Eske Willerslev (born 5 June 1971) is a Danish evolutionary geneticist notable for his pioneering work in molecular anthropology, palaeontology and ecology. He currently holds the Prince Philip Professorship in Ecology and Evolution at University of Cambridge, UK and the Lundbeck Foundation Professorship in Evolution at Copenhagen University, Denmark. He is director of the Centre of Excellence in GeoGenetics, a research associate at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and a professorial fellow at St John's College, Cambridge. Willerslev is a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences (US) and holds the Order of the Dannebrog issued by her Majesty Queen Margrethe II of Denmark in 2017.Kristian Leth and Eske Willerslev (2016): "Historien om det hele - fortællinger om magi og videnskab", People´sPress .Debate book about the concepts of magic and scienceKristoffer Frøkjær (2015): "Eske Willerslev - Han gør det døde levende", Gyldendal . Biographic book by science journalist Kristoffer Frøkjær.Eske Willerslev (2008): "Fra pelsjæger til professor - en personlig rejse gennem fortidens dna-mysterier", Jyllands-Posten .An autobiography.
Early life and education Willerslev was born in Gentofte, north of Copenhagen, as the son of historian Richard Willerslev and Lona Loell Willerslev. He has a younger sister, Anne Willerslev, an ophthamologist, and an identical twin brother, Rane Willerslev, an anthropologist and director of the National Museum of Denmark. He attended Ordrup Gymnasium.
Before becoming a scientist Willerslev led several expeditions in Siberia in the early 1990s with his twin brother, collecting ethnographic materials and megafauna skeleton remains. These objects are stored at the Danish Moesgaard Museum, the largest Siberian ethnographical collection in Denmark. Willerslev also lived as a fur trapper in the Sakha (Yakutia) Republic from 1993 to 1994.Fra pelsjæger til Professor. science.ku.dk. 2 June 2008 He obtained his Doctor of Science (DSc) degree from Copenhagen University in 2004. pp. 1–346, HCØ tryk, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Career In 2003 Willerslev moved to the University of Oxford as an independent Wellcome Trust Fellow, a position he held until 2005. In 2004, at the age of 33, he became a full professor at University of Copenhagen, making him the youngest professor in Denmark at the time. In 2014 he became an adopted member of the Crow Tribe in Montana (Apsaalooke), where he carries the name ChiitdeeXia'ssee (Well Known Scout). In 2015 Willerslev took up the Prince Philip Professorship of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at University of Cambridge.
Willerslev is a Foreign Associate Member of the National Academy of Sciences (USA), an elected member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, and an honorary doctor at both University of Oslo and University of Tartu. He also holds the Order of the Dannebrog, an order of chivarly issued by Queen Margrethe II of Denmark. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Oxford and a Visiting Miller Professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
Willerslev has received several awards including the Antiquity Prize for the best paper in the journal Antiquity in 2009, the Danish Independent Research Council's Major EliteForsk Prize, the Rosenkjær award for science communication, and the Genius Award (Geniusprisen) of Danish Science journalists for "an impressive array of research successes in the public eye, combined with a unique tour-de-force through university". In 2023 he was awarded the Balzan Prize.Balzan Prize 2023
Research
Environmental DNA During his MSc project Willerslev and colleagues were the first to obtain ancient DNA directly from ice cores. Later Willerslev and his team expanded on this approach and were the first to show that DNA from plants, mammals, and birds can be obtained directly from ancient as well as modern environmental samples (environmental DNA). Willerslev later showed that environmental DNA can also be obtained from a variety of settings including basal ice and revealed a forested Greenland some 400,000 years ago, questioning if southern Greenland was ice free during the last interglacial. His team has also used environmental DNA to reveal forested refugia in Scandinavia during the last interglacial, and that forbs rather than grasses were dominating the steppe environments of the northern hemisphere during the Pleistocene and were an important food source for the megafauna.
Using environmental DNA, Willerslev and collaborators estimated that woolly mammoth in mainland Alaska survived more than 3,500 years earlier than previously thought, thereby dismissing the Blitzkrieg and Impact hypotheses for megafauna extinction. They also clarified the importance of climate change as a driver of megafauna population dynamics, and the decline of protein-rich forbs during the Pleistocene extinctions.
In 2017 Willerslev's team was the first to apply a metagenomic approach to environmental DNA, reconstructing the biological succession of North America's interior Ice-Free Corridor. Environmental DNA analyses showed the Ice-Free Corridor's transition from being a steppe environment with mammoth and bison, to an open populous-dominated forest inhabited by elk, and ending as the conifer forest with species like moose of today. They also claim the interior Ice-Free Corridor is not the first route for early Americans moving south to lower North America from Alaska, given that it first became viable for human occupation 12.6 thousand years ago, i.e., after Clovis and pre-Clovis occupation was seen in the lower 48 states.
Willerslev and his team obtained and identified two-million-year-old environmental DNA sequences from the Kap København Formation in Greenland that indicated that the region once had a forested ecosystem with a wide variety of animal life. They published their results in December 2022.
Ice Age megafaunal extinctions
Willerslev led the team that published in 2011 a large-scale genetic study on the population dynamics of six Late Pleistocene megafaunal species across the northern hemisphere: woolly mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, horse, reindeer, muskox, and reindeer, coupling their genetic data with climate niche modelling and the archaeological record. They found that climate has been a major driver of population change over the past 50 thousand years. However, each species responded differently to the effects of climatic change and human contact. Climate change can explain the extinction the Eurasian musk ox and woolly rhinoceros, while it is more likely that a combination of climate and humans was responsible for the extinction of Eurasian steppe bison and wild horse. The causes behind the extinction of the woolly mammoth were ambiguous. They did not find any genetic signature or any distinctive range dynamics distinguishing extinct (woolly mammoth and rhino) from surviving species (horse, musk ox, and reindeer), revealing the challenges associated with predicting future responses of extant mammals to climate and human-derived change to their habitats.
First whole-genome sequencing of an ancient human In 2010 a team led by Willerslev sequenced the genome of a 4,000-year-old man from the Saqqaq culture of Greenland from his hair. This was the first whole-genome sequencing of an ancient human. The DNA obtained from the hair was fragmented into an average size of 55 base pairs. They revealed that the Saqqaq peoples represent a migration from Siberia to the Americas that is separate from that of Native American and Inuit ancestors. In 2014 his team showed that all paleoeskimos in the New World representing several distinct cultures all belonged to the same population as the Saqqaq man and that they lived in genetic isolation from Native Americans for almost 5,000 years before they died out about 700 years ago. This was the first genetic evidence for cultural change happening in isolation through the spread of ideas within a population rather than through meetings between different groups of peoples as seen e.g. during the European Neolithisation.
Early peopling of the Americas In 2008 Willerslev led the DNA study on coprolites from the Paisley Caves in Oregon showing human presence in North America more than 14,000 years ago and about 1000 years prior to Clovis.
In 2013 his team discovered a genetic link between western Eurasians and Native Americans by sequencing the genome of the 24,000-year-old Mal´ta boy from central Siberia, showing that all contemporary Native Americans carry approximately 1/3 of their genome from the Mal'ta population.
In 2014 his team sequenced the Clovis-age genome from the 12,600-year-old Anzick boy from Montana and found it to be ancestral to many contemporary Native Americans, thereby rejecting the Solutrean theory for early peopling of the Americas. The boy's skeleton was later reburied through the support of Willerslev, and this event facilitated his adoption into the Crow tribe.
In 2015 Willerslev's team sequenced the genome of the Kennewick Man, a ca. 8,500 year old skeleton whose origin have been heavily debated. The DNA analyses showed Kennewick to be more closely related to Native Americans than to any other contemporary groups and rejecting claims of Kennewick Man being closely related to Japanese Ainu or Europeans.
How the first people migrated from Siberia into the Americas has been a topic of discussion. Two theories dominated: 1) People migrated through an ice-free corridor between the ice masses which covered large areas of North America around the end of the last ice age. 2) People migrated along the Pacific coast. In a 2016 paper in Nature, a scientific journal, Willerslev and co-authors showed that this ice-free corridor could not sustain humans until much later, thereby making it most likely that the early Americans migrated along the Pacific coast.
In 2018 Willerslev's team found a new group of peoples in the Americas that they termed "Ancient Beringians" – the earliest group of Native Americans to have diversified. This was done through sequencing the genome of an 11.5-thousand-year-old skeleton from Upward Sun River (USR) in Alaska. From this genome they could infer that: the initial split between East Asians and Native Americans happened around 36 thousand years ago, with gene flow persisting until around 25 thousand years ago, likely when this group entered the Americas from Siberia. Gene flow from the Maltá-like ancestor in Siberia into all Native Americans took place 25–20 thousand years ago, i.e., just around the time of entrance into the Americas. That Ancient Beringians diversified from other Native Americans some 22–18.1 thousand years ago and are thus basal to the northern and southern Native American branches that diversified around 17.5–14.6-11.5 thousand years and to which all other Native Americans belong. That, after 11.5 thousand years, some of the northern Native American populations received gene flow from a Siberian population more closely related to Koryaks than to Palaeo-Eskimos, Inuit, or Kets as has previously been suggested. That Native American gene flow into Inuit was through northern and not southern Native American groups as previously argued by the Reich group.
Their findings finally suggest that the far-northern North American presence of northern Native Americans is from a back migration that replaced or absorbed the initial founding population of "Ancient Beringians".
Peopling of Australia