GeneaNet

Professor Hey, of Rutgers University, was quoted in Live Science as saying his method favoured 'actual genetic data over estimates used in previous calculations'. He said: 'The estimated effective size of the founding population for the New World is about 70 individuals.'

Archeological evidence supports his calculation that the initial settlement of North America occurred between 12,000 and 14,000 years ago. He said: 'The beauty of the new methodology is that it uses actual DNA sequences collected from Asian peoples and Native Americans, an approach that can provide a detailed portrait of historical populations.

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Julie Hunt knew her great-uncle was killed in World War I and that his body had never been found. But what she could never have imagined was that her grandfather’s brother Matthew Hepple finally would be formally identified through DNA testing.

He was one of hundreds of Australian soldiers whose remains were found 95 years after their death, buried at Fromelles. Not only did this bring closure for Ms Hunt and solve a long family mystery but it also gave her the opportunity to meet distant relatives for the first time.

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Five days after the passenger ship the Titanic sank, the crew of the rescue ship Mackay-Bennett pulled the body of a fair-haired, roughly 2-year-old boy out of the Atlantic Ocean on April 21, 1912. Along with many other victims, his body went to a cemetery in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where the crew of the Mackay-Bennett had a headstone dedicated to the "unknown child" placed over his grave.

When it sank, the Titanic took the lives of 1,497 of the 2,209 people aboard with it. Some bodies were recovered, but names remained elusive, while others are still missing. But researchers believe that they have finally resolved the identity of the unknown child -- concluding that he was 19-month-old Sidney Leslie Goodwin from England.

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A further 14 World War I Australian soldiers killed in the 1916 Battle of Fromelles have been identified. Veterans Affairs Minister Warren Snowdon said the diggers, originally from NSW, Victoria, Queensland and South Australia, were among 250 Australian and British soldiers recovered from mass graves in Pheasant Wood, France, in 2009.

Mr Snowdon said it brought the total number of Australians identified at Fromelles to 110. But, of the 250 recovered soldiers, 100 Australians and two Britons remain unnamed. The Battle of Fromelles on July 19, 1916, was the first action in which Australian troops fought on the Western Front. It proved disastrous.

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What would you do with a giant QR code—you know, the kind of URL you can scan with your phone—of your DNA ancestry? When I was asked this question, I didn't know the answer. Does anyone really have a need or want for a huge QR code that lets people see details about your family history? And for $440 (or more) a pop?

Balk at the price all you want, but someone is apparently buying these things. The company behind them, DNA 11, creates a number of different personalized portraits (some of which Ars has given away in the past, in fact), including standard DNA portraits, fingerprint portraits, and kiss portraits.

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Amelia Earhart's dried spit could help solve the longstanding mystery of the aviator's 1937 disappearance, according to scientists who plan to harvest her DNA from envelopes. Using Earhart's genes, a new project aims to create a genetic profile that could be used to test recent claims that her bones have been discovered.

Right now, "anyone can go and find a turtle shell and be like 'I found Amelia Earhart's remains,'" said Justin Long of Burnaby, Canada, whose family is partially funding the DNA project.

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Experts from the Smithsonian institution will spend Thursday and Friday taking DNA samples from remains found in a grave in a slave cemetery in Falls County that’s believed to be the final resting place of early Texas Ranger and Central Texas pioneer James Coryell.

This week, Texas Historical Commission archaeologists excavated the grave to unearth the remains from which the DNA samples will be taken. They’ll be compared to DNA samples from some of Coryell’s collateral relatives, who were found living outside of Texas.

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Top British archaeologists are urging the government to rethink a law requiring human remains be reburied, warning it risks undermining years of research into the island's ancient peoples and study of their DNA.

The row stems from the reinterpretation of a law introduced in 2008 by the Ministry of Justice. The rule states human bones discovered in England and Wales since that time, regardless of their age, must be re-interred after two years.

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Researching your family tree can only go back so far in time before records become patchy. Now genealogists from the University of Leicester are using DNA tests to trace Manx ancestry back to the Viking era.

Local men with popular Manx surnames are being asked to give a DNA sample to help researchers explore the links between Y chromosomes, surnames and common ancestry. The investigation starts on Saturday, 19 February 2011 at the Manx Museum.

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The islands of Polynesia were first inhabited around 3,000 years ago. The most commonly accepted view, based on archaeological and linguistic evidence as well as genetic studies, is that Pacific islanders were the latter part of a migration south and eastwards from Taiwan which began around 4,000 years ago.

But the Leeds research -- published February 3 in The American Journal of Human Genetics -- has found that the link to Taiwan does not stand up to scrutiny. In fact, the DNA of current Polynesians can be traced back to migrants from the Asian mainland who had already settled in islands close to New Guinea some 6-8,000 years ago.

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Descendants of Abraham Lincoln's assassin are pushing for a DNA test finally to resolve whether John Wilkes Booth escaped his well-recorded shooting death and lived for 40 years in Texas and Oklahoma.

Booth, an actor and Confederate sympathiser, shot the 16th President of the United States in the back of the head during a performance of Our American Cousin at Ford's Theatre in Washington DC.

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Three bone fragments found on a deserted South Pacific island are being analyzed to determine if they belong to Amelia Earhart — tests that could finally prove she died as a castaway after failing in her 1937 quest to become the first woman to fly around the world.

Scientists at the University of Oklahoma hope to extract DNA from the bones, which were found earlier this year by a Delaware group dedicated to the recovery of historic aircraft.

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Read also Amelia Earhart's Finger Bone Recovered?

When German archaeologists discovered bones in the tomb of Queen Eadgyth in Magdeburg Cathedral, they looked to Bristol to provide the crucial scientific evidence that the remains were indeed those of the English royal. Dr Alistair Pike in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology tells Hannah Johnson how tiny samples of tooth enamel proved the identity of a Saxon queen.

Teeth provide remarkable evidence about the early years of an individual’s life. The region where a person grew up can be traced in the tooth enamel laid down in their first 14 years because strontium and oxygen isotope ratios in the teeth reflect the food a person ate and the water they drank.

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Scientists tracing the genetic origins of an Icelandic family believe the first American arrived in Europe around the 10th century, a full five hundred years before Columbus set off on his first voyage of discovery in 1492.

Norse sagas suggest the Vikings discovered the Americas centuries before Columbus and the latest data seems to support the hypothesis that they may have brought American Indians back with them to northern Europe.

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