mtDNA of Europeans, Turks, and Turkic Central Asians

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Yes this would suggest a north west migration through the Bosphorus and following the Danube up to modern Holland and across the ice age landbridge to Britain

Apparently, the OP study looks at something called "hypervariable segments" (HVS) in the mtDNA, which are often used to compare populations using neighbor-distance trees. Here's another study that looks at HVS, though it looks at something totally different from the OP study:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17604454

Apparently, there are databases that are built. The OP study added more Turks to the database, and then looked at other nationalities who were already in the database. In that case, these studies shouldn't be very hard to replicate, and their effect can be cumulative over time as you add more and more people to the database.

"Hypervariable" segments?

I guess those are the segments that vary a lot within a species. So they would be the only segments to look at.

Right. I think that's what they mean.

I wonder if we can pull from the databases and try to replicate these results ourselves.

Maybe.

The OP study cites this 1998 study:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/article ... 837835.pdf

Which produced this neighbor-joining tree doing the same type of comparison as in the OP, with the HVS-I of the mtDNA, but with more Asian groups, and British as the only European group (there are bootstraps, whatever those are):



(Note that Kir-Talas and Kir-Sarytash are Kyrgyz populations. About the arrow, "The arrow points to the segment from which an African outgroup (!Kung San) would branch.")

It seems to show that Turks are closer to Europeans than to Central Asians, but as the OP study and the image posted in the OP show, it's the British they're closer to, and not necessarily other Europeans. Also, the OP study says it uses a larger, more diverse sample of Turks than the 1998 study.

I'm guessing the other Europeans in the 1998 study would go well off to the right and above if they were included in the image of the 1998 study.

I found this mtDNA database, which you can pull queries from:

http://empop.online/

I'm trying to work out how to use it. If anyone knowledgeable and interested wants to assist, be my guest.

EDIT: I found this paper, which explains how to create neighbor-joining trees, like that shown in the OP:

http://www.maths.bris.ac.uk/~madjl/fine ... tering.pdf

Only issue is, where can we get the data? With empop above, I can't find a way to browse data or query by population.

Keep in mind that the study in you OP is just MtDNA.

If they had tested the same subjects for nuclear DNA they might have gotten a different family tree, or if they had tested the DNA only from Y chromosomes they might have gotten different results still. Nuclear comes from both parents , Mt only from the female line via your mom, and Y only exists in males, and only through the male line via your father.

And all three different results might be clues to the past.

If your ancestors migrated to your homeland from somewhere else, and they migrated as whole families (like the Pilgrims on the Mayflower) then all three types of DNA would be from the same ancestorial homeland (in the case of modern American descendants of the Pilgrims all three would point to England).

But if the group that you're testing has MtDNA from region A, but Y DNA from region B, but has nuclear DNA that is a mix of both A and B then that might indicate that the folks you're testing are descended from a male only band of invaders from region B who invaded region A took the women from region A.

My guess is that if you test modern urban Mexicans you would find that their MtDNA would be thoroughly local American Indian, but that their Y DNA would be heavily White European Spanish, only their nuclear DNA would be a mix of the two. The reason being that modern Mexicans tend to descended from the male only band of Spanish Conquistadors marrying into the population of local Aztec women back in days of Cortez.

Yes. The second link looks too technical for us amateurs to figure out. Or not easily.

The Empop looks user friendly- with nice pretty colorful maps . But I cant figure out what the maps show. And the site is a slide show that you cant control anyway.

I guess you have to "subscribe" and set up "an account" to be able to use it.

Its about MtDNA. But you cant tell what the world maps are actually mapping. One has cute little squares and circles peppering the continents, and the second has blobs of color that range from "min to max". They dont tell you whether the populations being tested are modern residents of the places (like the USA), or are they testing for the populations that existed in the places before the "world got messed up" by Columbus et all as my lady Anthropology professor put in.

Yes this would also explain the British situation. MtDNA is through the female line and the female line in Britain is largely intact hence the strong connection to the Anotolian peninsula. The Y-chromosome is probably Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Danes and others...

I'm aware of that. My guess is that nuclear DNA for British is much closer to the French and Germans than it is to Central Asians. Such a study would basically tell us what we already know. Whatever the origin of the British, they have been in northwestern Europe for a very long time, and so would likely have nuclear DNA close to that of other Europeans.

mtDNA, however, tends to be much more resistant to the effects of mixing (on a population level), so it can be a very good marker for determining the origins of a population, where the population may have migrated from. The reason is that women have migrated a lot less often than men; if the women moved, it's likely the whole population moved. There is also the fact that only women pass their mtDNA down (EDIT: and that it is the mother who carries the baby for 9 months and then gives birth, while the father could be anywhere or even dead at the time of birth). Of course, there is also the possibility of bridal-kidnapping.

Last edited by beneficii on 07 Aug 2016, 5:22 am, edited 3 times in total.

I think Columbus gets far too much credit for human migrations. It's not like everyone stayed in their place until 1492. That is a very Eurocentric view of history, and is under increasing challenge. Of course, you want to try to get an idea when different populations moved to different places, and so you need to keep ethnicity in mind.

There have been a lot of migrations across the Eurasian steppe for thousands of years, for example.

Not only are you gigantically and massively missing the point your comment is a contradiction of itself.

Its precisely because anthropologists have to guard against being Eurocentric in thinking that they have to be aware of how the world was reshaped by events around Columbus's time that resulted in the world becoming European dominated for the last few centuries.

The point that you are missing is NOT that no one ever migrated before 1492. The point is that evidence of human migrations prior to around that time tends to get masked and buried by the noise of the recent more massive changes in the human world landscape of the last five hundred years that were set into motion by the maritime "space race" between Portugal in Spain the late 1400's the led to the Age of Discovery. which led in turn to European global expansion and domination. That maritime competition between Spain and Portugal didnt start with Columbus but its fair to use his name as shorthand for it because he did kick it into high gear.

If I am looking at a map of the world distribution of some kind of human trait (blood type, gene markers, or even cultural artifacts like language) its vital to know which kind of world map I am looking at: a map of the world prior to Columbus, or one depicting the world now.

You need to know if those colors in the American midwest are about the native americans who migrated to there from Asia in the stone age, or are the colors about the modern (largely White) population who came more recently from Europe(after Columbus). BIG difference.

Are the symbols in the Caribbean islands about the original Caribs and Arawak inhabitants? Or are they about the modern inhabitants of the Caribbean (mostly Black descendants of slaves brought over from Africa...after Columbus)? Big difference. Ditto for Australia. Ditto for other places even in the Old World. Maybe not Central Asia so much, but neighboring Siberia was very much remade by European colonialism Russian style that was goaded into happening by Columbus's voyages.




Sorry but you are wrong. Columbus (in a shorthand way) DOES get credit (or blame) for reshaping the world. Thats just basic.

naturalplastic,

My guess is that they look at the populations that are considered to characterize the region in question and will generally not collect from recent migrants or their descendants. They will tend not to collect from people known to be mixed with recent migrants. I'm under the impression that that is the common practice, and if otherwise researchers will say so.

Am I wrong?

EDIT: In the OP study, they mentioned the nucleuotide diversity, which shows how much variation there is in a population. In the OP study, these were the highest in Central Asia (i.e. Central Asia was the most diverse), were lower in Turkey, and were lower than that in Europe.

EDIT 2: I'm looking at the source of the British data given in the OP study, and it's from this study:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8217870

The article is behind a paywall, however. According to the abstract, "Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from 100 unrelated British White Caucasians was extracted, amplified and directly sequenced." So it looks like the population that is characteristic of Britain was looked at.

This website says this British study is very good:

http://www.mitotyping.com/Page/40

[quote="beneficii"]naturalplastic,

My guess is that they look at the populations that are considered to characterize the region in question and will generally not collect from recent migrants or their descendants. They will tend not to collect from people known to be mixed with recent migrants. I'm under the impression that that is the common practice, and if otherwise researchers will say so.

Am I wrong?

Thats my understanding of how they do it. Though it must be hard to truly screen out noise. A English person who is mainly anglosaxon (not a Paki immigrant or such) might have a Spanish ancestor who was ship wrecked from the Armada attack in Elizabethan times.
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So you're saying that "nucleotides" are most diverse the farthest east (in central asia). are the least diverse a little to the west in Turkey, but get a little more diverse again when you go even farther west when you get to Europe?

naturalplastic,

The Mergen study in the OP stated that the Turkic Central Asian populations have more diversity within each population than the Turkish, and the Turkish have more than the Europeans.

The low level of nucleotide diversity in Europeans has received commentary before and since the Mergen study. The Mergen study simply replicates that result, and I'm sure it has been replicated since.

The difference with the British is interesting. I just had an e-mail contact about this with historian Kyun Jin Kim, who authored The Huns, Rome, and the Birth of Europe (2013), and he thinks that this divergence of the mtDNA of the British from that of the Turkic populations predates the Huns. It looks like cyberdad may be right. I wonder, too, if the difference represents seafarers, as travelling by sea was long preferred in history due to travel on the sea being faster than that on land. The seafarers could have come from West Asia or the Pontic steppe and sailed around the European continent and reached the British Isles thousands of years ago, largely bypassing mainland Europe.