Prof. Pierre Zalloua

Thank you.

Actually, we've met three years ago.

Yes, we did.

Yeah, two years ago.

And then I'm happy that we finally made it.

I think ancient DNA has transformed the way we look at population migrations and who populated which part of the world first.

I think ancient DNA was, I would say, a

caused a paradigm shift in the way we do population genetics.

And no wonder that Papo Svante got the Nobel Prize for it.

I mean, it's really, it's transformed the way we look at human migrations.

And in a lot of places, actually, it made huge impact and it made major discoveries that made us change our ideas or our theories about when and how human migrated out of Africa.

The challenge, I have to just put it here, is Arabia because of the heat and because of the conditions where the remnants of humans in the desert actually extracting DNA from human remains has been extremely challenging.

And to date, I will tell you that that has not been a, maybe apart from a couple of samples,

no DNA beyond 5,000 years, we have not been able to get any DNA out of samples that are more than a few thousand years old from Arabia, from the entire Arabia, which is a huge challenge.

Exactly, exactly.

So in the Levant and in northern Levant, in the

Caucasus even, and in Iran, the Zagros Mountains, and in Anatolia, we've had ample, ample DNA samples.

And that's why the story is so exciting up to the point where we get to Arabia.

But we have other tools at our disposal that have given us ideas about when Arabia was populated and how Arabia was populated, et cetera.

But until we get ancient DNA, and I'm hoping