Category: News
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Genetic relatedness mattered in the co-burial ritual of Neolithic hunter–gatherers
Mattila, T. M., Fraser, M., Koelman, J., Krzewińska, M., Ivarsson-Aalders, M., Götherström, A., Jakobsson, M., Storå, J., Günther, T., Wallin, P. & Malmström, H. (2026). Genetic relatedness mattered in the co-burial ritual of Neolithic hunter–gatherers. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 293(2065). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2025.0813 Abstract Kin relations among past societies can offer valuable information about…
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Mark Chernyshev was awarded the Marcus Borgström grant for human genetics research
The 140,000 SEK grant will support detailed genetic analysis of ancient southern Africans who lived 10,200 to 1,400 years ago. This research will use computational methods to reconstruct how these populations changed over time, which is of particular interest because ancient southern Africans represent one of humanity’s earliest population splits (approximately 300,000 years ago) and harbour genetic variation not captured by existing datasets. Congratulations, Mark! M…
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New students
Recently, Larena Lab gained two students who also work with Mariam and others in the Jakobsson Lab. Lisa Brus is a Master’s student. Her thesis work aims to optimise and implement a low-cost, in-house Tn5-based library preparation protocol for Illumina sequencing using samples from Asia-Pacific populations. Maria Laura Genchi is a visiting student, completing an Erasmus…
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Mariam reports from the Philippines fieldwork, Nov-Dec 2025
Marian Omar Gómez travelled to the Philippines again in continuation of her PhD project. This time, she was joined for shorter periods by Armin Rassooli Tilehnovi (another PhD student at Human Evolution Program, Uppsala University), Max Larena, and Mattias Jakobsson. The three primary objectives were academic outreach, establishing a formal collaboration with the National Museum…
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Luciana Simões receives VR International Postdoc grant
The grant of 4,050,000 SEK will cover three years of Luciana’s research in collaboration with Emilia Huerta-Sanchez at Trinity College Dublin and Tom van der Valk at the Natural History Museum in Stockholm. Congratulations, Luciana! The roles of selection and demography on the fate of human genetic ancestry About 40,000 years ago, Neanderthals disappeared. More…
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Ancestry, admixture, and pathogens in contemporaneous Neolithic farmers and foragers on the Island of Gotland
New preprint by Magdalena Fraser, Federico Sanches-Quinto and several others from the Human Evolution Program team, and associated researchers is online now. Abstract Two archaeological cultural complexes coexisted on Gotland for over 500 years, between ∼3300 and 2800 calBCE, i.e. the Neolithic Funnelbeaker culture (FBC), and the Pitted ware culture (PWC). The ancestry of the…