DNA Forums: DNA Forums -> Migrations of the Slavs

A new paper tackles the relationship between R1a1a and the Slavs. As I reported last November in A Slavic marker at last, the marker M458, defining haplogroup R1a1a7, was obviously Slavic, yet the report of its discovery by Underhill et al. said no such thing. They used the Zhivotovsky "evolutionary effective rate" for dating, which habitually overestimates ages by a factor of three.

But the new paper by Marcin Woźniak and colleagues, Similarities and Distinctions in Y Chromosome Gene Pool of Western Slavs, American Journal of Physical Anthropology dives right into the connection between R1a1a and the Slavs. Significantly it uses the Zhivotovsky dating method, but gives two results, the pedigree and evolutionary mutation rates.

The research was evidently done prior to the Underhill paper and does not use the SNP M458, let alone the more recently- discovered SNP L260, defining R1a1a7b - apparently the equivalent of the "P for Polish" haplotype discovered by Peter Gwozdz. So the authors mainly deal in haplotypes, though referring to the Underhill paper in their discussion section.

The importance of this paper lies in the way Woźniak weaves his discoveries into the archaeological evidence. It is brave to attempt this, since there remains so much disagreement over the ethnicity related to various archaeological cultures. I am currently trying to make sense of the movements of Goths and Slavs myself. So I won't comment at the moment. Instead I offer up a map from Philip's Atlas of World History showing the migrations of Slavs.



Here's a quick attempt to very roughly paste Slavic migrations over the distribution of R1a1a7 from Underhill et al.