Category: Anthroplogy
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The past as a cultural landscape
By now you have read that the Clovis people may have had contemporaries. In case you didn’t know, until about ~10 years the “standard model” of the peopling of the Americas was that around ~13,000 years ago one single population cross…
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Nomads as post-hunter-gatherers
There’s a new paper in PLoS ONE which seems to confirm domesticate goat or sheep in southern Africa ~4,000 years ago. This is of particular interest because it may shed some light on the prehistoric migration of the Khoikhoi populations of the re…
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The first, second, and third nations
By now you’ve probably read about the paper which reports that there seem to have been three waves of humans migrating into the New World prior to the arrival of Europeans. A major aspect of this result is that it does not emerge out of a vacuum,…
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The genetic map of Britain
Update: A commenter noted that North England and Southwest Wales have different shape points. This is clear in the original PDF when I increased resolution. So ignore my comment about Brythonic Celtcs. End Update A few weeks ago I heard about the proje…
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Still not understanding the nature of affairs
I’m primarily science blogger, with an amateur interest in history. But I’m still disturbed that over 10 years after 9/11 elite media still can’t be bothered to be precise and accurate about the affairs of the Muslim world. As a neo-I…
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Has Dienekes Pontikos found the signature of the Indo-Europeans?
I don’t know the answer to the question posted in title above, and I’m moderately skeptical that he has. But I wanted to give him full credit in the public record if researchers confirm his findings in the next few years. You can read the f…
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The mystery of the origin of the Indo-Europeans may be solved within the next 2 years
Dienekes has a post up, The Bronze Age Indo-European invasion of Europe. The crux of his argument is as such: But there is another component present in modern Europe, the West_Asian which is conspicuous in its absence in all the ancient samples so far….
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Tomatoes!
This story in The New York Times, Flavor Is Price of Scarlet Hue of Tomatoes, Study Finds, is pretty cool: Yes, they are often picked green and shipped long distances. Often they are refrigerated, which destroys their flavor and texture. But now resea…
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Population replacement in Neolithic Spain?
There’s a new ancient DNA paper out which examines the maternal lineage and the autosomal background of two individuals extracted from a Spanish site dated to 7,000 years before the present. That is, during the European Mesolithic. In other word…
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The end of corruption?
Steve Sailer has been on the cousin marriage “beat” for a while now, every since his 2003 piece on the practice in Iraq. Why is cousin marriage bad? Because large interrelated clans can create sets of societies within societies. Here’…
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Sleeping like a Neandertal
Forgot to highlight one of the coolest abstracts from SMBE 2012, A genomewide map of Neandertal ancestry in modern humans: 2. The map allows us to identify Neandertal alleles that have been the target of selection since introgression. We identified ove…
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Sleeping like a Neandertal
Forgot to highlight one of the coolest abstracts from SMBE 2012, A genomewide map of Neandertal ancestry in modern humans: 2. The map allows us to identify Neandertal alleles that have been the target of selection since introgression. We identified ove…
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SMBE 2012
Dienekes has summaries up of human-related abstracts of Society for Molecular Biology & Evolution 2012. 1) Remember these are not papers, and some of the abstracts may never become papers, at least in recognizable form 2) Speaking of which, Estim…
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Not out of Sheba
Liya Kebede, Credit There is a new paper, Ethiopian Genetic Diversity Reveals Linguistic Stratification and Complex Influences on the Ethiopian Gene Pool, which is being sensationalized in the media. For example, the BBC headline: ‘DNA clues to …
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Reason: the God that fails, but we keep socially promoting….
One point which I’ve made on this weblog several times is that on a whole range of issues and behaviors people simply follow the consensus of their self-identified group. This group conformity probably has deep evolutionary origins. It is often m…
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Reason: the God that fails, but we keep socially promoting….
One point which I’ve made on this weblog several times is that on a whole range of issues and behaviors people simply follow the consensus of their self-identified group. This group conformity probably has deep evolutionary origins. It is often m…
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Genetics’ random truths
Update: Please do not take the labels below (e.g., “Baloch”) as literal ancestral elements. The most informative way to read them is that they indicate populations where this element is common, and, the relationship of proportions can tell …
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Hispanos and Sephardic ancestry
A correspondent emailed me to tell me that Linda Chavez, whose father was a New Mexican Hispano, was found to have Sephardic Jewish ancestry in Henry Louise Gates Jr’s Finding your Roots series. This brings me to point to a recent paper, The impa…
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Abraham’s genetic threads
Every few days my Google Alerts have been dropping in my inbox reviews of Harry Osters’ Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People. The latest is in the The Tablet, A Case for Genetic Jewishness: For a Jewish genetics researcher, being told i…
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The Malagasy Ancestry Project
Just a heads up, Dr. Joseph K. Pickrell has begun moving on the Malagasy Ancestry Project. More information: The genetics of the Malagasy people have been essentially unstudied. Analysis of Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA markers have corroborated t…