Rishi Sunak is no son of India
The elite diaspora have globalisation etched into their bones
Rishi Sunak is no son of India
The elite diaspora have globalisation etched into their bones
The details of Eurasian back-migration into Africa
Carl Zimmer has an interesting write-up on the new method to detect Neanderthal ancestry in Africa, Neanderthal Genes Hint at Much Earlier Human Migration From Africa. There are two quotes from researchers that are of note. First, from David Reich: Despite his hesitation over the analysis of African DNA, Dr. Reich said the new findings […]
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 9: the genetics of Africa
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 9: the genetics of AfricaThis week on The Insight (Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Google Podcasts) Razib Khan and Spencer Wells discuss the genetics of Africa, and how our human story has become more complicated…
Most of human history was in Africa
Citation: Scerri, Eleanor ML, et al. “Did our species evolve in subdivided populations across Africa, and why does it matter?.” Trends in ecology & evolution (2018).Over the last generation our understanding of the origin of what we term “modern hu…
The tribe more diverse than all of Asia!
BushmanIn 2010, a paper, which sequenced the whole genome of Bishop Desmond Tutu, revealed that the San Bushmen of South Africa show more genetic difference between two men from different tribes than the differences between a European and an East Asian…
The great Han Empire in Africa
Howard French’s China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa is a bit cliche. Rather than a scholarly book it’s more an observational travelogue, and it suffers somewhat from the fact that it is focused on Chinese who live in Africa, but are never of it. Chinese are Chinese, […]
Beyond “Out of Africa” and multiregionalism: a new synthesis?
For several decades before the present era there have been debates between proponents of the recent African origin of modern humans, and the multiregionalist model. Though molecular methods in a genetic framework have come of the fore of late these were originally paleontological theories, with Chris Stringer and Milford Wolpoff being the two most prominent public exponents of […]
“Out of Africa” bottleneck is what really matters for mutations
At least in relation to mutational load, if you read a new preprint in biorxiv, The demographic history and mutational load of African hunter-gatherers and farmers: The distribution of deleterious genetic variation across human populations is a key issue in evolutionary biology and medical genetics. However, the impact of different modes of subsistence on recent […]
Afro-Asiatic and Eurasian Backflow
If you follow Y genealogy you know that the distribution of R1ba2 exhibits a peculiar pattern. R1b is the most common haplgroup in Western Eurasia, and shares a deep common ancestry with R1a. It seems to have risen to high frequencies in Europe only du…
Azores to Atlantis: Africa through the shadows
In many ways the image of Africa in the minds of Westerners has become a trope. The “Dark Continent,” eternal, and primal. Like many tropes the realized existence of this Africa is only within the imagination. The real Africa is far differ…
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…
The islands of genetic uniqueness in the swell
I recall years ago reading Spencer Wells discuss how important it was to sample “indigenous people”* before they were swallowed up by the cresting panmixia. Of course panmixia has to be conditioned on the fact that the vast majority of Han …
The Bantu völkerwanderung
Image Credit: Mark Dingemanse
I recall years ago someone on the blog of Jonathan Edelstein, a soc.history.what-if alum as well, mentioning offhand that archaeologists had “debunked” the idea of the Bantu demographic expansion. Because, unf…
The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam
Link to review: In the lands of the living God
The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam
Link to review: In the lands of the living God