08/10/2025 -
Recent ancient DNA discoveries are reshaping our understanding of Roman and early medieval Britain. Far from being an isolated island after the fall of Rome, Britain was home to people of remarkably diverse origins. New genomic analyses of burials from Kent and Dorset reveal that individuals of African ancestry lived and integrated within Anglo-Saxon communities more than 1,300 years ago.
1) EAS003 – A Young Man from Kent with African Roots
The genome England_Saxon_oAfrica:EAS003.SG comes from a young man buried in Kent in the early 7th century CE. His DNA, studied in the 2024 paper
“West African ancestry in seventh-century England”, revealed a striking mixture: roughly half of his ancestry was West African, the rest Northern European.
Isotopic analysis show...
See more
03/10/2025 -
23andMe has released its 2025 ancestry update, and overall the results are excellent. In our community, the improvements are clear: more precise regional assignments, better separation of closely related populations, and refinements driven by larger, better-curated reference datasets.
Why Results Change Over Time
Your raw DNA does not change after you test. What changes is the reference panel—the database of people from known populations that your DNA is compared against. As new and richer reference data are added, the algorithm can distinguish, for example, Northern French from Belgian ancestry, or Spanish from Portuguese, with greater confidence. Sometimes this means a region you previously had may shrink, disappear, or be split more finely. That is not your family history changi...
See more
30/09/2025 -
Ancient DNA from the Canary Islands reveals Amazigh (North-African) roots for the pre-Hispanic Guanches, followed by post-15th-century Iberian admixture and island-by-island drift—yielding a modern population (Spanish_Canarias) that is related yet genetically distinct.
North-African origins and island colonization
Genome-wide analyses of pre-conquest individuals across the archipelago place Guanche ancestries closest to Northwest Africa (Amazigh/Berber-related), with minor inputs from earlier Eurasian farmers and trans-Saharan sources. Archaeology and linguistics align with an Amazigh colonization during Late Antiquity, with settlement signals beginning around the 3rd century CE.
Founder effects, drift, and east–west structure
A time-series transect (3rd–16th c. CE...
See more
16/09/2025 -
The Genetic History of Portugal: Five Millennia at Europe’s Atlantic Edge
Ancient DNA now traces Portugal’s population history from Mesolithic foragers through the Neolithic transition, the Beaker/Bronze Age steppe pulse, Roman and Islamic-period mobility, to the subtle regional structure seen today.
From hunter-gatherers to early farmers (Mesolithic → Neolithic)
Genome-wide transects across Iberia show that by the Neolithic (from ~5500 BCE) Anatolian-related farmers moved into the peninsula and mixed with local Western Hunter-Gatherers (WHG). This farmer–forager blend persisted into the Chalcolithic, with a north-east to south-west gradient in the persistence of WHG-associated ancestry recorded in new Portuguese ancient genomes.
The Bronze Age transformation: St...
See more
19/08/2025 -
A recurring observation in population genetics is that Ashkenazi Jews often cluster with Southern Italians and Sicilians in PCA plots and G25 analyses. This similarity, however, does not imply direct kinship, but rather parallel demographic trajectories that produced convergent ancestry compositions.
Shared Mediterranean–Levantine Foundations
Both Ashkenazi Jews and Southern Italians share high proportions of Southern European and Levantine ancestry.
For Ashkenazi Jews, the Levantine ancestry reflects their deep Middle Eastern origin, with continuity from ancient Jewish populations and subsequent integration with local Italians during the Roman Empire. Ancient DNA studies show that Jewish communities in Roman Italy retained Near Eastern ancestry while admixing with ...
See more
