BACKGROUND The earliest fossils of Homo sapiens are located in Africa and dated to the
late Middle Pleistocene. At some point later, modern humans dispersed into Asia and …

Global climate has fluctuated greatly during the past three million years, leading to the
recent major ice ages. An inescapable consequence for most living organisms is great …

The past few years have witnessed a revolution in our ability to obtain DNA from ancient
humans. This important new data has added to our knowledge from archaeology and …

Neandertals, the closest evolutionary relatives of present-day humans, lived in large parts of
Europe and western Asia before disappearing 30,000 years ago. We present a draft …

One enduring question in evolutionary biology is the extent of archaic admixture in the
genomes of present-day populations. In this paper, we present a test for ancient admixture …

Phylogeography is a discipline concerned with various relationships between gene
genealogies—phylogenetics—and geography. The word “phylogeography” was coined in …

Phylogenetic trees describe the pattern of descent amongst a group of species. With the
rapid accumulation of DNA sequence data, more and more phylogenies are being …

Neanderthals, our closest extinct relatives, lived in western Eurasia from 400,000 years ago
until they went extinct around 40,000 years ago. DNA retrieved from ancient specimens …

What is a meme? First coined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, a meme is any idea,
behavior, or skill that can be transferred from one person to another by imitation: stories …

The rapid expansion of next‐generation sequencing has yielded a powerful array of tools to
address fundamental biological questions at a scale that was inconceivable just a few years …