Mesoamerica is a historically and culturally defined geographic area comprising current central and south Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, and border regions of Honduras, western Nicaragua, and northwestern Costa Rica. The permanent settling o...
Ancient DNA (aDNA) research first began in 1984 and ever since has greatly expanded our understanding of evolution and migration. Today, aDNA analysis is used to solve various puzzles about the origin of mankind, migration patterns, and the spread of...
High Throughput DNA Sequencing (HTS) revolutionized the field of paleomicrobiology, leading to an explosive growth of microbial ancient DNA (aDNA) studies, especially from environmental samples. However, aDNA studies that examine environmental microb...
The integration of massively parallel sequencing (MPS) technology into forensic casework has been of particular benefit to the identification of unknown military service members. However, highly degraded or chemically treated skeletal remains often f...
The invention of next-generation-sequencing has revolutionized almost all fields of genetics, but few have profited from it as much as the field of ancient DNA research. From its beginnings as an interesting but rather marginal discipline, ancient DN...
Rapid and cost-effective retrieval of endogenous DNA from ancient specimens remains a limiting factor in palaeogenomic research. Many methods have been developed to increase ancient DNA yield, but modifications to existing protocols are often based o...
Ancient DNA (aDNA) has the ability to inform the evolutionary history of both extant and extinct taxa; however, the use of aDNA in the study of avian evolution is lacking in comparison to other vertebrates, despite birds being one of the most species...
Following the discovery in the late 1980s that hard tissues such as bones and teeth preserve genetic information, the field of ancient DNA analysis has typically concentrated upon these substrates. The onset of high-throughput sequencing, combined wi...
The giant panda was widely distributed in China and south-eastern Asia during the middle to late Pleistocene, prior to its habitat becoming rapidly reduced in the Holocene. While conservation reserves have been established and population numbers of t...
Ancient human viruses have been detected in ancient DNA (aDNA) samples of both Anatomically Modern Humans and Neanderthals. Reconstructing genomes from aDNA using reference mapping presents numerous problems due to the unique nature of ancient sample...
Mitochondria are unique organelles carrying their own genetic material, independent from that in the nucleus. This review will discuss the nature of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and its levels in the cell, which are the key elements to consider when try...
Background/Objectives: Ancient DNA (aDNA) research workflows heavily depend on efficient aDNA extraction and NGS library preparation. In this study, we compared some of the commonly used laboratory protocols and compared the source of the bone materi...
Background/Objectives: Southeastern Europe and Croatia have served as a genetic crossroads between the Near East and Europe since prehistoric times, shaped by numerous and repeated migrations. By integrating 19 newly generated ancient genomes with 28...
The field of ancient DNA (aDNA) has recently been in a state of exponential growth, largely driven by the uptake of Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) techniques. Much of this work has focused on the mammalian megafauna and ancient humans, with compara...
Rapa Nui is one of the most remote islands in the world. As a young island, its biota is a consequence of both natural dispersals over the last ~1 million years and recent human introductions. It therefore provides an opportunity to study a unique co...
Domestic pigs (Sus scrofa) were first transported to Polynesia through a series of long-distance voyages ultimately linked to the Neolithic expansion of Austronesian-speaking people out of Asia. The descendants of the founding pigs belong to a rare m...
Taxonomic decisions made by palaeontologists are often based on a few morphological features preserved in the fossil material. This practice may sometimes lead to the description of new species based on single specimens, which are, in fact, extreme o...
Significant palaeoecological and paleoclimatic changes that took place during Late Pleistocene—Early Holocene transition are considered important factors that led to megafauna extinctions. Unlike many other species, the brown bear (Ursus arctos) has...
Establishing robust temporal control of the arrival of domesticated stock and the associated husbandry skills and lifeways in Southern Africa remains frustrated by the osteological similarities between domestic stock and wild endemic fauna. We report...
In Southeast Asia (SEA), Bos indicus (zebu) refers to the traditional cattle, whereas Bos taurus (taurine) refers to exotic breeds imported from foreign countries. Notably, a previous study reported that all Thai cattle dating to 3500–1700 year...
(1) Background: Integrated bioarchaeological approaches combining osteological and ancient DNA analyses provide powerful insights into health, disease, and population history in past societies. However, the relationship between rare skeletal variatio...
Archaeological fish remains are an important source for reconstructing past aquatic ecosystems and ancient fishing strategies using aDNA techniques. Here, we focus on archaeological samples of European whitefish (Coregonus spp.) from Switzerland cove...
An accurate DNA clock can strengthen cross-disciplinary inputs in the study of genealogies and ancient migrations. New Y-chromosome sequence data gathered from a Lotli Pai Kaundinya (LPK) Brahmin cohort whose staged migration from the Pontic Steppe t...
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...
The Spanish Merino is the most significant sheep breed globally due to its economic and cultural importance in human history. It has also had a substantial influence on the development of other Merino and Merino-derived breeds. Historical sources ind...
Diagnosis of leprosy and tuberculosis in archaeological material is most informative when based upon entire genomes. Ancient DNA (aDNA) is often degraded but amplification of specific fragments also provides reliable diagnoses. Cell wall lipid biomar...
The Asiatic wild dog (Cuon alpinus), restricted today largely to South and Southeast Asia, was widespread throughout Eurasia and even reached North America during the Pleistocene. Like many other species, it suffered from a huge range loss towards th...
In many human rights and criminal contexts, skeletal remains are often the only available samples, and they present a significant challenge for forensic DNA profiling due to DNA degradation. Ancient DNA methods, particularly capture hybridization enr...
This article presents a comprehensive genetic study focused on pre-Hispanic individuals who inhabited the Aburrá Valley in Antioquia, Colombia, between the tenth and seventeenth centuries AD. Employing a genetic approach, the study analyzed ma...
Paleoclimatic changes during the Pleistocene–Holocene transition is suggested as a main factor that led to species extinction, including the woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius), Steller’s sea cow (Hydrodamalis gigas) and the Don-hare (...
The efficient extraction of DNA from challenging samples, such as bones, is critical for the success of downstream genotyping analysis in molecular genetic disciplines. Even though the ancient DNA community has developed several protocols targeting s...
This paper aims to provide a first glimpse into the genomic characterization of individuals buried in Casal Bertone (Rome, first–third centuries AD) to gain preliminary insight into the genetic makeup of people who lived near a tannery workshop...
The rapid accumulation of ancient human genomes from various areas and time periods potentially enables the expansion of studies of biodiversity, biogeography, forensics, population history, and epidemiology into past populations. However, most ancie...
Human mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is a relevant marker in evolutionary and population genetics, including ancient DNA (aDNA) research, due to inherent characteristics. However, aDNA is prone to damage and sequencing artefacts, potentially confounding e...
The COVID-19 outbreak has reminded us of the importance of viral evolutionary studies as regards comprehending complex viral evolution and preventing future pandemics. A unique approach to understanding viral evolution is the use of ancient viral gen...
The analysis of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) hypervariable region (HVR) sequence data from ancient human remains provides valuable insights into the genetic structure and population dynamics of ancient populations. mtDNA is particularly useful in studyi...
Retrieving high-quality endogenous ancient DNA (aDNA) poses several challenges, including low molecular copy number, high rates of fragmentation, damage at read termini, and potential presence of exogenous contaminant DNA. All these factors complicat...
Epigenetic changes have been identified as a major driver of fundamental metabolic pathways. More specifically, the importance of epigenetic regulatory mechanisms for biological processes like speciation and embryogenesis has been well documented and...
Starting four decades ago, studies have examined the ecology and evolutionary dynamics of populations and species using short mitochondrial DNA fragments and stable isotopes. Through technological and analytical advances, the methods and biomolecules...
Dog domestication is still largely unresolved due to time-gaps in the sampling of regions. Ancient Italian canids are particularly understudied, currently represented by only a few specimens. In the present study, we sampled 27 canid remains from Nor...
Taxonomic profiling of ancient metagenomic samples is challenging due to the accumulation of specific damage patterns on DNA over time. Although a number of methods for metagenome profiling have been developed, most of them have been assessed on mode...
The chronological period from the beginning of the Chalcolithic Age to the end of the Bronze Age on the Iberian northern sub-plateau of the Iberic Peninsula involves interesting social and cultural phenomena, such as the appearance of the Bell Beaker...
The evaluation of the integrity and quantity of DNA extracted from archaeological human remains is a fundamental step before using the latest generation sequencing techniques in the study of evolutionary processes. Ancient DNA is highly fragmented an...
Disentangling the effects of glaciers and climate on vegetation is complicated by the confounding role that climate plays in both systems. We reconstructed changes in vegetation occurring over the Holocene at Jøkelvatnet, a lake located direct...
The taxonomical identification merely based on morphology is often difficult for ancient remains. Therefore, universal or specific PCR amplification followed by sequencing and BLAST (basic local alignment search tool) search has become the most frequ...
Increasing evidence suggests that bdelloid rotifers regularly undergo horizontal gene transfer, apparently as a surrogate mechanism of genetic exchange in the absence of true sexual reproduction, in part because of their ability to withstand desiccat...
The reconstruction of ancient metagenomes from archaeological material, and their implication in human health and evolution, is one of the most recent advances in paleomicrobiological studies. However, as for all ancient DNA (aDNA) studies, environme...
The curse of ancient Egyptian DNA was lifted by a recent study which sequenced the mitochondrial genomes (mtGenome) of 90 ancient Egyptians from the archaeological site of Abusir el-Meleq. Surprisingly, these ancient inhabitants were more closely re...
Background/Objectives. The Black Death pandemic, combined with the antisemitic climate of 14th-century Europe, led to widespread violence against Jewish communities, including numerous pogroms such as the one in 1348 in Tàrrega (Catalonia, Spa...
Throughout history, it has been observed that human populations have buried the deceased members of their communities following different patterns. During the Copper Age and the Bronze Age—periods on which this study focuses—in the northe...
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