You’re carrying secrets in your cells. Ghost stories, buried migrations, ancient romances.

A Harvard geneticist is decoding them. Meet David Reich, who doesn’t just study DNA. He time-travels through it. And in doing so, he has shattered long-held myths, national origin stories, and simplistic ideas of who we are.

Think your ancestry is linear, clean, singular? Think again. Reich’s work shows it’s a swirling soup of hunter-gatherers, nomads, farmers, warriors. Collisions, conquests, intermarriages. We're all remix, no original.

In India alone, Reich’s research detonated the idea of genetic purity — showing that modern Indians descend from a fusion of Steppe pastoralists, indigenous South Asian hunter-gatherers, and Harappan-related groups — themselves a blend of ancient Iranian-related farmers and local foragers. It’s science as cultural X-ray.

His lab is the Rosetta Stone of human prehistory: integrating genetics with archaeology, linguistics, and anthropology to chart our tangled, turbulent path as a species.

Reich has found “ghost populations” that no longer exist, but live on inside us. He’s traced the interbreeding between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals — a prehistoric one-night stand that left its imprint in our immune systems.

Reich's approach is audacious and precise — equal parts detective work and poetry. One of his favourite analogies? Ancient genomes are like “palimpsests” — medieval scrolls written over and over, where the original text can still be deciphered beneath the ink. That's humanity: overwritten, but not erased.

His best-selling book Who We Are and How We Got Here reads like a thriller of our species — a global, messy, magical story told by the molecules inside us. The kind that rewires how we think about race, identity, borders, and belonging.

And not without controversy. Some worry his data could be misused to draw regressive conclusions. Others argue his focus on hard genetic evidence risks flattening culture and context. But Reich is clear: genes don’t determine destiny — they tell stories. And stories need decoding.

At SYNAPSE 2025, David Reich will crack open the double helix of human history. He’ll show us how we’re not descendants of one people, but of many peoples, many times over. Why “purity” is a myth, and “origin” is a fog. And how ancestry isn’t a straight line — but a braided river of billions, flowing backward and forward at once. 

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