The hunt for ancient DNA
Ewen Callaway has a good survey of what’s been going down in ancient human genomics over the past year in Nature, Ancient DNA reveals secrets of human history. It’s not paywalled, so read the whole thing. Most of it won’t be too surpr…
Old Man’s Culture
too
A few readers reminded me of the recent Rachel Caspari article in Scientific American, The Evolution of Grandparents. It’s actually based on her earlier research, published in PNAS in 2004, Older age becomes common late in human evolution. I …
Non-zero sum transitions in the human past
A few people have pointed me to the recent paper in Science, Tenfold Population Increase in Western Europe at the Neandertal–to–Modern Human Transition. The basic result is obvious, and not totally revolutionary: anatomically modern humans may simp…
Why the human X chromosome is less diverse
The Pith: The human X chromosome is subject to more pressure from natural selection, resulting in less genetic diversity. But, the differences in diversity of X chromosomes across human populations seem to be more a function of population history than …
Asian Negritos are not one population
Negrito, Philippines. Credit: Ken Ilio
In the post below I mentioned that the Malaysian and Philippine Negritos seem to be two very distinct populations. This was something I wanted to explore in more detail, so I naturally decided to poke around the…
The end of evolutionary psychology
A new paper in PLoS Biology is rather like the last person to leave turning the light off. Evolutionary psychology as we understood it in the 1980s and 1990s is over. Darwin in Mind: New Opportunities for Evolutionary Psychology:
None of the aforementi…
What did red-haired Neanderthals look like?
So asks a commenter below in relation to the question above. First, why would one even presume that they were red-haired, see my 2007 post, or the paper in Science: A Melanocortin 1 Receptor Allele Suggests Varying Pigmentation Among Neanderthals. In …
Neanderthal-human mating, months later….
Image credit:ICHTO
Recently something popped up into my Google news feed in regards to “Neanderthal-human mating.” If you are a regular reader you know that I’m wild for this particular combination of the “wild thing.” Bu…
What one (or more) genomes can tell us
The Pith: We are now moving from the human genome project, to the human genomes project. As more and more full genomes of various populations come online new methods will arise to take advantage of the surfeit of data. In this paper the authors crunch …
How did modern humans settle the world?
In lieu of lots of text, above is a stylized representation of the routes which Neo-Africans took ~50 thousand years ago from their point of departure to parts unknown. The two colors represent two models. The red lines show two major streams issuing …
Is Chris Stringer a multi-regionalist?
In an interesting piece in The Guardian on possible proto-gorilla/proto-human hybridization, the journalist lobs this grenade:
But now that the once popular “single-origin model” of the evolution of Homo sapiens has been disproved, and the …
Tightening the interval of the expected
The Pith: The rarer the genetic variant, the more likely that variant is to be specific to a distinct population. Including information about the distribution of these genetic variants missed in current techniques can increase greatly the precision of …
Disease and human demographic history
There’s a write-up in The New York Times on a new paper to come out in PNAS soon on the relationship of disease variants to human demographic history over the past few hundred thousand years. I’ll probably review the paper when it comes ou…
Why hominin fossils matter
Yesterday Dienekes had a post up, Homo erectus soloensis fades into the past…. In it he states:
Every year or so there seems to be a redating of a key fossil in human evolution. It’s nice to see scientific self-correction in action, and soo…
We stand on the shoulders of cultural giants
In reading The cultural niche: Why social learning is essential for human adaptation in PNAS I couldn’t help but think back to a conversation I had with a few old friends in Evanston in 2003. They were graduate students in mathematics at Northwes…
Cave of Forgotten Dreams, see it, but tune the narration out
Today I took some time out to see Cave of Forgotten Dreams. My main reaction is that I really would have appreciated less verbal exposition from Werner Herzog. The most gripping portions of the film were invariably those which focused on the cave art w…
Convergent evolution happens!
In the image to the left you see three human males. You can generate three pairings of these individuals. When comparing these pairs which would you presume are more closely related than the other pairs? Now let me give you some more information. The r…
Massive Neandertal & Denisovan introgression
Update: John Hawks’ lab is working in the same area, and he disagrees with the specific results presented here. Always reminds you to be careful about sexy results presented at conference! (someone should do a study!)
So claimed Peter Parham at a…
Present genetic variation is a weak guide to past genetic variation
As I’ve been harping on and on for the past few years that the patterns of contemporary genetic variation are probably only weakly tied to past patterns of genetic variation (though Henry Harpending warned me about this as far back as 2004). A …
You are a mutant!
The Pith: You are expected to have 30 new mutations which differentiate you from your parents. But, there is wiggle room around this number, and you may have more or less. This number may vary across siblings, and explain differences across siblings. …