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There's an article in Science Magazine about archeological research that has been happening for several years at an underwater site off the south coast of England, at a place called Baldnor Cliff, which has yielded numerous flint objects and plant matter. Some of the plant matter was recently...

Eurogenes posted a link to an article published by the Linguistics Society which claimed to prove that Proto-Indo-European developed on the Eurasian Steppe about 6500-5500 BP. If that's true, and if everyone is correct in assuming that Corded Ware are closely related to those northern IE folk...

Nature Magazine has published the abstract of a paper about the discovery of a 55,000 year old skull found in Isreal. The abstract states that the shape of the skull resembles that of modern skulls and the find should shed light on the peopling of Eurasia from the Middle East. The article...

In the Eurogenese BlogSpot today, there's a copy of an abstract that was presented by David Reich and Nick Patterson at a conference. The title of the paper was "DNA points to the Eurasian steppe as a proximate source for Indo-European migrations into Europe. The abstract indicates that this...

Eurogene's Blog has a link to an open access paper by two Cambridge professors who compared archeology and carbon dating data in order to estimate population fluctuations during the Upper Paleolithic. They concluded that the results support the idea of southwestern France being a population...

Wishing you all many rum and cokes this evening and a happy 2015.

Live Science reported on a study by Gregory Clark, an economist at the University of California, who looked at social mobility in Britain. He assumed that once someone joined the social and economic elite, the prominence of their family would only last for a few generations. Instead, he found...

There's an article in Science Daily about a site in the Czech Republic where scientists have found evidence of Gravettian people hunting mammoths about 30,000 years ago. To me, the most interesting thing about the find was the conclusion that the hunters used domesticated dogs, which I think...

German chancellor Angela Merkel has said that she will no longer support British membership in the EU if Britain continues to oppose the free movement of labour by having its own immigration restrictions. The British Conservative Party, with a wary eye on the growing popularity of the UK...

Here's a link to a paper about DNA in the Balkans. The authors think the results verify that the Balkans area has been an important corridor for the flow of genes from the Middle East into Europe. Not exactly a surprising idea, but it's always useful to have more data about such an important...

It appears that the use of copper in the Middle East may go back further than was thought. However, for me, the really interesting thing about this find is that the copper tool appears to have originally come from the Caucausus. Here's the article I found in Archeology News. "A copper awl...

In another thread, I had previously mentioned that the blog "For What They Were ... We Are" (http://forwhattheywereweare.blogspot.ca/) contained a reference to an archeological study indicating the earliest Bell Beaker settlements in Portugal were separate from the previously existing Neolithic...

I came across this information, which seems to contradict commonly held ideas about when fixed settlements first developed. "During ongoing excavations in northern Sudan, Polish archaeologists from the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology in Poznań, have discovered the remains of a settlement...

This website details a very interesting excavation project in Crete. www.unc.edu/~dchaggis/ Unfortunately for me, the website is partly in Greek. Not surprising, but since I can't read Greek, I can't tell whether there's the potential for new DNA information.

I found this article on the BBC News website. "Archaeologists have released details on what they have described as the most important Pictish stone find to have been made in Moray in decades. Weighing more than a ton and stretching to 1.7m, the Dandaleith Stone dates from the 6th to 8th...

I found this article in Live Science magazine. Here's the link. www.livescience.com/47187-skull-with-brain-unearthed.html "A Stone Age skull with what may be bits of brain clinging to it has been unearthed at an ancient hunter-gatherer site in Norway. The skeletal fragment, which is about...

I found this article on an on-line news service called Huffington Post. It doesn't mention anything about whether there will be any attempt to extract DNA - I imagine that at this point, contamination would be an issue, although modern DNA extraction methods can supposedly limit that problem...

Okay, there doesn't seem to be much in the news about DNA this week, and I'm bored, so I'm going to suggest that we try to guess the Y DNA and autosomal results of the paper by David Reich et al addressing the genotyping of more than 40 3000-9000 year old humans from the Samara region of the...

Livescience Magazine has an article that discusses the genetic disposition of the Iceman toward hardening of the arteries and heart disease. www.livescience.com/47114-otzi-had-heart-disease-genes.html I seem to remember having read something about the Iceman and heart disease somewhere else...

Here's an article published by Nature Communications about a study that suggests Europe's modern mtDNA signature was largely established about 6000 years ago, in the mid Neolithic, by people of an unknown origin who largely replaced the early Neolithic farmers, for reasons that aren't yet clear...