Vikings, Vikings, Vikings! “eastern” ancestry in the whole Baltic Iron Age

Open access Population genomics of the Viking world, by Margaryan et al. bioRxiv (2019), with a huge new sampling from the Viking Age.

#EDIT (16 SEP 2020): The paper has been published in Nature.

Interesting excerpts (emphasis mine, modified for clarity):

To understand the genetic structure and influence of the Viking expansion, we sequenced the genomes of 442 ancient humans from across Europe and Greenland ranging from the Bronze Age (c. 2400 BC) to the early Modern period (c. 1600 CE), with particular emphasis on the Viking Age. We find that the period preceding the Viking Age was

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How the genocidal Yamnaya men loved to switch cultures

After some really interesting fantasy full of arrows, it seems Kristiansen & friends are coming back to their most original idea from 2015, now in New Scientist’s recent clickbait Story of most murderous people of all time revealed in ancient DNA (2019):

Teams led by David Reich at Harvard Medical School and Eske Willerslev at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark announced, independently, that occupants of Corded Ware graves in Germany could trace about three-quarters of their genetic ancestry to the Yamnaya. It seemed that Corded Ware people weren’t simply copying the Yamnaya; to a large degree they

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Ancient DNA study reveals HLA susceptibility locus for leprosy in medieval Europeans

Open access Ancient DNA study reveals HLA susceptibility locus for leprosy in medieval Europeans, by Krause-Kyora et al., Nature Communications (2018)

Abstract:

Leprosy, a chronic infectious disease caused by Mycobacterium leprae (M. leprae), was very common in Europe till the 16th century. Here, we perform an ancient DNA study on medieval skeletons from Denmark that show lesions specific for lepromatous leprosy (LL). First, we test the remains for M. leprae DNA to confirm the infection status of the individuals and to assess the bacterial diversity. We assemble 10 complete M. leprae genomes that all differ from each other. Second,

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WordPress Translation Plugin – now using Google Translation from and into Swedish, Finnish, Danish, Norwegian, Polish, Czech, Romanian, Bulgarian, Hindi, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, etc.

The latest improvements added to the Indoeuropean Translator Widget have been included in the simpler WordPress Translation Plugin available in this personal blog.

It now includes links to automatic translations from and into all language pairs offered by Google Translation Engine, apart from other language pairs (from individual languages, like English or Spanish) into other online machine translators, viz Tranexp or Translendium.

Available language pairs now include English, Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan*, Czech, Chinese (traditional/simplified), Welsh*, Danish, German, Greek, Spanish, Persian*, French, Hindi, Croatian, Icelandic*, Italian, Hebrew*, Latin*, Korean, Hungarian*, Dutch, Japanese, Norwegian (Bokmål), Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian Portuguese*), Romanian, Russian, … Read the rest “WordPress Translation Plugin – now using Google Translation from and into Swedish, Finnish, Danish, Norwegian, Polish, Czech, Romanian, Bulgarian, Hindi, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, etc.”

WordPress Translation Plugin: ‘Indoeuropean Translator Widget’ – now also Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Polish, Greek, Russian, Polish, Romanian, Finnish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, …

The latest upgrades are only available in the simpler WordPress Translation Widget Plugin.

You can download it from the official WordPress Plugin Repository site. New upgrades will automatically appear on your WordPress blog dashboard.

As always, this widget plugin, when activated from the Design tab of your WordPress blog dashboard, will put links – with the tag rel="nofollow", so that search engines don’t follow them – to automatic translations of that website by mainly Google Translation Engine language pairs, to and from (at least) all of these ones into each other, all in all 24×23 language pairs [more … Read the rest “WordPress Translation Plugin: ‘Indoeuropean Translator Widget’ – now also Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Polish, Greek, Russian, Polish, Romanian, Finnish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, …”