The phylogeography of the trans-Caucasus
Randy McDonald points me to this fascinating post, Genetic clues to the Ossetian past. In the post author outlines phylogeographic inferences one can make from uniparental lineages; maternal and paternal lines of descent. Specifically, they are in interested in the origins and relationships of the Ossete people. I assume that one reason Randy pointed me […]
Genes and Rex Wandalorum et Alanorum
The idea of a “folk wandering” was once a well accepted idea in history, in particular for the phase of the Late Roman Empire, and the subsequent fall of the Western Empire. It’s a rather simple concept: the collapse of the Pax Romana occurred simultaneous with a mass ethnic reordering of Europe, primarily via the […]
The Fulani have an old “Berber” (?) element
After the second Henn et al. paper I did download the data. Unfortunately there are only 62,000 SNPs intersecting with the HGDP. This is somewhat marginal for fine-grained ADMIXTURE analyses, though sufficient for PCA from what I recall. That being said, the intersection with the HapMap data sets runs from ~190,000 SNPs, to the full […]
The old Amazon
Once Hidden by Forest, Carvings in Land Attest to Amazon’s Lost World: For some scholars of human history in Amazonia, the geoglyphs in the Brazilian state of Acre and other archaeological sites suggest that the forests of the western Amazon, previously considered uninhabitable for sophisticated societies partly because of the quality of their soils, may […]
Between the desert and the sea
Zinedine Zidane, a Kabyle There is a new paper in PLoS Genetics out which purports to characterize the ancestry of the populations of northern Africa in greater detail. This is important. The HGDP data set does have a North African population, the Mozabites, but it’s not ideal to represent hundreds of millions of people with […]
Europe, 10,000 B.C.
The image above come from John Hawks’ weblog. I was thinking today about the resettlement of Europe since the Last Glacial Maximum. It is clear that much of northern Europe was not habitable until the Holocene, after the Ice Age. And those regions which were habitable were often marginal. But, there were zones of southern Europe […]
Human behavior over the ages
Over at Scientific American Eric Michael Johnson has a very long post up, The Case of the Missing Polygamists. It is a re-post of something he already published at Psychology Today a few years ago. Though provisionally a review of Sex at Dawn, Johnson covers a lot of ground, and also has extensive quotations from […]
Systems come back to equilibrium (eventually)
The daughter’s return: A glimmer of hope in the sad tale of sex-selective abortion in India: Now, however, comes evidence that India may in fact be succeeding. In a pair of articles in the Indian Express, Surjit Bhalla, an economist, and Ravinder Kaur, a sociologist, use a different set of figures to get a different result. […]
Where Europe expanded & New Guinea persisted
The model outlined in Guns, Germs, and Steel serves to a great extent as a corrective to ideological theories about the expansion and rise to dominance of European power in the 18th and 19th centuries, before its crest in the 20th. Jared Diamond famously gives a great deal of weight to biogeographical parameters. Charles C. […]
The bush & the bramble of the human family
I wonder if in future years we’re going to look at “species debates” in the context of human evolution like we look at counting angels on the head of a pin. Over at BBC News Clive Finlayson has a rambling opinion piece up, Has ‘one species’ idea been put to bed? Finlayson, the author of The […]
Elite kin groups down the generations
The Pith: The purported sons of great men often are really the sons of great men. Another case of “Conan was right”. Dienekes points me to a neat new paper, Present Y chromosomes reveal the ancestry of Emperor CAO Cao of 1800 years ago, which attempts to validate the claims to descent from a particular […]
The sons of Adam: spirit, not blood
Hominin increase in cranial capacity, courtesy of Luke Jostins A few years ago a statistical geneticist at Cambridge’s Sanger Institute, Luke Jostins, posted the chart above using data from fossils on cranial capacity of hominins (the human lineage). As you can see there was a gradual increase in cranial capacity until ~250,000 years before the present, […]
D.I.Y. population structure analysis
I badger readers here to actually use all the analytic tools which researchers put out into public circulation, rather than just offering cheap opinions. Obviously it’s way more fun and informative to have discussions with someone who can check their own hunches by doing a few “runs” overnight. Secondly, if you have minimal technical skills […]
Culture evolves our bodies!
Human cultural diversity One of the most annoying aspects of talking about human evolution is the rather misguided idea that cultural evolutionary processes operate in a zero-sum environment in relation to biological evolutionary processes. The colloquial rendering of this idea is that because humans are a highly cultural plastic species, we are “beyond” biological evolution. […]
Dogs are necessary when man is sufficient
Wolf-to-dog transition had little to do with humans, ancient skull suggests. I think the headline here is deceptive. This is the important part: A Canadian researcher who specializes in the biology of ancient dogs co-authored one of the most significant studies of the year in canine science: a paper detailing the world’s earliest evidence of […]
“Descendant of Genghis Khan” sequenced
Chinese Scientists Announce the First Complete Sequencing of Mongolian Genome: In this study, the DNA sample was from a male adult who belongs to the Mongolian “Royal Family” and is the 34th generation descendant of Genghis Khan. “The sample is very valuable for the study with a full record of family pedigree and no background […]