A genomic dating tool resolves the origins of ancient Eurasian genomes

Abstract

Radiocarbon dating is the gold-standard in archaeology to estimate the age of skeletons, a key to studying their origins. Half of all published ancient human genomes lack 20 reliable and direct dates, which results in obscure and contradictory reports. We developed Temporal Population Structure (TPS), the first DNA-based dating method for ancient genomes ranging from the Upper Palaeolithic to modern-day samples and applied it to all 961 ancient Eurasians. We show that TPS predictions for radiocarbon-dated skeletons align with their known dates and correctly account for kin relationships. The TPS-dating of 359 poorly dated Eurasian 25 samples resolves conflicts and sheds new light on disputed findings as illustrated by five test cases. We discuss the phenotypic traits of the Time Informative Markers (TIMs) that underlie TPS.Summary: TPS is a novel method to date humans from the Upper Palaeolithic to modern time 30 from their DNA sequences.

Diverse genetic origins of medieval steppe nomad conquerors – a response to Mikheyev et al. (2019)

“…The authors have failed to demonstrate that such a low number of SNPs in ancient genomes can produce reliable results. In our experience, these numbers for nearly haploid genomes are insufficient to derive accurate ancestry estimation (Esposito et al 2018;Esposito et al 2019). It is easy to show why this is the case.…”

“…For instance, a bone from the Darra-i-Kur cave in Afghanistan, initially assumed to be from the Palaeolithic (30,000 BP) (Dupree 1972) and often cited as one of the very few Pleistocene human fossils from Central Asia, was recently radiocarbon-dated to the Neolithic (4,500 BP) (Douka et al 2017). Though a major limitation of radiocarbon dating is the high amount of collagen extraction (500 mg), the authors could have employed TPS (Esposito et al 2019) to support their dating, which, excepting Sample #656, were unjustified.…”