“Out of Africa” bottleneck is what really matters for mutations
At least in relation to mutational load, if you read a new preprint in biorxiv, The demographic history and mutational load of African hunter-gatherers and farmers: The distribution of deleterious genetic variation across human populations is a key issue in evolutionary biology and medical genetics. However, the impact of different modes of subsistence on recent […]
The logic of human destiny was inevitable 1 million years ago
Robert Wright’s best book, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, was published near 20 years ago. At the time I was moderately skeptical of his thesis. It was too teleological for my tastes. And, it does pander to a bias in human psychology whereby we look to find meaning in the universe. But this is […]
How Tibetans can function at high altitudes
About seven years ago I wrote two posts about how Tibetans manage to function at very high altitudes. And it’s not just physiological functioning, that is, fitness straightforwardly understood. High altitudes can cause a sharp reduction in reproductive fitness because women can not carry pregnancies to term. In other words, high altitude is a very strong selection […]
The arcane art of ancient admixture
I have mentioned the PLoS Genetics paper, The Date of Interbreeding between Neandertals and Modern Humans, before because a version of it was put up on arXiv. The final paper has a few additions. For example, it mentions the generally panned (at leas…
Neandertal one stop shopping
If you have a hard time following all the Neandertal genomics findings from the last few years, and their implications, National Geographic has a really thorough piece up. It’s a good digest of all the news you can use. One thing I would like to …
Don’t trust an archaeologist about genetics, don’t trust a geneticist about archaeology
Who to trust? That is the question when you don’t know very much (all of us). Trust is precious, and to some extent sacred. That’s why I can flip out when I realize after the fact that someone more informed than me in field X sampled biased…
I believe in the blank slate!
Well, not really…but in some ways close enough judged against the initial reference point of where I started on certain questions. Dienekes contends:
This will help us understand both: the ancestors of non-Africans did not come forth fully forme…
I believe in the blank slate!
Well, not really…but in some ways close enough judged against the initial reference point of where I started on certain questions. Dienekes contends:
This will help us understand both: the ancestors of non-Africans did not come forth fully forme…
I believe in the blank slate!
Well, not really…but in some ways close enough judged against the initial reference point of where I started on certain questions. Dienekes contends:
This will help us understand both: the ancestors of non-Africans did not come forth fully forme…
There may be no gene which is essential for our humanity
The always informative Ann Gibbons has a piece in Slate, The Neanderthal in My Family Tree. There is almost nothing new for regular readers of this weblog, but it’s rather awesome that Slate is now publishing stuff like this. Many people are simp…
The Others, in black and white
New Scientist has a piece up, Europeans did not inherit pale skins from Neanderthals, based on a paper I blogged last month. One thing that I hadn’t though about in detail…how did anatomically modern humans of various shades perceive Neand…
Humanity isn’t, it becomes
John Hawks prompts to reemphasize an aspect of my thinking which has undergone a revolution over the past 10 years. I pointed to it in my post on the Khoe-San. In short, the common anatomically modern human ancestors of Khoe-San and non-Khoe-San may n…
The brambly bush of humanity
Over at Haldane’s Sieve there are more than preprints posted, there are commentaries from the authors as well. For example, for The genetic prehistory of southern Africa, the first author, Dr. Joseph K. Pickrell, has a extended comment up.
But oc…
The pruned tree
Dienekes Pontikos has a long post up on how reticulation within phylogenetic trees may distort our perception of human natural history when we force the data into a more conventional tree (i.e., bifurcation after bifurcation). The concrete reason for t…
Not all genes are created the same
The map to the right shows the frequencies of HGDP populations on SLC45A2, which is a locus that has been implicated in skin color variation in humans. It’s for the SNP rs16891982, and I yanked the figure from IrisPlex: A sensitive DNA tool for a…
Europeans got less shaded in stages
The Pith: the evolution of lighter skin is complex, and seems to have occurred in stages. The current European phenotype may date to the end of the last Ice Age.
A new paper in Molecular Biology and Evolution, The timing of pigmentation lightening in E…
Eat smarter, don’t work out harder?
There have been several recent studies reemphasizing diet over exercise (timely because Americans are kind of fat, on average). A new piece in The New York Times looking at the Hadza of Tanzania, who are hunter-gatherers, seems to reiterate this point,…
On phylogenetic instrumentalism
ADMIXTURE and STRUCTURE tests aren’t formal mixture tests. Yes! In fact, in the “open science” community this issue is repeated over and over and over, because people routinely get confused (our audience does not consist of population gen…
The origins of modern humanity: 2012
Matt Ridley has a column up, Did Your Ancestor Date a Neanderthal? In it he juxtaposes the two recent papers which got some attention on the relationship of modern humans to Neandertals. To be frank I think it took too much of the “two sides/oppo…
Neanderthal admixture & the ecology of academe
Yesterday I pointed out that David Reich had a moderately dismissive attitude toward the new paper in PNAS, Effect of ancient population structure on the degree of polymorphism shared between modern human populations and ancient hominins. Here’s …