David Reich

And we might be able to appreciate that.

So maybe we could see whether there's been a quickening of natural selection over that time period.

There's a question about, I think the view amongst common trait geneticists is that we've been at a kind of steady state where almost where the natural selection that does occur is just there pushing down slightly bad variants, not...

not adapting to new situation.

We're at a kind of stable point.

So it's not clear how that works because over a scale of 2 million years, we're clearly genetically quite different from our ancestors.

Our brains are bigger.

We do some things differently.

Our proportions are different.

And yet over the last 200,000 years, we are...

not profoundly different.

There's not genetic changes that differ dramatically across populations.

So there's like a kind of disconnect.

It's tempting to think evolution has stopped from one perspective because there's so little fixed differences.

But on the other hand,

Somehow it looks, if you look in the last 10,000 years in West Eurasian DNA, which we're doing now, it looks like a lot of change is happening.

So it's a very confusing situation.

It feels like we don't really understand what's going on, but there's a lot to learn.

So we're working right now on a study which is documenting changes over the last 10,000 years in Europe and Western Eurasia, based on tracing changes in about 8,500 high-quality DNA sequences from people from this period that have been collectively accumulated by us and others.

So we've been working very hard at this, led by Ali Akbari in my group.