Extensive pedigrees reveal the social organization of a Neolithic community.

Social anthropology and ethnographic studies have described kinship systems and networks of contact and exchange in extant populations. However, for prehistoric societies, these systems can be studied only indirectly from biological and cultural remains. Stable isotope data, sex and age at death can provide insights into the demographic structure of a burial community and identify local versus non-local childhood signatures, archaeogenetic data can reconstruct the biological relationships between individuals, which enables the reconstruction of pedigrees, and combined evidence informs on kinship practices and residence patterns in prehistoric societies.

Enhancing the learning of evolutionary anthropology skills by combining student-active teaching with actual and virtual immersion of Master's students in fieldwork, laboratory practice, and dissemination.

Higher education in evolutionary anthropology involves providing students with in-depth knowledge of biological and cultural heritage sites and collections that are frequently inaccessible. Indeed, most sites, fossils, and archaeological remains can be visited or manipulated only rarely and solely by specialists with extensive experience. Owing to the development of 3D and medical imaging techniques, this fragile heritage is now more widely accessible, and in a dynamic way.

Origin and mobility of Iron Age Gaulish groups in present-day France revealed through archaeogenomics.

The Iron Age period occupies an important place in French history because the Gauls are regularly presented as the direct ancestors of the extant French population. We documented here the genomic diversity of Iron Age communities originating from six French regions. The 49 acquired genomes permitted us to highlight an absence of discontinuity between Bronze Age and Iron Age groups in France, lending support to a cultural transition linked to progressive local economic changes rather than to a massive influx of allochthone groups.

Ten millennia of hepatitis B virus evolution.

Hepatitis B virus (HBV) has been infecting humans for millennia and remains a global health problem, but its past diversity and dispersal routes are largely unknown. We generated HBV genomic data from 137 Eurasians and Native Americans dated between ~10,500 and ~400 years ago. We date the most recent common ancestor of all HBV lineages to between ~20,000 and 12,000 years ago, with the virus present in European and South American hunter-gatherers during the early Holocene.

Using Y-chromosome capture enrichment to resolve haplogroup H2 shows new evidence for a two-path Neolithic expansion to Western Europe.

Uniparentally-inherited markers on mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and the non-recombining regions of the Y chromosome (NRY), have been used for the past 30 years to investigate the history of humans from a maternal and paternal perspective. Researchers have preferred mtDNA due to its abundance in the cells, and comparatively high substitution rate. Conversely, the NRY is less susceptible to back mutations and saturation, and is potentially more informative than mtDNA owing to its longer sequence length.