Interred with Their DNA

We, as humans, have long been fascinated by our history both as individuals and as a species, and questions of personal ancestry are increasingly becoming answerable by the popularization of genetic testing services such as those offered by Ancestry.com and 23andMe. Beyond our individual provenance, however, is the question of the history of humankind, and the relatively recent explosion in the field of ancient DNA research is rising to this challenge. The insights into early human history that can be gleaned from sequencing and careful analysis of ancient genomes are myriad, and 2018 has been rife with exciting discoveries that are illuminating our origin story. The movements of our ancestors over large swaths of time and distance has long been under archaeological inquiry, and a plethora of recent papers are complementing, and occasionally contradicting, knowledge of past human migratory dynamics. Until recently, much of this work was focused on themovement of our ancestors out of Africa and the peopling of Eurasia (reviewed in Nielsen et al., 2017); however, with the increasing availability of ancient DNA samples, paleogeneticists are now revealing more detailed movements around the globe. Genome-wide data from 18 ancient individuals in Southeast Asia, for example, suggest that the introduction of farming to the region occurred viamigration of a population from southern China, whose ancestry was admixed with hunter-gatherers prior to their movement (Lipson et al., 2018). An independent study of 26 ancient whole genomes