AADR: A Curated Compendium of Ancient Human Genomes

The Allen Ancient DNA Resource (AADR) is a uniformly curated dataset of thousands of ancient and present-day human individuals. It provides genotypes at up to 2 million positions in the genome, reprocessed from raw sequencing files to enable co-analysis across studies. This resource is designed for scientists analyzing population history and natural selection.

Use Cases

• Analyzing population history based on uniformly processed genotypes from thousands of individuals.
• Studying natural selection by comparing ancient and present-day genomes across up to 2 million positions.
• Conducting meta-analyses of ancient DNA datasets, as the resource facilitates co-analysis of disparate studies.
• Investigating human migration and admixture patterns using a curated compendium of ancient samples.

Strengths

• Contains genotypes from thousands of ancient and present-day individuals.
• Provides uniform curation and reprocessing of raw data (BAM/FASTQ) to reduce ancient DNA damage artifacts.
• Genotypes are called at an expanded set of up to 2 million positions in the genome (hg19 coordinates).

Limitations

• Genotypes are not a perfect match to those in original publications due to uniform reprocessing.
• Key metadata such as exact row count, column names, and license are not provided in the sources.
• Sources mention different version numbers and release dates (e.g., V12 in 2026 vs. V9 in 2024), indicating potential version conflicts.

Provenance

Source

Harvard Dataverse, authored by Swapan Mallick and David Reich.

Collection Method

Reprocessed from BAM or FASTQ files from original publications, with uniform trimming and genotype calling.

Freshness

2026-06-08