Comments on: Seeing Ötzi through our eyes

By: Razib Khan

Razib Khan — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 00:44:11 +0000

#4, the problem is that you need good reference populations. if you have a thorough admixed present day set of populations it isn’t always to easily reconstruct ancient populations when one of the ancient populations can not be found in ‘pure’ form (which is the case for austronesian + oceanian admixing). see:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7263/full/nature08365.html

i pointed this out to you before. it’s not a trivial objection, though it can be overcome (again, see above). i assume though that aDNA will make some of these issues less problematic.

By: Justin Giancola

Justin Giancola — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 11:29:59 +0000

^ Good post Eurologist.

By: Eurologist

Eurologist — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 10:21:01 +0000

I am not as pessimistic. I think Europe is sufficiently big with wrinkles at the fringe that even two or three time periods of severe mixing in the core has left sufficient structure and information at the edges. The problem with Europe is not that – it is that it likely started out rather homogeneous in the Gravettian in the first place, over a huge scale (from France to the Ukraine and parts of Urals, with some clines, of course), and then got twice re-settled post-LGM by pretty much the same people, and then again during the neolithic by highly-related people (some NW Anatolian/ Thracian/Balkan mixture – again with a strong cline).

Let’s compare this to Austronesia – a currently hot topic. There, within the past 6,000 years or so, language, archaeology, and genetics draw the same picture of the spread of settlement. Why is it so easy, there? Because “Mongoloid” genetics and Papuan is about >=50,000 years apart with no contact until rice farmers pushed south – not the ~25,000 max between Europe and West Asia, with continuous gene flow before and after in *both* directions. However, if several distinct populations can be made out in Europe with very specific East-West clines both in the North and in the South, as is the case, *my* bet is that these populations predate the neolithic.

By: Steve Sailer

Steve Sailer — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 10:04:18 +0000

So, lots of people in Europe back then were like Sardinians today?

What are Sardinians like today? I ask because I really don’t know …

You never hear much about Sardinians. There’s a famous Corsican we’ve all heard of, but there aren’t many famous Sardinians. A Sardinian lady won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1926, but I have no idea who she was. Gramsci was born in Sardinia, but his family were Catholic refugees from Albania.

By: Patrick Wyman

Patrick Wyman — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 22:59:24 +0000

Really excellent point. My hope is that we get a temporally intermediate sample with which to compare Otzi at some point in the near future; Kristina Killgrove is working on a Roman-period DNA project, but I’m not sure if she intends to do any genome analyses or just discern haplotypes from her samples.

By: Jean M

Jean M — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 18:58:34 +0000

So true.