God is intuitive
Update: An ungated version of the paper. I used to spend a lot more time talking about cognitive science of religion on this weblog. It was an interest of mine, but I’ve come to a general resolution of what I think on this topic, and so I don’t spend much time discussing it. But in […]
The words of the father
Over at A Replicated Typo they are talking about a short paper in Science, Mother Tongue and Y Chromosomes. In it Peter Forster and Colin Renfrew observe that “A correlation is emerging that suggests language change in an already-populated region may require a minimum proportion of immigrant males, as reflected in Y-chromosome DNA types.” But […]
Out of Africa’s end?
The BBC has a news report up gathering reactions to a new PLoS ONE paper, The Later Stone Age Calvaria from Iwo Eleru, Nigeria: Morphology and Chronology. This paper reports on remains found in Nigeria which date to ~13,000 years B.P. that exhibit a very archaic morphology. In other words, they may not be anatomically […]
Shades of 2050
I have long had a problem with projections of the racial makeup of the USA which implicitly neglect the complexities inherent in the identity of someone of mixed origin. A new study analyzing Census data on interracial marriages between 1980 and 2008 highlights some of the subtleties: The study also examined trends in biracial and […]
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 gift of the gopi
Krishna with milk-maids Unlike in some Asian societies dairy products are relatively well known in South Asia. Apparently at some point my paternal grandmother’s family operated a milk production business. This is notable because Bengal is not qu…
Of beasts and men
“There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare [children] to them, the same [became] mighty men which [were] of old, men of renown.” – Genesis 6:4 Th…
Horses, not people (sort of)
I have criticized the “pots not people” paradigm on this weblog before. In short, the idea is that material cultural changes reflected in the archaeological record are an indicator of memetic, not genetic, evolution. So a shift from pottery…
10 Questions for Charles C. Mann
Charles C. Mann is the author of several books, including 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus and 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. Much of his work has been involved in publicizing the ecological factors which shape th…
Tutsi genetics, ii
In my post below, Tutsi probably differ genetically from the Hutu, there were many comments. Some I did not post because they were rude, though they did ask valid questions. I will address those issues, but let me quote one comment:
That’s an interes…
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 …
Platonism is useful only when it’s useful
Below John Farrell posted an amusing comment:
Razib, are you implying there was no clearly defined ‘ontological leap’ from the animal to the human??? I’m going to have to clear this with the CDF in Rome.
The figure to left illustrates the simult…
The point mutation which made humanity
Steve Hsu points me to a piece in The New Yorker on the science and personality of Svante Pääbo. The personality part includes references to Pääbo’s bisexuality, which to me seemed to be literally dropped into the prose to spice it up. Of cou…
The end of environmental inequality means the rise of genetic inequality
A few people have pointed me to Charles Murray’s comment at The Enterprise Blog, The Debate about Heritability of General Intelligence Radically Narrows, which alludes to the recent finding of genomic confirmation of the behavior genetic heritabi…
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…
The King Tut DNA story
Last year some readers forwarded me a strange story about Hitler’s “Jewish genes”. I didn’t think much of it, but enough people asked that I thought I should at least address the story (or lack of one). Today something similar i…
The fall of empires as an exponential distribution
I was alerted to Samuel’s Arbesman’s new paper, The Life-Spans of Empires, by the fact that he pointed to his research on his weblog. Interestingly I’m not the only one who was interested, as after I pointed to it on my link round u…
Old Man’s Culture
too
A few readers reminded me of the recent Rachel Caspari article in Scientific American, The Evolution of Grandparents. It’s actually based on her earlier research, published in PNAS in 2004, Older age becomes common late in human evolution. I …
Non-zero sum transitions in the human past
A few people have pointed me to the recent paper in Science, Tenfold Population Increase in Western Europe at the Neandertal–to–Modern Human Transition. The basic result is obvious, and not totally revolutionary: anatomically modern humans may simp…
DIY admixture analysis
Dienekes Pontikos has just released DIY Dodecad, a DIY admixture analysis program. You can download the files yourself. It runs on both Linux and Windows. Since I already have tools in Linux I decided to try out the Windows version, and it seems to wor…