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Ancient nuclear genomes enable repatriation of Indigenous human remains.

ABSTRACT: After European colonization, the ancestral remains of Indigenous people were often collected for scientific research or display in museum collections. For many decades, Indigenous people, including Native Americans and Aboriginal Australians, have fought for their return. However, many of these remains have no recorded provenance, making their repatriation very difficult or impossible. To determine whether DNA-based methods could resolve this important problem, we sequenced 10 nuclear genomes and 27 mitogenomes from ancient pre-European Aboriginal Australians (up to 1540 years before the present) of known provenance and compared them to 100 high-coverage contemporary Aboriginal Australian genomes, also of known provenance. We report substantial ancient population structure showing strong genetic affinities between ancient and contemporary Aboriginal Australian individuals from the same geographic location. Our findings demonstrate the feasibility of successfully identifying the origins of unprovenanced ancestral remains using genomic methods.

SUBMITTER: Wright JL

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6300400 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Ancient nuclear genomes enable repatriation of Indigenous human remains

Project description:For many decades Indigenous people, including Native Americans and Aboriginal Australians, have fought for their return of their ancient people. By sequencing ten ancient nuclear genomes of Aboriginal Australians and 27 mitogenomes from ancient pre-European Aboriginal Australians (up to 1,540 yr BP) of known provenance we demonstrate the feasibility of successfully identifying the geographic origins of unprovenanced ancestral remains using genomic methods.

| EGAS00001003359 | EGA

Ancient nuclear genomes enable repatriation of Indigenous human remains

Project description:Ancient nuclear genomes enable repatriation of Indigenous human remains

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Two ancient human genomes reveal Polynesian ancestry among the indigenous Botocudos of Brazil.

Project description:Understanding the peopling of the Americas remains an important and challenging question. Here, we present (14)C dates, and morphological, isotopic and genomic sequence data from two human skulls from the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil, part of one of the indigenous groups known as 'Botocudos'. We find that their genomic ancestry is Polynesian, with no detectable Native American component. Radiocarbon analysis of the skulls shows that the individuals had died prior to the beginning of the 19th century. Our findings could either represent genomic evidence of Polynesians reaching South America during their Pacific expansion, or European-mediated transport.

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Ancient Genomes From Bronze Age Remains Reveal Deep Diversity and Recent Adaptive Episodes for Human Oral Pathobionts.

Project description:Ancient microbial genomes can illuminate pathobiont evolution across millenia, with teeth providing a rich substrate. However, the characterization of prehistoric oral pathobiont diversity is limited. In Europe, only preagricultural genomes have been subject to phylogenetic analysis, with none compared to more recent archaeological periods. Here, we report well-preserved microbiomes from two 4,000-year-old teeth from an Irish limestone cave. These contained bacteria implicated in periodontitis, as well as Streptococcus mutans, the major cause of caries and rare in the ancient genomic record. Despite deriving from the same individual, these teeth produced divergent Tannerella forsythia genomes, indicating higher levels of strain diversity in prehistoric populations. We find evidence of microbiome dysbiosis, with a disproportionate quantity of S. mutans sequences relative to other oral streptococci. This high abundance allowed for metagenomic assembly, resulting in its first reported ancient genome. Phylogenetic analysis indicates major postmedieval population expansions for both species, highlighting the inordinate impact of recent dietary changes. In T. forsythia, this expansion is associated with the replacement of older lineages, possibly reflecting a genome-wide selective sweep. Accordingly, we see dramatic changes in T. forsythia's virulence repertoire across this period. S. mutans shows a contrasting pattern, with deeply divergent lineages persisting in modern populations. This may be due to its highly recombining nature, allowing for maintenance of diversity through selective episodes. Nonetheless, an explosion in recent coalescences and significantly shorter branch lengths separating bacteriocin-carrying strains indicate major changes in S. mutans demography and function coinciding with sugar popularization during the industrial period.

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Imputation of ancient human genomes.

Project description:Due to postmortem DNA degradation and microbial colonization, most ancient genomes have low depth of coverage, hindering genotype calling. Genotype imputation can improve genotyping accuracy for low-coverage genomes. However, it is unknown how accurate ancient DNA imputation is and whether imputation introduces bias to downstream analyses. Here we re-sequence an ancient trio (mother, father, son) and downsample and impute a total of 43 ancient genomes, including 42 high-coverage (above 10x) genomes. We assess imputation accuracy across ancestries, time, depth of coverage, and sequencing technology. We find that ancient and modern DNA imputation accuracies are comparable. When downsampled at 1x, 36 of the 42 genomes are imputed with low error rates (below 5%) while African genomes have higher error rates. We validate imputation and phasing results using the ancient trio data and an orthogonal approach based on Mendel's rules of inheritance. We further compare the downstream analysis results between imputed and high-coverage genomes, notably principal component analysis, genetic clustering, and runs of homozygosity, observing similar results starting from 0.5x coverage, except for the African genomes. These results suggest that, for most populations and depths of coverage as low as 0.5x, imputation is a reliable method that can improve ancient DNA studies.

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Metagenomics analysis of ancient human remains

Project description:Metagenomics analysis of ancient human remains

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Authenticated DNA from ancient wood remains.

Project description:BackgroundThe reconstruction of biological processes and human activities during the last glacial cycle relies mainly on data from biological remains. Highly abundant tissues, such as wood, are candidates for a genetic analysis of past populations. While well-authenticated DNA has now been recovered from various fossil remains, the final 'proof' is still missing for wood, despite some promising studies.ScopeThe goal of this study was to determine if ancient wood can be analysed routinely in studies of archaeology and palaeogenetics. An experiment was designed which included blind testing, independent replicates, extensive contamination controls and rigorous statistical tests. Ten samples of ancient wood from major European forest tree genera were analysed with plastid DNA markers.ConclusionsAuthentic DNA was retrieved from wood samples up to 1,000 years of age. A new tool for real-time vegetation history and archaeology is ready to use.

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Monitoring DNA contamination in handled vs. directly excavated ancient human skeletal remains.

Project description:Bones, teeth and hair are often the only physical evidence of human or animal presence at an archaeological site; they are also the most widely used sources of samples for ancient DNA (aDNA) analysis. Unfortunately, the DNA extracted from ancient samples, already scarce and highly degraded, is widely susceptible to exogenous contaminations that can affect the reliability of aDNA studies. We evaluated the molecular effects of sample handling on five human skeletons freshly excavated from a cemetery dated between the 11 to the 14(th) century. We collected specimens from several skeletal areas (teeth, ribs, femurs and ulnas) from each individual burial. We then divided the samples into two different sets: one labeled as "virgin samples" (i.e. samples that were taken by archaeologists under contamination-controlled conditions and then immediately sent to the laboratory for genetic analyses), and the second called "lab samples"(i.e. samples that were handled without any particular precautions and subject to normal washing, handling and measuring procedures in the osteological lab). Our results show that genetic profiles from "lab samples" are incomplete or ambiguous in the different skeletal areas while a different outcome is observed in the "virgin samples" set. Generally, all specimens from different skeletal areas in the exception of teeth present incongruent results between "lab" and "virgin" samples. Therefore teeth are less prone to contamination than the other skeletal areas we analyzed and may be considered a material of choice for classical aDNA studies. In addition, we showed that bones can also be a good candidate for human aDNA analysis if they come directly from the excavation site and are accompanied by a clear taphonomic history.

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Ancient Clostridium DNA and variants of tetanus neurotoxins associated with human archaeological remains.

Project description:The analysis of microbial genomes from human archaeological samples offers a historic snapshot of ancient pathogens and provides insights into the origins of modern infectious diseases. Here, we analyze metagenomic datasets from 38 human archaeological samples and identify bacterial genomic sequences related to modern-day Clostridium tetani, which produces the tetanus neurotoxin (TeNT) and causes the disease tetanus. These genomic assemblies had varying levels of completeness, and a subset of them displayed hallmarks of ancient DNA damage. Phylogenetic analyses revealed known C. tetani clades as well as potentially new Clostridium lineages closely related to C. tetani. The genomic assemblies encode 13 TeNT variants with unique substitution profiles, including a subgroup of TeNT variants found exclusively in ancient samples from South America. We experimentally tested a TeNT variant selected from an ancient Chilean mummy sample and found that it induced tetanus muscle paralysis in mice, with potency comparable to modern TeNT. Thus, our ancient DNA analysis identifies DNA from neurotoxigenic C. tetani in archaeological human samples, and a novel variant of TeNT that can cause disease in mammals.

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