Speaker: Dr. Laurent Frantz (Queen Mary University of London/ The University of Oxford)
Title: Understanding domestication in the genomic era
Where: Anatomy G04 Gavin de Beer LT, UCL (Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT)
When: 31 May 2018, 17:30
Abstract:
Beginning with dogs over 15,000 years ago, the domestication of plant and animals has played a key role in the development of modern societies. Given its fundamental importance, a vast literature from a wide variety of academic disciplines has explored and explained the origins of domestication. For example, domestication has fascinated evolutionary biologists for decades because of the dramatic impact that artificial selection played in the evolution of traits in both domestic plants and animals.
Genomic information, extracted from both modern and archaeological samples have had a tremendous impact on our understanding of animal domestication, not only allowing us to better retrace their origin but also to understand fundamental evolutionary processes (e.g. the role of gene-flow from wild populations). Here I will present novel ancient genomics data-sets from world wide sampling of pigs and dogs and how this new source of data is revolutionising our understanding of their domestication history.
