Friday, April 27, 2012

U5 mtDNA Haplogroup & Mesolithic Scandinavian Pitted Ware Culture

Commentary from Dieneke's Antrolopology Blog on a new paper out in Science:

During the Neolithic period there still existed foragers in Scandinavia who belonged to the Pitted Ware (PWC) culture. These have been the object of a previous mtDNA study, which found them to be strongly differentiated from contemporaneous Funnel Beaker or Trichterbecherkultur (TRB) farmers.

In another commentary by the same author, 

The authors sampled 3 TRB individuals from "one passage tomb, Gokhem, dated to 5,500–4,500 years BP" which were found to belong to haplogroups H, J, and T, and 19 PWC individuals "from three different sites on the Baltic island of Gotland dated to 4,800–4,000 years BP" which were found to belong to haplogroups J, T, V (one each), "Other" (two), U5 and U5a (three each), and U4/H1b (eight samples).

U5b is my mtDNA haplogroup. So, it seems pretty certain that, of these Scandinavian groups, I am matrilineally more closely related to the Pitted Ware hunter-gatherer culture as opposed to the Funnel Beaker or TRB farmers of mesolithic Scandinavia.

No comments:

Dare to be true to yourself.