I think you guys are missing the point. I am outlining how genetic data and archaeological data are complementing each other. The degree to which Yu Hong was of European ancestry is vague at this point. What is not vague is that he has some European ancestry and some European/Middle Eastern artifacts in his tomb. Curious correlation, that’s it.

Kambiz

I enjoyed reading your article. Although I agree with Mesk that somewhere in Yu Hong’s line would be European descent, I understand it was something you implied.

You offered a clarifying statement:

“What we know from this study alone is that at most of Yu Hong’s genes were most likely of European origin,”

…but this is even less conservative than your previous formulation. We simply cannot say anything about “most” of Yu Hong’s genes from this study, since it looked solely at a single locus. As I said above:

“Yu Hong’s mother’s mother’s mother’s mother’s mother’s mother’s mother could have been European, while every other one of his ancestors was Asian.”

In other words, only one direct female ancestor need be of European ancestry to create this mtDNA profile; essentially the entirety of Yu Hong’s nuclear genome could be Asian in origin, and this survey would have been unable to detect that.

What can we say from this study? Simply this:

“At least one of Yu Hong’s female ancestors was most likely descended from a western Eurasian lineage.”

I appreciate your criticism of the National Geographic’s exaggerated claims, but you didn’t go far enough. Mind you, it’s hard to blame the magazine when even the scientific literature is bloated with similar exaggerated claims regarding the information content of single-locus studies.

I think I need to write up a broader critique of the community’s current blind reliance on mtDNA and Y-DNA studies to inform estimates of ancestry to make my case clearer – just as soon as I get some free time!

Perhaps if I wrote,

“What we know from this study alone is that at most of Yu Hong’s genes were most likely of European origin,”

then that would be more in line with what I wanted to imply.

However, I already stated the one locus limit and how Y chromosomal studies may either support more evidence of his non-Asian ancestry or show that maybe his father’s lineage was more Asian than not. And, I criticized at least National Geographic for taking this analysis to a completely distorted conclusion that all of Yu Hong was European.

Anyways, thanks for the clarification. I appreciate the input.

Kambiz

“What we know is that at least half of Yu Hong genes were most likely European.”

No, we don’t. We know that one tiny portion of his genome carries a signature that is otherwise found predominantly in western Eurasia. This tells us very little about the remainder of his genome: for instance, Yu Hong’s mother’s mother’s mother’s mother’s mother’s mother’s mother could have been European, while every other one of his ancestors was Asian.

The fact that the mtDNA evidence fits with the archaeology is all very nice, but let’s not lose sight of the fact that this genetic data is based on ONE locus. There’s an unpleasant habit in the literature at the moment of depicting Y-DNA and mtDNA together as providing complete genealogical information, when in fact these are convenient but not necessarily particularly informative markers.