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Age assessment of migrants is crucial, particularly for unaccompanied foreign minors, a population facing legal, social, and humanitarian challenges. Despite existing guidelines, there is no unified protocol in Europe for age assessment. The Forensic Anthropology Society of Europe (FASE) conducted a comprehensive questionnaire to understand age estimation practices in Europe. The questionnaire had sections focusing on the professional background of respondents, annual assessment numbers, requesting parties and reasons, types of examinations conducted (e.g., physical, radiological), followed protocols, age estimation methods, and questions on how age estimates are reported. The questionnaire's findings reveal extensive engagement of the forensic community in age assessment in the living, emphasizing multidisciplinary approaches. However, there seems to be an incomplete appreciation of AGFAD guidelines. Commonalities exist in examination methodologies and imaging tests. However, discrepancies emerged among respondents regarding sexual maturity assessment and reporting assessment results. Given the increasing importance of age assessment, especially for migrant child protection, the study stresses the need for a unified protocol across European countries. This can only be achieved if EU Member States wholeheartedly embrace the fundamental principles outlined in EU Directives and conduct medical age assessments aligned with recognized standards such as the AGFAD guidelines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the goals of the Forensic Anthropology Society of Europe (FASE) is to map the existing education and practice opportunities in the field of forensic anthropology in order to support the development of the discipline and to optimize the training courses provided by the Society. To address this goal, an online questionnaire was sent to European and South African practitioners of forensic anthropology and related disciplines in 2016. The results of the questionnaire showed that the status and roles of forensic anthropologists vary depending on the national legal systems, education, and employment status of the practitioners. Despite the fact that the expertise of forensic anthropologists has been increasingly requested in a variety of investigations and the spectrum of tasks has become broader, including identification of living persons, specialized education in forensic anthropology is still restricted to a few graduate and postgraduate programs in European countries and to annual FASE courses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Bronze Age of Eurasia (around 3000-1000 BC) was a period of major cultural changes. However, there is debate about whether these changes resulted from the circulation of ideas or from human migrations, potentially also facilitating the spread of languages and certain phenotypic traits. We investigated this by using new, improved methods to sequence low-coverage genomes from 101 ancient humans from across Eurasia. We show that the Bronze Age was a highly dynamic period involving large-scale population migrations and replacements, responsible for shaping major parts of present-day demographic structure in both Europe and Asia. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesized spread of Indo-European languages during the Early Bronze Age. We also demonstrate that light skin pigmentation in Europeans was already present at high frequency in the Bronze Age, but not lactose tolerance, indicating a more recent onset of positive selection on lactose tolerance than previously thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identified (documented) osteological collections represent an important resource in the development of forensic anthropology standards and methods as well as a precious tool for learning and training of practitioners. Even though the number of papers presenting identified collections worldwide increases, many of the collections have still not been divulged to the scientific community in sufficient detail to ascertain their exact number. The Forensic Anthropology Society of Europe (FASE) therefore developed a tool that goes beyond sporadic publications: the FASE Map of Identified Osteological Collections, which is freely accessible and continuously updated and revised. The online map is available at http://forensicanthropology.eu/osteological-collections/. The map of skeletal collections was created in 2017 and currently displays information on 153 identified osteological collections (43 of them categorized as contemporary) located in 41 different countries. This article offers a short analysis of the type, geographical location and content of the collections included in the map. The aim of this article and the map as such is to provide a useful resource to facilitate research planning and teaching in forensic anthropology and related disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Western Eurasia witnessed several large-scale human migrations during the Holocene 1-5 . Here, to investigate the cross-continental effects of these migrations, we shotgun-sequenced 317 genomes-mainly from the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods-from across northern and western Eurasia. These were imputed alongside published data to obtain diploid genotypes from more than 1,600 ancient humans. Our analyses revealed a 'great divide' genomic boundary extending from the Black Sea to the Baltic. Mesolithic hunter-gatherers were highly genetically differentiated east and west of this zone, and the effect of the neolithization was equally disparate. Large-scale ancestry shifts occurred in the west as farming was introduced, including near-total replacement of hunter-gatherers in many areas, whereas no substantial ancestry shifts happened east of the zone during the same period. Similarly, relatedness decreased in the west from the Neolithic transition onwards, whereas, east of the Urals, relatedness remained high until around 4,000 BP, consistent with the persistence of localized groups of hunter-gatherers. The boundary dissolved when Yamnaya-related ancestry spread across western Eurasia around 5,000 BP, resulting in a second major turnover that reached most parts of Europe within a 1,000-year span. The genetic origin and fate of the Yamnaya have remained elusive, but we show that hunter-gatherers from the Middle Don region contributed ancestry to them. Yamnaya groups later admixed with individuals associated with the Globular Amphora culture before expanding into Europe. Similar turnovers occurred in western Siberia, where we report new genomic data from a 'Neolithic steppe' cline spanning the Siberian forest steppe to Lake Baikal. These prehistoric migrations had profound and lasting effects on the genetic diversity of Eurasian populations., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

During the 12 th and 13 th centuries, numerous leprosy hospitals were founded in Europe. Given that leprosy was not considered infectious, this may reflect social dimensions of the disease. Aiming at exploring the impact of leprosy on medieval people and the organisation of the Danish leprosarium at Næstved, we reconstructed the diet of twenty patients using stable isotopes, and compared our results with relevant historical data. The isotope results revealed a terrestrial C 3 diet with a small contribution of aquatic foods. Contrary to historical evidence of daily fish consumption in the leprosy hospital, only six individuals consumed relatively large amounts of freshwater fish. Leprosaria have been considered monastic institutions, and thus a varied diet, poor in aquatic protein, questions the monastic nature of the hospital and points to a social stratification. A multi-isotope analysis of a larger sample set would add to our understanding of the diet of the leprosy patients, as well as their treatment in the leprosarium .

This study reports the results of a collaborative study undertaken by two independent research groups to (a) confirm recent PCR-based detection of Yersinia pestis DNA in human teeth from medieval plague victims in France, and (b) to extend these observations over five different European burial sites believed to contain plague victims dating from the late 13th to 17th centuries. Several different sets of primers were used, including those previously documented to yield positive results on ancient DNA extracts. No Y. pestis DNA could be amplified from DNA extracted from 108 teeth belonging to 61 individuals, despite the amplification of numerous other bacterial DNA sequences. Several methods of extracting dentine prior to the DNA extraction were also compared. PCR for bacterial 16S rDNA indicated the presence of multiple bacterial species in 23 out of 27 teeth DNA extracts where dentine was extracted using previously described methods. In comparison, positive results were obtained from only five out of 44 teeth DNA extracts for which a novel contamination-minimizing embedding technique was used. Therefore, high levels of environmental bacterial DNA are present in DNA extracts where previously described methods of tooth manipulation are used. To conclude, the absence of Y. pestis-specific DNA in an exhaustive search using specimens from multiple putative European plague burial sites does not allow us to confirm the identification of Y. pestis as the aetiological agent of the Black Death and subsequent plagues. In addition, the utility of the published tooth-based ancient DNA technique used to diagnose fatal bacteraemias in historical epidemics still awaits independent corroboration.