The two Pleistocene people of Europe
Dual ancestries and ecologies of the Late Glacial Palaeolithic in Britain: Genetic investigations of Upper Palaeolithic Europe have revealed a complex and transformative history of human population movements and ancestries, […]
Basque against the Romans
Genetic origins, singularity, and heterogeneity of Basques: Basques have historically lived along the Western Pyrenees, in the Franco-Cantabrian region, straddling the current Spanish and French territories. Over the last decades, […]
Demographic Reticulation!
I made an offhand comment on Twitter that it would take a few decades for the public to understand the insight that demographic reticulation is ubiquitous in human prehistory. This is probably the biggest claim in Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past. Well, […]
Northeast Africans before and after the Bantus
One of the major changes in our understanding of human genetic demographic patterning across the world over the last twenty years is that we no longer believe most of the extant patterns date to the Last Glacial Maximum ~20,000 years ago. If you do not think this was a view held a generation ago, read […]
Solute carrier family genes are important…but how?
Over the last ten years David Reich and other researchers have been constructing what is basically an atlas of human demographic history. Taking the genealogies written in our DNA, mapping them onto population bifurcations and admixtures, and synthesizing that back together with what we know from history and archaeology. To a great extent, this is […]
African genomics tells us about deep structure and history
Two interesting papers in Genome Biology that are open access, Whole-genome sequence analysis of a Pan African set of samples reveals archaic gene flow from an extinct basal population of modern humans into sub-Saharan populations and African evolutionary history inferred from whole genome sequence data of 44 indigenous African populations. Since they are open access […]
Let the genomic die fly!
A new “polygenic risk score” (PRS) paper is making some waves, Polygenic Prediction of Weight and Obesity Trajectories from Birth to Adulthood. Since it is open access I suggest you read it. But basically, they took ~2 million common variants (there are about ~100 million common variants in the world population) in ~300,000 individuals in […]
What did modern humans look like during the “Out of Africa” event?
Recently I was having an email exchange with a friend (a prominent public intellectual who is not a scientist), and we were thinking about what “ancestral Africans” looked like. More precisely, the populations which were resident around ~100,000 to ~200,000 years before the present. These are the people who are depicted in paleoanthropology documentaries. Here […]
Who We Are and How We Got Here, a book worth reading
Yesterday I talked to a friend who has a review copy of Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past. They gave me a preview (their overall assessment was positive). I haven’t personally asked to get a copy because, to be honest, I thought there […]
Another great-great-great…great-uncle in Asia
The paper which surveys the relationship of the 40,000 year old Tianyuan sample is finally out in Current Biology, 40,000-Year-Old Individual from Asia Provides Insight into Early Population Structure in Eurasia. There isn’t anything too surprising here. Here is the part of the abstract that presents new finding: …we generated genome-wide data from a 40,000-year-old […]
The architecture of skin color variation in Africa
Very interesting abstract at the ASHG meeting of a plenary presentation,Novel loci associated with skin pigmentation identified in African populations. This is clearly the work that one of the comments on this weblog alluded to last summer during SMBE. There I was talking about the likely introduction of the derived SLC24A5 variant to the Khoisan peoples […]
The Tibeto-Burman and Austro-Asiatic ancestry of Bengalis
When I first got my father’s 23andMe results the Y and mtDNA were an interesting contrast. He, and therefore myself, carried Y lineage R1a1a, the lord of the paternal lineages. That was not that great a surprise. In the 1000 Genomes results for the Bangladeshi sample 20% of the men were direct paternal descendants of […]
Genetic variation and disease in Africa
Very readable review, Gene Discovery for Complex Traits: Lessons from Africa. It’s open access, so I recommend it. The summary: The genetics of African populations reveals an otherwise “missing layer” of human variation that arose between 100,000 and 5 million years ago. Both the vast number of these ancient variants and the selective pressures they […]
Khoisan may not have diverged ~300,000 years ago
A few years ago I contributed to an op-ed which defended the utility of the race concept in biology in USA Today (which by the way prompted a quite patronizing email from a famous doyen of population genetics who wished to correct my ignorance; here’s a clue: “Out of Africa again & again”). In my […]
Africa, the churning continent
Martin Meredith’s The Fortunes of Africa glosses very quickly over one of the major reasons that the “great scramble” for the continent occurred in the late 19th century, the discovery of the usefulness of quinine as an anti-malarial agent. Perhaps because I’ve read Plagues and Peoples and The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History […]
Population structure in Neanderthals leads to genetic homogeneity
In France you can find Neanderthals’ tools in your garden, everywhere. A small population is indeed hard to believe.https://t.co/b2I2WbLUsL — David Enard (@DavidEnard) September 18, 2017 The above tweet is in response to a article which reports on the finding past month in PNAS, Early history of Neanderthals and Denisovans. It’s open access, you should […]
Release the UK Biobank! (the prediction of height edition)
There’s so much science coming out of the UK Biobank it’s not even funny. It’s like getting the palantír or something. Anyway, a preprint, submitted for your approval. A vision of things to come? Accurate Genomic Prediction Of Human Height: We construct genomic predictors for heritable and extremely complex human quantitative traits (height, heel bone density, […]
Massive genomic sample sizes = detecting evolution in real time
The recent PLOS BIOLOGY paper, Identifying genetic variants that affect viability in large cohorts, seems to have triggered a feeding frenzy in the media. For example, Big Think has put up Researchers Find Evidence That Human Evolution Is Still Actively Happening. I wasn’t paying close attention because of course human evolution is still happening actively. […]
After agriculture, before bronze
The above plot shows genetic distance/variation between highland and lowland populations in Papa New Guinea (PNG). It is from a paper in Science that I have been anticipating for a few months (I talked to the first author at SMBE), A Neolithic expansion, but strong genetic structure, in the independent history of New Guinea. What […]