New study tells about the Siberian origin, but not yet about the Finns

Finally, the new study about the Siberian origin in Finland is published.   It is however too early to say where the Finns came from, or even speculate on it, because the study includes no samples from the settlement areas of ancient (prehistoric) Finns or from areas where they according scientists came from.   Rumors tell that researchers have Iron Age samples also from the Southwest Finland, but we have still to wait to see it.  The data is not yet available, but I'll be online soon after I have them. 

Perspectives using traditional unsupervised admixture analysis

Trying to border us closer on our reality and on the side of believable I have done the following series of Admixture analyses using samples of living Eurasian populations.  My database consists of 0.5 million SNP's over the world, but to minimize the effect of recent genetic drift I made a LD pruning operation decreasing the amount of SNP's to 125 kSNP's. Without that many isolated sample groups would hijack the analysis and turn the history backward.   But there are many kinds of genetically isolated populations;  the Basques are not a young isolation.  Conversely in large areas in the North Europe and in the North Asia many populations are very young and they can make the history really backward in genetic tests. Those small northern, not so long ago diverged groups, were hunter-gatherers or nomads without borders.  Once western or eastern civilizations with text books appeared to the neighborhood they were localized and they we named.  This happened only a few hundreds years ago.  No one really know where they lived and where they came from THOUSANDS years ago.    

This post just to remind about the present-day reality after hypocrite uniparental speculations about our ancestry seen on the internet and in popular science.  The command line was

$admixture1.3 data.bed n -j4 -B

where n is 9-15 and 20 (20 only in numeric data) .

You can repeat this test with your own data and post results here.  Remember to carry out LD-pruning to get rid of the misleading recent genetic drift.

The data includes 560 individual,  20 samples at its peak in each group.  I computed group averages to make the results more easy to read.  The data behind bars can be downloaded here.

Be aware of the bar colors, because I had not nerve to arrange colors manually and automated "R barplot" coloring was not a bullet proof solution and same colors exist repeatedly with several k values. You can check the result using downloaded data.

Mongolian or not Mongolian

I already promised to stop my IBD rant, but it did happen that a new Chinese study provoked me to do a little more.  This new study is here and here.   The figure below shows shared IBD segments of 1-2 cM and the ratio between shared segments of Evenks and Mongolians.  If the ratio is high then the Evenk admixture is more likely than the Mongolian one.  If the ratio is low, but over 1, we go closer the Mongolian probability, but the Evenks IBD (Siberians) can act like a proxy for Mongolians.  Ratios below 1 means that the Mongolian admixture is more likely than the Evenk (Siberian) one. 

Pskov Russia, the connection between Finnic groups

This will be my last IBD test for a while, because IBD itself is not a good method for seeking oldest ancestral linkages.  It is still a good statistic method manifesting events of the Iron Age and the genealogical time frame.  It is excellent in seeking real ancestral linkages in the before mentioned time-period and can be preferred instead of any method using allele data, such as PCA, DSTAT etc., because all those methods imply only genetic distance and genetic  distance depends on the admixture itself.   Using allele statistic in seeking the origin of mixed populations is always misleading.  You can only suggest that your hypotheses are right or wrong and continue testing using different variations to increase the probability.

Here I present some IBD results of both Finnic and Russian populations using Beagle version 5.   The linkage between all Finnic people and also between Finnic and Baltic people is notable and turns up in Pskov (in Finnish Pihkova). The Pskov area is also the northernmost place in Russia where I have found autosomal relatives (23andme).

I use again Finnish samples from the 1000 genomes project, but at this time I grouped them using my project members, whose geographic origin is known.  

  

  

Cross-checking with Pskov is presented below.  Notice that there is no Siperian admixture in Pskov. Although people, including most researches, suggest that the Siberian admixture among Finnic people is a common signature of the origin of the FU languages, nothing about it is proven.  The Siberian admixture in Finland is dated to the Iron Age by several scientists and research.  Still the hypothesis of the present day Siberian admixture in Finland and the origin of the language (FU urheimat theories) is usually thought to be proven!  The IBD connection between Finns and North Russian is two-fold;  at first the Finnish Iron Age migration to Russia and secondly the common Siberian admixture which is quite new.  This kind of Iron Age Siberian migration/admixture doesn't exist between Finns and people in Pskov and we have no evidence about migrations from Finland to Pskov.  Instead of this, we have clear and undeniable linguistic evidences about Finnish eastern migrations to the Northwestern Russia, at least to the area of the lake Onega! The primary conclusion have to be that the Pskov area had a pre-Iron Age connection with Finnic people, including the Finns. It must have happened before the Siberian admixture in Finland and before the Finnish eastern migration. 

Russian results do not give an observation of any distinct ancestry from the Pskov area and only the northernmost Russians show some divergence from the Russian resemblance.