ORIGIN SIGNED

Project "ORIGIN" data sheet

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 Partnership

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 Project objective

Human history in Africa over the last tens of thousands of years is an integral part of understanding the origins of our species. The starting point for most genetic studies of human origins has been based on the depth of present-day human diversity between and within African populations. Even though aDNA studies provided additional resolution and transformed our understanding of the past demography of different human groups reaching as far as ~430ka in Europe, due to the challenging conditions for endogenous DNA preservation, relatively few ancient genomes have been recovered from Africa compared to Europe and Asia, limiting our insights into the population history of the African continent. This project aims to fill-in this gap by making use of the recent advancements in aDNA methodology and generate genome-wide data from a larger number of ancient African individuals across the continent and dating as far back as the Later Stone Age, i.e. to at least ~20ka. These ancient genomes will be analysed together with the published present-day and ancient modern human, as well as archaic datasets in order to investigate migrations, level of interactions, admixture and population structure of different human groups within Africa, as well as between Africa and other parts of the world.