The oldest genetically identifiable nuclear family met a violent death, according to analysis of remains from 4,600-year-old burials in Germany.

Writing in the journal PNAS, researchers say the broken bones of these stone age people show they were killed in a struggle.

Comparisons of DNA from one grave confirm it contained a mother, father, and their two children. The son and daughter were buried in the arms of their parents.

Dr Wolfgang Haak, from The Australian Centre for Ancient DNA, in Adelaide, conducted the DNA analysis and says the scientific evidence supports the idea that they were indeed a family — "We’re really sure, based on hard biological facts not just supposing or assuming."

In total, the four graves contain 13 bodies, eight children aged six months to nine years and five adults aged 25 to 60.

In two graves, DNA was well preserved, which allowed comparisons between the occupants. One of these contained the nuclear family, while the other grave contained three related children and an unrelated woman. The researchers suggest she may have been an aunt or stepmother.

Corded Ware

These stone age people are thought to belong to a group known as the Corded Ware Culture, signified by their pots decorated with impressions from twisted cords. In their burial culture all bodies usually face south.

In the family grave the adults did face south, but the children they hold in their arms face towards them. The researchers say an exception to the cultural norm was made so as to express the biological relationship.

The care with which the bodies were laid out shows that whoever buried them must have known who they were says Dr Haak. He adds he was moved the first time he saw the grave.

"You feel some kind of sympathy for them, it’s a human thing, somebody must have really cared for them. Normally you should be careful in archaeological research not to allow feelings in that make us base judgements on modern ideas, we don’t know how hard daily life was back there and if there was any space for love."

Teeth hold clue

As well as looking at the DNA of each individual the researchers examined deposits of the element strontium in their teeth.

Found in rocks and soils, strontium is taken in from food as teeth grow in childhood. It can act as an indicator of where people came from.

The children and adult males had the same type of strontium - which was also found locally, but the nearest match to the women’s teeth was at least 50km away, suggesting they had moved to the area.

Dr Alistair Pike from Bristol University, who carried out the strontium analysis, says this indicates a culture of exogamy or marrying out.

"It’s a bit like kings and queens in Europe in the past, creating an alliance by marrying out sons and daughters. This creates a bond between communities - useful if your harvest fails or if you need help fighting a war."

Broken bones

The most grisly aspect of the find is the manner of their death. Dr Pike says it was violent.

"They were definitely murdered , there are big holes in their heads, fingers and wrists are broken."

At least five of the individuals show the effects of a violent attack, one even had the tip of a stone weapon embedded in a vertebra.

Wolfgang Haak says that as most of the people in the graves were women and children it is probable that most of the adults were elsewhere at the time of the attack, perhaps out fighting or working in their fields.

"They returned home to the village and found their loved ones dead. It’s an assumption, but the most plausible explanation."

Researchers say such violence fits with what we know about life in central Europe at the time - the area had fertile soils, a stable climate and natural access routes. This made it a desirable place to live, but also created competition amongst its inhabitants, leading to violent confrontations when one community tried to displace another.
Science Reporter, BBC News
 

The DNA Story

In 2005 four outstanding multiple burials were discovered near Eulau, Germany. The 4,600-year-old graves contained groups of adults and children buried facing each other. Investigation determined the supposed families fell victim to a violent event.

The archaeological, anthropological, geochemical (radiogenic isotopes), and molecular genetic (ancient DNA) sciences delved into autosomal, mitochondrial, and Y-chromosomal markers, and thus identified genetic kinship among the individuals.

A direct child-parent relationship was detected in one burial, providing the oldest molecular genetic evidence of a nuclear family. Strontium isotope analyses point to different origins for males and children versus females. By this approach, we gain insight into a Late Stone Age society, which appears to have been exogamous and patrilocal, and in which genetic kinship seems to be a focal point of social organization.

A reconstructed Neanderthal skeleton, right, and a modern human version of a skelaton, left, are on display at the Museum of Natural History Wednesday, Jan. 8, 2003 in New York. Credit: AP Photo

Humans and their close Neanderthal relatives began diverging from a common ancestor about 700,000 years ago, and the two groups split permanently some 300,000 years later, according to two of the most detailed analyses of Neanderthal DNA to date.

Using different techniques, two teams of scientists separately sequenced large chunks of DNA extracted from the femur of a 38,000-year-old Neanderthal specimen found in a cave 26 years ago in Croatia. One team sequenced more than one million base pairs and the other 65,000 pairs of the genome.

The achievements could help shed light on the evolution of our own species, and it paves the way for building a complete library of the Neanderthal genome, the scientists say.

No evidence of interbreeding

In popular imagination, Neanderthals are often portrayed as prehistoric brutes who became outsmarted by a more advanced species, humans, emerging from Africa. But excavations and anatomical studies have shown Neanderthals used tools, wore jewelery, buried their dead, cared for their sick, and possibly sang or even spoke in much the same way that we do. Even more humbling, perhaps, their brains were slightly larger than ours.

The results from the new studies confirm the Neanderthal’s humanity, and show that their genomes and ours are more than 99.5 percent identical, differing by only about 3 million bases.

"This is a drop in the bucket if you consider that the human genome is 3 billion bases," said Edward Rubin of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who led one of the research teams.

For comparison, the genomes of chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, differ from humans by about 30 million to 50 million base pairs.

The findings also appear to refute speculations by some scientists that Neanderthals and humans interbred in more recent times. "We see no evidence of mixing 30,000 to 40,000 years ago in Europe," Rubin said. "We don’t exclude it, but from the data that we have, we have no evidence that pages were ripped from one genome and put in the other."

Ruling out contamination

One of the biggest challenges in sequencing Neanderthal DNA is finding a bone sample that hasn’t been too contaminated by human handling. Fortunately, the femur fragment used in the studies was relatively small and uninteresting, causing it to be largely overlooked.

The femur "was thrown in a big box of uninformative bones and not handled very much," said Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, leader of the other sequencing project. "Whereas more interesting bones—where you can study the muscle attachment and the morphology of Neanderthals—had been extensively cleaned and handled and thus tend to be much more contaminated."

The researchers also relied on other clues, such as chemical damage unique to ancient DNA, to help verify that the genetic material was indeed Neanderthal. "One of the crucial things is that we feel confident that the DNA we have, which we’re calling Neanderthal, is truly Neanderthal," Rubin said.

New advances

The success of the two team’s sequencing projects were made possible by recent advances in DNA sequencing technology, which now allow scientists to sequence DNA over 100 times faster than in the past.

Paabo’s team recovered more than a million Neanderthal base pairs using a new automated technique called "pyrosequencing." In this process, DNA fragments are attached to tiny artificial beads, sequenced, and then matched to similar sections on human chromosomes.

Rubin’s team employed "metagenomics," which involves integrating short fragments of extracted Neanderthal DNA into the genomes of bacteria. The Neanderthal DNA gets amplified as the bacteria divide, and then scientists pluck out human-matching bases using "probes" made with snippets of human DNA.

The researchers say their achievements mark the "dawn of Neanderthal genomics," and they estimate that further advances in DNA sequencing technology could allow the completion of a very rough draft of the entire Neanderthal genome within two years.

"There’s no question that we’re going to have a Neanderthal genome, and likely, we’re going to have several Neanderthal genomes," Rubin said. The team hopes to extract and sequence DNA from the bones of other individuals and to complete several drafts of the Neanderthal genome.

Clues to our past

A complete Neanderthal genome would help scientists identify the genetic changes in our own genome that set us apart from other hominids.

The comparison between recently sequenced chimpanzee genomes and ours is already shedding light on the evolutionary changes our ancestors went through to make them less ape-like. But because chimps and humans began diverging some 6.5 million years ago, examination of their genome cannot reveal what happened in the final stretches of our own evolution.

"Humans went through several stages of evolution in the last 400,000 years," said study co-author Jonathan Pritchard of the University of Chicago. "If we can compare humans’ and Neanderthals’ genomes, then we can possibly identify what the key genetic changes were during that final stage of human evolution."

A completed genome will also reveal new insights about Neanderthals, who disappeared mysteriously about 30,000 years ago.

"In having the Neanderthal genome sequence …we’re going to learn about the biology, learn about things that we could never learn from the bones and the artifacts that we have," Rubin said.

source: LiveScience

Results show modern humans, Neandertals diverged 660,000 years ago

Now there’s even more scientific proof that you are not a Neandertal, no matter what anyone says.

An international consortium of researchers reports in the Aug. 8 Cell that for the first time the complete sequence of mitochondrial DNA from a Neandertal has been deciphered. Comparison of the Neandertal sequence with mitochondrial sequences from modern humans confirms that the two groups belong to different branches of humankind’s family tree, diverging 660,000 years ago.

Read the rest of this entry »

Strands of 1,000-year-old DNA from 10 Viking skeletons have been retrieved, a team of scientists claims.

Of particular interest to us, is this paragraph from the research article:

Among present day Scandinavians Hg I constitutes <2%, however, we have previously observed a markedly higher frequency (10–20%) of Hg I in Danish Iron Age and Viking Age population samples. With the observation of Hg I for subject G6 this trend is also seen for the Viking population sample from Galgedil. Interestingly, Hg I shows a low frequency (1 out of 114 subjects) among other ancient populations in Italy, Spain, Great Britain, and early central European farmers.

If true, the achievement would be notable, since many researchers say it is impossible to recover authentic DNA from ancient humans.

Jorgen Dissing of the University of Copenhagen and colleagues say they retrieved the genetic material from the freshly sampled teeth of skeletons dating back to around A.D. 1000 and found at a non-Christian burial site called Galgedil on the Danish island of Funen.

Wearing protective suits, the researchers removed the teeth from the jaw at the moment the skeletons were unearthed, where they had lain untouched for 1,000 years. Subsequent laboratory procedures were carefully controlled to avoid contamination with modern human DNA.

Read the rest of this entry »

A 30-year-old systems administrator from a small village close to Madurai in Tamil Nadu has been identified as one of the direct descendants of the first ever settlers in India, who had migrated from the African coast some 70,000 years ago.

The DNA of Virumandi Andithevar, one of the circa 700 inhabitants of Jothimanickam village, matched the white chromosome marker scientifically labeled “M130″, which is a gene found only among the descendants of the African migrants who had spread across the world tens of thousands of years ago. “This young man and 13 members of his nine-generation clan carried the same marker in their genes. It means that his ancestors in all probability settled in this village several generations ago,” said Prof. Rm Pitchappan, who led a team of scientists tracking the “M130″ DNA.

“M130 is actually present sporadically among the population along the Western Ghats and around Madurai,” said Dr Pitchappan, who heads the School of Biological Sciences at Madurai Kamaraj University. His research was part of the “Genographic Project”, a global initiative launched by National Geographic and a team of reputed scientists for unraveling the mystery of human migration. “The genetic studies carried out using M130 told us about the first human migration to India. We identified the marker of the first coastal migration in our Madurai samples. The search took us to Virumandi, who belongs to the Piramalai Kallar community, whose DNA matched M130, establishing him as one of the direct descendants of the first migrant from the African coast, who must have come here some 70,000 years ago,” Dr Pitchappan said.

Virumandi is elated with the news. “This is God’s gift to me, to be told that my roots go back to 70,000 years. They used to say that our village of 700 people had spawned from just three ancestors and I had often wondered from where and when they came. Now I have the answer — they came 70,000 years ago from Africa,” Virumandi said.

It took five years to establish the DNA link between Virumandi and the first migrants to the subcontinent. The studies also proved that though the migration to India took place some 70,000 years ago, the first settlement in the South happened about 10,000 years later.

“More than half of the Australian aborigines carry this M130 gene. The marker is also present among some people in Philippines and the tribals of Malaysia,” said Dr Pitchappan.

The Genographic Project will gather all data in collaboration with indigenous and traditional people around the world. The public is invited to join the project by purchasing a Genographic Project public participation kit. The proceeds from the sales go to further field research and the Genographic Legacy Fund, which in turn supports indigenous conservation and revitalization projects.

from The Asian Age

A Smithsonian Team Gives Unearthed Body a Name

William T. White, 14 years of age, from Accomack County on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, died in 1852 of pneumonia. All dressed up in a white burial suit and put into an iron coffin, he was left behind when the cemetery where he was buried in Northwest Washington moved a decade after his death. And there he stayed, forgotten, while the city continued to grow above him - and 155 years passed by.

He was accidentally unearthed by a construction crew in 2005 and researchers at the Smithsonian Institution vowed to find out who he was. But this historical drama / detective story took a couple of wrong turns in the process.

Smithsonian anthropologist Douglas W. Owsley stated the boy had been about five feet tall and probably sickly because of a hole between two chambers in his heart. He had been buried in a cemetery that probably belonged to Columbian College, the precursor to George Washington University, in what is now Columbia Heights, and had been a student at the college preparatory school when he died Jan. 24, 1852.

It’s All In The Case

Back to the beginning though - the research began with the coffin; the Fisk and Raymond “metallic burial case” was a big clue. Such airtight coffins were expensive, most affordable by the rich and were popular between 1850 and 1860. It was opened in August 2005 to be examined by a team of pathologists.

The body was extremely well preserved and the fashion of pleated shirt and vest with cloth-covered buttons, flared trousers, darned socks and ankle-length underdrawers seemed to indicate the 1850s. An autopsy concluded that the boy probably died of lobar pneumonia.

The grave was found in the now-residential neighborhood of Columbia Heights. Columbian College had once been there, and a page from a 1970 history of George Washington University stated that the old college had a cemetery. Further research showed that the original cemetery was moved in 1866 from the periphery of the college grounds to the main campus. And it was during this move that the iron coffin was probably left behind. This might have been because the tombstone was absent or had been misplaced during the Civil War, when the college was the site of two sprawling military hospitals, the researchers said.

Dead Ends

The team began reading lists of obituaries from the 1850s compiled from local newspapers and jumped too quickly at an item in the May 27, 1852 edition of Washington’s Daily National Intelligencer that had an obituary for Lemuel P. Bacon, 12, the son of Columbian’s president, Joel Bacon. It seemed perfect - “seemed.”

With samples of the dead boy’s mitochondrial DNA ( which can be traced and matched via female descendants over many generations), Hull-Walski and Scott developed a Bacon family tree and located a descendant in Texas. But that descendant’s DNA did not match. Dead End Number One. It is never that easy, as we genealogical researchers know!

Continuing with the obits, the Jan. 28, 1852 edition of the Intelligencer carried a brief obituary for a William Taylor White, of Accomack, who had died “at college hill” four days earlier. In a digest of old wills for Accomack County, they found one in which a guardian had left White money for his education. This time, Scott said, “we really felt like we had the right person.”

However, the course of genealogy never runs smoothly - when the researchers saw that the same digest contained the will of a Levin White, who had a son named William T., they “assumed” he must have been the boy’s late father. But when a descendant of Levin White was located in Baltimore and her DNA did not match. Dead End Number Two.

The team had also found an obituary for a William Henry White, who had died Sept. 29, 1852, at the age of 14. There was no connection to the college, but the boy’s father, Mathias, had been a Pennsylvania Avenue undertaker who used Fisk and Raymond coffins. Again a descendant was traced, this time to suburban Maryland - but again the DNA did not match. Dead End Number Three.

The Tide Turns

It was now summer 2006, and the team had been working on the case for a year. The boy’s body was being preserved at the museum, encased in a white body bag inside a metal cooler, but no closer to knowing who he was.

That Spring, a clue came by accident. Searching through a computer database of the Washington Intelligencer, Hull-Walski stumbled on another notice of the death of William T. White. Not an obituary, but a heartfelt “resolution” drawn up by his college friends, expressing their anguish at the loss of one who “was bound to us by the tenderest ties of friendship.” Somehow it had not turned up in prior research, but it reinforced to Hull-Walski that, despite the DNA, William T. White had to be the coffin boy. She showed the notice to Scott. “It’s him,” she told her colleague. But where had they gone wrong?

“So we started again,” Hull-Walski said. She appealed to colleagues on the Eastern Shore, where White was born, explaining the problem and asking for help and a local genealogist called her with the news that the Levin White she thought was William’s father, and whose family tree she had traced, was from a different White clan.

Later, two acquaintances visiting an Accomack records office found an 1850 court document that referred to White’s status as an orphan — and listed the name of his deceased father, William A. White. There was the research mistake, Hull-Walski realized, and that’s why the DNA didn’t match. “It was a relief,” she said.

The Tie That Binds

The identification was made after museum researchers, led by Deborah Hull-Walski and Randal Scott, figured out that the youth might be White, constructed a 788-person family tree — a diagram that stretched the length of a wall — and tracked down a descendant in Lancaster, Pa.

Linda Dwyer, 64, a night clerk in a convenience store, matched to a sample of DNA taken from the boy’s left shinbone. “I think it’s awesome,” Dwyer said, adding that she believes she is White’s great-great-great-grandniece. “The whole technology of finding me and putting it all together. . . . It’s so cool.”

Yes it is Linda, yes it is.

source: Wash Post Article

European colonization (or conquering) of South America resulted in a dramatic shift from a native American population to a largely mixed one, a genetic study has shown. It is not surprising that the study suggests male European settlers mated with native and African women, and slaughtered the men - though areas like Mexico City “still preserve the genetic heritage” because these areas had a high number of natives at the time of colonization. All according to the journal Public Library of Science Genetics.

The international team of researchers wrote:

“The history of Latin America has entailed a complex process of population mixture between natives and recent immigrants across a vast geographic region.

“Few details are known about this process or about how it shaped the genetic make-up of Latin American populations.”

Clear signature

The study examined 249 unrelated individuals from 13 Mestizo populations (people from a mixed European/native American origin) in seven countries, ranging from Chile in the south to Mexico in the north.

Not only did the European settlers take away land and property, they also took away the women

“There is a clear genetic signature,” explained lead author Andres Luiz-Linares from University College London.

“The initial mixing occurred predominately between immigrant and European men and native and African women.”

Furthermore, the study showed that it was a pattern that was uniform across Latin America, but within the genetic landscape of Latin America, there were variations.

“We see it in all the populations we examined, so it is clearly a historical fact that the ancestors of these populations can be traced to matings between immigrant men and native and African women.”

“The Mestizo with the highest native ancestry are in areas which historically have had relatively large native populations,” they reported.

This included Andean regions and cities such as Mexico City, where major civilizations were already established by the time Europeans reached the continent in the late 15th Century.

“By contrast, the Mestizo with the highest European ancestry are from areas with relatively low pre-Columbian native population density and where the current native population is sparse,” they added.

Bloody Past

Explaining the fate of native males when the Europeans arrived, Professor Luiz-Linares said: “It is a very sad and terrible historical fact, they were basically annihilated.

“Not only did the European settlers take away land and property, they also took away the women and, as much as possible, they exterminated the men.”

As well as providing an insight into the past, the team hopes that the findings will also help shape studies aimed at identifying and analyzing diseases.
from BBC News

Well, it is here - the place to get your canine tested and cataloged.

DNAPrint Genomics will provide the kits and info to peek into your dog’s ancestry and breed. The public availability of the dog genome has provided the basis for the development of cutting-edge tools and techniques for understanding canine genealogy. They will provide you a fifteen-digit proprietary score that allows you to compare your dog’s score to our database of purebred and mixed breeds allowing accurate breed identification.

Products and Services

The $199 Doggie DNAPrint® 1.0 Kit is a DNA-based test that looks at 204 canine Ancestry Informative Markers (CanAIMs) on the dog genome. It requires a cheek swab of your dog.

They also feature a Doggie DNAPrint Club, though at this stage, I do not see how that benefits you, the consumer.