Marcel Keller

University of Basel | UNIBAS · Integrative Prehistory and Archeological Science

This article presents the results of a palaeogenetic analysis of a canine of a horse discovered in Saale Late Glacial deposits during excavations in the opencast lignite mine Jänschwalde in 2013. A morphological study of skeletal remains was published in 2014. The Jänschwalde horse is one of the oldest equids to have been the subject of palaeogenet...

The traditional concept of „nomadic“ cultures as mobile and economically simple is nowadays increasingly displaced by more nuanced interpretations. Much of the scientific literature on diet and mobility of Eurasian pastoralist populations focuses on the Bronze Age and Early Iron Age. As a result, the relative underrepresentation in these analyses o...

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...

El concepto tradicional de que las culturas "nómadas" son, por lo general, móviles y económicamente simples está siendo desplazado por interpretaciones más matizadas. Gran parte de la literatura científica sobre la dieta y la movilidad de las poblaciones ganaderas euroasiáticas se centra en la Edad del Bronce y la Primera Edad del Hierro. La relati...

The study of human pathogens, their genomes and their evolution has been revolutionized by the introduction of ancient DNA techniques both in the lab and in silico. Today, palaeogenomic research can reconstruct microbial genomes starting from as much as a couple of reads detected during screenings. With every year, the number of organisms and genom...

The traditional notions of "nomadic" cultures as homogenously mobile and economically simple is increasingly displaced by more nuanced interpretations. A large part of the scientific literature on diet and mobility among Eurasian pastoralists is focused on Bronze Age and Iron Age. The relative underrepresentation of more recent contexts in these an...

Objectives: Contemporary archeological theory emphasizes the economic and social complexity of Eurasian steppe populations. As a result, old notions of “nomadic” cultures as homogenously mobile and economically simple are now displaced by more nuanced interpretations. Large part of the literature on diet and mobility among Eurasian pastoralists is...

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...

Domestication of horses fundamentally transformed long-range mobility and warfare¹. However, modern domesticated breeds do not descend from the earliest domestic horse lineage associated with archaeological evidence of bridling, milking and corralling2–4 at Botai, Central Asia around 3500 bc³. Other longstanding candidate regions for horse domestic...

Hepatitis B virus (HBV) has been infecting humans for millennia and remains a global health problem, but its past diversity and dispersal routes are largely unknown. We generated HBV genomic data from 137 Eurasians and Native Americans dated between ~10,500 and ~400 years ago. We date the most recent common ancestor of all HBV lineages to between ~...

Of all known epidemics in Antiquity, the Justinianic Plague became the focus of attention in recent years – not least because it is the first for which the causative agent, the bacterium Yersinia pestis, could be unambiguously identified by palaeogeneticists. The reconstruction of ancient Y. pestis genomes is able to uncover the geographical and te...

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...

DNA hybridization‐capture techniques allow researchers to focus their sequencing efforts on pre‐selected genomic regions. This feature is especially useful when analyzing ancient DNA (aDNA) extracts, which are often dominated by exogenous environmental sources. Here, we assessed, for the first time, the performance of hyRAD as an inexpensive and de...

The Middle and Late Bronze Age, a period roughly spanning the 2nd millennium BC (ca. 2000–1200 BC) in the Near East, is frequently referred to as the first ‘international age’, characterized by intense and far-reaching contacts between different entities from the eastern Mediterranean to the Near East and beyond. In a large-scale tandem study of st...

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...

Warfare is assumed to be one of the defining cultural characteristic of steppe nomads in Eastern Eurasia, with high levels of violence used by Classical and Chinese historiographers as markers of cultural "otherness" when describing these societies. Especially for the first centuries AD, these interpretive hampers more nuanced reconstructions of th...

The Middle and Late Bronze Age Near East, a period roughly spanning the second millennium BC (ca. 2000-1200 BC), is frequently referred to as the first ‘international age’, characterized by intense and far-reaching contacts between different entities from the eastern Mediterranean to the Near East and beyond. In a large-scale tandem study of stable...

Objectives Warfare is assumed to be one of the defining cultural characteristics of steppe nomads in Eastern Eurasia. For the first‐centuries CE, a period of political turmoil in Northern China and Southern Siberia, relatively few data are, however, available about the degree and variability of violence in these communities. Here, we provide new da...

Along with the publication of 137 ancient human genomes retrieved from archaeological remains of the Eurasian steppe, Damgaard et al., 2018 identified two individuals infected with Yersinia pestis, yielding one genome with 0.24x average coverage (DA147, 2nd-3rd c. AD) and another with 8.7x (DA101, 6th-9th c. AD). A phylogenetic analysis performed o...

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...

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...

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...

The second plague pandemic (14th - 18th century AD), caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis , is infamous for its initial wave, the Black Death (1346-1353 AD), and its repeated scourges in Europe and the vicinity until the Early Modern Era. Here, we report 32 ancient Y. pestis genomes spanning the 14th to 17th century AD through the analysis of hu...

The study of multiple burials within communal medieval and early modern cemeteries has long been neglected. Especially the use of this burial type as a way to deal with simultaneous deaths during epidemics or war has become an important topic of research. An excavation in Stans in central Switzerland recently revealed parts of a cemetery associated...

Bayesian phylogenetic analysis allows for the estimation of the time to the most recent common ancestor (tMRCA) of sequences sampled at different times, as long as they prove to be ‘measurably evolving’, which means that the time between sampling dates was long enough to allow the appearance of a measurable amount of genetic changes. This ‘temporal...

Zusammenfassung Vergangene Pestepidemien wurden vor allem in schriftlichen Quellen überliefert; insbesondere die Justinianische Pest des frühen Mittelalters und der Schwarze Tod des späten Mittelalters wurden dort in lebendigen Farben beschrieben. Vor der Einführung der aDNA-Analyse war es aber oftmals schwierig, archäologische nachgewiesene Bestat...

Im Michelsberger Erdwerk Bruchsal ‚Aue‘ wurden zwischen 1987 und 1992 vier Einzelbestattungen und zwei Mehrfachbestattungen mit drei bzw. neun Individuen freigelegt. In diesem Beitrag werden die Ergebnisse morphologischer, paläogenetischer und archäogenetischer Analysen an der Neunfachbestattung sowie den Einzelbestattungen und Skelettresten, die a...

With this paper, we present burials from two early medieval cemeteries, Aschheim-Bajuwarenring and Altenerding/Klettham where the causative agent of plague, Yersinia pestis, could be detected palaeogenetically. The burials from the early medieval cemeteries of Aschheim-Bajuwarenring and Altenerding/Klettham show that plague victims have been dresse...

The Justinianic Plague, which started in the 6th century and lasted to the mid-8th century, is thought to be the first of three historically documented plague pandemics causing massive casualties. Historical accounts and molecular data suggest the bacterium Yersinia pestis as its etiological agent. Here we present a new high-coverage (17.9 fold) Y....

Straight next to a segment of the outer ditch of the Late Neolithic Michelsberg Culture earthwork of Bruchsal-Aue in SW-Germany (ca. 4250-3650 calBC), a multiple burial of eight individuals (two male adults and six children) plus a subsequent child burial was excavated. In this study, we applied a multidisciplinary approach to elucidate interperson...