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David Reich

Professor of Genetics, Harvard Medical School, Harvard University

Search every verified David Reich interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. David Reich, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, has continued to discuss how ancient DNA research is reshaping understanding of human history. In interviews and lectures during 2025 and 2026, he described findings from his laboratory, which has studied over 50,000 ancient and modern human genomes. He stated that people living in a place today are almost never the direct descendants of those who lived there earlier, arguing that migration, mixture, and population turnover have been the rule rather than the exception across human history. He also discussed work with collaborator Ali Akbari that challenges the long-standing view that natural selection has been largely dormant in humans over recent millennia, presenting evidence of intensified selection during the Bronze Age, including for traits related to pigmentation and other complex characteristics. Reich also addressed the implications of his research for understanding ancestry and social categories. He said that ancient DNA shows that no population is "pure" and that modern racial categories are social constructs that do not map neatly onto genetic groupings. He cautioned that direct-to-consumer ancestry tests can provide unreliable information, particularly for communities like African Americans seeking details about their deep past. In a 2025 tribute event, he noted funding challenges for ancient DNA research in the United States, stating that federal support has been limited and that philanthropic contributions could make a significant difference to laboratories in the field.

Recent appearances

  • Veritalk: David Reich on migration, mixed ancestries, and ancient DNA

    July 07, 2026 · 📺 Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences

    David Reich, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and of human evolutionary biology in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, explains how ancient DNA is rewriting what we thought we knew about human history. Drawing on more than 50,000 ancient and modern genomes his lab has studied, Reich shows that the people living in a place today are almost never the direct descendants of the people who lived there before — migration, mixture, and population turnover — are the rule across human history, not the exception. Reich argues that sweeping population mixtures — phenomena we typically…

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  • How 3,800 DNA Sites Proved Us Wrong – David Reich

    May 18, 2026 · 📺 Dwarkesh Clips

    Full episode:    • David Reich – Bronze Age shock, the Neande...   Me on twitter: https://x.com/dwarkesh_sp David Reich is back. He and collaborator Ali Akbari just published a paper that overturns a long-standing consensus about human evolution - that natural selection has been dormant in our species for the last 10s of 1000s of years. David is a very brilliant and rigorous scholar. It was a real delight to learn from him again.

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  • The Bronze Age radically altered our DNA – David Reich

    May 10, 2026 · 📺 Dwarkesh Clips

    Full episode:    • David Reich – Bronze Age shock, the Neande...   Me on twitter: https://x.com/dwarkesh_sp David Reich is back. He and collaborator Ali Akbari just published a paper that overturns a long-standing consensus about human evolution - that natural selection has been dormant in our species for the last 10s of 1000s of years. David is a very brilliant and rigorous scholar. It was a real delight to learn from him again.

    Watch on YouTube ↗

  • David Reich – Bronze Age shock, the Neanderthal puzzle, & the sudden spread of farming

    May 08, 2026 · 📺 Dwarkesh Patel

    David Reich is back. He and collaborator Ali Akbari just published a paper that overturns a long-standing consensus about human evolution — that natural selection has been dormant in our species since the agricultural revolution. By scaling ancient DNA sequencing and developing a new statistical method, they found that selection has actually sped up. Selection went especially bonkers during the Bronze Age (around 3,000 years ago). That's when gene frequencies for everything from immune function to body fat to intelligence were most in flux. Over the last 10,000 years, selection pushed the ge…

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  • Your ancestors aren't who you think they are | David Reich: Full Interview

    April 21, 2026 · 📺 The Well and 3 more

    What if one of our oldest ideas about ancestry is simply wrong? David Reich argues that ancient DNA has exposed the myth of purity and uncovered a far messier history of who we are and where we came from. ❍ Subscribe to The Well on YouTube: https://bit.ly/welcometothewell Over the last 15 years, data on ancient DNA has upended the old story of human history. In this full-length interview, geneticist David Reich explains how new findings have challenged the family tree model of ancestry and revealed a past shaped by migration, interbreeding, disappearance, and constant change. From Neander…

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  • How Ancient DNA Changed Everything We Thought We Knew About Human History. With David Reich

    March 08, 2026 · 📺 The Science and Cocktails Foundation

    Science & Cocktails is proud to announce an episode with David Emil Reich, Professor at Harvard University and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, award-winning superstar scientist of Ancient DNA who has uncovered the roots of modern humans, their history and language, and author of the book "Who We Are and How We Got Here". He will tell us how to look at our human past and how that can help us improve human health for the future. How is it that we can obtain whole genome DNA data of similar quality to what you get from sending your spit to a direct-to-consumer ancestry tes…

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  • IGM Seminar Series: Dr. David Reich, PhD - January 29th, 2026

    March 05, 2026 · 📺 IGM UCSD

    "Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia" - Dr. David Reich, January 29th, 2026 @ IGM Seminar Series, UC San Diego. Ancient DNA has transformed our understanding of the past by revealing previously unknown populations and migrations, but its potential to reveal as much about biology as history has not been realized because estimating the frequencies of alleles with enough precision to detect significant shifts over time requires large sample sizes, and because it has been unclear how to distinguish subtle allele frequency shifts due to population structure and…

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  • David Reich: 90% of Ancient Humans Vanished. We Reconstructed Their History.

    October 31, 2025 · 📺 Dr Brian Keating

    Harvard geneticist David Reich has rewritten human prehistory using ancient DNA. In this conversation we go past the headlines — past the Yamnaya, past the Neanderthal admixture story most listeners already know from his book and from his appearances elsewhere — and into the parts that don't usually get airtime: — The ghost populations. Entire civilizations that left no pottery, no tools, no bones we can identify, and yet whose genetic signatures are scattered across every living human. The people who built Stonehenge. The people who crossed Beringia. We know they existed because we are partl…

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  • Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA as a Window into Human History and Biology | David Reich

    October 27, 2025 · 📺 Harvard Radcliffe Institute

    David Reich discusses the revolution wrought by the creation, 15 years ago, of a new tool for studying the human past: ancient DNA sequencing. The invention of the microscope around 400 years ago made possible the discovery of the world of previously invisible microorganisms. In the same way, when we obtain DNA from past cultures today, we find surprise after surprise, often in tension with what we thought we knew, based on archaeology, linguistics, and history. Reich explores how these new discoveries help us better appreciate our shared, and complicated, genetic past and how they might be us…

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  • David Emil Reich, Professor of Genetics, Harvard Medical School

    July 15, 2025 · 📺 Simons Foundation

    A Tribute to Jim Simons in Celebration of the Importance of Basic Science and Mathematics Leaders in mathematics, science and philanthropy gathered on June 27, 2025, to remember the incredible contributions of Jim Simons and to inspire continued philanthropic support of basic research. To learn more about the event go here: https://www.simonsfoundation.org/2025... For more information about the life of Jim Simons go here: https://www.simonsfoundation.org/2024... Photo Credit: Sam Ogden

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  • The caste system transformed Indian genetics – David Reich

    September 22, 2024 · 📺 Dwarkesh Patel

    Full Episode:    • David Reich — How one small tribe conquere...   Transcript: https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/david... Apple Podcasts: http://apple.co/3RFuS7b/ Spotify: http://spoti.fi/3APeQ3L Me on Twitter:   / dwarkesh_sp   If you’re interested in advertising on the podcast: https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/adver...

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  • David Reich — How one small tribe conquered the world 70,000 years ago

    August 29, 2024 · 📺 Dwarkesh Patel

    There's a second audio track with better sound: English (US). I had no idea how wild human history was before chatting with the geneticist of ancient DNA David Reich. Human history has been again and again a story of one group figuring ‘something’ out, and then basically wiping everyone else out. From the tribe of 1k-10k modern humans who killed off all the other human species 70,000 years ago, to the Yamnaya steppe nomads 5,000 who killed off 90+% of (then) Europeans and also destroyed the Indus Valley Civilization. So much of what we thought we knew about human history is turning out to be…

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Notable quotes

“The mainstream view in human evolution in the last several decades has been that natural selection has been pretty quiescent over the last several hundred thousand years of human history. There are several lines of evidence that have been deployed to document this. One is that if you compare diverse populations from different continents around the world, for example Europeans and East Asians, and you look at mutation”

“I think that part of this is ideological. So when we were working on our studies in Europe, for example, between 5000 and 3000 years ago, and found this huge ancestry transmission associated with the Yamnaya spread and the cultures locally known as the Corded Ware or the Bell Beaker. And we showed that there was a huge disruption in the ancestry. I think it was very surprising in light of the discussion that had happ”

“So the way to think about it is that up until now our data center business has been almost entirely GPUs. Vera is our CPU, and you know what's really exciting is that Vera opens a brand new 200 billion TAM for NVIDIA, a market we have never addressed before, and every major hyperscaler is partnering with us to get it deployed, and that's huge for the company because for the first time we have a second engine of that ”

“There's also evidence of fluctuating selection over time. So if you look at the polygenic score that predicts performance on IQ tests, there's very very strong positive selection from about 5,000 years ago to 2,000 years ago. And then there's almost no selection at all in the last 2,000 years. If you asked sociologists or other people when is there going to be the most strong selection for this trait, I don't know wh”

“The results show overwhelmingly that not only are there hundreds of positions of the genome that are affected by directional selection in this period, but there has been an intensification of natural selection over this period in Europe and the Middle East. Natural selection has intensified since the advent of agriculture, mostly immune-related. Selections fluctuated over time.”

“Humans are pretty non-diverse compared to our relatives like chimpanzees. So the population structuring that exists amongst chimpanzees into different groups goes back hundreds of thousands of years. Whereas humans become relatively homogeneous amongst almost all living people today by maybe about 70,000 years ago. There's a few exceptions that go back a little bit more, but basically by that time and this is true co”

Other executives at Harvard University

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  • Pardis Sabeti, Professor, Harvard

The summary and quote tags on this profile are produced with AI assistance from verified, first-person interview transcripts, then checked by our team to confirm the speaker's identity and the accuracy of every quote. See how we verify →