It was an amazing decade for anthropological genetics. Improvements in sequencing technologies have, on the one hand, provided thousands of whole modern human genomes readily available for analysis, and on the other hand, allowed sequencing of whole ancient genomes, a feat that revolutionized the way in which we study human evolution. One of the most fascinating areas of research that has developed from these new resources is the observation that modern humans share derived alleles with archaic populations, such as Neandertals and Denisovans, and some of these alleles remain variable in human populations. This observation is concordant with three scenarios: (i) recent introgression events from the archaic humans into modern human populations; (ii) ancient structure in the ancestral human population(s); and (iii) recurrent mutations at orthologous loci. It is now clear that all these scenarios have considerable influence on shaping the landscape of modern human genomic variation. In addition, some of these ancient variants have been maintained through adaptive forces, especially involving variation-maintaining adaptive forces (i.e., different ramifications of balancing selection). These adaptations relate to evolutionarily important functional categories, such as immunity, metabolism, growth, and climatic adaptation. This symposium will bring together paleoanthropologists, genetic anthropologists and population geneticists who are leaders in the field to lay out state-of-the-art methodological and theoretical developments involving genetic variation that has been maintained for hundreds of thousands of years in the human lineage. We hope that this symposium will lead to novel discussion regarding recent human evolution, the ancient migrations that shaped contemporary genetic structure in humans, and the adaptive impact of ancient human variation.