Vincent Zvenigorosky

• PhD
• PostDoc Position at University of Strasbourg

Seventeen years of archaeological and anthropological expeditions in North-Eastern Siberia (in the Sakha Republic, Yakutia) have permitted the genetic analysis of 150 ancient (15th-19th century) and 510 modern individuals. Almost all males were successfully analysed (Y-STR) and this allowed us to identify paternal lineages and their geographical ex...

Scythians are known from written sources as horse-riding nomadic peoples who dominated the Eurasian steppe throughout the Iron Age. However, their origins and the exact nature of their social organization remain debated. Three hypotheses prevail regarding their origins that can be summarized as a “western origin”, an “eastern origin” and a “multi-r...

This article describes current matrimonial strategies and residence patterns in two communities in the Sakha Republic. In Tolon, a rural settlement in central Sakha, community exogamy is predominant and patrilocality is detectable in postnuptial residence patterns. In the sub-Arctic town of Khonuu no gendered residence patterns are observed. Khonuu...

The likelihood ratio (LR) method is commonly used to determine kinship in civil, criminal, or forensic cases. For the past 15 years, our research group has also applied LR to ancient STR data and obtained kinship results for collections of graves or necropolises. Although we were able to reconstruct large genealogies, some pairs of individuals show...

Androgen receptor (AR), a member of the nuclear receptor superfamily controls prostate epithelial cell plasticity by repressing a panel of genes involved in epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT), including the human CDH2 gene encoding N-cadherin. At the opposite, pathological AR variants such as AR-V7 associated with prostate tumor progression up...

The recent developments in genomic sequencing have permitted the publication of many new complete genome sequences of Treponema pallidum pallidum, the bacterium responsible for syphilis, which has led to a new understanding of its phylogeny and diversity. However, few archived samples are available, because of the degradability of the bacterium and...

This review presents the results of paleogenetic studies on the ancient population of Yakutia in the Middle Ages. The diversity of haplogroups and STR haplotypes of the Y chromosome of 74 men from Yakut burials from the 15th–19th centuries was considered and compared with the data on modern ethnogeographical groups of the Yakuts. A comparison of ge...

Simple Summary We want to study (i) how tobacco and tea spread in a population with no previous contact with these substances and (ii) what factors influenced their diffusions. We measured the rates of theobromine, theophylline, caffeine, nicotine, and cotinine in hair samples from 47 frozen bodies from eastern Siberia which date from the contact w...

Simple Summary We have studied the dental epidemiology of 96 frozen bodies from north-eastern Siberia (Yakuts) before and after the contact—with an accurate chronology–between Autochthonous and European populations. The peculiarities of the Yakut population are the rarity of cavities and the relative frequency of dental pathologies leading to death...

In an effort to characterize the people who composed the groups known as the Xiongnu, nuclear and whole mitochondrial DNA data were generated from the skeletal remains of 52 individuals excavated from the Tamir Ulaan Khoshuu (TUK) cemetery in Central Mongolia. This burial site, attributed to the Xiongnu period, was used from the first century BC to...

Objective: To investigate how tobacco and tea spread among virgin populations and how the first addictions have subsequently influenced the behavior of present-day populations. Design : Retrospective observational study using data from frozen burials and levels of theobromine, theophylline, caffeine, nicotine, and cotinine measured in hair samples...

The likelihood ratio (LR) method is commonly used to determine kinship in civil, criminal, or forensic cases. For the past 15 years, our research group has also applied LR to ancient STR data and obtained kinship results for collections of graves or necropolises. Although we were able to reconstruct large genealogies, some pairs of individuals show...

In the absence of any other conclusive forensic evidence, DNA profiling is the method of choice for body identification. This study focuses on the case of a carbonized corpse whose complete autosomal short tandem repeat (STR) profile could not lead to direct identification by the investigators. To assist in the progress of investigation, we endeavo...

For fifteen years, part of the work of our research team has been focused on the study of parental links between individuals living hundreds or thousands of years ago, whose remains have been found in single graves or large funerary complexes. These studies have been undertaken using methods developed by forensic genetics to identify individuals, m...