a~ as R1b-Z2103, because they got so many out of this family, but it’s problematic to try and estimate prevalence of this in the Afanasievo as a whole I guess due to the family relationship). It will be interesting to see if Harald Ringbauer’s methods for detecting IBD segments/chunks in common in ancient dna can really push this home and demonstrate any direct links between these people and the other Afanasievo who are autosomally identical to Yamnaya.
@Matt
Your comments are very interesting.
However, I would note that AG3’s Y chromosome haplogroup is Q-F746 while most of the ANE ancestry in Europe appears to have arrived with populations carrying subclades of R1. (in that case slightly closer to MA1).
Would it be possible that the affinity with AG3 only reflects higher East Asian ancestry in the ANE component of Europeans relative to MA1? Since it seems to me AG3 is more eastern-shifted than MA1.
Also if you don’t mind me asking, what are your thoughts on the eastern-part of the ancestry of ANE pops? They always get modeled as part Tianyuan but a lot of Southeast Asians today carry related haplogroups and in a few papers they seem to show significant stats with Jomon (maybe because Jomon are closer to the ENA part of ANE or because they are part ANE -or both?)
Lastly, concerning EHG I think Narasimhan’s study on Central Asia showed some cline with WSHG-type pops so I am not sure they lack more recent East Asian-related ancestry. Though not all of the samples may have it.
@James
AG3 is a female. I think you mean AG2 when referring to the yDNA haplogroup part.
@James, R1 is held by various of the SE European/Italian Euro HG, that’s true. Although Q was found at low frequency among the early Corded Ware culture during the later population movement. I’m not sure what the meaning is in the comment though actually?
AG3 just seems on PCA to take a less “central” position that in dimensions that peak in an EHG/etc direction that tends to indicate its accumulated more unique drift to the contributing North Eurasian groups. So I don’t think any greater affinity to later groups is driven by having more East Asian ancestry, but just more drift along the relevant path. That’s typical when comparing samples over time from other groups. (When projected on PCA, Ust Ishim is more central->Kostenki & Tianyuan, Vestonice, etc…). I can’t remember if AG3 is more Eastern Non-African (ENA) actually compared to MA-1; I think generally her f4 stats came out with more affinity to East Asians and less to Onge relative to MA-1.
I don’t have a lot of thoughts about the ENA ancestry in ANE groups; it seems like different qpGraphs can find lots of different things.
EHG look like they formed not long after the time of AG3 judging from the date of first EHG samples and behaviour in ADMIXTURE, and don’t look like later ones were recently admixed with WSHG+SE European Iron Gates HG or anything. I can’t say in absolute sense how much ENA ancestry they all have, and there may be unsampled variation, but the samples I’ve looked at mostly certainly seem between AG3 and Iron Gates HG, and not between WSHG and Iron Gates HG, so whatever level they have is not inconsistent with that I think. There’s probably some variation in the EHG groups and probably were some people around who were more clinal to WSHG, since WSHG seem to have EHG ancestry to me.
@DaThang
Yes I meant AG2.
@Matt
Appreciate the reply.
Just surprised that the ANE component in EHG, CHG and some other post-Ice Age European HGs seems closer to Afontova Gora but their haplogroups are more like the Mal’ta boy.
Since you mentioned it the Onge affinity is another interesting aspect of ANE pops, since it seems to me it’s often stronger than Tianyuan affinity in some stats I’ve seen however most qpGraphs use Tianyuan as a source/proxy.
I do think Yana is more related to Tianyuan over MA1, and that probably has to do with being closer in time and Yana experiencing direct gene flow with Tianyuan-like pops. Afontova Gora seems to me to be slightly more “East Asian” proper in relation to its ENA affinity.
I’ve also noticed that WSHG appear to have EHG ancestry, and probably looked more like that Tarim samples here before it.
On that note, do you think that Iron Gates is a better source for EHG’s non ANE-related ancestry than other more WHG-type pops? Could this affinity not be partially mediated by apparent EHG ancestry in Iron Gates?
Not wanting to be boring, I would like to know the phenotype (skin colour, hair colour, eyes colour) of the mummies that were tested (I couldn’t find anything about that in the research), because there are some guys out there that said those mummies were not the “Nordic” ones.
I was very grateful for someone to give me the answer.
Check tab J. of the supplemetary material attached as an excel file to the paper.
Main paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04052-7#Sec26
Supplementary Data 1
Sample information, qpAdm modelling results and phenotypic traits of the studied individuals.
https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41586-021-04052-7/MediaObjects/41586_2021_4052_MOESM4_ESM.xlsx
Information on SNPs can be found for example on snpedia: https://www.snpedia.com/index.php/SNPedia
You can also compare the SNPs from this new paper with data from an earlier paper “Human population dynamics and Yersinia pestis in ancient northeast Asia”:
Main paper: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abc4587
The relevant supplementary material in an Excel File File(abc4587_data_file_s5.xlsx)
https://www.science.org/doi/suppl/10.1126/sciadv.abc4587/suppl_file/abc4587_data_file_s5.xlsx
If you want to compare the SNP data with the SNP data from the whitest ancient population sampled to date, have a look at the phenotype data in the Excel file “Data S2” of the following paper:
The Arrival of Siberian Ancestry Connecting the Eastern Baltic to Uralic Speakers further East
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982219304245#app2
Data S2. Phenotype Prediction Results, Related to Table 1.
https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S0960982219304245-mmc5.xlsx
The inclusion for some time in the Eurogenes G25 dampened the impact a bit but still really interesting results. This Tarim population in particular feels a bit like seeing sample VK531 of fully Euro HG ancestry from late 3rd millennium northern Norway. While the sometimes posited early Gumugou/Qawrighul/Xiaohe horizon seems out as far as Tocharian, Afanasievo as Proto-Tocharian is obviously still holding up well as the paper mentions and Razib relates. Much of the tentative and more specific path Mallory generally traced as I recall it seems to work out quite well for example though his recent, and quite cautious, article on Tocharian origins might be worth a re-read here for up-to-date details on his thinking.
@ Otto Kerner
“By process of elimination, this implies that the EHGs and perhaps their ANE ancestors might have spoken some common ancestor of Uralic and Indo-European”
OTOH, *if* we relate the ancestor of Uralic ultimately to N-rich ENA-rich populations and the ancestor of Indo-European to R and Q rich ANE-rich populations, as seems plausible going by aDNA so far to the extent we can speak about this kind of time-depth anyway, any common ancestor to me seems to probably not be that recent at all and the various commonalities some linguists have argued for, to the extent they definitively exist, between them might have arisen later on due to contact. If we think along those lines, Indo-European might have a more recent common ancestor with even Amerindian languages (and certainly all these ANE-rich Q and R groups around that area) than Uralic for that matter.
An interesting aspect of this is how much more success this kind of hypothetical ANE-rich ancestor of IE ended up having in the future compared to this R-rich ANE-rich Tarim population, in terms of language and even spread of its ancestry even as diluted down the line as it naturally was. Very different fates…
@ Matt
“So maybe another idea about the Indo-European mobility revolutions (wheels and wagons, then perhaps the improved and domesticated horse?) is these also led to the invasions of the spaces where hunter-gatherers were adapting and were resurgent in the face of often somewhat failed agricultural or pastoral colonisations. Then perhaps rather than IE expansions being a pure resurgence of Euro HG+ANE ancestry, perhaps in a sense they were a thwarting of that kind of resurgence and an expansion of Near East related ancestry (Caucasus/Iran and Anatolian type).”
The idea of steppe groups very in touch with the argued-for “secondary products revolution” (some innovations claimed for that arguably being theirs or often spread by them more widely) and taking the productive economy to places it hadn’t really been in or had periods of severe decline that they took advantage of and replacing hypothetical even more extremely HG-rich groups down the line makes some sense but I wonder how far you can take that idea. Maybe there’s a comparison of sorts to make here within Neolithic Europe further west and somewhat earlier with certain dynamics leading to those I-rich, though still overall very autosomally Anatolia_N-rich, Neolithic groups on the relative fringes of the early farming expansion and maybe better adapted in the long run in that area (and ultimately expanding towards the steppe from the northwest as the more G2a-rich Balkan cultures had been expanding to it from the southeast).
We do see that kind of more extreme resurgence to an extent in BA groups from northeastern Europe from the Carpathian Basin, as you mentioned and has been discussed a bunch, and going north, and maybe Scandinavian ones too (more data from the latter would be better, I’m thinking something like the non-Baltic-Uralic-admixed Levanluhta outlier for example which seemed particularly HG-rich). The modern European cline parallels the more “mainstream” Neolithic one a lot with the same exception of those two regions to an extent. Some kind of early CW – GAG/Iberian line (i.e. where the more continuous Neolithic cline of groups stops) leaves out only Baltic-Finnic-Scandinavian-northern Slavic groups out towards the “north” of it. Arguably maybe only those more far northern groups might have become more “extreme” than they did at that point and you might be seeing an even bigger split in Europe between the north-east and north-center vs the rest? In that kind of argument, you can also naturally see the steppe groups acting as a relative homogenizer of Europe, having drawn populations that fall almost on a cline of steppe-Minoan to steppe-ROU_C_o closer towards the center.
On something more concrete, since you brought up heights, quick scan of Chapter 5 from Mallory-Mair – The Tarim Mummies (a more careful read which might not be hard to get to, ahem, for interested people might show some I missed) for heights of different populations:
“Loulan/Kroran beauty”: 1.52 m, up to 1.56 m alive
Xiaohe Cemetery Grave 5A man: 1.7 m
“Hami Mummy” 1400-800 BC: 1.56 m, p to 1.6 m alive. Another female mummy from the same area: 1.5 m
Zahongluke/Zaghunluq site from Cherchen/Qiemo, 1000-600 BC: “Ur-David”/”Cherchen Man” 1.76 m, 1.78 m alive and two women from same place: 1.6 m, 1.7 m
South Siberian Scythian-Sarmatian period: 1.69+-3 m for males, full range 1.55-1.8 m. 1.56 m for women, full range 1.43 m to 1.7 m
Shangma in southern Shanxi at a similar date as Cherchen: 1.65 m, 1.47-1.79 range for men
Subeshi 5th-4th centuries BC: a man at 1.65 m, a woman at 1.57 m
Lop Nur Grave 35: woman at 1.6 m
Yingpan 2nd-3rd centuries BC: Yingpan Man at 1.8 m
Bronze Age Ireland male-female: 1.73 m – 1.65 m
Bronze Age Italy male-female: 1.68-1.69 m – 1.56-1.58 m
Royal shaft graves/Grave Circles at Mycenae male-female: 1.72 m average male, tallest woman 1.61 m
Btw, I noticed you bringing up a reference to height about the UK and how “genetic height also slightly decreases as Yamnaya ancestry increases”. What reference did you have in mind? Might be a spurious correlation in my mind but I kinda wonder if that greater genetic height southeast to northwest (also brings to mind these old anthropological maps of an east to west reduction in blond hair, the much rarer red hair seemingly generally following the opposite west to east direction) has something to do with the cline of Scandinavian-related impact, despite also greater continental impact reducing steppe-related ancestry there overall.
@Forgetful, I think the height+steppe ancestry reverse is here by Patterson and others based on UK Biobank: https://elifesciences.org/articles/39702
“Interestingly, the north-south genetic cline in the UK tracks the height gradient in the opposite direction than in Continental Europe (Figure 2—figure supplements 2 and 4)” (e.g. Northern tend to be slightly shorter) “and after correcting with principal components, we do not observe any evidence of residual stratification in comparison with the 1000 genomes data (Figure 2a,c).”
The connection of steppe ancestry with the north-south gradient in Britain was in this Galinsky paper – https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27773431/
It may reverse with some nutritional effect though in future, just there for now at least.
@Forgetful, also I had a look to see if Biobank replicates any of those old maps, whether polygenic blonde hair score maps to UK geography. Unfortunately couldn’t find anything – maybe not of genetic interest to the studies that tried to genetically characterise the phenotype. The trait does seem fairly polygenic (it’s not so much like in my experience families tend to have sharp differences between sibling blonde hair colour, even allowing for assortativr mating, and gradients with Europe are fairly smooth, while red hair is more driven by a few locii?).
There is a signal of differentiation in IRF4 variants between England and Ireland, where the derived variant is more associated with lighter skin, freckling, reduced tanning, light eyes, *darker* but earlier greying hair (so more depigmentation overall across the lifecycle but not early on). That might associate with some differentiation with England. I’ll be interested to see what our 800 British genomes show, although the great bulk are from the later Iron Age it will still anchor what happened in the first 2000 years and the later 2000 years, and whether the mix of post 0 BCE in mainly England had any effect on selection.
@Matt
Thanks for the info.
“The authors conclude, correctly I think, that this points to the probable origins of the Tocharian languages from the Afanasievo, and the possibility (I bet) that the ancient Yamnaya language was similar to that of the Tocharians. The fact that the Tarim people seem to have been mostly very distant branches of R1b illustrates the origin of the R lineage deep in Siberia during the Pleistocene. R and Q are clearly from the Paleo-Siberians.”
The conclusion from everything so far is that the Tocharian has no direct connection with the PIE people and its placement in the IE group today is under question.
Based on a limited number of indirect borrowed words (most likely from native Uralic* speakers, who have apparently been in contact with PIE people), we cannot place this language in an IE group.
In Tocharian we have an obviously non-Indo-European structure / grammar linking it to Proto-Uralic as well as to Proto-Samoyedic or Ket and just a limited number of attested IE vocabulary.
The Tocharian branch is often argued to have split off the Indo-European proto-language at an early stage, but it is attested only from the 5th century CE onwards.
Tocharian is known from manuscripts dating from the 5th to the 8th century AD, which means that his age is in question too. In my opinion, it is also questionable whether it is not an Uralic language with IE influence or IE with a huge influence from Uralic language, rather the former. Given the fact that the grammar of an language is its most stable characteristic compared to the vocabulary, which very often undergoes changes, observed even today in real time. Accept the grammar as the scaffolding of an language.
Quotes:
*
“Tocharian agglutinative case inflexion as well as its single series of voiceless stops, the two most striking typological deviations from Proto-Indo-European, can be explained through influence from Uralic. A number of other typological features of Tocharian may likewise be interpreted as due to contact with a Uralic language.”
“Indeed, many of the defining traits of Tocharian may be attributed to contact with an early form of Samoyedic, probably in the form of substrate influence.“
“A close match between the Pre-Proto-Tocharian and Pre-Proto-Samoyedic vowel systems is a strong indication that the Uralic contact language was an early form of Samoyedic.“
“To sum up, the development of the Tocharian vowel system can be understood very well in light of the South Siberian system represented by Ket. Although theoretically this could be due to influence from Uralic, Yeniseian or even Yukaghir, contacts with an early stage of Samoyedic seem the most likely in view of the evidence of the stops and other evidence still to follow. In the vowel system there are no parallels between Tocharian on the one hand and Turkic or Iranian on the other.”
If the basic part of this language, which is the grammar, corresponds to and is even identical with non-IE languages like Ket or Samoyedic, this leads to only one possible conclusion – Tocharian is simply one of the many native Asian languages with some cosmetic and superficial / lexical influence from IE language.
Furthermore this is not the first paper to show once again that R1a and R1b, or Q have nothing to do with the formation of PIE or IE languages. These can only be late Indo-Europeanized certain branches of obvious Asian origin.