It is shown that the Bronze Age was a highly dynamic period involving large-scale population migrations and replacements, responsible for shaping major parts of present-day demographic structure in both Europe and Asia.
The genome sequence of a male infant recovered from the Anzick burial site in western Montana is sequenced and it is shown that the gene flow from the Siberian Upper Palaeolithic Mal’ta population into Native American ancestors is also shared by the AnZick-1 individual and thus happened before 12,600 years bp.
The results suggest that there has been gene flow between some Native Americans from both North and South America and groups related to East Asians and Australo-Melanesians, the latter possibly through an East Asian route that might have included ancestors of modern Aleutian Islanders.
It is shown that nuclear DNA has degraded at least twice as fast as mtDNA, a baseline for predicting long-term DNA survival in bone, and considerable sample-to-sample variance in DNA preservation could not be accounted for by geologic age.
The genomes of 137 ancient and 502 modern human genomes illuminate the population history of the Eurasian steppes after the Bronze Age and document the replacement of Indo-European speakers of West Eurasian ancestry by Turkic-speaking groups of East Asian ancestry.
Genome-wide data from 400 Neolithic, Copper Age and Bronze Age Europeans is presented, finding limited genetic affinity between Beaker-complex-associated individuals from Iberia and central Europe, and excludes migration as an important mechanism of spread between these two regions.
Neither interpretation fits the complexity of Southeast Asian history: Both Hòabìnhian hunter-gatherers and East Asian farmers contributed to current Southeast Asian diversity, with further migrations affecting island SEA and Vietnam.
Analysis of the oldest genomes suggests that there was an early split within Beringian populations, giving rise to the Northern and Southern lineages, and that the early population spread widely and rapidly suggests that their access to large portions of the hemisphere was essentially unrestricted, yet there are genomic and archaeological hints of an earlier human presence.
An approximately 7,000-year-old Mesolithic skeleton discovered at the La Braña-Arintero site in León, Spain, is sequenceed to retrieve a complete pre-agricultural European human genome, providing evidence that a significant number of derived, putatively adaptive variants associated with pathogen resistance in modern Europeans were already present in this hunter-gatherer.