ancient dna

Ancient DNA reveals how cats conquered the world "Humans may have had pet cats for as long as 9,500 years. In 2004, archaeologists in Cyprus found a complete cat skeleton buried in a Stone Age village. Given that Cyprus has no native wildcats, the animal (or perhaps its ancestors) must have...

It's relatively small paper compared to the mastodons published earlier this month, but nevertheless interesting. Paleogenomic Evidence for Multi-generational Mixing between Neolithic Farmers and Mesolithic Hunter-Gatherers in the Lower Danube Basin (extended PDF with supplementary materials...

I noticed on Jean Manco's site that new SNPs were available for the Romano-British samples tested by Martiniano 2016 and the Celtic Hinxton genomes tested by Schiffels 2016. The six R1b samples from Roman Britain belonged to: - R1b-L21>DF63 - R1b-L21 (not just L11 as previously reported) -...

It's been raining ancient DNA samples lately! 127 new ancient DNA samples, including 82 Y-DNA, from various Neolithic and Chalcolithic cultures in Europe. Parallel ancient genomic transects reveal complexpopulation history of early European farmers Abstract Ancient DNA studies have...

Didn't see the documentary on the possible Gladiators from Eboracum (York, England) listed here! Did you guys see it!?! (Sorry in advance if it was though before!). I am very interested in these guys as I matched two skeletons from this same cemetery - Driffield Terrace in York. I matched...

I have analysed dozens of ancient genomes using Dodecad dv3 and K12b and Eurogenes K36, and I noticed that almost every time ancient Scandinavians or Germanic tribes possessed non-negligible percentages of African admixture. These were sometimes reported as Central African or Northwest African...

I have run a Yamna genome as well as the Iron-Age Celtic and Anglo-Saxon Hinxton genomes in the Eurogenes K36 calculator. Now is time to have a look at some Mesolithic and Neolithic Europeans. Keep in mind that the component names for the Eurogenes K36 admixture are not accurate and do not...

I should have done this a long time ago, but never found the time among the many things on my to-do list. I ran a Yamna genome in the Dodecad and Eurogenes calculators just to see what would come out of it, and to help interpret the maps I created from the Dodecad calculators. Keep in mind...

I had not made any new archaeological maps for 6 years. Yet there are still periods that weren't covered, including that particularly interesting one that saw the emergence of the Khvalynsk culture, which may well have been the first PIE culture in the Steppe, before Sredny Stog and Yamna. That...

Just saw this in the news: Was Viking ruler Rollo Danish or Norwegian? This means that we should get the Y-DNA haplogroup of the Viking rulers of Normandy, from Rollo to William the Conqueror. Looking forward to it.

Late Bronze Age J2a1 found 1110-1270 B.C. Ludas-Varjú-dűlő, Hungary. Kyjatice Culture. Individual BR2 Y-DNA J2a1. "The genomic stasis of the Neolithic is subsequently interrupted during the third millennium BC coinciding with the onset of the Bronze Age. Our two Bronze Age samples, BR1...

Here is a summary of my observations posted in this thread regarding the autosomal analysis of the Mesolithic and Bronze Age samples from Haak et al 2015. Eurogenes K15 analysis The K15 admixtures for all the Yamna, Corded Ware and Bell Beaker samples can be found in this spreadsheet. As I...

Wolfgang Haak et al., Massive migration from the steppe is a source for Indo-European languages in Europe, bioRxiv http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/013433 ID I0412 Culture: Els Trocs, Spain (Cardial pottery, Early Neolithic) 5310-5206 BCE mtDNA N1a1a1 Y-DNA I2a1b1, L161+ ID I0172 Culture...

Schiffels et al. (2014) tested two Iron Age Celtic samples and four early medieval Anglo-Saxon samples, all from Hixton in Cambridgeshire, East Anglia, England. The Iron Age Britond lived approximately 2,000 years ago, while the Anglo-Saxon individuals are dated to c. 1,300 years before present...

Here is a new paper by Daniel Gómez-Sánchez and co-workers. They tested 19 mitochondrial sequences from the Burgos region in Castile and León, northern Spain, all dating from the late Copper Age (2050 to 2500 BCE). The authors note the heterogeneity of mt-haplogroups compared to other...

A new paper by Emilia Huerta-Sánchez and colleagues was published in Nature yesterday: Altitude adaptation in Tibetans caused by introgression of Denisovan-like DNA. Abstract As modern humans migrated out of Africa, they encountered many new environmental conditions, including greater...

Sikora et al. published a new paper comparing the genome of two 2,500-year-old Iron Age Thracians (P192-1 and K8) with Ötzi (Chalcolithic Alps), Gök4 and ajv70 (Neolithic Sweden), brana1 (Mesolithic Spain) and Swedish hunter-gatherers. The admixture comparison is particularly interesting. The...

A very interesting new paper by Wilde et al. 2014 tested three genes (HERC2, SLC45A2 and TYR) associated with skin, eye and hair pigmentation in 63 ancient samples from the Pontic-Caspian Steppe (mostly modern Ukraine) dating from the Chalcolithic and Bronze Age. The results are relatively...

At present, ancient Y-DNA tests have only confirmed the presence of haplogroups G2a and F among the remains of Neolithic farmers from the Linear Pottery culture (LBK) in Central Europe. Elsewhere, only G2a and E-V13 have been found, besides the Mesolithic lineage I2a. Most people now agree that...

Rasmussen et al. tested the entire genome of a boy from the Clovis culture who died 12,600 years ago in Anzick, Montana. The results shows that all indigenous people in both North an South America seem to be descended from the same group of ancestors as those of the Clovis culture, which started...