The settlement of Europe: Population genetic history of Pleistocene modern humans in Europe

古DNA研究为深入了解已灭绝人类的遗传关系和种群结构提供了巨大的潜力。尽管最近已经从尼安德特人和丹尼索瓦人等灭绝的人类中获得了大量的遗传信息，但人们对更新世现代人类的遗传结构知之甚少，这些现代人类与这两种灭绝的人类是同时代的，例如大约35，000年前殖民欧洲的欧洲克罗马努人。然而，来自更新世现代人类的群体遗传数据在理解古人类遗传数据中出现的复杂情况方面发挥着关键作用，这些数据涉及不同更新世人类之间的基因流动，遗传瓶颈和排斥。使用最近建立的DNA捕获方法与高通量测序相结合，我们将在这个项目中从欧洲和西亚的大量更新世早期现代人类中产生群体遗传数据。为了确定古代现代人类DNA的真实性，我们将应用最近发表的一项协议，该协议能够根据DNA损伤和降解模式来验证古代DNA。因此，该项目将为我们提供对克罗马努人的人口历史和现代人类在欧洲的定居的直接见解，这些都是传统考古方法无法解决的。

Ancient DNA research offers a great potential to gain insights into genetic relationships and population structure of extinct human populations. Despite a tremendous amount of genetic information that has recently become available from extinct humans such as Neandertals and Denisovans, very little is known about the genetic structure of Pleistocene modern humans that were contemporary with both extinct hominins, such as the European Cro-Magnon that colonized Europe about 35,000 years ago. However, population genetic data from Pleistocene modern humans plays a key role in understanding the complex picture emerging from the ancient human genetic data that involves gene flow between different Pleistocene hominins, genetic bottlenecks and extinctions. Using recently established DNA capture approaches in combination with high-throughput sequencing, we will generate in this project population genetic data from a large set of Pleistocene early modern humans from Europe and Western Asia. To establish the authenticity of the ancient modern human DNA, we will apply a recently published protocol that enables the verification of ancient DNA based on DNA damage and degradation patterns. This project will thus provide us with direct insights into the population history of Cro-Magnon and the settlement of Europe by modern humans that are not addressable with traditional archaeological approaches.