Zooming into the ancient world by reconstructing the joint genealogies of modern and ancient humans

In recent years, we have gone from databases that store the genetic differences observed between hundreds of thousands of sequenced people to using this information to build the actual genetic trees that relate individuals through their shared ancestors back in time. These genetic trees describe how our genomes have evolved up to millions of years into the past. Additionally, sequencing of DNA from ancient human bone has enabled the direct observation of genomic change over past millennia and has unlocked numerous previously hidden genetic histories. In this talk, I will illustrate how we can unearth the human past from these data, ranging from ancient migrations out of Africa and subsequent mixtures with now extinct Neanderthals to waves of ancestry transformations in a nation’s recent past.