News
April 14, 2023
Genetic population structure of the Xiongnu Empire at imperial and local scales.
Science Advances 9, eadf3904.
The Xiongnu established the first nomadic imperial power, controlling the Eastern Eurasian steppe
from ca. 200 BCE to 100 CE. Recent archaeogenetic studies identified extreme levels of genetic
diversityacross the empire, corroborating historical records of the Xiongnu Empire being multiethnic.
However, it has remained unknown how this diversity was structured at the local community level or
by sociopolitical status. To address this, we investigated aristocratic and local elite cemeteries at the
western frontier of the empire. Analyzing genome-wide data from 18 individuals, we show that
genetic diversity within thesecommunities was comparable to the empire as a whole, and that high
diversity was also observed within extended families. Genetic heterogeneity was highest among the
lowest-status individuals, implying diverse origins, while higher-status individuals harbored less genetic diversity, suggesting that elite status and power was concentrated within specific subsets of the broader Xiongnu population.
Related Press:
CNN.com: Ancient DNA reveals secrets of empire that pushed China to build its Great Wall
Science.org: Politically savvy princesses wove together a vast ancient empire
Nature.com: Burials reveal women’s high status in ancient Mongolia
March 29, 2023
Entwined African and Asian genetic roots of medieval peoples of the Swahili coast.
Nature 615, 866-73.
The urban peoples of the Swahili coast traded across eastern Africa and the Indian Ocean and were
among the first practitioners of Islam among sub-Saharan people. The extent to which these early
interactionsbetween Africans and non-Africans were accompanied by genetic exchange remains
unknown. Here we report ancient DNA data for 80 individuals from 6 medieval and early modern
(AD 1250–1800) coastal towns and an inland town after AD 1650. More than half of the DNA of
many of the individuals from coastal towns originates from primarily female ancestors from Africa, with a large proportion—and occasionally more than half—of the DNA coming from Asian ancestors. The Asian ancestry includes
components associated with Persia and India, with 80–90% of the Asian DNA originating from
Persian men.Peoples of African and Asian origins began to mix by about AD 1000, coinciding with the large-scale adoption of Islam. Before about AD 1500, the Southwest Asian ancestry was mainly Persian-related, consistent with the narrative of the Kilwa Chronicle, the oldest history told by people of the Swahili coast. After this time, the sources of DNA became increasingly Arabian, consistent with evidence of growing interactions with southern Arabia. Subsequent interactions with Asian and African people further changed the ancestry of present-day people of the Swahili coast in relation to the medieval individuals whose DNA we sequenced.
Related Press:
The New York TImes.com: DNA Confirms Oral History of Swahili People
Science.org: DNA shows ‘Persian Princes’ helped found medieval African trading culture
February 1, 2023
MHAAM Scientists discover ancient Egyptian secrets to embalming
A February 2023 Nature article explains how biomolecular analyses enabled new insights into the
art of mummification and the mysteries and diverse sources of the substances used. Although the
existence of mummies is well known, the details of how ancient embalmers practised their art have
remained largely obscure. In a recent issue of Nature (February 9, 2023), MHAAM archaeoscien-
tists and their colleagues draw on finds from an embalming workshop in Saqqara that dates to
around 664–525 BC to reveal many of the details of the process. The researchers analyzed 31
ceramic vessels found in the workshop. By combining biochemical analyses of the residues in the
vessels with the inscriptions, such as “to be put on his head”, featured on many of them, they were
able to establish which chemicals were used and how they were mixed, named and applied. The researchers also note that some of the embalming substances were imported from the Levant or even from south or southeast Asia, indicating that mummification might have helped to promote long-distance trade.
November 3, 2022
PBS Secrets of the Dead "The End of the Romans"
Episode 6, Season 8 explores how archaeoscience is changing our
understanding of the fall of Rome, including the work of the MHAAM,
SoHP, and the Historical Ice Core Project.
Streaming here until November 23rd!
October 3, 2022
Svante Pääbo, Director of MPI-EVA, awarded 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology
Harvard’s SoHP and MHAAM take deep satisfaction in the Nobel Prize’s Committee’s
decision to award the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Svante
Pääbo,pioneer in the study of ancient DNA to reconstruct the human past. Svante is
directorof the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, whose
Department of Archaeogenetics, led by Johannes Krause, is our European partner in the
MaxPlanck-Harvard Research Center for the Archaeoscience of the Ancient Mediterran-
ean. Johannes, SoHP’s David Reich and Nick Patterson have all been major collabora-
tors,contributors, and co-authors in the discoveries that, as the Nobel Committee
emphasizes, help us understand what makes today’s homo sapiens --us-- unique. Svante’s seminal breakthroughs are leading and guiding SoHP and MHAAM in its ongoing investigations here at Harvard and at our sister institution in Leipzig.
June 24, 2022
(Bio)archaeological approaches to disease and death
in early medieval France
A shrinking written record marks past pandemics. But the victims remain,
and from their strange burials and ancient DNA, the Science of the
Human Past has begun to reconstruct what happened, in France and
across western Eurasia, during the first pandemic of bubonic plague in
the Roman Empire and its neighbors from 541 to 750 AD.
June 2022 marked the launch of a pioneering international investigation
of anomalous burials in France that take us back to that first pandemic.
November 1, 2019
From Homer To History with the Max Planck - Harvard Research Center For the Archaeoscience of the Ancient Mediterranean:
Recent Results from Bronze Age Investigations
German and U.S. team members from the Max Planck-Harvard Research Center for the Archaeoscience of the Ancient Mediterranean (MHAAM) presented some of their most remarkable discoveries from archaeoscience and ancient genetics in a day-long symposium at Harvard University. For more, please see the photos and videos linked here.
September 18-21, 2018
International Symposium on Biomolecular Archaeology (ISBA) highlights the work of MHAAM
The growing prominence of the work of Harvard’s Initiative for the Science of the Human Past (SoHP) and MHAAM was hard to miss at the eighth biennial world gathering of biomolecular archaeologists in Jena, Germany, September 18-21, 2018. The International Symposium on Biomolecular Archaeology (ISBA) was hosted by Johannes Krause and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (MPISHH), SoHP’s collaborative partner in the creation of MHAAM.
The previous ISBA meeting, held at Oxford in 2016, attracted about 200 participants. The explosive growth of the new discipline of archaeoscience was manifest this year in Jena: with more than 400 participants, attendance outstripped all predictions for a conference meeting in a lovely but somewhat out-of-the way corner of eastern Germany.
Harvard’s SoHP and MHAAM investigators and their projects were exceptionally well represented. After an opening lecture by Svante Pääbö, Wednesday’s papers included David Reich on the genomic formation of south and central Asia; Alissa Mittnik used archaeogenetics to discover household structure and marital patterns among Bronze Age farmsteads in Bavaria, while Eadaoin Harney presented on the mysterious skeletons of Roopkund and Iñigo Olalde sketched the genetic history of the Iberian peninsula over the last 8000 years from aDNA. On Friday Noreen Tuross reevaluated Neanderthal subsistence, current MHAAM post-doc Saskia E. Ryan explored changes in ancient diets from birth to toddling through novel uses of light stable isotopes in tooth dentin, and Nathan Nakatsuka estimated ancient nuclear DNA contamination from linkage disequilibrium patterns.
Harvard-authored posters kept up the pace: the two current holders of MHAAM graduate fellowships, second-year PhD candidates Aurora Allshouse (Archaeology/Anthropology) and Megan Michel (Human Evolutionary Biology), respectively, used isotopes to track movement around a busy Byzantine port city, and highlighted the aDNA search for markers of malaria among ancient Sardinians. Prof. Tuross presented recent questions on the microbiome and isotopic fractionation, Dr. Linda M. Reynard took a new look at fundamental methodological questions arising from light stable isotopes in archaeological contexts, and Alexander Kim examined Yeniseian hypotheses in light of genome-wide ancient DNA from historical Siberia.
Finally, two scientists working at MPISHH on the historical plague pandemics that are central to MHAAM’s transatlantic research program presented critical insights featuring new evidence from mass graves, three of which were identified by the Harvard MHAAM pandemic team. In his poster “Ancient Yersinia pestis genomes from Britain, France, Germany and Spain reveal extensive strain diversity during the First Plague Pandemic (541-750 CE),” Marcel Keller presented the first robust molecular proof that the Justinianic Pandemic reached Britain, France and Anglo-Saxon England, and abundant new evidence from early medieval Bavaria. Gunnar U. Neumann underlined plague persistence in Europe during the Second Pandemic thanks to a 16th century Yersinia pestis genome from particularly well-preserved individuals from Logroño, Spain. McCormick co-authored both papers. Alumni of the SoHP network also featured prominently in the meeting, including former Harvard post-docs Pontus Skoglund (Francis Crick Institute, London) who gave a paper on modelling early human lineages in Africa, and Michael Campana (Smithsonian Institution, Center for Conservation Genomics) who displayed evidence for Ancient DNA phylogenomics using DNA capture and maximal information (super)trees.
August 29, 2018
Ancient Peoples-Modern Names: Reconciling material cultures in archaeology with the new archaeogenetic data
A new study in Nature – Scientific Reports addresses the fundamental issue of identifying and naming genetic clusters in the new field of archaeogenetics. The first joint publication of the Max Planck – Harvard Research Center for the Archaeoscience of the Ancient Mediterranean lays the groundwork for resolving misunderstandings in the classification of ever growing libraries of ancient genetic data.
Ancient DNA analysis is a powerful new tool for investigating the human past that is transforming the traditional disciplines like archaeology and history. This new study tackles one of the fundamental obstacles in the collaboration between archaeogeneticists and archaeologists: the development of a common language for archaeological phenomena.
Recent methodological advances in the field of ancient DNA analysis have exponentially increased the number of ancient genomes published. This data can be analyzed to identify statistical groupings of individuals who share more genetic variants with each other. To name these “genetic clusters,” geneticists have frequently borrowed names from archaeological groupings, without considering the historically problematic nature of the concept of cultures and identities in archaeology. This has led to the misinterpretation of the genetic results in subsequent papers and by the public, or even a rejection of ancient DNA studies as a whole in parts of the archaeological community.
The nature of names is that they have or rather convey meanings. What we call a thing inevitably influences what we think it is. Naming is thus a double-edged sword that can to the same extent prevent and stir misunderstandings.
To address these issues the paper focuses on two aspects: 1. It explains the concept of “genetic clusters” in contrast to “archaeological cultures.” 2. It discusses naming conventions used in recent genetic publications and introduces two future possibilities for the nomenclature of genetic clusters: a system based exclusively on the combination of geographical terms and relative dates (e.g. Levant Middle Bronze Age), and a mixed nomenclature that additionally uses names of archaeological cultures (e.g. Yamnaya) and subsistence practices (like hunter-gatherer). The authors of the paper lay the groundwork for debate establishing a wider theoretical framework that allows more careful integration of genetic research into ancient studies.
April 11, 2018
“Death by Contact: Ancient Pathogen Genomes from Epidemics in Early Mexico," MHAAM Lecture by Johannes Krause (Director, Department of Archaeogenetics, MPISSH Jena, Univ. Tübingen), with comments by Edward T. Ryan, Director of Global Infectious Disease, Massachusetts General Hospital, Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases, Harvard School of Public Health, and Principal Investigator, Harvard collaboration with the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research in Dhaka, Bangladesh; and Noreen Tuross, Landon T. Clay Professor of Scientific Archaeology, Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University.
Genome-wide data from ancient microbes may help to understand mechanisms of pathogen evolution and adaptation for today’s emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases. Ancient pathogen genomes provide, furthermore, the possibility to identify causative agents of past pandemics and therefore elucidate mortality crisis such as those that marked the early contact period in the New World. In order to identify the presence of pathogens in past populations our group used a novel high-throughput DNA sequence alignment and taxonomic assignment tool MALT (MEGAN ALignment
Tool) and were able to identify traces of Salmonella enterica DNA in individuals buried in an early contact era epidemic cemetery at Teposcolula-Yucundaa, Oaxaca in Southern Mexico. This cemetery is linked to the 1545–1550 CE epidemic that affected large parts of Mexico, the pathogenic cause of which has been debated for more than a century. After application of a specifically designed targeted DNA enrichment procedure we generated genome-wide data from ten individuals for Salmonella enterica subsp. entericaserovar Paratyphi C, a bacterial cause of enteric fever. We propose S. Paratyphi C as a strong candidate for the epidemic population decline during the 1545 outbreak at Teposcolula-Yucundaa and provide evidence that it was likely introduced by Europeans.
April 11, 2017
"Vectors, climate, economic conditions of epidemiology of historical plagues," (MHAAM Workshop, April 11, 2018).
The Justinianic (541-ca. 750) and Black Death Pandemics (1347-1722) are among the largest-scale and persistently controverted disease events in human history. They have been viewed as causing enormous demographic, economic, and cultural changes resulting in the end of medieval civilization and the beginnings of modernity or, in the case of the Justinianic Pandemic, the destruction of the Roman economy and the civilization and polity built upon it. To verify and correctly assess these massive events, it is essential to reconstruct them at the highest level of detail possible, including their biology. Until very recently, multiple theories argued that the pathogen was not Yersinia pestis.
Palaeogenetic work has confirmed historical evidence that Y.p. was in fact the main pathogen. Advancing technology is allowing the reconstruction of the complete genomes of these ancient bacteria, offering the possibility to track with precision the evolution of this lethal pathogen between and within pandemics going back at least to the Roman Empire. Controversial theories and hypotheses continue to be formulated re the vectors of bubonic plague (rats, not rats; other micromammals; rat fleas, human fleas, human lice), often in seeming disregard of the medical consensus (e.g., difficulty of inter-human transmission except for pneumonic plague), the zoological and entomological knowledge of the vectors and their behavior patterns, including under different climate scenarios, and how these might affect the epidemiology of Y.p. in ancient and medieval civilization. The workshop brought together specialists from Jena, Harvard, NIH, CDC and the University of York (UK) to discuss these questions, as well as ongoing archaeogenetic work in Jena and historical work at Harvard.
October 10, 2017
The new Max Planck-Harvard Research Center for the Archaeoscience of the Ancient Mediterranean was inaugurated at Harvard University on October 10, and featured a keynote lecture by Dr. Johannes Krause on his latest, unpublished research, as well as by Dr. Susan Alcock, Dr. David Reich and Dr. Iosif Lazaridis on new evidence for ancient migrations.
The event included the signing of the agreement between the Max Planck Society and SoHP.
August 23-26, 2017
Professor Michael McCormick, SoHP Postoctoral Fellow Alexander More, and three Harvard-SoHP graduate students, Henry Gruber, Megan Michel and Jake Ransohoff, from the departments of History and of Human Evolutionary Biology traveled to Jena in July 2017, to meet with colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. During three active and exciting days, visitors from Harvard attended a lecture on new methods for analyzing and representing population genetics data; discussed new advances in genome data and prehistoric human migration with Dr. Stephan Schiffels and Dr. Wolfgang Haak; and joined a round-table discussion with doctoral students at Max Planck’s Historic Plague Project, led by Dr. Kirsten Bos and Dr. Alexander Herbig.
The Harvard team, in turn, shared their recent work on the philology of ancient plague sources, and discussed their findings in light of the new scientific vistas opened by the Historical Plague Project. The visit included a tour of exhibits and the conservation lab at the famous State Museum of Prehistory in Halle, and culminated with a trip to the Max Planck Institute’s labs in Jena. Group meals in Jena’s old town closed each busy day, during which senior scholars and graduate students alike renewed old collaborations and inaugurated new ones.
