José Víctor Moreno Mayar

• National Autonomous University of Mexico

The Indo-European languages are among the most widely spoken in the world, yet their early diversification remains contentious 1–5 . It is widely accepted that the spread of this language family across Europe from the 5th millennium BP correlates with the expansion and diversification of steppe-related genetic ancestry from the onset of the Bronze...

Reconstructing the history—such as the place of birth and death—of an individual sample is a fundamental goal in ancient DNA (aDNA) studies. However, knowing the place of death can be particularly challenging when samples come from museum collections with incomplete or erroneous archives. While analyses of human DNA and isotope data can inform us a...

Rapa Nui (also known as Easter Island) is one of the most isolated inhabited places in the world. It has captured the imagination of many owing to its archaeological record, which includes iconic megalithic statues called moai¹. Two prominent contentions have arisen from the extensive study of Rapa Nui. First, the history of the Rapanui has been pr...

Encompassing regions that were amongst the first inhabited by humans following the out-of-Africa expansion, hosting populations with the highest levels of archaic hominid introgression, and including Pacific islands that are the most isolated inhabited locations on the planet, Oceania has a rich, but understudied, human genomic landscape. Here we d...

Today, Germanic languages, including German, English, Frisian, Dutch and the Nordic languages, are widely spoken in northwest Europe. However, key aspects of the assumed arrival and diversification of this linguistic group remain contentious 1—3 . By adding 712 new ancient human genomes we find an archaeologically elusive population entering Sweden...

The island of St Helena played a crucial role in the suppression of the transatlantic slave trade. Strategically located in the middle of the South Atlantic, it served as a staging post for the Royal Navy and reception point for enslaved Africans who had been "liberated" from slave ships intercepted by the British. In total, St Helena received appr...

Genome-wide data from two Indigenous South American groups reveal their dynamic population history. The Mapuche from Southern Chile and the Ashaninka from Amazonian Peru remained largely isolated over time. Yet, both groups interacted with other South American peoples sporadically.

Aridoamerica and Mesoamerica are two distinct cultural areas in northern and central Mexico, respectively, that hosted numerous pre-Hispanic civilizations between 2500 BCE and 1521 CE. The division between these regions shifted southward because of severe droughts ~1100 years ago, which allegedly drove a population replacement in central Mexico by...

Although Brazil was inhabited by more than 3,000 Indigenous populations prior to European colonization, today’s Indigenous peoples represent less than 1% of Brazil’s census population. Some of the decimated communities belonged to the so-called “Botocudos” from central-eastern Brazil. These peoples are thought to represent a case of long-standing g...

Over the past few decades there has been a growing demand for genome analysis of ancient human remains. Destructive sampling is increasingly difficult to obtain for ethical reasons, and standard methods of breaking the skull to access the petrous bone or sampling remaining teeth are often forbidden for curatorial reasons. However, most ancient huma...

A great-grandson of the legendary Lakota Sioux leader Sitting Bull (Tatanka Iyotake), Ernie LaPointe, wished to have their familial relationship confirmed via genetic analysis, in part, to help settle concerns over Sitting Bull’s final resting place. To address Ernie LaPointe’s claim of family relationship, we obtained minor amounts of genomic data...

The Cycladic, the Minoan, and the Helladic (Mycenaean) cultures define the Bronze Age (BA) of Greece. Urbanism, complex social structures, craft and agricultural specialization, and the earliest forms of writing characterize this iconic period. We sequenced six Early to Middle BA whole genomes, along with 11 mitochondrial genomes, sampled from the...

A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03328-2.

The maritime expansion of Scandinavian populations during the Viking Age (about ad 750–1050) was a far-flung transformation in world history1,2. Here we sequenced the genomes of 442 humans from archaeological sites across Europe and Greenland (to a median depth of about 1×) to understand the global influence of this expansion. We find the Viking pe...

The possibility of voyaging contact between prehistoric Polynesian and Native American populations has long intrigued researchers. Proponents have pointed to the existence of New World crops, such as the sweet potato and bottle gourd, in the Polynesian archaeological record, but nowhere else outside the pre-Columbian Americas1–6, while critics have...

From 1500 to 1900, an estimated 12 million Africans were transported to the Americas as part of the transatlantic slave trade. Following Britain's abolition of slave trade in 1807, the Royal Navy patrolled the Atlantic and intercepted slave ships that continued to operate. During this period, the island of St Helena in the South Atlantic served as...

The sequencing of ancient DNA has enabled the reconstruction of speciation, migration and admixture events for extinct taxa¹. However, the irreversible post-mortem degradation² of ancient DNA has so far limited its recovery—outside permafrost areas—to specimens that are not older than approximately 0.5 million years (Myr)³. By contrast, tandem mass...

Motivation: The presence of present-day human contaminating DNA fragments is one of the challenges defining ancient DNA (aDNA) research. This is especially relevant to the ancient human DNA field where it is difficult to distinguish endogenous molecules from human contaminants due to their genetic similarity. Recently, with the advent of high-thro...

The Viking maritime expansion from Scandinavia (Denmark, Norway, and Sweden) marks one of the swiftest and most far-flung cultural transformations in global history. During this time (c. 750 to 1050 CE), the Vikings reached most of western Eurasia, Greenland, and North America, and left a cultural legacy that persists till today. To understand the...

Motivation The presence of present-day human contaminating DNA fragments is one of the challenges defining ancient DNA (aDNA) research. This is especially relevant to the ancient human DNA field where it is difficult to distinguish endogenous molecules from human contaminants due to their genetic similarity. Recently, with the advent of high-throug...

Identifying the causes of similarities and differences in genetic disease prevalence among humans is central to understanding disease etiology. While present-day humans are not strongly differentiated, vast amounts of genomic data now make it possible to study subtle patterns of genetic variation. This allows us to trace our genomic history thousan...

Complex processes in the settling of the Americas The expansion into the Americas by the ancestors of present day Native Americans has been difficult to tease apart from analyses of present day populations. To understand how humans diverged and spread across North and South America, Moreno-Mayar et al. sequenced 15 ancient human genomes from Alaska...

with In this Article, Angela M. Taravella and Melissa A. Wilson Sayres have been added to the author list (associated with: School of Life Sciences, Center for Evolution and Medicine, The Biodesign Institute, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA). The author list and Author Information section have been corrected online.

Ancient migrations in Southeast Asia The past movements and peopling of Southeast Asia have been poorly represented in ancient DNA studies (see the Perspective by Bellwood). Lipson et al. generated sequences from people inhabiting Southeast Asia from about 1700 to 4100 years ago. Screening of more than a hundred individuals from five sites yielded...

Over the last decade, studies of ancient biomolecules—particularly ancient DNA, proteins, and lipids—have revolutionized our understanding of evolutionary history. Though initially fraught with many challenges, the field now stands on firm foundations. Researchers now successfully retrieve nucleotide and amino acid sequences, as well as lipid signa...

Ancient steppes for human equestrians The Eurasian steppes reach from the Ukraine in Europe to Mongolia and China. Over the past 5000 years, these flat grasslands were thought to be the route for the ebb and flow of migrant humans, their horses, and their languages. de Barros Damgaard et al. probed whole-genome sequences from the remains of 74 indi...

For thousands of years the Eurasian steppes have been a centre of human migrations and cultural change. Here we sequence the genomes of 137 ancient humans (about 1× average coverage), covering a period of 4,000 years, to understand the population history of the Eurasian steppes after the Bronze Age migrations. We find that the genetics of the Scyth...

Two distinct population models have been put forward to explain present-day human diversity in Southeast Asia. The first model proposes long-term continuity (Regional Continuity model) while the other suggests two waves of dispersal (Two Layer model). Here, we use whole-genome capture in combination with shotgun sequencing to generate 25 ancient hu...

Significance Ancient DNA has revolutionized the field of archaeology, but in the Caribbean and other tropical regions of the world, the work has been hampered by poor DNA preservation. We present an ancient human genome from the Caribbean and use it to shed light on the early peopling of the islands. We demonstrate that the ancestors of the so-call...

Despite broad agreement that the Americas were initially populated via Beringia, the land bridge that connected far northeast Asia with northwestern North America during the Pleistocene epoch, when and how the peopling of the Americas occurred remains unresolved1–5. Analyses of human remains from Late Pleistocene Alaska are important to resolving t...

Supplemental Data for Terminal Pleistocene Alaskan genome reveals first founding population of Native Americans

The original analyses of faunal assemblages excavated from Blydefontein Rock Shelter, Karoo in 1967 (Sampson) and 1985 (Bousman) were undertaken by Klein and Cruz-Uribe and did not identify remains of domestic stock. Reanalysis of the 1985 faunal assemblage by Scott and Plug found the remains of domestic stock. Ten specimens were morphologically id...

The transatlantic slave trade was the largest forced migration in world history. However, the origins of the enslaved Africans and their admixture dynamics remain unclear. To investigate the demographic history of African-descendant Marron populations, we generated genome-wide data (4.3 million markers) from 107 individuals from three African-desce...

The complex evolutionary history of maize (Zea mays L. ssp. mays) has been clarified with genomic-level data from modern landraces and wild teosinte grasses [1, 2], augmenting archaeological findings that suggest domestication occurred between 10,000 and 6,250 years ago in southern Mexico [3, 4]. Maize rapidly evolved under human selection, leading...

In ancient DNA (aDNA) research, evolutionary and archaeological questions are often investigated using the genomic sequences of organelles: mitochondrial and chloroplast DNA. Organellar genomes are found in multiple copies per living cell, increasing their chance of recovery from archaeological samples, and are inherited from one parent without gen...

The Blydefontein Rock Shelter is a Later Stone Age archaeological site in the eastern Karoo of South Africa. No remains of domesticated animals have been reported although a dung layer, interpreted as deriving from sheep, dates to approximately one thousand years ago. The published morphological analyses of the site’s fauna include many wild taxa,...

How and when the Americas were populated remains contentious. Using ancient and modern genome-wide data, we find that the ancestors of all present-day Native Americans, including Athabascans and Amerindians, entered the Americas as a single migration wave from Siberia no earlier than 23 thousand years ago (KYA), and after no more than 8,000-year is...

How and when the Americas were populated remains contentious. Using ancient and modern genome-wide data, we found that the ancestors of all present-day Native Americans, including Athabascans and Amerindians, entered the Americas as a single migration wave from Siberia no earlier than 23 thousand years ago (ka) and after no more than an 8000-year i...

The past decade has witnessed a revolution in ancient DNA (aDNA) research. Although the field's focus was previously limited to mitochondrial DNA and a few nuclear markers, whole genome sequences from the deep past can now be retrieved. This breakthrough is tightly connected to the massive sequence throughput of next generation sequencing platforms...

Kennewick Man, referred to as the Ancient One by Native Americans, is a male human skeleton discovered in Washington state (USA) in 1996 and initially radiocarbon dated to 8,340-9,200 calibrated years before present (BP). His population affinities have been the subject of scientific debate and legal controversy. Based on an initial study of cranial...

Understanding the peopling of the Americas remains an important and challenging question. Here, we present 14C dates, and morphological, isotopic and genomic sequence data from two human skulls from the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil, part of one of the indigenous groups known as ‘Botocudos’. We find that their genomic ancestry is Polynesian, with n...

Summary: We present bammds, a practical tool that allows visualization of samples sequenced by second-generation sequencing when compared with a reference panel of individuals (usually genotypes) using a multidimensional scaling algorithm. Our tool is aimed at determining the ancestry of unknown samples—typical of ancient DNA data—particularly when...

Significance Short and damaged DNA is ubiquitous in most environments and can survive more than half a million years. We show that naturally competent environmental bacteria can take up such degraded DNA and incorporate it into their genomes, including DNA from a 43,000-y-old woolly mammoth bone. The process occurs as part of cellular DNA replicati...

Understanding the evolution of diversity and the resulting systematics in marine systems is confounded by the lack of clear boundaries in oceanic habitats, especially for highly mobile species like marine mammals. Dolphin populations and sibling species often show differentiation between coastal and offshore habitats, similar to the pelagic/littora...

Background Influenza viruses such as swine-origin influenza A(H1N1) virus (A(H1N1)pdm09) generate genetic diversity due to the high error rate of their RNA polymerase, often resulting in mixed genotype populations (intra-host variants) within a single infection. This variation helps influenza to rapidly respond to selection pressures, such as those...

We present an Aboriginal Australian genomic sequence obtained from a 100-year-old lock of hair donated by an Aboriginal man from southern Western Australia in the early 20th century. We detect no evidence of European admixture and estimate contamination levels to be below 0.5%. We show that Aboriginal Australians are descendants of an early human d...

The development of second-generation sequencing technologies has greatly benefitted the field of ancient DNA (aDNA). Its application can be further exploited by the use of targeted capture-enrichment methods to overcome restrictions posed by low endogenous and contaminating DNA in ancient samples. We tested the performance of Agilent's SureSelect a...

Supplementary Results and Methods