The Scythians were half Asian

 A few people have been criticizing me for my latest twitter post on Scythians (post anything on these people and you get a bunch of wind, I guess people feel very strongly about being related to them?)

Anyways, the criticism is that early Scythians were supposedly 100% Andronovo, had a Caucasoid/Europoid phenotype and lacked any distinctive East Asian ancestry or the associated phenotype. The people saying so make one important mistake: they conflate Andronovo with Scythian. While it's true that the latter originally came from the former, it's also true that they're widely separated in space and time with true Scythian cultures only emerging in the 1st millenium BCE. It must also be kept in mind the Andronovo horizon was massive, spanning most of Central Asia and reaching the boundaries of modern day Mongolia on the East. Given so, it's impossible for the populations in the horizon to be homogenous in ancestry. 

Scythians can certainly be Andronovo descendants, but not all Andronovo descendants are Scythian, nor did all even survive till the 1st millenium BCE (late Iron Age onwards). So we must ask ourselves where the Scythian homeland is, and what were the genetics of people found nearby in the Iron Age. 

Animal style art is a distinctive feature of Scythian and Scythian-like cultures (Cimmerians, Sarmatians). The earliest such art is from the Arzhan kurgans (Arzhan 0, Arzhan 1) in modern-day Russia, right next to Mongolia and Kazakasthan.

Here is where the earliest Scythian kurgan mounds are from, by the way, nestled well on the easternmost edges of the Eurasian steppes. The Arzhan 0 kurgan is in fact a princely tomb, with identical construction to Arzhan 0 and of course, filled with animal style decorative art, and dated to the 9th century BCE by accelerator mass spectrometry. Read more about it here

The Arzhan culture is succeeded by the Pazyrk culture, another early-Scythian one dated to the 6th-3rd centuries BCE. Regardless to say, these are some of the oldest sites where the material culture archaeologists consider "Scythian" arose, and they're deep inside Asia, right next to a bunch of Siberian people where the Andronovo descendants could've picked up a ton of EA ancestry, of course. 

Kuzmina discusses this in her magnum opus in a bit of detail, though keep in mind she lacked any genetic data and relied purely on archaeolinguistics and anthropology. I'll quote the relevant part.

He suggested that the impulse from Central Asia was of crucial importance at the end of the Bronze Age. This impulse brought to Scythia the arrows, daggers, knives, and horse-gear of the Karasuk culture. The reason in support of this hypothesis was offered by M. P. Gryaznov’s (1980) discovery of the Arzhan barrow in Tuva. There, early articles of horse equipment along with the objects of Scythian art have been discovered. It has been suggested that the complex dated to the 8th century BC which is a considerably early date. Scholars from St. Petersburg assume that the Scythian culture formed in Central Asia in the 8th or perhaps in the 9th century BC. They even admit the probability of the influence of Chinese art on the formation of the animal style. The Central-Asian hypothesis, which has gained wide acceptance, is represented in the works of N. A. Bokovenko (Moshkova 1992)

 Kuzmina and 20th century Russian archaeologists did not have the power of aDNA, but we do. So let's see how actual Scythian men and women from these earliest sites plot on a PCA. 

Huh, what a surprise! every single early Scythian sample clusters with modern day Bashkirs. [click the image so it magnifies in your window, otherwise it will be blurry).

The oldest Scythian samples are Zevakinko_IA and Aldy Bel_IA (this one is from the famous Arzhan kurgans, by the way). How about checking them out on G25?

Distance to: RUS_Tuva_Aldy_Bel_IA

0.04341559 Bashkir
0.04764879 Tatar_Siberian
0.07581902 Tatar_Siberian_Zabolotniye
0.08711644 Nogai
0.09365923 Uzbek
0.10087071 Yukagir_Forest
0.10372093 Hazara_Afghanistan
0.10404151 Tubalar
0.10465838 Karakalpak

As expected. 

Distance to: RUS_Zevakino_Chilikta_IA

0.04804137 Bashkir
0.05933492 Uzbek
0.06077576 Tatar_Siberian
0.07615525 Nogai
0.07823705 Tatar_Crimean_steppe
0.07973288 Hazara_Afghanistan
0.08347611 Uygur
0.08489468 Turkmen_Uzbekistan
0.08967604 Hazara
0.09028372 Turkmen

Barely surprising to anyone who's been following the latest studies on this. How about checking out one of the later descendant cultures, such as Pazyryk? 

Distance to: KAZ_Pazyryk_IA

0.04310245 Tatar_Siberian
0.05177868 Bashkir
0.07341034 Nogai
0.07795478 Tatar_Siberian_Zabolotniye
0.08562940 Uzbek
0.08595528 Tubalar

Here's how the Pazyrk Scythians depicted themselves. 

One last thing, how much East Asian do they have exactly?

Target: RUS_Zevakino_Chilikta_IA

Distance: 2.7621% / 0.02762117
45.6 MNG_Khovsgol_BA
39.2 RUS_Krasnoyarsk_MLBA
15.2 TKM_Gonur1_BA

Target: KAZ_Pazyryk_IA

Distance: 1.4174% / 0.01417422
53.2 MNG_Khovsgol_BA
39.4 RUS_Krasnoyarsk_MLBA
7.4 TKM_Gonur1_BA

Target: RUS_Tuva_Aldy_Bel_IA

Distance: 2.6900% / 0.02690034
50.4 MNG_Khovsgol_BA
47.4 RUS_Krasnoyarsk_MLBA
2.2 TKM_Gonur1_BA 

Yep, I'm hardly surprised. They were basically ancient hapas, tongue-in-cheek. How do Bashkirs look like? This model will probably be a poorer fit on them, as we need more proximal sources, but let us see. 

Target: Bashkir

Distance: 3.7975% / 0.03797549
47.8 RUS_Krasnoyarsk_MLBA
46.8 MNG_Khovsgol_BA
5.4 TKM_Gonur1_BA

Very similar. Some Turanian (BMAC) and the rest being Andronovo + Khovsgol (East Asian proxy). This was also the conclusion Ruscone et al. came to. 

Our findings shed new light onto the debate about the origins of the Scythian cultures. We do not find support for a western Pontic-Caspian steppe origin, which is, in fact, highly questioned by more recent historical/ archeological work (1, 2). The Kazakh Steppe origin hypothesis finds instead a better correspondence with our results

So that's settled. The Scythians were a nearly 50:50 product of Steppe Iranics and East Asians with some additional Turanian throw in.