Over the past few years there have been several research papers that have made headlines because of their insights into major genetic shifts in the population of Britain throughout time (see CA 338 regarding the Bronze Age Beaker migration, CA…
Newly published research has added more evidence to our growing understanding of kinship and migration in Anglo-Saxon England, revealing that two 7th-century individuals, buried over 250km (153 miles) apart, each had a grandparent with West African ancestry. One of these…
REVIEW BY MS Migrations are back. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, large-scale population movements were frequently the go-to explanation for the appearance in the archaeological record of new ways of doing things – be it novel building styles,…
A long-lost Roman emperor. Who could resist such a headline? The media lapped it up. But how could anyone lose an emperor in the first place? It turns out that this emperor was self-declared, so he wasn’t really an emperor at all
In the decades since the cracking of the human genome, the study of ancient DNA – known as archaeogenetics – has had a dramatic effect on our understanding of the distant past. The analysis of genetic material preserved in archaeological…
Ancient human DNA is revolutionising our ability to detect human migration that occurred hundreds of years ago. Joscha Gretzinger and Stephan Schiffels explain how these advances have transformed our understanding of the past.
Review by E O’Brien. In Buried, Alice Roberts, derives information relating not only to the death of individuals but to the lives lived by those individuals from examination of their bones. Topics explored include infant mortality in the Roman world;…
Humans only live for so long. Thus, if two individuals are identified as having had a close genetic relationship there can only be so many years between their dates of death
A large study, led by researchers from the University of Copenhagen, has mapped the DNA of the Viking world. The results (recently published in Nature: https:// doi.org) paint a complex picture of population movement across Europe during this period. Over…