Hi folks,
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This is indeed an interesting new result. Now let's think about how it changes our views of the early expansion of R-U106.
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I'm going to use my half-finished phylogeography document as a starting point. Here (Figure 4), I demonstrated that R-U106's earliest burials were in the Corded Ware Culture in Bohemia in the 30th century BC, with an expansion here primarily north-westwards, with R-Z156 reaching Holland by the 21st century BC at the latest, and R-Z18 reaching Denmark by the 24th century BC. I posited that the majority of R-U106 nevertheless carried on north-westwards, settling somewhere in the north of modern Germany or nearby, but are generally missing from the archaeological record.
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I12902 (Ray - note number!) is found in the north of Holland, somewhere between the late 26th and late 23rd centuries BC. This is generally consistent with the above ideas. What it does, however, is force the migration to the North Sea to slightly earlier on in this history, expand the early western boundary of R-U106's early migration, and specify the route that R-A2150 in particular is likely to have taken.
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The large "native" (EHG) European autosomal fraction is consistent with what we know about early Corded Ware Culture (CWC) expansion. The migrants from the step culture that formed the CWC were majority male, and interbred (willingly or forcefully) with the native EHG women, so the steppe ancestry fraction ended up diluted, particularly as one travels west into the "purer" EHG populations. Remembering that I12902 is at least 400 years and as much as 800 years after the initial CWC migrations, the steppe ancestry fraction has had a dozen or two generations to have been diluted away.
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Holland is an important staging point for early R-U106, and this result strengthens that connection. However, it is also important to remember that R-U106 didn't form a major part of the early migrations to the British Isles, France, Iberia and Italy that were dominated by the R-P312 Bell Beaker groups. We see R-U106 in Bell Beaker culture burials, but these are primarily northern and eastern groups (e.g. R-Z18 in Denmark). Consequently, R-U106's main stamping grounds cannot have been much further south-west than Holland, and I12902 may represent our haplogroup's most western early outpost. One intriguing possibility about why R-U106>A2150 didn't succeed in the same way that R-U106>Z2265 did could be that it was out-competed by the R-P312 Bell Beaker groups during the Corded Ware Culture to Bell Beaker transition, which wasn't a sharp one.
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Holland at the time was very different from the fertile paradise of tulip-growing fame it is today. It was much more like the English fenlands (which were themselves much more extensive) - a wide expanse of salt marsh and peat marsh, cut by mud-filled channels and fringed by wind-blown sandy islands. Some small sandy islands persisted (cf. Isle of Ely in England) on which settlements could thrive - easily defended for those who knew the landscape, but hard to build an empire on.
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In short, this is a region in which a small haplogroup like R-A2150 could have made a home, but not somewhere from which a massive Bell Beaker population boom is going to start. That is likely from further up the Rhine. We also know that R-A2150 was found in the Unetice culture about 600 years later, so it's very likely that this isn't the only population of R-A2150 that existed. Before this paper, I put the origin of R-A2150 in western Germany, and that still looks reasonable to me.
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Cheers,
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Iain.
Kevin Terry
Inventorb