Hannah Moots

We talked about how archaeogenetics can be integrated with historical and archaeological sources to better understand mobility in the Roman Mediterranean and beyond. For an overview of the paper we discussed see this great write-up from @archaeologymag.bsky.social archaeology.org/issues/septe...

Happy to share that our paper, and my first first-author paper from my PhD work, is now out in iScience! Many thanks to all co-authors and everyone involved in the study. www.cell.com/iscience/ful...

We are thrilled to share this review for the Peopling the Past-adjacent volume, "Ancient Pasts for Modern Audiences: Public Scholarship and the Mediterranean World", co-edited by our very own Chelsea Gardner and Sabrina Higgins @sabrinahiggins.bsky.social : bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2026/2026.10...

Ever wondered what seals, cormorants and snails can tell us about the Early Middle Ages? I humbly recommend my new(ish) article on how many small human practices in coastal Scotland built the foundations for larger social changes... link.springer.com/article/10.1... #envhist 🏺 #medievalsky

I am happy to share the first preprint of my PhD! We developed mixKIN, an ancestry-aware kinship estimation tool for low-coverage genomes. By accounting for ancestries, it allows us to reconstruct genetic kinship accurately even in complex or admixed populations. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Come & do a fully funded AHRC Collaborative PhD with me, Sophie Newman & Jess Thompson (NMS) in Edinburgh! Full details on the project & how to apply via tinyurl.com/longafterlife ☠️🧪⛪🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 please share widely! 🔁

Out now 😊🐦‍⬛

Wooden tools crafted by Neanderthals at hunting sites have been found before. For the first time, there's now evidence from a domestic context too. “We know what was happening in the kitchen, in the sleeping areas,” says @iphes-cerca.bsky.social's M. Gema Chacón. “It’s like a snapshot.” @science.org

Neanderthals were talented hunters AND home decorators. Evidence from a Spanish rock shelter includes new tool types and evidence for windbreaks and other domestic arrangements. “Now we can start to imagine the spaces they were living in,” says archaeologist @annemiekemilks.bsky.social. @science.org

Aktuelle Untersuchungen der ersten beiden intakten #Bestattungen am #Göbeklitepe (Türkei) aus der Mitte des 9. Jahrtausends v. Chr. sowie weiterer fragmentierter menschlicher Knochen geben Einblick in die vielfältige Bestattungskultur Anatoliens im #Neolithikum: 🏺 www.dainst.org/newsroom/nos...

Only 2 days left! I'm hiring a computational postdoc to join my group — exciting science, great team, don't wait! Apply now 👇 euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/464445 #PostdocPosition #Bioinformatics #AcademicJobs

Excited to share our preprint on the spread of megaliths in Neolithic Europe. Trade networks formed in the wake of migrations, and megaliths then spread within those networks. On their own, migration and cultural diffusion tell an incomplete story. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Thrilled: NSF awarded $11.9M to SCIBG, co-led by Rockefeller, ASU & KU, to sequence genomes of U.S. species. 🧬 As a Diné geneticist and ASU co-lead, I'm humbled this massive effort centers #Indigenous knowledges and #genomic #data #sovereignty from the start. 🙏 news.asu.edu/20260924-env...

Super excited to share my postdoctoral work at @imbavienna.bsky.social @viennabiocenter.bsky.social - We discovered that some retrotransposons, or "jumping genes" 🧬, are able to spread from cell to cell via a new viral infectivity route. A short thread: 🧵👇 (1/7)

I am hiring a postdoc! Are you interested to work on population genetics/ drug resistance/ data? Want to work in Montpellier, France? Fastq files don't scare you? PhD required, start date hopefully Nov 1! (end date Sep 30 2028) Please share! abetterscientist.wordpress.com/2026/09/29/p...

Stable carbon isotopes from #Mesolithic hazelnuts from 6 Danish sites show that 83% of source hazels grew under open or semi-open conditions - in contrast to classic closed-forest expectations🔆🍃Thx to Laila Rehmeier & @felixthehauskat.bsky.social for leading!⬇️ #Palaeoecology #Archaeology #Forests

Apparently I'm giving an inaugural lecture - all very welcome! Thurs October 8th, 5pm, drinks to follow.

🏺 🦣 Nice paper on later E. European Upper Palaeolithic mammoth ivory figurine production & aesthetics. The Mezin-type geometric designs are so beautiful, and their placement on the (apparently) female figurines might indicate tattooing or scarification traditions. www.nature.com/articles/s40...

New publication from team @ewhale-dna.bsky.social: mitochondrial SNP panels & molecular sexing from eDNA let by the amazing Lauren Rodriguez doi.org/10.1111/2041...

Fst is a key genetic differentiation metric, but it emphasizes common variants over rare. In IEEE ICASSP out now lab member Margarita Geleta introduces Fq, which can be tuned across the allele freq spectrum. Fst & Shannon differentiation fall out of it as special cases. arxiv.org/abs/2511.03063

A great paper from Radchenko and colleagues. How distinct structures in mammoth ivory cued the production techniques, aesthetics and maybe wider symbology, of Late Upper Palaeolithic female figurines of communities from Mizyn, Ukraine. www.nature.com/articles/s40... #FossilFriday 🦣🏺

A century of moss carder bee genomes. It's great to see this work published. Thanks to all our collaborators :)

Comic artist Ulli Lust won Germany's biggest non-fiction prize for her book "Early Man was a Woman," out now in English. "The idea of an egalitarian society which didn’t diminish women is a wonderful realization for many people," she told me in an interview for @science.org. "We need that."

Ulli Lust's #archaeological #GraphicNovel about Ice Age gender myths and #Paleolithic society is finally being published in English! And @andrewcurry.com used the opportunity for a nice little @science.org interview: www.science.org/content/arti...

Great news for archaeologists with a new PCI-Friendly journal! The Journal of Archaeological Science now accepts PCI Archaeology-recommended preprints, with fast feedback on *direct publication* or further evaluation. #OpenScience #Archaeology 🧪🏺 A new path for your next paper!

The RAxML-NG v2.0 preprint is out: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... v2.0 features integrated model testing, fast branch support metrics, automatic parallelization, phylogenetic difficulty prediction, genotype evolution models, to name but the most important features. And it is A LOT FASTER of course

I’m looking to hire an NIH funded postdoc to join our lab here at Davis (please RT). Ongoing areas of interest include: 1) polygenic signals of selection from time series, ARGs, GWAS, etc 2) The interpretation of GWAS, polygenic scores, & sources of confounding

Our paper on the second plague pandemic is now finally published: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... We present 11 new Y. pestis genomes from around Europe and introduce a new approach to refine the dating of ancient genomes that helped us to contextualize 75 plague genomes of the Second Pandemic.

The September GBE Highlight features the article by Koyanagi, Kotoku & Kishima on the role of genetic exchange in the evolution of wild rice. Highlight: Ghosts of Long-Lost Connections in the Genomes of Wild Rice 🔗 academic.oup.com/gbe/article/... #societyjournal

Increasingly powerful methods are enabling increasing complex models of ancient human history to be inferred from population genomic data. In a recent review, I highlight two blind spots in these inferences: limitations of the methods and choices of models to fit. arxiv.org/abs/2608.27591

Pick which country is bigger, then watch it morph from Mercator to Equal Earth projection to see how close you were.

The new map makes Africa, Latin America, South Asia and Oceania larger than the traditional Mercator projection.

Our paper on archaic introgression in imputed ancient genomes is out. Imputation performs better in archaic regions, making Neanderthal and Denisovan segments detectable in low-coverage data. Thousands of archived genomes become usable. doi.org/10.1038/s414...

Extremely happy to share our new study on Sheeppox virus (SPPV) ! We notably found many genomes in Medieval parchments🦠📖 A short thread about it : share.google/JqVOTB2lvxcO...

Ancient parchments, covered in ancient disease DNA! Researchers led by @ucddublin.bsky.social's @gingerhowley.bsky.social recover the genes of a deadly animal pathogen from medieval manuscripts. @science.org

Our paper on ancient sheeppox virus genomes, including many found from parchment samples, is now published af Science Advances. Congrats to all our co-authors and particularly first author Louis. #aDNA share.google/JqVOTB2lvxcO...

Our work on systematic perturb-seq of primary human T cells is now out in Cell 🎉 www.cell.com/cell/fulltex... It's been a privilege to work with @ronghuizhu.bsky.social between @jkpritch.bsky.social @marsonlab.bsky.social labs, with a dream-team of co-authors ❤️ Highlights in preprint thread👇

I am VERY EXCITED to see the ad come out for post-doc positions associated with my Cambridge Lab for Ancient World Studies: please pass on to anyone who might be interested and works across ancient regions/languages/worlds... www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/researc...

Diachronic reuse of Neolithic burial monuments by Bronze Age newcomers in Southwestern Britain by @nikolavukovic.bsky.social et al. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

One of my favorites from Dolly Parton, singing with Emmylou Harris & Linda Ronstadt. She was such a bright light and a force for good through her music and programs like Imagination Library. Whenever I tell people I'm from Tennessee, I always say "like Dolly Parton" 🩵 youtu.be/DvJUPyK-Vws?...

🧬 Ancient DNA → ancient proteins? We now have the computational toolkit to make this possible: CarpeDeam + AdDeam + AlphaFold + Foldseek. In our new preprint, we reconstruct an archaeal ATP synthase from ~2M-yo aeDNA from Greenland and predict its 3D structure. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Gary, Indiana is without power for the 11th straight day after storms. This is climate injustice.

Our new study with @benmpeter.bsky.social is now on biorxiv! Here we present a new computational tool which makes it possible to conduct population genetic analyses from very contaminated and very low quality archaic human genomes. (1/7)

Featuring great illustrations by @dilekopter.bsky.social

Check out our new review: Ancient DNA in motion! We examine how the integration of archaeogenomic data with archaeological evidence can help reconstruct past human mobility and interactions, as well as their consequences, while also addressing key terminological and interpretive limitations.

Oh boy - our new ancient DNA module is available for nf-core/mag! Robustly and reproducibly reconstruct ancient metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) using our new nf-core/mag tooling! doi.org/10.1371/jour...