paleogenomics

From @trevorcousins_, @aylwyn_scally, and @richard_durbin: "Here we introduce a coalescence-based hidden Markov model. . . . [W]e present evidence for an extended period of structure in the history of all modern humans, in which two ancestral populations that diverged ~1.5 million years ago came together in an admixture event ~300 thousand years ago, in a ratio of ~80:20%. Immediately after their divergence, we detect a strong bottleneck in the major ancestral population. We inferred regions of the present-day genome derived from each ancestral population, finding that material from the minority correlates strongly with distance to coding sequence, suggesting it was deleterious against the majority background. Moreover, we found a strong correlation between regions of majority ancestry and human–Neanderthal or human–Denisovan divergence, suggesting the majority population was also ancestral to those archaic humans." [Diagram: population-genetics tree chart showing two ancestral lineages "A" and "B" diverging at ~1 Ma, admixing at ~300 ka with B contributing ~20%, branching further into Neanderthals/Denisovans, Khoisan, West Africans, and Non-Africans, with a ~2% Neanderthal/Denisovan admixture into non-Africans around 30-100 ka.] 11:56 AM · Feb 8, 2026 · 697 Views