New preprint led by Hrushikesh Loya, me, and Simon Myers where we introduce GhostBuster! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
The idea is to find all the different ways a target individual relates to reference groups in genealogies, to "bust the ghosts" in our ancestry.
Inferring hominin history with recurrent gene flow from single unphased genomes and a two-locus statistic www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04...
Flyer with information about the Genetics & Neurobiology of Language summer course at Cold Spring Harbor, held on July 27th to August 3rd 2026, applications due by April 10th 2026. Instructors are Simon Fisher from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Netherlands, David Poeppel from New York University and Kate Watkins from the University of Oxford, UK. The course description is as follows: Why are children able to acquire highly sophisticated language abilities without needing to be taught? What are the neurobiological and neurophysiological processes that underpin human speech and language, and how do they go awry in developmental and acquired disorders? Which genetic factors contribute to this remarkable suite of human skills, and are there evolutionary precursors that we can study in other species? This unique CSHL course, in its sixth iteration, addresses these core questions about the bases and origins of speech and language, through talks, interactive sessions, keynotes and debates, involving leading experts from a range of disciplines. It integrates the state-of-the-art from complementary perspectives, including development, cognitive models, neural basis, gene identification, functional genomics, model systems and comparative/evolutionary studies. The invited speakers are: Jennifer Below, Vanderbilt University Elika Bergelson, Harvard University Esti Blanco-Elorrieta, New York University Jonathan Brennan, University of Michigan Karen Emmorey, San Diego State University Evelina Fedorenko, MIT Julia Fischer, Cognitive Ethology Laboratory, Germany Tecumseh Fitch, University of Vienna, Austria Adeen Flinker, NYU Langone Timothy Gentner, University of California, San Diego Liberty Hamilton, UC Berkeley Catherine Hobaiter, Wild Minds Lab, University of St. Andrews, UK Sonja Vernes, The University of St. Andrews, UK Sandra Waxman, Northwestern University For funding opportunities and additional course information, please go to: meetings.cshl.edu/courses
“An absolute highlight of my career so far. Academically, I was challenged, provoked, & inspired. I loved how much discussion & thought we packed in, broadening my outlook on the study of language.” Kind words from an alumnus of our summer course. Apply by April 10: meetings.cshl.edu/courses.aspx...
Genetics and culture are deeply intertwined. Does your field have something to say about this vast topic? Wanna learn more about the latest research on this?
Join us for this SMBE satellite meeting in Sardinia!
Travel grants are available!
More info here: sites.google.com/view/gene-cu...
A biobank-scale method for learning modulators of gene-environment interaction underlying human complex traits from multiple environmental exposures www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03...
Excited to share our new preprint on time-lagged F2-statistics, which informs about migration rates from ancient DNA data. Find a preprint here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03...
The work was driven by Giulio Isacchini and Oskar Hallatschek. Proud to be part of it! […]
Nice to see this out! Great work by Kiran Kumar and Sebastian Zöllner!
Many living people carry fragments of Neanderthal DNA, remnants of ancient interbreeding events, with uneven distribution across chromosomes. New work by @sarahtishkoff.bsky.social lab suggests patterns are most consistent with Neanderthal contribution to human populations being highly male biased.🧪
@pratikkatte.bsky.social and I just released Lorax 🌲, a tool for interactive exploration of biobank-scale ancestral recombination graphs (ARGs).
If you’ve ever wanted to scroll across the ancestries of thousands of genomes… this is for you.
Happy to share our last study on how age, biological sex and genetics affect not only the extent of antibody responses against viruses but also the specific viral epitopes recognised. Thanks to Axel Olin @EtiennePatin @LabExMI @institutpasteur @cdf1530 @CNRS
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
We are seeking two students: One would develop computational methods for the analysis of ancient DNA from sediments, and apply these tools to novel datasets. The second would generate and analyze aDNA data from archaeological sediments at a number of Holocene sites.
🚨 6th HAAM-RADIO Webinar
🌍 African Population Demography and Social Organizations of the Past
🗓️ Wed, 28 Jan 2026
Register here:
👉 forms.gle/FuBTTX4wreW4...
#AncientDNA #HumanGenetics #AfricanHistory #HAAM #Webinar
@abinstitute.bsky.social @cesarforteslima.bsky.social
@hildegunnink.bsky.social
Starting off 2026 in a highly porcine manner. The story dropped on Jan 1 when a lot of the planet was focussed more on a hangover cure (myself included), than on the latest in human-pig research. Huge congrats to the dozens of amazing scientists and hooray for pigs!
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Oh, look! A paper about the coolest piece of software I've ever built!
And we're live, Lecture A1 is online. Introduction to Bayesian workflow, generative models, estimands, estimators, estimates, error checking, beginnings of probability theory and Bayesian updating. www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztbY...
📢 We're hiring a postdoc (33 months) in human evolutionary genomics / paleogenomics / statistical genetics, Paris 🇫🇷
Project on selection on disease-associated variants, integrating ancient genomes, GWAS, and Ancestral Rec. Graphs.
Start May 2026 (flexible).
Apply here: emploi.cnrs.fr/Offres/CDD/U...
How much better is an ancestral recombination graph (ARG) than a site frequency spectrum (SFS)? For recovering mutation rate history, we can answer fairly precisely because both ARG and SFS are linear transforms of mutation rate history. This blog post uses spectral analysis to clarify the picture.
demografr: A toolkit for simulation-based inference in population genetics www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12...
The Influence of Demographic History and Genetic Architecture on Complex Traits via Runs of Homozygosity www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12...
Preprint online right before the holidays! Excited to share the first piece of work from the Zhang Lab, led by my absolutely stellar postdoc Michelle Kim! In this work, we ask how admixture, selection and demography shape complex trait genetics and GWAS performance www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
A curated global dataset of social contact between diverse language communities
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
GWAS has been an incredible discovery tool for human genetics: it regularly identifies *causal* links from 1000s of SNPs to any given trait. But mechanistic interpretation is usually difficult.
Our latest work on causal models for this is out yesterday:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
A short🧵:
course schedule as a table. Available at the link in the post.
I'm teaching Statistical Rethinking again starting Jan 2026. This time with live lectures, divided into Beginner and Experienced sections. Will be a lot more work for me, but I hope much better for students.
I will record lectures & all will be found at this link: github.com/rmcelreath/s...
Work from my amazing undergrad @leyan-wang.bsky.social is just preprinted! TL;DR: If you worry that ARG methods might fail on unphased data due to phasing errors, you may not need to.
Check it out & consider reposting to support a great young scientist!
The preprint from my first postdoc is finally out! I had a blast working on this project with such an amazing team!
Origins of language, one of humanity’s most distinctive traits, may be best explained as a unique convergence of multiple capacities each with its own evolutionary history, involving intertwined roles of biology & culture. This framing can expand research horizons. A 🧵 on our @science.org paper.🧪1/n
The 2026 EMBL symposium 'Reconstructing the human past using ancient and modern genomics' is live with a fantastic invited speaker lineup!
Abstract deadline 9 June. If work is ongoing, plan for Heidelberg in September😉.
Organised by Maanasa Raghavan, @matejahajdi.bsky.social, Choongwon Jeong & me.
If you're interested in how advances in human genomics are transforming our understanding of the biology of spoken & written language abilities, please do check out my new peer-reviewed "tutorial" article, just published.
🗣️🧬🧪
[Will also make a Bsky explainer 🧵 on it next week when I get some time🙂.]
