In the past couple of weeks had run analysis through all the Iranian aDNA samples from Lazaridis* looking for SNPs of interest.
(* And Armenian too, but not in the list below, will put up that table later as I have to recheck for SLC24A5.)
Have now added in results of the 4 neolithic + 1 iron Age Iranian aDNA samples from the Broushaki et al 2016 paper that came out very recently as well.)
roughnotes.22web.org/iran_adna_full.html
(Note: none of the Iran N samples derived for either of the LCT related SNPs. Which has an interesting implication)
As stated, the above table now also contains the data on the new Iranian neolithic samples that Broushaki et al 2016 provided in their Suppl Materials tables S9, S29 and S30.
To note:
* Iranian Neolithic sample WC1 from 7,455-7,082 calBCE indeed carried an allele for blue eyes (i.e. derived) AND was an entire match (for all alleles read) to the modern "European" blue eye haplotype, making Iran_N ancestors/a possible source population of the "European" blue eye ht. Earliest population to have this so far, IIRC/as far as I'm aware.
* (I just checked the Israeli sample I0867 7300-6350 BCE and it seems to be an ancestor (possible source population) for this haplotype too but fewer alleles read. And though I only glanced at the results, this ancient sample from Levant Neolithic may not have had blue eyes either, but not sure if carrier. Will mention when producing next table on Armenians.)
* The WC1 Iran_N sample also carried the derived allele for rs2228479, said to be associated with red/blond hair and poor tanning, high presence in one Asian population.
* Moreover, one of the Iran neolithic samples is a carrier for red hair: AH4 dated 8,205-7,755 calBCE carried the derived allele for rs11547464.
So nothing about the "European" phenotype is European. "Their" features were entirely derived from elsewhere. Just not so heavily selected elsewhere.
Moreover, another direct implication from the excellent Broushaki et al 2016 paper:
And *any* of these mutations that Indians may have - though they've not been selected for, clearly - we would have due to affinity with Iran_N and nothing to do with Europeans (i.e. nothing to do with ethnic Europeans invading or migrating).
Of course, we were already told some years back that the mutation for blue eyes arose in the "Near East" some 10kya ago. Well, so far the data seems to indicate that it arose in Iran Neolithic. As the derived allele (i.e. allele for blue eyes at rs12913832) was carried by Iran Neolithic individual at least one millennium before IIRC the earliest carriers of blue-eyes among either WHG or SHG. (E.g. La Brana is only from 7kya, i.e. 5000 BCE.) Besides, WHG - so-called "Western European" Hunter Gatherers - were from the "Near East" too and nothing European, merely a source for input into modern Europeans. And more memorably: SHG, Hunter Gatherers found in Scandinavia, carried the EDAR mutation (straight hair in E Asians) - this is IIRC as per the Mathieson 2015 paper. So SHG may have been like modern light-eyed Mongolians but darker. And did SHG contribute much at all to modern Europeans? They're not part of the 4 source components of "W-Eurasians" identified in the Lazaridis 2016 paper, unless SHG were now subsumed under WHG (but then, why do they have a separate designation as SHG). Whatever, modern Europeans don't seem to have inherited the EDAR mutation (in any case it didn't get selected). Whereas E Asians did. Has there been any report on what extent SHG may have affinities to modern E Asians?
(BTW: Supplementary materials p.23-p.24 of Broushaki et al 2016 are particularly good BTW, so too their peddling Iran Neolithic genomes as more likely indication of as Indo-Iranian urheimat or at least ethnic locus of dispersal than Yamna steppes. Note that Iran Neolithic genomes had no direct impact on the steppes, so that makes it all the more entertaining.
The Sarmatians of the Iron Age being almost exclusively Iran-derived Iranians - and not steppe derived, i.e. they travelled up into the steppes from Iran as seen by their Y haplogroups and generally uniparental markers - makes it further entertaining how profoundly influential they were on European culture, modern European "IE" *language*, and religion in all the key places of Europe. From Slavs to Germanic people to Celts. HUGE impact. The very Iranian Sarmatians practically invented everything that passes for modern European culture. Everything.
Unlike Scythians, Sarmatians can't be stolen as "European" by ethnicity: they were Iranians from Iran/Iran (non-steppe) territories.
Their impact on the royal houses of Europe is another thing. Up to Scandinavian Viking burials. Sarmatians were NOT ethnically European. They were ethnically Iranian. Of course, they greatly influenced the ethnogenesis of modern Europeans in the regions described. And their impact in Roman/N African territories was not nothing either.)
ADDED:
Similar table for aDNA from Armenia + the sole Levant Neolithic sample from Israel (in 1st sample column):
roughnotes.22web.org/armenia_adna_full.html
The 2nd L1a-M27 individual matches for all alleles available with the common European blue eye haplotype, besides being an actual carrier of the blue eye mutation at rs12913832 of HERC2.
The Levant Neolithic matches most positions of the same haplotype. No data at key locus rs12913832, but still, it may have been the ancestral haplotype for the most common blue eye haplotype seen in modern Europeans. C.f. similar to the Llorente paper high coverage Iran Neolithic sample: matches most positions for the haplotype, except one and is not a carrier of the actual mutation (despite the Llorente paper imputing the mutation, they too admitted it wasn't actually observed). So I think that Iranian Neolithic sample carried some ancestral haplotype to what eventually became the common one seen in modern Europeans (and possibly the common ht in many other blue-eyed but non-European populations). Anyway, it's not European.
- As per someone else, fair hair mutations present in non-Europeans (Chalcolithic Iranians and others IIRC) before Europeans acquired it. Can't remember what mutation(s) this was. IIRC it was supposed to be the earliest occurrence in these non-European populations.
- In any case, I note that an Iran Neolithic sample carried a mutation that lightened the phenotype (including hair), which mutation is seen mostly in *southern* Europeans (think Italians) but is much less common in N Europeans (think Germanic/Celtic and Slavic speaking Europeans). This may be the earliest occurrence.
- Red hair mutations present in Levant Neolithic (as per others) and, as per the Broushaki paper, one derived allele is present in an Iranian neolithic sample (only a carrier, but still). <- Also before any Europeans had it as far as I'm aware. So red hair not European either. [Note/remember: Neanderthals carried a different mutation for red hair, so that has nothing to do with this.]
- And we already knew blue eyes were "Near Eastern" from that other paper from a few years back. It just turns out that before WHG acquired it from their Near Eastern point of entry into Europe (wherever/whatever part of the "Near East" WHG were originally from), Iran Neolithic already had it.
So where did the Kalash get it from? Where do you think they got it from. All the way from Europeans - who didn't turn fair until relatively recently - or from their own region since the Neolithic ? The Kalash seem to have always been a small population and largely isolated, so recessive alleles can easily homogenise and get fixed in them. No surprises there.
Surprising, however, is how recently Europeans turned fair. (Considering their whining and grandstanding about it ever since they turned it into the defining part of their identity. So by their own definition - sorry, too late to rewrite it - there were no Europeans until people in Europe turned fair. That must make them the youngest population on the planet.)
Anyway, Europe turning fair recently must be like the lactose tolerance mutation suddenly became near-pervasive in Europeans (still don't know when that happened), whereas about 4.5 millennia back the mutation was really, really rare in Europe apparently. Likewise, not 4 millennia back, Europeans were still dark (dark - like fair - is a relative term, but let's just say that they were dark enough that the KKK types would have lynched their own ancestors). Then suddenly, since just 4 millennia back give or take, Europeans started turning fair and most of it got fixed. Because of selection apparently. [And then they spent about half that time, almost 2 millennia now, persecuting "dark" people and pretending "whiteness"="European" and having collective amnesia about their own origins and imagining people with light features anywhere else in the world "must be" derived from them, who are in reality themselves the derived population and have been fair for probably a shorter time than those other populations.]
But apparently it's argued that lactase persistence wasn't really selected for in Europe after all (at least the numbers came out too low to indicate selection, and this surprised some people). Wonder if Europe's population size was just so small - it was certainly much smaller before they swallowed the "New World" - or Europe just so malleable for other reasons, that features that originated in or dispersed from Iran and the Levant in the neolithic and were not selected for heavily in those regions got fixed in Europe=the periphery. Probably with founder effects as happened with the R1b and R1a. (European R1b way over 50% in some places apparently.)
Wonder when lactase persistence became so common in N Europe: was it in the middle ages? There were famines and disease from want then, so maybe it gave an added advantage to Europeans possessed of the mutation at that time. (No one's studied such recent aDNA with a focus on the mutation for lactose tolerance to my limited knowledge.)
Anyway, the point of this post was that the main and sole feature of European identity (i.e. "whiteness" which includes "caucasoid" features) is not European and originated in populations NOT directly ancestral to them. So they can stop trying to claim the Kennewick man, the Kalash, the Chachapoyans, etc etc as being "Euro-derived". It's Europeans' features that are derived. Whereas all these other people's supposedly "European" like phenotypes were developed at a time before Europeans got their current phenotype. Of course whiteness obssessed Europeans will still like to imagine "their" "white" ancestors going about invading and colonising pre-Columbian Peru etc, but then the world is filled with jihadis and oryanists and other such monotheists. It's the world we live in. For some unreason the rest of us have to live on the same planet with these people. Nothing for it but to avoid where possible.
(Aside: About the EDAR found in SHG, wonder if Saami show especial affinity to the SHG?)
The useful parts of this post are the 2 links in blue. And of course the name-dropping of the Broushaki 2016 paper. The authors are not propping up the Anatolian PIE theory, but it seems to me that - peripherally - they proffer some Near Eastern PIE theory (as far I can tell). Further, the fact that they claimed that IIRC the "Anatolian Chalcolithic" Kumtepe sample showed greatest affinity to Iran Neolithic (over Anatolia Neolithic) seems to me that they themselves rule out Anatolia as PIE urheimat. I.e. they have Anatolia Neolithic persistence replaced by Iranian input, although they mentioned homogenising it didn't seem two-way (Iron Age Iranian's relation to Kumtepe doesn't count when Kumtepe itself merely carries on the Iranian Neolithic thread). And in their main article the authors IIRC claimed that the Iranian Neolithic genome and its regional affinity (to Iran's Zoroastrians all the way to the Indian subcontinent) seems to them to better represent the "Indo-Iranian" source of dispersal. Where exactly they place the PIE Urheimat not sure, but that doesn't seem to be the main point of this paper of theirs (I'm sure they have a pet theory on this though and that it will come out eventually).
Further, their longer discussion in the Supplementary Materials seems to undercut the possible "steppe admixture" they offer in the main article for the Iron Age Iranian (R1b) sample. Although it was verging on tentative even in the main text, it was almost undermined in the SM. That part was a very entertaining read. (And even in the main article they actually ended up saying there was little support for a steppe IE dispersal point into the southern regions. In other words, they made any claims to steppe admixture lose value.)
Even so late in the day, nothing is fixed and everything is still up in the air. Apparently Harvard doesn't have a monopoly on the storytelling. (And Balanovsky wasn't even part of this paper. Wonder what he's leaning towards now, though.)
Strange, how instead of clearing up the historical picture, the aDNA is only muddying it up, especially as it comes in in bits and pieces, from here and there. From one cave or spot, or from one region wracked by founder effects (notably the steppes), and then it is all taken as *the* *sole* representative signature of the entire region/nation/population since time immemorial. Large regions that were centres of numerous and/or influential populations need thorough sampling. And *all* the data must be collected before people can start drawing conclusions. It's tiring to see all the continuously updated storytelling, continuously patching up embarrassing assumptions carried on from the previous papers. Why not get all the data from everywhere together first, and then see what it says or whether it's only raises more questions and answers none of the original ones.
But that would be too much to expect from Harvard types. Hellenthal's team seems to have done better. (After all, I'm still guessing what PIE urheimat theory they're pushing. Maybe they're trying to revive Sarianidi's once celebrated theory? I.e. Near Eastern Chalcolithic PIE Urheimat. Probably. Must be. Anatolia Neolithic seems to have failed.)
(* And Armenian too, but not in the list below, will put up that table later as I have to recheck for SLC24A5.)
Have now added in results of the 4 neolithic + 1 iron Age Iranian aDNA samples from the Broushaki et al 2016 paper that came out very recently as well.)
roughnotes.22web.org/iran_adna_full.html
(Note: none of the Iran N samples derived for either of the LCT related SNPs. Which has an interesting implication)
As stated, the above table now also contains the data on the new Iranian neolithic samples that Broushaki et al 2016 provided in their Suppl Materials tables S9, S29 and S30.
To note:
* Iranian Neolithic sample WC1 from 7,455-7,082 calBCE indeed carried an allele for blue eyes (i.e. derived) AND was an entire match (for all alleles read) to the modern "European" blue eye haplotype, making Iran_N ancestors/a possible source population of the "European" blue eye ht. Earliest population to have this so far, IIRC/as far as I'm aware.
* (I just checked the Israeli sample I0867 7300-6350 BCE and it seems to be an ancestor (possible source population) for this haplotype too but fewer alleles read. And though I only glanced at the results, this ancient sample from Levant Neolithic may not have had blue eyes either, but not sure if carrier. Will mention when producing next table on Armenians.)
* The WC1 Iran_N sample also carried the derived allele for rs2228479, said to be associated with red/blond hair and poor tanning, high presence in one Asian population.
* Moreover, one of the Iran neolithic samples is a carrier for red hair: AH4 dated 8,205-7,755 calBCE carried the derived allele for rs11547464.
So nothing about the "European" phenotype is European. "Their" features were entirely derived from elsewhere. Just not so heavily selected elsewhere.
Moreover, another direct implication from the excellent Broushaki et al 2016 paper:
And *any* of these mutations that Indians may have - though they've not been selected for, clearly - we would have due to affinity with Iran_N and nothing to do with Europeans (i.e. nothing to do with ethnic Europeans invading or migrating).
Of course, we were already told some years back that the mutation for blue eyes arose in the "Near East" some 10kya ago. Well, so far the data seems to indicate that it arose in Iran Neolithic. As the derived allele (i.e. allele for blue eyes at rs12913832) was carried by Iran Neolithic individual at least one millennium before IIRC the earliest carriers of blue-eyes among either WHG or SHG. (E.g. La Brana is only from 7kya, i.e. 5000 BCE.) Besides, WHG - so-called "Western European" Hunter Gatherers - were from the "Near East" too and nothing European, merely a source for input into modern Europeans. And more memorably: SHG, Hunter Gatherers found in Scandinavia, carried the EDAR mutation (straight hair in E Asians) - this is IIRC as per the Mathieson 2015 paper. So SHG may have been like modern light-eyed Mongolians but darker. And did SHG contribute much at all to modern Europeans? They're not part of the 4 source components of "W-Eurasians" identified in the Lazaridis 2016 paper, unless SHG were now subsumed under WHG (but then, why do they have a separate designation as SHG). Whatever, modern Europeans don't seem to have inherited the EDAR mutation (in any case it didn't get selected). Whereas E Asians did. Has there been any report on what extent SHG may have affinities to modern E Asians?
(BTW: Supplementary materials p.23-p.24 of Broushaki et al 2016 are particularly good BTW, so too their peddling Iran Neolithic genomes as more likely indication of as Indo-Iranian urheimat or at least ethnic locus of dispersal than Yamna steppes. Note that Iran Neolithic genomes had no direct impact on the steppes, so that makes it all the more entertaining.
The Sarmatians of the Iron Age being almost exclusively Iran-derived Iranians - and not steppe derived, i.e. they travelled up into the steppes from Iran as seen by their Y haplogroups and generally uniparental markers - makes it further entertaining how profoundly influential they were on European culture, modern European "IE" *language*, and religion in all the key places of Europe. From Slavs to Germanic people to Celts. HUGE impact. The very Iranian Sarmatians practically invented everything that passes for modern European culture. Everything.
Unlike Scythians, Sarmatians can't be stolen as "European" by ethnicity: they were Iranians from Iran/Iran (non-steppe) territories.
Their impact on the royal houses of Europe is another thing. Up to Scandinavian Viking burials. Sarmatians were NOT ethnically European. They were ethnically Iranian. Of course, they greatly influenced the ethnogenesis of modern Europeans in the regions described. And their impact in Roman/N African territories was not nothing either.)
ADDED:
Similar table for aDNA from Armenia + the sole Levant Neolithic sample from Israel (in 1st sample column):
roughnotes.22web.org/armenia_adna_full.html
The 2nd L1a-M27 individual matches for all alleles available with the common European blue eye haplotype, besides being an actual carrier of the blue eye mutation at rs12913832 of HERC2.
The Levant Neolithic matches most positions of the same haplotype. No data at key locus rs12913832, but still, it may have been the ancestral haplotype for the most common blue eye haplotype seen in modern Europeans. C.f. similar to the Llorente paper high coverage Iran Neolithic sample: matches most positions for the haplotype, except one and is not a carrier of the actual mutation (despite the Llorente paper imputing the mutation, they too admitted it wasn't actually observed). So I think that Iranian Neolithic sample carried some ancestral haplotype to what eventually became the common one seen in modern Europeans (and possibly the common ht in many other blue-eyed but non-European populations). Anyway, it's not European.
- As per someone else, fair hair mutations present in non-Europeans (Chalcolithic Iranians and others IIRC) before Europeans acquired it. Can't remember what mutation(s) this was. IIRC it was supposed to be the earliest occurrence in these non-European populations.
- In any case, I note that an Iran Neolithic sample carried a mutation that lightened the phenotype (including hair), which mutation is seen mostly in *southern* Europeans (think Italians) but is much less common in N Europeans (think Germanic/Celtic and Slavic speaking Europeans). This may be the earliest occurrence.
- Red hair mutations present in Levant Neolithic (as per others) and, as per the Broushaki paper, one derived allele is present in an Iranian neolithic sample (only a carrier, but still). <- Also before any Europeans had it as far as I'm aware. So red hair not European either. [Note/remember: Neanderthals carried a different mutation for red hair, so that has nothing to do with this.]
- And we already knew blue eyes were "Near Eastern" from that other paper from a few years back. It just turns out that before WHG acquired it from their Near Eastern point of entry into Europe (wherever/whatever part of the "Near East" WHG were originally from), Iran Neolithic already had it.
So where did the Kalash get it from? Where do you think they got it from. All the way from Europeans - who didn't turn fair until relatively recently - or from their own region since the Neolithic ? The Kalash seem to have always been a small population and largely isolated, so recessive alleles can easily homogenise and get fixed in them. No surprises there.
Surprising, however, is how recently Europeans turned fair. (Considering their whining and grandstanding about it ever since they turned it into the defining part of their identity. So by their own definition - sorry, too late to rewrite it - there were no Europeans until people in Europe turned fair. That must make them the youngest population on the planet.)
Anyway, Europe turning fair recently must be like the lactose tolerance mutation suddenly became near-pervasive in Europeans (still don't know when that happened), whereas about 4.5 millennia back the mutation was really, really rare in Europe apparently. Likewise, not 4 millennia back, Europeans were still dark (dark - like fair - is a relative term, but let's just say that they were dark enough that the KKK types would have lynched their own ancestors). Then suddenly, since just 4 millennia back give or take, Europeans started turning fair and most of it got fixed. Because of selection apparently. [And then they spent about half that time, almost 2 millennia now, persecuting "dark" people and pretending "whiteness"="European" and having collective amnesia about their own origins and imagining people with light features anywhere else in the world "must be" derived from them, who are in reality themselves the derived population and have been fair for probably a shorter time than those other populations.]
But apparently it's argued that lactase persistence wasn't really selected for in Europe after all (at least the numbers came out too low to indicate selection, and this surprised some people). Wonder if Europe's population size was just so small - it was certainly much smaller before they swallowed the "New World" - or Europe just so malleable for other reasons, that features that originated in or dispersed from Iran and the Levant in the neolithic and were not selected for heavily in those regions got fixed in Europe=the periphery. Probably with founder effects as happened with the R1b and R1a. (European R1b way over 50% in some places apparently.)
Wonder when lactase persistence became so common in N Europe: was it in the middle ages? There were famines and disease from want then, so maybe it gave an added advantage to Europeans possessed of the mutation at that time. (No one's studied such recent aDNA with a focus on the mutation for lactose tolerance to my limited knowledge.)
Anyway, the point of this post was that the main and sole feature of European identity (i.e. "whiteness" which includes "caucasoid" features) is not European and originated in populations NOT directly ancestral to them. So they can stop trying to claim the Kennewick man, the Kalash, the Chachapoyans, etc etc as being "Euro-derived". It's Europeans' features that are derived. Whereas all these other people's supposedly "European" like phenotypes were developed at a time before Europeans got their current phenotype. Of course whiteness obssessed Europeans will still like to imagine "their" "white" ancestors going about invading and colonising pre-Columbian Peru etc, but then the world is filled with jihadis and oryanists and other such monotheists. It's the world we live in. For some unreason the rest of us have to live on the same planet with these people. Nothing for it but to avoid where possible.
(Aside: About the EDAR found in SHG, wonder if Saami show especial affinity to the SHG?)
The useful parts of this post are the 2 links in blue. And of course the name-dropping of the Broushaki 2016 paper. The authors are not propping up the Anatolian PIE theory, but it seems to me that - peripherally - they proffer some Near Eastern PIE theory (as far I can tell). Further, the fact that they claimed that IIRC the "Anatolian Chalcolithic" Kumtepe sample showed greatest affinity to Iran Neolithic (over Anatolia Neolithic) seems to me that they themselves rule out Anatolia as PIE urheimat. I.e. they have Anatolia Neolithic persistence replaced by Iranian input, although they mentioned homogenising it didn't seem two-way (Iron Age Iranian's relation to Kumtepe doesn't count when Kumtepe itself merely carries on the Iranian Neolithic thread). And in their main article the authors IIRC claimed that the Iranian Neolithic genome and its regional affinity (to Iran's Zoroastrians all the way to the Indian subcontinent) seems to them to better represent the "Indo-Iranian" source of dispersal. Where exactly they place the PIE Urheimat not sure, but that doesn't seem to be the main point of this paper of theirs (I'm sure they have a pet theory on this though and that it will come out eventually).
Further, their longer discussion in the Supplementary Materials seems to undercut the possible "steppe admixture" they offer in the main article for the Iron Age Iranian (R1b) sample. Although it was verging on tentative even in the main text, it was almost undermined in the SM. That part was a very entertaining read. (And even in the main article they actually ended up saying there was little support for a steppe IE dispersal point into the southern regions. In other words, they made any claims to steppe admixture lose value.)
Even so late in the day, nothing is fixed and everything is still up in the air. Apparently Harvard doesn't have a monopoly on the storytelling. (And Balanovsky wasn't even part of this paper. Wonder what he's leaning towards now, though.)
Strange, how instead of clearing up the historical picture, the aDNA is only muddying it up, especially as it comes in in bits and pieces, from here and there. From one cave or spot, or from one region wracked by founder effects (notably the steppes), and then it is all taken as *the* *sole* representative signature of the entire region/nation/population since time immemorial. Large regions that were centres of numerous and/or influential populations need thorough sampling. And *all* the data must be collected before people can start drawing conclusions. It's tiring to see all the continuously updated storytelling, continuously patching up embarrassing assumptions carried on from the previous papers. Why not get all the data from everywhere together first, and then see what it says or whether it's only raises more questions and answers none of the original ones.
But that would be too much to expect from Harvard types. Hellenthal's team seems to have done better. (After all, I'm still guessing what PIE urheimat theory they're pushing. Maybe they're trying to revive Sarianidi's once celebrated theory? I.e. Near Eastern Chalcolithic PIE Urheimat. Probably. Must be. Anatolia Neolithic seems to have failed.)