Beyond “Out of Africa” within Africa
It looks as if the vast majority (95% or more depending on the population) of the ancestry of non-African humans derives from a population expansion which began around ~60,000 years ago. Before this period some researchers argue there was a non-trivial period of isolation. The “long bottleneck” (David Reich alludes to this in Who We […]
Beyond “Out of Africa” within Africa
It looks as if the vast majority (95% or more depending on the population) of the ancestry of non-African humans derives from a population expansion which began around ~60,000 years ago. Before this period some researchers argue there was a non-trivial period of isolation. The “long bottleneck” (David Reich alludes to this in Who We […]
The Ancient Neanderthal Mariner
More recent stuff on Neanderthals of interest, Neandertals, Stone Age people may have voyaged the Mediterranean: A decade ago, when excavators claimed to have found stone tools on the Greek island of Crete dating back at least 130,000 years, other archaeologists were stunned—and skeptical. But since then, at that site and others, researchers have quietly […]
The braided estuary of human evolution
Metaphors matter because they evoke images, and images are often one of the best ways to understand something in a deep fashion. Consider Charles Darwin’s musing:“It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank…”He brought something memorable and famil…
What did modern humans look like during the “Out of Africa” event?
Recently I was having an email exchange with a friend (a prominent public intellectual who is not a scientist), and we were thinking about what “ancestral Africans” looked like. More precisely, the populations which were resident around ~100,000 to ~200,000 years before the present. These are the people who are depicted in paleoanthropology documentaries. Here […]
Arabia as Africa-across-the-sea
In antiquity ostriches and lions roamed the Syrian desert. The cheetah even still clings to a tenuous existence in the fastness of the central Iranian desert. The point being that the new finding of African modern human remains on the southeast fringe of Arabia ~85,000 years ago shouldn’t be too surprising. Old modern(ish) looking humans date […]
The Others were people too
Neanderthals, cousins we knew.In 2010, our understanding of Neanderthals, our human cousins, changed forever. Before this year, there was a live debate about whether they were human at all, whether they had fully elaborated language, or even culture.Wh…
Denisovans, Neanderthals, Yetis, oh my!
An excellent open access paper is out in Cell which explores the distribution of archaic hominin, and in particular Denisovan, ancestry, Analysis of Human Sequence Data Reveals Two Pulses of Archaic Denisovan Admixture: Anatomically modern humans interbred with Neanderthals and with a related archaic population known as Denisovans. Genomes of several Neanderthals and one Denisovan […]
Who We Are and How We Got Here, a book worth reading
Yesterday I talked to a friend who has a review copy of Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past. They gave me a preview (their overall assessment was positive). I haven’t personally asked to get a copy because, to be honest, I thought there […]
Out of Africa to Out of Eden (well, perhaps not yet)
The recent African origins hypothesis for modern humans had several things going for it. First, most of the old fossils that look like modern humans were in Africa. Chris Stringer and others were pushing the African origins of our modern lineage before genetics came to the fore. But of course, you also have DNA. The […]
Neanderthal vs us: for wont of a SNP?
Recently at a human evolution conference in England Svante Paabo (or someone in his group) was alluding to discovering how modern humans and Neanderthals differed by looking at the ~30,000 genetic positions (bases) where modern humans and Neanderthals exhibit fixed differences. That is, Neanderthals and modern humans exhibit totally disjoint frequencies. I’ve been saying this […]
Khoisan may not have diverged ~300,000 years ago
A few years ago I contributed to an op-ed which defended the utility of the race concept in biology in USA Today (which by the way prompted a quite patronizing email from a famous doyen of population genetics who wished to correct my ignorance; here’s a clue: “Out of Africa again & again”). In my […]
Quantitative genomics, adaptation, and cognitive phenotypes
The human brain utilizes about ~20% of the calories you take in per day. It’s a large and metabolically expensive organ. Because of this fact there are lots of evolutionary models which focus on the brain. In Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human Richard Wrangham suggests that our need for calories to feed our […]
The culture of reasoning: the Ummah shall not agree upon error
Because I watch Screen Junkies‘ “Honest Trailers” I get recommendations like the above from Looper, The Real Reason Why Valerian Flopped At The Box Office. Of course no one knows the ‘real reason’ Valerian flopped, aside from “it didn’t seem like a good movie.” The reality is that Valerian and the City of a Thousand […]
18,000 years BC (the film)
Alpha, set 20,000 years ago in Europe, was apparently originally titled “Solutrean.” The change is probably for the best. It will come out next spring. I really hope that this movie is good and does well. It isn’t often that you have something which takes place during the Last Glacial Maximum. The plot seems to […]
Desperately seeking the secret of FOXP2
Since the early 2000s FOXP2 has shown up again and again in the press and scientific literature. Dubbed the “language gene” it exhibits evidence of accelerated evolution in the human lineage after it split from other apes. Additionally, a homolog of the same gene shows evidence of evolutionary change distinctive to songbirds and whales. Obviously […]
The search for Eden opens up new vistas
The end of Eden A particular conception of the “Out of Africa” model of human origins died in this decade. This model hooked into preexistence narratives about “Adam” and “Eve”, utilizing Y and mitochondrial DNA lineages passed down through direct male and female lines respectively. Its most extreme manifestation could be exemplified by Richard Klein’s […]
A reticulation + pulse expansion of modern human genetic variation
Ancient genomes from S Africa pushes modern human divergence beyond 260,000 years ago https://t.co/HaO7GO2KAs WANTED TO GO TO SLEEP!!! — Razib Khan (@razibkhan) June 6, 2017 In response to a little bit of fatigue at the constant stream of ancient DNA, John Hawks digs the knife in a bit deeper. There’s more. Since Hawks is […]
The human phylogenetic graph gets curiouser and curiouser
While most of my readers were sleeping, Lee Berger in South Africa was giving a press conferences on new Homo naledi related results. Three papers are in elife. It’s open access, so read yourself. The major result is that the fossils have been dated to a 236,000 to 335,000 years ago. If you aren’t a […]
Beyond “Out of Africa” and multiregionalism: a new synthesis?
For several decades before the present era there have been debates between proponents of the recent African origin of modern humans, and the multiregionalist model. Though molecular methods in a genetic framework have come of the fore of late these were originally paleontological theories, with Chris Stringer and Milford Wolpoff being the two most prominent public exponents of […]