Cover image

Natural selection shaped some of the traits that set present-day humans apart from their extinct relatives, Neandertals and Denisovans. In this issue, Peyrégne et al. describe a method to identify the signatures left in the genome by these selective events. The cover portrays the genealogical history that relates archaic and modern humans for a region in the genome where selection took place. Each dot represents an individual connected to its ancestors and descendants by lines. Along the branch that gives rise to present-day humans, a new advantageous sequence variant emerged (red) that spread rapidly through the population and is now fixed among all living humans. (Digital artwork by Stéphane Peyrégne. [For details, see Peyrégne et al., pp. 1563–1572.])