Humans like us in Sri Lanka 48,000 years ago
Bows and arrows and complex symbolic displays 48,000 years ago in the South Asian tropics: Archaeologists contend that it was our aptitude for symbolic, technological, and social behaviors that was central to Homo sapiens rapidly expanding across the majority of Earth’s continents during the Late Pleistocene. This expansion included movement into extreme environments and appears […]
Biogeography, Denisovans, and Siberia
A new ancient DNA preprint, this time using the sequence of a 34,000-year-old sample from Northeastern Mongolia. The preprint is Denisovan ancestry and population history of early East Asians: We present analyses of the genome of a ~34,000-year-old hominin skull cap discovered in the Salkhit Valley in North East Mongolia. We show that this individual […]
Massive “Basal Eurasian” back-migration”
In 2005 Dienekes Pontikos had a post up, The mitochondrial time depth of humanity: It is common to distinguish between Africans and non-Africans, with the former being much more genetically diverse than the latter. But, the real “gap” in human origins seems to be between the really old Africans (“Paleoafricans”) and the rest (“Afrasians”). The […]
Were ancestral human languages tonal?
Those of you who have read this weblog for a while know that ASPM is one of the genes that was once a major topic of interest. But the 2000s turned into the 2010s, and I kind of lost interest. There was some really strange result though that ASPM and tonal languages had some association. […]
The great explosion across the World Island
Last week I recorded an episode of The Insight with Chris Stringer. The topic de jure mostly had to do with Denisovans…but now I wish I’d waited a week. There would have been more to talk about! Two new papers have confirmed and solidified the fact that modern humans expanded into Europe earlier than we […]
We are all Denisovans now!
Since 2010 the combination of improvements in genomic technology and ancient DNA have totally revolutionized our understanding of the human past through genetic techniques. In the 2000s there was a “live debate” about archaic introgression into modern human genomes, in large part because the techniques were not powerful enough to answer the questions that were […]
Homo antecessor is not the ancestor!
Meanwhile, ancient protein is marching onward. A new paper in Nature, The dental proteome of Homo antecessor: The phylogenetic relationships between hominins of the Early Pleistocene epoch in Eurasia, such as Homo antecessor, and hominins that appear later in the fossil record during the Middle Pleistocene epoch, such as Homo sapiens, are highly debated…Here we present the […]
The deep origins of East Eurasians
The recent big paper on ancient DNA from East Asia has opened up a bit of a semantic can of worms. If you read all these ancient DNA papers with their stylized models you start to develop a sense of the big overall framework, but even in a big sprawling preprint with copious supplements, it […]
The Human Genome Diversity Project at high-coverage!
After a few years of presentations and preprints, the new high-quality whole-genome analysis of the HGDP dataset is finally published in Science, Insights into human genetic variation and population history from 929 diverse genomes. The HGDP dates back 30 years, so this is the culmination of a long line of research. The authors in this […]
High-coverage Neanderthal genome and gene flow with Denisovans
Two new preprints on Neanderthals, A high-coverage Neandertal genome from Chagyrskaya Cave and 100,000 years of gene flow between Neandertals and Denisovans in the Altai mountains. The first preprint is an empirical one focused on a new high-coverage Neanderthal genome, which allows for more powerful inferences. To me, the most interesting insight is that Neanderthals […]
Neanderthals as a reservoir of paleo-modern human heritage
A new preprint reports on the peculiar Y chromosomal patterns that one finds in Neanderthals, Denisovans, and modern humans. Spencer Wells has told me that Y and mtDNA are actually much more informative now that we have an ancient DNA autosomal scaffold. I think that’s right. The strange result from Neanderthals is both their Y […]
How biogeography will be more important in understanding human evolutionary history
As a follow-up to the post below, I thought I would make certain expectations and assumptions more explicit on my part. The new methods to infer our species’ population history are quite complicated and require a lot of analytical and computational firepower. They’re predicated on big datasets (e.g., whole genomes, and lots of them) and […]
The complex origins of our species in Africa
The figure to the right illustrates a model that is put forward in a new paper, Recovering signals of ghost archaic introgression in African populations. This was originally a preprint, Recovering signals of ghost archaic introgression in African populations. So we’ve discussed the implications extensively. Carl Zimmer has covered the story in The New York […]
Neanderthal ancestry in Africa and West Eurasian gene flow
A new (open access) paper in Cell, Identifying and Interpreting Apparent Neanderthal Ancestry in African Individuals, is making a big splash in the media. Whether you believe this paper on its own is conditional on how deeply you can grok the methods. Honestly I don’t know if I trust myself to render any judgment until […]
All narratives are wrong, some are just less wrong
A few days ago Spencer and I recorded a “predictions for 2020s” episode for The Insight, before we go back to “regularly scheduled programs.” One of the topics (of ten) we discussed is that the old “Out of Africa” model is going to be marginalized/complicated. What did we mean by this? Some of the hints […]
The modern human back-sweep from Southeast Asia
The Insight is back with a 2-hour episode. If you unsubscribed due to a lack of new content, please resubscribe. Spencer and I devoted this episode to a “decade wrap-up,” so we had a lot to talk about (OK, ten general things to talk about, as we did a countdown), but there are already episodes […]
The Asian human species that we are lost
A new paper, The GenomeAsia 100K Project enables genetic discoveries across Asia: The underrepresentation of non-Europeans in human genetic studies so far has limited the diversity of individuals in genomic datasets and led to reduced medical relevance for a large proportion of the world’s population. Population-specific reference genome datasets as well as genome-wide association studies […]
We don’t know much about deep East Asian paleogenetics
A comment below that captures my thoughts well: The deeper I dig into the Tianyuan discussions posted online, the less I seem to understand… seriously, we NEED more samples from east Asia, specifically China to piece together the east Eurasian developments and to understand where Tianyuan fits in all of this. Is it even more […]
Answers to questions we don’t need to answer about human origins
For many years I have been arguing that there isn’t a specific genetic variant associated with “modern humanity.” If most selection is on standing variation in the form of soft sweeps, then what distinguishes our “modern” lineage from older hominin lineages which flourished 200,000 years ago is more a matter of degree than kind. The […]
Late Denisovan admixture?
From A method for genome-wide genealogy estimation for thousands of samples, this section jumped out at me:
In the East and South Asian groups, the data suggest a very recent arrival of Denisovan DNA (mainly <15,000 YBP). In non-Africans, Neandertha…