MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort

Ancient DNA

2021· other· en· W4211173420 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueThe Encyclopedia of Ancient History · 2021
Typeother
Languageen
FieldBiochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology
TopicForensic and Genetic Research
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Alberta
Fundersnot available
KeywordsAncient DNADiversity (politics)PopulationEvolutionary biologyGeographyAdaptation (eye)GenealogyHistoryArchaeologyBiologyAnthropologySociologyDemography

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

As the continent where humans evolved and thus exhibit the greatest genetic diversity, Africa is one of the most attractive places to conduct ancient DNA (aDNA) research. Yet the “aDNA revolution” only recently reached the continent, thanks in part to methodological breakthroughs that make it possible to extract aDNA from poorly preserved materials from hot and/or humid climates. Since the first fully sequenced ancient African human genome was published in 2015, dozens of additional genomes from the continent have illuminated population movements, economic and social transitions, patterns of adaptation, and the timing of our species' evolution. However, sequenced individuals come from archaeological contexts widely separated in space and time and represent only a tiny fraction of ancient human genetic diversity. Many questions and entire regions/time periods have yet to be explored using aDNA. This is also the case for non‐human African aDNA studies, which have been slower to develop in part because of poor preservation. This entry describes the science of aDNA, discusses how the field has revolutionized in the past decade, and explores the history of aDNA research in Africa starting with mummy studies in the 1980s. It concludes with a discussion of the ethical challenges facing African aDNA research, some of which are specific to the continent while others apply to postcolonial contexts more broadly. While there is major work ahead to ensure aDNA studies in Africa and beyond are conducted ethically and equitably, the field is poised to shift knowledge on the African past in the coming years.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: Other
Teacher disagreement score0.088
Threshold uncertainty score0.998

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0030.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.013
GPT teacher head0.243
Teacher spread0.230 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it