Reconstructing the early pastoralist genetic history in Inner Eurasia using ancient and present day genome sequences


Genome sequence variation among a set of conspecific individuals harbors
rich information of the evolutionary history of their species and
populations. The genetic history of humans has been at the forefront of
our understanding of evolution at the genome sequence level, by
developing and utilizing state-of-the-art genomics technologies for
decoding genome sequences and the theoretical and computational
frameworks for reconstructing the evolutionary history out of the decoded
sequences. In this talk, I will briefly outline how one can investigate the
evolutionary history of populations using population-scale genome
sequence data and provide a case study of the early pastoralists in East
Asia. While Bronze Age pastoralism was introduced into the Kazakh Steppe
and the Sayano-Altai region mainly by the movement of pastoralists,
surprisingly we observe the expansion of pastoralism further to the east
where the expansion of the western pastoralists did not reach: 1) 4,000-
old-year Bronze Age agropastoralists in the Tarim Basin, 2) Late Bronze Age
horse herders in Mongolia associated with either the Deer Stone Khirigsuur
Complex (DSKC) or the Figure Burial cultures. These case studies exemplify
how genome sequence data can be used to track populations across time
and space and to resolve a long-standing mystery in the human history.