Topic
Field of genetics that recovers and studies degraded DNA from ancient human, animal, and pathogen remains to trace ancestry, migration, and disease history.
Researchers led by Université de Montréal found 45 people from Montreal's Notre-Dame Cemetery consistent with 100% European ancestry, mostly French. The result tests accounts of settler-Indigenous mixing in New France, for one burial ground only.
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Researchers found French ancestry in all 45 people sequenced from Montreal's Notre-Dame Cemetery, with no recent Indigenous or African admixture. It bears on Quebec family stories of Indigenous ancestry, but it describes one small cemetery sample.
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Michael Legge's team identified at least 17 people in jumbled bones from Highsted and dated the cemetery's use past the Roman invasion. Its possible rank as third-largest of its type rests on about 26 burials recorded in 1955, a count that matches 20 skeletons plus six possible cremations.
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A study co-authored at the University of Latvia finds sharp-force wounds on three of the six people in a ninth-century grave. A co-author says a Viking raid cannot be proved, though the date keeps it possible.
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Northern Arizona University researchers analysed DNA from 121 spotted bats, the oldest about 2,100 years old, and found the most diversity in the US Southwest. The museum and cave samples give a baseline for a bat that is hard to count, though the reported finding maps diversity by place, with northern populations looking more vulnerable.
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Stockholm-led paleogeneticists built 20 ancient genomes from unidentifiable Siberian bone scraps and found a yak relative that diverged 400,000 years ago. The result argues for sequencing fragments that shape cannot place, though the animal still needs anatomy before it gets a formal name.
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Lund University researchers trace the aurochs' Scandinavian extinction to overlapping pressures, with the last Swedish animals alive at least 6,500 years ago. The lead author draws a case for wildlife corridors from the order in which those pressures arrived.
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Kansas researchers say genetic evidence puts the arrival of today's Indigenous peoples' ancestors in the Americas no earlier than 21,000 years ago. That bound weighs against entry before the ice age's coldest peak, though the authors say gaps in sampling leave room for earlier groups.
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Dundee's Christopher Rynn has reconstructed the face of the Punin-2 man, an Andean hunter-gatherer of 3,000 to 4,000 years ago. Local advice shaped its eyes, so the portrait adds little against the old Oceanic and archaic readings, and Rynn says ancient DNA will settle lineage.
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Stockholm University researchers analyzed DNA from 142 medieval Swedes and found close relatives were uncommon among people sharing a grave. The Science Advances study turns the parent-and-child reading of a shared grave into a hypothesis that needs testing.
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A UCD-led team read 3,500 years of sheeppox evolution out of manuscript skins and Bronze Age sheep teeth, which puts a dated, provenanced sampling frame for livestock disease inside library reading rooms.
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Researchers found sheeppox virus DNA in 32 folia of medieval European parchment, including three pages of the York Gospels. The finding turns animal-skin manuscripts into a dated archive of ancient livestock disease.
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Radiocarbon can leave a medieval burial floating inside a century. A University of Tartu team used each plague genome's position on the evolutionary tree to tighten that window, and says many samples now line up with recorded outbreaks.
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A team at Nicolaus Copernicus University ran isotopes, DNA and textile analysis on a 17th century Polish burial, and the sequence they report puts the padlock on the toe at interment and the sickle at the throat only after someone dug the grave open again.
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A University of Tartu team sequenced Yersinia pestis from archaeological remains and built a way to narrow radiocarbon dates using a genome's place on the family tree, then matched samples to outbreaks chroniclers recorded.
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An international team sequenced Yersinia pestis from teeth at four Siberian cemeteries and found it in 18 of 46 people, among them siblings and parents who appear to have died in the same outbreak. The work is published in Nature.
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Archaeologists closing a dig near Żórawina noticed a four-metre circle in the soil and found 42 drilled teeth above a man's skeleton. The 2900 B.C.E. estimate rests on the shape of his battle axe until radiocarbon comes back.
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The coyote signal came out of a study built to validate new techniques for reading ancient ancestry in living genomes, and the write-up reports it without a percentage or a date for when dog and coyote met.
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University of Waterloo anthropologists matched skeletal DNA to living relatives and named Harry Peglar, William Orren, David Young and John Bridgens. Six of the 105 men who walked away from Erebus and Terror now have names.
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