Software developed to investigate more detailed differences between ancient DNA data has proved its worth this week after a paper describing human pop

Twigstats software sheds light on mysteries of Europe's old-school migrators

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2025-01-05 12:00:04

Software developed to investigate more detailed differences between ancient DNA data has proved its worth this week after a paper describing human population movements in Europe in the first millennium AD was published in the science journal Nature.

Speaking to The Register, mathematician and open source maintainer Leo Speidel said he hoped the project would go on to help reveal the human genetic history of Japan, Poland, and the UK.

Speidel, who recently started as group leader in interdisciplinary math and science at Japan's research institute RIKEN, was the first author of research, which sheds new light on population movements during the Roman occupation of Northern Europe, as well as Anglo-Saxon and Viking migration in the first millennium.

Speidel said the software project powering the study – dubbed Twigstats – is built on an earlier tool that has been widely used in the field since 2019 to help date genetic mutations and build a genetic family tree. Mutations cascade through genetic history, so the more mutations one individual shares with another, the more closely related they are to each other.