Hélios Delbrassine

Homo sapiens-specific evolution unveiled by ancient southern African genomes - Nature The genomes of 28 ancient southern African individuals dated to between 10,200 and 150 years before present offer insights into the evolution of Homo sapiens.

Our new ancient DNA paper has just been published!
We present 28 new genomes from southern Africa - several of them high-coverage whole genomes.
Exciting to be moving towards population-level representation of ancient southern African genetic diversity!

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

‼️📢 Neandertal as prey‼️
We demonstrated selective cannibalism behavior at the end of the Middle Palaeolithic in Northern Europe

#Neandertal #Prehistory #Cannibalism #MiddlePaleolithic #Goyet

A very special paper where we did something NEW! 🔥combining a large genetic dataset 🧬, a large linguistic dataset 💬, and Bayesian multilevel logistic regressions 📈, counting the effects of areal contact (geographic constrains) 🌎. Genetic admixture explains higher levels of linguistic exchanges...

An empirically-based scenario for the evolution of cultural transmission in the human lineage during the last 3.3 million years Humans accumulate an ever-growing body of knowledge that far exceeds the capacity of any single individual or generation. Social learning and transmission are essential for this process. However, how ...

🧪 By our colleague F. d’Errico: the evolution of cultural transmission over the past 3.3 million years! Outcome of a 4-year project supported by the GPR Human Past and by I. Collage’s yearly visits as a Visiting Scholar shorturl.at/EEK2S @univbordeaux.bsky.social @cnrsecologie.bsky.social

🧬 Over 1,000 years of history revealed from 3,000+ burials in Sint-Truiden.

Researchers from KU Leuven & global partners uncovered genetic traces of migration, ancestry & the Black Death, powered by VSC 💻

📰 Read more www.vscentrum.be/post/discove...

#HPC #DNA #Paleogenomics #Supercomputing

Discover our results of the largest ancient DNA study ever conducted on a single burial site: 400 skeletons from the Belgian city Sint-Truiden (8th–18th century). A unique glimpse into 1000 years of genetic history. (1/9) @kuleuvenuniversity.bsky.social

Genetic ancestry and nucleotide diversity. Colors represent genetic ancestries estimated by whole-genome sequencing data of contemporary human populations. Countries having no data remained empty. Circle size indicates the average nucleotide diversity of each population.

Fantastic paper in @science.org today revealing:
1. strong selection for cold tolerance in Beringia
2. gene-flow across the strait around 5ky
3. diversification of S. American lineages into 4 groups ~ 14k-10ky
4. followed by population crash of >40-80%

Wat verhalen die de wereld over reizen over de mensheid onthullen In mythen overal ter wereld zitten elementen die al met de mensheid meereizen zo lang die bestaat. Dat blijkt als je culturele en genetische informatie combineert.

Had the pleasure of being interviewed by Bas den Hond at @trouw.nl about our preprint on the diffusion of mythological motifs around the world!

He did a truly marvellous job, read the full piece here:

www.trouw.nl/wetenschap/w...

Thank you so much Marta! It was wonderful meeting you and everyone else - thanks for all the work & organization! :)

@heliosdlbs.bsky.social had a poster about this work at #HumanEvo25 - fascinating study 🤩🤩🤩

🚨 New call: FRB-CESAB & HEIRS (w/ PNDB) will fund 4 projects under the IdeaShare & DataShare schemes – incl. one on #Biodiversity & #HumanEvolution.
2 yrs funding | Interdisciplinary teams
🔗 www.icarehb.com/opportunity-...
#ResearchFunding

A male Denisovan mandible from Pleistocene Taiwan Denisovans are an extinct hominin group defined by ancient genomes of Middle to Late Pleistocene fossils from southern Siberia. Although genomic evidence suggests their widespread distribution through...

Incredibly proud that our paper on the #palaeoproteomics analysis of the Penghu mandible, led by @tsutatsuta.bsky.social and in collaboration with Chun-Hsiang Chang, Enrico Cappellini and co, is out now in
@science.org! doi.org/10.1126/scie...

The Coming Out of a Transgender Scientist "I know that I am making the right decision because whenever I think about changing my gender role, I am flooded with feelings of relief."

We're disappointed to see Ben Barres's powerful book "The Autobiography of a Transgender Scientist" among the ~400 titles removed from the Naval Academy Library. Needless to say, we're proud to have published his book and will keep it — and his memory — alive.

A Dataset on Linguistic Connectivity Across and Within Countries - Scientific Data Scientific Data - A Dataset on Linguistic Connectivity Across and Within Countries

This looks useful -- A Dataset on Linguistic Connectivity Across and Within Countries
#linguistics #languages
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Revealed: first DNA profiles of ancient people who roamed a lush Sahara The genomes of two women who lived 7,000 years ago in the Sahara when it was a green savannah reveal a remarkably isolated population.

The genomes of two women who lived 7,000 years ago in the Sahara when it was a green savannah reveal a remarkably isolated population

https://go.nature.com/3QWkjOV

front page of the article

Figure. 3 from the article showing products of the Quina system at the Longtan site

Figure 4 from the article showing features of Quina products compared to ordinary scrapers.

Figures showing the site location and stratigraphy

Our new paper reports a complete Quina technological system in the 60-50 ka assemblage at Longtan, Southwest China

Ruan, Q. et al. (2025) Quina lithic technology indicates diverse Late Pleistocene human dynamics in East Asia doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

🆓 faculty.washington.edu/bmarwick/PDF...

fascinating paper, congrats to all the authors!
the model they present is full of potential, great prospects indeed

A geographic history of human genetic ancestry Describing the distribution of genetic variation across individuals is a fundamental goal of population genetics. We present a method that capitalizes on the rich genealogical information encoded in g...

Really excited to see this work, led by Mike Grundler, published! It's a new method for inferring the geographic locations of shared genetic ancestors. In the paper, we and use it to infer the geographic history of human genetic ancestry

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Population-scale analysis of inheritance patterns across 858,635 individuals reveals recent historical migration patterns across the North Sea from the Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution The North Sea's historical migrations have impacted the genetic structure of its neighbouring populations. We analysed haplotype sharing among 858,635 modern individuals from Denmark and Britain to in...

New Preprint klaxon - and calling all Danes+Brits who are interested in genetics+history - a new preprint led by Xiaolei Zhang in my group with Soren Brunak's group about genetic exchange from 1100 to the present day between UK (Britain)+Denmark. Read on for details www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Female lineages and changing kinship patterns in Neolithic Çatalhöyük Arguments have long suggested that the advent of early farming in the Near East and Anatolia was linked to a ‘Mother Goddess’ cult. However, evidence for a dominant female role in these societies has ...

The lecture was based on this preprint www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... certainly exciting possibilities to understand Neolithic mobility & relationships #archaeology 🏺🧪

New aDNA preprint looking at 5th-7th century CE cemeteries from across present-day southern Germany. Generation-by-generation assimilation of people with diverse ancestries from across Western Eurasia as (presumably) formerly-Romanised populations move and mix.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Congratulations! Super excited to see how it'll turn out!

Forcing authors to edit or retract papers simply because they contain ‘forbidden terms’ is damaging to scientific integrity, says ESHG statement from ESHG

Forcing authors to edit or retract papers simply because they contain ‘forbidden terms’ is damaging to scientific integrity, says ESHG

Read the statement from #eshg:

Our papers, out today in @nature.com, show how ancient DNA from the Eneolithic and Bronze Age steppe points to a North Pontic origin of the Indo-European language family and a Caucasus-Lower Volga (CLV) origin of Indo-Anatolian (inclusive of the now extinct Anatolian languages). 1/

The distribution of highly deleterious variants across human ancestry groups A major focus of human genetics is to map severe disease mutations. Increasingly that goal is understood as requiring huge numbers of people to be sequenced from every broadly-defined genetic ancestry...

“The distribution of highly deleterious variants across human ancestry groups”. Preprint with Anastasia Stolyarova and @gcbias.bsky.social: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

2024 was harsh... but we made a thing:
BiosS (Bioanthropology of southern south America) is our brand new research group 💪
You can see more details at: idacor.conicet.gov.ar/bioss-sudame...
or follow us on IG: @biossud

EXCLUSIVE: NSF starts vetting all grants to comply with Trump’s orders Grantee accounts remain frozen, while union accuses NSF of ignoring rules governing peer review

EXCLUSIVE: NSF starts vetting all grants to comply with Trump’s orders | Science | AAAS www.science.org/content/arti...

Thank you, Felix! It's been wonderful meeting you and I sincerely look forward to the next time.
Lots of inspiring chats and prospects!

thank you so much, Sergi! It was really nice meeting you there, I hope we'll see each other again in the future!

Very interesting research on the relationship of cultural and genetic diffusion. Hélios (@heliosdlbs.bsky.social) gave an excellent presentation @icarehb.bsky.social yesterday. I look forward to the final publication.