About

DNA phenotyping is a challenging statistical problem, complicated by inference in unobservable archaic populations. The question of what our archaic hominin ancestors may have looked like has captured the attention of scientists and popular culture. Previous research has sequenced that pigmentation related variants in ancient and archaic genomes, but this work remains spread across single locus studies and phenotype prediction attempts rather than directly consolidated into a systematic archaic focused resource. Here, I attempt to evaluate the possibility of phenotype prediction in 14 archaic Neanderthal and Denisovan individuals through the analysis of depth and missingness in available genomes, and compare available pigmentation-related SNPs in these archaic populations to diverse modern human genomes obtained from the Simons Genome Diversity Project.