ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2021
Sometimes hidden but always there: the assumptions underlying genetic inference of demographic histories.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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12 citing papers in PubMed.
- Pan-African model explainsbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- GHIST 2024: The First Genomic History Inference Strategies Tournament.Molecular biology and evolution · 2025Article
- The effect of habitat loss and fragmentation on isolation by distance and divergence.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Effective Population Size Estimation in Large Marine Populations: Considering Current Challenges and Opportunities When Simulating Large Data Sets With High-Density Genomic Information.Evolutionary applications · 2025Review
- Estimating Recent and Historical Effective Population Size of Marine and Freshwater Sticklebacks.Molecular ecology · 2025Article
- Reconciling Gene Tree Discordance and Biogeography in European Crows.Molecular ecology · 2025Article
- Article
- Human population dynamics in Upper Paleolithic Europe inferred from fossil dental phenotypes.Science advances · 2024Article
- From the Ground Up: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Past Fertility and Population Narratives.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2023Article
- Article
- Archaeology, demography and life history theory together can help us explain past and present population patterns.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- A manifesto for palaeodemography in the twenty-first century.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
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Abstract
Demographic processes directly affect patterns of genetic variation within contemporary populations as well as future generations, allowing for demographic inference from patterns of both present-day and past genetic variation. Advances in laboratory procedures, sequencing and genotyping technologies in the past decades have resulted in massive increases in high-quality genome-wide genetic data from present-day populations and allowed retrieval of genetic data from archaeological material, also known as ancient DNA. This has resulted in an explosion of work exploring past changes in population size, structure, continuity and movement. However, as genetic processes are highly stochastic, patterns of genetic variation only indirectly reflect demographic histories. As a result, past demographic processes need to be reconstructed using an inferential approach. This usually involves comparing observed patterns of variation with model expectations from theoretical population genetics. A large number of approaches have been developed based on different population genetic models that each come with assumptions about the data and underlying demography. In this article I review some of the key models and assumptions underlying the most commonly used approaches for past demographic inference and their consequences for our ability to link the inferred demographic processes to the archaeological and climate records. This article is part of the theme issue 'Cross-disciplinary approaches to prehistoric demography'.
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