Uralic populations in the qpAdm models by Zeng et al. 2023

[Jaska]

No population gets two grey dots, but all Yeniseian, Samoyedic and South Siberian Turkic populations get one grey dot. And Uralic-speaking populations were the only ethnolinguistic group where almost all members got two orange dots. These results emerged naturally after the procedure was decided, its not a conspiracy or something.

Naturally I do not assume any conspiracy here. I just say that their results do not seem to justify the exclusion of all the other eastern ancestries and the picking up of only the simplest model where there is no other eastern ancestries but only the Yakutia ancestry in the Uralic populations. As we can see, in many populations there could just as well be several eastern ancestries present. This ambiguity of the results should not be just ignored in order to aim for the simplest possible model.

It looks plausible that the Yakutia ancestry is needed in all the Uralic populations (and in some others, too), but this does not automatically lead to the conclusion that it was the sole eastern ancestry.

Thanks for explaining their process thoroughly.

The authors were looking for Admixed *Inner Eurasian* populations, populations that are part of the clines stretching from Europeans/West Asians to East Asians/Siberians, containing most Central Asian and North Eurasian populations. Hungarians are a generic Central European population and are not a part of these clines, and there are other populations that the authors exclude too (e.g. Turks from Anatolia). This is once again imputing motives to the authors that on an unbiased close reading they simply don't have.

The Hungarians are a Uralic speaking population, exclusion of which looks weird when they make claims concerning especially the Uralic populations. You must admit that if they had the Hungarians included, they probably had to rephrase their main conclusion about the Yakutia ancestry in the modern Uralic populations (although we see the eastern ancestries in the ancient Hungarians).

And how “inner Eurasian” is the Kola Peninsula? Still they included the BOO samples, probably because there was a possible connection to the Uralic speaking populations. Yet they excluded the Hungarians, who are undoubtedly Uralic speaking.