Christiana Scheib

University of Cambridge | Cam

This paper has several aims: to determine if Yersinia pestis was the causative agent in the last Scottish plague outbreak in the mid-17th century; map the geographic spread of the epidemic and isolate potential contributing factors to its spread and severity; and examine funerary behaviours in the context of a serious plague epidemic in early moder...

In recent years, sediments from cave environments have provided invaluable insights into ancient hominids, as well as past fauna and flora. Unfortunately, locations with favourable conditions for ancient DNA (aDNA) preservation in sediments are scarce. In this study we analysed a set of samples obtained from soil adhered to different human skeletal...

The Roman period saw the empire expand across Europe and the Mediterranean, including much of what is today Great Britain. While there is written evidence of high mobility into and out of Britain for administrators, traders, and the military, the impact of imperialism on local, rural population structure, kinship, and mobility is invisible in the t...

The Merovingian period (5th to 8th cc AD) was a time of demographic, socioeconomic, cultural, and political realignment in Western Europe. Here, we report the whole-genome shotgun sequence data of 30 human skeletal remains from a coastal Late Merovingian site of Koksijde (675 to 750 AD), alongside 18 remains from two Early to Late Medieval sites in...

The extent of the devastation of the Black Death pandemic (1346–1353) on European populations is known from documentary sources and its bacterial source illuminated by studies of ancient pathogen DNA. What has remained less understood is the effect of the pandemic on human mobility and genetic diversity at the local scale. Here, we report 275 ancie...

Following the development of modern genome sequencing technologies, the investigation of museum osteological finds is increasingly informative and popular. Viable protocols to help preserve these collections from exceedingly invasive analyses, would allow greater access to the specimens for scientific research. The main aim of this work is to surve...

Medieval hospitals were founded to provide charity, but poverty and infirmity were broad and socially determined categories and little is known about the residents of these institutions and the pathways that led them there. Combining skeletal, isotopic and genetic data, the authors weave a collective biography of individuals buried at the Hospital...

The lateral angle method of sex estimation is tested on an archaeological population with genetic sex. Casts of the internal auditory canal were made using a quick drying impression material on 90 individuals (76 adults and 14 nonadults) from Anglo‐Saxon and Medieval Cambridgeshire. The anterior and posterior angles of the internal auditory canal w...

The Roman period saw the empire expand across Europe and the Mediterranean, including much of what is today the United Kingdom. While there is written evidence of high mobility into and out of Britain for administrators, traders and the military, the impact of imperialism on local population structure is invisible in the textual record. The extent...

Although dozens of ancient Yersinia pestis genomes and a vast corpus of documentary data are available, the origin and spread of consecutive outbreaks of the Second Plague Pandemic in Europe (14th-18th c.) are still poorly understood. For the majority of ancient genomes, only radiocarbon dates spanning several decades are available, hampering an as...

Metabolomic approaches, such as in clinical applications of living individuals, have shown potential use for solving questions regarding the past when applied to archaeological material. Here, we study for the first time the potential of this Omic approach as applied to metabolites extracted from archaeological human dentin. Dentin obtained from mi...

Studies of ancient DNA have transformed our understanding of human evolution. Palaeogenomics can also reveal historic and prehistoric agents of disease, including endemic, epidemic and pandemic pathogens. Viruses - and in particular those with single or double-stranded DNA genomes - are an important part of the palaeogenomic revolution, preserving...

The extent of the devastation of the Black Death pandemic (1346-53) on European populations is known from documentary sources and its bacterial source illuminated by studies of ancient pathogen DNA. What has remained less understood is the effect of the pandemic on human mobility and genetic diversity at local scale in the context of the social str...

Modern humans have populated Europe for more than 45,000 years1,2. Our knowledge of the genetic relatedness and structure of ancient hunter-gatherers is however limited, owing to the scarceness and poor molecular preservation of human remains from that period³. Here we analyse 356 ancient hunter-gatherer genomes, including new genomic data for 116...

Objectives A statistical study comparing osteological and ancient DNA determinations of sex was conducted in order to investigate whether there are sex biases in United Kingdom and Irish Neolithic megalithic burials. Materials and Methods Genetic and osteological information from human individuals from 32 megalithic sites in the UK and Ireland dat...

Human herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV-1), a life-long infection spread by oral contact, infects a majority of adults globally. Phylogeographic clustering of sampled diversity into European, pan-Eurasian, and African groups has suggested the virus codiverged with human migrations out of Africa, although a much younger origin has also been proposed. We p...

Background The human pathogen Haemophilus influenzae was the main cause of bacterial meningitis in children and a major cause of worldwide infant mortality before the introduction of a vaccine in the 1980s. Although the occurrence of serotype b (Hib), the most virulent type of H. influenzae , has since decreased, reports of infections with other se...

Human herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV-1), a life-long infection spread by oral contact, today infects a majority of adults globally, yet no ancient HSV-1 genomes have yet been published. Phylogeographic clustering of sampled diversity into European, pan-Eurasian, and African groups(Pfaff et al. 2016; Szpara, Tafuri, et al. 2014) has suggested that the...

The geographical location and shape of Apulia, a narrow land stretching out in the sea at the South of Italy, made this region a Mediterranean crossroads connecting Western Europe and the Balkans. Such movements culminated at the beginning of the Iron Age with the Iapygian civilisation which consisted of three cultures: Peucetians, Messapians and D...

Background Hansen’s disease (leprosy), widespread in medieval Europe, is today mainly prevalent in tropical and subtropical regions with around 200,000 new cases reported annually. Despite its long history and appearance in historical records, its origins and past dissemination patterns are still widely unknown. Applying ancient DNA approaches to i...

The Finnish population is a unique example of a genetic isolate affected by a recent founder event. Previous studies have suggested that the ancestors of Finnic-speaking Finns and Estonians reached the circum-Baltic region by the 1st millennium BC. However, high linguistic similarity points to a more recent split of their languages. To study geneti...

The geographical location and shape of Apulia, a narrow land stretching out in the sea at the South of Italy, made this region a Mediterranean crossroads connecting Western Europe and the Balkans. Such movements culminated at the beginning of the Iron Age with the Iapygian civilization which consisted of three cultures: Peucetians, Messapians and D...

Ancient DNA from Yersinia pestis has been identified in skeletons at four urban burial grounds in Cambridge, England, and at a nearby rural cemetery. Dating to between ad 1349 and 1561, these represent individuals who died of plague during the second pandemic. Most come from normative individual burials, rather than mass graves. This pattern repres...

Across Europe, the genetics of the Chalcolithic/Bronze Age transition is increasingly characterized in terms of an influx of Steppe-related ancestry. The effect of this major shift on the genetic structure of populations in the Italian Peninsula remains underexplored. Here, genome-wide shotgun data for 22 individuals from commingled cave and single...

Before the end of the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM, ∼16.5 ka ago)1 set in motion major shifts in human culture and population structure,2 a consistent change in lithic technology, material culture, settlement pattern, and adaptive strategies is recorded in Southern Europe at ∼18-17 ka ago. In this time frame, the landscape of Northeastern Italy change...

The recently enriched genomic history of Indigenous groups in the Americas is still meager concerning continental Central America. Here, we report ten pre-Hispanic (plus two early colonial) genomes and 84 genome-wide profiles from seven groups presently living in Panama. Our analyses reveal that pre-Hispanic demographic events contributed to the ex...

The transition from Stone to Bronze Age in Central and Western Europe was a period of major population movements originating from the Ponto-Caspian Steppe. Here, we report new genome-wide sequence data from 30 individuals north of this area, from the understudied western part of present-day Russia, including 3 Stone Age hunter-gatherers (10,800 to...

The recently enriched genomic history of Indigenous groups in the Americas is still meagre concerning continental Central America. Here, we report ten pre-Hispanic (plus two early colonial) genomes and 84 genome-wide profiles from seven groups presently living in Panama. Our analyses reveal that pre-Hispanic demographic changes and isolation events...

Although ancient DNA data have become increasingly more important in studies about past populations, it is often not feasible or practical to obtain high coverage genomes from poorly preserved samples. While methods of accurate genotype imputation from > 1 × coverage data have recently become a routine, a large proportion of ancient samples remain...

The end of the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) in Europe (~16.5 ka ago) set in motion major changes in human culture and population structure. In Southern Europe, Early Epigravettian material culture was replaced by Late Epigravettian art and technology about 18-17 ka ago at the beginning of southern Alpine deglaciation, although available genetic evide...

Transition from the Stone to the Bronze Age in Central and Western Europe was a period of major population movements originating from the Ponto-Caspian Steppe. Here, we report new genome-wide sequence data from 28 individuals from the territory north of this source area - from the under-studied Western part of present-day Russia, including Stone Ag...

The Iron and Classical Ages in the Near East were marked by population expansions carrying cultural transformations that shaped human history, but the genetic impact of these events on the people who lived through them is little-known. Here, we sequenced the whole genomes of 19 individuals who each lived during one of four time periods between 800...

The development of next-generation sequencing (NGS), a technology coincidentally well-suited to highly fragmented, low copy number DNA sources, spawned a rapid expansion in the field of ancient DNA (aDNA). It has gathered a reputation as a sexy subject, quite literally. Some of the headlines targeted to the public: ‘Mystery humans spiced up ancient...

The second plague pandemic, caused by Yersinia pestis, devastated Europe and the nearby regions between the 14th and 18th centuries AD. Here we analyse human remains from ten European archaeological sites spanning this period and reconstruct 34 ancient Y. pestis genomes. Our data support an initial entry of the bacterium through eastern Europe, the...

What is osteobiography good for? The last generation of archaeologists fought to overcome the traditional assumption that archaeology is merely ancillary to history, a substitute to be used when written sources are defective; it is now widely acknowledged that material histories and textual histories tell equally valid and complementary stories abo...

The Early Iron Age nomadic Scythians have been described as a confederation of tribes of different origins, based on ancient DNA evidence [1-3]. It is still unclear how much of the Scythian dominance in the Eurasian Steppe was due to movements of people and how much reflected cultural diffusion and elite dominance. We present new whole-genome seque...

In the fourth millennium BCE a cultural phenomenon of monumental burial structures spread along the Atlantic façade. Megalithic burials have been targeted for aDNA analyses, but a gap remains in East Anglia where Neolithic structures were generally earthen or timber. An early Neolithic (3762 – 3648 cal. BCE) burial monument at the site of Trumpingt...

The first historically documented pandemic caused by Yersinia pestis began as the Justinianic Plague in 541 within the Roman Empire and continued as the so-called First Pandemic until 750. Although paleo-genomic studies have previously identified the causative agent as Y. pestis, little is known about the bacterium's spread, diversity, and genetic...

In this study, we compare the genetic ancestry of individuals from two as yet genetically unstudied cultural traditions in Estonia in the context of available modern and ancient datasets: 15 from the Late Bronze Age stone-cist graves (1200–400 BC) (EstBA) and 6 from the Pre-Roman Iron Age tarand cemeteries (800/500 BC–50 AD) (EstIA). We also includ...

During the medieval period, hundreds of thousands of Europeans migrated to the Near East to take part in the Crusades, and many of them settled in the newly established Christian states along the Eastern Mediterranean coast. Here, we present a genetic snapshot of these events and their aftermath by sequencing the whole genomes of 13 individuals who...

Supplementary graph 2 Ranges of Ry for assignments XX (female), XY (male), and XX** (consistent with XY but not XX). Whisker range is interquartile ranges

Supplementary graph 1 Value of ratio of reads mapping to Y vs. X + Y (Ry) for each individual. Standard error bars in red.

Supplementary table 1 Contamination data, genetic sex and biological sex estimates for the St John's hospital sample. Results are either returned as XX (female) or XY (male), (“XX” when Ry + CI [=1.96*SE] < 0.016 and “XY” when Ry‐ CI >0.075), “consistent with XX but not XY” (RY‐ CI < 0.016 and Ry + CI < 0.075), “consistent with XY but not XX” (RY‐...

The Early Iron Age nomadic Scythians have been described as a confederation of tribes of different origins, based on ancient DNA evidence. It is still unclear how much of the Scythian dominance in the Eurasian Steppe was due to movements of people and how much reflected cultural diffusion and elite dominance. We present new whole-genome sequences o...

The first historically documented pandemic caused by Yersinia pestis started as the Justinianic Plague in 541 within the Roman Empire and continued as the so-called First Pandemic until 750. Although palaeogenomic studies have previously identified the causative agent as Y. pestis , little is known about the bacterium’s spread, diversity and geneti...

Objectives: In tests on known individuals macroscopic sex estimation has between 70% and 98% accuracy. However, materials used to create and test these methods are overwhelming modern. As sexual dimorphism is dependent on multiple factors, it is unclear whether macroscopic methods have similar success on earlier materials, which differ in lifestyle...

Founder effects in modern populations The genomes of ancient humans can reveal patterns of early human migration (see the Perspective by Achilli et al. ). Iceland has a genetically distinct population, despite relatively recent settlement (∼1100 years ago). Ebenesersdóttir et al. examined the genomes of ancient Icelandic people, dating to near the...

Little is known regarding the first people to enter the Americas and their genetic legacy.Genomic analysis of the oldest human remains from the Americas showed a direct relationship between a Clovis-related ancestral population and all modern Central and South Americans as well as a deep split separating them from North Americans in Canada.We prese...

This poster explores the potential role of rs11227639, an eQTL affecting the well-studied ”gene for speed” ACTN3, as a target of positive selection in Siberian populations. It also considers its epistatic interaction with rs1815739, a common LoF variant in this gene and suggests further work to understand how rs11227639 affects muscle phenotype.

The transition from hunting and gathering to farming in Europe was brought upon by arrival of new people carrying novel material culture and genetic ancestry. The exact nature and scale of the transition—both material and genetic—varied in different parts of Europe [ 1–7 ]. Farming-based economies appear relatively late in Northeast Europe, and the...

The Canaanites inhabited the Levant region during the Bronze Age and established a culture that became influential in the Near East and beyond. However, the Canaanites, unlike most other ancient Near Easterners of this period, left few surviving textual records and thus their origin and relationship to ancient and present-day populations remain unc...

The Canaanites inhabited the Levant region during the Bronze Age and established a culture which became influential in the Near East and beyond. However, the Canaanites, unlike most other ancient Near Easterners of this period, left few surviving textual records and thus their origin and relationship to ancient and present-day populations remain un...

Farming-based economies appear relatively late in Northeast Europe and the extent to which they involve genetic ancestry change is still poorly understood. Here we present the analyses of low coverage whole genome sequence data from five hunter-gatherers and five farmers of Estonia dated to 4,500 to 6,300 years before present. We find evidence of s...