Researchers have identified three major waves of migration in early Europe, using a new technique to analyze human genomes. The analysis revealed that Scandinavia was a crucial hotspot for people as they traveled northward and dispersed elsewhere during the first millennium.
In a study published Wednesday (Jan. 1) in the journal Nature, the researchers detailed a new approach to understanding ancient DNA. They applied the method — called "time-stratified ancestry analysis" using a statistical technique called Twigstats — to over 1,500 previously published genomes. This technique allowed the team to uncover waves of migration and ancestry information that other methods had obscured.
