Slavic origins

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/avaria#Italian Some time ago one of the Avar period samples from Hungary reported initially as a female (V37.2: released Feb 2019): AV1 AV1 AV1 petrous .. .. 1240K AmorimNatureCommunications2018 1361 541-637 calCE (1487±26 BP) Hungary_Avar Szólád Hungary 46.28333333 17.85 F X2m'n 1472±27 0.325459145 2.76426 802843 half All PASS (literature) .. .. 0.325459145 0.0874 X2m'n 0.98 2018 Gained male Y-chromosome (V42.4: released Mar 2020): 5697 AV1 AV1 AV1 petrous 2018 AmorimNatureCommunications2018 AmorimNatureCommunications2018 1361 541-637 calCE (1487±26 BP) Hungary_AvarPeriod Szólád Hungary 46.28333333 17.85 1240K .. 2.573859 802843 U R1b1a1a2a1 .. X2m'n .. .. .. .. .. .. .. half .. PASS (literature) This erroneous information possibly have come from the authors themselves as even folks from the Reich's Lab were bamboozled for a while (although not completely, as the sex of the sample was changed to U nknown). Fortunately since then they&

I think that most people interested in archaeogenetics would easily name two ancient groups that are the base of genetic composition of modern day Balto-Slavs. These two groups are the Baltic Bronze Age and the Corded Ware Culture. But nor the Slavs, nor even the Balts lie on a hypothetical cline between CWC and Baltic_BA. They also aren't identical to any of them. Clearly at least one additional source of ancestry is needed - the neolithic farmers of Europe. To check which neolithic group can or cannot be the source of this surplus ancestry I've modelled modern populations using a large set of ancients. Then I subtracted from the targets the ancestry from sources not located on the EEF-WHG cline. Below you can see the West Eurasian PCA with the distribution of samples used in this model.   Results of this experiment: Slavs Balts Germanics Selected Germanic, Baltic and Slavic groups Selected IA and Medieval groups The first thing you may notice is the stark difference in the ty

One of the false information that keeps being repeated is the supposed Baltic HG admixture in the Bronze Age Baltic population. I've even seen people who instructed others to use Baltic_LVA_HG as a source of the so called "Balto-Slavic drift" in their models. If true, such admixture would make Baltic BA a hard-core north-east European population, and by extension it would anchor the Slavs to the northern Belarus or even north-western parts of Russia. Maybe that's why this idea is so popular? But the problem is that it ignores the data we have had for a long time. In the Baltics, a sudden shift towards Eastern Hunter-Gatherers was observed in the Middle Neolithic, as evidenced below: Target: Baltic_LVA_MN Distance: 1.9079% / 0.01907883 50.2 RUS_Karelia_HG 49.8 Baltic_LVA_HG It would be reasonable to expect that Baltic BA also has additional EHG admixture, but nor Baltic BA, nor Balts, nor Slavs have it. Mittnik et al. made an attempt to model Baltic BA as a mixture of

Early Slavic samples are still scarce in the archaeogenetic record, but at the same time there are already enough of them to start see certain patterns. One of them is the variability of the level of ancestry related to the Baltic BA cluster. For some reason there are plenty of people who strongly believe that only the samples with the highest Baltic BA-like ancestry can be representative for a Proto-Slavic population. According to them any deviation from this Baltic genetic profile eliminates given individual from a pool of potential Proto-Slavs. Such reasoning is wrong on so many levels and ignores so much of the already published data, that I don't know if even a dozen of blog posts will be enough to deal with these shenanigans. But for now let's focus on one simple aspect - that certain samples can't be representative for the Proto-Slavic population just because they don't look like Balts (sic!). Below you can see a North European PCA with Lithuanians a

Coordinates - Eurogenes Global 25 Anatolia_BA - Bronze Age populations without outliers CWC-Yamnaya - German CWC and Yamnaya Samara HG - Serbian Iron Gates, Motala HG, NOR_North_LN_HG, NOR_Meso, NOR_N_HG N - Polish GAC, German LBK N-HG - Blatterhohle, Wartberg