Bell Beakers and R1b

Over at Dienekes blog he has a post up about the extraction of R1b from a male who lived in Germany 4-5,000 in the past. This is important because R1b is one of the two most common male lineages (on the Y chromosome, passed from father to son) in Europe, and, it has inexplicably been underrepresented or absent in the ancient DNA samples. The other modal lineage is R1a (it too is underrepresented). I have a pretty good grasp of variation on the autosomal dimension. A modest familiarity with uniparental lineages, Y and mtDNA. And finally, a rather weak understanding of archaeological patterns. Since mtDNA tends to be found at very high concentrations in subfossil remains you'll get a good yield of that in the near future (as in the paper Dienekes covers). Y chromosomal information is more difficult. The problem with autosomal information is that you need more of ...