EMBL Keynote Lecture - Of Neanderthals and Denisovans, Svante Pääbo

Presenter: Svante Pääbo, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany

From the EMBO|EMBL Symposium Reconstructing the Human Past - Using Ancient and Modern Genomics
EMBL Advanced Training Centre, Heidelberg, Germany
31 March - 3 April 2019

Our laboratory works on methods to retrieve DNA from ancient bones and other tissue remains as well as sediments found at archaeological excavations. We take a particular interest in Neandertals and Denisovans, the closest evolutionary relative of present-day humans. We have generated genomes from a number of Neandertals and retrieved the genome from a small bone found at a site in the Altai Mountains, which turned out to come from a hitherto unknown extinct Asian hominin group related to Neandertals, which we named “Denisovans”. We have shown that gene flow occurred among modern human ancestors and different archaic hominins. Consequently, about 2.0% of the genomes of people living outside Africa come from Neandertals while about 4.0% of the genomes of people living in Oceania come from Denisovans. Some of the genetic variants inherited from Neandertals and Denisovans were advantageous to modern
humans and many are today involved in susceptibility to diseases. I will summarize our current knowledge about the functional consequences of such genetic contributions from archaic
hominins as well as recent work that begin to unravel the population history and interactions among Neandertals, Denisovans, and early modern humans.

Видео EMBL Keynote Lecture - Of Neanderthals and Denisovans, Svante Pääbo канала European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL)