Human evolution itself is a mystery. There are lots of obscurities that need to be explored to have an overall illustration of human evolution. Different stages have been constructed based on the fossil evidence, though there are missing links which hasn’t been rectified yet. In fact, the relationship or interaction between the extinct and extant hominids hasn’t been clearly depicted. The emergence of population genetics in the evolutionary biology particularly in the human evolutionary studies led to the development of new discipline ‘Archaeogenetics’ with which explains the human past through molecular population genetics.
Archaeogenetics’ is defined as defines as the study of the past by use of the techniques of molecular genetics (Renfrew and Boyle, 2000). This discipline targets to collect genetic information from the fossil hominids, makes it compared with those of present living human population groups and tries to decipher the genetic relationship of extinct and extant human population and overall the probable relations with the environmental factors through statistical models.
Different studies have been come up from Europe as a number of archaeological sites are discovered in the nineteenth and twentieth century (Trigger, 1979). The issues related with the human early demographic history are the main concerns of the Archaeogenetics. Besides this, it also concerns with the archaic pathogens that affects the health of extinct human through historical epidemics.
The significance of Archaeogenetics lies in the concept that it can shed light on the origins and geographical spread of prehistoric languages and also assist archaeologists in answering questions regarding the influence of population growth in the archaeological record (Forster and Renfrew, 2006).
As an example, mt DNA analysis of modern populations of South Asia, East Asia and Oceania reveals that there was large population expansion before the advent of microlith technology. Through molecular clock analysis, this expansion was dated to 38-28 ka ago [kiloannus (ka): a unit of time equivalent to 1000 years] while microlith technology is expected to started from 35–30 ka ago (Petraglia, 2009).