Jasmin Rees PhD chapter as a paper just out at the AJHG @ajhgnews.bsky.social, with Sergi Castellano, who first envisioned the study. Jas investigated signatures of human local genetic adaptation in hundreds of micronutrient-associated genes.

Excited to share that I’ve started as Associate Professor at the Technical University of Denmark! 🧑‍🎓 I also received an a NNF Emerging Investigator grant to use genomics + machine learning to study extinction. 👉 PhD & Postdoc positions coming soon — follow for updates! Reposts appreciated 🙏

Anglo-Saxons with West African roots: DNA analysis of 7th century burials reported in @antiquity.ac.uk today reveals long-distance connections reached across continents and cultures. Read about it @science.org:

#Population history of the Southern #Caucasus: Archaeogenetic study generates #DNA transect spanning nearly 5,000 years. In @cellpress.bsky.social by Eirini Skourtanioti, Xiaowen Jia, @hringbauer.bsky.social & an intl. team. #PopulationGenetics More: tinyurl.com/8r39ywfu & doi.org/10.1016/j.ce...

Our aDNA time transect centered on modern Georgia is out! 🧬 Genetic continuity over 5000 years, but some Bronze Age gene flow and urban outliers since Antiquity - including some with artificially deformed skulls 💀 linked by IBD segments to Asian nomads. #aDNA #PopGen www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Was Rapa Nui less isolated than thought? ⏬️ There is also genetic evidence of late inter-island contacts: When re-modelling the Ioannidis et al 2020 split dates with a corrected model we show that their genetic "settlement" dates actually reflect later movements www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

#SMBE2025 Symposium 27: Population genetics through time session B 🔗 smbe2025.scimeeting.cn/en/web/program/25070

At long last, scientists have a nearly complete cranium from hominins known as Denisovans. scim.ag/4e7QdT4

A 4-year postdoc position in population genomics is available in my group at the University of East Anglia, to work on a project sequencing a thousand fox genomes across rural and urban environments in the UK. vacancies.uea.ac.uk/vacancies/15...

🧵1/n ✨🔮✨ Meet (y)our instructors of this year's #HAAMsummerschool 👇 #aDNA #course #humanpopgen

We have updated our preprint about 850,000 person UK-Danish haplotype sharing - sheding light on the rich history each person carries with them in their DNA and comparing this to historical records. Xiaolei Zhang postdoc in my group led this work. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Planning to apply for #research #funding from the ERC? From the next application rounds, expect changes to the: • proposal structure • evaluation process • extra funding you can request • eligibility for Starting & Consolidator #Grants (from 2027) More 👇 europa.eu/!RPHWvv

Now published in PNAS: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Scientists used to think diseases that jump from animals to people really took off when people started domesticating cattle, sheep and goats 11,000 years ago. A new look at ancient bacterial DNA in @science.org by @poojaswali.bsky.social and colleagues suggests the pivotal moment came much later.

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) @kuleuvenuniversity.bsky.social

This ancient Middle Eastern civilization that developed an early alphabet spread its culture far and wide — but not its DNA https://go.nature.com/3Rx0f63

Phoenician-Punic civilization: Their #culture spread across the #Mediterranean mainly by a dynamic process of cultural transmission & assimilation. New study by @hringbauer.bsky.social, Ilan Gronau, David Reich & colleagues in @nature.com. #aDNA tinyurl.com/32j6wrjk & www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The Phoenicians used mastery of the seas to spread their culture across the pre-Roman Mediterranean - but a new study of ancient DNA by @hringbauer.bsky.social & colleagues shows mass migration wasn't part of the package: www.science.org/content/arti... @science.org

Check out our ancient DNA paper on the maritime Punic civilization! 🦴🧬🌊 We find that their Levantine Phoenician cultural ancestors contributed surprisingly little ancestry to Punic sites in the central and western Mediterranean! (1/4) doi.org/10.1038/s415... #aDNA #PopGen #Punic #Phoenician

So excited to see this paper from @nadasalem.bsky.social, @hringbauer.bsky.social & team using our Twist aDNA panel: “Ancient DNA from the Green Sahara reveals ancestral North African lineage.” Congratulations to the authors! 🧬 @twistbioscience.com

Colossal is back with their totally BS claims. They reverse engineered snps into 14 GENES and claim they changed a grey wolf into a dire wolf. 1/n time.com/7274542/colo...

For 5,000 years, the Sahara was dotted with lakes and crisscrossed by rivers, populated by giraffes, hippos, elephants, fish – and people. A new study from @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social geneticist @nadasalem.bsky.social and colleagues reveals where they came from. @science.org

A great thread by the Green Sahara aDNA study's lead author @nadasalem.bsky.social ⬇️

Alte #Genome aus der Grünen #Sahara entschlüsselt. Intl. Team um @nadasalem.bsky.social, @hringbauer.bsky.social & Johannes Krause enthüllt eine lange isolierte nordafrikanische Abstammungslinie aus der Zentralsahara während der African Humid Period vor über 7.000 Jahren. www.mpg.de/24410386/032...

Ancient genomes from the Green #Sahara. Study led by @nadasalem.bsky.social, @hringbauer.bsky.social & Johannes Krause reveals a long-isolated North African human lineage in the Central Sahara during the African Humid Period over 7,000 years ago. tinyurl.com/43maxc7k & www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Our study analyzing the DNA of ~7ky-old Pastoralists from the "Green Sahara" is out! Who were these people, and how did herding spread into the region when the present-day desert was dotted with water bodies? 🧬🦴🏜️ (1/7) #PopGen #GreenSahara #aDNA www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Oh wow!👀 Calling IBD on SNP array data of 370,000 Danes - an impressive 6.2 (!!) percent of Denmark's present-day population 🇩🇰 Revealing fascinating population genetic fine-structure from recent centuries, all through the powerful lens of long shared haplotypes. 🧬

New aDNA preprint looking at 5th-7th century CE cemeteries from across present-day southern Germany. Generation-by-generation assimilation of people with diverse ancestries from across Western Eurasia as (presumably) formerly-Romanised populations move and mix. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Europe as “a haven” for US researcher - The EU’s research funding bodies are thinking of ways to welcome US scientists and European ex-patriots who might be looking for a more sympathetic place to work now that Donald Trump is in the White House #AcademicSky 🧪 sciencebusiness.net/internationa...

I had a great visit to the MPI for evolutionary anthropology yesterday to give a talk on 'Evolution Evolving'. Thanks to my wonderful host Laurel Fogarty and everyone who met with me and attended my talk. Such interesting work going on there!

An important new paper by @beademarch.bsky.social and her team challenges how we use ancient proteins to study the past. Analysis of 1,832 sequences from waterfowl (ducks & geese) reveals why palaeoproteomics isn't the simple solution we hoped for... 👇🧵 1/4 www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-5...

Huge congratulations to the awesome Dr. Yilei Huang on his stellar PhD defense! 🌟👏🎉 Supervising one's first PhD student is truly special, and I got so incredibly lucky to have worked with Yilei (and the entire Archaeogenetics department @MPI-EVA Leipzig).

New paper with Sarthak Mishra! Maybe it will bring you some joy given all this (waves arms around). "Estimating recombination using only the allele frequency spectrum" 1/2 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Big aDNA study led by the fantastic @iosiflazaridis.bsky.social that helps to resolve the spread of Indo-European languages. 🗣🧬🌍 Includes genomes of 211 Yamnaya (~3000 BCE) from the Steppes between Hungary and central Asia - revealing a dramatic demographic expansion and extreme mobility. #PopGen

Our papers, out today in @nature.com, show how ancient DNA from the Eneolithic and Bronze Age steppe points to a North Pontic origin of the Indo-European language family and a Caucasus-Lower Volga (CLV) origin of Indo-Anatolian (inclusive of the now extinct Anatolian languages). 1/

If you need another break from current news, come with me 7000 years ago to search for the first speakers of Indo-European languages. 🧪 Gift link: nyti.ms/42ILio5

Indo-European languages are spoken by half the people in the world today. The search for their origins has obsessed scholars for centuries. New @nature.com papers by @iosiflazaridis.bsky.social and others use ancient DNA to pinpoint where Indo-European got its start, and how it may have spread.

In other contexts, such as in the search for rare, deleterious variants, an emphasis on ancestry groups is unwarranted. In particular, while rare nucleotide variants are often described as “ancestry-specific”, they will in fact be found in large enough samples of any ancestry.

😂

How we hunt viruses in the museum: scilog.fwf.ac.at/en/magazine/...

My bluesky debut! One week to the submission deadline for SMBE 2025, Beijing 20-24 July smbe2025.scimeeting.cn @anaignatieva.bsky.social and I are organising a symposium on popgen through time: using ARGs, aDNA, or otherwise to understand the evolutionary processes that shape genomes through time.

In new study, we find dramatic differences in specificities of serum neutralizing antibodies in infants w single infection by a recent SARS-CoV-2 strain versus adults/children imprinted by an early viral strain. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

"the science of extreme longevity continues as an immense joke." www.nytimes.com/2025/01/20/o...

Check out our new research in NPJ Biofilms and Microbiomes on the surprising patterns of oral streptococci variation in humans and the clues they encode for understanding human evolution and the recent impacts of oral hygiene. A big congratulations to Irina Velsko! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

It’s been four hours since the TikTok ban, and I have already written and published my first Linux book, and learned Chinese. I am now going out for a midnight run, and then I will make a protein shake.

Check out our Ancient Genomics Lab, including @pontus-skoglund.bsky.social, @boothicus.bsky.social and Frankie Tait, on tonight’s new episode of Digging for Britain. 🦴 Watch it now on iPlayer (from 46:00), or tune in to BBC Two at 20:00. www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/epis...

Y'all, there is now a Paperpile extension for Word. This should be useful for a lot of us who have heavy Word users and heavy Google Doc users on the same writing teams. paperpile.com/word-plugin/

Last days to apply for this PhD position in Computational Population Genetics @MPI_EVA_Leipzig (the deadline is January 15th)!

Thrilled to have been a part of this study led by @aidaandres.bsky.social that finds evidence of genetic adaptation in chimpanzees to different habitats. Most notably signatures of positive selection in chimpanzees underlie resistance to malaria in humans (GYPA and HBB).

"Ancient DNA reveals family ties" is named on of the top 10 Science Break-throughs in 2024 by Science (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...). Our work on early Celtic princely burials and their discovered close kinship gets mentioned, too! #ancientDNA #science