Adelberg Lecture in Genetics: "A Neanderthal Perspective on Recent Human Evolution"

Our laboratory has generated high-quality genome sequences from Neanderthals and Denisovans, archaic hominins who shared a common ancestor with present-day humans about half a million years ago. Analyses of these genomes show that gene flow occurred among modern human ancestors and archaic hominins. I will discuss the effects of some of these variants as well as of some variants that appeared and rose to high frequencies in modern humans since their divergence from the archaic hominins.