High-resolution genomic history of early medieval Europe

Leo Speidel (), Marina Silva, Thomas Booth, Ben Raffield, Kyriaki Anastasiadou, Christopher Barrington, Anders Götherström, Peter Heather and Pontus Skoglund ()
Additional contact information
Leo Speidel: Francis Crick Institute
Marina Silva: Francis Crick Institute
Thomas Booth: Francis Crick Institute
Ben Raffield: Uppsala University
Kyriaki Anastasiadou: Francis Crick Institute
Christopher Barrington: Francis Crick Institute
Anders Götherström: Stockholm University
Peter Heather: King’s College London
Pontus Skoglund: Francis Crick Institute

Nature, 2025, vol. 637, issue 8044, 118-126

Abstract: Abstract Many known and unknown historical events have remained below detection thresholds of genetic studies because subtle ancestry changes are challenging to reconstruct. Methods based on shared haplotypes1,2 and rare variants3,4 improve power but are not explicitly temporal and have not been possible to adopt in unbiased ancestry models. Here we develop Twigstats, an approach of time-stratified ancestry analysis that can improve statistical power by an order of magnitude by focusing on coalescences in recent times, while remaining unbiased by population-specific drift. We apply this framework to 1,556 available ancient whole genomes from Europe in the historical period. We are able to model individual-level ancestry using preceding genomes to provide high resolution. During the first half of the first millennium ce, we observe at least two different streams of Scandinavian-related ancestry expanding across western, central and eastern Europe. By contrast, during the second half of the first millennium ce, ancestry patterns suggest the regional disappearance or substantial admixture of these ancestries. In Scandinavia, we document a major ancestry influx by approximately 800 ce, when a large proportion of Viking Age individuals carried ancestry from groups related to central Europe not seen in individuals from the early Iron Age. Our findings suggest that time-stratified ancestry analysis can provide a higher-resolution lens for genetic history.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08275-2 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:637:y:2025:i:8044:d:10.1038_s41586-024-08275-2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-08275-2

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().