Ancient DNA, Evolution, and Domestication
After graduating from CMC in 1996, Greger Larson spent a year in Central Asia on a Watson Fellowship before starting a job in the environmental consulting industry in Azerbaijan. Subsisting on a literary diet of Stephen J. Gould’s writings, he worked and wandered the deserts of Turkmenistan over the next three years.
Ultimately concluding that “evolution was cooler than oil,” Larson pursued his masters in archeology at Oxford University, continued further studies in ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado, and completed his Ph.D. in zoology at Oxford in 2006.
Larson is currently a professor at Oxford University where he uses ancient DNA to address a wide variety of questions about evolution, migration, and domestication. He also directs the Palaeogenomics & Bio-Archaeology Research Network, also at Oxford University.
(He says that he rarely wonders what his salary would be had he stuck to oil.)