South Asians too are sons of the farmers?
I mentioned a few days ago that a friend was trying to get together some data to analyze the genetic variation of South Asians. By a strange coincidence Dienekes just published a more detailed analysis of South Asians…and uncovered something very interesting, though not that surprising. Some technical preliminaries: A note of caution: The reduced […]
Sons of the farmers, the origins of Africans
Most readers at this point are aware that I am very curious as to the origin of Europeans at the interface of hunter-gatherer populations and Neolithic farmers. What we thought we knew around the year 2000 does not seem to align very well with the conflicting results coming out of recent analyses. There is no […]
Sons of the farmers, the story of Japan
Ainu in 19th century Hokkaido, and rice paddies Unlike some islands Japan has a long history of human habitation. More interestingly, under the Jomon culture the Japanese archipelago was home to one of the earliest, if not the earliest, societies which used pottery. The Jomon do not seem to have been intensive agriculturalists. Rather, with […]
“Genome blogging”
Nature profiles Dodecad, the Pickrell Affair, and the emergence of amateur genomicists in a new piece. Interestingly David of BGA is going to try and get something through peer review. In particular, the relationship of Assyrians and Jews. So we have Genomes Unzipped, Dodecad, and BGA. What next? Who next? I hope Dienekes doesn’t mind if […]
To classify humanity is not that hard
In my post below I quoted my interview L. L. Cavalli-Sforza because I think it gets to the heart of some confusions which have emerged since the finding that most variation on any given locus is found within populations, rather than between them. The standard figure is that 85% of genetic variance is within continental […]
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 […]
The face of Ariadne
In response to my post from this weekend positing that the Sardinians are a particularly pristine distillation of the genetic heritage of Europe’s first Neolithic farmers, a friend suggests that I compare & contrast Sardinian actress Caterina Murino and the depictions of women which one sees on the walls of Minoan palaces. The Minoans being […]
Ron Bailey Unzipped
Over at Reason Ron Baily has an excellent piece up, I’ll Show You My Genome. Will You Show Me Yours? He reviews his results from two genotyping chips, and has placed his results online. I doubt readers of this weblog will learn anything that new, though the article might prove illuminating to friends & family. […]
To study humankind, AAA responds
This morning I received an email from the communication director of the American Anthropology Association. The contents are on the web:
AAA Responds to Public Controversy Over Science in Anthropology
Some recent media coverage, including an article in the New York Times, has portrayed anthropology as divided between those who practice it as a science and those […]
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 […]
Excavating the Neolithic genetic strata
After linking to Marnie Dunsmore’s blog on the Neolithic expansion, and reading Peter Bellwood’s First Farmers, I’ve been thinking a bit on how we might integrate some models of the rise and spread of agriculture with the new genomic findings. Bellwood’s thesis basically seems to be that the contemporary world pattern of expansive macro-language families […]
Painting the human tree of life
Tishkoff et al.
Reading Peter Bellwood’s First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies, I’m struck by how much of a difference five years has made. When Bellwood was writing the ‘orthodoxy’ of the nature of the expansion of farming into Europe leaned toward cultural diffusion. Today the paradigm is in flux, as a new generation of […]
The men of the north: the Sami
Ole Magga, Norwegian politician
On this blog I regularly get questions about the Sami (Lapp*). That’s because I often talk about Finnish genetics, have readers such as Clark who are of part-Sami origin, and, the provenance and character of the Sami speak to broader questions about the emergence of the modern European gene pool. More precisely […]
Knowledge of heritability, ignorance of genes
Does the Slut Gene Exist?:
The DRD4 study isn’t an isolated case of shaky genetic science. In fact, it joins a cadre of questionable scientific assertions that link single genes to much broader patterns of behavior.
The last decade has witnessed an explosion in genetics studies, and with it, a proliferation of sensational study results that run […]
On that Native American ancestor
Traces of Sub-Saharan African and Amerindian admixture in old stock European Americans:
Some people like to overestimate extra-European admixture in old stock Americans, while others take the position that it never happened. It did happen, and I can prove it, but certainly not to a great extent, otherwise I wouldn’t be bending over backwards to find […]
No Romans needed to explain Chinese blondes
Uyghur boy from Kashgar
Every few years a story crops up about “European-looking” people in northwest China who claim to be of Roman origin. A “lost legion” so to speak. I’ll admit that I found the stories interesting, amusing, if implausible, years ago. But now it’s just getting ridiculous. This is almost like the “vanishing blonde” […]
We were all Africans…before the intermission
Quick review. In the 19th century once the idea that humans were derived from non-human ancestral species was injected into the bloodstream of the intellectual classes there was an immediate debate as to the location of the proto-human homeland; the Urheimat of us all. Charles Darwin favored Africa, but in many ways this ran against the […]
The inevitable social brain
One of the most persistent debates about the process of evolution is whether it exhibits directionality or inevitability. This is not limited to a biological context; Marxist thinkers long promoted a model of long-term social determinism whereby human groups progressed through a sequence of modes of production. Such an assumption is not limited to […]
The rise of men & the fall of the non-men
Dienekes Pontikos ruminates on the changes in human genetic variation on a world-wide scale over the past 10,000 years based on an MDS plot of East Eurasian genetic variation which he generated. I’ve taken his plot and added geographical labels, so you can see the difference in scale between geography and genetics in terms of […]