Javier Blanco-Portillo

Stanford University | SU · Department of Biology

By demonstrating the role that historical population replacements and waves of admixture have played around the world, the genetics work of Reich and colleagues has provided a paradigm for understanding human history [Reich et al. 2009; Reich et al. 2012; Patterson et al. 2012]. Although we show in Ioannidis et al. [2021] that the peopling of Polyn...

Central African hunter-gatherers (CAHGs) are widely seen as isolated populations displaced into the forest by the expansion of Bantu-speaking farmers. By contrast, recent studies revealed various genetic signs of long-term adaptation of CAHGs to forest environments and independence from Bantu demography. It remains unclear whether cultural diversit...

The population of Mexico has a considerable genetic substructure due to both its pre-Columbian diversity and due to genetic admixture from post-Columbian trans-oceanic migrations. The latter primarily originated in Europe and Africa, but also, to a lesser extent, in Asia. We analyze previously understudied genetic connections between Asia and Mexic...

Mexico has considerable population substructure due to pre-Columbian diversity and subsequent variation in admixture levels from trans-oceanic migrations, primarily from Europe and Africa, but also, to a lesser extent, from Asia. Detailed analyses exploring sub-continental structure remain limited and post-Columbian demographic dynamics within Mexi...

Polynesia was settled in a series of extraordinary voyages across an ocean spanning one third of the Earth¹, but the sequences of islands settled remain unknown and their timings disputed. Currently, several centuries separate the dates suggested by different archaeological surveys2–4. Here, using genome-wide data from merely 430 modern individuals...

The possibility of voyaging contact between prehistoric Polynesian and Native American populations has long intrigued researchers. Proponents have pointed to the existence of New World crops, such as the sweet potato and bottle gourd, in the Polynesian archaeological record, but nowhere else outside the pre-Columbian Americas1–6, while critics have...