title: Pitfalls of the Geographic Population Structure (GPS) Approach Applied to Human Genetic History: A Case Study of Ashkenazi Jews.
abstract: In a recent interdisciplinary study, Das et al. have attempted to trace the homeland of Ashkenazi Jews and of their historical language, Yiddish (Das et al. 2016 Localizing Ashkenazic Jews to Primeval Villages in the Ancient Iranian Lands of Ashkenaz. Genome Biol Evol. 8:1132-1149). Das et al. applied the geographic population structure (GPS) method to autosomal genotyping data and inferred geographic coordinates of populations supposedly ancestral to Ashkenazi Jews, placing them in Eastern Turkey. They argued that this unexpected genetic result goes against the widely accepted notion of Ashkenazi origin in the Levant, and speculated that Yiddish was originally a Slavic language strongly influenced by Iranian and Turkic languages, and later remodeled completely under Germanic influence. In our view, there are major conceptual problems with both the genetic and linguistic parts of the work. We argue that GPS is a provenancing tool suited to inferring the geographic region where a modern and recently unadmixed genome is most likely to arise, but is hardly suitable for admixed populations and for tracing ancestry up to 1,000 years before present, as its authors have previously claimed. Moreover, all methods of historical linguistics concur that Yiddish is a Germanic language, with no reliable evidence for Slavic, Iranian, or Turkic substrata.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biology and Ecology, Faculty of Science, University of Ostrava, Czech Republic Institute of Parasitology, Biology Centre, Czech Academy of Sciences, Ceske Budejovice, Czech Republic A.A. Kharkevich Institute for Information Transmission Problems, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia pavel.flegontov@osu.cz,a.kassian@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Pavel
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Flegontov
authors.affiliation: Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA), Moscow, Russia pavel.flegontov@osu.cz,a.kassian@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Alexei
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Kassian
authors.affiliation: Research Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment, University College London, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Mark G
authors.initials: MG
authors.lastname: Thomas
authors.affiliation: Saint Petersburg State University, Russia.
authors.forename: Valentina
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Fedchenko
authors.affiliation: Department of Biology and Ecology, Faculty of Science, University of Ostrava, Czech Republic.
authors.forename: Piya
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Changmai
authors.affiliation: Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA), Moscow, Russia Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow, Russia.
authors.forename: George
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Starostin
mesh_terms: D019143:Evolution, Molecular; D005828:Genetics, Population / Q000379:methods* / Q000592:standards; D015894:Genome, Human; D063426:Human Migration; D006801:Humans; D007585:Jews / Q000235:genetics*; D010375:Pedigree; D011153:Population / Q000235:genetics*
keywords: Ashkenazi Jews; Yiddish; geographic population structure; population genetics; relexification.