Category Archives: Historical Population Genetics

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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Assessing temporal and geographic contacts across the Adriatic Sea through the analysis of genome-wide data from Southern Italy: Southern Italy was characterised by a complex prehistory that started with different […]

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Estimating population split times and migration rates from historical effective population sizes: The estimation of effective population sizes (Ne) through time is of fundamental interest in population genetics, but the […]

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Over at my Substack Iberia: Ancient Europe’s Edge of the Earth (part 1) – Unpacking prehistoric Spanish and Portuguese genetics elicited a comment from Walter Bodmer questioning the representative of […]

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Stable population structure in Europe since the Iron Age, despite high mobility: Ancient DNA research in the past decade has revealed that European population structure changed dramatically in the prehistoric […]

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Genome-wide data from medieval German Jews show that the Ashkenazi founder event pre-dated the 14th century: We report genome-wide data for 33 Ashkenazi Jews (AJ), dated to the 14th century, […]

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The traditional model, which I’ve alluded to before on this weblog before, is that Japan is a synthesis of Jomon and Yayoi, with the latter dominant, and bringing rice-agriculture to […]

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Cosmopolitanism at the Roman Danubian Frontier, Slavic Migrations, and the Genomic Formation of Modern Balkan Peoples: The Roman Empire expanded through the Mediterranean shores and brought human mobility and cosmopolitanism […]

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A new open-access paper, Genome of a middle Holocene hunter-gatherer from Wallacea: Much remains unknown about the population history of early modern humans in southeast Asia, where the archaeological record […]

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Since David hasn’t mentioned it, I’m going to post some notes on Dynamic changes in genomic and social structures in third millennium BCE central Europe. This is a big deal […]

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A new paper on Turkey, The genetic structure of the Turkish population reveals high levels of variation and admixture: We delineated the fine-scale genetic structure of the Turkish population by […]

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A new paper on Italian Bronze Age and Iron Age genomics, Ancient genomes reveal structural shifts after the arrival of Steppe-related ancestry in the Italian Peninsula. The abstract: Across Europe, […]

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A new paper on rare Y chromosomal lineages around the Baltic, Phylogenetic history of patrilineages rare in northern and eastern Europe from large-scale re-sequencing of human Y-chromosomes: …a considerable number […]

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Region I1 I2*/I2a I2b R1a R1b G J2 J*/J1 E1b1b T Q N Russia 5 10.5 0 46 6 1 3 0 2.5 1.5 1.5 23 Lithuania 6 6 1 […]

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About five years ago researchers discovered that there was some affinity between people in the Amazon and populations in Australasia. This was very strange but robust. After that, an ancient […]

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A new paper on Scythians in Science, Ancient genomic time transect from the Central Asian Steppe unravels the history of the Scythians: The Scythians were a multitude of horse-warrior nomad […]

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A new preprint on ancient DNA, Ancient genomes from present-day France unveil 7,000 years of its demographic history. It goes from the late Pleistocene to the Iron Age, and has a lot of Neolithic samples, as well as Mesolithic and Bronze Age samples Major takeaways: – The Magdalenian populations, as represented by Goyet2, seem to […]

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A new paper came out today on ancient East Asian DNA. More precisely, this work focused on early and late Neolithic samples from China, especially the lower Yellow river basin (north-central China) and the Fujian in southeast China. A major result can be boiled down to the Admixturegraph to the right. The first ancient DNA […]

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Since I last blogged about the Knanaya Christians of Kerala my collaborator has gotten me more samples from this southern state. I decided to look at all the Knanaya (I’m nearly 20 samples now), the 5 Nasrani I have, and 2 Nairs and 2 Mappila. I’m running some more detailed analyses, but I thought I […]

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Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present is one of my favorite books because it combines erudition with trenchent and opinionated analysis. One of the arguments explicit within the author’s narrative is that the geographic parameters of Eurasian steppe created a set of societies and […]

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Razib Khan