so this is these two

fields of science coming together, like a kind of, you know, scientific chocolate peanut butter Reese's peanut butter cup. But what's the process once they come

together? Like, how do you study disease in ancient people? at the DNA of living people and finding different variations in their genes that put them at risk for certain diseases. There are genes that can raise your risk for heart disease, for cancer, for schizophrenia, for all sorts of conditions. And scientists have actually been able to create pretty long lists of these genes where there's strong evidence that if you have a certain version of a gene, you are at a greater risk of getting these diseases. And so these scientists who are pulling ancient DNA out of bones that are 5,000, 10,000 years old are saying, well, let's see if these people who lived thousands of years ago had those genes too. When did these mutations arise and how did they spread? Let's trace the whole history of these mutations that today put us at risk of different diseases. So how exactly do they do that? Well,