Kelly Elaine Blevins, PhD

The first paper of my PhD is out and #openaccess: Structural Violence and Physical Death at Tlatelolco: Selecting the Chronically Malnourished for Sacrifice at a Late Postclassic Mesoamerican City (1300–1521 CE) journals.upress.ufl.edu/bioarchaeology… 1/7

Review: Ancient DNA insights into diverse pathogens and their hosts by @Blevinske, María C. Ávila-Arcos, Verena J. Schuenemann & Anne C. Stone go.nature.com/4q6DZPn

Discover our results of the largest ancient DNA study ever conducted on a single burial site 🧬: 400 skeletons from the Belgian city Sint-Truiden (8th–18th century). A unique glimpse into 1000 years of genetic history. (1/9) @CHG_CME @KU_Leuven

#WithoutNSF my lab won’t receive the critical funding it needs to continue studying how ancient pathogens adapted to human hosts. #NSF supports our country's leadership in science and innovation. #SupportNSF #SaveNSF youtube.com/watch?v=XxOE75…

#MetagenomicsMonday🧬 Exploring the dominant Streptococcus phylogenetic clades in samples from multiple oral sites and from ancient and modern-day humans and non-human primates! nature.com/articles/s4152…

Did you get a chance to read the thread on our new @NatureHumBehav paper on SES yet? If not, don't worry, I have something better for you! Check out this comic by the amazing @Lizah_Aart The complete comic here: communities.springernature.com/posts/are-we-b… You can also scroll this thread 👇🏾

Next week, the @ARCHE_Griffith Seminar Series is continuing with "Fire, Society and Culture: New evidence from 400,000 year old sites in the UK" Presented by Professor Nick Ashton. Date: Thursday 3rd April Time: 12pm Room: N78_-1.23 Brisbane South (Nathan)

I wrote about how population stratification in genetic analyses led to a decade of false findings and almost certainly continues to bias emerging results. But we are starting to have statistical tools to sniff it out. A 🧵:

In a new paper, colleagues and I raise concerns about the conclusions and data from Zhang et al 2022, a paper which reported that they obtained DNA from a 14-thousand-year-old individual from Red Deer Cave in Yunnan China referred to as ‘Mengzi Ren’ (MZR) (Zhang et al Fig 1) 1/15

aDNA/aeDNA folks: tired of eyeballing hundreds of damage plots? I am excited to introduce AdDeam—a tool to rapidly generate damage profiles, cluster them, and spot outliers. biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

In every civilization, people end up sorted into levels of socio-economic status (SES). We explore the history, present, and future of scientific research on the complicated relationship between SES and DNA in @NatureHumBehav 💰🧬🎓 Link: rdcu.be/efacK Thread below 👇🏽

Excited to share our recent preprint on quantifying pandemic potential from experimental transmission studies, spearheaded by grad student Elizabeth Somsen in my group and in collab with Troy Sutton & lab at Penn State and Anice Lowen at Emory: biorxiv.org/content/10.110….

Attention ancient environmental DNA folks. In our recent preprint, we provide coordinates of microbial-like regions (contaminated or evolutionary conserved or convergent) for 4,294 eukaryotic reference genomes.

New paper! In the Cambridge Archaeological Journal we present a fresh analysis of the spectacular Bronze Age cemetery at Başur Höyük and its implications for “early state formation” - open-access, #aDNA, ritual killings, teenagers, and “cosmopolitics” 🏺 shorturl.at/UvmnG

I wrote about the "health freedom" movement currentaffairs.org/news/health-fr…

Published at Nature today.

I write about this cool fossil face found in Spanish cave belongs to first known Western European | Science | AAAS science.org/content/articl…

The best opening slide doesn't exi...

Just published! "The problems with genetic essentialism, determinism, and reductionism." karger.com/hde/article-pd…

#Bioinformatics is a powerful tool for #biologists working with #GenomicsData🧬 Our free online courses on bioinformatics workflows are available on demand until February 2026. From 10-30 March 2025, join our educators for a limited facilitation period in the comments 🔽

In case you missed this remarkable archaeological news from earlier this week: Track marks beside footprints show that some of the earliest known people in the Americas were constructing and dragging travois. johnhawks.net/weblog/ancient…