Genome diversity in the Neolithic Globular Amphorae culture and the spread of Indo-European languages.

Francesca Tassi,Alicja Budnik,Carles Lalueza-Fox,Elena Pilli,Guido Barbujani,Federica Alberti,Stefania Vai,Andrea Brunelli,Roberta Rosa Susca,Alessandra Modi,Damian Labuda,David Reich,Silvia Ghirotto,Martina Lari,David Caramelli

doi:10.1098/rspb.2017.1540

Abstract

It is unclear whether Indo-European languages in Europe spread from the Pontic steppes in the late Neolithic, or from Anatolia in the Early Neolithic. Under the former hypothesis, people of the Globular Amphorae culture (GAC) would be descended from Eastern ancestors, likely representing the Yamnaya culture. However, nuclear (six individuals typed for 597 573 SNPs) and mitochondrial (11 complete sequences) DNA from the GAC appear closer to those of earlier Neolithic groups than to the DNA of all other populations related to the Pontic steppe migration. Explicit comparisons of alternative demographic models via approximate Bayesian computation confirmed this pattern. These results are not in contrast to Late Neolithic gene flow from the Pontic steppes into Central Europe. However, they add nuance to this model, showing that the eastern affinities of the GAC in the archaeological record reflect cultural influences from other groups from the East, rather than the movement of people.

Highlights

Almost all Europeans speak Indo-European (IE) languages, and certainly not by chance
We ordered the ancient populations based on the number of single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) selected by the filtering process, and adding the populations one by one we identified a common subset of SNPs, namely 101 979 SNPs in 39 populations, for a total of 199 ancient individuals spanning from the Pleistocene to the Iron Age
In its classical formulation, the Kurgan hypothesis, i.e. a late Neolithic spread of proto-Indo-European languages from the Pontic steppes, regards the Globular Amphorae culture (GAC) people as largely descended from Late Neolithic ancestors from the East, most likely representing the Yamna culture; these populations continued their Westward movement, giving rise to the later Corded Ware and Bell Beaker cultures

Summary

Introduction

Almost all Europeans speak Indo-European (IE) languages, and certainly not by chance. There is genetic evidence of population movements from the Russian steppes into Central Europe in the Bronze Age [20,21] and Iron Age [22] These processes may or may not have had large-scale consequences at the demographic and linguistic level, but the later expansion would be consistent with a spread of languages associated with the Kurgan hypothesis [18,21]. To obtain insight into the origins of genomic variation in Middle Neolithic Central Europe, we collected and typed samples of 17 individuals from the Megalithic barrow of Kierzkowo (Poland), which is archaeologically assigned to the Globular Amphorae culture (GAC). A subset of samples, namely 56 individuals belonging to five populations, was extracted from the initial dataset and used together with nine GAC samples for the coalescent simulations and additional exploratory analysis (electronic supplementary material, table S7). Posterior probabilities for models and parameters were calculated using R scripts from http://code.google.com/p/popabc/source/browse/ #svn%2Ftrunk%2Fscripts, modified by S.G

Results

Discussion

15. Bramanti B et al 2009 Genetic discontinuity

17. Haak W et al 2010 Ancient DNA from European