Ancient DNA

Even 10 years ago ancient DNA results for mtDNA were a rarity but now there are many more being published in the technical literature. Now full genomes are available too which gives an even more detailed understanding of where people have come from. It is changing the overall understanding of people movement in pre-history.

The Eupedia states that H4 was not found in Europe before the Bronze Age and that is from the ancient DNA found at the time of writing. But the situation is always changing and the Spanish early farmer  result of Olade in the table below changes that statement.

A fun thing to do is to use GEDmatch and the files for the ancient DNA to find out how much you personally match some prehistoric and also later historic populations. This uses autosomal DNA rather than mitochondria, but that might help us know which original population we match to best, which is useful if your genealogy is from a focused area. European populations have been found to be made up of 4 basic original populations, a Western Hunter Gatherer (WHG), Northern Hunter Gatherer (NHG), and early Neolithic farmers (ENE), and Steppe herders, the Yamnaya. The farmers include both the Eastern Hunter gather (EHG) and ones from the Caucasus. The Yamnaya also include the Eastern and Caucasian hunters.

The British Isles are made up of Celtic tribes, Saxons and Vikings overlaid onto the earlier pre-historic structure. Samples of Saxon,Celtic and Scandinavian Vikings are also in GEDmatch.

There are some H4 people from the Bronze Age too, and their details are below. Eventually we may get their aDNA results loaded into GEDmatch so that we can play with them too.

This web page describes the samples in more detail http://www.y-str.org/p/ancient-dna.html  

You could try using a very small match threshold of 50 SMP and 1.5cM and compare your aDNA results (or your mother’s)  on the one to one compare tool as well as the general fun compare to all archaic DNA link on the top menu.

FTDNA now offer an ancient DNA button for your autosomal DNA and it does all the arithmetic for you and gives you the finished percentages of hunter gatherer, farmer or bronze age steppes (metal age invader). But you can not choose the samples that are the most relevant for you. If you are Scandinavian only the Northern Hunter gather is relevant for example.

Summary of useful samples

The ones below are only mtDNA (so far) so can not be played with on GEDmatch, but it is useful to see the early spread

Olade 2015

http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2015/09/23/molbev.msv181.full

Fernandes 2016 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303044230_Preliminary_results_of_a_prehistoric_human_ancient_DNA_time_series_from_coastal_and_hinter land_Croatia

Brotherton 2015 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3978205/

There are more samples of these early bronze age people in GEDmatch if you find it a fun investigation. Search Anthrogenica.com or ask the admins for more information.