All articles tagged with #human ancestry
Scientists have successfully sequenced the oldest ancient Egyptian genome from a man who lived around 4,500-4,800 years ago, revealing that his ancestry was predominantly North African with some West Asian influence, providing new insights into early Egyptian population history and cultural connections with Mesopotamia.
Scientists confirmed that a 28,000-year-old child buried in Portugal had both modern human and Neanderthal ancestry, using advanced DNA dating techniques that overcame previous contamination issues. The child's physical traits and burial site suggest cultural practices and interbreeding between early human groups, providing new insights into human evolution and shared traditions. Future research aims to further explore ancient human interactions.
Researchers have developed a method called ancIBD to accurately detect identity-by-descent (IBD) segments in human ancient DNA (aDNA) data. IBD segments are long genomic segments that are co-inherited from a recent common ancestor and can provide valuable information about genealogical connections and demographic history. The ancIBD method utilizes phased genotype likelihoods imputed by GLIMPSE and a hidden Markov model (HMM) to infer IBD blocks. The researchers evaluated the performance of ancIBD on simulated and downsampled aDNA data, demonstrating its robustness in detecting IBD segments even at low coverage depths. They also used ancIBD to identify biological relatives and uncover genealogical connections among ancient Eurasian individuals, shedding light on ancient migration patterns and population interactions.