Africans aren’t pure humans either
Last year when discussing the possible admixture of Neandertals with the ancestors of modern non-Africans I joked that Sub-Saharan Africans were “pure humans.” This was tongue-in-cheek in part because the results from the Neandertal genome …
The divisibility of human ancestry
The class human or H. sapiens refers to a set of individuals. On the grand scale it’s really not all that clear and distinct. When do “archaic” humans become “modern” humans? Taking into account human variation, what is a …
When sociology meets statistical genetics
In Dr. Daniel MacArthur’s post on Roots into the Future Blaine Bettinger left an interesting comment:
It will be interesting to see how 23andMe deals with the pool of people that respond to the 10,000 free kits. Doesn’t seem like they can p…
Southeast Asian migrations, Indians and Tai
If you have not read my post “To the antipode of Asia”, this might be a good time to do so if you are unfamiliar with the history, prehistory, and ethnography of mainland Southeast Asia. In this post I will focus on mainland Southeast Asia…
Asian Negritos are not one population
Negrito, Philippines. Credit: Ken Ilio
In the post below I mentioned that the Malaysian and Philippine Negritos seem to be two very distinct populations. This was something I wanted to explore in more detail, so I naturally decided to poke around the…
Neanderthal-human mating, months later….
Image credit:ICHTO
Recently something popped up into my Google news feed in regards to “Neanderthal-human mating.” If you are a regular reader you know that I’m wild for this particular combination of the “wild thing.” Bu…
Reify my genes!
BEHOLD, REIFICATION!
In the comments below Antonio pointed me to this working paper, What Do DNA Ancestry Tests Reveal About Americans’ Identity? Examining Public Opinion on Race and Genomics. I am perhaps being a bit dull but I can’t figure …
Of sensible sematics
One of my met peeves is the confusion which some ethno-linguistic terms can cause. For example, the fact that there were Iranian language speakers on the plains of Ukraine ~2,000 years ago naturally indicates to people that Scythian nomads issued …
Of literality and metaphor in the war between Arya and Dasa
Over at Brown Pundits Zach Latif brings up the point that the Indian bias for light skin may date back to the Aryans. And it does seem that such a bias manifests in the earliest texts. But as someone not …
Massive Neandertal & Denisovan introgression
Update: John Hawks’ lab is working in the same area, and he disagrees with the specific results presented here. Always reminds you to be careful about sexy results presented at conference! (someone should do a study!)
So claimed Peter Parham at a…
The Cape Coloureds are a mix of everything
A Cape Coloured family
I’ve mentioned the Cape Coloureds of South Africa on this weblog before. Culturally they’re Afrikaans in language and Dutch Reformed in religion (the possibly related Cape Malay group is Muslim, though also Afrikaan…
Flavors of Afro-Asiatic
In the post yesterday I reported what was generally known about the Horn of Africa, that its populations seem to lie between those of Sub-Saharan African and Eurasia genetically. This is totally reasonable as a function of geography, but there are also…
A genomic sketch of the Horn of Africa
Iman, a Somali model
Since I started up the African Ancestry Project one of the primary sources of interest has been from individuals whose family hail for Northeast Africa. More specifically, the Horn of Africa, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia. The pr…
Caste is not ancestrally arbitrary
First, thanks to Zack for the opportunity to blog here. More importantly, thanks to Zack for the Harappa Ancestry Project! I’ve learned a lot from him in terms of the optimal way to go about “genome blogging,” and have been …
Zombie genome blogging
Happy Memorial Day, if you’re American!
Dienekes has some very interesting posts up over at Dodecad, How to create Zombies from ADMIXTURE etc., and More Zombies: Ancestral North Indians and Ancestral South Indians reborn. If you are playing with …
ADMIXTURE, African Ancestry Project, and confirmation bias
I’ve been running the African Ancestry Project for a while now on the side on Facebook. But it’s getting unwieldy, so I finally set up the website. The main reason I started it up is that there have been complaints for a while now of proble…
The continuing tangling of the human tree
Last summer I made a thoughtless and silly error in relation to a model of human population history when asked by a reader the question: “which population is most distantly related to Africans?” I contended that all non-African populations…
A best case scenario for unsupervised ADMIXTURE?
One of the great things about ADMIXTURE is that the population elements shake out of the data through the logic of the program. The worst thing is that it is then left up to you to make sense of the elements. A useful way to use ADMIXTURE and avoid exc…
You learn from failure
In yesterday’s post on African genetics I tried to work with a large set of populations, but narrowed SNPs down to ~40,000. Today I thought I’d go another route, focus on having a thicker market set, but with fewer populations. So I did a b…
Another genome blogger….
Reader “Diogenes,” with ADMIXTURE in hand, and way more knowledge of archaeology than I can comprehend, now has a blog. Why am I starting a blog…:
I named my blog Artemis since I believe the “Neolithic” which shaped our wo…