Ancient DNA from Belarus

[Peterski]

One of abstracts from Human Evolution 2017 conference:

Human aDNA diversity from Eastern European territory

Alena Kushniarevich1,2, Lehti Saag3, Kristiina Tambets1, Maxim Charniauski4, Mikalai Pamazanau4, Alexei Avlasovich4, Andrei Voitehowich4, Anu Solnik1, Tuuli Reisberg1, Jüri Parik3, Oleg Davydenko2, Mait Metspalu1

1Estonian Biocentre, Tartu, Estonia; 2Institute of Genetics and Cytology of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus, Minsk, Belarus; 3University of Tartu, Dep. of Evolutionary Biology; 4Institute of History of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus, Minsk, Belarus

In our project, we focus on dynamics of human population structure in Eastern Europe during the last four thousand years. We have extracted DNA from 14 teeth representing two temporal layers of today's Belarus territory. One sample belongs to the Bronze Age Corded Ware culture, whereas 13 are from Medieval (11-13 cc AD) Slavic and Baltic ethnic contexts. Paired-end libraries for all samples were sequenced with Illumina NextSeq500 with the average genome coverage of ~0.3x. Variant calling was done using ANGSD (doHaploCall command) using the list of SNPs from the aDNA data set in Lazaridis et al., 2016. For the initial investigation of the newly generated aDNA sequences we have performed PCA, projecting aDNA samples on the PC, calculated from the modern human variation from Central-East Europe. We also have determined mtDNA haplogroups for all our samples using mtDNA-Server and haplogrep online tools.
To tackle the questions of genetic continuity/discontinuity and the possible reasons thereof (e.g. signals of recent selection) in East Europe during the time period of our interest, we are going to apply allele frequency-based analyses (PCA, ADMIXTURE, f3-statisctics etc) to our low-coverage genomes, available samples from Medieval Central-Eastern Europe and of Bronze Age samples from West Eurasia, as well as today's populations. For the genomes of high coverage, we are planning to run haplotype-based analyses.

[Peterski]

I guess that the results will show a lot of genetic continuity in Belarus from Bronze Age Corded Ware to the Middle Ages.

[jingorex]

All i want to know is the Y DNA.

Why can't they tell us that?

[Leto]

I'd love to see their results. Especially the medieval ones.

[kingjohn]

All i want to know is the Y DNA.

Why can't they tell us that?

they were G1

[Arduti]

Would love to see a kit for them on GEDmatch.

[Rethel]

Only one quite ancient... medieval are rather obvious, mixed,
but maybe will put some light on hidden migrations, but I do
not expect nothing special, or "pure", too much different than
modern population... maybe some very slight shifts. Thats all.