Human evolutionary history has important implications for biomedical research. A good understanding of human evolutionary history, such as gene flow, genetic drift, and natural selection, can help us to interpret the distributions of rare and common disease-causing alleles, and to identify disease-causing genes in the emerging era of personal genomics. We will use data generated from our laboratory as well as publically-available genomic data to study human evolutionary history and population diversity.

The ‘delayed expansion’ hypothesis. In this hypothesis, the ancestal Eurasian population separated from African populations approximately 100 thousand years ago (kya) but did not expand into most of Eurasia until approximately 40 kya.