Playing with Archeological DNA Samples: Part 2— The Findings
In Part 1 I went through the nitty gritty of getting the publicly available DNA data from research publications and turning it into an easy to use commerical text files in 23andMe format (RSID+chromosome+position+genotype/allele) that can be uploaded to various sites that offer a slew of DNA analyses. Now, let’s get into the fun stuff.
I’ve gone through a sampling from a few different datasets, including
- East Siberia / Bering Sea / Alaska
- Scythians / Sarmatians
- Ancient Levant
- Viking Age North-Eastern Europe
The first study was looking at the migration from Northern Mongolia to North America. I picked a few samples to look at and uploaded the results to MyTrueAncestry.
It was really cool to see them map onto similar samples around lake Baikal and ancient Montana! I also ran them through some admixture calculators on Genoplot (see my earlier guide) and saw the following:
Then I looked at Scythians — some of my own ancient ancestors that gradually moved from northern Iran to Ukraine over millenia. It was fascinating to see the progression from Asia to Eastern Europe
The older samples matched Central Asia — their ancestral lands. But also some of Europe started showing up:
But what was really interesting to me was the large chunk of African DNA they were still carrying!
Truly a testament to the great migrations of modern humans.
Of all the samples I had, only one (IO575) matched itself in MTA:
I did pull in the data for a few ancient Levantines, but only played around with one:
This one was fascinating to me because my spouse is an Ashkenazi Jew, and I recently found out that modern DNA-based research is rewriting the book on their origins. Here’s a paper describing the Hellenic–Slavic-Scythian origins of the Ashkenaz, if you are interested in the details. The summary is that Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews were probably the descendants of Anatolian Hellenic/Roman emmigrants who mixed with Scythians and were then absorbed by Slavic tribes moving East. Yiddish is a Slavic language mapped onto Germanic vocabulary, after the expansion of Kievan Rus destroyed the Khazar Khaganate, which provided cover for many Jews in the region, forcing the remaining groups to move Northwest.
Anyway, using the PCA feature of Genoplot, I was able to confirm this for at least this sample (circled) vs my wife (arrow):
You can see the “old” jews look like Palestinians and Druze of today, while the “new” Jews look more like South Italians and Greeks.
And finally, let’s look at everyone’s favorites — the Vikings :)
I’ve recently discovered thatI have a LOT of Viking DNA in me — mostly South Swedish / Baltic, but also some Danish and Norwegian. So I went on a quest to grab as many sample as I could. I’ll get to others eventually, but for selfish reasons, I started with the Pskov (VK159), Smolensk (VK224), and Chernigov (VK539):
I also added IIf from Medieval Estonia / Livonia, because I may have close ties to that area I did not know about before, through my Latvian family branch.
It’s really cool to see the difference, as you move south in Kievan Rus, starting with 34% of DNA from South Baltics in the North compared to 20% Atlantic in the South. Clearly there was a difference in genetic makeup among the Varangians that colonized the old Slavic lands and cities.
The Livonian sample carries no Asian blood, other than some Siberian, which makes sense given that Estonians and Livonians were Uralic in origin. VK159 is eerily similar to my own admixture!
Fun thing is that they all look very similar in “ancient” population admixture
But quite different using modern populations as references instead
with a clear split between the North / Baltic and South Russian / Ukrainian.
And of course it’s nice to be able to plot them against other samples and populations in a PCA (circle is me)
Playing with these, not only was I able to confirm some of the theories put forth in recent research literature, and trace the differences in populations as they migrated across large distances, but also shed more light on my own origins and give myself some new ideas of where to look for more info. I now know that I cluster better with old Rus Vikings than most modern populations. I have way more Fenno-Scandinavian in me than I ever expected. It’s amazing to see almost the same “ethnic mix” show up in a sample from a thousand years ago that I see in my own DNA today. Genetics are truly wild!
