Is the population of England descendants form people who inhabited Roman Britain? And where they in there turn, descendants of the preceding Celtic populations? In the paper reviewed here they have sequenced ancient genomes of individuals from northern Britain: from a Roman era York cemetery, and from earlier Iron-Age and later Anglo-Saxon burials. Roman genomes show affinity with modern British Celtic populations, particularly Welsh. They also show similarity with the earlier Iron-Age genome, suggesting population continuity, but differ from the later Anglo-Saxon, and current East England genomes. This pattern concord with profound impact of migrations in the Anglo-Saxon period. Strikingly, one Roman skeleton shows Middle Eastern origin, confirming the cosmopolitan character of the Empire, even at its northernmost fringes.
doi: 10.1038/ncomms10326 Genomic signals of migration and continuity in Britain before the Anglo-Saxons
What is the ancient population history of north-eastern Europe, in particular when did populations speaking Uralic languages, such as Finns and Saami arrive? In this review we present two paprer that analyse ancient genomic data from Estonia, Finland and north-western Russia. The genetic makeup of northern Europe was shaped by migrations from Siberia that began at least 1500 BC. This Siberian ancestry was subsequently admixed into many modern populations in the region, particularly into populations speaking Uralic languages today. Furthermore, phenotypic traits often associated with modern Northern Europeans, like light eyes, hair, and skin, as well as lactose tolerance, can be traced back to the Bronze Age in the Eastern Baltic.
doi:10.1016/j.cub.2019.04.026 The Arrival of Siberian Ancestry Connecting the Eastern Baltic to Uralic Speakers further East Saag, L. 2019
doi:10.1038/s41467-018-07483-5 Ancient Fennoscandian genomes reveal origin and spread of Siberian ancestry in Europe Lamnidis, T. C. 2018
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Variation in pigmentation among human populations may reflect local adaptation to regional light environments, because dark skin is more photoprotective, where as pale skin aids the production of vitamin D. Understanding the evolution of skin pigmentation may help us understand the population history of humans. Africa has extensive variation in skin pigmentation variants associated with dark pigmentation in Africans are identical by descent in South Asian and Australo-Melanesian populations.
doi:10.1126/ science.aan8433 Loci associated with skin pigmentation identified in African populations
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During the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) Upper Paleolithic period, hunter gatheresr in europe are divided by the glacier covering the alps in two distinct groups, confined to the remaining inhabitable land of the very suthern parst of Europe, the Iberian Peninsula in the west and Italy and the Balkans in the sout East. With the end of the ice age hunter gatheres from this Italian refuge – defiend by the 14,000-year-old individual from Villabruna, Italy came to dominate all of europe – the Villabruan cluster. The question arises, what happned to the HG in the Iberian refuge?
Survival of Late Pleistocene Hunter-Gatherer Ancestry in the Iberian Peninsula
doi://10.1016/j.cub.2019.02.006
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Since the SARS outbreak 18 years ago, a large number of severe acute respiratory syndrome-related coronaviruses have been discovered in their natural reservoir host, bats. Previous studies indicated that some of those bat coronaviruses have the potential to infect humans. The paper reviewed suggest that the Wuhan SARS Coronavirus 2, causing the disease COVID-19, originated in bats.
Zhou, P. et al.
A pneumonia outbreak associated with a new coronavirus of probable bat origin doi://10.1038/s41586-020-2012-7
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Sardinia has been of special interest to geneticists for decades. The reason being that it is the only place in Europe that has retained a genetic profile similar to the Neolithic first farmers of Europe originally from Anatolia. The paper “Genetic history from the Middle Neolithic to present on the Mediterranean island of Sardinia” in Nature Communications studies the genetic history of the island.
Genetic history from the Middle Neolithic to present on the Mediterranean island of Sardinia in Nature Communications
Joseph H. Marcus et al.
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-14523-6
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North and South America are the last continents to be populated by humans. When did the first inhabitants arrive? How do they relate to current day Native Americans? Where did they come from? Where there more than one group?
doi:10.1126/science.aav2621 Early human dispersals within the Americas
doi:10.1016/j.cell.2018.10.027 Reconstructing the Deep Population History of Central and South America
doi:10.1126/science.aar6851 Ancient human parallel lineages within North America contributed to a coastal expansion
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Why did the Indo-Europeans conquer large part of the world? What was the change in conditions and technology on the West and Central Eurasian steps that set the people living there on a track of conquest? In this review we look into the theory it was the domestication of horses and the invention of the wheel and axle; the wagon.
Sources
Talk by David Anthony, Wheeled vehicles, horses, and Indo-European origins https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HliaR2Ep24s
doi:10.1126/science.aao3297 Ancient genomes revisit the ancestry of domestic and Przewalski’s horses
doi:10.1126/science.aar7711 The first horse herders and the impact of early Bronze Age steppe expansions into Asia
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The Indus Valley Civilization, also known as the Harappan Civilization, was spread over northwestern South Asia from 2600 to 1900 BC and was one of the first large-scale urban societies of the ancient world, characterized by systematic town planning, elaborate drainage systems, granaries, and standardization of weights and measures. The reviewed paper examines the origin of it’s people. It turns out that they where a mixture of people related to ancient Iranians and Southeast Asian hunter-gatherers having no Steppe pastoralist-derived ancestry. The Indus Valley Civilization Iranian-related ancestry derives from a lineage leading to early Iranian farmers, herders, and hunter gatherers before their ancestors separated. This indactes that, in contrast to Europe, farming began in the Indus Valley without being connected by substantial movement of people.
An Ancient Harappan Genome Lacks Ancestry from Steppe Pastoralists or Iranian Farmers
Shinde, V. et. al. 2019 Cell
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2019.08.048
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Ancient DNA show population history of Neolithic Europe. Who where the first farmers of Europe? Where did they come from? Where did the Indo-European languages originate?
Review of the paper The Genomic History of Southeastern Europe in Nature anwsers some of those questions.
doi:10.1038/nature25778
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