Reconstructing humanity’s ghosts: genetic evidence for interbreeding among archaic humans

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• Trevor Cousins
• Thursday 16 May 2024, 13:10-14:00
• Richard King room, Darwin College.

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Advances in technology allow a detailed view of an individual’s complete genome sequence. This enables researchers to reconstruct the last few million years of human evolution, revealing for example how archaic humans such as Neanderthals and Denisovans interbred with modern humans. Using statistical models, we find evidence for modern humans interbreeding with a “ghost” population, i.e. a group of archaic humans that are now extinct and from whom we have no direct genetic data. We estimate that this ghost population diverged from our ancestors _{1.5 million years ago, went extinct in the last} 300 thousand years, and that about 20% of every modern human’s genome derives from an interbreeding event with this group.

This talk is part of the Darwin College Science Seminars series.

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