Phylogenetic analysis of the human ancient mitochondrial DNA [An article from: Journal of Archaeological Science]

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Description:
To identify the genealogy of human skeletal remains recovered from an archaeological site, we analyzed the coding region of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) in detail. This region is both genealogically important, and relatively impervious to postmortem damage. We also sequenced the segments of the control regions of mtDNA, and assigned the mtDNA under study to relevant haplogroups using the known mtDNA database. Thereafter, we classified each mtDNA into maternal lines according to the sequence polymorphism of the control and coding region. This approach is especially useful for ancient DNA analysis, because it enables us to identify the genealogy of the individuals with high level of certainty. Therefore, the genetic structure of the ancient individuals, their origins and temporal changes can be inferred more clearly and reliably. Moreover, erroneous recombination of the results, which is the major problem of the segmental analysis of mtDNA, can be monitored by looking out for the incongruence between the results by using haplogroup motif analysis.