The Arrival of Siberian Ancestry Connecting the Eastern Baltic to Uralic Speakers further East

Abstract

Europe PMC Funders Author Manuscripts In this study we compare the genetic ancestry of individuals from two as yet genetically unstudied cultural traditions in Estonia in the context of available modern and ancient datasets: 15 from the Late Bronze Age stone-cist graves (1200–400 BC) (EstBA), and 6 from the Pre-Roman Iron Age tarand cemeteries (800/500 BC–50 AD) (EstIA). We also included 5 Pre-Roman to Roman Iron Age Ingrian (500 BC–450 AD) (IngIA) and 7 Middle Age Estonian (1200–1600 AD) (EstMA) individuals to build a dataset for studying the demographic history of the northern parts of the Eastern Baltic from the earliest layer of Mesolithic to modern times. Our findings are consistent with EstBA receiving gene flow from regions with strong Western hunter-gatherer (WHG) affinities, and EstIA from populations related to modern Siberians. The latter inference is in accordance with Y chromosome (chrY) distributions in present-day populations of the Eastern Baltic, as well as patterns of autosomal variation in the majority of the westernmost Uralic speakers [1–5]. This ancestry reached the coasts of the Baltic Sea no later than the mid-first millennium BC; i.e. in the same time window as the diversification of west Uralic/Finnic languages [6]. Furthermore, phenotypic traits often associated with modern Northern Europeans like light eyes, hair and skin as well as lactose tolerance can be traced back to the Bronze Age in the Eastern Baltic. Keywords ancient DNA; shotgun sequencing; population genetics; phenotype; kinship; Bronze Age; Iron Age; Middle Ages; Eastern Baltic; Estonia