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Researchers from the Crick, @UCL and King's College London used a new way of analysing ancient DNA to better understand European migrations in the years 1-1,000 AD The findings were led by Leo Speidel with senior author Pontus Skoglund crick.ac.uk/news-and-repor…

Twigstats links up directly with admixtools2 uqrmaie1.github.io/admixtools. R package incl documentation and examples available here: leospeidel.github.io/twigstats/

We’ve conducted many simulations to test this, incl with bottlenecks, various errors and continuous gene flow and think it works really well, especially to boost power to quantify admixture between closely related sources.

We can replicate the fascinating fine-scale patterns of genetic structure in Neolithic Ireland, revealing close ties between the elite, reported by Lara Cassidy et al (nature.com/articles/s4158…). This is not captured by regular outgroup f3 statistics.

Twigstats can also time-stratify events. Deep events may act as confounders to more recent events. E.g. for Neanderthal admixture, there are alternative histories with deep structure and no admixture resulting in similar f-stats values. Twigstats can distinguish these scenarios.

We then applied Twigstats to >1500 imputed ancient genomes focusing on the early medieval period from 1AD – 1000AD in Europe. We’re revisiting this period encompassing the Iron Age, the fall of the Roman Empire, the ‘Migration Period’ and the Viking Age. We see three major events

1 AD – 500AD: We see clear evidence of northern European/Scandinavian-related ‘pink’ ancestry appearing across Europe. These match historical accounts of Germanic expansions and arrive early in places, e.g. a first/second century AD individual in Slovakia.

500AD – 1000AD: We then shift our focus to Scandinavia itself, where a huge diversification in ancestry is seen by the Viking Age, compared to the preceding early Iron Age. This was observed previously, but how did this dramatic diversification happen?

With increased power, we fit every Viking Age individual. Southern Scandianvia shows influx from the ‘yellow’ central European ancestries. We think that this northwards expansion started likely before 800AD, transforming ancestry in pre-Viking Age Scandinavia and beyond.

Additionally, we also see impact from other parts of Europe, notably eastern groups, in parts of Scandinavia, consistent with previous aDNA studies.

This was a big team effort, and huge thanks to Pontus Skoglund, @marinasdsilva, Tom Booth, @_kakia_ , Anders Götherström, Chris Barrington, Ben Raffield, and Peter Heather for making this paper happen!

And quite unbelievably, it also made the cover. Entirely thanks to a very special cover design by Oliver Uberti. The cover is inspired by Scandinavian runestones, sometimes mentioning voyages taken by ancestors to foreign lands.

Finally, most recently, I migrated from London to Tokyo RIKEN. I had a great time in London at The Francis Crick Institute and UCL and hope to be back frequently.

Also don't miss Leo's thread on our paper, and the Crick's excellent illustrated lay summary by Clare crick.ac.uk/news-and-repor…

In the current climate of vaccine hesitancy, it is important to realise how much public health investments have done to childhood survival rate. Read this historic review to understand that we really should not take health for granted theconversation.com/infectious-dis…

Very happy to share the results of my Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions project done at UCL Genetics Institute with Mark Thomas and Pontus Skoglund from The Francis Crick Institute. We used ancient DNA to reveal remarkably high genetic diversity in the region of modern-day Ukraine / Україна over the last 3,500 years until ~500 years ago.

The paper: science.org/doi/10.1126/sc… Photo caption: Scythian burial in Skorobir necropolis in Bilsk hillfort Photo credit: Iryna Shramko

The study was made possible by the resilience of Ukrainian researchers – second author Olga Utevska from V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University and MSCA4Ukraine fellow at genomicstartu, and numerous archaeologists conducting excavations in Ukraine despite the war.

Proud to have contributed to this study exploring 🇺🇦Ukraine's deep history through ancient DNA from 91 individuals. Thanks and congratulations to Lehti Saag, Olga Utevska, Mark Thomas and all other co-authors in Ukraine and beyond.

Check out our Ancient Genomics Lab, including Pontus Skoglund, @boothicus and Frankie Tait, on tonight’s new episode of Digging for Britain. 🦴 Watch it now on iPlayer (from 46:00), or tune in to BBC Two at 20:00. bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episod…