Photograph by Lindsey Larson
The skyline of Tallinn, the capitol of Estonia.
This week the entire Genographic Project team travelled from all over the world to Tallinn, Estonia for our third annual Genographic Project Scientific Conference! We have had the most amazingly warm welcome from President Toomas Hendrik Ilves as well as from Richard Villems, who also is from Estonia. It's been great to see all of our friends here - the Genographic Project works with a diverse bunch of geneticists, anthropologists, linguists, computational biologists, as well as our friends at Applied Biosystems, IBM and the Waitt Family Foundation. So to get everyone in the same room and chatting about our work so far has been awesome. Additionally, Richard Villems brought along some `home-team` scientists from Tartu and Tallinn to a roundtable discussion at the Estonian Academy of Science.
For the past couple days, we've been talking about the exciting discoveries that our team has made in the last year. So far we have heard from our team about mummies in South Africa, eating butterfly larva in the Peruvian Amazon ("tastes like butter!"), visiting each and every "Atamas" or chief house in a community of Cossacks in Russia, and our newest Principal Investigator, Lisa Matisoo-Smith, told us about studying rat DNA in Oceania (more on Lisa and the rats later!).
Photograph by Lindsey LarsonThe Genographic Project team during the conference. Left to right: Elena Balanovska, Oleg Balanovsky, Olga Vasinskaya, David Soria, and Jason Blue-Smith.
We are capping off our stay in Estonia with a public lecture at the National Library, where Spencer Wells and the rest of our scientific team will have the opportunity to present the Genographic Project to Estonians and encourage them to participate as well.
Photograph by Lindsey LarsonMax Blankfeld, Doron Behar, Saharon Rossett, Jaume Bertranpetit and David Comas deep in discussion after one of the Genographic Project presenations.
