Iron Age and Anglo-Saxon genomes from East England reveal British migration history

British population history has been shaped by a series of immigrations, including the early Anglo-Saxon migrations after 400 CE. It remains an open question how these events affected the genetic composition of the current British population. Here, we present whole-genome sequences from 10 individual...

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Main Authors:	Schiffels, Stephan, Haak, Wolfgang, Paajanen, Pirita, Llamas, Bastien, Popescu, Elizabeth, Loe, Louise, Clarke, Rachel, Lyons, Alice, Mortimer, Richard, Sayer, Duncan, Tyler-Smith, Chris, Cooper, Alan, Durbin, Richard
Format:	Online
Language:	English
Published:	Nature Publishing Group 2016
Online Access:	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4735688/

id	pubmed-4735688
recordtype	oai_dc
spelling	pubmed-47356882016-03-04 Iron Age and Anglo-Saxon genomes from East England reveal British migration history Schiffels, Stephan Haak, Wolfgang Paajanen, Pirita Llamas, Bastien Popescu, Elizabeth Loe, Louise Clarke, Rachel Lyons, Alice Mortimer, Richard Sayer, Duncan Tyler-Smith, Chris Cooper, Alan Durbin, Richard Article British population history has been shaped by a series of immigrations, including the early Anglo-Saxon migrations after 400 CE. It remains an open question how these events affected the genetic composition of the current British population. Here, we present whole-genome sequences from 10 individuals excavated close to Cambridge in the East of England, ranging from the late Iron Age to the middle Anglo-Saxon period. By analysing shared rare variants with hundreds of modern samples from Britain and Europe, we estimate that on average the contemporary East English population derives 38% of its ancestry from Anglo-Saxon migrations. We gain further insight with a new method, rarecoal, which infers population history and identifies fine-scale genetic ancestry from rare variants. Using rarecoal we find that the Anglo-Saxon samples are closely related to modern Dutch and Danish populations, while the Iron Age samples share ancestors with multiple Northern European populations including Britain. Nature Publishing Group 2016-01-19 /pmc/articles/PMC4735688/ /pubmed/26783965 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms10408 Text en Copyright © 2016, Nature Publishing Group, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited. All Rights Reserved. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
repository_type	Open Access Journal
institution_category	Foreign Institution
institution	US National Center for Biotechnology Information
building	NCBI PubMed
collection	Online Access
language	English
format	Online
author	Schiffels, Stephan Haak, Wolfgang Paajanen, Pirita Llamas, Bastien Popescu, Elizabeth Loe, Louise Clarke, Rachel Lyons, Alice Mortimer, Richard Sayer, Duncan Tyler-Smith, Chris Cooper, Alan Durbin, Richard
spellingShingle	Schiffels, Stephan Haak, Wolfgang Paajanen, Pirita Llamas, Bastien Popescu, Elizabeth Loe, Louise Clarke, Rachel Lyons, Alice Mortimer, Richard Sayer, Duncan Tyler-Smith, Chris Cooper, Alan Durbin, Richard Iron Age and Anglo-Saxon genomes from East England reveal British migration history
author_facet	Schiffels, Stephan Haak, Wolfgang Paajanen, Pirita Llamas, Bastien Popescu, Elizabeth Loe, Louise Clarke, Rachel Lyons, Alice Mortimer, Richard Sayer, Duncan Tyler-Smith, Chris Cooper, Alan Durbin, Richard
author_sort	Schiffels, Stephan
title	Iron Age and Anglo-Saxon genomes from East England reveal British migration history
title_short	Iron Age and Anglo-Saxon genomes from East England reveal British migration history
title_full	Iron Age and Anglo-Saxon genomes from East England reveal British migration history
title_fullStr	Iron Age and Anglo-Saxon genomes from East England reveal British migration history
title_full_unstemmed	Iron Age and Anglo-Saxon genomes from East England reveal British migration history
title_sort	iron age and anglo-saxon genomes from east england reveal british migration history
description	British population history has been shaped by a series of immigrations, including the early Anglo-Saxon migrations after 400 CE. It remains an open question how these events affected the genetic composition of the current British population. Here, we present whole-genome sequences from 10 individuals excavated close to Cambridge in the East of England, ranging from the late Iron Age to the middle Anglo-Saxon period. By analysing shared rare variants with hundreds of modern samples from Britain and Europe, we estimate that on average the contemporary East English population derives 38% of its ancestry from Anglo-Saxon migrations. We gain further insight with a new method, rarecoal, which infers population history and identifies fine-scale genetic ancestry from rare variants. Using rarecoal we find that the Anglo-Saxon samples are closely related to modern Dutch and Danish populations, while the Iron Age samples share ancestors with multiple Northern European populations including Britain.
publisher	Nature Publishing Group
publishDate	2016
url	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4735688/
_version_	1613531528096120832

Iron Age and Anglo-Saxon genomes from East England reveal British migration history

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