An international team of scientists has completed analysis of the world’s largest dataset of 5,000 genomes from ancient inhabitants of Europe and Asia. The study revealed the prehistoric human gene pools of Western Eurasia in unprecedented detail. Four articles containing the main results of the study were published in the scientific journal magazine Nature.
175 researchers from universities and museums in the UK, USA, Germany, Australia, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, France, Poland, Switzerland, Armenia, Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan and Italy participated in the large-scale project. They worked under the guidance of experts from the University of Copenhagen. The initiative brought together experts in archaeology, evolutionary biology, medicine, ancient DNA research, infectious diseases and epidemiology studies.
In particular, scientists have managed to map the movement of genes for various diseases, including type 2 diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease, as a result of population migrations across Eurasia more than 5 thousand years ago.
The researchers also found new scientific evidence explaining why the prevalence of multiple sclerosis in Scandinavia was twice as high as in southern Europe as a result of human resettlement.
The ancient Eurasian dataset was reconstructed through analysis of bones and teeth. The ages of the specimens ranged from the Mesolithic to the Bronze and Iron Ages, the Viking period and the Middle Ages.
According to participants in the study, as the genetic information collected is processed, it will be available to all scientists and will serve new discoveries.
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