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0:00
Hi, welcome everyone.
I'm Mattias Jakobsson.
I'm Professor of Genetics
at Uppsala University,
and I will be talking
about ancient DNA in
the human evolutionary inference.
And I'm mainly going to be focusing
on anatomically modern humans,
and what we actually can learn by
looking into genetic information
from modern humans from the
last, say, 10,000-5,000 years.
0:24
So my outline is the following;
I'm going to start by talking about
some patterns of genetic variation
in Europe, and how they
can be interpreted in terms
of the neolithic transition
and the introduction
of farming into Europe.
And while I've done
that and only focused
on modern day genetic variation,
I'm going to switch gear a bit,
and in the second
part of this talk I'm
going to talk about
ancient DNA methods
for anatomically modern humans.
I will talk a little bit
about the challenges,
and I'll talk a little bit about
the potentials of using this data
of understanding our past.
After I've completed
the second part,
I'll come back to the
Neolithic transition
and what we can learn about the
past in Europe, as an example,
focus on Scandinavia
and Southern Europe,
and then I'll try to summarize
all this into a synthesis.
1:20
So it's well known from
the archaeological record
that farming practices started
some 10,000 to 12,000 years
in the Fertile Crescent
in the Middle East,
and that it spread relatively
rapidly over the next 5,000 years
to western, and southern,
and northern Europe.
And the ruling theory here has been
that the farming actually spread
as a movement of ideas,
or a movement of culture,
or even an idea that was actually
invented by the local hunter
gatherers living in the various
parts of Europe at the time.
