The perils of human genomics
A friend pointed me to the heated comment section of this article in Nature, Rebuilding the genome of a hidden ethnicity. The issue is that Nature originally stated that the Taino, the native people of Puerto Rico, were extinct. That resulted in an avalanche of angry comments, which one of the researchers, Carlos Bustamante, felt […]
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 Australian Aborigines may not be just descendants of first settlers
Just realized. The Science paper has some interesting dates which allows us to make the above inference. – Separation between Europeans and East Asians 25-38 thousand years before present. – Gene flow between proto-East Asians and proto-Australians before the Native Americans diverged from the former 15 thousand years before the present. – A conservative first […]
Out of Africa onward to Wallacea
There are two interesting and related papers out today which I want to review really quickly, in particular in relation to the results (as opposed to the guts of the methods). Taken together they do change our perception of how the world was settled by anatomically modern humans, and if the findings are found to […]
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…
Deleterious drag as a side effect of adaptation
The Pith: Evolution is a sloppy artist. Upon the focal zone of creative energy adaptation can sculpt with precision, but on the margins of the genetic landscape frightening phenomena may erupt due to inattention. In other words, there are often downsid…
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…
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…