Denisovan dental morphology in East Asians and in the New World?
An interesting paper in PNAS, Rare dental trait provides morphological evidence of archaic introgression in Asian fossil record: The recently described Denisovan hemimandible from Xiahe, China [F. Chen et al., (2019) Nature 569, 409–412], possesses an unusual dental feature: a 3-rooted lower second molar. A survey of the clinical and bioarchaeological literature demonstrates that the […]
The vines around the tree trunks
A lot of the understanding of scientific theories and models in the public domain is communicated by evocative metaphors and turns of phrase. For example, Charles Darwin famously wrote: It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, […]
The natural history of song – a human universal
“I am human, and I think nothing human is alien to me.” – Terrence One of the bizarre things about modern cultural anthropology is that its tendency toward extreme relativism means that it engages in so much “thick description” that generalities of humanity disappear in the avalanche of prose. A deep sense of ontological incommensurability […]
It’s a Denisovan world, and paleoanthropology just lives in it!
Unless you’ve been sleeping under a rock, you may have seen a new paper, A late Middle Pleistocene Denisovan mandible from the Tibetan Plateau. The reason it is a big deal is that except for a fragment of a skull reported on at a conference, this is the first remains outside of Denisova cave identified […]
African genomics tells us about deep structure and history
Two interesting papers in Genome Biology that are open access, Whole-genome sequence analysis of a Pan African set of samples reveals archaic gene flow from an extinct basal population of modern humans into sub-Saharan populations and African evolutionary history inferred from whole genome sequence data of 44 indigenous African populations. Since they are open access […]
Denisovans and the human story
The Siberian cave where a new human species was discoveredWe are all aware of the iconic fossil finds which mark the various milestones of our understanding of human evolution. The story of how our species became what it is today. Raymond Dart’s Taung …
The expansion of modern humans ~50,000 as part of a regular Poisson process
Last of the giants: What killed off Madagascar’s megafauna a thousand years ago?: The first job is to understand exactly when the megafauna died out. Radiocarbon dating of over 400 recent fossils demonstrates that animals under 22 pounds lived on Madagascar throughout the last 10,000 years. For animals over 22 pounds, there are abundant fossils […]
The teleos of modern humans
Next week’s episode of The Insight is going to be on Denisovans. It’s a long one because so much has come out in the last few months on the specific topic, as well as the broader framing issues (e.g., the discovery of a new human species on Luzon). One of the major points Spencer and […]
The teleos of modern humans
Next week’s episode of The Insight is going to be on Denisovans. It’s a long one because so much has come out in the last few months on the specific topic, as well as the broader framing issues (e.g., the discovery of a new human species on Luzon). One of the major points Spencer and […]
Deep Denisovan population structure
The Denisovan session at the American Society of Physical Anthropology meeting was very interesting. In Science Anne Gibbons reports on the findings, Our mysterious cousins—the Denisovans—may have mated with modern humans as recently as 15,000 years ago: The elusive Denisovans, the extinct cousins of Neanderthals, are known from only the scraps of bone they left […]
Very ancient ghosts in the African genome
The above figure is from a preprint (updated from last year), Recovering signals of ghost archaic introgression in African populations. But to truly get a sense of this preprint, I would highly recommend you read the supplementary material. And, to be honest, a publication from 2007, The Joint Allele-Frequency Spectrum in Closely Related Species, as […]
A more complex tree of recent human origins
Sometimes charts are useful. The above plot does not have branch lengths which are proportional to length. But, they capture I think the rough topology. I’ve also put notes on there.
Some of the branches are certainly wrong. We’ll know mor…
Reevaluating “multiple origins” for modern humans
Following up on the post below, The Deep Origins Of East African Hunter-Gatherers, as well as some discussions on Twitter, I think I want to do some clarification about where I think we are now. My thoughts shouldn’t be a surprise if you have read everything I’ve said, but I may not have put them […]
Arabia between Africa & Eurasia
Arabia between Africa and EurasiaShanidar cave in Iraq, once occupied by NeanderthalsFor hundreds of thousands of years Neanderthals and the ancestors of modern humans interacted in the broad zone of territory we now call the “Middle East.” Neanderthal…
Europe had a lot of demographic turnover because there were never many humans
Now things are coming into focus. Population dynamics and socio-spatial organization of the Aurignacian: Scalable quantitative demographic data for western and central Europe: Demographic estimates are presented for the Aurignacian techno-complex (~42,…
How your Neanderthal functions in the human genome
What does it mean that you have Neanderthal ancestry? Everyone agrees now that that ancestry exists, but does it make you any different from what you’d be otherwise? From a scientific perspective, one might ask what the function of Neanderthal genetic …
Most of human history was in Africa
Citation: Scerri, Eleanor ML, et al. “Did our species evolve in subdivided populations across Africa, and why does it matter?.” Trends in ecology & evolution (2018).Over the last generation our understanding of the origin of what we term “modern hu…
The state origins of “modern humans” in 2018 (it’s a flux)
After reading the supplements to the new Siberian paper I have a few general thoughts that I want to lay out. First, the clines vs. clusters considerations seem to be one we need to revisit. Like the expansion of Native American peoples ~15,000 years ago, it seems that the “Out of Africa” migration pulse happened […]
What if everything that’s not a disease is polygenic?
In the early 2000s FOXP2 was dubbed the “language gene”. It was a sexy story. Humans exhibited accelerated adaptive evolution on this locus in relation to our relatives. Additionally, vocally oriented lineages such as birds and whales were also subject to the same process. But over the past five years or so I’ve heard a […]
The new African “multi-regionalism” & pan-Neanderthalism
We live in times when our understanding of the origin and diversification of modern humans is undergoing great change. More concretely, our understanding of what it means to be human is transforming. The terms are overused, but perhaps it could be called a “revolution” or “paradigm shift” between the year 2000 and today. At the […]