The agricultural “express train”
One model for the spread of the agricultural way of life into Europe is of inexorable “demic diffusion” via a “wave of advance” of farming populations met by a land surplus. Conceptually and analytically it’s an elegant model. It’s also fundamentally methodologically individualistic, and so in keeping with the spirit of the age. There’s no […]
Neanderthals came in all colors
There’s a report in Science about a new short paper about Neandertal pigmentation genetics. The context is this. First, in 2007 an ingenuous paper was published which inferred that it may be that Neandertals had red hair, at least based on an N = 2 from two divergent locations. The new study looks at three […]
When independent thought flourishes
One of the things I instinctively hated about my “ancestral culture,” that of Bangladesh, is that there wasn’t that great of an emphasis on individual independent thought. Why, for example, was it important never to drink water while you were eating, as opposed to after you were done? The response was simple: that’s the rule. […]
We are all…Sardinians?
The title is tongue in cheek. But I have been noting with interest Dienekes’ trial runs with TreeMix. With it he has discovered a very peculiar admixture event, at least as determined by the software. The results are below, with my clarifying labels: Basically the software seems to be implying that there has been gene […]
Where the wild clines aren’t
In the recent ‘do human races’ exist controversy Nick Matzke’s post Continuous geographic structure is real, “discrete races” aren’t has become something of a touchstone (perhaps a post like Cosma Shalizi’s on I.Q. and heritability).* In the post Matzke emphasized the idea of clines, roughly a continuous gradient of genetic change over space. Fair enough. […]
Extraordinary claims require a lot of evidence
Several people have emailed me about the Solutrean hypothesis. The trigger is the publication of Across Atlantic Ice: The Origin of America’s Clovis Culture. To my surprise this has received a lot of media attention. The Washington Post, io9, and The New Scientist. Granted, the coverage has been appropriately skeptical. But it still gets to […]
Are Sardinians like Iberians?
Dienekes asks: In terms of autosomal DNA, the Iceman clearly clusters with modern Sardinians, and also appears slightly more removed than them compared to continental Europeans. Interestingly, at least as far as the PC analyssi shows, Sardinians appear to be intermediate between the Iceman and SW Europeans, rather than Italians. Perhaps, this makes sense if […]
Men on the move and women in place?
After posting on Basque mtDNA I wanted to make something more explicit that I alluded to below, that uniparental lineages are highly informative, but they may not be representative of total genome content. This is plainly true in the case of mestizos from Latin America, but we don’t need genetics to point us in the […]
Basque maternal heritage & continuity
There’s a new paper in AJHG which caught my eye, The Basque Paradigm: Genetic Evidence of a Maternal Continuity in the Franco-Cantabrian Region since Pre-Neolithic Times (ungated). The first thing you need to know about this paper is that it focuses on only the direct maternal lineage of Basques via the mtDNA. In some ways […]
Kalash haplotype sharing
Prompted by my posts, Dienekes, A teaser on the Kalash: I am in the middle of a ChromoPainter/fineSTRUCTURE analysis of a broad dataset designed to explore certain mysteries that have often come up in my previous experiments. Barring the unexpected, the analysis should be completed sometime next week. Below you can see the normalized number […]
Kalash on the human tree
A recent paper on Turkish genetics has a tree which illustrates a summary of how the Kalash shake out: I say summary because this tree takes a lot of information and tries to generate the best fit representation. It does hide some information by the nature of its aggregation of patterns. For example, the position […]
The Kalash in perspective
When Zack ran ChromoPainter/fineStructure on South Asians the results naturally yielded a blueish hue along the diagonal. This is expected because the diagonal represents the population’s own relationship with itself. The bluer the diagonal, the more inbred and isolated the population is likely to be. To the top left you see various Austro-Asiatic tribes, […]
Non-overlapping magisteria for the social and biological?
Most of you know that Stephen Jay Gould proposed ‘non-overlapping magisteria’ for science and religion. I don’t care much for the framing myself, though neither am I on the same page as Sam Harris and company. But I thought of this model when reading this comment below: Kind of a tangent, but I think it […]
Kkkhhhaaannn!!!
My post, 1 in 200 men direct descendants of Genghis Khan, is linked up somewhere almost every week. Why is it so popular? No idea. But one thing that has come to mind: we’ve come a long way in since the early 2000s in assembling databases of human scientific genealogies. Soon enough a substantial proportion […]
The social and biological construction of race
Many of our categories are human constructions which map upon patterns in nature which we perceive rather darkly. The joints about which nature turns are as they are, our own names and representations are a different thing altogether. This does not mean that our categories have no utility, but we should be careful of confusing […]
Everlasting permanence
By this point you have probably read about Jonathan Franzen’s comments about digital books. For example: “I think, for serious readers, a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience. Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn’t change.” This seems to be a recapitulation of the […]
Monogamous societies superior to polygamous societies
The title is rather loud and non-objective. But that seems to me to be the upshot of Henrich et al.’s The puzzle of monogamous marriage (open access). In the abstract they declare that “normative monogamy reduces crime rates, including rape, murder, assault, robbery and fraud, as well as decreasing personal abuses.” Seems superior to me. As a […]
When Eve met Creb
The excellent site io9 has a piece up today which is a fascinating indicator of the nature of popular science publications as a lagging indicator. It is a re-post of a piece published last April, How Mitochondrial Eve connected all humanity and rewrote human evolution. In it you have an encapsulation of a particular period […]
The quest for an Afrikaner genotype
Update: If interested, please email me at contactgnxp -at- gmail -dot- com. Also, I am getting some feedback via 23andMe that people with white South African matches noticed Africa segments in many of the ancestry paintings. This has definitely increased by probability that the admixture proportion is ~5 percent. There will probably be a few […]
The erectus within?
The Pith: More caveman admixture in modern humans, especially Melanesians! A new paper on archaic adaptive introgression among Melanesians has been discussed elsewhere. But I think it is worth reviewing, because it’s probably a foretaste of what’s to come. Researchers are combing through the human genome, as more and more genomes come on line, in […]