User:Sonia.calab/sandbox2

Challenges and future perspectives
The analysis of ancient genomes of anatomically modern humans has, in recent years, completely revolutionized our way of studying population migrations, transformation and evolution. Nevertheless, much still remains unknown. The first and obvious problem related to this kind of approach, which is going to be partially overcome by the continuous improvement of the ancient DNA extraction techniques, is the difficulty of recovering well preserved ancient genomes, a challenge that is particularly observed in Africa and in Asia, where the temperatures are higher than in other colder regions of the world. Further, Africa is, among all the continents, the one that harbors the most genetic diversity. As we do not possess ancient DNA coming from the time and the region inhabited by the original ancestors of present-day non-African population, we still know little about their structure and location. The second and more important challenge that this matter has to face is the recovery of DNA from early modern humans (100,000 – 200,000 Before Present). These data, together with a major number of archaic genomes to analyzed and with the knowledge of the timing and of the distribution of archaic genetic admixture, will allow scientists to more easily reconstruct the history of our species. In fact, collecting more data about or genetic history will allow us to track human evolution not only in terms of migrations and natural selection, but also in terms of culture. In the next decade paleogenomics research field is going to focus its attention mainly on three topics: the definition, at a fine-scale detail, of past human interactions by denser sampling, the comprehension of how these interactions have contributed to agricultural transition by analysis of DNA of understudied regions and, finally, the quantification of the natural selection contribution to present-day phenotypes. To interpret all these data geneticists will be required to cooperate, as they have already done with anthropologists and archaeologists, with historians.