Interview #4 - Tom Booth

Into the Dust Archaeology

In this interview, I totally geek out with Tom Booth, an archaeogeneticist at the Francis Crick Institute, just a few blocks away from my university in London. Tom studies ancient DNA to answer questions of human migration and identity way back in ancient times before we had written history, and his particular interest is the Neolithic – Bronze Age population turnover in Britain. One thing that makes Tom unique is his deep understanding of the archaeology as well as the science of genetics, giving him the ability to make sense of both the material record and the DNA. We discuss the rapid development of aDNA studies over the past couple decades, some of the secrets it is revealing, and some of the pitfalls of interpreting this kind of evidence.