Ancient DNA on the Map: Where and When the World's Published Ancient Human Genomes Lived

I place every ancient individual in the Allen Ancient DNA Resource (AADR), release v66.p1, on a map by burial place and date, and use the archive's own annotations to describe its coverage and two well known episodes of European prehistory. Of 17,629 ancient individuals, 16,496 (94%) have at least one data set that passes the archive's quality assessment. They come from 3,664 sites in 127 present-day countries and span 43,925 BCE to 1890 CE, though half lived after 450 BCE; 80% were first published in 2020 or later. Sampling is heavily skewed: 68.4% of located modern humans were buried in Europe, which holds 9.2% of today's population and 7.5% of the land, while Africa supplies 1.9% for 17.1% of the population. The earliest individuals labelled Neolithic in each of 24 countries of Europe and Anatolia become later with distance from central Anatolia, by 0.88 years per kilometre (r = 0.75), an apparent spread of about 1.1 km a year. Y chromosome haplogroups, used here as a proxy for male lines and not for ancestry, change abruptly around 2500 BCE: in Britain none of 76 men dated before 2500 BCE carries R1b, against 50 of 56 (89.3%) from 2500 to 1500 BCE, and in Iberia, Scandinavia and central Europe R1b and R1a together rise from under 5% of men before 3000 BCE to at least half after 2500 BCE.

Interactive version: https://maps.tristanhotham.com/ancient-dna/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/ancient-dna. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/31/ancient-dna/.

Data: Allen Ancient DNA Resource (AADR) v66.p1, Mallick et al., Harvard Dataverse, doi:10.7910/DVN/FFIDCW (CC0 1.0).