A look at the ethics of ancient DNA sampling in Africa
Nature Reviews Genetics has a short piece discussing the current landscape of ancient DNA sampling in Africa: “African ancient DNA research requires robust e...
All posts tagged with ancient DNA
Quote: Matthias Höss on the fascination with ancient DNA
In 2000, Igor Ovchinnikov and coworkers sequenced part of the mitochondrial genome of an infant’s skeleton from Mezmaiskaya Cave, Russia: “Molecular analysis...
Goat immunity modified by introgression during and after domestication
Goat domestication may provide another example in which introgression brought new genetic variations conferring advantages for immunity into a population. A ...
The genetic ancestry of modern lions
Marc de Manuel and coworkers have a new paper in PNAS that presents some new findings about lion population history from whole-genome sequencing. The paper h...
Neandertal ancestors of African populations
Earlier this year, Lu Chen and coworkers from Joshua Akey’s research group published an assessment of the amount of Neandertal ancestry in the genomes of pre...
Denisovan ancestors of the Iceland population
Last week in Nature, Laurits Skov and collaborators from Aarhus University and from Kari Stefansson’s research group in Iceland gave a high-resolution look a...
What ancient DNA is telling us about the prehistory and history of the horse
Ludovic Orlando has a great review of recent research into the origins and evolution of domesticated horses: “Ancient Genomes Reveal Unexpected Horse Domesti...
Chicken ancient DNA and natural selection during medieval times
Three years ago, Liisa Loog and coworkers published a fascinating paper quantifying natural selection from ancient DNA data in chickens: “Inferring Allele Fr...
Can methylation of DNA in ancient bones really predict the morphology of Denisovans?
Last week, Cell published a new paper by David Gokhman and coworkers that tries to infer the skeletal form of Denisovans from signatures of methylation in th...
Skeletons from the Himalayan lake
Yesterday a fascinating story came out in Nature Communications about the skeletons of Roopkund Lake, in northern India: “Ancient DNA from the skeletons of R...
Profile: David Reich on ancient DNA
Harvard geneticist David Reich recently was awarded a prize in Molecular Biology from the National Academy of Sciences. On the occasion, PNAS has done an int...
How will ancient proteins change paleoanthropology?
Nature has a news feature by Matthew Warren that provides a nice background to recent work on proteomics of fossil hominins: “Move over, DNA: ancient protein...
A Denisovan news article
A nice article by Ewen Callaway has just come out in Nature looking at the current scientific scene regarding the mysterious Denisovans: “Siberia’s ancient g...
Link: The academic battles of ancient DNA
This week the talk of archaeology and human genetics is a long feature article in the New York Times Magazine about the academic struggles of ancient DNA: “I...
Link: Three big insights into our African origins
Recently, I delivered a lecture to the American Society for Human Genetics, focusing on the African record of human origins. It was a great privilege to spea...
A better track of contamination in ancient DNA
A new paper from Anja Furtwängler and coworkers finds that the usual way of estimating contamination fraction in ancient DNA samples may fall short: “Ratio o...
Link: A plea to think about the ethics of sampling ancient bodies
Chip Colwell writes in The Conversation about the questionable ethics involved in some ancient DNA sampling: “Rights of the dead and the living clash when sc...
Should archaeologists really fear and loathe geneticists?
Ancient DNA is following its Moore’s Law-like progression toward greater and greater sample sizes from past populations. Until this year, it may not have see...
Link: Ancient genome brings light to Taíno ancestry
Lizzie Wade has a news story in Science that provides a review of a new paper by Hannes Schroeder and colleagues, who have sequenced the genome of 1000-year-...
Making the Mesolithic population of Scandinavia
A short article in The Conversation by Jan Apel describes some new research from Mattias Jakobsson’s lab on the population mixture that gave rise to the Meso...
Link: Implications of an 11,500-year-old genome from an infant skeleton from Alaska
A paper in Nature this week presents analysis of the ancient genome of an infant skeleton from Alaska, some 11,500 years old: “Terminal Pleistocene Alaskan g...
Mushroom-munching poplar-popping Neandertals
Neandertals ate mushrooms. That’s the conclusion of new work examining the DNA remnants in ancient dental calculus. Can we believe it?
Link: Essay overview of paleogenetics of ancient migrations
Last September, Aeon published a useful essay by science writer Jacob Mikanowski, touching on many of the ways that ancient DNA is changing the way we look a...
Notable: Penguin population turnover from ancient DNA
Notable paper: Stefanie Grosser, Nicolas J. Rawlence, Christian N. K. Anderson, Ian W. G. Smith, R. Paul Scofield, Jonathan M. Waters. 2016. Invader or resid...
Another Denisovan from Denisova Cave
Denisova Cave is one of the most fascinating places in the story of human origins. The cave is in the northern wall of the Anuy River valley, within the Alta...
Link: Pääbo wins award
Some nice coverage of Svante Pääbo in the Washington Post on the occasion of him winning one of the 3-million dollar “Breakthrough Awards” last week: “3 scie...
Upcoming event: ‘The Past, Present, and Future of DNA’ at Harvard
On October 2, I will be participating in a public symposium at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, titled “The Past, Present, a...
Notable: New World tuberculosis came from seals
Notable paper: Bos, K. I., Harkins, K. M., Herbig, A., Coscolla, M., Weber, N., Comas, I., … & Krause, J. (2014). Pre-Columbian mycobacterial genomes rev...
The genome from Ust’-Ishim
Qiaomei Fu and colleagues from Svante Pääbo’s lab have reported on a genome from northern Siberia that dates to 45,000 years ago. The genome comes from a hum...
A new early modern human genome from Siberia
Ann Gibbons reports from a recent conference in Spain about new work that has sequenced a whole genome from a 45,000-year-old femur from Siberia: “Oldest Hom...
Ghost populations and ancient DNA
The rapidly changing field of ancient DNA has settled into a kind of normal science, as several teams of researchers have coalesced around a set of approache...
Infographic: Field guide to Pleistocene hookups
Here’s my inaugural infographic, illustrating what we know about mating relationships from ancient DNA:
The Denisova-Sima de los Huesos connection
I direct your attention to a new paper by Mattias Meyer and colleagues describing a mitochondrial DNA sequence from Sima de los Huesos, Spain (Meyer et al. 2...
Baiting ancient DNA with RNA
A new paper by Meredith Carpenter and colleagues describes a novel method that can greatly enrich the yield of DNA from ancient samples:
Cave bear DNA from Sima de los Huesos
Jesse Dabney and colleagues, including Svante Pääbo from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, report on the assembly of a complete mitocho...
Dog domestication complexity
Ewen Callaway covers the active area of dog domestication research in a new Nature News article (“Dog genetics spur scientific spat”) Callaway:dog:2013.
Tracking the potato pathogen
An increasing number of authors of scientific papers are writing good blog summaries of their work. The really great part is that the authors tend to give ba...
The sea shall give up her dead
I really like this ScienceNOW account by Traci Watson of new work that has uncovered ancient DNA in deep-seafloor contexts: “Ancient DNA Found Hidden Below S...
Denisova at high coverage
Science today has released the new paper on the Denisova high-coverage genome by Mattias Meyer and colleagues from Svante Pääbo’s group Meyer:Denisova:2012. ...
Neandertal ancestry "Iced"
UPDATE (2015-10-21): This post has gotten some attention from social media recently, because Ötzi has been in the news. Later analyses have made clear that o...
Calculus microbially
Molecular archaeologist Christina Warinner gave a TED talk and the main ideas are now in a CNN article: “Why your dental plaque is valuable”.
Mailbag: Fickle finger
Re: Denisova
How widespread is Denisovan ancestry today?
Last month, David Reich and colleagues Reich:Denisova:2011 reported on estimates of Denisovan ancestry for island and mainland Asian populations. Their most ...
Ancient genomes review
Mark Stoneking and Johannes Krause present a review article in the current Nature Reviews Genetics Stoneking:Krause:2011 that gives an overview of the scienc...
Did Denisovans have genetic adaptations to high altitude?
We don’t really know the extent of territory that might have been occupied by the population represented by the Denisova genome. The signs of mixture into th...
A problem of fuzzy mammoths
Paleogenomics is changing the way we study evolution. In a number of cases, it now allows us to study extinct organisms with the same methods as we study liv...
Mummy trouble redux
Speaking of Jo Marchant, she has a long article in the current Nature about the mummy DNA controversy (“Ancient DNA: Curse of the Pharoah’s DNA”).
Mummy troubles
Mummies are always trouble. I hate to say it. You see, in my line of work we can do an awful lot with a skeleton. We’re usually down to a few pieces of bone,...
Hobbit DNA hunt
Every so often, a reader asks me if I know any new rumors about DNA sampling of “Homo floresiensis”. I’m not holding out much hope for success given the trop...
The Denisova mtDNA sequence: The X-Woman
In this week’s copy of Nature, Johannes Krause and colleagues Krause:Denisova:2010 report on the complete mitochondrial sequence of a pinky bone from Denisov...
Mailbag: Haplogroups of Peruvian mummies
Now that we have looked at the DNA of the Tarim Basin mummies, when is somebody going to do the same for the mummies found at Paracasa, Peru? I know that an...
A genome from the mid-Holocene of Greenland
I was really busy meeting awesome people and making new friends in Georgia this week. So, although I got to read and think about the Greenland ancient genome...
East meets West, and vice versa
Here’s a nice, symmetrical pair of stories:
Back-breeding aurochsen
I was just talking in class today about how people want to back-breed aurochsen out of extinction. Here’s a new story about the idea, from the Telegraph:
Ancient penguin mtDNA and substitution rates
Here’s an example of a really incomprehensible press release:
Today's Europeans different from Paleolithic and Neolithic predecessors
Dienekes, on a new study of early Neolithic and earlier mtDNA variation in Europe:
Mailbag: Holding on to ancient DNA
Hi, It is often claimed that ancient genes that were once very adaptable are discarded over time by drift, bottle necks etc. What if an ancient trait wer...
Olivia Judson: Museum collections in the DNA age
In “Dawn at the museum”, Olivia Judson points to the huge potential of ancient DNA techniques to wring new answers out of old taxidermied specimens.
A history of cattle breeding by the book?
Ancient DNA technology may make it possible to test some very interesting hypotheses about recent evolutionary change in human populations.
Hail, great Copernithal!
OK, so they’ve identified the body of Copernicus.
Neolithic grave relations
An interesting story:
When disease strikes an island species
Jennifer Viegas writes an interesting story about a new study that shows the extinction of Christmas Island rats was driven by black rat diseases:
Domesticated yeast face ancient amber-yeast competitors
So, they’ve resurrected 45-million-year-old yeast from amber, and are using it to brew beer under the “Fossil Fuels” label:
Scandinavian dogs R us?
Mitochondrial phylogeography is a useful tool for the study of wild populations. But applying phylogeography to domestic species is more complicated....
Viking ancestry, surnames, and medieval genetics
There's a fun paper in last month's Molecular Biology and Evolution by Georgina Bowden and colleagues, investigating whether the Viking influence on surname...
Ancient hair preserves DNA better?
That's the strand of this LiveScience article:
If you want to clone a baby mammoth, for goodness' sake keep it frozen!
Nicholas Wade writes to answer the mammoth cloning question. I know, nobody cares about anything else. It's always, "Clone, clone, clone!"
Neandertal genome damage profile
It's another week, which means it's time for another of the mysteriously-not-yet-appeared PNAS papers. But this time, a friendly source sent me the paper (w...
Ancient DNA profile
An article by science writer Henry Nicholls in PLoS Biology covers a lot of ground. Most of the attention goes to Alan Cooper, with Svante Pääbo i...
HIV susceptibility locus protects against an extinct virus
What's behind the headline about "resurrecting an ancient virus"?
Another use for ancient DNA
Ummm...
The genetics of refugia
The NY Times gave a short writeup earlier this week to a paper about ancient DNA from arctic foxes:
"Worn down by nearly three decades of peril"
Saw this today from The Onion, it's an oldie but a goodie:
Manfred's amazing technicolor dreamcoat
The story about blonde mammoths has been making the rounds, based on this paper by Holger Römpler and colleagues in Science. The abstract:
Contamination deamination
This strikes me as a problem:
Ancient hemorrhagic fever in Mexico?
I was reading through next month's Discover, and there is an article covering the work of Rodolfo Acuna-Soto, who has proposed that some of the most major e...
Early European mtDNA: only mysterious if you want it to be
A paper by Wolfgang Haak and colleagues in this week's Science sequenced ancient mtDNA in 24 Neolithic European skeletons.