New Archaeogenetic Study in Nature: International Research Group with the participation of Eötvös Loránd Research Network and Eötvös Loránd University Researchers Analyzes Bronze and Iron Age Populations of Europe

Recently, the genomes of nearly 800 prehistoric human individuals have been successfully analyzed as part of a large-scale archaeogenetic program carried out in an extensive European and American collaboration. The results of the research were published in Nature on the 22nd December 2021.

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The colleagues of RCH IAG at the HunLifeSci2021 international conference

Six members of RCH IAG participated at the Hungarian Molecular Life Science Conference 2021 between 05-07 November 2021 in Eger where the projects of the Institute of Archeogenomics were presented to representatives of the life sciences.

Through the lectures of Dániel Gerber and Bea Szeifert and the posters of Noémi Borbély and Erzsébet Fóthi, researchers and students were able to gain insights into the prehistoric, early medieval and present-day population genetic researchers carried out in our Institute.

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Origin of domestic horses finally established

• The modern horse was domesticated around 2200 years BCE in the northern Caucasus.
• In the centuries that followed it spread throughout Asia and Europe.
• To achieve this result, an international team of 162 scientists collected, sequenced and compared 273 genomes from ancient horses scattered across Eurasia.

Horses were first domesticated in the Pontic-Caspian steppes, northern Caucasus, before conquering the rest of Eurasia within a few centuries. These are the results of a study led by paleogeneticist Ludovic Orlando, CNRS, who headed an international team including archaeologist, archaeozoologist and geneticist researchers of the Research Centre for the Humanities. Answering a decades-old enigma, the study is published in Nature on 20 October 2021.

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An ethical statement on DNA testing of human remains has been published in the Nature

The statement, compiled and signed by 68 researchers from 31 countries, has been initiated by David Reich's laboratory at the Harvard Medical School. The starting point was an online, global, and multidisciplinary workshop in November 2020 focused on discussing ethical issues and guidelines for archaeogenetic research.

The rapid growth of ancient DNA and its impact on archaeology (and other fields) has led to calls for a discussion about the ethical standards to govern such research. The best practices for sampling of human remains for scientific analysis and engagement with stakeholder groups are key ethical discussions researchers are having about ancient DNA. While some guidelines have been previously proposed, there is no "one-size fits all" approach to ancient DNA ethics because of the notable variation in research contexts worldwide. What has been missing is a set of principles that can apply everywhere around the world that a substantial number of researchers from different disciplines and based in different places around the world agree to follow.

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