The origins of the Yakuts

One of the more substantive consequences of the powerful new genomic techniques has been in the area of ancient DNA extraction and analysis. The Neandertal genome story is arguably the sexiest, but closer to the present day there’ve been plenty of results which have changed the way we look at the past. The input of genetics has basically demanded a revision of the contemporary consensus of the origins of the Etruscans which emerged from archaeology. Though certainly ancestry and genetic relationship are informative, ancient DNA has also given us windows into the change of function and a record of adaptation which rests less on inference. I’m thinking here of the fact that ancient inhabitants of Central Europe 7,000 years ago do not seem to have been able to process milk in the manner which is the norm in that region today; some we know about because we know that they lacked the mutation which confers lactase persistence in Europeans. There are other examples, and I assume that in the near future we’ll still see a steep exponential increase in the generation of new results as techniques get better and cheaper. A new paper explores the demographic history of an obscure Siberian population using DNA extraction and phylogenetic analysis. The questions are historical, and relatively easy to resolve. Who are the Yakuts, where did they come from? Those of you who have played Risk know that Yakutsk is a region of Siberia, and the Yakuts are residents of that region. Interestingly the Yakuts speaking a Turkic language. Here is a map which shows the modern distribution of Turkic languages (I have shaded in what is presumed to be the Turkic Urheimat):