Professor Love Dalén at CPG has been awarded an Advanced Grant (€2.5M) from the European Research Council (ERC). The project (PrimiGenomes) will start in 2023 and aims to develop and implement novel palaeogenomic methods that will enable the study of evolutionary processes across long time-scales. Some of the questions that will be addressed include whether speciation leads to an increased rate of adaptive evolution, to what extent past interglacials caused bottlenecks in Arctic taxa, and how common it has been that extinct species contributed to the genomic make-up of species that still live today. In addition to genome sequencing, the funding from the ERC will be used to hire and train several PhD students and postdocs and to conduct multiple field expeditions to the Arctic.