Science AMA Series: We recently published a manuscript that showed
modern humans had sex with Neandertals approximately 100,000 years ago,
which is ~50,000 years earlier than previously known
human/Nea
Abstract
Hi Reddit! The publication can be found here:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature16544.html.
Who we are: Co-authors Martin Kuhlwilm, Bence Viola, Ilan Gronau,
Melissa Hubisz, Adam Siepel, and Sergi Castellano. Martin Kuhlwilm is a
geneticist, currently working at the UPF in Barcelona and previously at
the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig. He studies modern human, Neandertal
and great ape genomes, to understand what is special for each group and
which evolutionary patterns can be found. He also studies migration
patterns among hominin groups and great ape populations. Bence Viola is
a paleoanthropologist at the University of Toronto. His main interest is
how different hominin groups interacted biologically and culturally in
the Upper Pleistocene (the last 200 000 years). He combines data from
archaeology, morphology and genetics to better understand how the
contacts between Neanderthals, Denisovans and modern humans happened. He
mostly works in Central Asia and Central Europe, two areas where
contacts between modern and archaic humans are thought to have taken
place. Sergi Castellano, from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary
Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, focuses on understanding the role of
essential micronutrients, with particular emphasis on selenium, in the
adaptation of human metabolism to the different environments encountered
by archaic and modern humans as they migrated around the world. His
group is also interested in the population history of these humans as it
relates to their interbreeding and exchange of genes that facilitate
adaptation to new environments. Melissa, Ilan, and Adam used to work
together in the Siepel lab at Cornell University, and continue to work
together from a distance. Currently, Ilan is a faculty member in
Computer Science at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel.
Adam is a professor at the Simons Center for Quantitative Biology at the
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, New York. Melissa is a
graduate student in Computational Biology at Cornell. They are
especially interested in applying probabilistic models to genomic data
to learn about human evolution and population genetics. Ask us anything!
(Except whether “Neanderthal” should be spelled with an ‘h’.. we don’t
know!) Update: Thanks everyone for having us! Hope we were able to
answer some of your questions. We’re signing off now!