Population Genetics

The first two books of the series A Song of Sheep and Horses address the Proto-Indo-European Urheimat problem from a wide anthropological perspective, using archaeology and cultural and biological anthropology. These books are centered on the culture and population genomics of Late Proto-Indo-European- and North-West Indo-European-speaking communities, but offer a comprehensive view of many other ethnolinguistic communities that might have spoken other Indo-European, Uralic, and neighbouring dialects.

Phylogenealogy is the study of lines of descent of groups of men using the procedures of genetic genealogy, which include genetics, surname studies, history and social analysis.
This paper uses spatial and temporal variation in the subclade distribution of the dominant Irish/British haplogroup R1b-L21 to describe population changes in Britain and Ireland over a period of 4500 years from the early Bronze Age until the present. The main focus is on the initial spread of L21-bearing populations from south-west Britain as part of the Beaker Atlantic culture, and on a major redistribution of the haplogroup that took place in Ireland and Scotland from about 100 BC.
The distributional evidence for a British origin for L21 around 2500 BC is compelling. Most likely the mutation originated in the large Beaker colony in south-west Britain, where many old lineages still survive. From that spread point it was carried rapidly by sea into north-west France, Ireland, north-west Spain and the Middle Rhine, which today have a high incidence of L21, and into Northern England and Scotland. Of about 45 known early Bronze branches or subclades of L21, almost all are found in Britain or in the English-speaking Diaspora. We are able to identify most of the larger subclades of L21 as ‘Atlantic’—spread throughout the Atlantic Beaker range with a distinct presence in Cornwall-Devon in the early Bronze. Continental R-L21 has origins in small random samples from the extensive English distribution. While many studies have tried to identify continental contributions to Isles populations, here we suggest that the reverse was much greater, at least in the early Bronze Age.
The global distribution of L21 subclades is almost exactly Pareto, showing an entirely random expansion from an initial point of time, however that point is much later than the early Bronze. Around 100 BC a second major R-L21 expansion from a severe bottleneck was initiated in Ireland and Scotland, when a dozen residual ‘deep’ sub-branches sprang to life and came to dominate L21. This is consistent with a collapse in the effective population of Ireland, followed by a rapid expansion. The limited evidence suggests that a severe weather event, famine and/or epidemic occurred around this time. The strongly patrilineal nature of insular Celtic society helped to keep male lines culturally intact, so that these emergent deep subclades can still be identified with Irish clans to some extent.
Around 90 per cent of R-L21 individuals in Scandinavia have paternal-line relatives in Ireland and Scotland dating to Viking times. The distribution is random and involves small numbers and distinct lines, suggesting that some of these were taken to Scandinavia as prisoners and slaves.
The Great Migration of millions of people from Ireland and Scotland to North America in relatively modern times was so substantial that no founder effects can be discerned and the New World has acted as a growth matrix extending and preserving the pre-existing R-L21 distribution.
This paper introduces several ‘skyline’ methods to trace the development over time of the subclade distribution of L21. These show that the distribution in England has not changed a great deal since the Bronze Age, in stark contrast to the situation in Ireland and Scotland. England and the Continent now make a much smaller contribution to R-L21 than in the past, probably stemming from Roman and Germanic expansion that pushed L21-bearing populations westward.

Previous archaeological and linguistic theories have based the expansion of some Indo-European proto-languages on the spread of the Corded Ware cultures, under the influence of the Yamna horizon.

Investigation of human ancestry of ancient and modern DNA samples have been used together with recent archaeological and linguistic data to obtain a more precise general picture of the evolution of Eurasian cultures, peoples, and languages related to Indo-European languages.

The Indo-European demic diffusion model proposed advances the theory that the expansion of Indo-European languages from the steppe was linked to the expansion of R1b1a1a2-M269 lineages Eurasia. A North-West Indo-European group most likely expanded directly with western Yamna migrants into the East Bell Beaker culture, and the Corded Ware culture was probably not associated with the expansion of Indo-European languages. That challenges previous archaeological and linguistic theories concerning the dialectal evolution of Late Proto-Indo-European.

A long standing traditional cultural division exists between the Irish, the Welsh and the Highland Scots on one side, who are of Celtic heritage, and the English on the other side, who are of mixed Germanic, French, Celtic and even Roman ancestry. Until recently, no historian could really agree on on much influence the Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and Normans had had on the British and Irish gene pools, let alone agree on where the Celts came from before that. Were the Celts descended from Bronze or Iron Age invaders from the Continent ? Were they the direct descendants of the Neolithic farmers who built Stonehenge, or even of the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers who recolonised northern Europe at the end of the last glaciation 10,000 years ago ? Before the age of historical population genetics these questions were left to anyone's guess and speculations. The fast paced progress in genetic sequencing have shed a new light on our prehistory and it is now possible to answer all those questions with a great degree of certainty. This page attempts to retrace the origins of the British and Irish people through the analyses of their genetic markers using Y-chromosomal (Y-DNA) haplogroups, which are passed on nearly unaltered from father to son, mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), which is inherited only from one's mother, and complete genomic studies looking at all the chromosomes.

This is a major revisionist paper putting up an alternative point of view to the  dominant "Steppe hypothesis" for the  Eneolithic resettlement of Europe. I expect it to be controversial.

- R1a was a small element within R1 tribespeople that entered Europe at the beginning of the Holocene, mostly through the Balkans.. They passed up into the steppe by 6000 BC.

- around 3000 BC an Event occurred that  demolished the nearby Neolithic settlements containing millions of people and left only a few survivors. Two of the lucky men were R1a-Z283 and R1a-Z93, whose descendants expanded almost into unoccupied space.

- these survivors had picked up Bronze technology from their neighbours. They used it to control key resources - malachite, amber and other minerals - which were required by the new Bronze Age civilizations to the south. The trade enabled their population  to keep expanding the whole way through the Bronze Age.

- about 2200 BC a major drying event sent the tribes spilling into North India, Iran and beyond, where they formed the late Harappan culture  and  founded Hinduism and Zoroastrianism.

- later there were other R1a expansions, particularly the Slav/Ashkenazi  expansion in Greater Poland in the post-Roman period

The main points of departure from the canon are:
- no horses. the cow did it.
- trade and settlement of vacant lands, not invasion
- provides mild support for both the ''Anatolian hypothesis' and ''steppe hypothesis' - at different times.

Careful cross-disciplinary investigation of ancient DNA samples recently published supports a demic diffusion model for the expansion of Indo-European-speaking peoples of Yamna directly into central and western Europe through the Bell Beaker culture, challenging previous archaeological and linguistic theories based on the expansion through the Corded Ware culture. Potential consequences of this new model in archaeological and linguistic investigation are outlined, among them the development of a stable framework of time and space for Indo-European dialectal classification, allowing for a more precise dating of Indo-European branches and their splits and expansions, and why and how they might have occurred.

Previous archaeological and linguistic theories have based the expansion of some Indo-European proto-languages on the spread of the Corded Ware cultures, under the influence of the Yamna horizon.
Investigation of human ancestry of ancient and modern DNA samples have been used together with recent archaeological and linguistic data to obtain a more precise general picture of the evolution of Eurasian cultures, peoples, and languages related to Indo-European languages.
The Indo-European demic diffusion model proposed advances the theory that the expansion of Indo-European languages from the steppe was linked to the expansion of R1b1a1a2-M269 lineages Eurasia. A North-West Indo-European group most likely expanded directly with western Yamna migrants into the East Bell Beaker culture, and the Corded Ware culture was probably not associated with the expansion of Indo-European languages. That challenges previous archaeological and linguistic theories concerning the dialectal evolution of Late Proto-Indo-European.

The Kushites lived in Africa and Eurasia. Kushites originated in Africa. Researchers have observed that many of the Caucasus hunter-gatherers (CHG) and early European farmers (EF) populations carried R1a and R1b clades, and cultivated millet, which was not cultivated in Central Asia and the Middle East until 1000s of years after it was cultivated at Nabta Playa in Africa, and in the Ukraine by CHG and EF populations. Interestingly, the CHG carried the R1b1, and R1b1a lineages. Some researchers claim that these clades are " distant relatives " of V88, and that V88 is the result of a back migration from Eurasia to Central Africa. The archaeological evidence, on the other hand, lacks any corroboration of a back migration from Eurasia. Instead, the archaeogenetic evidence indicates that Niger-Congo speaking Africans from North Africa and the Saharo-Sahel, called Kushites in the historical literature early settled Crete, Iberia and Anatolia, and that these Africans introduced R1b, the Bell Beaker and the agro-pastoral cultural traditions into Eurasia during the Neolithic.

About Chitpavan Konkanastha Brahmins' Origins
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Books by this author - Vibhakar V. Lele- in the series – ‘Origins of Chitpavan Brahmins’:

1. Vol. 1. Origins of Chitpavan Brahmins - Chitpavan Konkanastha 
Brahmins’ History [Proto- and Pre-] - 532 pages/
Published Print copy available on Pothi.com at
₹ 1500/-
https://pothi.com/pothi/book/vibhakar-vitthal-lele-chitpavan-konkanastha-brahmins-history-proto-and-pre
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Abridged edition of above book as
2. Essentials Chitpavan Konkanastha Brahmins' History (Proto- and Pre) - 406 pages
₹ 900/-
Available on Pothi.com as printed book at
https://pothi.com/pothi/book/vibhakar-vitthal-lele-essentials-chitpavan-konkanastha-brahmins-history-proto-and-pre
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ii. As e-book on Pothi.com as ebook7539 at Rs. 400/-
***
3. Vol. 2. Sarasvati River - Ancestral Home of Chitpavan Brahmins - 245 pages/
₹ 500/-
Available as printed book on Pothi. com at-
https://pothi.com/pothi/book/vibhakar-vitthal-lele-chitpavans-ancestral-home-sarasvati-river
**
ii. As e-book on Pothi.com as ebook7538 at Rs.300/-
****
This book pieces together the most important story of who they were, from where they came, their Kuladevatas, original habitats, customs and other important details. It categorically disproves the ancient hollow anecdotes based upon the mere mythical propositions and conjectural
guesswork. The author would like to share the story with Chitpavans and well-wishers.

Dr Rosalind O’Hanlon, Professor of Indian history and culture, Oriental Institute, Oxford, who is researching in the Chitpavan Brahmins’ history, during a communication, informed me on the
underlying article on ‘The Roots Of Chitpavan Brahmins’ of which this book is a further elaboration that she found it most interesting and very much enjoyed, and learned from, all of the
materials that this author had collected therein.

Sources-1: Research paper by Mr. N. S. Rajpurohit, An eminent archaeologist from Karnataka, on Talagunda inscriptions;
2. Mr. Korati Sri Niwas Rao's book on ‘Sri Raghavendra Charitra’ (Kannada);
3. ‘Vyadeshwaroda Mahakavya’ by Vishwanatha (Early 17th century AD)
4. Lele Kulavrittanta and
5. Samrata Pulakeshi’s Shila-lekha

This book, with annexures, comprises of the propositions about the prehistory of Chitpavan Brahmins. Most of the important scattered details have been put in place to stitch together the ancient and medieval history of Chitpavan Konkanastha Brahmins. At the same time, the author delves into their proto-history from the times of sage Agasti.
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Few topics in European history are as controversial and disputed as the barbarian migrations into the Roman world at the end of Antiquity. What was the nature of these barbarian peoples that appear in the written sources of the period? Were they discrete ethnic groups whose arrival in the Empire was the end of long migrations of unified social and cultural groups or were they heterogeneous coalitions formed in the recent past? What relationship can be determined between the names of peoples in written sources and different material cultures found by archaeologists? How large and significant were these migrations? Did they replace local populations, simply dominate them, or rapidly merge with them? An international and interdisciplinary team is attempting to employ new approaches developed in genomics to help resolve these questions.

The study of the demographic characteristics of the first Mediterranean global network, the Roman Empire, is not an easy task. There are a lot of aspects to consider and an almost equal number of factors affecting them. In addition, the possible sources of information used to be incomplete and biased. Although methodology for conducting this kind of studies has evolved through time, allowing us to extract and to interpret the data in a better way, some aspects remain still obscure. [Contrib Sci

Introduction.-
Previous archaeological and linguistic theories have based the expansion of some Indo-European proto-languages on the spread of the Corded Ware cultures, under the influence of the Yamna horizon.
Results.-
SNPs and admixture analyses of ancient and modern DNA samples have been used together with recent archaeological and linguistic data to obtain a more precise general picture of the evolution of Eurasian cultures, peoples, and languages related to Indo-European languages.
The Indo-European demic diffusion model proposed advances the theory that the expansion of Indo-European languages from the steppe was mainly linked to the expansion of peoples belonging to haplogroup R1b in Eurasia. A North-West Indo-European group most likely expanded directly with western Yamna migrants into the East Bell Beaker culture, and the Corded Ware culture was probably not linked to the expansion of Indo-European languages. That challenges previous archaeological and linguistic theories concerning the dialectal evolution of Late Proto-Indo-European.

Relying on a populace well-educated in family history based in ancestral genealogy, a robust national genomics sector has developed in Québec over the past decade-and-a-half. The same period roughly coincides with a fourfold increase in the number of individuals and organizations in the region self-identifying with a mixed-race form of indigeneity that is counter to existing Indigenous understandings of kinship and citizenship. This paper examines how recent efforts by genetic scientists, working on a multi-year research project on the 'diversity' of the Québec gene pool, intervene in complex settler-Indigenous relations by redefining indigeneity according to the logics of 'Native American DNA'. Specifically, I demonstrate how genetic scientists mobilize genes associated with Indigenous peoples in ways that support regional efforts to govern settler-Indigenous relations in favour of otherwise white settler claims to Indigenous lands.

According to the poem THE WELSH TRIADS: "There were three social tribes on the Isle of Britain. The first was the tribe of the Cambrians. The second was the tribe of the Lloegrians, who came from Gascony. The third were the Brython, who came from Armorica (Veneti)". Therefore which was the tribe of King Arthur among the many tribes living in England during the Roman period? The scientific and comprehensive answer of the book allows us to know the real identity of the legendary king.  Although the Veneti were a very ancient and fascinating people who were scattered in various areas of Europe, they have oft been studied only by restricted groups of experts. It is now hightime to spread this knowledge among a more general audience of history lovers. This volume thus sets out to  offer an innovative study on the Veneti of the Atlantic and Baltic areas through a comprehensive analysis of historical, archaeological and mythological aspects.

If H2a1 Mitochondrial DNA (MtDNA) bearers suddenly appeared in Eastern Europe in late 6th millennium BC and were omnipresent during Eurasian Copper and Bronze Ages, their modern dispersion's pattern seems to indicate they consciously overlapped Palaeolithic sites we have linked to the practice of early medicine. However they brought new characteristics from a prior southeastern Anatolian (Taurus Mountains) and Levantine (Galilea) ethnogenesis based on the convergence of Pastoralism for Milk (PM), co-evolution between gene and food practice implying the development of Lactase Persistence (LP), the Early Seeds Processing and specific associated behaviours such as selected body parts or perforated teeth as beads in burials. A Levantine thaumaturgical and matriarchal organization based on military force seemed to have synthesized all these influences and has diffused a culture whose elements are all reunited in the grave of Individual from Hilazon Tachtit Stage D (12000 cal BP, Natufian Culture). The lineage seemed to have followed the Fertile Crescent corridor that leads to Lesser Caucasus and reconstituted in Karabakh, close to the Kalavan-1 site, most of the Natufian cultural context. During Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB), while H2a1 MtDNA bearers expanded in Western Asia by Levant to become one of the most frequent sub-haplogroup of H, the corridor that promoted exchanges between Armenian Obsidian sites and the later Halaf site of Domuztepe, close to the modern Cilician H2a1 MtDNA hotspot, imposed advanced agricultural technics on the Araxes and Vorotan rivers. Thanks to a solid transgenerational transmission of medicinal practices that allowed overpassing the simultaneous development of new diseases like Yersinia Pestis, the innovative woman's lineage became a key element in the new population's admixture from Araxes – Vorotan-Hakari Rivers, future pillar of the Kura-Araxes Culture. While the agricultural Halaf influence extended towards the Caspian maritime plain, Bolgarçay River (Azerbaijan) and Gilan, (Iran), medicinal exchanges with central Asia triggered a new military network specialized in the trade of Boric acid and projected H2a1 MtDNA bearers in Inner Asia. West, the Transcaucasian expansion of H2a1 MtDNA bearers put an end to the Shulaveri-Shomu Tepe culture and their penetration between Don and Volga broadcasted thaumaturgy and advanced agricultural technics until Rhine following Gravettian sites we have demonstrated to be dedicated to medical practices. A last wave of H2a1 MtDNA coincides with the expansion of the Kura Araxes Culture in all Fertile Crescent and reached Atlantic during late 3 rd and early 2 nd millennia BC, changing the whole agricultural landscape of Western Europe until the Roman Empire. This paper demonstrate that Epi Palaeolithic elites were personally engaged in the survival and well-being of their groups, the Neolithic increasing demography forcing them to find solutions (*həll (n.) modern Azeri) making the 'Hellenism' the common base of the Indo-European culture born in Fertile Crescent.

There is a global distribution of Y-Chromosome R-M343 subclades across the African continent. The major subclades are R-M269 and R-V88. The V88 subclade is the oldest clade to separate from R-M343. The V88 sub-clade, had relatives in Early Neolithic samples from across a wide geographic area from Iberia, eastward to Germany and Samara. This would place carriers of relatives of V88 among the Yamnaya and Bell Beaker people. Given the wide distribution of V88 and M269 in Africa and Neolithic Europe suggest that, the Bell Beaker and Yamnaya people were Africans, not Indo-Europeans, because these cultural complexes and the people who practiced these cultures originated in Africa.

Recent improvements in genetic analysis and genotyping methods have resulted in a rapid expansion of the power of molecular markers to address ecological questions. Microsatellites have emerged as the most popular and versatile marker type for ecological applications. The rise of commercial services that can isolate microsatellites for new study species and genotype samples at reasonable prices presents ecologists with the unprecedented ability to employ genetic approaches without heavy investment in specialized equipment. Nevertheless, the lack of accessible, synthesized information on the practicalities and pitfalls of using genetic tools impedes ecologists’ ability to make informed decisions on using molecular approaches and creates the risk that some will use microsatellites without understanding the steps needed to evaluate the quality of a genetic dataset. The first goal of this synthesis is to provide an overview of the strengths and limitations of microsatellite markers and the risks, cost and time requirements of isolating and using microsatellites with the aid of commercial services. The second goal is to encourage the use and consistent reporting of thorough marker screening to ensure high quality data. To that end, we present a multi-step screening process to evaluate candidate loci for inclusion in a genetic study that is broadly targeted to both novice and experienced geneticists alike.

Haplogroup J1 is a Middle Eastern paternal lineage which underwent a first expansion around the Mediterranean basin and the Red Sea region during the Neolithic, and a second major re-expansion from the Arabian peninsula with the diffusion of Islam.