Biology subjects

Neff, N. C.

Publications and source records attributed to Neff, N. C..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Buried in two places: Lineages from elite Maya tombs also found in distant caves

Classic Maya societies (250-900 CE) carved out urban centers in the rainforest reaching population heights and political complexity previously unknown in the Mesoamerican tropics. Kinship was a central feature of the social fabric, and rulership was legitimized through claims of direct descent from mythical ancestors. Mortuary practices kept the dead close to the living, and ancestor veneration sometimes produced complex deposits of disarticulated remains that are difficult to identify and whose biological relationships to one another cannot be understood without genetic data. We screened 487 human tooth and bone samples and successfully generated genome-wide data for 430 of them. Of these, 341 samples representing 107 distinct individuals were recovered from both elite and non-elite tombs in a Classic period kingdom (250-900) CE in the rugged Maya Mountains of Belize. Remarkably, 24 of these individuals have skeletal elements in both an elite tomb and in a ritual tooth cache in a distant cave located 26.5km away on the other side of the Maya Mountains. These results indicate that elite lineages created ancestors from their deceased relatives in geographically expansive ways and highlights the importance of caves in the belief system of Classic Maya elites.

genetics↗

bioRxiv2026

Tracing mobility among Eneolithic-Bronze Age Kurgan populations in the North Pontic steppe

Five millennia ago, nomadic people from the North Pontic steppe left a profound impact on the course of Eurasian prehistory. However, little is known about their mobility patterns within their home region. To address this knowledge gap, we conducted a survey of the strontium isotope landscape of people interred in the 4th-3rd millennium BCE burial mounds (kurgans) of the western part of the North Pontic steppe. By analyzing the strontium signature in human bone and dentin, we established strontium baseline values for the region. We subsequently correlated enamel strontium ratios from 25 selected individuals with the baseline obtained and with published strontium data across the North Pontic steppe. Enamel strontium ratios show that some individuals interred in the northwest North Pontic fall within the regional baseline range, whereas others overlap with values reported for the eastern North Pontic steppe. In conjunction with carbon ({delta}13C) and nitrogen ({delta}15N) stable isotope data, we further determined that some individuals interred in the western Pontic steppe either spent the later part of life in the west Caspian steppe or were affected by physiological stress during lifetime. By integrating our data with published isotopic datasets, we produced a first baseline heatmap of the North Pontic steppe for the c. 4000-2000 BCE chronological period.

evolutionary biology↗

bioRxiv2022

Genome-wide data from medieval German Jews show that the Ashkenazi founder event pre-dated the 14th century

We report genome-wide data for 33 Ashkenazi Jews (AJ), dated to the 14th century, following a salvage excavation at the medieval Jewish cemetery of Erfurt, Germany. The Erfurt individuals are genetically similar to modern AJ and have substantial Southern European ancestry, but they show more variability in Eastern European-related ancestry than modern AJ. A third of the Erfurt individuals carried the same nearly-AJ-specific mitochondrial haplogroup and eight carried pathogenic variants known to affect AJ today. These observations, together with high levels of runs of homozygosity, suggest that the Erfurt community had already experienced the major reduction in size that affected modern AJ. However, the Erfurt bottleneck was more severe, implying substructure in medieval AJ. Together, our results suggest that the AJ founder event and the acquisition of the main sources of ancestry pre-dated the 14th century and highlight late medieval genetic heterogeneity no longer present in modern AJ.

genetics↗