Natural selection for height in Europeans
It is known that Northern Europeans tend to be somewhat taller than Southern Europeans. This seems intuitively obvious if you spend a bit of time around representative populations. Growing up in the Pacific Northwest I’ve always been on the short…
American probability of death over time
It’s Friday the 13th. So why not a morbid post? I stumbled onto to some “life tables” for 2007. Actually what the link gives you is the probability of death and life expectancy at a given age for males and females. This is obviously i…
Sorbs: relics of the Ostsiedlung
Relics of a lost race?
One of the issues which I have been exploring and mulling over the past year and a half on this weblog has been the idea that population movements were much more extensive in the past than we have thought until late. I can say a…
No 10,000 years of coexistence?
When the draft sequence of the Neandertal genome was analyzed it turned out that there was little difference across non-Africans in their proportion of admixture from this other human lineage. It was a rather strange finding as Neandertals seem to have…
Pygmies are short because nature made them so
Aka Pygmies
The Pith: There has been a long running argument whether Pygmies in Africa are short due to “nurture” or “nature.” It turns out that non-Pygmies with more Pygmy ancestry are shorter and Pygmies with more non-Pygmy …
How the “fierce people” came to be
The pith: there are differences between populations on genes which result in “novelty seeking.” These differences can be traced to migration out of Africa, and can’t be explained as an artifact of random genetic drift.
I’m not …
2,000 years of Yayoi – Japanese are gaikokujin!
A new paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society dovetails with some posts I’ve put up on the peopling of Japan of late. The paper is Bayesian phylogenetic analysis supports an agricultural origin of Japonic languages:
Languages, like genes, evolv…
South Asian endogamy predates the British
One of the things that happens if you read ethnographically thick books like Nicholas Dirks’ Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India is that you start to wonder if most castes were simply created by the British and for the Brit…
Beware of one tree!
Sometimes in the comments of this weblog people get into heated disagreements about one figure and its proper interpretation. I don’t get much involved most of the time because different visualization techniques often differ on the margin, so get…
The day of the farmer
About five months ago I read Peter Bellwood’s First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies. Bellwood’s thesis is simple: that the first adopters of farming entered into a period of rapid demographic expansion and by and large replac…
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…
The genetic world in 3-D
When Zack first mooted the idea of the Harappa Ancestry Project I had no idea what was coming down the pipe. I wonder if his daughter and wife are curious as to what’s happened to their computer! Since collecting the first wave of participants he…
Foragers to farmers: a tale of collective action?
The economist Samuel Bowles recently had a paper out in PNAS which caught my attention, Cultivation of cereals by the first farmers was not more productive than foraging. This naturally begs the question: why did farming conquer foraging as a lifestyle…
Friday Face
Since I posted about facial composites last week, I need to mention this, The most typical face on the planet:
The researchers conclude that a male, 28-year-old Han Chinese man is the most typical person on the planet. There are 9 million of them.
The…
Personal genomics in two dimensions
The Pith: In this post I take a different tack at genetic data visualization. Instead of bar plots, I show how genetic relationships can be explored using two dimensional spaces.
Last week I suggested that in some ways I had hit a wall of sharply reduc…
The scions of Shem?
The media is reporting rather breathlessly a new find out of Arabia which seems to push much further back the presence of anatomically modern humans in this region (more accurately, the archaeology was so sparse that assessments of human habitation see…
After the evolutionary revolution
Image credit: Luna04
My post The paradigm is dead, long live the paradigm! expressed to some extent my befuddlement at the current state of human evolutionary genetics and paleoanthropology. After the review of the paper of possible elevated admixtur…
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…
The Assyrians and Jews: 3,000 years of common history
2 Kings, 17:
[5] Then the king of Assyria came up throughout all the land, and went up to Samaria, and besieged it three years.
[6] In the ninth year of Hoshea the king of Assyria took Samaria, and carried Israel away into Assyria, and placed them in H…
Are Turks acculturated Armenians?
To the left you see a zoom in of a PCA which Dienekes produced for a post, Structure in West Asian Indo-European groups. The focus of the post is the peculiar genetic relationship of Kurds, an Iranian-speaking people, with Iranians proper, as well as Armenians (Indo-European) and Turks (not Indo-European). As you can see in […]