Ancient DNA (Archaeology)

This volume covers the Prehistory of Ukraine from the Lower Palaeolithic through to the end of the Neolithic periods. This is the first comprehensive synthesis of Ukrainian Prehistory from earliest times through until the Neolithic Period undertaken by researchers who are currently investigating the Prehistory of Ukraine. At present there are no other English language books on this subject that provide a current synthesis for these periods. The chapters in this volume provide up-to-date overviews of all aspects of prehistoric culture development in Ukraine and present details of the key sites and finds for the periods studied. The book includes the most recent research from all areas of prehistory up to the Neolithic period, and, in addition, areas such as recent radiocarbon dating and its implications for culture chronology are considered; as is a consideration of aDNA and the new insights into culture history this area of research affords; alongside recent macrofossil studies of plant use, and anthropological and stable isotope studies of diet, which all combine to allow greater insights into the nature of human subsistence and cultural developments across the Palaeolithic to Neolithic periods in Ukraine. It is anticipated that this book will be an invaluable resource for students of prehistory throughout Europe in providing an English-language text that is written by researchers who are active in their respective fields and who possess an intimate knowledge of Ukrainian prehistory.

Malcolm C. Lillie (PhD 1998, University of Sheffield) is Professor of Archaeology at Umeå University, Sweden. Previously he was Professor of Prehistoric Archaeology and Wetland Science at the University of Hull, England. Malcolm undertook MSc and PhD research at Sheffield University, the latter under the supervision of the late Professor Marek Zvelebil. His main research interests are the Prehistory of Ukraine, in situ preservation in wetlands, prehistoric and wetlands archaeology in general and the analysis of prehistoric human remains.

Inna Potekhina (PhD 1992, Institute of Archaeology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Kiev) is Head of the Bioarchaeology Department in the Institute of Archeology, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Kiev and an Associate Professor at the University of 'Kyiv-Mohyla Academy', where she teaches a course of anthropology and bioarchaeology. Inna is an author of more than 150 articles and four monographs on the anthropology of the prehistoric populations of Ukraine and Eastern Europe, the genomic history of Mesolithic-Eneolithic Ukraine and palaeodemography and palaeodiet reconstructions.

Chelsea Budd (PhD 2016, University of Oxford) is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Archaeology at the University of Umeå, Sweden. Her main research interests are Early European Prehistory, isotope geochemistry and the application of statistical modelling techniques to archaeological research.

How have humans colonised the entire planet and reshaped its ecosystems in the process? This unique and groundbreaking collection of essays explores human movement through time, the impacts of these movements on landscapes and other species, and the ways in which species have co-evolved and transformed each other as a result. Exploring the spread of people, plants, animals, and diseases through processes of migration, colonisation, trade, and travel, it assembles a broad array of case studies from the Pliocene to the present. The contributors from disciplines across the humanities and natural sciences are senior or established scholars in the fields of human evolution, archaeology, history, and geography.

European population history has been shaped by migrations of people, and their subsequent
admixture. Recently, ancient DNA has brought new insights into European migration events
linked to the advent of agriculture, and possibly to the spread of Indo-European languages.
However, little is known about the ancient population history of north-eastern Europe, in
particular about populations speaking Uralic languages, such as Finns and Saami. Here we
analyse ancient genomic data from 11 individuals from Finland and north-western Russia. We
show that the genetic makeup of northern Europe was shaped by migrations from Siberia that
began at least 3500 years ago. This Siberian ancestry was subsequently admixed into many
modern populations in the region, particularly into populations speaking Uralic languages
today. Additionally, we show that ancestors of modern Saami inhabited a larger territory
during the Iron Age, which adds to the historical and linguistic information about the
population history of Finland.

New genetic technologies are allowing for innovative applications in archaeology and anthropology, providing new insights into past populations’ origins and interactions, and even identifying close genetic links between ancient peoples and their living biological relatives. Yet for Indigenous peoples, these technological advances raise many questions around their very identity as founding populations and their histories, their ancestries, and connections between past and present groups. Scientific pronouncements about identity and related concepts may have profound social, cultural, political and economic consequences for Indigenous peoples. In particular, DNA is increasingly perceived as being able to provide objective evidence to support or refute land claims and other identity-based rights, to provide genetic criteria for tribal enrollment and to adjudicate the repatriation of ancestral remains to descendant communities. There is also concern that the lure and mystique of genetic information has the potential to reduce the complexities of identity to biological categories.
  These pressing issues were at the heart of a public symposium and workshop held in Vancouver, British Columbia, in October 2015. The event, “DNA and Indigeneity: The Changing Role of Genetics in Indigenous Rights, Tribal Belonging, and Repatriation,”  examined the ethical, legal, and scientific prospects and perils surrounding the use of genetic information to inform or substantiate claims of identity and cultural affiliation; and 2) discussed the real-world implications of genetic analysis in relation to Indigenous rights, tribal enrollment, and the repatriation of human remains. This volume shares the proceedings of the public symposium portion of the event.

Farming and sedentism first appeared in southwestern Asia during the early Holocene and later spread to neighboring regions, including Europe, along multiple dispersal routes. Conspicuous uncertainties remain about the relative roles of migration, cultural diffusion, and admixture with local foragers in the early Neolithization of Europe. Here we present paleogenomic data for five Neolithic individuals from northern Greece and northwestern Turkey spanning the time and region of the earliest spread of farming into Europe. We use a novel approach to recalibrate raw reads and call genotypes from ancient DNA and observe striking genetic similarity both among Aegean early farmers and with those from across Europe. Our study demonstrates a direct genetic link between Mediterranean and Central European early farmers and those of Greece and Anatolia, extending the European Neolithic migratory chain all the way back to southwestern Asia. paleogenomics | Neolithic | Mesolithic | Greece | Anatolia

Recent breakthroughs in ancient DNA sequencing have made us rethink the connections between human, linguistic and cultural expansions across Eurasia. Compared to western Eurasia 9-11 , however, eastern Eurasia remains poorly understood. Northeast Asia-the vast region encompassing Inner Mongolia, the Yellow, Liao and Amur River basins, the Russian Far East, the Korean peninsula and the Japanese Islandsremains especially under-represented in the recent literature. With a few exceptions that are heavily focused on genetics 12-14 or limited to reviewing existing datasets 4 , truly interdisciplinary approaches to Northeast Asia are scarce. The linguistic relatedness of the Transeurasian languages-also known as 'Altaic'-is among the most disputed issues in linguistic prehistory. Transeurasian denotes a large group of geographically adjacent languages stretching across Europe and northern Asia, and includes five uncontroversial linguistic families: Japonic, Koreanic, Tungusic, Mongolic, and Turkic (Fig. 1a). The question of whether

By: Nick Patterson, Michael Isakov, Thomas Booth, Lindsey Büster, Claire-Elise Fischer, Iñigo Olalde, Harald Ringbauer, Ali Akbari, Olivia Cheronet, Madeleine Bleasdale, Nicole Adamski, Eveline Altena, Rebecca Bernardos, Selina Brace, Nasreen Broomandkhoshbacht, Kimberly Callan, Francesca Candilio, Brendan Culleton, Elizabeth Curtis, Lea Demetz, Kellie Sara Duffett Carlson, Daniel M. Fernandes, M. George B. Foody, Suzanne Freilich, Helen Goodchild, Aisling Kearns, Ann Marie Lawson, Iosif Lazaridis, Matthew Mah, Swapan Mallick, Kirsten Mandl, Adam Micco, Megan Michel, Guillermo Bravo Morante, Jonas Oppenheimer, Kadir Toykan Özdoğan, Lijun Qiu, Constanze Schattke, Kristin Stewardson, J. Noah Workman, Fatma Zalzala, Zhao Zhang, Bibiana Agustí, Tim Allen, Katalin Almássy, Luc Amkreutz, Abigail Ash, Christèle Baillif-Ducros, Alistair Barclay, László Bartosiewicz, Katherine Baxter, Zsolt Bernert, Jan Blažek, Mario Bodružić, Philippe Boissinot, Clive Bonsall, Pippa Bradley, Marcus Brittain, Alison Brookes, Fraser Brown, Lisa Brown, Richard Brunning, Chelsea Budd, Josip Burmaz, Sylvain Canet, Silvia Carnicero-Cáceres, Morana Čaušević-Bully, Andrew Chamberlain, Sébastien Chauvin, Sharon Clough, Natalija Čondić, Alfredo Coppa, Oliver Craig, Matija Črešnar, Vicki Cummings, Szabolcs Czifra, Alžběta Danielisová, Robin Daniels, Alex Davies, Philip de Jersey, Jody Deacon, Csilla Deminger, Peter W. Ditchfield, Marko Dizdar, Miroslav Dobeš, Miluše Dobisíková, László Domboróczki, Gail Drinkall, Ana Đukić, Ceiridwen J. Edwards, Michal Ernée, Christopher Evans, Jane Evans, Manuel Fernández-Götz, Slavica Filipović, Andrew Fitzpatrick, Harry Fokkens, Chris Fowler, Allison Fox, Zsolt Gallina, Michelle Gamble, Manuel R. González Morales, Borja González-Rabanal, Adrian Green, Katalin Gyenesei, Diederick Habermehl, Tamás Hajdu, Derek Hamilton, James Harris, Chris Hayden, Joep Hendriks, Bénédicte Hernu, Gill Hey, Milan Horňák, Gábor Ilon, Eszter Istvánovits, Andy M. Jones, Martina Blečić Kavur, Kevin Kazek, Robert A. Kenyon, Amal Khreisheh, Viktória Kiss, Jos Kleijne, Mark Knight, Lisette M. Kootker, Péter F. Kovács, Anita Kozubová, Gabriella Kulcsár, Valéria Kulcsár, Christophe Le Pennec, Michael Legge, Matt Leivers, Louise Loe, Olalla López-Costas, Tom Lord, Dženi Los, James Lyall, Ana B. Marín-Arroyo, Philip Mason, Damir Matošević, Andy Maxted, Lauren McIntyre, Jacqueline McKinley, Kathleen McSweeney, Bernard Meijlink, Balázs G. Mende, Marko Menđušić, Milan Metlička, Sophie Meyer, Kristina Mihovilić, Lidija Milasinovic, Steve Minnitt, Joanna Moore, Geoff Morley, Graham Mullan, Margaréta Musilová, Benjamin Neil, Rebecca Nicholls, Mario Novak, Maria Pala, Martin Papworth, Cécile Paresys, Ricky Patten, Domagoj Perkić, Krisztina Pesti, Alba Petit, Katarína Petriščáková, Coline Pichon, Catriona Pickard, Zoltán Pilling, T. Douglas Price, Siniša Radović, Rebecca Redfern, Branislav Resutík, Daniel T. Rhodes, Martin B. Richards, Amy Roberts, Jean Roefstra, Pavel Sankot, Alena Šefčáková, Alison Sheridan, Sabine Skae, Miroslava Šmolíková, Krisztina Somogyi, Ágnes Somogyvári, Mark Stephens, Géza Szabó, Anna Szécsényi-Nagy, Tamás Szeniczey, Jonathan Tabor, Károly Tankó, Clenis Tavarez Maria, Rachel Terry, Biba Teržan, Maria Teschler-Nicola, Jesús F. Torres-Martínez, Julien Trapp, Ross Turle, Ferenc Ujvári, Menno van der Heiden, Petr Veleminsky, Barbara Veselka, Zdeněk Vytlačil, Clive Waddington, Paula Ware, Paul Wilkinson, Linda Wilson, Rob Wiseman, Eilidh Young, Joško Zaninović, Andrej Žitňan, Carles Lalueza-Fox, Peter de Knijff, Ian Barnes, Peter Halkon, Mark G. Thomas, Douglas J. Kennett, Barry Cunliffe, Malcolm Lillie, Nadin Rohland, Ron Pinhasi, Ian Armit & David Reich


Present-day people from England and Wales harbour more ancestry derived from Early European Farmers (EEF) than people of the Early Bronze Age1. To understand this, we generated genome-wide data from 793 individuals, increasing data from the Middle to Late Bronze and Iron Age in Britain by 12-fold, and Western and Central Europe by 3.5-fold. Between 1000 and 875 BC, EEF ancestry increased in southern Britain (England and Wales) but not northern Britain (Scotland) due to incorporation of migrants who arrived at this time and over previous centuries, and who were genetically most similar to ancient individuals from France. These migrants contributed about half the ancestry of Iron Age people of England and Wales, thereby creating a plausible vector for the spread of early Celtic languages into Britain. These patterns are part of a broader trend of EEF ancestry becoming more similar across central and western Europe in the Middle to Late Bronze Age, coincident with archaeological evidence of intensified cultural exchange2–6. There was comparatively less gene flow from continental Europe during the Iron Age, and Britain’s independent genetic trajectory is also reflected in the rise of the allele conferring lactase persistence to ~50% by this time compared to ~7% in central Europe where it rose rapidly in frequency only a millennium later. This suggests that dairy products were used in qualitatively different ways in Britain and in central Europe over this period.

The Early Iron Age nomadic Scythians have been
described as a confederation of tribes of different origins,
based on ancient DNA evidence [1–3]. It is still
unclear how much of the Scythian dominance in the
Eurasian Steppe was due to movements of people
and how much reflected cultural diffusion and elite
dominance. We present new whole-genome sequences
of 31 ancient Western and Eastern Steppe
individuals, including Scythians as well as samples
pre- and postdating them, allowing us to set the
Scythians in a temporal context (in the Western,
i.e., Ponto-Caspian Steppe). We detect an increase
of eastern (Altaian) affinity along with a decrease in
eastern hunter-gatherer (EHG) ancestry in the Early
Iron Age Ponto-Caspian gene pool at the start of
the Scythian dominance. On the other hand, samples
of the Chernyakhiv culture postdating the Scythians
in Ukraine have a significantly higher proportion of
Near Eastern ancestry than other samples of this
study. Our results agree with the Gothic source of
the Chernyakhiv culture and support the hypothesis
that the Scythian dominance did involve a demic
component.

The Yamnaya expansions from the western steppe into Europe and Asia during the Early Bronze Age (~3000 BCE) are believed to have brought with them Indo-European
languages and possibly horse husbandry. We analyze 74 ancient whole-genome sequences from across Inner Asia and Anatolia and show that the Botai people associated with the earliest horse husbandry derived from a hunter-gatherer population deeply diverged from the Yamnaya. Our results also suggest distinct migrations bringing West Eurasian ancestry into South Asia before and after but not at the time of Yamnaya culture. We find no evidence of steppe ancestry in Bronze Age Anatolia from when Indo-European languages are attested there. Thus, in contrast to
Europe, Early Bronze Age Yamnaya-related migrations had limited direct genetic impact in Asia.
One Sentence Summary: We investigate the origins of Indo-European languages in Asia by coupling ancient genomics to archaeology and linguistics