In The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World the archaeologist David Anthony outlines the thesis that migrations from the west Eurasian steppe during the Bronze Age reshaped the culture of Northern Europe. When Anthony published the book, which you should really read if you are... Read More

The map and chart above is from The genetic history of Ice Age Europe, a new paper in Nature from the Reich lab (the new data has been posted). It illustrates probably the major finding of the paper, using a ~40,000 year paleogenetic transect of 51 ancient DNA samples the authors conclude that there have... Read More

Last fall while at ASHG this paper came out, Ancient Ethiopian genome reveals extensive Eurasian admixture throughout the African continent: Turns out that there was a bioinformatics error which negates the magnitude of these results. Erratum to Gallego Llorente et al. 2015: The results presented in the Report “Ancient Ethiopian genome reveals extensive Eurasian admixture... Read More

In 2007 a friend told me of an encounter at a seminar where L. L. Cavalli-Sforza seem to offer agriculture almost reflexively as a solution to the conundrum of signals of positive selection in the genome of humans. Basically, all paths led to agriculture. I have to say that nearly ten years later Cavalli-Sforza's deep... Read More

There's a new paper in PNAS, Ancient genomes link early farmers from Atapuerca in Spain to modern-day Basques. It is a nice complement to the earlier paper on an earlier Iberian Neolithic sample. These individuals all date to a later period, most ~5,000 years ago, and one ~3,500 years. Despite the media hype, the results... Read More

Most readers are aware that ancient DNA has revolutionized historical inference of the past, particularly prehistory. In 15 years we've gone from draft genomes of one living human being, to genomes of humans who have lived tens of thousands of years ago! But by and large the ancient DNA revolution has been one of temperate... Read More

By now you may have read the breaking news in The Seattle Times that Eske Willerslev's group is going to publish genetic results on Kennewick Man. This "scoop" was obtained through the freedom of information act, which makes sense since Kennewick Man has been embroiled in political controversy since the beginning of its discovery by... Read More

In the post below Martin Sikora, an author on the K14 ancient DNA paper, has responded. The whole thing is worth reading: Hi Razib, after reading your post it I thought it would not hurt to chime in with a bit of perspective from my side, as I don’t entirely agree with some of your... Read More

As you may know the actress Daryl Hannah depicted Ayla, the protagonist from Jean Auel's Clan of the Cave Bear, in the film version. Unlike many castings Hannah was an inspired choice, as she does look like the description of Ayla in the novels. Tall, blonde, and with a high forehead (remember, there's a lot... Read More

Ancient DNA has made it big time, with a write up in The New York Times by Carl Zimmer, From Ancient DNA, a Clearer Picture of Europeans Today. The primary sources of the piece are two papers published recently in Europe, Ancient human genomes suggest three ancestral populations for present-day Europeans (ungated version) and Genome... Read More

David Reich's talk at SMBE 2014 has come and gone, and it seems like from the reports on Twitter that it was a synthesis of the results in their bioRxiv preprint from last fall, Ancient human genomes suggest three ancestral populations for present-day Europeans, and the ancient DNA samples from Samara in Russia. The major... Read More

PLoS GENETICS has finally published the paper which reported on the Iron Age Thracian ancient DNA results, Population Genomic Analysis of Ancient and Modern Genomes Yields New Insights into the Genetic Ancestry of the Tyrolean Iceman and the Genetic Structure of Europe. This seems to be a work which is an improvement on the margins,... Read More

How Europeans became Europeans is a big question, in large part because Europeans (i.e., "whites") are still what an ideology in disrepute would term the herrenvolk of the world. But this reality, the truth of which sows discord in any discourse, does not need to negate the fact that the question itself is of interest,... Read More

There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown. - Genesis 6:4 Joe Pickrell and David Reich have put up a... Read More

After reading the supplements of the La Brana hunter-gatherer paper I have a few extra thoughts in a very general sense. One result you see on PCA plots with Europeans is that the La Brana sample (along with the Swedish hunter-gatherers) are shifted toward modern Northern Europeans, and to some extent even Finns. Obviously this... Read More

Derived immune and ancestral pigmentation alleles in a 7,000-year-old Mesolithic European: Ancient genomic sequences have started to reveal the origin and the demographic impact of farmers from the Neolithic period spreading into Europe...The adoption of farming, stock breeding and sedentary societies during the Neolithic may have resulted in adaptive changes in genes associated with immunity... Read More

At some point you have no doubt encountered trees of the sort you see to the left. They are incredibly useful visualizations of historical relationships between lineages. Breeding populations. The metaphor of the tree of life was co-opted almost immediately by evolutionary science in the 19th century. On the orders of tens of millions to... Read More

Yesterday I pointed to a paper which was interesting enough, but didn't pass the smell test in relation to other evidence we have (at least in my opinion!). A primary concern was the fact that uniparental (male and female lineages) show a peculiar distribution of variation in comparison to autosomal genetic variation (i.e., the vast... Read More

The above is a graph which illustrates phylogenetic relationships using the TreeMix package. It is from the paper I alluded to yesterday. The paper, DNA analysis of an early modern human from Tianyuan Cave, China, is open access, so everyone should be able to read it. Its mtDNA analysis shows that the Tianyuan sample, from... Read More

I recently inquired if anyone was sequencing Cheddar Man. In case you don't know, this individual died ~9,000 years ago in Britain, but the remains were well preserved enough that mtDNA was retrieved from him. He was of haplogroup U5, which is still present in the local region. Cheddar Man is also particularly interesting because... Read More

Dienekes relays that Ötzi the Iceman carried the G2a4 male haplogroup. He goes on to observe: Yes, I believe that the Paleolithic-Neolithic dichotomy is more hindrance than help in understanding the European past (the Paleolithic itself may have exhibited more population turnover than we can appreciate). I suspect that the two most common European Y... Read More

Ewen Callaway has a good survey of what's been going down in ancient human genomics over the past year in Nature, Ancient DNA reveals secrets of human history. It's not paywalled, so read the whole thing. Most of it won't be too surprising for close readers of this weblog, but this part is new: Remember... Read More

John Hawks points to a report in Science on some morsels of information about Ötzi-the-Iceman's genetics, The Iceman's Last Meal: I'm assuming we'll know a whole lot more before the end of summer. So I'm going to go out on a limb and make a prediction based on what I suspect about the southern European... Read More