The authors are careful not to say the magic word, and any reference to the aboriginal peoples, but they are already cognizant that Kurgan Culture originated in the steppes of Ukraine and Itil/Volga-Urals area, and marched eastward to reach Gansu. That is hard to beat, a mass of the archeological, osteological, and cultural evidence had been accumulated to support that. And any biological evidence uncovered so far indicates a Caucasoid-Mongoloid admixture predating the studied period, whatever that period happened to be, and whatever was the Central Asiatic area explored. The authors are still referring to a population soups like generic Poles and Russians, not bothering to attempt a better resolution: The Poles are not less heterogeneous than Russians, and anybody who does not know that if you scratch a Russian you would find a Tatar should abstain from suggesting genealogical opinions. Euphemisms do not belong to science, they are a tool of politicians. We already have the predictable, in a sense that such traced would be discovered, tracers: R-SRY10831b and Q-P36 testify that Kurgan Culture originated in the steppes of Ukraine and Itil/Volga-Urals area, and marched eastward to eventually reach Gansu. We already reached South Siberia and Altai, are bordering on China, and now are found in the northern-most reaches of the Asiatic steppe belt.

The search for blond Indo-Iranians is an obvious blind alley. I addition to the common sense experience, nowhere in the historical notes was ever recorded that anything even remotely connected with India and Persia even smells of blondish. Nada, zilch, zippo. At the same time we have records of blondish Usun Huns, Dinlins/Tele/Oguzes described as blondish, the modern "Tatars" of the Lower Itil/Volgs are still frequently blondish, light hair is relatively frequent among the aboriginals from the Saratov/Saratau to Urals. The Huns had noses distinct from Chinese to such a degree that larger-nosed Chinese were in jeopardy in the times of troubles. Among some Siberian Türks, the dark hair is still considered to be unattractive and a bad omen.

M17

This posting is a mirror from the Dienekes blog. For more details, refer to the source. Additional comments are shown in blue italics; bold highlighting was added for this posting. On the Dienekes blog are posted very informative comments, not mirrored here.

May 12, 2009

Light-pigmented Caucasoids from prehistoric Siberia

This sample was previously tested for Y-chromosome and mtDNA polymorphisms.

The pigmentation-related loci tested can be seen in the labels of my post, which should lead you to some earlier studies on them.

Most individuals were found to be most similar to European than to East Asian or African individuals based on these loci, although some (2 from Andronovo) of them were more similar to East Asians or intermediate (1 from Tagar) between East Asians and Europeans.

Interestingly, 1 of the Andronovo Mongoloids (S07) was previously found to belong to Y chromosome haplogroup C(xC3), while the Caucasoid-Mongoloid individual from Tagar (S32) belonged to haplogroup R1a1 (I.e even in unlikely case the Andronovo Mongoloids were first generation immigrants, their kids were already a mixture; try to extract from that Andronovo Mongoloid mixture purebred Indo-Iranians. The Tagar crossbreed clearly carried his R1a1 from the Eastern European steppes, possibly for better then 2 millennia.)

It should be noted that the use of the term "European individual ancestry" does not mean that these individuals were from Europe, as no test to distinguish between European and Asian Caucasoids was performed, and we know from literary descriptions and occasional archaeological remains about the ancient presence of light-pigmented Caucasoids in Siberia (The repeated inferences to Indo-Europeans,  Maria Gambitus, Europeans for Caucasoids are not only misleading, but bring into scientific research an openly racial agenda).

From the paper:
 

The genotype for rs12913832 was obtained for 23 out of the 25 samples, and most had the G/G genotype (n=15), which indicates that at least 60% of ancient specimens were probably blue- or green-eyed individuals. The remaining samples had the A/G (n=5) or A/A (n=3) genotypes, which are predictive of brown eye color phenotype.
 

International Journal of Legal Medicine doi:10.1007/s00414-009-0348-5

Pigment phenotype and biogeographical ancestry from ancient skeletal remains: inferences from multiplexed autosomal SNP analysis

Caroline Bouakaze et al.

Abstract

In the present study, a multiplexed genotyping assay for ten single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) located within six pigmentation candidate genes was developed on modern biological samples and applied to DNA retrieved from 25 archeological human remains from southern central Siberia dating from the Bronze and Iron Ages. SNP genotyping was successful for the majority of ancient samples and revealed that most probably had typical European (i.e. Caucasoid, or are the Italians and French atypical Europeans?) pigment features, i.e., blue or green eye color, light hair color and skin type, and were likely of European (i.e. Caucasoid) individual ancestry. To our knowledge, this study reports for the first time the multiplexed typing of autosomal SNPs on aged and degraded DNA. By providing valuable information on pigment traits of an individual and allowing individual biogeographical ancestry estimation, autosomal SNP typing can improve ancient DNA studies and aid human identification in some forensic casework situations when used to complement conventional molecular markers.

Link