UGI External Seminar - Alice Pearson, Department of Genetics, University of Cambridge

Abstract: Consideration of genetic history is important to understanding recent evolutionary changes in human populations and how genomes affect present-day people. Ancient DNA helps us to infer past evolutionary events by providing genetic data-points before, during and after such events. My presentation will be about firstly, building a model of population structure in West Eurasia. Next, I describe a method for inferring local ancestry by embedding tree sequences generated from modern and ancient European samples in this model. Lastly, with these local ancestry assignments and tree sequences, I estimate various demographic parameters of ancient and modern Europeans.