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- [Narrator] We are the paradoxical ape: bipedal, naked, large brained. Long the
master of fire, tools, and language, but still trying to understand ourselves.
Aware that death is inevitable, yet filled with optimism. We grow up slowly. We hand
down knowledge. We empathize and deceive. We shape the future from our shared
understanding of the past. CARTA brings together experts from diverse disciplines
to exchange insights on who we are and how we got here; an exploration made possible
by the generosity of humans like you.
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- [Richard] Thank you, Pascal, and thank you to Ajit, as well, for running CARTA,
which is, really, a fantastic organization, as you guys all know because
you're here in the room. It was a pleasure to organize this meeting with Anne Stone
and it feels a bit like an amazing reunion of all the folks who are really on the
front lines and doing some of the most amazing things in the field of ancient DNA
in human evolution. So these CARTA meetings, they have an extremely high
production quality, and they're really a pleasure to be involved in and I want to
thank the organizers for all of the hard work that they do in making this possible
for me and for Anne and for the speakers here. So I will say a few words, also,
about CARTA and the big picture questions, the kind of deepest questions, that one
can imagine. The how did we get here? Where are we from? The interesting thing
and the great thing about CARTA, I think, is that these are big questions, hard
questions, but the progress, the answers come in very small details and one very
kind of small step at a time. So, for example, where did I come from? I came
from Santa Cruz and I got here on a Southwest Airlines flight. You probably
all have a similar story, but what we're going to hear today are five excellent
talks that are very, very technical in nature that push the envelope a little
bit. Answer, in some small way, very important questions about who we are and
how we got here. So the first five talks will be first from Sriram Sankararaman,
and I hope that I...I practiced a little bit before I got up here. I hope that is
not so terrible. Sriram will tell us a little bit about the legacy of ancestry
that we from Neandertals and Denisovans, and kind of where this is in our genomes
of people who are alive today. Next we'll have Tina Warner from Oklahoma, who will
tell us about the kind of amazing discoveries one can make from getting DNA
out of dental calculus, the things that...little bit of material that's on
the tooth and records a history of things that lived in your mouth over people that
lived a long time ago. And then a former colleague, Matthias Meyer, from the Max
Planck Institute in Leipzig will come and tell us about perhaps the most technically
challenging project out there now, getting DNA from extremely old, extremely
degraded, and extremely important hominem samples from the old world. Next, my other
former colleague, Kay Prüfer, also from Max Planck Institute will talk to us about
the Neandertal and the Denisovan genomes that have been sequenced in that group
there. These are extremely well-sequenced genomes that are we know in more exacting
detail than many of the genomes that we have for humans who live today, despite
the fact that this material is tens of thousands of years old. And then, finally,
we'll have Brenna Hen from currently at Stony Brook University who will tell us
about her work investigating the origins of modern humans, which we know
geographically happened someplace in Africa but it is very difficult to pin
down kind of exactly when and where that was, and she's working on that very hard
problem. Okay, so with that, I would like to ask the first speaker, Sriram, to come
up and we'll get started.
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