Dragon Bone Hill: An Ice-Age Saga of Homo erectus
Link to review: Dragon’s Battles
Dragon Bone Hill: An Ice-Age Saga of Homo erectus
Link to review: Dragon’s Battles
Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species
Link to review: Mother Nature: a complicated and morally ambivalent tale
Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species
Link to review: Mother Nature: a complicated and morally ambivalent tale
My family’s Neandertal genes, ii
Last week I reported that it turns out that one of my siblings carry a possible Neandertal haplotype on the dystrophin gene. To review, it seems likely that ~3% of the average non-African’s genome is derived from Neandertal populations. But by an…
A ‘leaky’ model
John Farrell pointed me to this Anne Gibbons’ piece, A New View Of the Birth of Homo sapiens. Here’s some interesting passages:
The new picture most resembles so-called assimilation models, which got relatively little attention over the yea…
The scions of Shem?
The media is reporting rather breathlessly a new find out of Arabia which seems to push much further back the presence of anatomically modern humans in this region (more accurately, the archaeology was so sparse that assessments of human habitation see…
After the evolutionary revolution
Image credit: Luna04
My post The paradigm is dead, long live the paradigm! expressed to some extent my befuddlement at the current state of human evolutionary genetics and paleoanthropology. After the review of the paper of possible elevated admixtur…
Neandertal admixture, revisiting results after shaken priors
After 2010′s world-shaking revolutions in our understanding of modern human origins, the admixture of Eurasian hominins with neo-Africans, I assumed there was going to be a revisionist look at results which seemed to point to mixing between diffe…
Of association & evolution
Two of the main avenues of research which I track rather closely in this space are genome-wide association studies (GWAS), which attempt to establish a connection between a trait/disease and particular genetic markers, and inquiries into the evolutionary parameters which shape the structure of variation within the human genome. Often with specific relation to a particular […]
Hobbit DNA in 2011
I predicted earlier that Hobbit DNA would be extracted in 2011. It was pretty much an educated guess based on various omissions I sensed in papers in 2010. But it seems that an attempt is going to be made: Scientists are planning an attempt to extract DNA from the ‘hobbit’ Homo floresiensis, the 1-metre-tall extinct distant […]
Kissing & the science of humanity
I approached Sheril Kirshenbaum’s The Science of Kissing: What Our Lips Are Telling Us with some trepidation and excitement. The former is a consequence of my hypochondria and its associated germophobia. I have no aversion to kissing in my own life (apologies for divulging personal information), but I did have some worries about having to […]
Mapping the “Green Sahara”
Guelta d’Archei, Chad. Credit: Dario Menasce. Everyone who is literate knows that the Sahara desert is the largest of its kind in the world. The chasm in cultural, biological, and physical geography is very noticeable. Northern Africa is part of the Palearctic zone, while the peoples north of the Sahara have long been part of […]
Beware of British newspapers: fossils edition
Several readers have pointed me to a headline in a British newspaper, Did first humans come out of Middle East and not Africa? Israeli discovery forces scientists to re-examine evolution of modern man: Scientists could be forced to re-write the history of the evolution of modern man after the discovery of 400,000-year-old human remains. Until […]
The rise of the skulls!
Neanderthal, La Chapelle-aux-Saints Fossils matter. Fossils are evidence. That was Milford Wolpoff’s refrain in the 1987 NOVA documentary which heralded the long cresting of mitochondrial Eve and Out of Africa. Fossils remain highly relevant and important when it comes to deeper time phylogenetic relationships, but it does seem that they have only served to supplement […]
Slouching toward idiocracy?
The September issue of Discover Magazine had an interesting piece, If Modern Humans Are So Smart, Why Are Our Brains Shrinking? It’s now online, though to read the full article you’ll have to have a print subscription, or, pay 99 cents to get a digital copy of that issue. John Hawks is described as “a […]
The paradigm is dead, long live the paradigm!
Mitochondrial DNA and human evolution: Mitochondrial DNA from 147 people, drawn from five geographic populations have been analysed by restriction mapping. All these mitochondrial DMAs stem from one woman who is postulated to have lived ab7out 200,000 years ago, probably in Africa. All the populations examined except the African population have multiple origins, implying that […]
The year of the Other human
Update: Please see follow up post. Carl Zimmer, Siberian Fossils Were Neanderthals’ Eastern Cousins, DNA Reveals: An international team of scientists has identified a previously shadowy human group known as the Denisovans as cousins to Neanderthals who lived in Asia from roughly 400,000 to 50,000 years ago and interbred with the ancestors of today’s inhabitants […]
Not misunderstanding the past requires suspicion
In my post on African farmers someone responded: It was famously reported last winter that Bushmen seem to differ genetically amongst themselves more than Europeans and Asians do. These two latter groups have been separate for at least 40,000 years. At least? Razib, you are way off on the separation time of Europeans and East […]
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 […]