Low Prevalence of Lactase Persistence in Bronze Age Europe Indicates Ongoing Strong Selection over the Last 3,000 Years

Lactase persistence (LP), the continued expression of lactase into adulthood, is the most strongly selected single gene trait over the last 10,000 years in multiple human populations. It has been posited that the primary allele causing LP among Eurasians, rs4988235-A [1], only rose to appreciable frequencies during the Bronze and Iron Ages [2, 3], long after humans started consuming milk from domesticated animals. This rapid rise has been attributed to an influx of people from the Pontic-Caspian steppe that began around 5,000 years ago [4, 5]. We investigate the spatiotemporal spread of LP through an analysis of 14 warriors from the Tollense Bronze Age battlefield in northern Germany (∼3,200 before present, BP), the oldest large-scale conflict site north of the Alps. Genetic data indicate that these individuals represent a single unstructured Central/Northern European population. We complemented these data with genotypes of 18 individuals from the Bronze Age site Mokrin in Serbia (∼4,100 to ∼3,700 BP) and 37 individuals from Eastern Europe and the Pontic-Caspian Steppe region, predating both Bronze Age sites (∼5,980 to ∼3,980 BP). We infer low LP in all three regions, i.e., in northern Germany and South-eastern and Eastern Europe, suggesting that the surge of rs4988235 in Central and Northern Europe was unlikely caused by Steppe expansions. We estimate a selection coefficient of 0.06 and conclude that the selection was ongoing in various parts of Europe over the last 3,000 years

Early farmers from across Europe directly descended from Neolithic Aegeans

Farming and sedentism first appeared in southwestern Asia during the early Holocene and later spread to neighboring regions, including Europe, along multiple dispersal routes. Conspicuous uncertainties remain about the relative roles of migration, cultural diffusion, and admixture with local foragers in the early Neolithization of Europe. Here we present paleogenomic data for five Neolithic individuals from northern Greece and northwestern Turkey spanning the time and region of the earliest spread of farming into Europe. We use a novel approach to recalibrate raw reads and call genotypes from ancient DNA and observe striking genetic similarity both among Aegean early farmers and with those from across Europe. Our study demonstrates a direct genetic link between Mediterranean and Central European early farmers and those of Greece and Anatolia, extending the European Neolithic migratory chain all the way back to southwestern Asia

The genomic origins of the world’s first farmers

The precise genetic origins of the first Neolithic farming populations in Europe and Southwest Asia, as well as the processes and the timing of their differentiation, remain largely unknown. Demogenomic modeling of high-quality ancient genomes reveals that the early farmers of Anatolia and Europe emerged from a multiphase mixing of a Southwest Asian population with a strongly bottlenecked western hunter-gatherer population after the last glacial maximum. Moreover, the ancestors of the first farmers of Europe and Anatolia went through a period of extreme genetic drift during their westward range expansion, contributing highly to their genetic distinctiveness. This modeling elucidates the demographic processes at the root of the Neolithic transition and leads to a spatial interpretation of the population history of Southwest Asia and Europe during the late Pleistocene and early Holocene.Open access articleThis item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at [email protected]

Shape from 2D edge gradients

Abstract. This paper presents a novel strategy for rapid reconstruction of 3d surfaces based on 2d gradient directions. I.e., this method does not use triangulation for range data acquisition, but rather computes surface normals. These normals are 2d integrated and thus yield the desired surface coordinates; in addition they can be used to compute robust 3d features of free form surfaces. The reconstruction can be realized with uncalibrated systems by means of very fast and simple table look-up operations with moderate accuracy, or with calibrated systems with superior precision. 1

Shape from single stripe pattern illumination, L. Van Gool (Ed

Abstract. This paper presents a strategy for rapid reconstruction of surfaces in 3d which only uses a single camera shot of an object illuminated with a simple stripe pattern. With this respect, it is a meaningful extension of our ‘shape from 2d edge gradient ’ method introduced earlier. The reconstruction is based on determining stripe directions and stripe widths in the camera image in order to estimate surface orientation. I.e., this method does not use triangulation for range data acquisition, but rather computes surface normals. These normals can be 2d integrated and thus yield the surface coordinates; in addition they can be used to compute robust 3d features of free-form surfaces for object recognition, pose estimation, etc. The method is straightforward and very efficient by processing only one image and using only simple image processing operations.

Pose estimation of cylindrical fragments for semi−automatic bone fracture reduction

Abstract. We present an approach for estimating the relative transformations between fragments of a broken cylindrical structure in 3d. To solve this problem, we first measure the orientation and position of the cylinder axes for each fragment by an adapted kind of Hough Transformation. The cylinder axes are an important feature for separation of fractured areas and for calculation of an initial reposition solution (constraining 4 DOFs). After these processing steps, we compute the relative transformations between corresponding fragments by using well-known surface registration techniques, like 2d depths correlation and the ICP (Iterative Closest Point) algorithm. One goal of our project is to use the proposed method for estimation of relative transformations between fragments of fractured long bones for computer aided and semi-automatic bone alignment and fracture reduction in surgery. 1 Introduction and Related Work Axis detection and registration of fragments of a broken cylinder has an important field of application in computer aided and semi-automatic bone alignment and fractur

Face recognition from facial surface metric

Recently, a 3D face recognition approach based on geometric invariant signatures, has been proposed. The key idea is a representation of the facial surface, invariant to isometric deformations, such as those resulting from facial expressions. One important stage in the construction of the geometric invariants involves in measuring geodesic distances on triangulated surfaces, which is carried out by the fast marching on triangulated domains algorithm. Proposed here is a method that uses only the metric tensor of the surface for geodesic distance computation. That is, the explicit integration of the surface in 3D from its gradients is not needed for the recognition task. It enables the use of simple and cost-efficient 3D acquisition techniques such as photometric stereo. Avoiding the explicit surface reconstruction stage saves computational time and reduces numerical errors

Six-colour fluorescent imaging of lymphoid tissue based on colour addition theory

Multi-colour imaging of immunofluorescently labelled tissue using confocal microscopy was accomplished by using colour addition theory. This new technique includes several improvements for immunolabelling: (1) the co-localization of two or more markers on one cell for the identification of specific cell populations; (2) the co-localization of two fluorescent dyes from secondary reagents for the identification of the cells; (3) a multi-step staining protocol with two primary antibodies originating from the same host species or with two or three biotin-conjugated primary antibodies. After image acquisition, colour segmentation/unmixing are applied to the single multi-colour image to generate multi-pseudo-channels for individual or co-localized fluorescent dyes. With this new technique, we have been able to visualize six cell populations simultaneously in the mouse lymph node and intestine. The efficiency of this method has also been demonstrated in the three-dimensional reconstruction of thick sections from mouse ileum. Our method is simple, efficient, and may be indispensable in experimental cell and tissue studies requiring multiple immunolabelling