Reconstructing the evolutionary history of our species from genetic data has been one of the major endeavors of these past decades. Current genetic evidence point towards an African origin of our species, but many important points of this history remain unclear, like:
- when exactly populations began to get out of Africa
- what migration routes did they follow
- what was the nature of interactions between modern humans and other Homo populations
- what was the size of the founding populations
- what was the importance of long-distance dispersal
- ...
We investigate these questions through the use of coalescent simulations, which are be integrated into a Bayesian inference framework to estimate the parameters of the seemingly complex colonization process of modern humans.
This approach will be extended to more realistic spatial expansions.
