| The Ancient DNA Laboratory at the University of Utah |
|
Research in the ancient DNA (aDNA) laboratory is focused on the use of molecular genetic methods to evaluate population histories. Similar to the use of genetic data in contemporary populations to infer population history and evolutionary events that have structured modern human genetic variation, Ancient DNA research provides an explicit temporal scale to such historical and evolutionary reconstructions by examining patterns of genetic variation in prehistoric populations. The focus of most, but not all, of the research in the lab is mitochondrial DNA variation in both human and non-human populations.
Existing projects in human population history being conducted by faculty and students in the aDNA laboratory include a collaborative project to investigate human population genetic variation and settlement of the Aleutian Islands, patterns of historic and prehistoric genetic variation and colonization of the North American arctic, and regional population genetic structure over the past several centuries in northern coastal Peru. Increasingly, investigators in the aDNA lab are using molecular tools to investigate the population dynamics of non-human organisms, human prey species, as an analog to infer human resource procurement strategies. Currently, one project is examining the changing patterns of genetic variation over time in elk populations of the San Francisco basin, while another is beginning to assess DNA sequence variation in prehistoric mammoth. All such projects are collaborative, involving faculty and graduate students, and specialists in other fields whose expertise amplifies the inferences to be made from genetic data. Most projects involve collaboration with other geneticists who study patterns of genetic variation in modern populations of a specific region in order to facilitate assessment of ancestral/descendant relationships, along with bone chemists who provide stable isotope data for dietary and paleoenvironmental reconstructions, as well as archaeologists who provide cultural and historic context for the genetic analyses, and who are the initial generators of testable hypotheses in prehistory to which the specificity of genetic analyses may be brought to bear.,
|
||||||||||
