Collaboration with Pontus Skoglund

The SapienCE initiative is a unique project to understand one of the most crucial periods of human origins from multiple perspectives. Our recent improved understanding of ancient DNA from the past 15,000 years in Africa, when integrated with information from present-day genomes, have shed new light on what we know and don’t know about the origins of modern human ancestry. Further, these findings have highlighted the rich complexity of recent population history in Africa in a way that may guide understanding of more ancient prehistory. Integrating our understanding of genomic ancestry with the diverse expertise of the SapienCE network has been very beneficial, and we are hopeful that further unravelling of the Holocene and Terminal Pleistocene population landscape in southern Africa will further improve our interdisciplinary understanding.