Dang Liu
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dangliu.bsky.social
Dang Liu
@dangliu.bsky.social
59 followers 77 following 1 posts
Postdoc @ Universität Zürich | genomics & genetics | human evolutionary & adaptive history | dangliu.github.io
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Reposted by Dang Liu
If you're interested in how advances in human genomics are transforming our understanding of the biology of spoken & written language abilities, please do check out my new peer-reviewed "tutorial" article, just published.
🗣️🧬🧪
[Will also make a Bsky explainer 🧵 on it next week when I get some time🙂.]
Genomic Investigations of Spoken and Written Language Abilities: A Guide to Advances in Approaches, Technologies, and Discovery
Purpose: The aim of this tutorial is to show how the rise of molecular technologies and analytical methods in human genetics yields exciting new ...
pubs.asha.org
Reposted by Dang Liu
Séminaire sur les apports récents de la génomique à l'histoire évolutive humaine au cours des derniers dix millénaires
Etienne Patin - L'histoire d'Homo sapiens à la lumière de la génomique
YouTube video by Institut Pasteur EDUCATION
www.youtube.com
Reposted by Dang Liu
The most surprising insight is that the Jomon, early inhabitants of the Japanese Archipelago, have much less Denisovan ancestry than all other East Asians - thus the Jomon (partially) descend from a lineage that predates the gene flow between modern-humans and Denisovans
Reposted by Dang Liu
🎉The 1st paper in our special issue "Population Genomics Methods and Software" is now published!!

“SimHumanity: Using SLiM 5.0 to run whole-genome simulations of human evolution”
www.pivotscipub.com/hpgg/5/4/000...

Many more exciting papers to come - stay tuned!
www.pivotscipub.com/hpgg/special...
SimHumanity: Using SLiM 5.0 to run whole-genome simulations of human evolution
SimHumanity: Using SLiM 5.0 to run whole-genome simulations of human evolution
www.pivotscipub.com
Reposted by Dang Liu
FLARE2: local ancestry inference with poorly-matched reference panels https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.13.681993v1
Reposted by Dang Liu
Method works from simple and complex scenarios in jointly estimating epoch time, population size, migration rate (symmetric or asymmetric), growth rate, and admixture proportion. Software integrated with msprime, demes, tsinfer/tsdate, relate, and singer. github.com/aprilweilab/...
Reposted by Dang Liu
Inference of complex demographic history using composite likelihood based on whole-genome genealogies https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.07.680347v1
Reposted by Dang Liu
We have a few remaining seats left in the “Programming for Evolutionary Biologists” course - 10th edition, Berlin, Feb 17 to Mar 6
evop.bioinf.uni-leipzig.de

A highly motivated and experienced team is waiting for you with an updated curriculum!
Programming for Evolutionary Biology School (EVOP) | February 18th – March 5th 2026
evop.bioinf.uni-leipzig.de
Reposted by Dang Liu
Parental haplotypes reconstruction in up to 440,209 individuals reveals recent assortative mating dynamics https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.24.678243v1
Reposted by Dang Liu
Alba Bossoms Mesa: ‘From rock art to cave walls: exploring new sources of ancient human DNA’
Can we get aDNA from cave art 😍??
Test: 11 sites from Iberia (300 libraries!)
5 cases w HUMAN mtDNA !!!
Nuclear DNA ongoing: but suggestion of male/female diffs on use of pigments; + pop ID (WHG)
Reposted by Dang Liu
📣New paper alert

doi.org/10.1007/s109...

How did populations in tropical regions cope with the global climatic change around the LGM?

While the tropics are often perceived as having been less impacted by the LGM, we show that -as is often the case - it is more complex than it seems!
The Last Glacial Maximum in the Tropics: Human Responses to Global Change, 30–10 ka - Journal of World Prehistory
The world at 18,000 BP, published by Gamble and Soffer (The world at 18,000 BP. Vol. 2: low latitude, Unwin Hyman, 1990), represents the first, and so far the only, attempt at characterising and discussing the impact of the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) on human societies on a global scale. At the time, they highlighted that research and data on the LGM in southern latitudes and the tropics in particular were scant. Since 1990, however, many sites dated to the LGM and located in tropical latitudes have been published. Many paradigms have changed regarding the peopling of the Americas, which allows the archaeology of this continent to be integrated into global scale studies of the LGM. The development of Pleistocene archaeology in tropical contexts, in parallel with methodological advances in cultural, geosciences and palaeoenvironmental studies have strongly reshaped what we know of the antiquity of human occupation in tropical regions and specific human–environment interactions. This article provides for the first time a pan-tropical perspective on the impact of the LGM on human groups living within the tropical latitudes, drawing from case studies in Southeast Asia, Africa and South America, specifically regions which have up until now never been discussed together. To this end, we focus on six different tropical regions between 30 and 10 ka. We present the archaeological and paleoenvironmental data available in these areas, along with proposed relationships for variations in these two records. Finally, we discuss at the regional scale the presence or absence of human changes (site density and techno-cultural change or continuity) before, during and immediately after the LGM.
doi.org
Reposted by Dang Liu
We are excited to share GPN-Star, a cost-effective, biologically grounded genomic language modeling framework that achieves state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of variant effect prediction tasks relevant to human genetics.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
(1/n)
Reposted by Dang Liu
Reposted by Dang Liu
Brilliant paper by Visscher et al.

Populations differ in traits/disease burden. Are these differences due to genetics?

Comparing single variants or polygenic scores between populations is biased due to environmental confounders correlated with the variants.

1/3

www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...
Direct effect of genetic ancestry on complex traits in a Mexican population
Human populations differ in disease prevalences and in average values of phenotypes, but the extent to which differences are caused by genetic or environmental factors is unknown for most complex trai...
www.medrxiv.org
Reposted by Dang Liu
SINGER, our ARG inference method, is finally published and freely available online:

doi.org/10.1038/s415...

It was a long journey – 16 months from initial submission to acceptance. Is it just me, or has peer review gotten more arduous lately? 4+ rounds of review isn't so unusual these days...
Robust and accurate Bayesian inference of genome-wide genealogies for hundreds of genomes - Nature Genetics
SINGER is a method for creating ancestral recombination graphs to understand the genealogical history of genomes. The method has increased speed, and thus scalability, without sacrificing accuracy.
doi.org
Reposted by Dang Liu
🧬 The MOOC “Human Population and Evolutionary Genetics” is open for registration!!
👉 bit.ly/4fw3Zje
💀🌍 Where do we come from? What was the migration history of our species? What role does the Neanderthal genome play in our genetic heritage? How has our species adapted to different environments?
Human Population and Evolutionary Genetics
This Mooc aims to provide basic knowledge on population genetics and the help of genetics in the study of human migrations and human adaptation to extreme conditions.
bit.ly
Reposted by Dang Liu
I'm pleased to share this new article by @svenkasser.bsky.social, Laura Fortunato @anthrolog.bsky.social, Marc Feldman and myself.

The article extends gene-culture coevolution to recognize evolutionary effects of culture arising through drift and migration.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
Reposted by Dang Liu
New volume on the interface between languages, human history, anthropology, archaeology and (a bit of) genetics, curated by M. Robbeets and M. Hudson. A very rich table of content for everyone interested in these multidisciplinary studies of the human past. I contributed two chapters:
The Oxford Handbook of Archaeology and Language
Abstract. Linguists have long described their findings in an archaeological context, while archaeologists have been interested in what language can tell th
academic.oup.com
Reposted by Dang Liu
Here's a paper with a skeleton of the idea, but there is really lots of research to do on the structure of workflow networks, now to make them robust, how to development diagnostics and calculi for steps within them. doi.org/10.1073/pnas...
Bridging theory and data: A computational workflow for cultural evolution | PNAS
Cultural evolution applies evolutionary concepts and tools to explain the change of culture over time. Despite advances in both theoretical and emp...
doi.org
Reposted by Dang Liu
Check out our dive into 50,000 years of Indian genetic history!🇮🇳
🧬~2,700 genomes
🦴Neanderthal/Denisovan DNA
🌾Hunter-gatherer, Iranian farmer & Steppe ancestry
🩺Health-linked, population-specific variants

@lauritsskov.bsky.social & Priya Moorjani
#Genomics #India #HumanEvolution #PopulationGenetics