Ancient DNA from Romania

[Fungene]

It seems the authors are not willing to make a statements who were the buried people in Capidava.
... the only option is they were Bulgars or subjects of the Bulgarian empire.

A few more bits of information: according to the archaeological report the authors reference — Pinter et al. 2011. “Preliminary Research in Capidava Medieval Necropolis (Topalu com., Constanţa County).”Pontica — M3 (Female) and M4 (Male) were the only individuals who had grave goods, small bronze objects in both cases (ring, buttons.)

M3 was buried with a bronze ring bearing a pentagram, a symbol indicating she was probably a Bogomil.
M3 and M4 were both, according to Rusu et al., R0a2’3 and the authors of the genetic study suggest M3 and M4 were perhaps maternally related. That’s about as far as they go in speculating about these two samples.

Although M3 and M4 were the only ones in the group to have grave goods, they both had all the medical conditions mentioned in my previous post (to which you can add osteoarthritis, which I had omitted.) They clearly relied on a diet of grains, not fish or meat — One wonders from whom they were getting provisions.

That's about all we know about these individuals. Do they look like Bulgars to you?

[eastara]

A few more bits of information: according to the archaeological report the authors reference — Pinter et al. 2011. “Preliminary Research in Capidava Medieval Necropolis (Topalu com., Constanţa County).”Pontica — M3 (Female) and M4 (Male) were the only individuals who had grave goods, small bronze objects in both cases (ring, buttons.)

M3 was buried with a bronze ring bearing a pentagram, a symbol indicating she was probably a Bogomil.
M3 and M4 were both, according to Rusu et al., R0a2’3 and the authors of the genetic study suggest M3 and M4 were perhaps maternally related. That’s about as far as they go in speculating about these two samples.

Although M3 and M4 were the only ones in the group to have grave goods, they both had all the medical conditions mentioned in my previous post (to which you can add osteoarthritis, which I had omitted.) They clearly relied on a diet of grains, not fish or meat — One wonders from whom they were getting provisions.

That's about all we know about these individuals. Do they look like Bulgars to you?

We still don't know what the original Bulgars looked like genetically. However for e few centuries they could have mixed with the locals at least on the maternal side, or this is the original population from Roman times. People must have in mind that the border along the Danube has been protected by Roman castles and legions. In later times, when a part of the Eastern Roman Empire, most were with Anatolian, and not local origin. Thus, Roman generals and emperors born in the Balkans should not be always presumed with local origin.
In Early Middle ages all fortresses and towns North of the Balkan mountains(except some on the Black sea coast) were destroyed and deserted. After they became a part of the Bulgar Empire some have been rebuilt.

[Fungene]

We now get samples from Romania showing up in papers. Nice.
The Wang et al. “The Genetic Prehistory of the Greater Caucasus” preprint at BioRxiv is interesting for a variety of reasons.

Here is one relevant to this thread: Fig. 2d (below), which shows some prehistoric individuals projected onto modern Western Eurasian populations. For the moderns, the tan pentagons are for Romanians and the tan stars represent Moldavians.
Just a short comment about the symbols: Moldavians cluster closer to Bulgarians than Romanians do in this diagram. I have never seen that in any PCA of modern European populations, so perhaps the symbols in this PCA got mixed up. Now, because the symbols for Romanians and Moldavians cluster together, the possible mix-up doesn’t really matter for the main observation, which is this.

In drawing a line from Romania Eneolithic (full orange dots) to Yamnaya Samara (full dark green diamonds), one tracks right through the Romanian-Moldavian cluster.* The orange dots represent I2532, Coțatcu, close to Râmnicu Sărat, and I2533, which is Cârcea Viaduct, southeast of Craiova.
That’s something like the story of admixture in Romania in the blink of an eye. Sure, it’s more complicated. It’s just that this PCA gives us a good clue about what’s a good direction to look in and what’s a waste of time. Why am I saying this? Listening to the noise in Romanian media (sometimes helped along by some Romanian researchers) one would have expected Romanians to cluster with central Europeans, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Russians, or Avars. Well, I guess not.
* Can’t comment yet on Yamnaya Hungary (downward-pointing full, dark-green triangles); the samples haven’t been published yet.
PCAFig2.png

[Fungene]

[QUOTE=Fungene;396305]
Wang et al. “The Genetic Prehistory of the Greater Caucasus” preprint at BioRxiv.
...
Fig. 2d ... which shows some prehistoric individuals projected onto modern Western Eurasian populations. For the moderns, the tan pentagons are for Romanians and the tan stars represent Moldavians.
[QUOTE]
"Moldavian" is the term used by the authors. They may have meant "Moldovan."
Bulgarian is represented by tan upward-pointing triangles.
key.png

[Fungene]

[QUOTE=Fungene;396305]
Wang et al. “The Genetic Prehistory of the Greater Caucasus” preprint at BioRxiv.
...
Yamnaya Samara (full dark green diamonds)
...
QUOTE]

About Yamnaya Samara: Using Globular Amphora as a stand-in for Anatolian farmer-related ancestry [Anatolian Neolithic + Western Hunter Gatherer], the paper estimates that the contribution of farmer-related ancestry to Yamnaya Samara is 13.2% with a standard error of 2.7%.
Likewise, for Yamnaya Hungary, it would be 17.1%, with a standard error of 4.1% (438-442).

[eastara]

It looks Bulgarians, Romanians and Moldavian form one cluster. However there are Romanians closer to Croats and Bulgarians closer to Greek and Albanians.
I also wondered about the Moldavians, they are closer to the Greeks, while Moldavians are in fact mixed with Ukrainians. Haven't they mixed up the Gagauz from Moldova with Moldavians? In the previous study "137 ancient human genomes from across
the Eurasian steppes" people had the wrong impression Bulgarians took part in the analysis as one dot looks like over Bulgaria, but in fact the samples are Gagauz from Moldova. Only reading carefully the study is revealed also that the dot over Jordan are in fact Cherkess refugees from the Caucasus and not local Arabs.

https://static-content.springer.com/...MOESM1_ESM.pdf

[Fungene]

I also wondered about the Moldavians, they are closer to the Greeks, while Moldavians are in fact mixed with Ukrainians. Haven't they mixed up the Gagauz from Moldova with Moldavians?

They could have mixed up the Gagauz with Moldovans. For the moment, I don't seem to find an analysis that compares them directly. Do you have a link, or could you post a graph?

EDIT: somehow I doubt that that the "Moldavians" are relabelled Gagauz. It is more likely someone swapped symbols representing two populations.

In the previous study "137 ancient human genomes from across
the Eurasian steppes" people had the wrong impression Bulgarians took part in the analysis as one dot looks like over Bulgaria, but in fact the samples are Gagauz from Moldova.
https://static-content.springer.com/...MOESM1_ESM.pdf

I don't see any sample identified as being from Moldova, Romania, or Bulgaria in the supplement or in the Excel spreadsheet available online. Maybe you could help?

[Fungene]

It looks Bulgarians, Romanians and Moldavian form one cluster. However there are Romanians closer to Croats and Bulgarians closer to Greek and Albanians.

Looks like one stray Croat sample.
2014: Croats close to Hungarians, not really Romanians.
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/art...l.pone.0105090

[Fungene]

I don't see any sample identified as being from Moldova, Romania, or Bulgaria in the supplement or in the Excel spreadsheet available online. Maybe you could help?

OK: 12 Gagauz in the info on the present-day dataset spreadsheet for "137 ancient...".
and, of course, plenty on Gagauz by Onur Dincer here: https://anthrogenica.com/showthread....l=1#post300529 and comments by Eastara

[eastara]

Looks like one stray Croat sample.
2014: Croats close to Hungarians, not really Romanians.
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/art...l.pone.0105090

I meant there are outlier Romanians, closer to Croats (in fact Hungarians, but they are missing from the above plot).

Here is the admixture analysis from "Standing at the Gateway to Europe" and it is clear that Romanians stand a fraction North compared to Bulgarians, and Gagauze a fraction south of the Bulgarians. Don't know how a Moldavian looks autosomally, but judging from the abundance of haplogroups I2a Dinaric and R1a they should be slightly North from the Romanians ( at least in Wallahia). So don't feel confident the brown star there are real Moldavians,while the Romanians look OK