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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
How Archimedes’ lever explains human evolution
Last August I had a post up, The point mutation which made humanity, which suggested that it may be wrong to conceive of the difference between Neanderthals and the African humans which absorbed and replaced them ~35,000 years ago as a matter of extreme differences at specific genes. I was prompted to this line of […]
Australia on fire
Fascinating, Orbital cycles, Australian lake levels, and the arrival of aborigines: But the other big feature is that the lake-filling events that occurred after 50,000 years ago were much smaller than those which occurred before. Climactically, the conditions 10,000 years ago should have been the same as the conditions 115,000 years ago. But the lake […]
The end of “archaic” H. sapiens
The Pith: The Bushmen branch of the human family tree diverged ~130,000 years ago. The non-Africans branched off from the Africans ~50,000 years ago. The Europeans and East Asians diverged ~35,000 years ago. One of the terms in paleoanthropology which can confuse is that of archaic Homo sapiens (AHS). This is in contrast to anatomically […]
Out of Africa’s end?
The BBC has a news report up gathering reactions to a new PLoS ONE paper, The Later Stone Age Calvaria from Iwo Eleru, Nigeria: Morphology and Chronology. This paper reports on remains found in Nigeria which date to ~13,000 years B.P. that exhibit a very archaic morphology. In other words, they may not be anatomically […]
When all probable things can not be right
I’ve been chewing on the modern human range expansion into Neandertal territory paper for a few days now. But I haven’t been able to bring myself to say much. There are two reasons. First, it’s a simulation paper, and I don’t exactly know what I can say besides being skeptical of the plausibility of some […]
Personal genomics & rare populations notes
I’m going to address two points in this post. The next possible target for getting an undersampled population, and the Malagasy results. First, lots of great submissions in regards to populations which are undersampled. Some of them are actually …
Neandertal introgression and admixture
Ed Yong has a good good review of a new Neandertal introgression/admixture paper in PNAS. It’s not live on the web yet, so let me quote Ed: Even if the odds of successful interbreeding were just 5 percent, Neanderthal genes would make up the majo…
The gift of the gopi
Krishna with milk-maids Unlike in some Asian societies dairy products are relatively well known in South Asia. Apparently at some point my paternal grandmother’s family operated a milk production business. This is notable because Bengal is not qu…
Racism, what about speciesism?
One thing that came to the fore in late 2008 was the worry that a financial regulatory regime which had been exceeding lax was now more conscious of the excesses of the previous era. The problem being that one will not necessarily be prepared for the n…
Of beasts and men
“There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare [children] to them, the same [became] mighty men which [were] of old, men of renown.” – Genesis 6:4 Th…
Africans aren’t pure humans either
Last year when discussing the possible admixture of Neandertals with the ancestors of modern non-Africans I joked that Sub-Saharan Africans were “pure humans.” This was tongue-in-cheek in part because the results from the Neandertal genome …
Tutsi probably differ genetically from the Hutu
Paul Kagame with Barack and Michelle Obama
I first heard about Rwanda in the 1980s in relation to Dian Fossey’s work with mountain gorillas. The details around this were tragic enough, but obviously what happened in 1994 washed away the events d…
The divisibility of human ancestry
The class human or H. sapiens refers to a set of individuals. On the grand scale it’s really not all that clear and distinct. When do “archaic” humans become “modern” humans? Taking into account human variation, what is a …
The HGDP made less racist!
Back in the 1990s there was a lot of controversy around the Human Genome Diversity Project. In fact there were whole books devoted to the sociology of the project. Though on some of the details critics of the project may have had a point, their overall…
Platonism is useful only when it’s useful
Below John Farrell posted an amusing comment:
Razib, are you implying there was no clearly defined ‘ontological leap’ from the animal to the human??? I’m going to have to clear this with the CDF in Rome.
The figure to left illustrates the simult…
The point mutation which made humanity
Steve Hsu points me to a piece in The New Yorker on the science and personality of Svante Pääbo. The personality part includes references to Pääbo’s bisexuality, which to me seemed to be literally dropped into the prose to spice it up. Of cou…
Crohn’s disease is about barely keeping you alive
The Pith: Natural selection is a quick & dirty operator. When subject to novel environments it can react rapidly, bringing both the good and the bad. The key toward successful adaptation is not perfection, but being better than the alternatives. T…