Genome flux and stasis in a five millennium transect of European prehistory

By C. Gamba, E. Jones, M. Teasdale, R. Mclaughlin, G. González-Fortes, V. Mattiangeli, László Domboróczki, I. Kővári, I. Pap, A. Anders and 7 more. Nature Communications, 2014

665 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Great Hungarian Plain was a crossroads of cultural transformations that have shaped European prehistory. Here we analyse a 5,000-year transect of human genomes, sampled from petrous bones giving consistently excellent endogenous DNA yields, from 13 Hungarian Neolithic, Copper, Bronze and Iron Age burials including two to high (~22 × ) and seven to ~1 × coverage, to investigate the impact of these on Europe’s genetic landscape. These data suggest genomic shifts with the advent of the Neolithic, Bronze and Iron Ages, with interleaved periods of genome stability. The earliest Neolithic context genome shows a European hunter-gatherer genetic signature and a restricted ancestral population size, suggesting direct contact between cultures after the arrival of the first farmers into Europe. The latest, Iron Age, sample reveals an eastern genomic influence concordant with introduced Steppe burial rites. We observe transition towards lighter pigmentation and surprisingly, no Neolithic presence of lactase persistence. Recent advances in high-throughput sequencing techniques have enabled the analysis of ancient human genomes. Here the authors sequence ancient human genomes that span a period of 5,000 years, to understand the ancestral influence on Europe's genetic landscape.

Subfields: Genetics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ecbfcddf693c2debf394e9a09aac3e3f719ebd3c

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Citations in the corpus

Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe (2015, neutral): “La Mina (4) Baalberge (3) Esperstedt (1) Sweden MN (1) Yamnaya (9) Hungary CA (1) Corded Ware (4) Karsdorf (1) Bell Beaker (6) BenzigerodeHeimburg (3) Alberstedt (1) Unetice (8) Hungary BA (2) Halberstadt (1) Hungary IA (1)”
The genetic history of Ice Age Europe (2016, background): “92 13,380-13,130 Direct-UF (17) Epigravettian Petrous Shotgun M K3 J2 Satsurblia No 1.”
From the field to the laboratory: Controlling DNA contamination in human ancient DNA research in the high-throughput sequencing era (2017, positive): “Given its extremely high density, the petrous part of the temporal bone has been shown to yield 4-to 16-fold more endogenous DNA than teeth, and up to 183-fold more than other bones (Gamba et al. 2014).”
Genomic insights into the origin of farming in the ancient Near East (2016, neutral): “What was the distribution of Basal Eurasian ancestry in the ancient Near East? (2) Were the first farmers of the Near East part of a single homogeneous population, or were they regionally differentiated? (3) Was there continuity between late pre-agricultural hunter–gatherers and early farming popula”