137 ancient human genomes from across the Eurasian steppes

Abstract

For thousands of years the Eurasian steppes have been a centre of human migrations and cultural change. Here we sequence the genomes of 137 ancient humans (about 1× average coverage), covering a period of 4,000 years, to understand the population history of the Eurasian steppes after the Bronze Age migrations. We find that the genetics of the Scythian groups that dominated the Eurasian steppes throughout the Iron Age were highly structured, with diverse origins comprising Late Bronze Age herders, European farmers and southern Siberian hunter-gatherers. Later, Scythians admixed with the eastern steppe nomads who formed the Xiongnu confederations, and moved westward in about the second or third century BC, forming the Hun traditions in the fourth-fifth century AD, and carrying with them plague that was basal to the Justinian plague. These nomads were further admixed with East Asian groups during several short-term khanates in the Medieval period. These historical events transformed the Eurasian steppes from being inhabited by Indo-European speakers of largely West Eurasian ancestry to the mostly Turkic-speaking groups of the present day, who are primarily of East Asian ancestry.

Genetic insights into the social organisation of the Avar period elite in the 7thcentury AD Carpathian Basin

“…Scythians were described by a recent genomic study as genetically highly structured. The Scythian samples from Hungary had relatively increased European farmer ancestry and showed no signs of gene flow from Inner Asian groups 17 . In the 5 th century AD, the Carpathian Basin was conquered by the Huns, who are associated with the Inner Asian Xiongnu confederation in the historical and archaeological research.…”

“…The strict separation of Asian and European populations is also displayed on the Ward-type clustering tree, which is based on the same dataset as the PCA. Here the Avar elite is located on an Asian branch of the tree and clustered together with Central Asian populations dated to the Late Iron Age, Hunnic and Medieval periods 17 , and furthermore, with Xiongnu period population from present-day Mongolia 29,30 and Scythians from the Altai region [31][32][33][34] (Fig. 3).…”

“…The Avar group shows significant genetic distances (p <0.05) from most ancient populations. Only two groups from Central Asia have nonsignificant differences from the Avar elite: one group containing Late Iron Age samples (nomads from the Late Iron Age and Hun period from the Kazakh Steppe and the Tian Shan) (FST = -0.00116, p = 0.42382), and a group of Medieval samples from the Central Asian Steppe and the Tian Shan (Turks, Karluk, Kimak, Karakhanid, Kipchak, Golden Horde and other Medieval nomads) 17 (FST = 0.00650, p = 0.26839, Table S4). Note, that the reference dataset of the distance calculations is smaller than that used for haplogroup-based analyses, because the whole mitochondrial genome datasets of ancient Asian populations are scarce in the current state of research.…”

“…In the 5 th century AD, the Carpathian Basin was conquered by the Huns, who are associated with the Inner Asian Xiongnu confederation in the historical and archaeological research. Their genetic origin is intensively studied as well 17 , but bioarchaeological data on the scarce human remains connected to the Huns from Hungary have not been published yet. Besides influxes from the east, the Carpathian Basin witnessed the movement of people from the north as well.…”

Jomon genome sheds light on East Asian population history

“…To further explore the deep relationships of Jomon and other Eurasian populations, we used TreeMix [45] to reconstruct admixture graphs of IK002 and 18 ancient and present-day Eurasian and Native American groups ( Fig.1C & Fig.S6 ). We found the IK002 lineage placed basal to the divergence between ancient and present-day Tibetans [7,29] and the common ancestor of the remaining ancient/present-day East Eurasians [29,46] and Native Americans [47,48] . These genetic relationships are stable across different numbers of migration incorporated into the analysis.…”