by Matthew Woolf, Education & Outreach Executive
For most of human history, the discovery of a skeleton would have been the best insight into an ancient person’s life. The clothes and ornaments placed alongside the body may tell a story about what their world valued, what that person held dear. Perhaps a shard of pottery nearby would contain an inscription. Harshly weathered fragments of letters, maybe even words or phrases, offering a precious glimpse into the communication and culture of the person in the ground.
But the idea that from a few ancient bones, an intricate history of entire populations could be traced, right up until the present day, was a fanciful dream of science fiction as recently as as ten years ago. The key that unlocked this brave new world: DNA.
David Reich is one of those who trusted from early on, that contained within the genetic code of ancient people, are clues about the history of seismic events of whole populations of the past, waiting to be uncovered. Mass migrations, replacements, long periods of isolation and huge mixing events, are now able to be traced in meticulous detail. This is due to remarkable technological advancements pioneered by Reich and others, which enable the extraction, and industrial analysis, of whole genome sequences from the remains of archaic people.
Such work is vital for explaining why we as Jnetics exist as a charity. This technique was recently used to investigate the remains of 12th century bodies found in a well in Norwich, uncovering not only that they were of Ashkenazi Jews, but that they carried the BRCA mutation still prevalent in our community today (see jewishbrca.org). Not only that, but by tracing periods of isolation, migration and population mixtures, we can understand why certain conditions are more common in certain Jewish groups and even determine when they came about.
David Reich was born in Washington DC in 1975 into a Jewish family steeped in academic success. His mother Tova is a novelist, his father Walter a professor at George Washington University and the first director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, whilst his uncle is Rabbi Avi Weiss, founded the Open Orthodox movement and two Yeshivas associated with it.
David’s academic career began at Harvard, where he initially studied Sociology, a possible influence on his later interest in relating genetics to the clues it gave about societies of the past.
During his undergraduate, he transitioned to achieve a BA in Physics and Medicine, continuing his studies at Oxford University where he obtained a PhD in Zoology, his thesis focusing on using genetic analysis to investigate human evolution.
He then returned to Harvard where he accelerated research into new techniques for extracting DNA from ancient samples, and refined methods for uncovering the information buried within the data, leading to some astounding results. His team uncovered that the split between humans and chimpanzees occurred far later than previously thought, and that interbreeding continued for several million years after the split began.
Further work focused on tracing migration patterns of different population group with discoveries that shook previously held assertions about ancient history. Current ‘indigenous’ white Europeans descend from three distinct populations that merged within the last nine thousand years. Native American populations arose from multiple major migrations from Asia, and perhaps most surprisingly, all modern populations outside Africa carry ancestry from interbreeding with Neanderthals and Denisovans, our now-extinct genetic cousins. David’s work has won him many prestigious awards, including the Darwin-Wallace medal for outstanding contribution to evolutionary biology. He continues to advance his field in many new directions, and we at Jnetics are excited to see where it goes.
