For thousands of years, the Iberian Peninsula — home now to Spain and Portugal — has served as a crossroads. Along with historical records and archaeological digs, researchers now have a new lens on Iberia’s past: DNA preserved in the region’s ancient skeletons. Archaeologists and geneticists are extracting genetic material spanning not just Iberia’s written history but its prehistory, too. “We wanted to bridge the ancient populations and the modern populations,” said Iñigo Olalde, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Olalde is the lead author of a paper published on Thursday in Science that analyzes the DNA of 271 ancient Iberians.

Source: The North Africa Journal March 14, 2019 18:00 UTC