Project Members
Michael Hammer, Principal Investigator
Jeff Wall, University of Southern California
Walt Klimecki, The University of Arizona
Murray Cox, Post-Doctoral Researcher
David Morales, Mathematics
Heather Norton, Post-Doctoral Researcher
Olga Savina, Computation
August Woerner, Computation
HOMINID Project Data (password
protected)
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About the Project
The study of genetic variation in human populations has played a key role in efforts to reconstruct the long-term history of our species. While many
genetic studies support the hypothesis of an African origin of anatomically
modern humans (AMH), there are still many unanswered, fundamental questions
pertaining to the manner in which the human genome and the human species
evolved, such as (1) did archaic forms in Eurasia (e.g.,
H.
neanderthalensis and H. erectus) contribute to the gene pool of AMH as they expanded out of Africa,
(2) did H. sapiens evolve in a structured population or in a single, isolated deme, (3) did AMH experience a bottleneck upon dispersal out of Africa, and (4) when did human populations begin to expand dramatically in size? This collaborative project seeks to answer many of these questions by building a public database of DNA sequences from extant human populations, and providing computational tools for analyzing the sequence data. The combination
of a large-scale, carefully planned experimental design and novel analytical and
statistical methods give this proposal much greater power to distinguish among
different evolutionary models than previous studies.
DNA sequence data are being generated from 90 genomic regions in a sample of 90 humans from six geographically diverse populations (e.g., three from sub-Saharan Africa and three from Eurasia) and representatives of the great apes. Each locus is chosen from a genomic region with a high rate of recombination and low density of genes to minimize the possible confounding effects of recent natural selection. Concurrently, statistical and computational methods are being developed for rigorously testing the null model of no admixture between AMH and archaic forms, for estimating the admixture ratio (if the null hypothesis is rejected), and for testing a number of hypotheses related to the history of population subdivision during the transition to anatomically modern form and subsequent changes in population size. Similar large-scale sequencing projects undertaken by private industry and public consortia are not designed to answer the anthropological questions posed here. The project is an ideal synergy of the expertise of the investigators in empirical genetics (Hammer) and theoretical genetics (Wall), and serves to integrate recent discoveries in genetics with those from paleontology and archaeology and facilitates future research on human origins
questions, both in our respective laboratories and in the broader scientific
community.
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