Large-scale archaeogenetic studies of people from prehistoric Europe tend to be broad in scope and difficult resolve with local archaeologies. However, accompanying supplementary information often contains useful finer-scale that is comprehensible without specific genetics expertise. Here, we show how undiscussed details provided aDNA papers can provide crucial insight into patterns ancestry ch...

‘New glume wheat’ (NGW) is an archaeobotanical type increasingly recognised at Neolithic–Bronze Age sites across Europe and Western Asia. NGW has been via aDNA morphological analyses of chaff remains as a member the Triticum timopheevii wheat group, recent cultivation which known only from western Georgia. This study combines geometric morphometric (GMM) analysis grains with updated results par...

Abstract Ancient environmental DNA retrieved from sedimentary records (sedaDNA) can complement fossil-morphological approaches for characterizing Quaternary biodiversity changes. PCR-based metabarcoding is so far the most widely used method in studies, including sedaDNA. However, degradation of ancient and potential contamination, together with PCR amplification drawbacks, have to be carefully ...

Parchment represents an invaluable cultural reservoir. Retrieving an additional layer of information from these abundant, dated livestock-skins via the use of ancient DNA (aDNA) sequencing has been mooted by a number of researchers. However, prior PCR-based work has indicated that this may be challenged by cross-individual and cross-species contamination, perhaps from the bulk parchment prepara...

Ancient DNA (aDNA) recovered from plague victims of the second plague pandemic (14th to 17th century), excavated from two different burial sites in Germany, and spanning a time period of more than 300 years, was characterized using single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) analysis. Of 30 tested skeletons 8 were positive for Yersinia pestis-specific nucleic acid, as determined by qPCR targeting the ...

Degradation-specific processes and variation in laboratory protocols can bias the DNA sequence composition from samples of ancient or historic origin. Here, we identify a novel artifact in sequences from historic samples of Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua), which forms interrupted palindromes consisting of reverse complementary sequence at the 5' and 3'-ends of sequencing reads. The palindromic sequ...

The Aleutian Islands were colonized, perhaps several times, from the Alaskan mainland. Earlier work documented transitions in the relative frequencies of mtDNA haplogroups over time, but little is known about potential source populations for prehistoric Aleut migrants. As part of a pilot investigation, we sequenced the mtDNA first hypervariable region (HVRI) in samples from two archaeological s...

Museum specimens of endangered species are important to determine pre-decline population structure and characterise loss diversity in surviving populations. Kākāpō (Strigops habroptilus), the critically New Zealand ground parrot, suffered massive declines nineteenth twentieth centuries resulting a genetic bottleneck adverse inbreeding effects. The University Sydney Chau Chak Wing (formerly Macl...

The field of ancient DNA (aDNA) has rapidly accelerated in recent years as a result of new methods in next-generation sequencing, library preparation and targeted enrichment. Such research is restricted, however, by the highly variable DNA preservation within different tissues, especially when isolating ancient pathogens from human remains. Identifying positive candidate samples via quantitativ...

The extraction of DNA from archaeological or forensic skeletal remains can provide quite powerful data for analysis, but is plagued by a unique set of methodological problems. One of the most important methodological problems to overcome in such analyses is the presence of modern contamination on the surfaces of bones and teeth, which can lead to false positives and erroneous results unless it ...