The great pruning, and the great synthesis
Sahul 10,000 years ago
John Hawks has a very long rumination on the story of blonde Melanesians which came out last week. If I can read between the lines I think some of the implications dovetail with John’s thesis in his 2007 paper on adaptive …
Reification is alright by me!
Long time readers know that I’m generally OK with reification as long as we don’t take it too seriously. And we do that all the time. An “object” is really only an “object” in a human-sense. Reduced down to particle…
Finding fake roots
I haven’t watched much of Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s Finding Your Roots series. It seems like Gates has kind of created a mini-empire in genealogical series on PBS. More power to him, but it hit diminishing returns for me a long time ago. But …
Bell Beakers and R1b
Over at Dienekes blog he has a post up about the extraction of R1b from a male who lived in Germany 4-5,000 in the past. This is important because R1b is one of the two most common male lineages (on the Y chromosome, passed from father to son) in Euro…
Case closed: blonde Melanesians understood
As a small child perusing old physical anthropology books I would occasionally stumble upon images of people of Oceanian stock with light hair color. I would wonder: is this a biological or cultural feature? In other words, were people bleaching their …
Facing the ocean
Halford Mackinder’s conceptualization of the world
With the recent publication of the paper on the archaeogenetics of Neolithic Sweden I feel like we’re nearing a precipice. That precipice overlooks lands of great richness, filled with ho…
The last days of Grendel
A new paper in Science has just been published which in its broad outlines has been described in conference presentations. When examining the autosomal genetic variation of three individuals of the hunter-gatherer Pitted Ware Culture (PWC), and one of …
One baby, alone on a PCA island
A week ago I reported that according to 23andMe I’m 40% Asian, and she is 8% Asian (in the future if I say “she” without explanation, you know of whom I speak). Obviously something is off here. The situation resolved itself when I tu…
An algorithm is just an algorithm
In the comments below:
You should include a Moroccan or otherwise native North African sample. Without a North African sample West Africans act as proxy for some of that North African ancestry that does exist in Iberia, specially the Western third (Por…
Paternity most assured
The myth that 10 percent of children the product of ‘non-paternity events’ is rather persistent. I have no idea why, but I do know that even biologists accept it. But how we can we continue to accept this when surnames can provide populatio…
A deeper dive analysis of two Cubans
About a week ago I put up a post put on an analysis of a paper which reported on the ancestral make up of 50 Cubans (as well as assorted other Hispanic/Latino groups). One aspect of the paper which was somewhat notable is that 1 out of 3 Cubans were 90…
Reprising genes & geography
Comparing Spatial Maps of Human Population-Genetic Variation Using Procrustes Analysis:
Recent applications of principal components analysis (PCA) and multidimensional scaling (MDS) in human population genetics have found that “statistical maps&#…
The case of the white Cubans
In a follow up to a post below, a new paper in PLoS Genetics has some data on American Hispanics. Specifically, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Mexicans, and Cubans, as well as assorted Central and South Americans. I am not too interested in the cases excep…
Understanding across cultures
One of the non-science aspects of this weblog which I’ve been addressing over the past 10 years is attempting to get a grip upon cultural variation. There are two major dimensions in terms of the problem. One is positive, in that people don’…
When little differences matter a great deal
In the comment below Clark alludes to the fact that Jonathan Haidt kept reiterating that even if there were differences between populations due to recent evolution, if it was due to selection on standing variation upon quantitative traits then the betw…
Jonah Lehrer, science fiction writer
He’s back, and he’s out with a new book, Imagine: How Creativity Works. I am talking of course about Jonah Lehrer, the enfant terrible of cognitive neuroscience. OK, perhaps more Wunderkind. In any case, I was struck by this post on his web…
Revenge of the herders
Let me make something explicit: I believe that the model outlined in First Farmers is too simple, and that extant patters of linguistic and genetic variation need to accept the likelihood of multiple population reorganizations across vast swaths of Eur…
The real secret history of the Mongols?
Thank god for steppe hyper-patriarchy; it’s a model which we can test. Dienekes points me to a paper, The Y-chromosome C3* star-cluster attributed to Genghis Khan’s descendants is present at high frequency in the Kerey clan from Kazakhstan…
How culture crashes clines
The USA has been in Afghanistan for over 10 years now. Like many Americans my own personal preference is that we get out as soon as possible. Because of American involvement we see terms like “Pashtun” bandied about in the media, but there…
The evolution of the human face
The face is an important aspect of our phenotype. So important that facial recognition is one of many innate reflexive cognitive competencies. By this, I mean that you can recognize a face in a gestalt manner, just like you can recognize a set of three marbles. You don’t have to think about it in a […]