Peter Forster (geneticist)
Peter Forster ( * June 27, 1967 in London ) is a German - British geneticist and explores the origin and genetic history of man. He occupied himself not only Archäogenetik among others, with the reconstruction and dissemination of original languages and forensic genetics.
Life
Peter Forster studied chemistry at the Christian -Albrechts -University of Kiel and the University of Hamburg. At the Heinrich -Pette - Institute for Virology and Immunology in Hamburg, he specialized in genetics and a PhD in 1997 in the field of biology on the subject of dispersal and differentiation of modern homo sapiens Analysed with mitochondrial DNA. After his research at the Institute of Forensic Medicine, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität in Münster, he was appointed Research Fellow at the McDonald Institute for Archaelogical Research in Cambridge. Since 1999, Forster Fellow at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge, and editor of the International Journal of Legal Medicine. Peter Forster is a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina since 2012.
Research results
The existence of modern man is busy in Africa 200,000 years ago. Peter Forster discovered also analyzed using modern and fossil DNA, that there was only one successful migration out of Africa, which dates Forster to 60,000 years. The size of this group of emigrants he averaged less than 200 people. Their descendants migrated an average of about 200 to 1,000 meters per year and reached Europe and Australia more than 40,000 years ago, America about 20,000 years ago. Due to the very small founder numbers and the subsequent isolation of the continents of today's feature differences have emerged, which were formerly summarized in " human races ".
At the geographical DNA patterns discovered Forster that today's language areas have arisen on every continent, especially through the prehistoric spread of culturally or militarily dominant men whose new languages were apparently preferred by the local women and passed on to the children. Thus today there is a statistical relationship between the language and the Y chromosomes of today's men, but no such connection with the mtDNA of today's women. Peter Forster has tested its statistical evolutionary approach on languages , and thereby calculated that the Celtic languages were spreading in the Bronze Age from 3000 BC, and the Germanic languages in the Iron Age by 600 BC, up to Britain. To achieve these results, Forster has created bug- DNA and language databases, and with his colleagues the phylogenetic network analysis of mitochondrial DNA, Y - chromosomal DNA, and linguistic data, and the concept of mtDNA and Y - chromosomal " clock " to the application stage brought. As a further practical applications he developed DNA parentage tests, tests of geographical origin and relationship advice for genealogy, family research and forensic medicine.
Writings (selection )
- The Y Chromosome Consortium ". A nomenclature system for the tree of human Y -chromosomal binary haplogroups " Genome Res 12:339-348, 2002.
- Forster P, Renfrew C: ". Phylogenetic Methods and the Prehistory of Languages " McDonald Institute Press, University of Cambridge, 2006, ISBN 978-1-902937-33-5.