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closeThis article needs a correction
Posted by dpwes on 15 Feb 2013 at 00:16 GMT
The following line is inaccurate and needs to be corrected.
"R1a1a-M17 diversity declines toward the Pontic-Caspian steppe where the mid-Holocene R1a1a7-M458 sublineage is dominant [46]."
R1a1a7-M458 does not dominate the Pontic Caspian steppe. The authors obviously don't know where the Pontic Caspian steppe is. They probably think it's in Poland, but that's not the case.
RE: This article needs a correction
akhan220 replied to dpwes on 03 Jan 2020 at 20:54 GMT
This seems like a valid concern. Figure 2 of the citation [46] seems to be in conflict with the quote "R1a1a-M17 diversity declines toward the Pontic-Caspian steppe where the mid-Holocene R1a1a7-M458 sublineage is dominant".
R1a1a7-M458 frequency seems to almost drops to zero in the Pontic Steppe region in the cited figure.
Why have the authors not responded to or amended this in several years now? This reflects poorly not only on open science journalism but also the associated institutions in my opinion.
RE: This article needs a correction
dplatt replied to dpwes on 15 Jan 2020 at 20:42 GMT
We were very interested in exploring whether there was any signal indicating an immigration into Afghanistan from the Pontic Steppes. For this reason, we sought Pontic Steppes samples. Since there weren’t hypotheses framed involving Polish immigrations, those populations weren’t included.
At the time the paper was written, Y data for Steppes proper were somewhat scarce. So our info for M458 was drawn from figure S3 from https://www.nature.com/ar.... S3 identifies samples according to river valleys, with Dnester, Dnepr, and Don entering the Black Sea passing through the Pontic Steppes, and the Volga passing through the eastern Pontic Steppes on the way to the Caspian Sea. By that reckoning, there is a strong east to west cline of M458, with strongly reduced representation along the Volga, which trend is completed by our own samples that showed insignificant representation in Afghanistan. It would be unlikely to see such under-representation if western Pontic Steppes provided a significant immigration to Afghanistan.
Having said that, M458 does find a maximum geographically in the Oder and Vistula river basins that do pass through Poland on the way to the Baltic. However, we did not include those populations in our analysis since they did not inform the question of Pontic immigration into Afghanistan. Among the regions we considered in resolving the question, M458 is dominant in the Western Pontic Steppes, but much less towards the east.