A way with words

I pride myself on having a fairly broad vocabulary. Now I'm no George Will, but I can throw the heavy lumber around when necessary. I had a word throw me off guard last night.

I was having trouble sleeping and was checking out a link to A.A. Aliev's paper Origin of Jewish Clusters of E1b1b1 (M35) haplogroup - The Russian Journal of Genetic Genealogy Vol 1, No. 1, 2010 ISSN: 1920-2989 when the word hit me.

I happen to be on a genetics board with the author and sent him this note:

I have a question in regard to this paper. What does "prevent" mean in the following sentence? Is this a typo or an anthropological term that I am not privy to? Does the author mean detect?

"Given that all listed subclades have been 

from the Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean, you can prevent their presence in the region even in the era of the formation of Jewish 

nation."

Robert

I got the following response:

prevent=precede, concede It means that these subclades were there before the era of the formation of Jewish nation Farroukh

I had to go to the books for this one. And he was right. A transitive verb, supposedly first used around the fifteenth century. Now I have egg on my face. Might not be able to face my learned cohorts again.

Prevent

ORIGIN late Middle English (in the sense [act in anticipation of] ): from Latin praevent- ‘preceded, hindered,’ from the verb praevenire, from prae ‘before’ + venire ‘come.’

I am not sure about the exact timing of late middle english but I had never seen the word used in this context. Will have to ask Latin prof Denis about this one. I don't think that his conjunction is correct but this might be a bit of wounded nitpicking on my part. Have any of you ever heard of the word being similarly used? In the last five hundred years anyway.