Time : 10:00-11:00 am , Apr. 16（Monday）

Venue: Room 300, SIBS Main Building, Yueyang Road 320

Host：Prof. Shuhua Xu

        CAS-MPG Partner Institute for Computational Biology

Speaker：Prof. Mark Stoneking, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany

Title: The Genomic and Cultural Landscape of Madagascar

Abtract:

       Although situated ～400 km from the east coast of Africa, Madagascar exhibits cultural, linguistic, and genetic traits from both Southeast Asia and Eastern Africa. However, the settlement history remains contentious, as it is not clear if the initial colonization was from Africa, from Southeast Asia, or by an already admixed population. It is also not clear to what extent the dispersal from Africa and Southeast Asia was sex-biased. Moreover, to what extent is African vs. Southeast Asian genetic ancestry correlated with African vs. Southeast Asian cultural and linguistic traits in admixed Malagasy populations? To address these and other questions about Malagasy populations, a systematic, grid-based sampling of ~3,000 individuals from 257 villages across Madagascar has been carried out. I shall present and discuss the results of the analyses of these data, together with data on cultural and linguistic traits. In addition, the admixed ancestry of Malagasy populations can be used to detect signals of positive selection occurring after the admixture, and such analysis reveals one of the strongest signals of recent positive selection ever detected in humans.