Ilan Gronau: "Secrets from the Neanderthal genome"

Individual genome sequences hold invaluable information about our evolutionary past, and recent advances in sequencing technology has made this type of data increasingly available. One of the greatest leaps made in the past ten years has been in our ability to sequence DNA from bones that are tens of thousands of years old. This ability has allowed researchers for the first time to directly study extinct human groups such as the mysterious Neanderthals. However, since high quality genomes sequenced from ancient DNA are still scarce, extracting evolutionary information from them requires the development and use of sophisticated computational methods.

In this talk I will describe our recent study of the Neanderthal genome. The first draft genome published in 2010 provided the first conclusive evidence for interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans. Since the initial study, additional genomes have been sequenced and analyzed and they all provided supporting evidence for interbreeding. The possibility that our ancestors mated with Neanderthals is now a well-established fact, but the joint history of modern humans and Neanderthals remains largely obscure. The objective of our re-analysis attempt was to reconstruct a detailed history of demographic changes in Neanderthals and modern humans. I will briefly describe the computational approach we took, and will focus most of the talk on our main findings and how we established them. The most intriguing finding surprisingly had less to do with Neanderthals and more to do with a cryptic group of early modern humans that inhabited the Middle East more than 100,000 years ago.

The talk requires no previous knowledge in biology and contains cool photos of bones and caves.