Abstract
Radiocarbon dating is the gold-standard in archaeology to estimate the age of skeletons, a key to studying their origins. Half of all published ancient human genomes lack reliable and direct dates, which results in obscure and contradictory reports. We developed Temporal Population Structure (TPS), the first DNA-based dating method for ancient genomes ranging from the Upper Palaeolithic to modern-day samples and applied it to all 961 ancient Eurasians. We show that TPS predictions for radiocarbon-dated skeletons align with their known dates and correctly account for kin relationships. The TPS-dating of 359 poorly dated Eurasian samples resolves conflicts and sheds new light on disputed findings as illustrated by five test cases. We discuss the phenotypic traits of the Time Informative Markers (TIMs) that underlie TPS.
Summary TPS is a novel method to date humans from the Upper Palaeolithic to modern time from their DNA sequences.
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