Search results for "ANCIENT DNA"
showing 10 items of 124 documents
Early history of European domestic cattle as revealed by ancient DNA
2006
We present an extensive ancient DNA analysis of mainly Neolithic cattle bones sampled from archaeological sites along the route of Neolithic expansion, from Turkey to North-Central Europe and Britain. We place this first reasonable population sample of Neolithic cattle mitochondrial DNA sequence diversity in context to illustrate the continuity of haplotype variation patterns from the first European domestic cattle to the present. Interestingly, the dominant Central European pattern, a starburst phylogeny around the modal sequence, T3, has a Neolithic origin, and the reduced diversity within this cluster in the ancient samples accords with their shorter history of post-domestic accumulation…
Environment and excavation: Pre-lab impacts on ancient DNA analyses
2008
Ancient DNA (aDNA) analyses enjoy an increasing role in palaeontological, archaeological and archaeozoological research. The limiting factor for aDNA studies is the degree of DNA preservation. Our study on 291 prehistoric cattle remains from Europe, the Near East and North Africa revealed that DNA preservation is mainly influenced by geographic and climatic conditions. Especially in hot climates, the preservation of sample material is generally low. We observed that these specimens are prone to further degradation and contamination during and after excavation. We give a description of the main caveats and a short guideline for adequate sample handling in order to facilitate the cooperation …
Absence of the lactase-persistence-associated allele in early Neolithic Europeans.
2007
Lactase persistence (LP), the dominant Mendelian trait conferring the ability to digest the milk sugar lactose in adults, has risen to high frequency in central and northern Europeans in the last 20,000 years. This trait is likely to have conferred a selective advantage in individuals who consume appreciable amounts of unfermented milk. Some have argued for the “culture-historical hypothesis,” whereby LP alleles were rare until the advent of dairying early in the Neolithic but then rose rapidly in frequency under natural selection. Others favor the “reverse cause hypothesis,” whereby dairying was adopted in populations with preadaptive high LP allele frequencies. Analysis based on the cons…
Paleogenetic and morphometric analysis of a Mesolithic individual from Grotta d'Oriente: An oldest genetic legacy for the first modern humans in Sici…
2020
Abstract Grotta d’Oriente, a coastal cave located on the island of Favignana (Sicily, Italy) is a key site for the study of the early human colonization of Sicily. Inside the cave, during different field excavations, three burials attributable to the Late Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic were found. The Mesolithic Oriente B individual, directly dated at 9,377 ± 25 uncal BP, was previously assigned to HV1 haplogroup using a traditional approach. However, it is well known that PCR based methods are prone to erroneous haplotype or haplogroup determination. In order to redefine the mitochondrial lineage of this Mesolithic hunter-gatherer and explore its phylogenetic position, we target-enriche…
Y-SNPs Do Not Indicate Hybridisation between European Aurochs and Domestic Cattle
2008
BackgroundPrevious genetic studies of modern and ancient mitochondrial DNA have confirmed the Near Eastern origin of early European domestic cattle. However, these studies were not able to test whether hybridisation with male aurochs occurred post-domestication. To address this issue, Götherström and colleagues (2005) investigated the frequencies of two Y-chromosomal haplotypes in extant bulls. They found a significant influence of wild aurochs males on domestic populations thus challenging the common view on early domestication and Neolithic stock-rearing. To test their hypothesis, we applied these Y-markers on Neolithic bone specimens from various European archaeological sites.Methods and…
Eight microsatellite markers isolated from common ragweed (Ambrosia artemisiifolia L.) and cross-amplification with herbarium specimens
2009
; Eight microsatellite markers were developed for population genetic analyses of the common ragweed, Ambrosia artemisiifolia. Markers were tested for amplification with three populations (two recent populations from France and North America, and one historical population from herbarium specimens). These loci revealed a high level of genetic variability (5-19 alleles per locus; expected heterozygosity, 0.48-0.92). No significant deviation from Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium and no linkage disequilibrium were observed. The data thus demonstrate their utility as efficient genetic markers for determining the genetic diversity, population differentiation, and gene flow among invasive, native, and h…
The Postmedieval Latvian Oral Microbiome in the Context of Modern Dental Calculus and Modern Dental Plaque Microbial Profiles
2021
Recent advantages in paleomicrobiology have provided an opportunity to investigate the composition of ancient microbial ecologies. Here, using metagenome analysis, we investigated the microbial profiles of historic dental calculus retrieved from archaeological human remains from postmedieval Latvia dated 16–17th century AD and examined the associations of oral taxa and microbial diversity with specific characteristics. We evaluated the preservation of human oral microbiome patterns in historic samples and compared the microbial composition of historic dental calculus, modern human dental plaque, modern human dental calculus samples and burial soil microbiota. Overall, the results showed tha…
Reconstructing the deep population history of Central and South America
2018
We report genome-wide ancient DNA from 49 individuals forming four parallel time transects in Belize, Brazil, the Central Andes, and the Southern Cone, each dating to at least ∼9,000 years ago. The common ancestral population radiated rapidly from just one of the two early branches that contributed to Native Americans today. We document two previously unappreciated streams of gene flow between North and South America. One affected the Central Andes by ∼4,200 years ago, while the other explains an affinity between the oldest North American genome associated with the Clovis culture and the oldest Central and South Americans from Chile, Brazil, and Belize. However, this was not the primary sou…
Defining the Island Dwarfing Rate of an Extinct Sicilian Elephant Using Ancient DNA
2020
Evolution on islands, and the often extreme phenotypic changes associated with it, has attracted much interest from evolutionary biologists. However, measuring the rate of change of a particular phenotypic trait of extinct animals can be challenging, due to the incompleteness of the fossil record. Here, we use combined molecular and fossil evidence to define the minimum and maximum rate of dwarfing in an extinct Mediterranean dwarf elephant from Puntali Cave (Sicily). Despite the challenges associated with recovering ancient DNA from warm climates, we successfully retrieved a mitogenome from a sample with an estimated age between 147,000 and 50,000 years. Our results suggest that this speci…
Sedimentary Ancient DNA (sedaDNA) Reveals Fungal Diversity and Environmental Drivers of Community Changes throughout the Holocene in the Present Bore…
2021
Fungi are ecologically important in several ecosystem processes, yet their community composition, ecophysiological roles, and responses to changing environmental factors in historical sediments are rarely studied. Here we explored ancient fungal DNA from lake Lielais Svētiņu sediment throughout the Holocene (10.5 kyr) using the ITS metabarcoding approach. Our data revealed diverse fungal taxa and smooth community changes during most of the Holocene with rapid changes occurring in the last few millennia. More precisely, plankton parasitic fungi became more diverse from the Late Holocene (2–4 kyr) which could be related to a shift towards a cooler climate. The Latest Holocene (~2 kyr) showed …