What Ancient DNA Reveals About Love, Family & Marriage 1,350 Years Ago

Talks on Tuesdays: Real lectures in your favourite venues. 45-mins + Q&A with Dr Simon “Jono” Tuke Talks on Tuesdays is a live event series bringing big ideas, real experts, and curious minds together - at your favourite local venues. Think thought-provoking lectures, audience questions, and post-talk mingling over drinks and dinner. This isn’t a uni lecture. It’s a social, intelligent night out.Come alone or with friends, leave with something to talk about. Event Schedule: 6.30pm Arrival & Doors Open 7pm Lecture Starts 7.45pm Q&A 8pm Talk Concludes 8.30pm Event Closes. *Please arrive close to 6.30pm A La Carte menu and full bar available throughout the night - pay as you go. Your Topic: Dead Men Do Tell Tales: What Ancient DNA Reveals About Love, Family & Marriage 1,350 Years Ago What can the DNA of people buried 1,350 years ago tell us about who they loved, married and called family? Quite a lot, as it turns out. In three Austrian cemeteries once used by communities associated with the Avars, researchers recovered ancient DNA that gives us an extraordinary glimpse into family life more than a thousand years ago. But having the DNA is only the beginning. To understand how these individuals were connected, researchers needed to ask a surprisingly modern question: what if we treated an ancient cemetery like a social network? Using statistical techniques similar to those used to study networks such as Twitter, Dr Simon “Jono” Tuke and his collaborators have been able to examine patterns of genetic relatedness between individuals and investigate what those connections can reveal about marriage, kinship and the social structures of the past. In this talk, Jono will take us from ancient graves to modern network science, showing how DNA, mathematics and statistics can work together to reconstruct relationships between people who lived more than 1,000 years ago. Your Speaker: Laurence Deziel Dr Simon “Jono” Tuke is a Senior Lecturer in Mathematical Sciences at Adelaide University and an applied statistician specialising in bioinformatics, biostatistics and network analysis. But statistics wasn’t always the plan. Jono began his career as a veterinary surgeon before making the rather dramatic leap from animals to algorithms, returning to university to study mathematics and computer science and ultimately completing a PhD in statistics. Today, his research uses statistics to answer questions across an extraordinarily broad range of fields — from healthcare and animal behaviour to social networks, historical texts and ancient DNA. His recent work has explored how sophisticated statistical network models can be applied to DNA recovered from people who lived more than a thousand years ago, helping researchers reconstruct patterns of biological kinship, marriage and family structure in ancient communities.