Human colonization of the New World is generally believed to have entailed migrations from Siberia across the Bering isthmus. However, the limited archaeological record of these migrations means that details of the timing, cause and rate remain cryptic. Here, we have used a combination of ancient DNA, 14C dating, hydrogen and oxygen isotopes, and collagen sequencing to explore the colonization ...

This paper examines the role of adverse climatic conditions on political protest and institutional development. In particular, it assesses the role of adverse climate on the eve of the French Revolution on peasant uprisings in 1789. Historians have argued that crop failure in 1788 and cold weather in the winter of 1788/89 led to peasant revolts in various parts of France. To test this hypothesi...

Ancient DNA (aDNA) has the ability to inform the evolutionary history of both extant and extinct taxa; however, the use of aDNA in the study of avian evolution is lacking in comparison to other vertebrates, despite birds being one of the most species-rich vertebrate classes. Here, we review the field of "avian ancient DNA" by summarising the past three decades of literature on this topic. Most ...

This study explores the elationship between the genus Canis and hunteregatherers through a case study of prehistoric Native Americans in the San Francisco Bay-Sacramento Delta area. A distinctive aspect of the region’s prehistoric record is the interment of canids, variously classified as coyotes, dogs, and wolves. Since these species are difficult to distinguish based solely on morphology, anc...

This third volume in our ISCANEE (International Scholars Conference on Ancient Near Eastern Economics) / ISLET (Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends) series places the phenomenon of interest-bearing debt in its historical context by tracing its dynamics from Sumer down through the neo-Babylonian epoch, and relating what is known about early Egypt, Nuzi and other neighboring regi...

While terrestrial megafaunal extinctions have been well characterized worldwide, our understanding of declines in marine megafauna remains limited. Here, we use ancient DNA analyses of prehistoric (<1450-1650 AD) sea lion specimens from New Zealand's isolated Chatham Islands to assess the demographic impacts of human settlement. These data suggest there was a large population of sea lions, uniq...

Rapa Nui is one of the most remote islands in the world. As a young island, its biota is a consequence of both natural dispersals over the last ~1 million years and recent human introductions. It therefore provides an opportunity to study a unique community assemblage. Here, we extract DNA from museum-preserved and newly field-collected spiders from the genus Tetragnatha to explore their histor...

BACKGROUND Despite the successful retrieval of genomes from past remains, the prospects for human palaeogenomics remain unclear because of the difficulty of distinguishing contaminant from endogenous DNA sequences. Previous sequence data generated on high-throughput sequencing platforms indicate that fragmentation of ancient DNA sequences is a characteristic trait primarily arising due to depur...

Methodologies are one of the most significant key factors to the success of project development. Since there is no single methodology that can be uniquely pointed as “the best", the discipline of situational method engineering (SME) promotes the idea of creating method components, rather than complete methodologies, and tailoring them to specific situations at hand. In this paper we present a h...

PCR analyses of ancient and degraded DNA suffer from their extreme sensitivity to contamination by modern DNA originating, in particular, from carryover contamination with previously amplified or cloned material. Any strategy for limiting carryover contamination would also have to be compatible with the particular requirements of ancient DNA analyses. These include the need (i) to amplify short...