My PhD project aims at using both present-day and ancient genomic data to infer and describe the history of African human populations. As detailed below, I plan on working with data from different countries across Africa, and research diverse aspects of the human past (i.e. adaptation to changes in diet, ancient pandemics, migrations and admixture between differentiated populations). My four main research projects include (i) the study of the AMY1 gene, which is responsible for the digestion of starch and could have been under positive selection during the Neolithic revolution, (ii) the population history and genomic adaptation of many ethnicities living in present-day Ethiopia, (iii) the history behind several human remains from the Late Stone Age site of Zuurberg in eastern South Africa, and (iv) the presence of pathogens and mutualistic microbiota in ancient populations across the African continent.