Eurogenes 500K SNP BioGeographicAncestry Project
Since I have been promoting the Dodecad Ancestry Project, it seems only fair to bring to your attention Eurogenes 500K SNP BioGeographicAncestry Project. The sample populations are a bit different from Dodecad, but again ADMIXTURE is the primary tool. But the author also makes recourse to other methodologies to explore more than simply population level […]
The flux of genes on the South Seas
Huli Wigman from the Southern Highlands, Painting of Tahitian Women on the Beach by Paul Gauguin
Many demographic models utilized in genetics are rather simple. Yet the expansion and retreat of various demes in post-Ice Age Europe seems to be far more complex than had previously been assumed, though I suspect part of the rationale for […]
15 ancestral components to bind them all
Dienekes Pontikos keeps chugging along, and has cranked out a new bar plot from the ADMIXTURE program with 15 putative ancestral components. He has “69 populations, and 1,189 individuals in total.” Most of these were assembled from public data, but some of them are particular to the Dodecad Ancestry Project. He contends:
In comparison to the […]
Icelanders descended from Native Americans?
That is the question, and tentatively answered in the affirmative according to a new paper in The American Journal of Physical Anthropology. A new subclade of mtDNA haplogroup C1 found in icelanders: Evidence of pre-columbian contact?:
Although most mtDNA lineages observed in contemporary Icelanders can be traced to neighboring populations in the British Isles and Scandinavia, […]
Homozygosity runs in the family (or not)
The number 1 gets a lot more press than -1, and the concept of heterozygosity gets more attention than homozygosity. Concretely the difference between the latter two is rather straightforward. In diploid organisms the genes come in duplicates. If the alleles are the same, then they’re homozygous. If they’re different, then they’re heterozygous. Sex chromosomes […]
Was the Pocahontas exception necessary?
In Jonathan Spiro’s Defending the Master Race it is recounted that as American states were passing more robust anti-miscegenation laws and legally enshrining the concept of the one-drop-rule an exception was made in Virginia for those with 1/16th or less Native American ancestry. The reason for this was practical: many of the aristocratic “First Families […]
The layers and fault-lines of genes
At Genomes Unzipped Luke Jostins elaborates on how the genetic facts he now has about his paternal lineage change how he views his own personal history:
… my father’s father is Latvian, and the N1 haplogroup is not rare in the Baltic regions. In fact, the subgroup, N1c1, is more common in parts of Eastern Europe […]
The future Indian Yao Ming
In a nation of ~1 billion, even one where a large minority are positively malnourished, you’d expect some really tall people. So not that surprising: NBA Awaits Satnam From India, So Big and Athletic at 14:
In a country of 1.3 billion people, 7-foot, 250-pound Satnam Singh Bhamar has become a beacon for basketball hope.
At age 14.
…
That […]
European man of many faces: Cain vs. Abel
When it comes to the synthesis of genetics and history we live an age of no definitive answers. L. L. Cavalli-Sforza’s Great Human Diasporas would come in for a major rewrite at this point. One of the areas which has been roiled the most within the past ten years has been the origin and propagation […]
The importance of representativeness
A few weeks ago when I posted on the results of a high likelihood of a partially eastern origin for the Mundari people I received a message via Facebook that the article really wasn’t relevant to most South Asians, since only 1-2% spoke a Mundari language (along with pointers to old out of date articles). […]
What intra- & inter- population genetic variance tells us
The figure to the left is a composite merged from two different papers. One analyzes the patterns of genetic variation within African Americans, and the other the patterns within the East Turkic ethnic group, the Uyghurs. The bar plots show the ancestral element which is similar to two parent populations which resemble Europeans and Africans […]
Engineering the Messiah
In the 1920s the Soviet Union sponsored a “humanzee” breeding program. From what I recall the ultimate rationale for the funding was that the program might create a race of superior warriors, combing the incredible physical strength on a per pound basis of the chimp, with the greater level of intelligence found in human beings. […]
Around the great northern circle
Recently there’s been some talk about how the Mercator projection distorts our perceptions of the world, in particular how it makes Africa seem very small in relation to North America, and about the same size as Greenland. But there’s another artifact of the Mercator projection as well: it misleads us in terms of our perception […]
Assyrians & Finns in a worldwide genetic context
Dienekes is now allowing people to “out” themselves in terms of their ancestry on a comment thread over at the Dodecad Ancestry Project. One of the major purposes of the project has been to survey variation in under-sampled groups which could give us insights into human genetic history. Yesterday I pointed to an analysis of […]
The genetic heritage of Europe’s north
If you haven’t, you should keep an eye on Dienekes‘ Dodecad Ancestry Project (RSS). The pilot phase of data collection is over, and the first population level statistics are now coming out. Of particular interest to me is a new analysis of various northern European ethnicities just published.
The samples used in this analysis are:
– 25 […]
The shades of the ancestors
Joe Pickrell of Genomes Unzipped kept digging and found something totally unexpected. Am I partly Jewish? An unexpected turn of events:
In my last post, I discussed how I used 23andMe data to test hypotheses about my ancestry. In particular, I was intrigued by Dienekes Pontikos’s result suggesting that I (and my colleague Vincent) might be […]
On the “liberal gene”
Jim Manzi has already posted on the warranted skepticism of DRD4 being reported in the press as the “liberal gene.” Here’s the original paper. The main issue I have is not with the original research, but the inevitable confusions in the media which always arise. First, we know that complex behavioral phenotypes such as religiosity […]
Have ADMIXTURE run on your genetic data
The last 24 hours of the initial sample collection phase of the Dodecad Ancestry Project are upon us. So if you have raw 23andMe data, you got a day to send it in, if you’re of the following groups:
-Greeks (not necessarily from Greece: Cypriots, Pontic Greeks from the former USSR, North Epirotes, Griko speakers from […]
My Dodecad results
A few days ago Dienekes opened up the Dodecad project to a wider range of Eurasians. I decided to send my 23andMe sample to Dienekes ASAP, and the results came back today. I’m DOD075. Dienekes also just put up an explanation of the 10 ancestral components he’s generating from ADMIXTURE (along with tree-like representations of […]
Sons of the conquerors: the story of India?
The past ten years has obviously been very active in the area of human genomics, but in the domain of South Asian genetic relationships in a world wide context it has seen veritable revolutions and counter-revolutions. The final outlines are still to be determined. In the mid-1990s the conventional wisdom was that South Asians were […]