The erectus within?
The Pith: More caveman admixture in modern humans, especially Melanesians! A new paper on archaic adaptive introgression among Melanesians has been discussed elsewhere. But I think it is worth reviewing, because it’s probably a foretaste of what’s to come. Researchers are combing through the human genome, as more and more genomes come on line, in […]
The milkmen
Dienekes and Maju have both commented on a new paper which looked at the likelihood of lactase persistence in Neolithic remains from Spain, but I thought I would comment on it as well. The paper is: Low prevalence of lactase persistence in Neolithic South-West Europe. The location is on the fringes of the modern Basque […]
Reconstructing a generation unsampled
In the near future I will be analyzing the genotype of an individual where all four grandparents have been typed. But this got me thinking about my own situation: is there a way I could “reconstruct” my own grandparents? None of them are living. The easiest way to type them would be to obtain tissue […]
Between the desert and the sea
Zinedine Zidane, a Kabyle There is a new paper in PLoS Genetics out which purports to characterize the ancestry of the populations of northern Africa in greater detail. This is important. The HGDP data set does have a North African population, the Mozabites, but it’s not ideal to represent hundreds of millions of people with […]
PGD:2010s::IVF:1980s
Get ready for PGD, the acronym for preimplantation genetic diagnosis. We don’t really talk about “test tube babies” anymore. It’s “IVF,” and as American as apple pie (OK, perhaps as Israeli as falafel). Here’s the Ngrams result: It’s just not that big of a deal anymore. But take a look at the order articles in The […]
Human behavior over the ages
Over at Scientific American Eric Michael Johnson has a very long post up, The Case of the Missing Polygamists. It is a re-post of something he already published at Psychology Today a few years ago. Though provisionally a review of Sex at Dawn, Johnson covers a lot of ground, and also has extensive quotations from […]
Science evolves
I missed this piece in Edge from Chris Stringer in November, Rethinking “Out of Africa”. He sums up his current thinking at the end: We’ve got the lineage of the hobbit, ‘Homo floresiensis’ (in quotation marks because its human status in not yet clear), perhaps diverging more than two million years ago, evolving in isolation in southeast […]
Economic forecasters should put their $ where their mouth is
Happy Days Are Here Again! Don’t believe the naysayers: An economic recovery is right around the corner.: Economic forecasting is a mug’s game. There are simply too many unknowable factors that affect “the economy” for anyone to make accurate predictions. The Fukushima earthquake and nuclear disaster, for instance, had a noticeably negative macroeconomic impact around […]
The bush & the bramble of the human family
I wonder if in future years we’re going to look at “species debates” in the context of human evolution like we look at counting angels on the head of a pin. Over at BBC News Clive Finlayson has a rambling opinion piece up, Has ‘one species’ idea been put to bed? Finlayson, the author of The […]
The sons of Adam: spirit, not blood
Hominin increase in cranial capacity, courtesy of Luke Jostins A few years ago a statistical geneticist at Cambridge’s Sanger Institute, Luke Jostins, posted the chart above using data from fossils on cranial capacity of hominins (the human lineage). As you can see there was a gradual increase in cranial capacity until ~250,000 years before the present, […]
Out of Africa to Out of Arabia
Dienekes and Greg Cochran have been talking about this possibility for a few years. But a combination of archaeological finds and the current unsettled nature of the human evolutionary genomics literature means that “Out of Arabia” is a real possibility (not laugh-out-loud crazy and weird). So I took the liberty of cooking up a new […]
Culture evolves our bodies!
Human cultural diversity One of the most annoying aspects of talking about human evolution is the rather misguided idea that cultural evolutionary processes operate in a zero-sum environment in relation to biological evolutionary processes. The colloquial rendering of this idea is that because humans are a highly cultural plastic species, we are “beyond” biological evolution. […]
Human origins in 2011
Interesting piece in LiveScience, What We Learned About Our Human Ancestors in 2011. The author highlights the likelihood of a lot of admixture across very diverged lineages, as well as the nascent “Out of Arabia” hypothesis. This quote from Michael Hammer gets at where we’re “going next”: “We’ve probably just scratched the surface of what […]
But it still adapts!
Dienekes and Maju recently pointed to a paper, Contrasting signals of positive selection in genes involved in human skin color variation from tests based on SNP scans and resequencing, in Investigative Genetics. Skin color is an interesting trait because it’s one of the big “wins” in human genomics over the past 10 years. To a great […]
Modern humans in Arabia >100,000 years ago
The genetic model of the “Out of Africa” scenario is getting more complex. There may be two waves, as well as the likelihood of admixture between the Neo-Africans and “archaic” hominins, such the Neandertals and Denisovans. From what I can gather the genetic evidence is now converging upon the sequence of events where African populations […]
On structure, variation, and race
I noticed yesterday that Andrew Sullivan, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and a cast of others were having a roiling debate on race and I.Q. My name came up in several comment threads on various issues. I’m aware of this because I have Google Alerts set for my name. I don’t have the time or energy to get immersed […]
How the worm turns the genic world
In the middle years of the last decade there were many papers which came out which reported many ‘hard’ selective sweeps reshaping the human genome. By this, I mean that you had a novel mutation arise against the genetic background, and positive selection rapidly increased the frequency of that mutation. Because of the power and […]
Man is the environment of the rat
The above is a figure from a new paper in PLoS ONE, Multiple Geographic Origins of Commensalism and Complex Dispersal History of Black Rats. Here’s the abstract: The Black Rat (Rattus rattus) spread out of Asia to become one of the world’s worst agricultural and urban pests, and a reservoir or vector of numerous zoonotic […]
Are most people “behaviorally modern”?
Paintings at Lascaux, Prof saxx Behavioral modernity: Behavioral modernity is a term used in anthropology, archeology and sociology to refer to a set of traits that distinguish present day humans and their recent ancestors from both living primates and other extinct hominid lineages. It is the point at which Homo sapiens began to demonstrate a […]