Corroborating written history with ancient DNA: The case of the Well-man described in an Old Norse .

The potential of ancient DNA analyses to provide independent sources of information about events in the historical record remains to be demonstrated. Here we apply palaeogenomic analysis to human remains excavated from a medieval well at the ruins of Sverresborg Castle in central Norway. In , the Old Norse of King Sverre Sigurdsson, one passage details a 1197-CE raid on the castle and mentions a dead man thrown into the well.

The population genomic legacy of the second plague pandemic.

Human populations have been shaped by catastrophes that may have left long-lasting signatures in their genomes. One notable example is the second plague pandemic that entered Europe in ca. 1,347 CE and repeatedly returned for over 300 years, with typical village and town mortality estimated at 10%-40%.

Multi-omic detection of in archaeological human dental calculus.

Mineralized dental plaque (calculus) has proven to be an excellent source of ancient biomolecules. Here we present a genome (6.6-fold), the causative agent of leprosy, recovered via shotgun sequencing of sixteenth-century human dental calculus from an individual from Trondheim, Norway.