What we can learn from ancient genomics – the Crafoord Academy Lecture 2016 with Eske Willerslev, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
What we can learn from ancient genomics
Eske Willerslev, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
I am interested in how we, as modern humans, obtained our contemporary genetic diversity, geographical distribution, and cultural variation. I am also trying to understand how early modern man began to impact the environment on a large scale. Over the past two decades my research group has addressed these questions using a combination of genomics and environmental DNA. In this presentation, I will take you through some of our recent findings focusing on the human population history of Europe, Asia, and the Americas, and the extinction of the big bodied Ice Age megafauna.
Eske Willerslev is Professor at the Universities of Cambridge and Copenhagen and a foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences (USA). He is particularly known for establishing the field of environmental DNA, where genetic information from higher plants and animals is obtained directly from environmental samples, and for sequencing the first ancient human genome and using these approaches to understand our genetic past.
Organizer: The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Crafoord Foundation, in collaboration with the Department of Biology, Lund University.