Brown eyed farmers & blue eyed hunter-gatherers.

slowburner

Interesting if not peer-reviewed research results.
http://www.nature.com/news/ancient-european-genomes-reveal-jumbled-ancestry-1.14456

Ipso

You might find the discussion here interesting.

http://www.anthrogenica.com/showthread.php?1756-Ancient-human-genomes-suggest-three-ancestral-populations-for-Europeans

Ipso

Another ancient DNA result.

http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2014/01/brown-skinned-blue-eyed-y-haplogroup-c.html?m=1

slowburner

Ipso wrote: »

Another ancient DNA result.

http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2014/01/brown-skinned-blue-eyed-y-haplogroup-c.html?m=1

You know you're getting old when abstracts are easier to read than blogs.

slowburner

Even more on 'old blue eyes'.

http://www.independent.ie/world-news/original-blueeyed-boy-lived-in-a-cave-7000-years-ago-29952309.html

Abstract here:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature12960.html

Wibbs

The skin colour is an odd one. IIRC while eye colour is easy enough, it's actually not quite nailed down that xyz genes = pale skin or abc genes = pale. Hence the reports not quite sure how dark or not the chaps people were. Yes he had African versions of the genes, but could that admixture still make him pale? Asians are also pale, but by a different set of genes to Europeans. The more I read it the more it seems to me anyway that the jury is still out.

dubhthach

Haplogroup C is the big news on this to be honest. It's one of the final nails in the head to Oppenheimer's theories about R1b been linked to Spanish refugee. Correlates with known evidence from Neolithic which was also showing lack of R1b in ancient DNA samples.

slowburner

Interesting article in the Guardian today with a topical theme .

The modern English inherited around 50% of their genes from early European farmers, 36% from western European hunter-gatherers, and 14% from the ancient north Eurasians. According to the study, published in Nature, modern Scots can trace 40% of their DNA to the early European farmers and 43% to hunter-gatherers, though David Reich, a senior author on the study at Harvard University, said the differences were not significant.

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/sep/18/ancient-ancestors-europeans-dna-study

dubhthach

Basically all Europeans are an "admixed" population akin to say modern Brazilians, however whereas Brazilians have had only 400-500 years to mix we've had on order of 5-8,000 years of contunious mix. Result is that modern European populations are fairly "blended", in comparison in Brazil (or Mexico as another example) you can find very wide variation in the three main admixture components (European, Amerindian and African) with some individuals 90%+ of one component etc.

The variation between various European populations can be tied down to geography and limitations on gene-flow due to various "borders" (linguistic for example)

dubhthach

There's some debate that ANE (Ancient North-Eurasian) is correlated to spread of Corded Ware material culture. To be clear "ANE" no longer exists as a distinct population (eg. you won't find people who are 90% ANE) they've been subsumed into other population groups via "intermarriage" etc. A parallel from the historic period would be what happened with the Goths in Iberia and the Franks in what is now France.

dubhthach

The following diagram explains the admixture process, using examples of ancient DNA (MA1, Loschbour, Stuttgart) to help infer the original source populations:



MA1 is the 25,000 year old "siberian" boy who was found to be Haplogroup R* on his y-Chromosome (Eg. negative for R1 and R2). What's interesting is the ANE population which he belonged to (which no longer exists as a distinct genetic population) contributed to both modern European and Amerindian populations.

Amerindians are a mix of an "East Asian" component and Ancient North Eurasian. What's interesting is that the dominant Y-chromosome haplogroup among Amerindians tends to be Haplogroup Q which is close relative to Haplogroup R, both forming part of wider "Paragroup" P.

Why this is important is that Haplogroup R is the most common y-chromosome haplogroup among European men today. In the form of R1b it reaches a level of 90% among Irishmen.