Two pulses of white admixture in American slaves?
I noticed today an interesting paper in Genetics by Simon Gravel, Population Genetics Models of Local Ancestry. As indicated by the title this is a general paper where the method is the main course. But, there was an interesting empirical result which …
The rise of the rare variant
A few people have mentioned to me a couple of new papers in Science are out on rare variants. They’re summed up in a short review article. I suspect this is going to be a big deal for some time. For humans we are coming to toward the end of the …
Sleeping like a Neandertal
Forgot to highlight one of the coolest abstracts from SMBE 2012, A genomewide map of Neandertal ancestry in modern humans:
2. The map allows us to identify Neandertal alleles that have been the target of selection since introgression. We identified ove…
Sleeping like a Neandertal
Forgot to highlight one of the coolest abstracts from SMBE 2012, A genomewide map of Neandertal ancestry in modern humans:
2. The map allows us to identify Neandertal alleles that have been the target of selection since introgression. We identified ove…
Not out of Sheba
Liya Kebede, Credit
There is a new paper, Ethiopian Genetic Diversity Reveals Linguistic Stratification and Complex Influences on the Ethiopian Gene Pool, which is being sensationalized in the media. For example, the BBC headline: ‘DNA clues to …
Genes in space
From some of the same people who brought you the genetic map of Europe, a very important paper, A model-based approach for analysis of spatial structure in genetic data. Here’s the abstract:
Characterizing genetic diversity within and between po…
Abraham’s genetic threads
Every few days my Google Alerts have been dropping in my inbox reviews of Harry Osters’ Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People. The latest is in the The Tablet, A Case for Genetic Jewishness:
For a Jewish genetics researcher, being told i…
Case closed: blonde Melanesians understood
As a small child perusing old physical anthropology books I would occasionally stumble upon images of people of Oceanian stock with light hair color. I would wonder: is this a biological or cultural feature? In other words, were people bleaching their …
Facing the ocean
Halford Mackinder’s conceptualization of the world
With the recent publication of the paper on the archaeogenetics of Neolithic Sweden I feel like we’re nearing a precipice. That precipice overlooks lands of great richness, filled with ho…
The billion SNPs of Alba?
A man of astonishing multitudes?
Daniel MacArthur points me to one of the funniest historical genetic popular write-ups I’ve seen in years. Study reveals ‘extraordinary’ DNA of people in Scotland:
Researchers believe that Scotland…
None dare call it eugenics!
Well, almost no one:
“The unspoken central reason for the societal taboo and the penal ban on incest is the possibility of hereditary defects — a factor that Strasbourg only hinted at. But the intention behind the eugenic argument is one th…
Common variant for “IQ gene”?
A few people have forwarded me this paper, Identification of common variants associated with human hippocampal and intracranial volumes:
…Whereas many brain imaging phenotypes are highly heritable…identifying and replicating genetic influen…
The Anglosphere American exception (?)
PLoS ONE has another article up about admixture in Argentina. The interesting aspect is that in its self-conception Argentina, like the United States of America or Australia, is a European settler nation, and therefore unlike Mexico, Boliva, or Brazil,…
Genes are probability, not destiny
On my Facebook feed some geneticist friends of mine were passing around an article in The New York Times, Study Says DNA’s Power to Predict Illness Is Limited. The article is based on a paper, The Predictive Capacity of Personal Genome Sequencing. In…
The real secret history of the Mongols?
Thank god for steppe hyper-patriarchy; it’s a model which we can test. Dienekes points me to a paper, The Y-chromosome C3* star-cluster attributed to Genghis Khan’s descendants is present at high frequency in the Kerey clan from Kazakhstan…
How culture crashes clines
The USA has been in Afghanistan for over 10 years now. Like many Americans my own personal preference is that we get out as soon as possible. Because of American involvement we see terms like “Pashtun” bandied about in the media, but there…
The evolution of the human face
The face is an important aspect of our phenotype. So important that facial recognition is one of many innate reflexive cognitive competencies. By this, I mean that you can recognize a face in a gestalt manner, just like you can recognize a set of three marbles. You don’t have to think about it in a […]
Neanderthals came in all colors
There’s a report in Science about a new short paper about Neandertal pigmentation genetics. The context is this. First, in 2007 an ingenuous paper was published which inferred that it may be that Neandertals had red hair, at least based on an N = 2 from two divergent locations. The new study looks at three […]
The Indonesian cline
Dienekes has touched upon it in detail, so I don’t have much to add. Except for two points: 1) The ancestry cline here is not due to isolation-by-distance, but the expansion of the Austronesian population rather precipitously ~4,000 years ago. As Dienekes observed this was rather clear by non-genetic means; this is just icing on […]