Abstract

In the last decade, ancient DNA (aDNA) has transformed our understanding of human evolutionary history, enabling us to study genetic variation directly across time and space without being constrained to the smaller subset of diversity found in present-day populations. However, despite genomic data being recovered from more than 10,000 ancient humans to date, relatively few genomes have been recovered from the time period when modern humans started dispersing out-of-Africa and could have encountered some of the last Neandertals.

Modern humans and Neandertals overlapped in Eurasia during a period known as the Middle to Upper Palaeolithic transition, starting at minimum _{48,000 years ago, but possibly even earlier. The exact timing and the reasons for the disappearance of Neandertals at} 40,000 years ago, the extent to which they overlapped with modern humans in Eurasia, and the nature of their interactions have been intensively debated for decades and still remain contentious issues today. In this talk I will outline the current projects in the newly established Max Planck Research Group for ‘Hominin Palaeogenomics’ (HOPE), with which we are aiming to address some of these outstanding questions and fill in the crucial gaps in one of the key periods in human evolutionary history.