LEIPZIG, GERMANY—According to a statement released by the Max Planck Society, an international team of researchers led by Harald Ringbauer of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology has developed a tool to identify segments of DNA in ancient genomes shared by up to sixth-degree relatives. Such segments are known as IBD, or “Identity by Descent,” segments in today’s population. But it is much more difficult to identify these almost identical shared sections of genomes in ancient peoples whose genomes have degraded over time. The new technique, called “ancIBD,” fills in gaps in ancient genomes with modern DNA reference panels, allowing researchers to look for up to sixth-degree relatives among ancient populations. Ringbauer and his colleagues then applied ancIBD to more than 4,000 published ancient genomes belonging to people who lived across Eurasia over the past 50,000 years, and identified hundreds of pairs of relatives. Sometimes these individuals had been buried hundreds of miles apart from each other. “We found exciting links between ancient cultures, and the signal of long shared segments allowed us for the first time to specifically demonstrate close relationships between important ancient cultures, sometimes over vast spaces over the order of only a few hundred years,” Ringbauer explained. Read the original scholarly article about this research in Nature Genetics. For more on ancient DNA research, go to "Worlds Within Us."
