Regional Variation In Europe
The founder analysis as described above dates the arrival of mtDNAs in Europe as a whole or, in the case of the Lateglacial expansions, the timing of a bottleneck within Europe itself Richards et al. 2000, 2003 . As mentioned earlier, over the past 25 years archaeology has become much more interested in the regional variation rather than the overall process. Richards et al. 2000 therefore repeated the analysis at the regional level. It has to be stressed that this approach has several...
Criticisms Of The Mitochondrial Dna Work
The mtDNA work has been criticized from a traditional population-genetics perspective by a number of authors Cavalli-Sforza amp Minch 1997 Barbujani et al. 1998 Chikhi et al. 1998,2002 Barbujani amp Bertorelle 2001 . The common thread in these critiques is that the age of a population is not the age of the common molecular ancestor of its set of DNA sequences Barbujani amp Chikhi 2000 , with the implication being that this point has been somehow missed in the analysis. As we have seen, however,...
European Mitochondrial Dna Variation
Mitochondrial DNA variation in Europe was studied for the first time by a number of groups in the early 1990s, mostly focusing on sequences from the fast-evolving first hyper-variable segment of the mtDNA control region HVS-I . Initially, it seemed that the European mtDNA landscape might be so flat as to be almost entirely uninformative with respect to European prehistory Pult et al. 1994 . For example, an attempt by Simoni et al. 2000 , using spatial autocorrelation, indicated no...
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Figure 6 Maximum parsimony tree for the major Y-chromosome haplogroups and their distribution in Europe. The West Eurasian parts of the tree are highlighted and color-coded. The haplogroup nomenclature of Underhill et al. 2000 is indicated beneath the tree that of the Y Chromosome Consortium 2002 is within the frame and that of Semino et al. 2000 is in parentheses. See Semino et al. 2000 for further details. Figure 6 Maximum parsimony tree for the major Y-chromosome haplogroups and their...
Classical Markers And The Neolithic Transition
The wave of advance model appeared to be compatible with the rate of spread of the Neolithic measured from radiocarbon dates. More important, however, was the introduction of genetic data into the equation. At the time, these necessarily comprised only the classical, non-DNA markers allele frequencies for blood groups, the tissue antigen HLA system, and some enzymes. Assuming that the Near East and Europe had been relatively isolated during the Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic, and had...
Introduction Farmers Our Ancestors
Prehistoric archaeology grew up under the shadow of nationalism, providing the means by which the newly established European nation-states could create a unitary past for their peoples Trigger 1989, Kohl amp Fawcett 1995 . There was traditionally a tendency, therefore, for the narratives of European prehistorians to divide their actors into us and them. At the deepest level, as Zvelebil 1995a argues, this amounted to a founding myth for European culture and civilization that placed...
The Wave Of Advance
The subject of the genetic history of Europe was more or less created by Luca Cavalli-Sforza and his colleagues in the 1970s. Their work has cast a long shadow, to the extent that today's genetic researchers into the ancestry of Europeans, and even many archaeologists, continue to discuss their subject matter in the terms that they laid down. Cavalli-Sforza's work was pioneering in two ways. It was the first sustained attempt to apply genetic data to a question of major archaeological interest....
Critiques Of The Wave Of Advance
Despite some rather vigorous methodological disagreements between the two main proponents of large-scale Neolithic demic diffusion, the Cavalli-Sforza and Sokal groups, the southeast-northwest gradient itself was robust to a number of tests. It appeared there was a genuine pattern that needed explaining, rather than some artefact of the analysis. Nevertheless, interpreting the gradients was not as unprob-lematic as first thought. This was originally argued not by geneticists, however, but by an...