Dang Liu

Interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans was strongly sex biased Sex biases in admixture and other demographic processes are recurrent features throughout human evolution. For admixture between Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans (AMHs), sex bias has been p...

Many living people carry fragments of Neanderthal DNA, remnants of ancient interbreeding events, with uneven distribution across chromosomes. New work by @sarahtishkoff.bsky.social lab suggests patterns are most consistent with Neanderthal contribution to human populations being highly male biased.🧪

@pratikkatte.bsky.social and I just released Lorax 🌲, a tool for interactive exploration of biobank-scale ancestral recombination graphs (ARGs).

If you’ve ever wanted to scroll across the ancestries of thousands of genomes… this is for you.

Demographic and genetic factors shape the epitope specificity of the human antibody repertoire against viruses - Nature Immunology Patin and colleagues present a mineable Resource database for identifying demographic and genetic factors that impact antiviral antibody repertoires in humans.

Happy to share our last study on how age, biological sex and genetics affect not only the extent of antibody responses against viruses but also the specific viral epitopes recognised. Thanks to Axel Olin @EtiennePatin @LabExMI @institutpasteur @cdf1530 @CNRS

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

We are seeking two students: One would develop computational methods for the analysis of ancient DNA from sediments, and apply these tools to novel datasets. The second would generate and analyze aDNA data from archaeological sediments at a number of Holocene sites.

Pygenstrat: A Python package for EIGENSTRAT data processing AbstractMotivation. Ancient DNA studies rely heavily on the EIGENSTRAT genotype format (.geno, .ind, .snp) for standard population genetic analyses includi

@dilekopter.bsky.social

🚨 6th HAAM-RADIO Webinar
🌍 African Population Demography and Social Organizations of the Past
🗓️ Wed, 28 Jan 2026
Register here:
👉 forms.gle/FuBTTX4wreW4...

#AncientDNA #HumanGenetics #AfricanHistory #HAAM #Webinar
@abinstitute.bsky.social @cesarforteslima.bsky.social
@hildegunnink.bsky.social

Genomic and morphometric evidence for Austronesian-mediated pig translocation in the Pacific Several millennia of human-mediated translocation of non-native pig species (genus Sus) to the islands of Wallacea and Oceania have considerably altered local ecosystems. To investigate the timing and...

Starting off 2026 in a highly porcine manner. The story dropped on Jan 1 when a lot of the planet was focussed more on a hangover cure (myself included), than on the latest in human-pig research. Huge congrats to the dozens of amazing scientists and hooray for pigs!

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

Oh, look! A paper about the coolest piece of software I've ever built!

And we're live, Lecture A1 is online. Introduction to Bayesian workflow, generative models, estimands, estimators, estimates, error checking, beginnings of probability theory and Bayesian updating. www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztbY...

📢 We're hiring a postdoc (33 months) in human evolutionary genomics / paleogenomics / statistical genetics, Paris 🇫🇷
Project on selection on disease-associated variants, integrating ancient genomes, GWAS, and Ancestral Rec. Graphs.
Start May 2026 (flexible).
Apply here: emploi.cnrs.fr/Offres/CDD/U...

How much better is an ancestral recombination graph (ARG) than a site frequency spectrum (SFS)? For recovering mutation rate history, we can answer fairly precisely because both ARG and SFS are linear transforms of mutation rate history. This blog post uses spectral analysis to clarify the picture.

demografr: A toolkit for simulation-based inference in population genetics https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.18.694482v1

The Influence of Demographic History and Genetic Architecture on Complex Traits via Runs of Homozygosity https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.17.694908v1

Determining the driving factors shaping genetic architecture of complex traits in recently admixed populations Understanding the genetic architecture of complex traits in admixed populations remains challenging due to heterogeneous genetic backgrounds and demographic histories. Mischaracterizing admixture can ...

Preprint online right before the holidays! Excited to share the first piece of work from the Zhang Lab, led by my absolutely stellar postdoc Michelle Kim! In this work, we ask how admixture, selection and demography shape complex trait genetics and GWAS performance www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

A curated global dataset of social contact between diverse language communities

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

Causal modelling of gene effects from regulators to programs to traits - Nature Approaches combining genetic association and Perturb-seq data that link genetic variants to functional programs to traits are described.

GWAS has been an incredible discovery tool for human genetics: it regularly identifies *causal* links from 1000s of SNPs to any given trait. But mechanistic interpretation is usually difficult.

Our latest work on causal models for this is out yesterday:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
A short🧵:

course schedule as a table. Available at the link in the post.

I'm teaching Statistical Rethinking again starting Jan 2026. This time with live lectures, divided into Beginner and Experienced sections. Will be a lot more work for me, but I hope much better for students.

I will record lectures & all will be found at this link: github.com/rmcelreath/s...

Work from my amazing undergrad @leyan-wang.bsky.social is just preprinted! TL;DR: If you worry that ARG methods might fail on unphased data due to phasing errors, you may not need to.

Check it out & consider reposting to support a great young scientist!

The preprint from my first postdoc is finally out! I had a blast working on this project with such an amazing team!

What enables human language? A biocultural framework Explaining the origins of language is a key challenge in understanding ourselves as a species. We present an empirical framework that draws on synergies across fields to facilitate robust studies of l...

Origins of language, one of humanity’s most distinctive traits, may be best explained as a unique convergence of multiple capacities each with its own evolutionary history, involving intertwined roles of biology & culture. This framing can expand research horizons. A 🧵 on our @science.org paper.🧪1/n

The 2026 EMBL symposium 'Reconstructing the human past using ancient and modern genomics' is live with a fantastic invited speaker lineup!

Abstract deadline 9 June. If work is ongoing, plan for Heidelberg in September😉.

Organised by Maanasa Raghavan, @matejahajdi.bsky.social, Choongwon Jeong & me.

Genomic Investigations of Spoken and Written Language Abilities: A Guide to Advances in Approaches, Technologies, and Discovery Purpose: The aim of this tutorial is to show how the rise of molecular technologies and analytical methods in human genetics yields exciting new ...

If you're interested in how advances in human genomics are transforming our understanding of the biology of spoken & written language abilities, please do check out my new peer-reviewed "tutorial" article, just published.
🗣️🧬🧪
[Will also make a Bsky explainer 🧵 on it next week when I get some time🙂.]

YouTube video by Institut Pasteur EDUCATION Etienne Patin - L'histoire d'Homo sapiens à la lumière de la génomique

Séminaire sur les apports récents de la génomique à l'histoire évolutive humaine au cours des derniers dix millénaires

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

🎉The 1st paper in our special issue "Population Genomics Methods and Software" is now published!!

“SimHumanity: Using SLiM 5.0 to run whole-genome simulations of human evolution”
www.pivotscipub.com/hpgg/5/4/000...

Many more exciting papers to come - stay tuned!
www.pivotscipub.com/hpgg/special...

FLARE2: local ancestry inference with poorly-matched reference panels https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.13.681993v1

Selection scans and downstream analysis with selscan https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.10.681670v1

Method works from simple and complex scenarios in jointly estimating epoch time, population size, migration rate (symmetric or asymmetric), growth rate, and admixture proportion. Software integrated with msprime, demes, tsinfer/tsdate, relate, and singer. github.com/aprilweilab/...

Inference of complex demographic history using composite likelihood based on whole-genome genealogies https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.07.680347v1