Ancient North Eurasian in the context of "Tocharia"

The genetic history of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas is divided into two distinct periods: the initial peopling of the Americas from about 20,000 to 14,000 years ago (20–14 kya), and European contact, after about 500 years ago. The first period of the genetic history of Indigenous Americans is the determinant factor for the number of genetic lineages, zygosity mutations, and founding haplotypes present in today's Indigenous American populations.

Indigenous American populations descend from and share ancestry with an Ancient East Asian lineage which diverged from other East Asian peoples prior to the Last Glacial Maximum (26–18 kya). They also received geneflow from Ancient North Eurasians, a distinct Paleolithic Siberian population with deep affinities to both "European hunter-gatherers" (e.g. Kostenki-14) and "Basal East Asians" (e.g. Tianyuan man). They later dispersed throughout the Americas after about 16,000 years ago (exceptions being the Na-Dene and Eskimo–Aleut speaking groups, which are derived partially from Siberian populations which entered the Americas at a later time).

The Ancient Beringian (AB) is a human archaeogenetic lineage, based on the genome of an infant found at the Upward Sun River site (dubbed USR1), dated to 11,500 years ago. The AB lineage diverged from the Ancestral Native American (ANA) lineage about 20,000 years ago. The ANA lineage was estimated as having been formed between 20,000 and 25,000 years ago by a mixture of East Asian (~65%) and Ancient North Eurasian (~35%) lineages, consistent with the model of the peopling of the Americas via Beringia during the Last Glacial Maximum.

In archaeogenetics, eastern hunter-gatherer (EHG), sometimes east European hunter-gatherer or eastern European hunter-gatherer, is a distinct ancestral component that represents Mesolithic hunter-gatherers of Eastern Europe.

The eastern hunter-gatherer genetic profile is mainly derived from Ancient North Eurasian (ANE) ancestry, which was introduced from Siberia, with a secondary and smaller admixture of European western hunter-gatherers (WHG). However, the relationship between the ANE and EHG ancestral components is not yet well understood due to lack of samples that could bridge the spatiotemporal gap.

The Tarim mummies are a series of mummies discovered in the Tarim Basin in present-day Xinjiang, China, which date from 1800 BCE to the first centuries BCE, with a new group of individuals recently dated to between c. 2100 and 1700 BCE. The Tarim population to which the earliest mummies belonged was agropastoral, and they lived c. 2000 BCE in what was formerly a freshwater environment, which has now become desertified.

Zhang et al. (2021) found that these early mummies (dating from 2,135 to 1,623 BCE) had high levels of Ancient North Eurasian ancestry (ANE, about 72%), with smaller admixture from Ancient Northeast Asians (ANA, about 28%), but no detectable Western Steppe-related ancestry. They formed a genetically isolated local population that "adopted neighbouring pastoralist and agriculturalist practices, which allowed them to settle and thrive along the shifting riverine oases of the Taklamakan Desert." These mummified individuals were long suspected to have been "Proto-Tocharian-speaking pastoralists", related to the Afanasievo or BMAC cultures, but "the earliest Tarim Basin cultures appear to have arisen from a genetically isolated local population." Zhang et al. (2025) investigated a Late Bronze Age site in the far west of the Tarim Basin, dated 1600 to 1400 BC. Its inhabitants overwhelmingly descended from the Sintashta and Andronovo population, with additional ancestry from BMAC (10%) and Tarim_EMBA (12%). Nearly all subjects belonged to Y-DNA haplogroup R-M17.