Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past

Smithsonian Associates Inside Science, Interview Series

The Not Old Better Show, 2018

Massive technological innovations now allow scientists to extract and analyze ancient DNA as never before, and genomics is emerging as important a means of understanding the human past as archeology, linguistics, and the written word. In his new book Who We Are and How We Got Here, my guest on The Not Old Better Show, David Reich, left, describes how the human genome provides not only all the information that a fertilized human egg needs to develop but also contains within it the history of our species.

Image of Tibetan boys, left: Native Tibetans make use of a gene derived from Denisovans to stay healthy at high altitudes.