Papers in this group
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An intact and sealed storage jar known as Jar-35 was found in 2004, south of the Qumran settlement. A previous study identified tartrate in the deposit of the jar, indicating the possible past presence of wine (Buti et al. 2006). However, we cannot…
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Broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum L.) is one of the world's oldest cultivated cereals, with several lines of recent evidence indicating that it was grown in northern China from at least 10 000 cal bp. Additionally, a cluster of archaeobotanical…
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It is a major question in archaeology and anthropology whether human populations started to grow primarily after the advent of agriculture, i.e., the Neolithic time, especially in East Asia, which was one of the centers of ancient agricultural…
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DNA molecules originating from animals and plants can be retrieved directly from sediments and have been used for reconstructing both contemporary and past ecosystems. However, the extent to which such 'dirt' DNA reflects taxonomic richness and…
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The fossil record of early feathers has relied on carbonized compressions that lack fine structural detail. Specimens in amber are preserved in greater detail, but they are rare. Late Cretaceous coal-rich strata from western Canada provide the…
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Molecular studies of archival and fossil samples have traditionally focused on the nucleic acids derived from the host species. However, there has recently been an increase in ancient DNA research on the identification and characterization of…
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Preserved hair has been increasingly used as an ancient DNA source in high throughput sequencing endeavors, and it may actually offer several advantages compared to more traditional ancient DNA substrates like bone. However, cold environments have…
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The Equidae have a long evolutionary history that has interested palaeontologists for a long time. Their morphology-based taxonomy, however, is a matter of controversy. Since most equid species are now extinct, the phylogenetic tree based on genetic…
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Recent years have seen a broadening range of studies undertaken in the field of plant archaeogenetics as the field has entered a new stage of maturity. There has been a movement towards a more functional understanding of plant evolution that has…
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Background Virtually all well-documented remains of early domestic dog (Canis familiaris) come from the late Glacial and early Holocene periods (ca. 14,000–9000 calendar years ago, cal BP), with few putative dogs found prior to the Last…
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European Neandertals were replaced by modern human populations from Africa ~40,000 years ago. Archaeological evidence from the best-documented region of Europe shows that during this replacement human populations increased by one order of magnitude,…
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Recent work on the Neandertal genome has raised the possibility of admixture between Neandertals and the expanding population of Homo sapiens who left Africa between 80 and 50 Kya (thousand years ago) to colonize the rest of the world. Here, we…
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In order to investigate the genetic features of ancient West Siberian people of the Middle Ages, we studied ancient DNA from bone remains excavated from two archeological sites in West Siberia: Saigatinsky 6 (eighth to eleventh centuries) and Zeleny…