Fernando Villanea Delivers Dr Rufus Wood Leigh Lecture
Professor Fernando Villanea recently delivered the Dr. Rufus Wood Leigh Invited Lecture at the University of Utah. The Rufus Wood Leigh Distinguished Lecture is an annual, endowed event at the University of Utah. Established by Dr. Rufus Wood Leigh, a pioneer in physical anthropology, the series features leading scholars in anthropology, genetics, and Native American studies.
Title: Neanderthal and Denisovan Genomic Variation in American Populations
Abstract: Neanderthals and Denisovans were two extinct groups of archaic human and were our closest relatives on the tree of life. Before extinction, Neanderthals and Denisovans interbred with our direct ancestors, leaving an archaic genetic inheritance that lives on in the genomes of living people, and is both a window into the past, and a legacy that affects our current fitness and health. Today, all global populations carry archaic ancestry to some degree, which is an active area of research due to the medical significance of these gene variants. However, studying archaic genome ancestry in Indigenous American and admixed Latin American individuals presents a unique challenge: for over 20,000 years, that evolutionary trajectory was unique; but in the most recent 500 years, that trajectory was intermixed with the evolutionary histories of European and African populations. Modern American genomes thus carry confused signals of evolutionary processes in three sources of ancestry, which my research aims to de-convoluted to properly understand the origins, interactions, and medical importance of various archaic genome elements.