Geneticists

ancient DNA of pathogens, people, plants and animals

9 problems need geneticists

1. 01
   How many people lived in the Americas in 1492?

   Assess whether ancient and modern genomic evidence on population size can serve as an independent check on regional estimates, and state its date resolution.

   Demography · Americas · 1492–1650also needs demographers, archaeologists and data scientists
2. 02
   Did the Black Death reach sub-Saharan Africa in the fourteenth century?

   Re-screen published African ancient-DNA shotgun data in the European Nucleotide Archive for Yersinia pestis, reporting coverage and detection limits for each individual.

   Disease · Africa · 1340–1500also needs archaeologists and epidemiologists
3. 03
   What caused the cocoliztli epidemics of 1545 and 1576 in New Spain?

   Screen securely dated 1545 and 1576 epidemic burials beyond Teposcolula-Yucundaa with methods able to recover RNA viruses and parasites as well as bacteria.

   Disease · Americas · 1545–1581also needs epidemiologists and geoscientists
4. 04
   What new evidence can fix when and why five historically extinct species disappeared?

   Sequence dated museum skins, eggs and midden bones of the five species to test specimen provenance and when populations began to decline, extending the Eldey-pair identifications.

   Chronology · Global · 1500–1945also needs archivists, data scientists, philologists, archaeologists, computational linguists and GIS specialists
5. 05
   How many people did the Justinianic Plague kill, and did it change late antique society?

   Align the pathogen genomes from Harbeck (2013), Wagner (2014) and Keller (2019) with dated burials, so each site with plague DNA enters the regional register with its date range.

   Disease · Mediterranean · 541–750also needs epidemiologists and archaeologists
6. 06
   Were Mendel's pea-hybrid data too close to expectation, and if so, why?

   Assess whether botanical factors in pea segregation, such as those Fairbanks and Schaalje (2007) tested experimentally, could shift Mendel's expected ratios enough to explain his close fits.

   Science & knowledge · Europe · 1856–1866also needs data scientists
7. 07
   Why did plague disappear from western Europe after the early eighteenth century?

   Sample burials from the last outbreaks in Provence, the Baltic, Messina, southern Italy and the Balkans to test local reservoir against repeated reintroduction from Asia.

   Disease · Europe · 1650–1850also needs epidemiologists and archivists
8. 08
   Where was the land of Punt?

   Build mitochondrial reference data for baboons in Eritrea, Sudan, Somalia and Yemen and compare it with New Kingdom baboon mummies such as British Museum EA 6736 and EA 6738.

   Places · Africa · 2500–1150 BCEalso needs archaeologists
9. 09
   When did the thylacine go extinct in the wild?

   Design an environmental DNA survey of the south-western Tasmanian wilderness with stated detection limits, and test whether dated post-1930 hair, scat or skin samples contain thylacine DNA.

   Chronology · Pacific · 1888–2019also needs data scientists, archivists and GIS specialists

Drafted by Claude Opus 5.5