David Reich

The genome was not yet sequenced.

We had very little genetic variation accessible.

The amount of data has increased by orders and orders of magnitude every few years.

The types of data that we collect, the ability to collect ancient DNA beginning 14 years ago, the ability to...

generate the volumes of it we have.

We had no ancient DNA in 2009.

And then in 2014, we only had a few hundred individuals with genome-scale data.

We have tens of thousands of individuals with genome-scale data.

We have data from places we didn't have data before.

So it's such a destabilizing process.

And so someone like me

wanders into areas that I'm not expert in.

I'm not South Asian.

I get to be part of trying to learn about history of South Asia.

I get to interact with archaeologists at the cutting edge of learning about ancient

Southwest Pacific or ancient China or ancient Southern Europe.

It's like an incredible privilege, but also I'm a kind of rank amateur in terms of a lot of the work I do.

So one wanders from one area one's an amateur in to another area one's an amateur in and tries to learn a lot.

Maybe this is a little bit like...

what it's like in Silicon Valley right now, constantly doing new things and bringing some skills to bear that are useful and hopefully trying to be respectful of the people one works with and the knowledge, the tremendous knowledge people have and to learn as much as one can and to work with other people to try to produce some joint research product that makes progress.