fastIBD analysis of East/Central Eurasians and select West Eurasians

Individuals from the following populations have been included in this analysis:

Philippines_D Turkish_D Iranian_D Russian_D Finnish_D Turkish_Cypriot_D Ukrainian_D Belorussian_D Chinese_D Korean_D Japanese_D Tatar_Various_D Kazakh_D Szekler_D Hungarian_D Estonian_D Azeri_D Udmurt_D Mixed_Turkic_D 

These were analyzed in a context of a complete set of Central/East Eurasian populations; West Eurasian populations included were mostly Uralic and Turkic speaking groups, and a few others (such as East Slavs or Iranians).

A few quick points:

• fastIBD was run with default parameters over a dataset of 627 individuals/255020 SNPs
• fastIBD identifies segments of relatively recent origin that are shared by individuals. These results should not be construed as measures of overall genetic similarity or origins. Rather, they suggest which populations have exchanged genes in the relative recent past.

With that said, you can get:

• Spreadsheet of numeric results, showing sharing (in centi-Morgans, cM)
• Population-level graphical results, showing an ordering of other populations based on mean IBD sharing.

IBD sharing was assessed only for populations with 5+ individuals.

The following heat map allows for a quick appraisal of populations sharing an excess of IBD sharing (read row-by-row)

And, a few visualizations of mean IBD sharing:

Notice high levels of within-population IBD sharing for Finns, consistent with a population that experienced expansion from a small number of founders (small ancestral population size).

Compare with Turks, who are a much more diverse population.

These two plots (you can check the spreadsheet for exact numbers) indicate different sources for the East Eurasian element in Turks and Finns. 

The top eastern populations for Turks are: Turkmen, Chuvash, Uzbek, Uygur, all of which are Turkic speakers, followed by Hazara, Yukagir, and Selkup.  For Finns, there is high degree of sharing with various Siberian groups of different languages, including Uralic Selkups (16.4cM) and Nganassan (9.6cM). Turks share less with these Uralic speakers (6.4 and 2.8cM respectively). So, these are strong hints of common shared ancestry within the Turkic and Uralic language families.

The Chuvash population is also quite interesting, as it shares more with Selkup and Nganassan, contrasting with other Turkic speakers. This makes excellent sense, and is in agreement with other recent findings:

Results from this study maintain that the Chuvash are not related to Altaic or Mongolian populations along their maternal line, thus supporting the “Elite” hypothesis that their language was imposed by a conquering group —leaving Chuvash mtDNA largely of Eurasian origin. Their maternal markers appear to most closely resemble Finno-Ugric speakers rather than Turkic speakers.

Sources of data are listed at the bottom left of this blog.