 My research question is, what is the genetic ancestry of Europeans, of the people that live in Europe today, what's the genetic makeup, and where did their genetic makeup come from? So what we know is that humans at some point emerged from out of Africa and settled Europe, Asia, later on Australia, the Americas. But what we'd like to understand is, was that a one-time process, whether there was people coming to Europe and then they were stable and nothing ever changed, or was there actually changes in the genetic structure of people that live in Europe today and in the past? And that is very difficult to just do on modern genetic data. So what we study are ancient bones to tell us something about the genetic makeup of the people that lived in the past today. And in this particular project, we were interested in changes that happened in the last 10,000 years, which are related to changes in the subsistence strategy in the culture of the people. Because what happened in the last 10,000 years was a major revolution in our human evolution, in fact, where we changed from being hunter and gatherers to early farmers, to agriculturalists, with domestic animals, with crops. So there was this big change in the culture of the people. What we would like to understand is, if this change of culture is also related to a change in the genetic makeup, so that this culture, which we first actually see in the Near East and the so-called Fertile Crescent, if this change in culture was also related to maybe people coming from the Fertile Crescent, coming from the Near East, bringing domestic animals, bringing crops to Europe, so was it actually a genetic change of people with a massive inflow of genes and people into Europe with this new culture, or was it actually something that kind of independently Europeans developed, or maybe triggered by some neighboring populations that had those ideas already and spread those ideas into Central Europe? So was it a genetic change or a cultural change, where there may be even other genetic changes in the last 10,000 years in Europe that we might uncover by looking at those ancient skeletons DNA, and then what would those genetic changes be related to in terms of cultural changes and maybe even language changes and so forth? So can we actually correlate kind of change in the genetic makeup of the people with cultural changes that happen, and maybe even with linguistic language changes that happened in the last 10,000 years? To learn how the genetic makeup of people changed through time, we basically have to do genetic time travel. We have to go back in time and study the genetic makeup of people that lived hundreds, thousands, or 10,000s of years ago. And to do that, we use ancient bones, ancient human skeletons, and we extract the DNA from those ancient bones and then sequence them on new sequencing platforms that became available in the last 10 years. That was a big revolution in genetics. 10 years ago, it took billions of euros to sequence a single human genome, the first human genome ever sequenced. Now this can be done for hundreds of euros within one day. So it is really a big revolution that took place. And that also affects us as archaeogeneticists, because we can now also sequence the genomes of humans that lived hundreds or thousands of years ago by taking this DNA from those ancient bones and then reconstructing the genomes of those people that lived in the past, comparing those genomes to the people that live today and also to other people that lived in the past to get an overview of the genetic structure and also the relationship to people that live, for example, in different parts of the world today, to learn more about different processes that have shaped this genetic structure through time. So it involves a lot of molecular biology work in the lab where we extract DNA and turn it into DNA sequences, but also a lot of bioinformatics and population genetics where we compare genome-wide data for many thousands of modern people and also hundreds of people from the past to learn about how the genetic makeup changed through time. One of the first findings we had when we analyzed ancient human skeletons from the last 10,000 years was that there was a big genetic turnover between the indigenous Europeans, the hunter-gatherers, that lived in Europe for 10,000 of years and probably first came to Europe about 40,000 years ago and about 8,000 years ago, there was a big genetic shift when suddenly agriculture turns up in Europe. So people changed their subsistence strategy from hunting and gathering to farming. And this cultural change does not just see a change in culture, but it also sees a change in the genetic makeup because the people that practice agriculture about 7,500 years ago in Central Europe that we have analyzed suddenly have a genetic makeup of people that live in the Near East today or in Anatolia. So for us, it seems that agriculture was not something that the people in Europe invented, but instead it was actually people coming from the Near East to Europe, bringing agriculture with them, and that sees a change in the genetic makeup. In fact, it also sees a change in the phenotype of the people because we can also look at genes that, for example, code for eye color, hair color, skin color, and then we actually see that there were also big phenotypic changes, but especially we see this big change in the genetic structure. There's almost a complete replacement of the indigenous population and the incoming population from the Near East. And that is the first thing that we observed that happened about 7,500 years ago. And that was something that some archaeologists had already suspected just based on the material culture that's based on the archaeology. However, there was even something more surprising that we found, and that was that about 5,000 years ago there was another genetic turnover. Something that archaeologists and historians hadn't really seen in the archaeological data so far, but we see that there's a second genetic turnover, there's new genetic material that comes probably from Central Asia, from a region that is north of the Black Sea, north of the Caspian Sea from the step belt, so that it comes with cattle herders that come into Europe and then bring new genes into Europe, and then basically all those three different populations, the indigenous Europeans that hunt together us, the early farmers that came 7,500 years ago, and those people that came about 5,000 years ago into Europe, they admix. And this happens in what we call the Bronx Age, and this genetic makeup that comes out of this mixture that happens about 4,000 to 5,000 years ago is what we find in all Europeans today. So every single European population today has all these three genetic components that until 10,000 years ago were completely separated. There were European, Asian, and Near Eastern, and then 4,000 to 5,000 years ago, they all mixed together, and we find them now in different proportion, in different parts. For example, in Germany about 40% of the genetic makeup of the people is from Anatolia, early farmer. About 30% is from hunter-gatherers, and then about 10 to 20% is from Central Asia, from those kind of cattle herders, pastoralists. And then in other parts like in Estonia, more than 50% of the genes are from the steppe. And then in other parts like Sardinia or Spain, it's only about 5% that come from the steppe, and about 90% that comes from Anatolia. So we could actually see that those three genetic components came at that time period together, and we can now quantify those three different genetic components in all populations that live in Europe today. It's relevant because we can study the change in the genetic makeup of the people. And with this change in the genetic makeup, if we see a traumatic change in the genetic makeup of a population 5,000 years ago compared to a population 4,800 years ago in Europe, we can develop a hypothesis about then also other things might have changed at that time. And we can, for example, look at archaeology, material culture, or we can look into, for example, linguistics, languages, if the genetic makeup of the people changes, maybe that then also goes along with cultural change, where suddenly we have a transition between middle Neolithic material culture and then something that's called corded wear, for example, in Europe, which is then a late Neolithic culture. So do those two cultures then correspond with this two different genetic groups. And then also if the genetic makeup of people changes, so if there's migration and higher mobility, those people likely also bring languages, for example, with them. So do we also see at the same time a shift in the languages? And then if we kind of bring those three things together, three lines of evidence, genetic makeup shift, cultural shifts, as well as language shifts, we can properly bring them together and see if we that was one event that can be basically supported by all three lines of evidence, because it does not have to come together. It's not always that genetic shifts and genetic changes have to change culture, as well as cultural shifts and changes do not have to cause necessarily genetic shifts, because we also have many examples where the culture changes, but the genetic makeup of the people does not change at all. And the same is of course, truthful languages. If you, for example, look into Central Europe, we have one population that is a big outlier in terms of languages that are Hungarians. Hungarians speak a non Indo-European language. The genetic makeup of the people is however Central European. They don't look any how special compared to the neighboring countries that speak Indo-European languages. So genetic differences, of course, also in the past don't have to come with language differences, because of course we cannot really reconstruct language from genes because genes don't talk, but we can see if the different lines of evidence that we have overlap and basically genetic serves as generating new hypothesis. So if we have a big genetic turnover, then we should also look in the material culture into the archaeology. If we maybe find something that has changed, and some of the changes that the archaeologists have observed might be caused by this dramatic change in the genetic makeup, for example. And that is something we found, for example, in this study where about 5,000 years ago there's this big genetic change. And that is something that people in archaeology, as well as people that languages had not acknowledged to this degree like we can actually do it now, where we see this traumatic change, massive migration from Central Asia into Europe, that no linguist and most of the archaeologists had actually not acknowledged to be such a tremendous event that could have actually changed the culture and the languages. The future of our research is to do what we've just done for Europe, to understand the genetic ancestry of Europeans and shifts in the genetic makeup through the last 10,000 years in other parts of the world, to learn how did the genetic makeup of East Asians, of people that live in Australia today, of the Native Americans, of people that live in Polynesia today, changed through time, how our shifts in this genetic makeup correlated by historical or prehistorical events. And what can we basically learn about the different genetic components that we find in those different populations of the past that might be related to large changes in mobility or migrations that happened in the past so that we can actually learn who were the people that settled the Americas. Are they genetically closer to East Asians, to Siberians? We even see that there's a very strong genetic component that Europeans and Native Americans share, that they do not share with East Asians, so Native Americans are actually a mixture of an ancestral European and an East Asian genetic component. And that is things we can only understand if we kind of look in the past, if we study skeletons from past populations in many places in the world, reconstruct their genomes, compare them to modern people, compare them to ancient people, and at the end what we want to achieve is a map of the world, but a genetic map of the world, and not just a genetic map of the world of the people that live in the world today, but also in the past, having time slices, seeing how was the genetic makeup looking 500 years ago, 1,000 years ago, 1,500 years ago, 2,000 years ago, 10,000 years ago, 50,000 years ago, and how did it change through time? Because what we do by that is we're creating some sort of history of human populations. We are basically uncovering events in the past that nobody has written about, that are basically not part of the of the written resources that we have. We're basically uncovering, if you want, new evidence that archaeologists can use, that historians can use, that prehistoricians can use, as a new source for their own studies. They can then correlate what they find in texts, what they find in archaeology, what they find in anthropological remains, to the genetic shifts that happen through time and can see how this might be actually related to each other. So in some way I think we are uncovering a new source for history, which is very helpful for many different disciplines and it is less subjective as historical records, which are written by certain people with certain agendas and are only written by a tiny part of the population. So in a way we're giving a voice to the people that did not have history, like Native Americans or for example Native Australians, but we are also giving a voice to millions of people that basically also lived in places where there was even historical records, because we are telling basically the genetic history of every individual that we are analyzing, because we are reconstructing the genome of the person to find out where do the different genetic components that make up this person come from? So how did the parents, grandparents and grand-grandparents and so forth look like? And how can we even then correlate that to this entire population where this individual came from? So we're really telling, if you want, genetic history as a new discipline within history or prehistory if you want.