Human-on-human sex
Dienekes tips me off to the fact that the long-awaited Reich lab paper on Neandertal admixture dating has finally been put on arXiv! The date of interbreeding between Neandertals and modern humans:
Comparisons of DNA sequences between Neandertals and p…
Human version 2.001
Dienekes reflects on the seemingly simultaneous appearance of behavioral modernityin South Africa and Europe and Australia, pending the acceptance of the most recent finds. This part is very important in my opinion:
The San people still live in several…
The expanding crest of modern humanity
If you are interested in genomics and human evolution, a new review paper in PLoS Genetics is a must read, Genomic Data Reveal a Complex Making of Humans. A must read not because you need to agree with the thrust of the authors’ arguments, but be…
Sleeping like a Neandertal
Forgot to highlight one of the coolest abstracts from SMBE 2012, A genomewide map of Neandertal ancestry in modern humans:
2. The map allows us to identify Neandertal alleles that have been the target of selection since introgression. We identified ove…
Sleeping like a Neandertal
Forgot to highlight one of the coolest abstracts from SMBE 2012, A genomewide map of Neandertal ancestry in modern humans:
2. The map allows us to identify Neandertal alleles that have been the target of selection since introgression. We identified ove…
Pygmies: “old” populations, and a new “look” (?)
Over the years one issue that crops up repeatedly in human evolutionary genetics and paleoanthropology (or more precisely, the popular exposition of the topics in the media) is the idea that is that “population X are the most ancient Y.” X …
Another look at mtDNA
The new article in The American Journal of Human Genetics, A “Copernican” Reassessment of the Human Mitochondrial DNA Tree from its Root, is open access, so you should check it out. The discussion gets to the heart of the matter:
Supported by a con…
The evolution of the human face
The face is an important aspect of our phenotype. So important that facial recognition is one of many innate reflexive cognitive competencies. By this, I mean that you can recognize a face in a gestalt manner, just like you can recognize a set of three marbles. You don’t have to think about it in a […]
Neanderthals came in all colors
There’s a report in Science about a new short paper about Neandertal pigmentation genetics. The context is this. First, in 2007 an ingenuous paper was published which inferred that it may be that Neandertals had red hair, at least based on an N = 2 from two divergent locations. The new study looks at three […]
We are all…Sardinians?
The title is tongue in cheek. But I have been noting with interest Dienekes’ trial runs with TreeMix. With it he has discovered a very peculiar admixture event, at least as determined by the software. The results are below, with my clarifying labels: Basically the software seems to be implying that there has been gene […]
Beyond trees and European trees
Submitted for your approval, a very important post and preprint from Dr. Joseph Pickrell, Identifying targets of natural selection in human and dog evolution. If you read the preprint there’s a lot of good stuff. Dienekes highlighted the most relevant aspect: representation of genetic relationships with phylogenetic trees mask the likely reality of gene flow […]
Extraordinary claims require a lot of evidence
Several people have emailed me about the Solutrean hypothesis. The trigger is the publication of Across Atlantic Ice: The Origin of America’s Clovis Culture. To my surprise this has received a lot of media attention. The Washington Post, io9, and The New Scientist. Granted, the coverage has been appropriately skeptical. But it still gets to […]
Jerry Coyne on race: a reflection of evolution
After my post on the ‘race question’ I thought it would be useful to point to Jerry Coyne’s ‘Are there human races’?. The utility is that Coyne’s book Speciation strongly shaped my own perceptions. I knew the empirical reality of clustering before I read that book, but the analogy with “species concept” debates was only […]
Ötzi the Iceman and the Sardinians
Well, the paper is finally out, New insights into the Tyrolean Iceman’s origin and phenotype as inferred by whole-genome sequencing. In case you don’t know, Ötzi the Iceman died 5,300 years ago in the alpine region bordering Austria and Italy. His seems to have been killed. And due to various coincidences his body was also […]
Neandertal population structure
There’s a new paper out, Partial genetic turnover in neandertals: continuity in the east and population replacement in the west. The primary results are above. Basically, using 13 mtDNA samples the authors conclude that it looks as if there was a founder effect for Neanderthals in Western Europe ~50 K years ago, generating a very […]
Adam’s end was never in the cards
There has been a lot of talk in the media about a new paper which reports that the Y chromosome is not deteriorating, as had been previously inferred from the data. In the 2004 Bryan Sykes wrote Adam’s Curse: A Future Without Men which used this model as a framing device (and naturally elicited great general […]
Out of who knows where
In The New York Times, DNA Turning Human Story Into a Tell-All: The tip of a girl’s 40,000-year-old pinky finger found in a cold Siberian cave, paired with faster and cheaper genetic sequencing technology, is helping scientists draw a surprisingly complex new picture of human origins. The new view is fast supplanting the traditional idea […]
Out of Africa and out of Siberia
The latest edition of The American Journal of Human Genetics has two papers using “old fashioned” uniparental markers to trace human migration out of Africa and Siberia respectively. I say old fashioned because the peak novelty of these techniques was around 10 years ago, before dense autosomal SNP marker analyses, let alone whole genome sequencing. […]
When Eve met Creb
The excellent site io9 has a piece up today which is a fascinating indicator of the nature of popular science publications as a lagging indicator. It is a re-post of a piece published last April, How Mitochondrial Eve connected all humanity and rewrote human evolution. In it you have an encapsulation of a particular period […]
How the Amhara breathe differently
I have blogged about the genetics of altitude adaptation before. There seem to be three populations in the world which have been subject to very strong natural selection, resulting in physiological differences, in response to the human tendency toward hypoxia. Two of them are relatively well known, the Tibetans and the indigenous people of the […]