Monday, September 14, 2015

Maykop culture's people: The source of the Caucasian-like ancestry in the Yamnaya?

As David mentioned over at Eurogenes, we'll be seeing what some peoples of the Maykop culture   looked like genomically as Oxford University recently donated Maykop samples to the Reich lab.



As has been stated in the past on the Anthromadness blog; Haak et al. 2015 found what looked to be a West Asian ancestry carrying element in the Yamnaya Pontic-Caspian Steppe pastoralists and characterized it as Armenian/Cacuasian-like.

From what I understand, some in the genome blogging world have connected this element to the illusive "Teal component" which looks be a mixture between Ancient North Eurasian-related ancestry and West Asian / Near Eastern ancestry.

I'm no expert on the archaeological nature of these cultures (the Yamnaya and Maykop) but there seems to have definitely been some rather deep interactions between them whilst the Maykop culture geographically sat between the Yamnaya and West Asia to the south which has led some to believe that the Maykop are the source of the West Asian-esque input in the Yamnaya.

Only time will tell...


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