Benjamin Peter

Human evolution: Tracing ancient journeys through Denisovan DNA Variation in Denisovan ancestry across East Asia reflects complex demography and multiple introgression waves. A new study reports that the Jomon population, early diverged ancient hunter-gatherers…

Also check out the dispatch by Shigeki Nakagome: www.cell.com/current-biol..., and (of course) our new preprint on the genome of a 200,000 year old Denisovan www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The most surprising insight is that the Jomon, early inhabitants of the Japanese Archipelago, have much less Denisovan ancestry than all other East Asians - thus the Jomon (partially) descend from a lineage that predates the gene flow between modern-humans and Denisovans

This study, led by my PhD student Jiaqi Yang, maps how Denisovan ancestry spread across Europe and Asia. We find several early Europeans with (trace amounts of) Denisovan gene flow, likely due to old migrations throughout Eurasia. There is no evidence of direct contact of Europeans with Denisovans

An early East Asian lineage with unexpectedly low Denisovan ancestry Yang et al. study Denisovan ancestry in ancient and present-day humans. In contrast to other East Asians, genomic comparisons suggest that the Jomon derived most of their ancestry from a deep lineage…

If you need more exciting news about Denisovans, check out our paper on Denisovan ancestry in modern humans through time, out today in Current Biology: www.cell.com/current-biol...! #Denisovan #ancientDNA

The second paper is a systematic survey of Neandertal ancestry through time; a joint effort with @moorjanipriya.bsky.social ya.bsky.social’s lab at UC Berkeley, co-led by @leonardoiasi.bsky.social and Manjusha Chintalapati. Leo has a great summary of our main findings here:

The first paper, lead by @arevsumer.bsky.social, Kay Prüfer and Johannes Krause, describes some amazing new genomes from Ranis and Zlaty Kun. See Arev’s write-up here:

Neanderthal ancestry through time: Insights from genomes of ancient and present-day humans Gene flow from Neanderthals has shaped genetic and phenotypic variation in modern humans. We generated a catalog of Neanderthal ancestry segments in more than 300 genomes spanning the past 50,000 year...

Today is a very big day for our research group, with two of my students, @leonardoiasi.bsky.social and @arevsumer.bsky.social publishing papers on the same day! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... www.nature.com/articles/s41... #Neanderthals #gene-flow