The legacy of Luca Cavalli-Sforza on human evolution

Archaeology and the branch of population genetics focusing on the human past have historically lived parallel lives, often having complicated encounters when it came to unravelling the origins and evolution of Homo sapiens. These interactions were proven invaluable to obtain a deeper and more complete understanding of our past. At the same time, they sometimes uncovered biases and misinterpretations, with serious consequences for our understanding of data, methods and, most importantly, the history of our species. Cavalli-Sforza pioneered a real multidisciplinary approach, bridging population genetics and statistics with archaeology, human origins, and other fields in the humanities, inspiring researchers from these fields and blazing a trail for today’s successful interactions and collaborations. His legacy showed that these interdisciplinary approaches are possible and of vital importance, and exposed areas that still need significant development today.

Citation

Colucci M, Leonardi M, Hodgson J, Stringer C, Scerri E. The legacy of Luca Cavalli-Sforza on human evolution. Hum Popul Genet Genom 2025; 5(1):0001. https://doi.org/10.47248/hpgg2505010001

Type

Journal Article

Item Description

Copyright: © 2025 by the author(s). This is an Open Access article distributed under the Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, provided the original work is correctly credited. The attached file is the published version of the article.
NHM Repository

EISSN

2770-5005