Category Archives: Ancient DNA

1,000 ancient genomes uncover 10,000 years of natural selection in Europe: Ancient DNA has revolutionized our understanding of human population history. However, its potential to examine how rapid cultural evolution […]

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Since David has not posted, here they are… The genetic history of the Southern Arc: A bridge between West Asia and Europe: By sequencing 727 ancient individuals from the Southern […]

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The origin and legacy of the Etruscans through a 2000-year archeogenomic time transect: The origin, development, and legacy of the enigmatic Etruscan civilization from the central region of the Italian […]

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Have you taken my Steppelandia Quiz yet? A new ‘must read’ paper on Neanderthals, Initial Upper Palaeolithic humans in Europe had recent Neanderthal ancestry: Modern humans appeared in Europe by at least […]

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A new preprint, Projecting ancient ancestry in modern-day Arabians and Iranians: a key role of the past exposed Arabo-Persian Gulf on human migrations, finds that Basal Eurasian (BEu) ancestry seems […]

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Several people have asked me about the new study on ancient DNA in the Caribbean, A genetic history of the pre-contact Caribbean. There is a lot to this paper, some […]

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A new preprint uses about a dozen ancient genomes to create a model of the origins of Europeans and European farmers more precisely. The big deal here is that they […]

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Human mobility at Tell Atchana (Alalakh) during the 2nd millennium BC: integration of isotopic and genomic evidence: The Middle and Late Bronze Age Near East, a period roughly spanning the […]

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The genomic formation of First American ancestors in East and Northeast Asia: Upward Sun River 1, an individual from a unique burial of the Denali tradition in Alaska (11500 calBP), […]

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The power of ancient DNA in terms of human evolution at this point is to a large extent the ability to understand the arc of human cultural history as reflected in our genealogies. Archaeologists have long attempted to infer aspects of social and cultural practice from material remains. Now, geneticists are getting into this game, […]

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We’ve been waiting for ancient DNA to answer some questions about Eastern Eurasia for a while. I always thought Qiaomei Fu would spearhead it, but it doesn’t seem like it worked out that way. That’s bcause she’s not on a new preprint, The Genomic Formation of Human Populations in East Asia, which fills in a […]

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From A method for genome-wide genealogy estimation for thousands of samples, this section jumped out at me:
In the East and South Asian groups, the data suggest a very recent arrival of Denisovan DNA (mainly <15,000 YBP). In non-Africans, Neandertha…

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In the recent paper on the genetics of Philistines they had good quality DNA from 10 individuals. Some archaeologists have criticized over-generalizing from such a small dataset. Naively I think this is a good caution. But we have many many ancient DNA results from humans now, and I think this naive objection needs to be […]

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Unfortunately, we do not have a time machine, nor is there any likely possibility of any such thing in the near future. The laws of physics are what they are. That is why those of us who are interested in the human past must make recourse to discipline…

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In the 1970s A. J. Ammerman and L. L. Cavalli-Sforza argued for the validity of a model of Neolithic expansion of farmers into Europe predicated on a “demic diffusion” dynamic. This is in contrast to the idea that farming spread through the diffusion of ideas, not people. The formal theory is inspired by the Fisher wave model, […]

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Most “old hands” in the discipline of historical population genetics remember when grand narratives were constructed out of Y chromosomal haplogroup distributions. One of the most distinctive ones is that of haplogroup R1b, which exhibits very high frequencies in the west of Europe, as high as more than 80% among the Basques. Because the Basques […]

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Unless you’ve been asleep you are aware of another megafauna ancient DNA discover, Partial genomic survival of cave bears in living brown bears: Although many large mammal species went extinct at the end of the Pleistocene epoch, their DNA may persist due to past episodes of interspecies admixture. However, direct empirical evidence of the persistence […]

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Unless you’ve been asleep you are aware of another megafauna ancient DNA discover, Partial genomic survival of cave bears in living brown bears: Although many large mammal species went extinct at the end of the Pleistocene epoch, their DNA may persist due to past episodes of interspecies admixture. However, direct empirical evidence of the persistence […]

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It’s been a lot of cheddar the past few weeks. Or should I say Cheddar Man, the 9,150 year old Mesolithic subfossil from the area of Cheddar Gorge in England. This individual is important because it’s the oldest remain of such high quality found in Great Britain. And, in the late 1990s, as reported in […]

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Before David Reich’s book, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past, I highly recommend a new preprint from Pontus Skoglund and Iain Mathieson*, Ancient genomics: a new view into human prehistory and evolution. It’s basically at the sweet spot for a lot of readers: […]

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Razib Khan