In the year 2015….
Recently I was having a discussion with some friends about getting the full genomes of everyone in my immediate family when the price point comes down to $1,000, just as I have had my immediately family genotyped. You can find some interesting stuff just from the genotype alone, which for current affordable platforms aims for […]
Ötzi tidbits
The genome of Ötzi the Iceman is floating around somewhere, but for now we only have to go on what leaks out via the media. From National Geographic, Iceman Autopsy: The genetic results add both information and intrigue. From his genes, we now know that the Iceman had brown hair and brown eyes and that […]
Mixed-race people are mildly complicated
I was pointed today to a piece in the BBC titled What makes a mixed race twin white or black?. The British media seems to revisit this topic repeatedly. There are perhaps three reasons I can offer for this. First, it tends toward sensationalism. Even though the BBC is relatively staid, when it comes to […]
Mixed-race people are mildly complicated
I was pointed today to a piece in the BBC titled What makes a mixed race twin white or black?. The British media seems to revisit this topic repeatedly. There are perhaps three reasons I can offer for this. First, it tends toward sensationalism. Even though the BBC is relatively staid, when it comes to […]
The genetics of hair texture: a mystery
Lauryn Hill, Image credit: Lisa Lang I received an email today from a friend about speculation on the genetics of hair texture. More specifically, curly vs. straight hair. I know that there are a few SNPs which are correlated with straight vs. curly hair (23andMe has actually been involved in this), but the architecture hasn’t […]
Latitudes and longitudes and spherical cows
A new paper in The American Journal of Physical Anthropology surveys the variation of genes across latitudes and longitudes. The authors found that both latitude and longitude were significant in the Americas, while only latitude was significant in Eurasia. They used microsatellites, which is fine by me. The main issue which they acknowledge is that […]
Decency not by law alone
Rasmus Nielsen has a long response below to the issue of the getting some sort of consent from Aboriginals in the local region in regards to a specimen from a deceased individual. He has a full entry on this at the new weblog of his research group. As an aside, let me say that it […]
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 […]
The words of the father
Over at A Replicated Typo they are talking about a short paper in Science, Mother Tongue and Y Chromosomes. In it Peter Forster and Colin Renfrew observe that “A correlation is emerging that suggests language change in an already-populated region may require a minimum proportion of immigrant males, as reflected in Y-chromosome DNA types.” But […]
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 […]
Ötzi, first, but not last, farmer?
Dienekes relays that Ötzi the Iceman carried the G2a4 male haplogroup. He goes on to observe: We now have G2a3 from Neolithic Linearbandkeramik in Derenburg and G2a in Treilles in addition to Ötzi from the Alps. G2a folk got around. He joins Stalin and Louis XVI as a famous G2a. It was already clear with […]
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 Merina of Madagascar are Malay and Bantu
A month ago I asked for a Malagasy genotype. Almost immediately I received a response from someone that was 33% Malagasy. More recently I have sent a genotyping kit to someone who is Malagasy. Those results should come in within a month or so. But a fe…
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…