Ancient DNA with David Reich - Episode 42
b'Massive technological innovations now allow scientists to extract and analyze\\nancient DNA as never before, and genomics is emerging as important a means of\\nunderstanding the human past as archeology, linguistics, and the written word.\\nIn his new book Who We Are and How We Got Here (Pantheon), David Reich describes\\nhow the human genome provides not only all the information that a fertilized\\nhuman egg needs to develop but also contains within it the history of our\\nspecies. Join Reich as he discusses how the genomic revolution and ancient DNA\\nare transforming our understanding of our lineage as modern humans, and how DNA\\nstudies reveal a deep history of inequality\\u2014among different populations, between\\nthe sexes, and among individuals within a population. He examines how research\\ncontradicts the orthodoxy that there are no meaningful biological differences\\namong human populations, at the same time using evidence provided by genomics\\nand ancient DNA to show that the differences that do exist do not conform to\\nfamiliar and often pernicious stereotypes. Reich, a pioneer in analyzing ancient\\nhuman DNA, is a professor in the department of genetics at Harvard Medical\\nSchool and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.'