We are a research group (led by Dr. Ke Wang) at the forefront of understanding the evolutionary history of humans through the lenses of paleogenomics, bioinformatics, and population genetics.

The inhabitation of modern Homo Sapiens on our planet has a long history over 100,000 years, who have left numerous traces of skeletons, created objects (such as lithics and metal artifacts), and caused subsequent local ecological changes. Archaeological excavations of human skeletons allow scientists to reveal the distribution of human fossils and their associated objects buried alongside them that constitute a critical feature of their archaeological cultural label. In the last decades, the successful retrieval of ancient DNA from human remains dated to the last 10,000 years has revolutionized our understanding of the settlement and peopling history of modern humans. Paleogenomics, compared to modern genomics, has resolved many key population history questions in a much more direct way. It meanwhile allows direct comparison between genetic evidence, and archaeological cultural hypotheses, sometimes, even linguistic theories.

While when the time scope of research question is beyond the capability of ancient DNA (too old to be recovered), the bioinfomatic methods based on the currently available data for estimating population evolutionary events become indispensible. The development of new bioinfomatic tools for population history analyses replies heavily on the mathmatical framework established in theoretical population genetics and evolutonary biology. One of the classic framework is coalescent theory, which is the theoretical basis of the presented developed tool here (MSMC-IM). Another widely recognised framework is site-frequency spectrum, which, compared to coalescent theory, would benefit from larger sample size (for more accurate frequency estimates, intuitively). We hope to leverage pros and cons from both frameworks to achieve more accurate estimates on the human evolutionary history.