Ian Barnes (born in Chadwell Heath in 1972) is an evolutionary geneticist notable for his work on ancient DNA, human and animal migration, and phylogenetics. Barnes is a Research Leader in the Department of Earth Sciences at the Natural History Museum in London.
He pioneered the use of ancient DNA to study the Late Pleistocene mammal fauna, which has provided insights into how animals responded to global climate change. More recently, his research has explored human population change in prehistoric Britain, including work on the Mesolithic human skeleton known as Cheddar Man
His work on phylogenetics includes a study of South American mammal species first identified by Darwin, led in collaboration with the University of York, and the American Museum of Natural History, which “resolved one of the last unresolved major problems in mammalian evolution: the origins of the South American native ungulates". He has also resolved the phylogenetic placement of the Nesophontidae, and evolutionary origins of various Caribbean mammal lineages including primates and rodents.
Education and career
Barnes obtained a BSc in Archaeological Sciences from the University of Bradford, and a DPhil in Biology from the University of York supervised by Keith Dobney. Following his doctoral research, Barnes worked with Mark Thomas at UCL on the recovery of DNA from medical museum specimens, and with Alan J. Cooper at the University of Oxford. He was then awarded a Wellcome Trust Bioarchaeology Fellowship and returned to UCL, and subsequently received a NERC fellowship to work on the Late Pleistocene megafauna at Royal Holloway, University of London. He was made Professor of Molecular Palaeobiology there in 2013, and moved that year to the Natural History Museum. He is the recipient of numerous research awards from major funding bodies including the Wellcome Trust and UKRI.
References
- "Prof Ian Barnes | Natural History Museum". www.nhm.ac.uk. Retrieved 4 January 2022.
- Barnes, Ian; Shapiro, Beth; Lister, Adrian; Kuznetsova, Tatiana; Sher, Andrei; Guthrie, Dale; Thomas, Mark G. (June 2007). "Genetic Structure and Extinction of the Woolly Mammoth, Mammuthus primigenius". Current Biology. 17 (12): 1072–1075. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2007.05.035. PMID 17555965. S2CID 7274116.
- Barnes, I.; Matheus, P.; Shapiro, B.; Jensen, D.; Cooper, A. (22 March 2002). "Dynamics of Pleistocene Population Extinctions in Beringian Brown Bears". Science. 295 (5563): 2267–2270. Bibcode:2002Sci...295.2267B. doi:10.1126/science.1067814. ISSN 0036-8075. PMID 11910112. S2CID 5883943.
- Stewart, John R.; Lister, Adrian M.; Barnes, Ian; Dalén, Love (7 March 2010). "Refugia revisited: individualistic responses of species in space and time". Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. 277 (1682): 661–671. doi:10.1098/rspb.2009.1272. ISSN 0962-8452. PMC 2842738. PMID 19864280.
- "Cheddar Man: Mesolithic Britain's blue-eyed boy". www.nhm.ac.uk. Retrieved 4 January 2022.
- Brace, Selina; Diekmann, Yoan; Booth, Thomas J.; van Dorp, Lucy; Faltyskova, Zuzana; Rohland, Nadin; Mallick, Swapan; Olalde, Iñigo; Ferry, Matthew; Michel, Megan; Oppenheimer, Jonas (May 2019). "Ancient genomes indicate population replacement in Early Neolithic Britain". Nature Ecology & Evolution. 3 (5): 765–771. doi:10.1038/s41559-019-0871-9. ISSN 2397-334X. PMC 6520225. PMID 30988490.
- Booth, Thomas J.; Brück, Joanna; Brace, Selina; Barnes, Ian (August 2021). "Tales from the Supplementary Information: Ancestry Change in Chalcolithic–Early Bronze Age Britain Was Gradual with Varied Kinship Organization". Cambridge Archaeological Journal. 31 (3): 379–400. doi:10.1017/S0959774321000019. ISSN 0959-7743. S2CID 233895343.
- Dunham, Will (19 March 2015). "Mystery of Darwin's strange South American mammals solved". www.abc.net.au. Retrieved 4 January 2022.
- Brace, Selina; Thomas, Jessica A.; Dalén, Love; Burger, Joachim; MacPhee, Ross D. E.; Barnes, Ian; Turvey, Samuel T. (December 2016). "Evolutionary History of the Nesophontidae, the Last Unplaced Recent Mammal Family". Molecular Biology and Evolution. 33 (12): 3095–3103. doi:10.1093/molbev/msw186. ISSN 0737-4038. PMID 27624716.
- Woods, Roseina; Barnes, Ian; Brace, Selina; Turvey, Samuel T (4 January 2021). Ávila-Arcos, Maria C (ed.). "Ancient DNA Suggests Single Colonization and Within-Archipelago Diversification of Caribbean Caviomorph Rodents". Molecular Biology and Evolution. 38 (1): 84–95. doi:10.1093/molbev/msaa189. ISSN 1537-1719. PMC 7783164. PMID 33035304.
- Woods, Roseina; Turvey, Samuel T.; Brace, Selina; MacPhee, Ross D. E.; Barnes, Ian (11 December 2018). "Ancient DNA of the extinct Jamaican monkey Xenothrix reveals extreme insular change within a morphologically conservative radiation". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 115 (50): 12769–12774. Bibcode:2018PNAS..11512769W. doi:10.1073/pnas.1808603115. ISSN 0027-8424. PMC 6294883. PMID 30420497.
- "Professor Ian Barnes, Royal Holloway".