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 […]
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 last 100,000 years in human history
In light of the recent results in human evolutionary history some readers have appealed to me to create some sort of clearer infographic. There’s a lot to juggle in your head when it comes to the new models and the errors and uncertainties in estimates derived from statistical inference. Words are not always optimal, and […]
243 full human genomes sequenced per second
MIT Technology Review has one of those articles about the exponential growth rate in the number of people who have been fully sequenced. There’s nothing too exceptional in the piece. You do have to be careful about 10 year projections, especially if they’re exponential. But this part caught my eye: ” At this exponential pace, […]
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 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 […]
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 …
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…
Why Melanesians are blonde resolved?
Sort of and possible. I’ve been talking about this for years, and Greg Cochran points me to an abstract at the human genetics conference referenced earlier. Novel coding variation at TYRP1 explains a large proportion of variance in the hair colou…
Human genetics presentations of interest
Dienekes alerts me to the fact that the International Congress of Human Genetics abstracts are online. I spent an hour using only a few keywords, and came up with a lot. 1) If you have a presentation and think it might interest the readers here, feel f…
Tutsi genetics, ii
In my post below, Tutsi probably differ genetically from the Hutu, there were many comments. Some I did not post because they were rude, though they did ask valid questions. I will address those issues, but let me quote one comment:
That’s an interes…