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They were semi-mong:
Quote from Polako:
German Dziebel has a very interesting blog entry Yuzhnyi Olenii Ostrov: Ancient mtDNA Evidence for Amerindian Admixture in EuropeHowever, a pre-print at arXiv, courtesy of some of the same authors who wrote the Patterson et al. paper, proposes that Europeans might be a mix of three ancient groups: Neolithic farmers, Mesolithic European hunter-gatherers, and/or Mesolithic North or Central Asians. In fact, this model is very similar to the one I entertained in my blog entry about the Patterson et al. paper, in which I said that Mesolithic European hunter-gatherers carried a North Eurasian component, rather than being entirely of North Eurasian stock (see here). This makes sense in the light of ancient mtDNA results, which show Mesolithic Europeans carrying mostly West Eurasian-specific U4 and U5, but with some samples from Mesolithic and Neolithic Europe featuring a minority of Siberian-speific markers such as C.
http://anthropogenesis.kinshipstudie...ure-in-europe/
Karelia has historically been occupied by Karelians (or Karely in Russian), the speakers of the West Finnic branch of the Uralic family, but the ancient DNA recovered from the site suggests that there was no strong continuity between Yuzhnyi Olenii Ostrov people and modern Karelians, Finns or Saami, hence Uralic-speakers must have colonized this area in post-Mesolithic times. Craniologically, the Yuzhnyi Olenii Ostrov burial is dominated by Caucasoid morphology (left) but, importantly, there is a small number of skulls that display Mongoloid traits (right). Odontologically, the burial shows elevated frequencies of several Sinodonty (Northeast Asian-Amerindian) traits, including shoveling (the same trend as observed in other places such as the Caucasus), six-cusp upper molar, deflecting wrinkle of the metaconid and distal trigonid crest, which can be interpreted as either the preservation of archaic (plesiomorphic) tooth morphology in Mesolithic Europeans (e.g., six-cusp UM is found as far back as Homo erectus) or as gene flow from Asians and or American Indians (see Зубова А.В. 2011. “Одонтологические данные к проблеме «монголоидности» населения Восточной Европы в мезолитическую эпоху,” Вестник Московского университета. Серия XXIII. Антропология. № 1).
Among the surprising findings from Yuzhnyi Olenii Ostrov mtDNA are hg H (a highly frequent modern European haplogroup, which so far has been poorly attested in pre-Neolithic sites) and, especially, hg C1, which is found at highest frequency and diversity in the New World.At the same time, Der Sarkissian’s strangely categorical claim (p. 168) that “the possibility of a prehistoric genetic influence from the Americas into Mesolithic Europe is highly unlikely” is a gross overstatement. Considering the fact that a whole-genome analysis corroborates the presence of Amerindian admixture in Europe (with northern Europe being more affected than southern Europe), hg C1a is already considered to be the product of a back-migration from the New World to eastern Siberia, craniologically Mongoloid morphology has the earliest appearance in North America, and not East Asia (Peter Brown (1999). “The First Modern East Asians? A Further Look at Upper Cave 101, Liujiang and Minatogawa,” in Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Origins of the Japanese, International Research Center for Japanese Studies. Kyoto. Pp. 105-130. 1999) and archaeologically the quintessential Paleoindian fluted point industry is known to have expanded northward to Alaska and Northeast Asia, it’s not a stretch to imagine that some of these early “Mongoloid” groups migrated across Siberia into northern Europe at the end of the last Ice Age and merged with the pre-existing Caucasoid populations. The rarity of hg C1 in the ancient mtDNA samples in Europe may indicate a very targeted and restricted penetration of migrant forager groups that crossed Beringia after the melting of the glaciers. At the same time, Yuzhnyi Olenii Ostrov may be a refugium with deeper roots in European Upper Paleolithic, and hg C1 a relic surviving into the European Mesolithic from earlier times due to geographic isolation and long-term local endogamy reported for Yuzhnyi Olenii Ostrov by craniologists and odontologists (Jacobs K. (1992). “Human population differentiation in the peri-Baltic Mesolithic: The odontometrics of Oleneostrovskii mogilnik (Karelia),” Human Evolution 7 (4): 33-48).
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