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Ancient iceman probably has no modern relatives Buzz UpSendSharePrint Thu Oct 30, 2:21 pm ET Reuters – An undated handout file photo shows "Otzi", Italy's prehistoric iceman. "Otzi", … LONDON (Reuters) – "Otzi," Italy's prehistoric iceman, probably does not have any modern day descendants, according to a study published Thursday. A team of Italian and British scientists who sequenced his mitochondrial DNA -- which is passed down through the mother's line -- found that Otzi belonged to a genetic lineage that is either extremely rare or has died out. Otzi's 5,300-year-old corpse was found frozen in the Tyrolean Alps in...

A 5,300-year-old mummified 'ice man' unearthed in the Alps belonged to a previously unknown branch of the human family tree, scientists have discovered. No trace of the lineage appears to remain today, meaning that the 'ice man' - dubbed 'Oetzi' - is unlikely to have any descendants. Oetzi's mummified remains were found in September 1991 in the Eastern Alps near the Austro-Italian border. The 5,300-year-old remains of Oetzi the iceman. Scientists have failed to trace his lineage, fearing his family may have become extinct He was about 46 years old when he met his violent death. Examinations revealed that he...

Ying Zheng was the First Emperor of China, who ended the Warring States Period, established the first empire of China (Qin Dynasty) in 221 BC and died in 210 BC. According to historical records, it took 39 years and 720,000 workers to build an amazingly magnificent mausoleum... the population size of Qin Dynasty was twenty-two millions and it controlled a vast territory... Between February and March 2003, 121 human skeletons were excavated by a team from Archaeology Institute of Shannxi when cleaning up a Qin-Dynasty kiln 500 meters away from the site where Terra Cotta Warriors were found... Aiming at...

The first humans to arrive on the Indian subcontinent from Africa about 65,000 years ago left a genetic imprint that can still be found in the tribes of India... "Whether the original inhabitants of India were replaced by more modern immigrants or contributed to the contemporary gene pool has been debated," says Michael Bamshad of the University of Washington in Seattle, who has studied the genetic diversity of India. One way researchers have used to figure this out is to use linguistic groups. The tribes speaking Indo-European languages, for instance, are known to be descendants of the people who migrated...

Mitochondrial DNA may not hold the key to your origins after all. A study published in the open access journal BMC Biology reveals that fewer than 10% of African American mitochondrial DNA sequences analysed can be matched to mitochondrial DNA from one single African ethnic group. There has been a growing interest in the use of mitochondrial DNA to trace maternal ancestries, and several companies now offer to analyse individuals' mitochondrial DNA sequences to obtain information about their origins. The current study suggests that only one in nine African Americans may be able to find clues about where their ancestors...

The gene in question codes for a protein receptor called CCR5. The HIV virus binds to this receptor before entering cells. One gene variant, called CCR5-Delta32, has 32 DNA base pairs missing and produces a receptor that HIV cannot bind to, which prevents the virus from entering the cells. People with this variant have some resistance to HIV infection and also take longer to develop AIDS. Generally, only people in Europe and western Asia carry the variant, and it becomes less and less frequent as you move south. For example, more than 15 per cent of people in some areas...

Elephants, Human Ancestors Evolved in Synch, DNA Reveals Hope Hamashige for National Geographic News July 23, 2007 The tooth of a mastodon buried beneath Alaska's permafrost for many thousands of years is yielding surprising clues about the history of elephants—and humans. A team of researchers recently extracted DNA from the tooth to put together the first complete mastodon mitochondrial genome. The study, published in the journal PLoS Biology, significantly alters the evolutionary timeline for elephants and their relatives. The research may put to rest a contentious debate by showing that woolly mammoths are more closely related to Asian elephants than...

The Lichtenstein Cave is a short drive away from Manfred's village, deep in the Harz mountains. This is the spot where Manfred's relatives, dating back 3,000 years, were buried. The cave remained hidden from view until 1980, and it was only later, in 1993, that archaeologists discovered 40 Bronze Age skeletons. The 3,000-year-old skeletons were in such good condition that anthropologists at the University of Goettingen managed to extract a sample of DNA. That was then matched to two men living nearby: Uwe Lange, a surveyor, and Manfred Huchthausen, a teacher. The two men have now become local celebrities.

Nothing against fossils, but when it comes to tracing the story of human evolution they’re taking a back seat lately to everything from DNA to lice, and even the DNA of lice. A few years ago scientists compared the DNA of body lice (which are misnamed: they live in clothing, not the human body) to that of head lice, from which they evolved, and concluded that the younger lineage split off from the older no more than 114,000 years ago, as I described in a cover story last year. Since body lice probably arose when a new habitat did, and...

[isn't this Gannett?]

Ore. Discovery Challenges Beliefs About First Humans Until recently, most scientists believed that the first humans came to the Americas 13,000 years ago. But new archaeological findings from a cave in Oregon are challenging that assumption. Lee Hochberg of Oregon Public Television reports on the controversial discovery. LEE HOCHBERG, NewsHour correspondent: What archaeologist Dennis Jenkins found in the Paisley Caves in south central Oregon may turn on its head the theory of how and when the first people came to North America. Many scientists believe humans first came to this continent 13,000 years ago across a land bridge from Asia...

Woolly-Mammoth Gene Study Changes Extinction Theory Ball of permafrost-preserved mammoth hair containing thick outer-coat and thin under-coat hairs. Credit: Stephan Schuster lab, Penn State A large genetic study of the extinct woolly mammoth has revealed that the species was not one large homogenous group, as scientists previously had assumed, and that it did not have much genetic diversity. "The population was split into two groups, then one of the groups died out 45,000 years ago, long before the first humans began to appear in the region," said Stephan C. Schuster, associate professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at Penn...

But hair sample could have been from a wandering mercenary. An early wave of migration into the New World and the Arctic has been identified by sequencing a genome from a frozen hair excavated in Greenland. Archaeological evidence shows that there were two waves of migration to Greenland starting 4,500 years ago, first with the Saqqaq and then the Dorset groups, collectively known as the Paleo-Eskimos. Later, around 1,000 years ago, came the Thule culture which led to the current native population. The relationship between these three groups has been uncertain. Some theories hold that Paleo-Eskimos derived from the populations...

Research led by the University of Leeds has discovered genetic evidence that overturns existing theories about human migration into Island Southeast Asia (covering the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysian Borneo) - taking the timeline back by nearly 10,000 years. Prevailing theory suggests that the present-day populations of Island Southeast Asia (ISEA) originate largely from a Neolithic expansion from Taiwan driven by rice agriculture about 4,000 years ago - the so-called "Out of Taiwan" model. However an international research team, led by the UK’s first Professor of Archaeogenetics, Martin Richards, has shown that a substantial fraction of their mitochondrial DNA lineages (inherited...

First Americans Arrived Recently, Settled Pacific Coast, DNA Study Says Stefan Lovgren for National Geographic News February 2, 2007 A study of the oldest known sample of human DNA in the Americas suggests that humans arrived in the New World relatively recently, around 15,000 years ago. The DNA was extracted from a 10,300-year-old tooth found in a cave on Prince of Wales Island off southern Alaska in 1996. The sample represents a previously unknown lineage for the people who first arrived in the Americas. The findings, published last week in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, shed light on how...