Marina Silva

The Francis Crick Institute

Background The Islamic influence on the Iberian Peninsula left an enduring legacy culturally and linguistically, however the demographic impact is less well understood. This study aims to explore the dynamics of gene flow and population structure in eastern Iberia from the early to late Medieval period through ancient DNA. Results Our comprehensiv...

An archaeological watching brief was undertaken at the Jedburgh Abbey Rampart during repair and construction works to consolidate and secure the ‘rampart’ wall and its face, both of which had begun to deteriorate and fail. The watching brief followed on from earlier works to investigate the construction of the ‘rampart’, which had revealed the pres...

Several disease-causing bacteria have transitioned from tick-borne to louse-borne transmission, a process associated with increased virulence and genome reduction. However, the historical time frame and speed of such evolutionary transitions have not been documented with ancient genomes. Here, we discover four ancient cases of Borrelia recurrentis,...

The North Pontic region, which encompasses present-day Ukraine, was a crossroads of migration as it connected the vast Eurasian Steppe with Central Europe. We generated shotgun-sequenced genomic data for 91 individuals dating from around 7,000 BCE to 1,800 CE to study migration and mobility history in the region, with a particular focus on historic...

Ancient DNA has unlocked new genetic histories and shed light on archaeological and historical questions, but many known and unknown historical events have remained below detection thresholds because subtle ancestry changes are challenging to reconstruct. Methods based on sharing of haplotypes and rare variants can improve power, but are not explic...

Ancient DNA is a valuable tool for investigating genetic and evolutionary history that can also provide detailed profiles of the lives of ancient individuals. In this study, we develop a generalised computational approach to detect aneuploidies (atypical autosomal and sex chromosome karyotypes) in the ancient genetic record and distinguish such kar...

In 2017, ancient DNA analysis of the Harper Road burial from Southwark (London) found that the individual had male chromosomes. Now analysis has discovered that the individual had female chromosomes, data which match the osteological estimation of sex and the interpretation of the grave-goods.

Extinct lineages of Yersinia pestis, the causative agent of the plague, have been identified in several individuals from Eurasia between 5000 and 2500 years before present (BP). One of these, termed the ‘LNBA lineage’ (Late Neolithic and Bronze Age), has been suggested to have spread into Europe with human groups expanding from the Eurasian steppe....

Significance The Orcadian Neolithic has been intensively studied and celebrated as a major center of cultural innovation, whereas the Bronze Age is less well known and often regarded as a time of stagnation and insularity. Here, we analyze ancient genomes from the Orcadian Bronze Age in the context of the variation in Neolithic Orkney and Bronze Ag...

Extinct lineages of Yersinia pestis, the causative agent of the plague, have been identified in several individuals from Central Europe and Asia between 5,000 and 3,500 years before present (BP). One of these, the 'LNBA lineage' (Late Neolithic and Bronze Age), has been suggested to have spread into Central Europe with human groups expanding from t...

Historical records document medieval immigration from North Africa to Iberia to create Islamic al-Andalus. Here, we present a low-coverage genome of an eleventh century CE man buried in an Islamic necropolis in Segorbe, near Valencia, Spain. Uniparental lineages indicate North African ancestry, but at the autosomal level he displays a mosaic of Nor...

Two key moments shaped the extant South Asian gene pool within the last 10 thousand years (ka): the Neolithic period, with the advent of agriculture and the rise of the Harappan/Indus Valley Civilisation; and Late Bronze Age events that witnessed the abrupt fall of the Harappan Civilisation and the arrival of Indo-European speakers. This study focu...

Africa was the birth-place of Homo sapiens and has the earliest evidence for symbolic behaviour and complex technologies. The best-attested early flowering of these distinctive features was in a glacial refuge zone on the southern coast 100–70 ka, with fewer indications in eastern Africa until after 70 ka. Yet it was eastern Africa, not the south,...

We assembled genome-wide data from 271 ancient Iberians, of whom 176 are from the largely unsampled period after 2000 BCE, thereby providing a high-resolution time transect of the Iberian Peninsula.We document high genetic substructure between northwestern and southeastern hunter-gatherers before the spread of farming.We reveal sporadic contacts be...

Background: India is a patchwork of tribal and non-tribal populations that speak many different languages from various language families. Indo-European, spoken across northern and central India, and also in Pakistan and Bangladesh, has been frequently connected to the so-called "Indo-Aryan invasions" from Central Asia ~3.5 ka and the establishment...

Supplement to Silva et al 2017

Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) haplogroup L2 originated in Western Africa but is nowadays spread across the entire continent. L2 movements were previously postulated to be related to the Bantu expansion, but L2 expansions eastwards probably occurred much earlier. By reconstructing the phylogeny of L2 (44 new complete sequences) we provide insights on th...