Science AMA Series: We recently published a manuscript that showed modern humans had sex with Neandertals approximately 100,000 years ago, which is ~50,000 years earlier than previously known human/Nea
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Hi Reddit! The publication can be found here: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature16544.html. Who we are: Co-authors Martin Kuhlwilm, Bence Viola, Ilan Gronau, Melissa Hubisz, Adam Siepel, and Sergi Castellano. Martin Kuhlwilm is a geneticist, currently working at the UPF in Barcelona and previously at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig. He studies modern human, Neandertal and great ape genomes, to understand what is special for each group and which evolutionary patterns can be found. He also studies migration patterns among hominin groups and great ape populations. Bence Viola is a paleoanthropologist at the University of Toronto. His main interest is how different hominin groups interacted biologically and culturally in the Upper Pleistocene (the last 200 000 years). He combines data from archaeology, morphology and genetics to better understand how the contacts between Neanderthals, Denisovans and modern humans happened. He mostly works in Central Asia and Central Europe, two areas where contacts between modern and archaic humans are thought to have taken place. Sergi Castellano, from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, focuses on understanding the role of essential micronutrients, with particular emphasis on selenium, in the adaptation of human metabolism to the different environments encountered by archaic and modern humans as they migrated around the world. His group is also interested in the population history of these humans as it relates to their interbreeding and exchange of genes that facilitate adaptation to new environments. Melissa, Ilan, and Adam used to work together in the Siepel lab at Cornell University, and continue to work together from a distance. Currently, Ilan is a faculty member in Computer Science at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel. Adam is a professor at the Simons Center for Quantitative Biology at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, New York. Melissa is a graduate student in Computational Biology at Cornell. They are especially interested in applying probabilistic models to genomic data to learn about human evolution and population genetics. Ask us anything! (Except whether “Neanderthal” should be spelled with an ‘h’.. we don’t know!) Update: Thanks everyone for having us! Hope we were able to answer some of your questions. We’re signing off now!
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.165 | 0.071 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".