


Scientists Are aAIM-ing to Identify Your Ancestors

Scientists Are aAIM-ing to Identify Your Ancestors

Scientists Are aAIM-ing to Identify Your Ancestors

Scientists Are aAIM-ing to Identify Your Ancestors

Dr Elhaik with a skeleton of an ancient Israelite at Tel Megiddo (left). An illustration of how aAIMs can identify ancient origins (right). Credit: the University of Sheffield
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Scientists at the University of Sheffield studying ancient DNA have created a tool allowing them to more accurately identify ancient Eurasian populations, which can be used to test an individual’s similarity to ancient people who once roamed the earth.



The research, led by Dr Eran Elhaik, from the University of Sheffield’s Department of Animal and Plant Sciences, saw the identification of a small group of aAIMs that can be used to classify skeletons to ancient populations.

Dr Elhaik said: “We developed a new method that finds aAIMs efficiently and have proved that it is accurate.”



“Ancient populations are much more diverse than modern ones,” he said. “Their diversity was reduced over the years following events such as the Neolithic revolution and the Black Death.




He added: “Until now you couldn't test people for ancient DNA ancestry because commercial microarrays, such as the ones used for genetic genealogy, don't have a lot of markers relevant for paleogenomics - people could not study their primeval origins.

“This finding of aAIMs is like finding the fingerprints of ancient people. It allows testing of a small number of markers – that can be found in a commonly available array – and you can ask what part of your genome is from Roman Britons or Viking, or Chumash Indians, or ancient Israelites, etc.


Researchers said to make the study’s findings more accurate for identifying and classifying ancient people throughout the world, the framework and methods of the study should be applied again when more comprehensive ancient DNA databases are available.

The full study Ancient Ancestry Informative Markers for Identifying Fine-Scale Ancient Population Structure in Eurasians is published in the journal Genes.

This article has been republished from materials provided by the University of Sheffield. Note: material may have been edited for length and content. For further information, please contact the cited source.

Reference: Umberto Esposito, Ranajit Das, Syakir Syed, Mehdi Pirooznia, and Eran Elhaik. Ancient Ancestry Informative Markers for Identifying Fine-Scale Ancient Population Structure in Eurasians. 2019. Genes. https://doi.org/10.3390/genes9120625.