Yes, Uyghurs are a new hybrid population

Sometimes I wonder if the period between the publication of The History and Geography of Human Genes and The Journey of Man, roughly from the mid-90s to the early 2000s, will be seen as a golden age for historical population genetics in hindsight. A few weeks ago I pointed to new data based on DNA extraction which really confuses the picture of how Europe was populated over the past 25,000 years. It seems the more data we get, the more interesting things get. In the late 1990s the emergence of powerful technologies to extract and amplify genetic material and sequence it shed light on several questions which had long tantalized researchers ever since Alan Wilson's group began to push the frontiers of molecular evolution in the 1970s. Where in the 1980s there was only the mitchondrial Eve story, by the year 2000 there was enough to go around for several books. The Journey of Man, Mapping Human History and The Seven Daughters of Eve all came out very close together chronologically. These scientists and writers knew that striking fast was imperative. Though some broad models remain robust in the face of data, consider the hypothesis of a recent expansion of our species out of Africa, in the details there are many complications of simple narratives. Spencer Wells had a good story to tell in The Journey of Man. Looking at Y chromosomal lineages he concluded that when humans left Africa, some took a "Southern Route" through India to the east, while others took a "Northern Route" via Central Asia, where the ancestors of Chinese and Europeans parted ways. Just look at the map if you don't believe me. Of course some of the data from the new genetics don't totally floor us. Genetics does not support the Soultrean hypothesis. But big coarse models are often in for some trouble. The idea that Central Asians gave rise to Europeans and East Asians may be one of those hypotheses which was too elegant for reality.* The problem is that Central Asia is chock-full of hybrid populations, which look to be the outcomes of well known historical and social processes in the light of history. It is as if Africans turned out to be part-Australian and part-European in their genetics when they're supposed to be the antecessor population! (another model could be that those Central Asians who gave rise to Europeans and East Asians are extinct, but then how could one make inferences based on their genes when surveying contemporary populations?) But the framework established in the early 2000s by Wells and the HPGL is still alive & kicking. For example, Inferring human colonization history using a copying model: