
Team reveals genomic history of ancient civilizations in the Andes - Thevet
https://news.ucsc.edu/2020/05/fehrenschmitz-andes.html
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KhoomeiK
I'm an undergrad research ~intern for one of the professors on this paper! :)

Edit: I've been corresponding with Professor Fehren-Schmitz of the Human
Paleogenomics lab at UCSC for the past few months and will likely be focusing
on improving computational workflows at the lab in the next few months. One
recurring theme I've noticed in paleogenomics research is that the people who
do the actual paleogenomics aren't always the same people who develop the
computational genomics/bioinformatics tools [1], meaning there might be a bit
of a disconnect between those two fields. My understanding of computational
paleogenomics is still pretty rough, but it seems to me like a lot of the
tools still have a ton of room for improvement.

[1] Patterson et al., 2012 (Ancient Admixture in Human History)

~~~
bhickey
[1] That paper brings back memories! Back in 2011, I was chatting with Nick
about admixture and graph theory when it dawned on me that he was effectively
trying to solve the Steiner tree problem. Knowing that his formulation of the
problem was intractable provided a little nudge in the right direction.

It's also worth mentioning that (long) before joining David Reich's lab, Nick
Patterson worked at GCHQ where he was famously mentor to Clifford Cocks. The
story goes that Nick threw an unsolved asymmetric cryptography problem at
Cocks and he came back in the morning having invented RSA.

~~~
KhoomeiK
Oh wow! Super interesting to see how all these fields weave together like
that. There's a joke to be made somewhere here about graph theory too.

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adamvalve
[https://giphy.com/gifs/brick-
mansions-c2X9dXyMh6Pug](https://giphy.com/gifs/brick-mansions-c2X9dXyMh6Pug)

~~~
dang
Not here please.

