The Bushmen tell us a lot about human evolution because they are humans who have evolved
When it comes to the human genetics of the Khoe-San there’s a little that’s stale and unoriginal for me in terms of presentation. The elements are always composed the same. The Bushmen are the “most ancient” humans, who can tell…
The brambly bush of humanity
Over at Haldane’s Sieve there are more than preprints posted, there are commentaries from the authors as well. For example, for The genetic prehistory of southern Africa, the first author, Dr. Joseph K. Pickrell, has a extended comment up.
But oc…
Across the sea of grass: how Northern Europeans got to be ~10% Northeast Asian
The Pith: You’re Asian. Yes, you!
A conclusion to an important paper, Nick Patterson, Priya Moorjani, Yontao Luo, Swapan Mallick, Nadin Rohland, Yiping Zhan, Teri Genschoreck, Teresa Webster, and David Reich:
In particular, we have presented ev…
Deep dive into the Denisovans
By now you have probably seen the new Denisovan paper in the media. John Hawks has an excellent overview, as you’d expect. The only thing I will add is to reiterate that I think population movements in near and far prehistory significantly obscur…
Not all genes are created the same
The map to the right shows the frequencies of HGDP populations on SLC45A2, which is a locus that has been implicated in skin color variation in humans. It’s for the SNP rs16891982, and I yanked the figure from IrisPlex: A sensitive DNA tool for a…
Evolutionary & population genetics preprints – Haldane’s Sieve
OK, perhaps I can help with that. Dr. Coop speaks of the collaboration between himself & Dr. Joseph Pickrell, Haldane’s Sieve, which I added to my RSS days ago (and you can see me pushing it to my Pinboard). From the “About”:
As …
Consent and genomics
Interesting story in The New York Times, Genes Now Tell Doctors Secrets They Can’t Utter:
One of the first cases came a decade ago, just as the new age of genetics was beginning. A young woman with a strong family history of breast and ovarian cancer…
Genes & geography – the great correlation
A paper is out in PLoS Genetics which attempts to formalize the relationship between genes and geography, A Quantitative Comparison of the Similarity between Genes and Geography in Worldwide Human Populations. They found a reasonable correlation, but …
The Sardinian meter
I cropped the image above from the paper Inference of Population Structure using Dense Haplotype Data. The main reason was emphasize the distinctiveness of the Sardinian cluster, on the bottom right. As you can see this population exhibits a lot of co…
On phylogenetic instrumentalism
ADMIXTURE and STRUCTURE tests aren’t formal mixture tests. Yes! In fact, in the “open science” community this issue is repeated over and over and over, because people routinely get confused (our audience does not consist of population gen…
The GIF of genomics
As you may know the interminable Myriad genetics patents case has been making waves in the courts, most recently with mixed results as to whether their patents on several specific genetic diagnostics are valid. This aspect needs to be highlighted:
One…
Ötzi – more Neandertal than the average bear
Neandertal ancestry “Iced”:
Evaluating recent evolution, migration and Neandertal ancestry in the Tyrolean Iceman
Paleogenetic evidence from Neandertals, the Neolithic and other eras has the potential to transform our knowledge of human po…
Neanderthal admixture & the ecology of academe
Yesterday I pointed out that David Reich had a moderately dismissive attitude toward the new paper in PNAS, Effect of ancient population structure on the degree of polymorphism shared between modern human populations and ancient hominins. Here’s …
The Jewish Diaspora: not an empire of the mind
Berber queen?
In light of the previous post you know that I was going to post on the new paper in PNAS, North African Jewish and non-Jewish populations form distinctive, orthogonal clusters. Additionally, the press people at Albert Einstein did reach …
Ashkenazi Jews are probably not descended from the Khazars
A few people have asked me about a new paper on arXiv, The Missing Link of Jewish European Ancestry: Contrasting the Rhineland and the Khazarian Hypotheses. Since it is on arXiv you can read the preprint yourself. And, since it is a preprint it is not …
Humanity 2.0
Dienekes points to a David Reich video where he shows his hand as to future possible results to come out of his lab. The short of it is that it seems likely that most agricultural populations exhibit the same dynamic outlined in Reconstructing Indian H…
Azores to Atlantis: Africa through the shadows
In many ways the image of Africa in the minds of Westerners has become a trope. The “Dark Continent,” eternal, and primal. Like many tropes the realized existence of this Africa is only within the imagination. The real Africa is far differ…
Ashkenazi Jews are not inbred
Jews, and Ashkenazi Jews in particular, are very genetically distinctive. A short and sweet way to think about this population is that they’re a moderately recent admixture between a Middle Eastern population, and Western Europeans, which has bee…
The first, second, and third nations
By now you’ve probably read about the paper which reports that there seem to have been three waves of humans migrating into the New World prior to the arrival of Europeans. A major aspect of this result is that it does not emerge out of a vacuum,…
The privileges and burdens of a novel inversion
There’s two papers in Nature Genetics on the 17q21.31, and variation of haplotypes of inversions in world wide populations. Here’s a part of the discussion from the first paper:
In conclusion, we propose that the ancestral H2′ haplotype a…