Liisa Loog

• Research Associate at University of Cambridge

The contemporary European genetic makeup formed in the last 8,000 years when local Western Hunter-Gatherers (WHGs) mixed with incoming Anatolian Neolithic farmers and Pontic Steppe pastoralists.1, 2, 3 This encounter combined genetic variants with distinct evolutionary histories and, together with new environmental challenges faced by the post-Neol...

The contemporary European genetic makeup formed in the last 8000 years as the combination of three main genetic components: the local Western Hunter-Gatherers, the incoming Neolithic Farmers from Anatolia and the Bronze Age component from the Pontic Steppes. When meeting into the post-Neolithic European environment, the genetic variants accumulated...

Attempts to identify a ‘homeland’ for our species from genetic data are widespread in the academic literature. However, even when putting aside the question of whether a ‘homeland’ is a useful concept, there are a number of inferential pitfalls in attempting to identify the geographic origin of a species from contemporary patterns of genetic variat...

Demographic processes directly affect patterns of genetic variation within contemporary populations as well as future generations, allowing for demographic inference from patterns of both present-day and past genetic variation. Advances in laboratory procedures, sequencing and genotyping technologies in the past decades have resulted in massive inc...

Numerous pairs of evolutionarily divergent mammalian species have been shown to produce hybrid offspring. In some cases, F1 hybrids are able to produce F2s through matings with F1s. In other instances, the hybrids are only able to produce offspring themselves through backcrosses with a parent species owing to unisexual sterility (Haldane's Rule). H...

Demographic processes directly affect patterns of genetic variation within contemporary populations as well as future generations, allowing for demographic inference from patterns of both present day and past genetic variation. Advances in laboratory procedures and sequencing and genotyping technologies in the last decades have resulted in massive...

Grey wolves (Canis lupus) are one of the few large terrestrial carnivores that have maintained a wide geographical distribution across the Northern Hemisphere throughout the Pleistocene and Holocene. Recent genetic studies have suggested that, despite this continuous presence, major demographic changes occurred in wolf populations between the Late...

Genetic sequences have traditionally been generated solely from modern individ- uals. Advances in laboratory and sequencing techniques, however, have made it possible to retrieve genetic information from fossil, archaeological, museum, or otherwise dead and degraded specimens. Genetic material derived from ancient specimens is referred to as ancien...

Grey wolves (Canis lupus) are one of the few large terrestrial carnivores that have maintained a wide geographic distribution across the Northern Hemisphere throughout the Pleistocene and Holocene. Recent genetic studies have suggested that, despite this continuous presence, major demographic changes occurred in wolf populations between the late Pl...

Chan and colleagues in their paper titled “Human origins in a southern African palaeo-wetland and first migrations” (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1714-1) report 198 novel whole mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequences and infer that ‘anatomically modern humans’ originated in the Makgadikgadi–Okavango palaeo-wetland of southern Africa aroun...

Locating myxomatosis resistance Myxomatosis is a viral infection that was deliberately introduced from American cottontail rabbits into European rabbit populations to control their population. Over the past 60 years or so, similar resistance variants have emerged in parallel in the United Kingdom, France, and Australia. Alves et al. discovered that...

Ancient DNA evidence has confirmed hybridization between humans and Neanderthals and revealed a complex pattern of admixture between hominin lineages. Many segments of the modern human genome are devoid of Neanderthal ancestry, however, and this non-random distribution has raised questions regarding the frequency and success of hybridisation betwee...

Mobility is one of the most important processes shaping spatiotemporal patterns of variation in genetic, morphological, and cultural traits. However, current approaches for inferring past migration episodes in the fields of archaeology and population genetics lack either temporal resolution or formal quantification of the underlying mobility, are p...

Significance Migratory activity is a critical factor in shaping processes of biological and cultural change through time. We introduce a method to estimate changes in underlying migratory activity that can be applied to genetic, morphological, or cultural data and is well-suited to samples that are sparsely distributed in space and through time. By...

Ancient DNA provides an opportunity to infer the drivers of natural selection by linking allele frequency changes to temporal shifts in environment or cultural practices. However, analyses have often been hampered by uneven sampling and uncertainties in sample dating, as well as being confounded by demographic processes. Here, we present a Bayesian...

Ancient DNA provides an opportunity to infer the drivers of natural selection by linking allele frequency changes to temporal shifts in environment or cultural practices. However, analyses have often been hampered by uneven sampling and uncertainties in sample dating, as well as being confounded by demographic processes. Here we present a Bayesian...