New interesting article at PNAS: Estimating mobility using sparse data: Application to human genetic variation, by Loog et al (2017).
Download links and supplemental information.
Significance
Migratory activity is a critical factor in shaping processes of biological and cultural change through time. We introduce a method to estimate changes in underlying migratory activity that can be applied to genetic, morphological, or cultural data and is well-suited to samples that are sparsely distributed in space and through time. By applying this method to ancient genome data, we infer a number of changes in human mobility in Western Eurasia, including higher mobility in pre- than post-Last Glacial Maximum hunter–gatherers, and oscillations in Holocene mobility with peaks centering on the Neolithic transition and the beginnings of the Bronze Age and the Late Iron Age.
Abstract
Mobility is one of the most important processes shaping spatiotemporal patterns of variation in genetic, morphological, and cultural traits. However, current approaches for inferring past migration episodes in the fields of archaeology and population genetics lack either temporal resolution or formal quantification of the underlying mobility, are poorly suited to spatially and temporally sparsely sampled data, and permit only limited systematic comparison between different time periods or geographic regions. Here we present an estimator of past mobility that addresses these issues by explicitly linking trait differentiation in space and time. We demonstrate the efficacy of this estimator using spatiotemporally explicit simulations and apply it to a large set of ancient genomic data from Western Eurasia. We identify a sequence of changes in human mobility from the Late Pleistocene to the Iron Age. We find that mobility among European Holocene farmers was significantly higher than among European hunter–gatherers both pre- and postdating the Last Glacial Maximum. We also infer that this Holocene rise in mobility occurred in at least three distinct stages: the first centering on the well-known population expansion at the beginning of the Neolithic, and the second and third centering on the beginning of the Bronze Age and the late Iron Age, respectively. These findings suggest a strong link between technological change and human mobility in Holocene Western Eurasia and demonstrate the utility of this framework for exploring changes in mobility through space and time.
Featured image, from the article: Estimation of mobility through time from empirical data. (A) Relative mobility rate estimates in Western Eurasia over the last 14,000 y, using a 4,000-y sliding window (121 windows). The solid black line represents the mean α value from 10,000 date resampled iterations; the colored area represents the 95% confidence intervals of the jackknife distribution.
