Tag: skin

Tracking material cultures with ancient DNA: medieval Norse walrus ivory trade, and leather shields from Zanzibar

norse-walrus-ivory-trade

Two papers have been recently published, offering another interesting use of ancient DNA analysis for Archaeology and, potentially, Linguistics.

Open access Ancient DNA reveals the chronology of walrus ivory trade from Norse Greenland, by Star, Barrett, Gondek, & Boessenkool, bioRxiv (2018).

Abstract (emphasis mine):

The search for walruses as a source of ivory -a popular material for making luxury art objects in medieval Europe- played a key role in the historic Scandinavian expansion throughout the Arctic region. Most notably, the colonization, peak and collapse of the medieval Norse colony of Greenland have all been attributed to the proto-globalization of

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New preprint papers on Finland’s population history and disease, skin pigmentation in Africa, and genetic variation in Thailand hunter-gatherers

finland-genetics

New and interesting research these days in BioRxiv:

Haplotype sharing provides insights into fine-scale population history and disease in Finland, by Martín et al. (2017):

Finland provides unique opportunities to investigate population and medical genomics because of its adoption of unified national electronic health records, detailed historical and birth records, and serial population bottlenecks. We assemble a comprehensive view of recent population history (≤100 generations), the timespan during which most rare disease-causing alleles arose, by comparing pairwise haplotype sharing from 43,254 Finns to geographically and linguistically adjacent countries with different population histories, including 16,060 Swedes, Estonians, Russians, and Hungarians.

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