A “Gokturk” genome

“Ashina” (c. 551-23/4/582) was , by virtue of her marriage to Emperor Wu, empress of the Northern Zhou dynasty. She was a Gokturk by birth, daughter of Mokan Kagan and an unknown mother. Her given name is also unknown, and so she has been almost universally referred to by the name of her ancestral tribe since her reign.

There has been long, often heated, debate over the origins of the Ashina tribe. Were they ethnic Gokturks or merely Sarmatians who adopted Gokturk culture? Were they something else entirely? But we may wonder no more. For Yang et. al. recently published a paper (paid login now required to read the PDF) on the genome of Empress Ashina. Most Turkic nobles of the sixth century practiced cremation, and so it was only through her assimilation to the Chinese norm of tomb burial that a genome from the nobility survived.

The findings are remarkable. Autosomally, a basic two-way (using Afanasievo and AR_EN/Mongolia_N_North as standins for West Eurasian and ancestral North Asian) analysis shows that Ashina was of 2.3-3.9% West Eurasian and 96.1-97.7% ANA origin. PCA plotting shows that she clusters closest to both contemporary and ancient Mongols. Interestingly, she does not significantly significantly cluster with other Turkic populations of the same period, who show a more significantly mixed profile. This indicates that the Ashina were not ethnically Turkic, but rather from a Northeast Eurasian tribe (probably Mongolic in origin) which adopted Turkic culture.

She shares far more alleles with East Eurasian populations than West Eurasian; the authors estimate that this admixture occurred 1566 +/- 396 years before her birth, or roughly fifty-four generations assuming twenty-nine years for each generation (minimum 40.3 generations, maximum 67.6). Obviously, there had to be multiple admix events occurring around this time in order for this to register in her genome. For comparison, I am a descendant on several lines of Kayen, who is believed to be a daughter of Ashina’s great-uncle Istemi. My East Asian admixture is, at best, virtually nonexistent on most calculators, and while I do score relatively small amounts of Amerindian, which could be misplaced Northeast Asian, it would take far more than this one ancestor 1500 years ago to contribute to it, even if she does occur on many lines. A more likely explanation would be the multiple admixture events which occurred ~1k years ago with the Arpads, but even they were highly mixed (Laszlo I being only ~4-5% East Eurasian based on multiple admixture runs in both GEDmatch and G25).

From antiquity until now, it has been common for groups to assimilate to their host culture. The Ashina were evidently a Mongolic tribe who took on a Turkic identity, practicing Turkic religion, giving their children Turkic names, intermarrying with Turkic people. Within a couple of centuries their ancestors would have no idea that they were anything other than Turkic. We hear all the time of people believing they are entirely of one ethnicity and finding out through DNA testing they have exogamous admixture events in their recent past. Drew Barrymore, who most of us took to be a white Anglo-American (who is also half-Hungarian BTW), is actually one-eighth South Asian through Anglo-Indian ancestors. She had assumed that her Anglo-Indian ancestors were unmixed, as they were culturally English. My South Asian admix came as a surprise to me too, but I would discover that I have Romani heritage on at least one side of my family. Whether it was for reasons of antigypsy racism that my Roma ancestors assimilated to the point that their diddicoy descendants believed themselves to be entirely gorger I don’t know, but they found themselves marrying outside the community. This has gone on forever, and will always go on despite the cries of racial purists.