Failure to Replicate a Genetic Signal for Sex Bias in the Steppe Migration into Central Europe

Goldberg et al.(1) used genome-wide ancient DNA data (2) from central European Bronze Age (BA) populations, and their three ancestral sources of steppe pastoralists (SP), Anatolian farmers (AF), and European hunter-gatherers (HG), to investigate whether the SP migration into central Europe after 5,000 years ago (3, 4) was sex biased. By estimating a lower proportion of SP ancestry on the X-chromosome (36.6%) which is primarily carried in females than on the autosomes (61.8%), they suggested that the migration involved a ratio of 5-14 SP males for every female.\n\nWe attempted to replicate this finding using qpAdm (3), which leverages allele frequency correlations between the admixed (BA) and source (SP, AF, HG) populations with distant outgroups to eliminate potential biases due to genetic drift between the true source populations and the ones used as surrogates for them. Our outgroups are ...