Science AMA Series: We recently published a manuscript that showed modern humans had sex with Neandertals approximately 100,000 years ago, which is ~50,000 years earlier than previously known human/Neanderthal interactions. Ask Us Anything!

See the source article by following the link below:

Hi Reddit!

The publication can be found here: http://ift.tt/20FlwGO.

Who we are: Co-authors Martin Kuhlwilm, Bence Viola, Ilan Gronau, Melissa Hubisz, and Adam Siepel.

Martin Kuhlwilm is a geneticist, currently working at the UPF in Barcelona and previously at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig. He studies modern human, Neandertal and great ape genomes, to understand what is special for each group and which evolutionary patterns can be found. He also studies migration patterns among hominin groups and great ape populations.

Bence Viola is a paleoanthropologist at the University of Toronto. His main interest is how different hominin groups interacted biologically and culturally in the Upper Pleistocene (the last 200 000 years). He combines data from archaeology, morphology and genetics to better understand how the contacts between Neanderthals, Denisovans and modern humans happened. He mostly works in Central Asia and Central Europe, two areas where contacts between modern and archaic humans are thought to have taken place.

Melissa, Ilan, and Adam used to work together in the Siepel lab at Cornell University, and continue to work together from a distance. Currently, Ilan is a faculty member in Computer Science at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel. Adam is a professor at the Simons Center for Quantitative Biology at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, New York. Melissa is a graduate student in Computational Biology at Cornell. They are especially interested in applying probabilistic models to genomic data to learn about human evolution and population genetics.

Ask us anything! (Except whether "Neanderthal" should be spelled with an 'h'.. we don't know!)

">Science AMA Series: We recently published a manuscript that showed modern humans had sex with Neandertals approximately 100,000 years ago, which is ~50,000 years earlier than previously known human/Neanderthal interactions. Ask Us Anything!