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Simplified qpAdm plot using modern populations as sources Only samples with p > 0.01 and coverage >0.53 are shown. See also Figure S3A and Table S6.
Source publication
We investigate a 2,000-year genetic transect through Scandinavia spanning the Iron Age to the present, based on 48 new and 249 published ancient genomes and genotypes from 16,638 modern individuals. We find regional variation in the timing and magnitude of gene flow from three sources: the eastern Baltic, the British-Irish Isles, and southern Europ...
Context in source publication
Context 1
... almost identical pattern is seen for East Asian and Native American ancestry, used here as proxies of Siberian-Uralic ancestry ( Figure 6B). These were estimated with a supervised run of ADMIXTURE using five training populations from the 1000 genomes dataset (Utah residents with Northern and Western European ancestry [CEU], Indian Telugu in the UK [ITU], Han Chinese in Beijing, China [CHB], Peruvian in Lima Peru [PEL], and Yoruba in Ibadan, Nigeria [YRI]) ( Figure S4). To further explore the north-south differences, we used the first 10 PCs in a PCA based on the 16,638 modern Scandinavians ( Figure S3C) to calculate the average Euclidean PC distance between the 1,606 modern Danes and each of the 7,385 modern Norwegian and 7,647 modern Swedish individuals. ...
Similar publications
During archaeological excavations at Vester Egesborg, a landing site from the Late Germanic Iron Age and Viking Age was found. The find material at the site was large and varied, providing proof of contacts with other places in the southern Baltic Sea area. This includes a significant number of sherds looking like Early Slavic Sukow pottery, which...
Citations
... DNA molecules of Greek samples (n = 51) were extracted in the aDNA facilities at the Centre for Palaeogenetics (CPG), Stockholm University (Sweden). DNA extraction and library preparation were done as in (Rodríguez-Varela et al., 2023). Purified libraries were sequenced on NovaSeq 6000 at the SciLife Sequencing Centre in Stockholm. ...
Rapid and minimally destructive methods for estimating the endogenous organic content of subfossil bone save time, lab consumables, and valuable ancient materials. Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy is an established method to estimate bone protein content, and portable spectroscopes enable field applications. We review the ability of benchtop and portable FTIR indices to predict %N and %collagen from 137 bone specimens drawn from eight taxa. We also explore associations of these indices with the endogenous DNA content estimated for 105 specimens. Bulk bone elemental abundance and crystallinity index data reflect diagenetic alteration of these specimens, which come from a variety of depositional environments in four countries (Madagascar, Greece, Monaco, and Germany). Infrared (IR) indices from benchtop and portable units perform similarly well in predicting observed sample N content and collagen yields. Samples that include little collagen (0–5 wt%) tend to have similar IR index values, and we present a Bayesian approach for the prediction of collagen yields. Bone type best explains variation in target species DNA content (endogenous DNA being particularly abundant in petrosals), but low IR index values were consistently associated with minimal DNA content. We conclude that, although portable FTIR fails to distinguish collagen preservation among poorly preserved samples, a simple approach with minimal sample preparation can effectively screen bone from a variety of taxa, elements, and environments for the extraction of organics.
... Studies using Y-chromosome markers 6,7 found little evidence of an enrichment of Norse/Scandinavian haplogroups in Irish males with putatively Norse surnames while others, using genotypes from modern European populations to capture ancestry proportions population 2,3,8 , found conflicting evidence of Norwegian ancestry in the Irish population. Recently, ancient genomes from various timepoints have been used to illustrate that while there was indeed Norwegian Viking ancestry in Ireland, there was also significant gene flow from Ireland and the British Isles 9 , into Scandinavia during the Viking age 10 . However, the genetic footprints of the demographic history within the island of Ireland is relatively under-studied -there is a gap in our understanding of how the effective population size and genetic structure within regions of Ireland has changed over time. ...
Background
While subtle yet discrete clusters of genetic identity across Ireland and Britain have been identified, their demographic history is unclear.
Methods
Using genotype data from 6,574 individuals with associated regional Irish or British ancestry, we identified Irish-like and British-like genetic communities using network community detection. We segregated Identity-by-Descent (IBD) and Runs-of-Homozygosity (ROH) segments by length and approximated their corresponding time periods. Through this, we inferred the regional Irish and British demographic histories in these time periods by (1) estimating genetic relatedness between communities, (2) estimating changes in effective population sizes, (3) inferring recent migration rates across Ireland and Britain, and (4) estimating changing affinities to regional European populations. For a subset of the Irish communities, we determined the enrichment/depletion of surnames within the genetic communities.
Results
Through patterns of IBD-sharing and ROH, we find evidence of recent population bottlenecks in the Orcadian, Manx and Welsh communities. While the structure in Ireland is subtler, the communities share relatively more IBD segments that are shorter in length, and the genetic differences between the Irish communities are more subtle on average, when compared to the British communities. Regional effective population size trajectories indicate a similar demographic history throughout the island of Ireland. Further, we observe a stable migration corridor between north-east Ireland and south-west Scotland while there is a recent migration barrier between South-Eastern Ireland and Western Ireland. We observed an enrichment of Anglo-Norman and English surnames in the Wexford community while within the West Ulster-Argyll community, we saw an enrichment of Gallowglass and Scottish surnames.
Conclusions
Using well-annotated Irish and British reference genotypes, we observed temporal changes in genetic affinities within and between genetic communities in Ireland and Britain. In addition, using effective population size estimates and levels of haplotype-sharing, we detected varying degrees of genetic isolation in some Irish and British genetic communities across time. Using these new insights into the regional demographic history of Ireland and Britain across different time periods, we hope to understand the driving forces of rare allele frequencies and disease risk association within these populations.
... The second form of (known) permanent body modification in the Scandinavian Viking Age, artificial skull modification, is a rather newly discovered phenomenon that requires intensive research. Although recent aDNA studies suggest that at least one of the three known women with a modified skull was of Gotlandic origin (Rodríguez-Varela et al. 2023), skull modification does not seem to be an autochthonous custom of the Viking Age culture. As accounted for below, it is more likely that this custom originated in (south-)eastern Europe, and came to the North only sporadically, and through individual mobility. ...
... The existence of a Christian community can be assumed, at least for the cemetery of Havor, as the discovery of a cross pendant in the grave of a male, next to that of the woman with the modified skull, suggests (Toplak 2023c:176-177, 204-205). As indicated by aDNA analyses on the two individuals from Havor and Kvie, the female from Havor was of Gotlandic origin, while the female from Kvie came from the eastern Baltic area, possibly Lithuania (Rodríguez-Varela et al. 2023). ...
In recent years, research has provided evidence for permanent body modification in the Viking Age. Based on the current state of research, we identified around 130 male-gendered individuals from Scandinavia and beyond with dental alterations in form of horizontal furrows, most of them stemming from the Baltic isle of Gotland. We suggest that this custom was used as a sign of identification for a closed group of merchants. In contrast, artificial cranial modifications in the Viking Are so far are only known from three female individuals from Gotland. While both forms of body modification have received wide attention in other cultural contexts, the specific expressions of these customs in Viking Age society still lack systematic investigation with regard to their social implications. Based on the archaeological concept of embodiment and modern communication theories we discuss the perception of modified human bodies as media for the presentation and construction of social identities on Viking Age Gotland.
... The idea that these remains might represent lower-status individuals is supported by other cases where human remains were deposited in liminal environments, such as on the margins of settlements and within or next to middens and waste dumps. Recent aDNA analyses of skull fragments from two individuals who were deposited in or adjacent to ritual waste deposits at a high-status site at Ströja in Östergötland, Sweden, during the 8th century, have found that they belonged to nonlocal women, raising the possibility that they might have been foreign captives (see Hjulström and Lundeberg 2023, 196;Rodríguez-Varela et al. 2023). Collectively, therefore, these partial and fragmentary remains may offer the most explicit insight into both direct and indirect forms of violence that were projected against marginalized or subaltern peoples. ...
To date, traditional narratives of the Late Iron Age have focused almost exclusively on discussions of the elite. These were the martial rulers and major landholders who occupied the upper strata of Scandinavian society. The lives of lower-status population groups, including enslaved and other ‘unfree’ or dependent peoples such as landless farmers, have long been marginalized in archaeological discourse. We have little knowledge of the ways in which the lifeways of subaltern peoples were shaped by the construction and maintenance of socio-political hierarchies and networks, or of how social inequality permeated and impacted the daily lives of communities. In this article, the authors propose that the concept of structural violence , developed by sociologist Johan Galtung, has the potential to offer an interdisciplinary framework for multi-proxy studies of (bio)archaeological and textual data.
... We ran NgsRelate using BAM files as input with default parameters using a panel of 1,554,712 autosomal transversion SNPs from the Estonian Genome Diversity Project (EGDP) [31]. We calculated population allele frequencies from two different datasets of individuals from various archeological contexts in Sweden: Viking Age to Medieval dataset (n = 163) dataset covering three different sites, i.e., Sigtuna (n = 64), Fjälkinge (n = 11), and Västerhus (n = 88) [7,32], and a 17th century dataset (n = 44) [33]. All samples in the ancient reference panels were generated in a similar manner as the individuals tested here. ...
... In order to better understand previously detected kinship, we employed additional previously not used tools, KIN [8] and NgsRelate [9], to estimate the degree of relatedness and possible pedigree relationship between the two individuals. For the NgsRelate allele frequency estimation, we used various ancient genomic reference datasets, all consisting of genomic data generated from ancient samples from Sweden dated to the medieval period (n = 163) and the 17th century (n = 44) [7,32,33]. Finally, we assumed a minimum of 5000 overlapping SNPs as a cut-off value, as this has been shown to be a reliable and conservative value allowing for kinship estimation up to the third-degree [38]. Based on obtained autosomal kinship coefficients (θ) (0.09-0.15), associated k0 (0.31-0.58), k1 (0.36-0.56), and k2 (0.08-0.01) values (Tables 2 and S4), and results from KIN (Table S5), we noted that the two individuals were most probably second-degree relatives, as shown earlier [1]. ...
In 2021, we published the results of genomic analyses carried out on the famous bishop of Lund, Peder Winstrup, and the mummified remains of a 5–6-month-old fetus discovered in the same burial. We concluded that the two individuals were second-degree relatives and explored the genealogy of Peder Winstrup to further understand the possible relation between them. Through this analysis, we found that the boy was most probably Winstrup’s grandson and that the two were equally likely related either through Winstrup’s son, Peder, or his daughter, Anna Maria von Böhnen. To further resolve the specific kinship relation, we generated more genomic data from both Winstrup and the boy and implemented more recently published analytical tools in detailed Y chromosome- and X chromosome-based kinship analyses to distinguish between the competing hypotheses regarding maternal and paternal relatedness. We found that the individuals’ Y chromosome lineages belonged to different sub-lineages and that the X-chromosomal kinship coefficient calculated between the two individuals were elevated, suggesting a grandparent–grandchild relation through a female, i.e., Anna Maria von Böhnen. Finally, we also performed metagenomic analyses, which did not identify any pathogens that could be unambiguously associated with the fatalities.
... Another technical reason for including cosmopolitan breeds is to deal with the ascertainment bias of the SNP chip. We also took into consideration the results from Ref. 38 , in which the Old Irish Goat (OIG) breed is closely related to the Southern Italian breeds as highlighted by the Neighbour-Joining tree and historical data about the migration routes during the Viking Age (750-1050 CE) 31 . Thus, the wider dataset (WHOLE) includes goat breeds that belong to countries of the ancient Vikings' routes, from the continental Europe (the Netherlands) and 39 . ...
... The p-value is also provided in the output from standard errors estimated by jackknifing over chromosomes. We performed the analysis on the basis of the results of the statistics described above (TreeMix, f4-ratio) and joining the historical information with the most recent human genetic studies about Scandinavian and Celtic people 29,31 . ...
In the last decade, several studies aimed at dissecting the genetic architecture of local small ruminant breeds to discover which variations are involved in the process of adaptation to environmental conditions, a topic that has acquired priority due to climate change. Considering that traditional breeds are a reservoir of such important genetic variation, improving the current knowledge about their genetic diversity and origin is the first step forward in designing sound conservation guidelines. The genetic composition of North-Western European archetypical goat breeds is still poorly exploited. In this study we aimed to fill this gap investigating goat breeds across Ireland and Scandinavia, including also some other potential continental sources of introgression. The PCA and Admixture analyses suggest a well-defined cluster that includes Norwegian and Swedish breeds, while the crossbred Danish landrace is far apart, and there appears to be a close relationship between the Irish and Saanen goats. In addition, both graph representation of historical relationships among populations and f4-ratio statistics suggest a certain degree of gene flow between the Norse and Atlantic landraces. Furthermore, we identify signs of ancient admixture events of Scandinavian origin in the Irish and in the Icelandic goats. The time when these migrations, and consequently the introgression, of Scandinavian-like alleles occurred, can be traced back to the Viking colonisation of these two isles during the Viking Age (793-1066 CE). The demographic analysis indicates a complicated history of these traditional breeds with signatures of bottleneck, inbreeding and crossbreeding with the improved breeds. Despite these recent demographic changes and the historical genetic background shaped by centuries of human-mediated gene flow, most of them maintained their genetic identity, becoming an irreplaceable genetic resource as well as a cultural heritage.
... DNA molecules of Greek samples (n = 51) were extracted in the aDNA facilities at the Centre for Palaeogenetics (CPG), Stockholm University (Sweden). DNA extraction and library preparation were done as in (Rodríguez-Varela et al., 2023). Purified libraries were sequenced on NovaSeq 6000 at the SciLife Sequencing Centre in Stockholm. ...
... The barons were said to descend from the Mac Giolla Phádraig of Ossory, an ancient Irish clan. J-FTA78391 is associated with Levantine populations (El-Sibai et al. 2009), whereas R-A1488 is associated with Norman families and, earlier, with Scandinavia (Rodríguez-Varela et al. 2023). Hence, as well as dealing with the complexity of competing paternal lines, there is also the disruption of a connection to ancient Irish origins. ...
The surname Fitzpatrick is readily identified as Irish. Until recently, the traditional Fitzpatrick surname narrative was of a medieval super-progenitor named Giolla Phádraig. His offspring, the eponymous Mac Giolla Phádraig, it was said, somehow came to dwell in every Irish province; yet this is an Irish surname myth that works to erase the history of ancient 'Fitzpatrick' clans. This article demonstrates how deconstructing the surname Fitzpatrick, through working the hyphen of gene-eaology, is a practice of decolonisation. Via genetic data and archival records, dominant clan identities are disrupted, while connections with lost clans are re/membered. Critical analysis dismantles the dominant narrative imposed by colonial strategies and reconnects people with kinship groups and forgotten forebears. Questions arise from the deconstruction of an Irish surname. How might new clan identities be imagined, and how is losing a dominant surname narrative negotiated?
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 explicitly temporal and have not been adopted in unbiased ancestry models. Here, we develop Twigstats, a new 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 1,151 available ancient genomes, focussing on northern and central Europe in the historical period, and show that it allows modelling of individual-level ancestry using preceding genomes and provides previously unavailable resolution to detect broader ancestry transformations. In the first half of the first millennium ~1-500 CE (Common Era), we observe an expansion of Scandinavian-related ancestry across western, central, and southern Europe. However, in the second half of the millennium ~500-1000 CE, ancestry patterns suggest the regional disappearance or substantial admixture of these ancestries in multiple regions. Within Scandinavia itself, we document a major ancestry influx by ~800 CE, when a large proportion of Viking Age individuals carried ancestry from groups related to continental Europe. This primarily affected southern Scandinavia, and was differentially represented in the western and eastern directions of the wider Viking world. We infer detailed ancestry portraits integrated with historical, archaeological, and stable isotope evidence, documenting mobility at an individual level. Overall, our results are consistent with substantial mobility in Europe in the early historical period, and suggest that time-stratified ancestry analysis can provide a new lens for genetic history.
Damen i Viken. En folkvandringstida kvinna från Lovö, Sverige.
