Great to see our PalaeoBARN project research on the 14,300 year old #dog forming part of the @bodleian.ox.ac.uk fabulous 'Pets and their People' exhibition. Also sharing a bonus pic of a mummified #cat which really felt like the emotional ❤️😻 ⭐ of the exhibit! 🐈‍⬛ 🐕‍🦺 🐾🐾 @gregerlarson.bsky.social #aDNA

Delighted to have been awarded an ERC Advanced Grant for 'Stocking the Past' which will investigate the balance between arable farming and stockkeeping in Neolithic and Bronze Age Britain and Ireland using a range of isotopic and genomic approaches with a great team. Should be fun!

New preprint! "Joint dog and wolf genealogies reveal the evolution of the canine genome" We build genealogies of dogs and wolves to find two strong mutation-rate pulses, GC-biased gene conversion, selection, and inter-species gene flow shaping the canine genome. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

We are advertising a 3-year Evolution Education Trust funded #PhD studentship at @ugiatucl.bsky.social UCL to investigate the genomic history of infectious diseases preserved within historical pathology collections. Details: www.findaphd.com/phds/project.... #findaphd #EET

If you're you have experience in working in animal / pathogen #aDNA and are interested in a postdoctoral position as part of my ERC Project HERDPATH, please DM/email me kevin[at]palaeome.org

New PhD student position in Population Genomics at the Günther Lab within the Human Evolution Program within the Department of Organismal Biology (Uppsala University, Sweden). Last application date:7 August 2026 www.uu.se/en/about-uu/...

🚨 PhD Studentship Alert 🚨 4-year DPhil in Genomic Medicine and Statistics, funded by the Royal Society *Reconstructing the evolutionary history of pathogens using ancient DNA* ☠️🧬🦠🐕🐖🐇 🇬🇧 UK/home students 📍 Centre for Human Genetics, University of Oxford ⏰ Fri, 17 July tinyurl.com/gms-rs-dphil

I wrote about AI in academia. "PhD-level thinking", LLM bias, grunt work, alignment, AGI, data center water use, AI politics -- something for everyone.

Looking for a postdoc to join my group at the NHM London & work on aDNA of dogs/wolves! jobs.nhm.ac.uk/Job/JobDetai...

Come join our aDNA community at Trinity College Dublin and explore medieval ruminant genomes! Funded PhD studentship in ancient animal genomics at Trinity College Dublin. Deadline 27th May 2026 Please see the information attached for full description and application process.

🚨 Interested in joining our board of trustees?🚨 4 trustees position will soon be vacated and we are seeking expression of interest! You can fill this form by the 30th of April: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... Any question? Contact us at [email protected]

I want a "conference" where every academic cooks a dish for everyone and we all talk about our work casually while cooking. People can sous chef for each other. We eat and talk about our work in progress. You submit an abstract and a recipe.

Yesterday in @nature.com, we presented the earliest evidence of dogs anywhere in the world — three puppies that were buried by Stone Age hunter-gatherers in Türkiye almost 16,000 years ago. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We (with @yanwong.bsky.social) are advertising a 3 year postdoc position for a project on ARG inference and methods! Based at Oxford stats. Closing date noon 7 April, full details at my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...

🧬 NEW JOB: @york-bioarch.bsky.social is hiring a Postdoc in Ancient DNA Work on the RoBMobS project to explore mobility and diversity in Roman Britain using genomic data. 💰 £37k - £39k ⏳ 34 months 📍 York, UK 📅 Apply by 24 March 2026 jobs.york.ac.uk/vacancy/post...

Are you interested in human DNA from ancient sediments? Do you want to do a PhD in Vienna? We have two open positions in our group! You can learn more and apply here (scroll down to the very bottom, ours are the last two listings): careers.univie.ac.at/en/praedoc/s...

Can safely way this is the craziest and coolest study I have led. We chart the evolution of sheeppox virus, finding it in the Eurasian steppe ~3700 years ago, and also in a LOT of parchment from medieval Europe (made from a range of animals skins!) #aDNA

Really excited to share our new paper on the Early Iron Age mass grave at Gomolava (9th c. BCE), a study I had the pleasure to work on during my PhD with an amazing group of co-authors across multiple disciplines. Open access link: www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧵👇

🧬SedaDNA Postdoc position💥 2 years Starts 2026, apply by 1st March. Join Aleks Pluskowski at Reading & me at NHM. jobs.reading.ac.uk/Job/JobDetai...

The story the evolution of height in populations of Europe has been a bit of rollercoaster, veering between natural selection or admixture with populations who had a higher genetic propensity to be taller by chance. This preprint goes back to natural selection... www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Why are Dutch people so tall? This has been a long-standing debate in genetics, with earlier studies questioned due to unaccounted for confounding. Great to be involved in a new study (link below) using within-family GWAS; we confirm that height has been under positive selection.

A new study from Anthropic finds that gains in coding efficiency when relying on AI assistance did did not meet statistical significance; AI use noticeably degraded programmers’ understanding of what they were doing. Incredible.

I had intended to post something about this new Google DeepMind paper that appeared yesterday in Nature, but the press coverage has added to what there is to say. So this is a long 🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Heritability = a statistical description of sources of interindividual variation in a specific set of people under a specific set of environmental conditions. It doesn't index a fixed underlying feature of human biology. A few lines in this paper acknowledge that but its overall framing may mislead.

Our work on the generalizability of polygenic scores (PGS) from the @arbelharpak.bsky.social Lab is now officially out! We examine the accuracy of PGS predictions at the individual level. We make 3 observations that expose gaps in our understanding of PGS “portability.” rdcu.be/e0LAr (1/27)

Cow Tools! We have lived alongside cows for nearly 10,000 years. We breed them and exploit them It is now, only now, that we have discovered THEY CAN USE TOOLS Here I describe our study (paper) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... in @currentbiology.bsky.social with @auersperga.bsky.social

Excited to share our new preprint from the @arbelharpak.bsky.social Lab! How do recruitment into genetic studies and study characteristics impact what we infer about the genetic bases of traits, and what are the consequences? (1/21) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

I am looking for a postdoc to develop high-performance algorithms in computational genomics. Email or DM me if interested. For more information, see hlilab.github.io/vacancies. RTs appreciated!

While stories of singular DNA changes that drove evolution of human brain/behaviour remain seductive, advances across multiple fields of biology cast doubt on such simplistic narratives of our origins. A new paper from my lab shows how biobanks may speak to this fundamental question.🧪 Explainer🧵👇1/n

I've spent all day struggling to write a single page of a popular science article. I bang away at a word processor; give up; start diagramming on paper. Take some notes; draft a few sentences in pen; return to the computer...and very slowly I figure out what I was trying to say in the first place.

Lovely to work with @blevinske.bsky.social, @paleogenomics.bsky.social & Verena Schuenemann on " Ancient DNA insights into diverse pathogens and their hosts"! Read it at rdcu.be/eSVPN

Our new ancient DNA paper has just been published! We present 28 new genomes from southern Africa - several of them high-coverage whole genomes. Exciting to be moving towards population-level representation of ancient southern African genetic diversity! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Our paper in the PNAS Special Feature on 🐕 is out! We demonstrated the accuracy of imputing ancient canid genomes, looked at inbreeding levels over the past 10,000 years and found genomic regions resistant to ROH which were enriched for immunity and chemosensory genes. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

What's that? 5 ancient doggy papers in 10 days is too many dogs? Can I interest you in some cats? Perhaps a complete retelling of cat domestication, dispersal, and replacement across Eurasia? As you wish! Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Cell Genomics www.cell.com/cell-genomic...

A PNAS Special Feature exclusively about dogs? Woof! Here are 3 of the 8 that we were involved with. Congrats to @lachiescarsbrook.bsky.social & @undeaddandy.bsky.social Dingoes! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... German Shepherds! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Imputation! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

🚨 PNAS Special Feature 2 🐕 We used ancient DNA and dietary isotopes to show that landscape modification and the introduction of European dogs impacted dingo populations across Australia. 🔗 Full paper here: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

🚨 PNAS Special Feature 🐕 We analysed genomes of historical German Shepherds to reveal how bottlenecks linked to WWII and the use of popular sires led to significant declines in genomic health. We also found an early 20th century wolf-dog hybrid! 🔗 Full paper here: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Our paper is out! Although wolves and dogs can interbreed and produce fertile offspring, hybridization between the two is rare. We found that most dogs today have low but detectable levels of post-domestication wolf ancestry that has shaped their evolution in human environments. tinyurl.com/yt4x4r7n

The invention of agriculture (around 9,000 years ago) spurred the rise of early states? NO. Our research www.nature.com/articles/s41... (with @drqueue.bsky.social) in @nathumbehav.nature.com supports an alternative theory that States almost invariably formed in societies that grew cereal grains.

Very thankful to the @royalsociety.org for the opportunity to start my own research group at the Big Data Institute, @ndm.ox.ac.uk, as a Royal Society University Research Fellow! royalsociety.org/news/2025/11...

Delighted to see our paper characterising the inbreeding history of dogs and wolves over the past 10,000 years published this week in @pnas.org. Work led by the excellent @katiabou.bsky.social, and co-supervised by me, Laurent Frantz and Fernando Racimo www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

We are recruiting! If you like evolutionary biology, microbial genomics, and host-pathogen interactions we have a PhD opening at @ugiatucl.bsky.social using population-scale metagenomics to map global phage diversity and uncover evolutionary signatures that could point to new antimicrobials.

⏰ The clock is ticking❗ LESS THAN 10 DAYS LEFT to submit your abstracts (30th Nov). Do it here👉 icp2026.palaeogenomics.org/abstracts/ Many of you are asking for the registration fees 💸. We are still working out the details, but we estimate 400-500€ for regular attendees and 300-400€ for students.

I wrote a little bit about the "missing heritability" question and several recent studies that have brought it to a close. A short 🧵

The 2026 EMBL symposium 'Reconstructing the human past using ancient and modern genomics' is live with a fantastic invited speaker lineup! Abstract deadline 9 June. If work is ongoing, plan for Heidelberg in September😉. Organised by Maanasa Raghavan, @matejahajdi.bsky.social, Choongwon Jeong & me.

Thrilled to finally share the magnum opus of my PhD that focuses on the genetic basis of evolutionary change! Specifically, we know we can map the genetic basis of a trait, but can we tell which genes will underlie the trait shift when it evolves? doi.org/10.1101/2025...

🚨 New paper alert 🚨 Our research, published today in Science, reveals remarkable concordance between human and dog genomes through time, highlighting how deeply intertwined our evolutionary histories have been over the past 11,000 years. 🔗 Read the full paper here: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

In the immortal words of Sir Mix-a-Lot: "And ugh, double-up, ugh, ugh". 2 doggy papers are so much better than 1. Both studies a testament to slow science & international collaboration between brilliant people. What it's all about. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

First time on Bsky and first big announcement! I am excited to announce that our new study explaining the missing heritability of many phenotypes using WGS data from ~347,000 UK Biobank participants has just been published in @Nature. Our manuscript is here: www.nature.com/articles/s41....

Excited to share our latest work on the factors that determine what genes we find (and don't find!) in GWAS and burden tests. We describe a critical concept that we call *specificity*. Led by Jeff Spence and Hakhamanesh Mostafavi: