Reconstructing the Human Past – Using Ancient and Modern Genomics

Symposium Overview

The study of population genetic variation and the sequencing of ancient DNA represent promising new avenues for investigating human history and our evolutionary past. Population-scale sequencing projects investigating human diversity have provided us with more than a million genome wide datasets that allowed new insights into patterns of human variation and mobility, while others have obtained genome wide data from thousands of ancient human skeletons, allowing the investigation of human evolution in action and providing direct insights into population genetic dynamics in situ. Large-scale genetic variation data sets can now be integrated with genomics data from ancient remains and history records to provide novel insights into human history, cultural evolution and the genetic history of societies. Ancient DNA was furthermore used to reconstruct genomic variation of historic pathogens as well as oral and gut microbiomes in order to provide molecular fossils to study microbial evolution through time. This meeting will involve scientists from genomics, bioinformatics, microbiology, anthropology, archaeology and historians and may initiate future interactions in this exciting and timely new research area that has the potential to change the way we think about our human past and how we might study genetic variation in the future.