Tuesday, September 3, 2013

A Tidal Wave Of New Ancient DNA and Population Genetic Data

Dienekes' Anthropology blog recounts abstracts of conference papers providing an immense number of new ancient DNA data sets from Europe and North Africa, some from ISABS 2013 and some from EAA 2013.  None of the papers, taken individually, is really game changing.  But, collectively, the vastly expanded ancient DNA data set is solidifying and refining conjectures made based upon early ancient DNA results into well established results.

Among the most notable results are:

* the extent to which North Africa has been predominantly one corner of the West Eurasian in genetic macro-population (as opposed to sub-Saharan African) as far back as 23,000 years ago with sub-Saharan African contributions attributable to relatively recent low level population exchanges across the Sahara;

* the increasingly clear reality that there have been several important demic migration waves in Europe from the advent of the Neolithic revolution and Bronze Age collapse; and

* another solid archaeological example of megalithic architecture by people with forager economies.  The case of large scale social organization and religion preceding rather than following the Neolithic revolution is strengthening.


3 comments:

Krefter said...

Do u have any idea when they will make the results public. Because it gets annoying 3 months ago they talk about all these results mtdna, y dna, aust dna, pigmentation from steppes from enloithic nd bronze age. and give vague information okay they had all caucasin mtdna hg's no mongliod and they had pale skin and mainly dark eyes. they were unrelated to later kurgen people in central asia like sycthians in tagar. they also say they have 7 y dna samples from kurgens dating 5,000 or more years old thats huge.

they have had these for three years why are they keeping it a secret from the public i dont understand. They always give vague explaintions in these papers even though they say they have full results i have seen it more than once. and they have mentioned public and not public anceint dna samples so they keep somethings only for themslves. it seems they like being boring, mysterious, and keeping everything away from the public.

I doubt these results will come in till about a year from now.

andrew said...

The abstracts are for conference papers and normally you present a conference paper several months in advance of publication and do not publish the conference paper itself in the proceedings (although conferences differ on this point).

Mostly, the lag is due to delays associated with the peer review process, and also not just a little due to just plain old procrastination by researchers who become less excited about writing up the results once they themselves know how they will come out.

Six months to a year and a half until publication is probably a reasonable guess.

Krefter said...

That's disappointing why do they wait so long to make it public.