ORIGIN · reconstructing African prehistory using ancient DNA

Origin: reconstructing African prehistory using ancient DNA

Human history in Africa over the last tens of thousands of years is an integral part of understanding the origins of our species. For example, African populations harbour more genetic diversity than what is found in populations of all the other continents combined. However, the history shaping this diversity remains largely unknown, providing a barrier to populations with African ancestry benefiting from future advances in medical genetics and precision medicine. The vast majority of the current population structure in Africa was shaped by the expansions of food producers, mainly agriculturalists and pastoralists, over just the last few thousand years. Still, relative contributions of diverse populations that formed past genetic landscapes are to a large extent still unknown, as these expansions across the African continent erased the genetic footprint of previous populations and obscured signatures of older demographic processes. The genomes of present-day humans are directly shaped by the changes in human populations in the past and thus hold considerable information about past processes. Nevertheless, making inferences about human evolutionary history from present-day genomes alone is extremely challenging. Ancient DNA (aDNA), or DNA extracted from long dead organisms, has filled some of this gap and provided invaluable insights into prehistoric events and population history that would otherwise not be accessible. Even though aDNA transformed our understanding of the past demography of different human groups reaching as far back as ~430,000 years ago (ka) in Europe, Africa remained largely underrepresented in aDNA studies. The project “Origin: Reconstructing African prehistory using ancient DNA” aimed to reconstruct the genetic diversity of ancient African populations from across the continent by applying cutting-edge methods developed for the retrieval of aDNA from very poorly preserved human specimens stemming from difficult environments. These genome-wide data allow us to directly investigate past populations and hold the potential of addressing many of the most urgent questions in human origins.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз