Another great-great-great…great-uncle in Asia
The paper which surveys the relationship of the 40,000 year old Tianyuan sample is finally out in Current Biology, 40,000-Year-Old Individual from Asia Provides Insight into Early Population Structure in Eurasia. There isn’t anything too surprising here. Here is the part of the abstract that presents new finding: …we generated genome-wide data from a 40,000-year-old […]
Africa, the churning continent
Martin Meredith’s The Fortunes of Africa glosses very quickly over one of the major reasons that the “great scramble” for the continent occurred in the late 19th century, the discovery of the usefulness of quinine as an anti-malarial agent. Perhaps because I’ve read Plagues and Peoples and The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History […]
Origin of modern humanity pushed back 260,000 years BP (?)
The above figure is from a preprint, Ancient genomes from southern Africa pushes modern human divergence beyond 260,000 years ago. The title and abstract are pretty clear: Southern Africa is consistently placed as one of the potential regions for the evolution of Homo sapiens. To examine the region’s human prehistory prior to the arrival of […]
The Canaanites walk among us: ancient DNA edition
Ancient DNA from here to there: Ancient DNA has illuminated many things, but there is a logic as to what topics and questions it tackles. The focus on northern Eurasia is clearly a function of the probability of preservation, though techniques of extraction are getting better and better. I can’t imagine how we’d ever get […]
Ancient DNA in the near future
I recently inquired if anyone was sequencing Cheddar Man. In case you don’t know, this individual died ~9,000 years ago in Britain, but the remains were well preserved enough that mtDNA was retrieved from him. He was of haplogroup U5, which is still present in the local region. Cheddar Man is also particularly interesting because […]
Ötzi, first, but not last, farmer?
Dienekes relays that Ötzi the Iceman carried the G2a4 male haplogroup. He goes on to observe: We now have G2a3 from Neolithic Linearbandkeramik in Derenburg and G2a in Treilles in addition to Ötzi from the Alps. G2a folk got around. He joins Stalin and Louis XVI as a famous G2a. It was already clear with […]
The hunt for ancient DNA
Ewen Callaway has a good survey of what’s been going down in ancient human genomics over the past year in Nature, Ancient DNA reveals secrets of human history. It’s not paywalled, so read the whole thing. Most of it won’t be too surpr…
Hints of Ötzi’s genome
John Hawks points to a report in Science on some morsels of information about Ötzi-the-Iceman’s genetics, The Iceman’s Last Meal:
Also at the meeting, researchers led by geneticist Angela Graefen of the Institute for Mummies and the Icema…
Mediterranean men on the move
Seriously, sometimes history matches fiction a lot more than we’d have expected, or wished. In the early 2000s the Oxford geneticist Bryan Sykes observed a pattern of discordance between the spatial distribution of male mediated ancestry on the …
Neandertal admixture, revisiting results after shaken priors
After 2010′s world-shaking revolutions in our understanding of modern human origins, the admixture of Eurasian hominins with neo-Africans, I assumed there was going to be a revisionist look at results which seemed to point to mixing between diffe…
Hobbit DNA in 2011
I predicted earlier that Hobbit DNA would be extracted in 2011. It was pretty much an educated guess based on various omissions I sensed in papers in 2010. But it seems that an attempt is going to be made: Scientists are planning an attempt to extract DNA from the ‘hobbit’ Homo floresiensis, the 1-metre-tall extinct distant […]
European man of many faces: Cain vs. Abel
When it comes to the synthesis of genetics and history we live an age of no definitive answers. L. L. Cavalli-Sforza’s Great Human Diasporas would come in for a major rewrite at this point. One of the areas which has been roiled the most within the past ten years has been the origin and propagation […]