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…
Language, genes, & peoples of Southeast Asia
As I am currently reading Victor Lieberman’s magisterial Strange Parallels: Volume 2. So I was very interested in a new paper from BMC Genetics, Genetic structure of the Mon-Khmer speaking groups and their affinity to the neighbouring Tai populat…
Band of brothers at war
The fruits of human cooperation
The Pith: Human societies can solve the free rider problem, and generate social structure and complexity at a higher level than that of the band. That implies that much of human prehistory may have been characterized by…
Domestication as introgression and assimilation
The Pith: the spread of domestic rice may be a function not of the spread of rice per se, as much as a specific narrow set of genes which confer domestication to disparate rice lineages.
This has been a big month for rice. At least for me. Despite my b…
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…
Man at Bab el-Mandeb
In light of my last post I had to take note when Dienekes today pointed to this new paper in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Population history of the Red Sea—genetic exchanges between the Arabian Peninsula and East Africa signaled i…
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…
A mismeasured Mismeasurement of Man
I would say The Mismeasurement of Man is one of the most commonly cited books on this weblog over the years (in the comments). It comes close to being “proof-text” in many arguments online, because of the authority and eminence of the autho…
The way the world looks now in human evolutionary genetics
Randy McDonald points me to this very nice Q & A formatted piece in BMC Biology from March, Who is H. sapiens really, and how do we know?. The lucidity and clarity is impressive. If scientists keep putting stuff out there like that open access the…
Why rice is so nice
The Pith: What makes rice nice in one varietal may not make it nice in another. Genetically that is….
Rice is edible and has high yields thanks to evolution. Specifically, the artificial selection processes which lead to domestication. The ̶…
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 …
Loose vs. tight societies
A new paper in Science, Differences Between Tight and Loose Cultures: A 33-Nation Study, is making the media rounds. Here’s NPR:
…The idea for this study really dates to the 1960s. Back then, an anthropologist decided to evaluate a few doze…
The power of one (Nubian that is)
Maju pointed me to a new paper on the genetics of Sudanese today. My interest was piqued, then not so much when I looked more closely. Genetic variation and population structure among Sudanese populations as indicated by the 15 Identifiler STR loci:
Ba…
Toward evolutionary monism
Is there any substantive difference between natural, sexual, and artificial selection? Or is it just semantic sugar, useful for humans in our own cognitive bookkeeping? I lean toward the latter proposition. To some extent I would think that this is an …
Is the University of California putting politics before science?
Kennewick Man produced a cottage industry of journalism ~10 years ago, thanks to the political controversy around the science. Today the stakes are different. Consider this from John Hawks, “Agriculture, population expansion and mtDNA variation&#…
Proper methods and false results
The Pith: Honorable intent and punctilious adherence to proper form and method does not guarantee a set of results which flesh out a genuine phenomenon. Much of science is tragic.
Most of the time I point to and review papers on this weblog which excit…
1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created
For obvious reasons I don’t usually post about material I haven’t read, but Tyler Cowen points me to the fact that Charles C. Mann has a new book coming out this summer. If you haven’t, I would highly recommend his previous book, 1491…
There was scale and structure before history
Until relatively recently the spread of agriculture in Europe, and to some extent the whole world, was pigeon-holed into two maximalist models: cultural or demographic diffusionist. Neither of these models were maximalist in that they denied the impac…
The genetic complexity of prehistoric Sweden
Thanks to the fact that northern Europe is cool and archaeological research is rather well developed in the region due to quirks of history, there are lots of findings from ancient DNA which are answering long-standing questions. In particular Scandin…
Genetic variation in the Caucasus
The Pith: There is a very tight correlation between language and genes in the Caucasus region.
If the Soviet Union was the “The Prisonhouse of Nations,” then the Caucasus region must be the refuge of the languages. Not only is this region l…