We are thrilled that David Robson wrote a piece in The Atlantic about our joint research project with Giuseppe Testa and his team in Milan. Our two groups have been working together on using Williams syndrome and the effects of BAZ1B dosage variation as a model towards experimental testing of the self-domestication hypothesis of human evolution. The work has recently been published as a preprint. In a truly interdisciplinary project, we studied the effects of BAZ1B, a gene heavily implied in Williams syndrome, on neural crest stem cells, and combined the findings with insights gained from the comparison of modern and archaic human specific single nucleotide polymorphisms.
