African Demographic History

Understanding and describing demographic processes such as population expansion, bottlenecks, migration, and time to most recent common ancestor (TMRCA) are central goals in human population genetics. Coalescent techniques provide a powerful framework for studying these processes in both the recent and ancient past. We're applying Isolation-with-Migration and other coalescent models to estimate parameters such as effective population size, divergence time, and migration rates across African populations. We're particularly interested in applying these approaches to hunter-gatherer groups, with the aim of better understanding historical transitions to agropastoralism - as well as the deep evolutionary history of all humans.