Ancient Scythians were a genetic blend of Europeans and Asians, researchers find

A group of researchers led by the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) has discovered the first scientific evidence of genetic blending between Europeans and Asians in the remains of ancient Scythian warriors living over 2,000 years ago in the Altai region of Mongolia. Contrary to what was believed until now, the results published in PLoS ONE indicate that this blending was not due to an eastward migration of Europeans, but to a demographic expansion of local Central Asian populations, thanks to the technological improvements the Scythian culture brought with them.

The Altai is a mountain range in Central Asia occupying territories of Russia and Kazakhstan to the west and of Mongolia and China to the east. Historically, the Central Asian steppes have been a corridor for Asian and European populations, resulting in the region’s large diversity in population today. In ancient times however the Altai Mountains, located in the middle of the steppes, represented an important barrier for the coexistence and mixture of the populations living on each side. And so they lived isolated during millennia: Europeans on the western side and Asians on the eastern side.

Click here to read this article from History of the Ancient World

New project to examine immigration to medieval England

Scholars at the University of York are to launch a major research project focusing on the impact and extent of immigration into England in the Middle Ages.

The study, backed by a £784,545 grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, will create a huge database of around 80,000 immigrants who lived in England between 1330 and 1550. Once the database is completed, in 2015, it will be freely accessible to all online and will offer much material that has never been available before outside academia for family and local historians.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

Who were the 99% of ancient Rome?

From Gibbon to "Gladiator," it might seem like we know a lot about Ancient Rome, but our view of this civilization is a skewed one. The Romans lived in one of the most stratified societies in history. Around 1.5% of the population controlled the government, military, economy and religion. Through the writings and possessions they left behind, these rich, upper-class men are also responsible for most of our information about Roman life.

The remaining people – commoners, slaves and others – are largely silent. They could not afford tombstones to record their names, and they were buried with little in the way of fancy pottery or jewellery. Their lives were documented by the elites, but they left few documents of their own.

Now, Kristina Killgrove, an archaeologist from Vanderbilt University, wants to tell their story by sequencing their DNA, and she is raising donations to do it. “Their DNA will tell me where these people, who aren’t in histories, were coming from,” she says. “They were quite literally the 99% of Rome.”

Click here to read this article from CNN

Roots of the British, 1000 BC – AD 1000

Historians, archaeologists, linguists, geneticists and IT experts at the University of Leicester are collaborating in new ways to provide a clearer picture of the population history of Britain.

There have been many different interpretations of the roots of the Welsh, Scots and English, and the legacies of peoples such as Celts, Romans, Angles, Saxons and Vikings, who supposedly or certainly migrated here.

Combining data and expertise in a truly interdisciplinary collaboration promises to throw new light on these issues. Dr Jo Story, of the School of History, said: “To do this, the University of Leicester is exploiting its unique combination of a world-class Genetics Department studying the messages encoded in our genes, and Schools of History, English, Archaeology and Ancient History with international reputations for their research into the different legacy of texts, language and objects. We have built a collaborative group called ‘Roots of the British’ to bring these strands together.”

A new grant of £100,000, awarded by JISC as part of the 'Managing Research Data' Programme, will allow the development of a novel database, HALOGEN, to support the Roots of the British collaboration. David Carter and Mary Visser of IT Services prepared the successful grant application, and Jonathan Tedds will coordinate multi-disciplinary IT research expertise. Jonathan said: “The database will contain data on landscapes and artefacts, surnames and place-names, dialect and linguistic patterns, censuses, as well as genetic variation in the population. Combining such diverse data will present new challenges, which is why JISC is interested in funding these initiatives, and will also allow researchers to seek informative patterns about the past.”

At the same time a PhD student, Hayley Dunn, will begin her studies as part of the Roots of the British project. Normally, students spend their time in only one Department, but Hayley will be supervised both in the Department of Genetics (by Professor Mark Jobling) and in the School of Archaeology and Ancient History (by Dr Simon James). Dr James said: “We plan to combat the traditional separatism of different disciplines, in which experts from one field just cherry-pick ideas from another, by training a new generation of truly cross-disciplinary researchers for the future.”

Professor Jobling hopes that the new initiatives will lead to really new insights, for example: “Place-names in counties like Leicestershire show the massive influence the Vikings had on our culture, while in Warwickshire there are no Viking names. But can we see a difference in the proportions of ‘Viking’ genes in these places? Comparing different kinds of evidence for past Viking influence will help us understand how these key cultural changes in Britain’s past came about.”

Click here to go to the Roots of the British website