European hunter-gatherers were mostly replaced, but not totally. And they were neither black nor white
Peter Frost over at his blog has a long post on the transition to agriculture and pastoralism in Northern Europe. He tagged me on Twitter, so presumably, he’s soliciting my opinion/response. The post starts off with a quick reference to the attempt to leverage massive replacement in Northern Europe eight to four thousand years ago […]
Visualizing intra-European phylogenetic distances
In L. L. Cavalli-Sforza’s The History and Geography of Human Genes he used between population group genetic distances, as measured in FST values, to generate a series of visualizations, which then allowed him to infer historical processes. Basically the way it works is that you look at genetic variation, and see how much of […]
Visualizing intra-European phylogenetic distances
In L. L. Cavalli-Sforza’s The History and Geography of Human Genes he used between population group genetic distances, as measured in FST values, to generate a series of visualizations, which then allowed him to infer historical processes. Basically the way it works is that you look at genetic variation, and see how much of […]
The Ghosts of the European Pleistocene
2011’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams was a strange film. I went to watch it in the theaters mostly to see the paintings of Pleistocene peoples in an immersive manner, but the director and narrator, Werner Herzog, used the film as an instrument to forward his thesis that humanity as we understand it emerged during this […]
Across the sea of grass: how Northern Europeans got to be ~10% Northeast Asian
The Pith: You’re Asian. Yes, you!
A conclusion to an important paper, Nick Patterson, Priya Moorjani, Yontao Luo, Swapan Mallick, Nadin Rohland, Yiping Zhan, Teri Genschoreck, Teresa Webster, and David Reich:
In particular, we have presented ev…
Europeans as Middle Eastern farmers
The Pith: Over the past 10,000 years a small coterie of farming populations expanded rapidly and replaced hunter-gatherer groups which were once dominant across the landscape. So, the vast majority of the ancestry of modern Europeans can be traced ba…
Re-visualizing European ancestry
I decided to take the Dodecad ADMIXTURE results at K = 10, and redo some of the bar plots, as well as some scatter plots relating the different ancestral components by population. Don’t try to pick out fine-grained details, see what jumps out in a gestalt fashion. I removed most of the non-European populations to […]
Live not by visualization alone
Synthetic map
In the age of 500,000 SNP studies of genetic variation across dozens of populations obviously we’re a bit beyond lists of ABO blood frequencies. There’s no real way that a conventional human is going to be able to discern patterns of correlated allele frequency variations which point to between population genetic differences on this […]
Really fine grained genetic maps of Europe
A few years ago you started seeing the crest of studies which basically took several hundred individuals (or thousands) from a range of locations, and then extracted out the two largest components of genetic variation from the hundreds of thousands of variants. The clusters which fell out of the genetic data, with each point being […]
Where are the “Paleolithic Europeans”?
Over at my other blog I have a review up of a new paper in PLoS Biology. The authors argue that a particular Y haplogroup lineage, R1b1b2, which has often been assumed to be a marker of indigenous Paleolithic Europeans (i.e., those who were extant befo…