Human to Neanderthal gene flow and high quality Denisovan genomes
Recurrent gene flow between Neanderthals and modern humans over the past 200,000 years: Our understanding of admixture between humans and Neanderthals has changed dramatically over the past decade and a […]
How non-Africans came to be….
Most of the history of the human species is in Africa, which is why I wrote a Substack trying to outline what I think are various alternative models about what’s […]
Early Maghrebis are Eurasian back-migration
A new ancient DNA paper from Northwest Africa: Northwest African Neolithic initiated by migrants from Iberia and Levant: In northwestern Africa, lifestyle transitioned from foraging to food production around 7,400 years […]
Moderate population structure out-of-Africa
A few weeks ago I wrote on my Substack about a new model of African H. sapiens genesis that assumes recurrent gene flow between deeply divergent populations within the continent. […]
The replacement of the Neandersovan Y and mtDNA?
Harvard Magazine has a nice piece up on David Reich’s biography and research. The section where Reich addresses the strange issues regarding Neanderthals jumped out at me, as I’ve had […]
Ancient Africa may not have had as much deep structure as we think
A weakly structured stem for human origins in Africa: While it is now broadly accepted that Homo sapiens originated within Africa, considerable uncertainty surrounds specific models of divergence and migration […]
Depigmentation in Northern Europe
Direct detection of natural selection in Bronze Age Britain: We developed a novel method for efficiently estimating time-varying selection coefficients from genome-wide ancient DNA data. In simulations, our method accurately […]
Recent human origins in 2021
I wrote three long pieces for my Substack: Yo mama’s mama’s mama’s mama… etc. Our African origins: the more we understand, the less we know ($). What happens in Denisova […]
Through northern Arabia
Multiple hominin dispersals into Southwest Asia over the past 400,000 years: We have identified at least five pulses of human dispersal into northern Arabia, each associated with a phase of […]
Was H. luzonensis Denisovan?
Philippine Ayta possess the highest level of Denisovan ancestry in the world: Multiple lines of evidence show that modern humans interbred with archaic Denisovans. Here, we report an account of […]
T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us
Carole Hooven has a new book, T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us. I’ll be honest and admit I was only vaguely aware of the […]
More and more evidence for ‘complex demography’ in archaic ancestry
An ancestral recombination graph of human, Neanderthal, and Denisovan genomes: We note that our estimated TMRCA to Neanderthal within Neanderthal-introgressed segments in all non-African populations is recent, ~74 ka ago, […]
Complex admixture of “Denisovans” in Southeast Asia and Sahul
A new paper, Genomic insights into population history and biological adaptation in Oceania, is worth reading. Read it along with Multiple migrations to the Philippines during the last 50,000 years […]
The great panmixia
Human inbreeding has decreased in time through the Holocene: The history of human inbreeding is controversial. The development of sedentary agricultural societies may have had opposite influences on inbreeding levels. On the one hand, agriculture and food surplus may have diminished inbreeding by increasing population sizes and lowering endogamy, i.e. inbreeding due to population isolation. […]
Neanderthal Y chromosomes are paleo-modern?
I don’t have time to blog in detail today so I’ll point you to Ann Gibbon’s story, How Neanderthals lost their Y chromosome. You can find the link to the paper in there. The big issue here is that both mtDNA and Y chromosomes were replaced due to introgression from a population closer to modern […]
Humanity’s second “cradle” in Southeast Asia
Pleistocene SundalandThis week on The Insight (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Podcasts) Razib and Spencer talk about a topic which they have visited before, the role of Southeast Asia in understanding the origin of our species.A generati…
ABO introgression from Eurasian hominins
One of the oldest group of loci investigated for variation in humans are the ABO antigen markers. There are several reasons for this. First, you can assay them with pre-DNA methods. Second, they vary a lot. Third, they’re very important for things like blood donation. The fact that they vary a lot means that researchers […]
The Wallacean Hominin Wonderland
A new preprint, Introgression, hominin dispersal and megafaunal survival in Late Pleistocene Island Southeast Asia, attempts to synthesize paleontology, biogeography, and human evolutionary genomics. It’s a pretty impressive effort, and short and compact: The hominin fossil record of Island Southeast Asia (ISEA) indicates that at least two endemic super-archaic species, Homo luzonensis and H. floresiensis, […]
How the Amazonians got their Australasian
Nature recently came out with two blockbuster papers establishing a better chronology on the settlement of the New World by humans. More precisely, the papers seem to push the likely date back by over 15,000 years. The figure above is from one of the papers. It shows human-derived artifacts from sites that date to 25,000 […]
Let’s talk about sexual selection and Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin famously posited the origin of species through adaptation driven by natural selection. The theory of evolution as we understand it. But another of Darwin’s major ideas was that sexual selection was very important in driving diversity within species. More specifically Darwin thought that female choosiness was critical and explained why in species such […]