The Indo-European and African Puzzles

The Flegontov Lab is an active participant in major international consortia tackling some of the most significant questions in human prehistory. We are contributors to the monumental 2025 Nature study on “The genetic origin of the Indo-Europeans,” which assembled ancient DNA from hundreds of individuals to localize the geographic and ancestral origins of the Yamnaya archaeological complex.

Our contributions extend to the complex history of African populations, where our work has had a significant methodological impact. In a 2023 PLoS Genetics paper, our team demonstrated that modeling African population history using standard f-statistics can be highly biased depending on how the genetic markers (SNPs) are selected. We showed that commonly used SNP ascertainment schemes, while effective for non-African histories, introduce systematic errors when modeling the deep and complex relationships between multiple sub-Saharan African groups and archaic hominins. This critical finding serves as an essential guide for the entire research community, promoting greater accuracy in the study of African genetic diversity.