Origins of Ancient Picts revealed -- and an older hypothesis of a matrilineal society is called into question.

Findings from a recently published report, Open Access, Peer-Reviewed, Research Article: Morez, A. et al. (2023, April 27). "Imputed genomes and haplotype-based analyses of the Picts of early medieval Scotland reveal fine-scale relatedness between Iron Age, early medieval and the modern people of the UK." Plos Genetics. https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article/peerReview?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1010360

• Higher degree of genetic affinity, between the Pictish genomes and individuals from western Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and Northumbria.
• The same genetic structure detected in Iron Age Scotland was found in present-day Orcadians.
• Seven mitochondrial DNA findings from the Lundin Links cemetery revealed no direct maternal ancestors which could suggest exchanges of people, or at least females, between groups during the Pictish period, and challenge older ideas that the Picts were a matrilineal society.

See also: Davis, M. (2023, April 28). "Ancient DNA Reveals Painted People of Scotland Had Local Roots Related to Iron Age People in Britain." The Science Times. https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/43482/20230428/ancient-dna-reveals-painted-people-scotland-local-roots-related-iron.htm

Max Planck Society. (2023, December 20). "Revealing close and distant relatives in ancient DNA with unprecedented precision." Phys Org. https://phys.org/news/2023-12-revealing-distant-ancient-dna-unprecedented.html

From the original research: "Long DNA segments shared between two individuals, known as identity-by-descent (IBD), reveal recent genealogical connections. Here we introduce ancIBD, a method for identifying IBD segments in ancient human DNA (aDNA) using a hidden Markov model and imputed genotype probabilities."

Reference (Open Access): Ringbauer, H., Huang, Y., Akbari, A. et al. Accurate detection of identity-by-descent segments in human ancient DNA. Nat Genet (2023). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-023-01582-w

Key findings: "The Asian ancestry of Native Americans is more complicated than previously indicated," says first author Yu-Chun Li, a molecular anthropologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. "In addition to previously described ancestral sources in Siberia, Australo-Melanesia, and Southeast Asia, we show that northern coastal China also contributed to the gene pool of Native Americans." 

"Though the study focused on mitochondrial DNA, complementary evidence from Y chromosomal DNA suggests that male ancestors of Native Americans also lived in northern China at around the same time as these female ancestors."

The "Travel by Ancestry" blog watches this space as data continues to come in about earliest origins: https://www.familyheritageresearchcommunity.org/delmarva-dna

Open Access References:

• Li and Gao et al. Mitogenome evidence shows two radiation events and dispersals of matrilineal ancestry from northern coastal China to the Americas and Japan. Cell Reports, 2023 DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2023.112413

From the original research published in Nature: "Here we report the development of a non-destructive method for the gradual release of DNA trapped in ancient bone and tooth artefacts. Application of the method to an Upper Palaeolithic deer tooth pendant from Denisova Cave, Russia, resulted in the recovery of ancient human and deer mitochondrial genomes, which allowed us to estimate the age of the pendant at approximately 19,000–25,000 years. Nuclear DNA analysis identifies the presumed maker or wearer of the pendant as a female individual with strong genetic affinities to a group of Ancient North Eurasian individuals who lived around the same time but were previously found only further east in Siberia. "

Reference (Open Access): Essel, E., Zavala, E.I., Schulz-Kornas, E. et al. Ancient human DNA recovered from a Palaeolithic pendant. Nature (2023). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06035-2

Find out about how we may look to the animals for knowledge of ourselves and to guide us in our research of our earliest connections in  Dance of Life.