Researchers can bring together a picture of how people moved across the world by looking at changes in their DNA, but this becomes a lot harder when historical groups of people are genetically very similar. 

In research published in Nature, researchers report a new data analysis method called Twigstats, which allows the differences between genetically similar groups to be measured more precisely, revealing previously unknown details of migrations in Europe.

They applied the new method to over 1500 European genomes (a person’s complete set of DNA) from people who lived primarily during the first millennium AD (year 1 to 1000), encompassing the Iron Age, the fall of the Roman Empire, the early medieval ‘Migration Period’ and the Viking Age.

Read more about the team's work here: https://www.crick.ac.uk/news-and-reports/2025-01-01_ancient-dna-unlocks-new-understanding-of-migrations-in-the-first-millennium-ad