Ranajit Das

TL;DR: The results suggest that AJs originated from a Slavo-Iranian confederation, which the Jews call “Ashkenazic” (i.e., “Scythian”), though these Jews probably spoke Persian and/or Ossete, compatible with linguistic evidence suggesting that Yiddish is a Slavic language created by Irano-Turko-Slavic Jewish merchants along the Silk Roads as a cryptic trade language.

TL;DR: The genetic relationships between Israeli Druze and both modern and ancient populations are investigated, finding Druze biogeographic affinity, migration patterns, time of emergence and genetic similarity to Near Eastern populations are highly suggestive of Armenian-Turkish ancestries for the proto-Druze.

TL;DR: The results reinforce the non-Levantine origins of AJs using ancient DNA from the Near East and the Levant and discuss how these findings advance three ongoing debates concerning (1) the historical meaning of the term “Ashkenaz;” (2) the genetic structure of AJ's and their geographical origins as inferred from multiple studies employing both modern and ancient DNA and original ancient DNA analyses; and (3) the development of Yiddish.

TL;DR: It is shown that aAIMs identified by a novel principal component analysis (PCA)-based method outperform all of the competing methods in classifying ancient individuals into populations and identifying admixed individuals.

TL;DR: The complete mitochondrial genomes of 1 Eastern and 1 Western gorilla are sequenced to provide the most accurate date for their mitochondrial divergence, and to analyze patterns of nucleotide substitutions that suggest living gorillas may provide a useful model for understanding isolation and migration in the authors' extinct relatives.