R1b-M269--Back to the Drawing Board

[Allenson]

Once upon a time, R-M269 was thought to have its origins in the European Paleolithic. Later studies procliamed it to be a Neolithic arrival into Europe from the Near East/western Asia.

This latest study urges caution in either direction...

I'm still reading and digesting but thought I'd post the study and supplemental info for folks to read though.

[Logan]

No contridiction.

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%...l.pone.0010419

https://viewer.zoho.com/docs/micUz

[Transhumanist]

Who needs comedy, when you have Dienekes and Anatole Klyosov arguing over a point. This is not the first time. Check out the Rootsweb DNA List archives from late 2010 for more entertaining exchanges.

2 Comments
Anatole Klyosov said...
Excellent, Dienekes. I truly appreciate your boycott. It means that one more person who understands nothing in the area, is out.

Until you and other realize that DNA genealogy takes the chemical kinetics approach, and it has nothing to do with "population genetics", you fail to obtain meaningfull data.

Here are a few rules of DNA genealogy:

(1) Separate a haplotype dataset into DNA-lineages. Typically, there is a mix of them in almost any dataset. In those cases a "common ancestor" is a phantom.

(2) Employ the mutation rate constant which is calibrated and which is different for ANY haplotype format. There are more than 30 haplotype formats in current use. Hence, there are more than 30 mutation rate constants which should be in use.

(3) Employ well-defined criteria to prove that every separate DNA-lineage in a dataset has one and only one common ancestor. There are several criteria, and two principal ones are to be (a) a separate branch on a haplotype tree, and (b) a fit between a "linear" and "logarithmic" calculation procedures. In other words, time-dependent dynamics of mutations for each lineage should obey the first-order kinetics.

The way how you have "calculated" data based on mutations across a dataset is exactly the same as Zhivotovsky did. Threw everything into a blend, got some meaningless cocktail, and voila. The problem with Zhivotovsky and yours "calculations" is not a wrong mutation rate, but lack of separation of DNA-lineages. In those cases all "calculations" are doomed.

You better listen to a professional in chemical and biological kinetics, rather then follow you unqualified and primitive way of consideration of pretty complex haplotype datasets, which, neverthelesss, obey very clear rules of kinetics. If you believe that anthropologists understand physical chemistry in general, and chemical kinetics in particular, you are completely wrong.

Regards,

Anatole Klyosov

Sunday, August 28, 2011 1:46:00 AM

Dienekes said...
Anatole, I've simulated your method and it doesn't work; the logarithmic method in particular is crap and has incredibly huge confidence intervals.

Your lineage sorting is also crap, since haplotype clusters are not lineages, ancestral haplotypes can't be inferred (hence the need for "base" haplotypes). You go one step further and infer a number of phantom ancestors, reifying haplotype trees as phylogenies.

http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2008/09...ele-value.html

In particular, erroneously reconstructed ancestral haplotypes lead to a systematic underestimation of ages.

Your method overlooks all important sources of uncertainty to come up with artificially low confidence intervals. You believe your own BS and come up with fanciful scenaria of R1b Proto-Turks invading Europe, or R1a's coming from the Altai to Europe and then going back to Siberia all with clockwork precision.

You better listen to a professional in chemical and biological kinetics

Perhaps I will when I get into the biochemical business; for the time being I don't have to listen to you at all.

PS: I'd appreciate it if you stopped spamming my inbox with unsolicited copies of your genetics papers.

Sunday, August 28, 2011 2:21:00 AM