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Apparently, all Europeans have East Asian admixture, and Northern Europeans more of it than Southern Europeans. I read about it recently in a supplement from the latest David Reich et al. study on the origins of Amerindians (see section Note S3 here). The details are sketchy, so we'll have to wait until more info is available before getting stuck into the issue, but I wouldn't be surprised if these signals of East Asian autosomal admixture in Europeans were linked to the mtDNA C from Neolithic Ukraine.
Moving along, the presence of the two T lineages is also significant. This haplogroup seems to be common in remains from kurgan burials from West and South Siberia. Not only that, but it's also frequent in areas of Northern and Eastern Europe with very high frequencies of SNP markers linked to light eyes and fair hair, like the Baltic region.
This is worthy of note, because kurgan remains from South Siberia were tested for such markers, and appeared to show light eyes and fair hair at levels comparable to those of modern Northern and Eastern Europeans (more on that here). Indeed, they also mostly belonged to Y-chromosome haplogroup R1a, which is a marker that today dominates the region between the Baltic and Black Seas.
But mtDNA haplogroup T originally comes from the Near East, and most likely moved into Europe during the Neolithic. So the story unfolding here is that Near Eastern Neolithic migrants, carrying mtDNA T, and possibly Y-DNA R1a, migrated to Europe, and settled on the plains and steppes from the Baltic to the Caspian. Here they mixed with Mesolithic Europeans, who mostly carried mtDNA U lineages, and unknown Y-DNA haplogroups, as well as migrants from Siberia. This hybrid group then came up with the concept of the kurgan culture, and headed east, as far as South Siberia and Central Asia, spreading their language and way of life as they moved. Were these the early Indo-Europeans? Why not?
It's also important to note the presence of mtDNAs U3 and likely U1 in these Ukrainian results, especially in the context of a new study on West Siberian aDNA, published in the same online book. But I'll cover that in my next blog post.
http://eurogenes.blogspot.com.au/201...m-ukraine.html
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