Inferring deep history in genes

When Mendelism reemerged in the early 20th century to become what we term genetics no doubt the early practitioners of the nascent field would have been surprised to see where it went. The centrality of of DNA as the substrate which encodes genetic information in the 1950s opened up molecular biology and led to the biophysical strain which remains prominent in genetics. Later, in the 1970s Alan Wilson and Vincent Sarich used crude measures of genetic distance to resolve controversies in paleontology, specifically, the date of separation between the human and ape lineage. Genetics spans the physical and historical sciences, whereas physically oriented scientists may look to DNA as a basis for computation, historically oriented scholars can use it to illuminate mysteries in their own fields. In the 1980s the "mitochondrial Eve" arrived on the scene, purporting to map out the demographic history of our species over the past 200,000 years. This was during an era when extraction and amplification of genetic material was primitive, and so the numerous mitochondria were the preferred sources of information. Additionally, the uniparental nature of mtDNA makes it ideal for a coalescent model. Over the past two decades science has come much farther. Genetic material is easier to analyze, and the computers to do that analysis have become much more powerful. A non-trivial segment of the genome is now being brought to bear on questions of genetic history. More powerful computational techniques mean that the complexity of the models can be cranked up. This is evident in a recent paper, Inferring the Joint Demographic History of Multiple Populations from Multidimensional SNP Frequency Data: