Increased mobility in the Nordic Late Neolithic/Bronze Age

strontium-isotope-mtdna-sweden

Open access Mobility patterns in inland southwestern Sweden during the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age, by Blank, Sjögren, Knipper, et al. Archaeol. Anthropol. Sci. 13, 64 (2021).

NOTE. For a full archaeological description of the area of study, refer to the related paper Old bones or early graves? Megalithic burial sequences in southern Sweden based on 14C datings, by Blank, Sjögren, & Storå, Archaeol. Anthropol. Sci. 12, 89 (2020).

Interesting excerpts (emphasis mine):

The sampling from megalithic graves shows a chronological gap of at least 400 years (2600–2200 cal BC), when no megalithic graves were constructed or used

Read the rest “Increased mobility in the Nordic Late Neolithic/Bronze Age”

Distribution of Southern Iberian haplogroup H indicates exchanges in the western Mediterranean

Recent open access paper The distribution of mitochondrial DNA haplogroup H in southern Iberia indicates ancient human genetic exchanges along the western edge of the Mediterranean, by Hernández, Dugoujon, Novelletto, Rodríguez, Cuesta and Calderón, BMC Genetics (2017).

Abstract (emphasis mine):

Background
The structure of haplogroup H reveals significant differences between the western and eastern edges of the Mediterranean, as well as between the northern and southern regions. Human populations along the westernmost Mediterranean coasts, which were settled by individuals from two continents separated by a relatively narrow body of water, show the highest frequencies of mitochondrial haplogroup H. These

Read the rest “Distribution of Southern Iberian haplogroup H indicates exchanges in the western Mediterranean”

mtDNA suggest original East Germanic population linked to Jutland Iron Age and Bell Beaker

antiquity_classical_Europe_przeworsk

Open Access article A mosaic genetic structure of the human population living in the South Baltic region during the Iron Age, by Stolarek et al., at Scientific Reports 8:2455 (2018).

About the site:

Kowalewko is a village in Wielkopolskie vojevodship, close to Poznan, in the middle reaches of the Samica Kierska river. Biritual Roman Age cemetery (site 12), dated from the mid-1st to the beginning of 3rd century AD, is located in the featureless arable fields at the South and West of the village

About the Wielbark culture:

Chronology spans almost all the Roman Iron Age, since ca. 20

Read the rest “mtDNA suggest original East Germanic population linked to Jutland Iron Age and Bell Beaker”

Modern Hungarian mtDNA more similar to ancient Europeans than to Hungarian conquerors

middle-ages-europe

New preprint at BioRxiv, MITOMIX, an Algorithm to Reconstruct Population Admixture Histories Indicates Ancient European Ancestry of Modern Hungarians, by Maroti et al. (2018).

Abstract (emphasis mine)

By making use of the increasing number of available mitogenomes we propose a novel population genetic distance metric, named Shared Haplogroup Distance (SHD). Unlike FST, SHD is a true mathematical distance that complies with all metric axioms, which enables our new algorithm (MITOMIX) to detect population-level admixture based on SHD minimum optimization. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of our methodology we analyzed the relation of 62 modern and 25 ancient Eurasian

Read the rest “Modern Hungarian mtDNA more similar to ancient Europeans than to Hungarian conquerors”

mtDNA haplogroup frequency analysis from Verteba Cave supports a strong cultural frontier between farmers and hunter-gatherers in the North Pontic steppe

eneolithic-forest-zone

New preprint paper at BioRxiv, led by a Japanese researcher, with analysis of mtDNA of Trypillians from Verteba Cave, Analysis of ancient human mitochondrial DNA from Verteba Cave, Ukraine: insights into the origins and expansions of the Late Neolithic-Chalcolithic Cututeni-Tripolye Culture, by Wakabayashi et al. (2017).

Abstract:

Background: The Eneolithic (~5,500 yrBP) site of Verteba Cave in Western Ukraine contains the largest collection of human skeletal remains associated with the archaeological Cucuteni-Tripolye Culture. Their subsistence economy is based largely on agro-pastoralism and had some of the largest and most dense settlement sites during the Middle Neolithic in

Read the rest “mtDNA haplogroup frequency analysis from Verteba Cave supports a strong cultural frontier between farmers and hunter-gatherers in the North Pontic steppe”