Ancient DNA analysis has greatly contributed to understanding the population history of
several species. In the last 20 years, the field has undergone an important transformation …

For five decades, paleontologists, paleobiologists, and ecologists have investigated patterns
of punctuated equilibria in biology. Here, we step outside those fields and summarize recent …

Studies have found a pronounced decline in male effective population sizes worldwide
around 3000–5000 years ago. This bottleneck was not observed for female effective …

The advent of genome-wide ancient DNA analysis has revolutionized our understanding of
prehistoric societies. However, studying biological relatedness in these groups requires …

Cultural inheritance is a central issue in archaeology. If variation were not inherited, cultures
could not evolve. Some archaeologists have dismissed cultural evolutionary theory in …

The history of people's movements and interactions shapes both genetic and linguistic
variation. Genes and languages are transmitted separately and their distributions reflect …

Long segments of the genome that are shared 'identical by descent'(IBD) demonstrate
recent relatedness between individuals. A new computational method robustly identifies …

Recent advances in archaeogenomics have granted access to previously unavailable
biological information with the potential to further our understanding of past social dynamics …

Kinship, or what links together members of the same family, fundamentally structures the
web of relationships in human societies. Over the last few centuries, ethnographers have …

With the rise of ancient DNA studies in prehistoric archaeology, terms such as matriliny and
patriliny are commonly used in scholarly literature. From a sociocultural anthropological …