David Reich

So having that would crack our understanding of how modern human lineages braided together and relate to the other archaic lineages we have data from.

I think we need to, A, identify those skeletal remains or the sediments in old caves that are well-preserved or rock shelters that contain enough DNA to extract.

And I think we need extraction techniques that will allow us to get at that material.

Maybe we even already have them and we just need to wait until that begins to happen.

But it would be revolutionary because the experience in Eurasia has been when we get DNA from old sites or new sites for which there's been nothing, we find Denisovans.

We find people like we completely didn't expect to see before that break our understanding of the past.

I think the other area where I am super excited and I think it would be interesting

a thing to reward and to incentivize would be to try to crack this body of information to try to understand how biological adaptation happened in the last hundreds of thousands of years.

We simply don't know the answer to your question from a genetic point of view about how modern human

cognitive and other types of propensities, how they develop, the biological underpinning of the differences that modern humans have from our closest living relatives.

We just don't know how they evolved.

It's not even clear how biological they were.

But being able to interpret the genome in terms of how these changes occurred is we just don't know how.

I was at a talk

A few years ago, that was really shocking to me, which was based on, there was a researcher at Caltech, and she was talking about being able to directly read the brains of macaque monkeys.

A monkey would be shown 2,000 photographs.

And her student would be recording from different neurons in its visual cortex and learning the neurons' response to different images.

And so what they would do is they would decompose the images of faces, human faces, into eigenvectors with the principal component analysis.

And then the neurons, specific neurons, were responding to particular eigenvectors.

And they learned the language of how the photographs and the images