This year, for Department Day, our PhD student Zhe Xue presented a poster on his work on leopards. It’s always great to see something you have contributed to being presented publicly!
Zhe’s project builds on the work of Sidney Leedham, our former Part-II student who performed ecological analyses of different leopard subspecies (you can read more here).
During the last couple of weeks, I have been asked by Matthew Collins (Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge) to contribute two lectures to the module “Ancient Biomolecules”.
In my lecture “Climate and population genetics” I have discussed how to integrate climate into population genetics and genomics, which are the assumptions to take into account, and how to interpret the resulting information. In “The genetics of horse domestication”, I presented and explained a recent paper (Librado et al 2021, Nature) detailing the domestication and spread of Eurasian horses on the basis of ancient DNA data.
It was a lovely occasion, as my talks were followed by many questions and an interesting discussion. I hope there will be other opportunities to collaborate on these topics.
If you are in Cambridge tomorrow, I will be at the Department of Archaeology to give a talk in the Palaeolithic-Mesolithic seminar series.
My presentation will be about “Integrating palaeoclimate into the study of the past“, and I will also be introducing pastclim, our R package to easily access and use palaeoclimatic data. The seminar will not be recorded.
My gratitude goes to Aman Kang and Anna Mika, organisers of the series, who invited me.
Tomorrow I will be giving a talk about “Integrating palaeoclimate into population genomics” for the Uppsala-Hacettepe Palaeogenetics and Population Genetics (UHPalaeopopgen) webinar series.
If you want to follow the webinar, sign up from this link. The talk will not be recorded.
Thanks to the organisers Gülşah Merve Kılınç (Hacettepe University) and Torsten Günther (Uppsala University) for inviting me!
A new book chapter that I wrote just came out:
Leonardi, M., G. Barbujani, and A. Manica. 2021
Genetic demography: What does it mean and how to interpret it, with a case study on the Neolithic transition
In Ancient Connections in Eurasia, ed. by H. Reyes-Centeno and K. Harvati, pp. 91-100. Tübingen: Kerns Verlag. ISBN: 978-3-935751-37-7. https://doi.org/10.51315/9783935751377.005
The present work describes the basic principles underlying demographic reconstructions from genetic data, and reviews the studies using such methods with respect to the Neolithic Demographic Transition. It is intended as a tool for scholars outside the field of population genetics (e.g., archaeologists, anthropologists, etc.) to better understand the significance and intrinsic limitations of genetic demography, and to help integrate its results within the broader context of the reconstruction of the human past.
