Key finding:  The same jewelry may have been worn by ancient people of different cultures and, as DNA has revealed, matching jewelry is not always an indicator of shared ancestry.

Alex, B. (2024, January 29). "‘Landmark paper’ shows why ice age Europeans wore jewelry: Pendants and beads reveal nine cultures living across the continent 30,000 years ago." Science. News - Archaeology. https://www.science.org/content/article/landmark-paper-shows-why-ice-age-europeans-wore-jewelry

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