Ben Krause-Kyora

• Dr. rer. nat., Dipl. Biochem, M.A.
• Professor at Kiel University

Background The northern European Neolithic is characterized by two major demographic events: immigration of early farmers from Anatolia at 7500 years before present, and their admixture with local western hunter-gatherers forming late farmers, from around 6200 years before present. The influence of this admixture event on variation in the immune-re...

The Late Viking Age cemetery at Ostriv, located approximately 80 kilometres south of Kyiv in the region of the River Ros’, was discovered by a team from the Institute of Archaeology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (IA NASU) in 2017. By 2022, 100 inhumation graves had been excavated in an area of 1,500 square metres, of which 50% to 6...

Background The hypomorphic variant rs11209026-A in the IL23R gene provides significant protection against immune-related diseases in Europeans, notably inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD). Today, the A-allele occurs with an average frequency of 5% in Europe. Methods This study comprised 251 ancient genomes from Europe spanning over 14,000 years. In...

Reconstructing past environments can be challenging when archaeological materials are missing. The study of organic molecules, which remain as traces in the environment overmillennia, represents one way to overcome this drawback. Fecal lipid markers (steroids and bile acids) and ancient sedimentary DNA o􀀀er a complementary and cross-validating anal...

Yersinia pestis has been infecting humans since the Late Neolithic (LN). Whether those early infections were isolated zoonoses or initiators of a pandemic remains unclear. We report Y. pestis infections in two individuals (of 133) from the LN necropolis at Warburg (Germany, 5300-4900 cal BP). Our analyses show that the two genomes belong to distinc...

Yersinia pestis has been infecting humans since the Late Neolithic (LN). Whether those early infections were isolated zoonoses or initiators of a pandemic remains unclear. We report Y. pestis infections in two individuals (of 133) from the LN necropolis at Warburg (Germany, 5300–4900 cal BP). Our analyses show that the two genomes belong to distinc...

In medieval central Europe, rye was one of the most important agricultural crops. It’s properties of frost resistance, general resilience and resistance to many pathogens made it invaluable for medieval farmers. Rye has a distinct domestication history compared to other cereal crops and was not domesticated directly from its wild ancestors, like ba...

Background The hypomorphic variant rs11209026-A in the IL23R gene provides significant protection against immune-related diseases in Europeans, notably inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Today, the A-allele occurs with an average frequency of 5% in Europe. Methods This study comprised 251 ancient genomes from Europe spanning over 14,000 years. In t...

Humans have become one of the greatest evolutionary forces, and their perturbations are expected to elicit strong evolutionary responses. Accordingly, during (size) selective overharvesting of wild populations, marked phenotypic changes have been documented, while the evolutionary basis is often unresolved. Time-series collections combined with gen...

The “princely” barrows of Łęki Małe, Greater Poland are the oldest such monuments within the distribution area of Únětice societies in Central Europe. While in the Circum-Harz group and in Silesia similar rich furnished graves under mounds have appeared as single monuments as early as 1950 BC, Łęki Małe represents a chain of barrows constructed bet...

We present a robust radiocarbon ( ¹⁴ C) chronology for burials at Sakhtysh, in European Russia, where nearly 180 inhumations of Lyalovo and Volosovo pottery-using hunter-gatherer-fishers represent the largest known populations of both groups. Past dating attempts were restricted by poor understanding of dietary ¹⁴ C reservoir effects (DREs). We dev...

Objectives: Determine the geographic place of origin and maternal lineage of prehistoric human skeletal remains discovered in Puyil Cave, Tabasco State, Mexico, located in a region currently populated by Olmec, Zoque and Maya populations. Materials and Methods: All specimens were radiocarbon (14C) dated (beta analytic), had dental modifications cl...

Background Leprosy is a chronic infectious disease caused by Mycobacterium leprae (M. leprae) that reached an epidemic scale in the Middle Ages. Nowadays, the disease is absent in Europe and host genetic influences have been considered as a contributing factor to leprosy disappearance. In this study, a case-control association analysis between mult...

Understanding the factors that predispose species and populations to decline and extinction is a major challenge of biodiversity research. In the present study, we investigated the historical population genomics of an extinct oyster population from the Wadden Sea collected between 1868 and 1888, and compared it to French and British populations sam...

This study discusses waste management by mid-Holocene hunter-gatherer-fisher communities at Riņņukalns, on the Salaca river in Latvia. It combines microscopic analyses with geochemistry and radiocarbon dating. We observe natural landscape changes and human responses, with Mesolithic and earlier Middle Neolithic occupation on the backswamp. During t...

Yersinia pestis ( Y. pestis ) has been infecting humans since the Late Neolithic (LN). Whether those early infections were isolated zoonoses or initiators of a prehistoric Eurasia-wide pandemic remains unclear. We report the results of a pathogen screening on 133 LN human remains from the necropolis at Warburg (Germany, 5300 − 4900 cal BP). We iden...

Background Reindeer (Rangifer tarandus) are iconic mammals that inhabit the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions. In these areas, reindeer not only play a vital ecological role, but they also hold cultural and economic significance for indigenous communities. In order to thrive in the harsh conditions of the northernmost areas of the world, reindeer have...

This study discusses waste management by mid-Holocene hunter-gatherer-fisher communities at Riņņukalns, on the Salaca river in Latvia. It combines microscopic analyses with geochemistry and radiocarbon dating. We observe natural landscape changes and human responses, with Mesolithic and earlier Middle Neolithic occupation on the floodplain. During...

Several dog skeletons were excavated at the Roman town of Augusta Raurica and at the military camp of Vindonissa, located in the northern Alpine region of Switzerland (Germania Superior). The relationships between them and the people, the nature of their lives, and the circumstances of their deaths are unclear. In order to gain insight into this do...

We present the first robust radiocarbon (14C) chronology for prehistoric burial activity at Sakhtysh, in European Russia, where nearly 180 inhumations attributed to Lyalovo and Volosovo pottery-using hunter-gatherer-fishers represent the largest known mortuary populations of these groups. Past attempts at 14C dating were restricted by poor preserva...

The northern European Neolithic is characterized by two major demographic events: immigration of early farmers (EF) from Anatolia (5500 BCE) and their admixture (from ∼4200 BCE) with western hunter-gatherers (WHG) forming late farmers (LF). The influence of this admixture event on variation in the immune-relevant human leukocyte antigen (HLA) regio...

The Tyrolean Iceman is known as one of the oldest human glacier mummies, directly dated to 3350–3120 calibrated BCE. A previously published low-coverage genome provided novel insights into European prehistory, despite high present-day DNA contamination. Here, we generate a high-coverage genome with low contamination (15.3×) to gain further insights...

Yersinia pestis is the causative agent of at least three major plague pandemics (Justinianic, Medieval and Modern). Previous studies on ancient Y. pestis genomes revealed that several genomic alterations had occurred approximately 5000–3000 years ago and contributed to the remarkable virulence of this pathogen. How a subset of strains evolved to ca...

The Basel-Waisenhaus burial community (Switzerland) has been traditionally interpreted as immigrated Alamans because of the location and dating of the burial ground – despite the typical late Roman funeral practices. To evaluate this hypothesis, multi-isotope and aDNA analyses were conducted on the eleven individuals buried there. The results show...

The Basel-Waisenhaus burial community (Switzerland) has been traditionally interpreted as immigrated Alamans due to the location and dating of the burial ground – despite the typical late Roman funeral practices. To evaluate this hypothesis, multi-isotope and aDNA analyses were conducted on the eleven individuals buried there. The results show that...

Microscopy of mummified visceral tissue from a Medici family member in Italy identified a potential blood vessel containing erythrocytes. Giemsa staining, atomic force microscopy, and immunohistochemistry confirmed Plasmodium falciparum inside those erythrocytes. Our results indicate an ancient Mediterranean presence of P. falciparum, which remains...

Variation in apolipoprotein E (APOE) has been shown to have the strongest genetic effect on human longevity. The aim of this study was to unravel the evolutionary history of the three major APOE alleles in Europe by analysing ancient samples up to 12,000 years old. We detected significant allele frequency shifts between populations and over time. O...

THE LATE VIKING-AGE CEMETERY OF OSTRIV, located approximately 80 km south of Kyiv in the region along the Ros’ River, was discovered by the Institute of Archaeology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine team in 2017. By 2020, 67 inhumation graves had been excavated in an area of 1400 sq m. Most of the artefacts from Ostriv are uncommon in...

Background The pathogen landscape in the Early European Middle Ages remains largely unexplored. Here, we perform a systematic pathogen screening of the rural community Lauchheim “Mittelhofen,” in present-day Germany, dated to the Merovingian period, between fifth and eighth century CE. Skeletal remains of individuals were subjected to an ancient DN...

The history of the British Isles and Ireland is characterized by multiple periods of major cultural change, including the influential transformation after the end of Roman rule, which precipitated shifts in language, settlement patterns and material culture¹. The extent to which migration from continental Europe mediated these transitions is a matt...

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is often described as a model for modern civilization diseases in which environmental factors trigger disease manifestation in genetically compromised individuals. Little is known about the evolutionary history of variants associated with IBD in modern Europeans. Here, we analysed 610 IBD-variants in 2445 ancient da...

Medieval Europe was repeatedly affected by outbreaks of infectious diseases, some of which reached epidemic proportions, leaving behind a large number of dead often inhumed in mass graves. Among other things, this disproportionate pathogen exposure could have acted as a powerful selective pressure on the human immune gene-pool and may have been one...

Der Sammelband basiert auf einer gleichnamigen digitalen Ringvorlesung, die im Wintersemester 2020/2021 und Sommersemester 2021 an der Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel stattfand. In 16 Beiträgen und drei Vortragszusammenfassungen äußern sich anerkannte Expertinnen und Experten zu verschiedenen Fragen und Themenfeldern rund um die Coronavirus...

The distribution of the black rat (Rattus rattus) has been heavily influenced by its association with humans. The dispersal history of this non-native commensal rodent across Europe, however, remains poorly understood, and different introductions may have occurred during the Roman and medieval periods. Here, in order to reconstruct the population h...

Rye (Secale cereale ssp. cereale L.) is a secondary domesticate, considered to have originated as a weed in wheat fields and to have developed traits of domestication by evolving similar physiological and morphological characteristics to those of wheat. Although it migrated into Europe as a weed possessing domestication traits, it became one of the...

Outbreaks of infectious diseases repeatedly affected medieval Europe, leaving behind a large number of dead often inhumed in mass graves. Human remains interred in two burial pits from 14th century CE Germany exhibited molecular evidence of Salmonella enterica Paratyphi C (S. Paratyphi C) infection. The pathogen is responsible for paratyphoid fever...

A 5,000-year-old Yersinia pestis genome (RV 2039) is reconstructed from a hunter-fisher-gatherer (5300–5050 cal BP) buried at Riņņukalns, Latvia. RV 2039 is the first in a series of ancient strains that evolved shortly after the split of Y. Pestis from its antecessor Y. pseudotuberculosis ~7,000 years ago. The genomic and phylogenetic characteristi...

Pathogens and associated outbreaks of infectious disease exert selective pressure on human populations, and any changes in allele frequencies that result may be especially evident for genes involved in immunity. In this regard, the 1346-1353 Yersinia pestis-caused Black Death pandemic, with continued plague outbreaks spanning several hundred years,...

The distribution of the black rat ( Rattus rattus ) has been heavily influenced by its association with humans. The dispersal history of this non-native commensal rodent across Europe, however, remains poorly understood, and different introductions may have occurred during the Roman and medieval periods. Here, in order to reconstruct the population...

Medieval Europe was repeatedly affected by outbreaks of infectious diseases, some of which reached epidemic proportions. A Late Medieval mass burial next to the Heiligen-Geist-Hospital in Lübeck (present-day Germany) contained the skeletal remains of more than 800 individuals who had presumably died from infectious disease. From 92 individuals, we...

The historical phylogeography of Ostrea edulis was successfully depicted in its native range for the first time using ancient DNA methods on dry shells from museum collections. This research reconstructed the historical population structure of the European flat oyster across Europe in the 1870s—including the now extinct population in the Wadden Sea...

The Wartberg culture (WBC, 3500-2800 BCE) dates to the Late Neolithic period, a time of important demographic and cultural transformations in western Europe. We performed genome-wide analyses of 42 individuals who were interred in a WBC collective burial in Niedertiefenbach, Germany (3300-3200 cal. BCE). The results showed that the farming populati...

The initial spread of pastoralist subsistence to Inner Asia remains poorly defined due in part to limited research on settlement sites dating to the Eneolithic period (ca. 3600–2900 cal BC) in the Altai Mountains. The emergence of the Afanasievo culture in the Altai Mountains appears to have coincided with the arrival of domesticated sheep, goats,...

In ancient DNA research, the degraded nature of the samples generally results in poor yields of highly fragmented DNA; targeted DNA enrichment is thus required to maximize research outcomes. The three commonly used methods-array-based hybridization capture and in-solution capture using either RNA or DNA baits-have different characteristics that may...

Ancient genomic studies have identified Yersinia pestis (Y. pestis) as the causative agent of the second plague pandemic (fourteenth–eighteenth century) that started with the Black Death (1,347–1,353). Most of the Y. pestis strains investigated from this pandemic have been isolated from western Europe, and not much is known about the diversity and...

We combine the results of a radiocarbon ( ¹⁴ C) dating program with archaeogenetic, osteological and sparse stratigraphic data, to construct a Bayesian chronological model for a multi-generational sequence situated entirely on a plateau in the ¹⁴ C calibration curve. Calibrated dates of individual human bones from the Late Neolithic gallery grave a...

In ancient DNA research, the degraded nature of the samples generally results in poor yields of highly fragmented DNA, and targeted DNA enrichment is thus required to maximize research outcomes. The three commonly used methods – (1) array-based hybridization capture and in-solution capture using either (2) RNA or (3) DNA baits – have different char...

Goats were initially managed in the Near East approximately 10,000 years ago and spread across Eurasia as economically productive and environmentally resilient herd animals. While the geographic origins of domesticated goats (Capra hircus) in the Near East have been long-established in the zooarchaeological record and, more recently, further reveal...

The highly polymorphic human leukocyte antigen (HLA) plays a crucial role in adaptive immunity and is associated with various complex diseases. Accurate analysis of HLA genes using ancient DNA (aDNA) data is crucial for understanding their role in human adaptation to pathogens. Here, we describe the TARGT pipeline for targeted analysis of polymorph...

The Stone Age site Riņņukalns, Latvia, is the only well-stratified shell midden in the Eastern Baltic. In this paper, we present new interdisciplinary results concerning its dating, stratigraphy, features, and finds to shed light on the daily life of a fisher population prior to the introduction of domesticated animals. The undisturbed part of the...

The Cucuteni-Trypillia complex (CTC) flourished in eastern Europe for over two millennia (5100–2800 BCE) from the end of the Neolithic to the Early Bronze Age. Its vast distribution area encompassed modern-day eastern Romania, Moldova and western/central Ukraine. Due to a lack of existing burials throughout most of this time, only little is known a...

The Cucuteni-Trypillia complex (CTC) flourished in eastern Europe for over two millennia (5100-2800 BCE) from the end of the Neolithic to the Early Bronze Age. Its vast distribution area encompassed modern-day eastern Romania, Moldova and western/central Ukraine. Due to a lack of existing burials throughout most of this time, only little is known a...

The Wartberg culture (WBC, 3,500-2,800 BCE) dates to the Late Neolithic period, a time of important demographic and cultural transformations in western Europe. We perform a genome-wide analysis of 42 individuals who were interred in a WBC collective burial in Niedertiefenbach, Germany (3,300-3,200 cal. BCE). Our results highlight that the Niedertie...

Natural history collections are fundamental for biodiversity research as well as for any applied environment-related research. These collections can be seen as archives of earth´s life providing the basis to address highly relevant scientific questions such as how biodiversity changes in certain environments, either through evolutionary processes i...

It is a common assumption that – compared with the Mesolithic – the adoption of Neolithic lifeways was accompanied by a higher risk of infection and the development of epidemic diseases. Such a hypothesis seems plausible when considering singular archaeological parameters like increasing population density and palaeopathological indicators of poor...

Proving voyaging at sea by Palaeolithic humans is a difficult archaeological task, even for short distances. In the Mediterranean, a commonly accepted sea crossing is that from the Italian Peninsula to Sicily by anatomically modern humans, purportedly of the Aurignacian culture. This claim, however, was only supported by the typological attribution...

Cervus elaphus, fermur (Fon-4), before the sampling. (JPG)

Cervus elaphus, radius (Fon-6), before the sampling. (JPG)

Bos primigenius, molar (Fon-14), before the sampling. (JPG)

Cervus elaphus, molar I or II (Fon-16), before the sampling. (JPG)

Cervus elaphus, phalanx I (Fon-21), after the sampling. (JPG)

Homo sapiens, premolar III (Fon-25), before the sampling. (JPG)

Human and faunal skeletal remains sampled for isotopic and radiocarbon analyses. (DOCX)

Three-dimensional digital model of the left maxillary P3. (JPG)

Cervus elaphus, humerus (Fon-3), before the sampling. (JPG)

Cervus elaphus, scaphucuboid (Fon-5), before the sampling. (JPG)

Cervus elaphus, humerus (Fon-8), before the sampling. (JPG)

Sus scrofa, metatarsal II (Fon-9), before the sampling. (JPG)

Cervus elaphus, molar III (Fon-15), before the sampling. (JPG)

Cervus elaphus, tibia, right (Fon-20), before the sampling. (JPG)

Cervus elaphus, calcaneus (Fon-22), after the sampling. (JPG)

Three-dimensional digital model of the right maxillary M2. (JPG)

Cervus elaphus, humerus (Fon-1), before the sampling. (JPG)

Sus scrofa, metacarpal II (Fon-10), before the sampling. (JPG)

Sus scrofa, metacarpal III (Fon-11), before the sampling. (JPG)

Bos primigenius, vertebra (Fon-13), before the sampling. (JPG)

Cervus elaphus, tibia, right (Fon-18), before the sampling. (JPG)

Cervus elaphus, humerus (Fon-2), before the sampling. (JPG)

Cervus elaphus, ulna (Fon-7), before the sampling. (JPG)

Bos primigenius, cuneiform (Fon-12), before the sampling. (JPG)

Cervus elaphus, tibia, right (Fon-17), before the sampling. (JPG)

Cervus elaphus, tibia, right (Fon-19), before the sampling. (JPG)

Homo sapiens, parietal fragment (Fon-23), before the sampling. (JPG)

Homo sapiens, molar II (Fon-24), before the sampling. (JPG)

The gallery grave from Niedertiefenbach is an extraordinary find for the late Wartberg Group in the Neolithic of the German Lower Mountain Range. Only in this case a stratified sequence of at least 177 individuals is documented. A new extensive series of radiocarbon dates documents a greater age of the grave than previously published an allows the...

Details to the shotgun and amplicon datasets, FastQScreen results, mapping statistics and detected variants.

Data S2: Additional Information to the Multi-omics Data and Elemental/Stable Isotope Analysis, Related to Figures 2–4 Details to the comparative modern animal samples used in this study and to the metabolite, glycan, stable isotope, elemental, protein, and lipid analysis results.