In Professor Greger Larson's short talk he unearths some new truths about the domestication of some familiar animal friends. This ERC project takes advantage of revolutionary genetic technologies to characterise the nuclear genomes from ancient animal remains. By combining the resolution of thousands of DNA markers with the time depth of archaeology, this project aims to address fundamental questions regarding domestication: 1) where and how many times did early animal domestication take place, and 2) when did the mutations that are known to differentiate modern domestic and wild individuals first appear, and how often were similar genes selected for across species?

Greger is the Director of the Palaeogenomics & Bio-Archaeology Research Network and a member of the School of Archaeology where he is continuing his focus on the use of ancient DNA to study the pattern and process of domestication.