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, […]
But why is the lactase persistent allele not in HWE?
Dairying, diseases and the evolution of lactase persistence in Europe: In European and many African, Middle Eastern and southern Asian populations, lactase persistence (LP) is the most strongly selected monogenic […]
Back migration into Africa by Eurasians
Two preprints/papers. Identifying and Interpreting Apparent Neanderthal Ancestry in African Individuals: Admixture has played a prominent role in shaping patterns of human genomic variation, including gene flow with now-extinct hominins […]
The genetics of Southeast Asia gets more complex…
Ancient genomes from the last three millennia support multiple human dispersals into Wallacea: Previous research indicates that the human genetic diversity found in Wallacea – islands in present-day Eastern Indonesia […]
Yemen and the Yemeni Jews
In my Substack post Under pressure: the paradox of the diamond I said this: The implication of these DNA results is that Yemeni Jews are by and large descended from […]
So many assumptions about Africa
I have been staring and this figure and rereading Ancient West African foragers in the context of African population history. The Shum Laka sample from this paper, dating to four […]
Got milk long before genes for milk
The story of lactase persistence (“lactose tolerance”) evolving is one of the best gene-culture coevolution stories we had. Arguably it was the canonical example. The story was simple, multiple times […]
What was the population of the Americas in 1492?
Several people have asked me about the new study on ancient DNA in the Caribbean, A genetic history of the pre-contact Caribbean. There is a lot to this paper, some […]
The Greeks in the mountains
The New Yorker has a long feature that explores the strange results from the paper last year, Ancient DNA from the skeletons of Roopkund Lake reveals Mediterranean migrants in India. […]
Whole genomes of ancient farmers and hunter-gatherers
A new preprint uses about a dozen ancient genomes to create a model of the origins of Europeans and European farmers more precisely. The big deal here is that they […]
The great southern displacement in East Asia
The new preprint, Genomic Insights into the Demographic History of Southern Chinese, is somewhat inaccurately titled. It’s really more about the progenitors of the various Southeast Asian language families, whose […]
The Genetic History of the Middle East: into Arabia
A new massive preprint on the Middle East is out. I’ve edited the first figure to give people a general sense of the broad results and populations sampled. First, you […]
The genomic landscape of Brazil in 1950
A new whole-genome analysis out of Brazil has some interesting ancestry information. The preprint, Whole-genome sequencing of 1,171 elderly admixed individuals from the largest Latin American metropolis (São Paulo, Brazil): As whole-genome sequencing (WGS) becomes the gold standard tool for studying population genomics and medical applications, data on diverse non-European and admixed individuals are still […]
The genomic landscape of Brazil in 1950
A new whole-genome analysis out of Brazil has some interesting ancestry information. The preprint, Whole-genome sequencing of 1,171 elderly admixed individuals from the largest Latin American metropolis (São Paulo, Brazil): As whole-genome sequencing (WGS) becomes the gold standard tool for studying population genomics and medical applications, data on diverse non-European and admixed individuals are still […]
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 […]
Correlated response is a big story of selection
Adaptation is clearly one of the most important processes in understanding how evolution occurs. In a classical sense, it’s easy to understand. Parallel adaptations in body plans make dolphins and swordfish shaped the same. It’s physics. But with the emergence of DNA, a lot of the focus on adaptation has been displaced to the signatures […]
Knanaya & Kerala: perhaps there is some different down south?
Over the past few months I have been getting together some samples from people from Kerala, with a focus on Knanaya Christians. A subset of the brother St. Thomas Christian community, two things have jumped out in my analyses: – they are quite endogamous – they are shifted off the ‘India-cline’ More precisely, like Cochin […]
Hard sweeps and natural selection obscured by Bronze Age admixture
The above is the map from the Online Ancient Genome Repository. You can see the variation by region. There’s a lot of ancient DNA in Europe. Very little in Asia. And only moderate amounts elsewhere. The map is from a new preprint, Ancient human genomes reveal a hidden history of strong selection in Eurasia: The […]
Blood group A at greater risk from COVID-19 (maybe)
To a great extent much of the population genetics of humans in the 20th-century that doesn’t involve external traits is the population genetics of blood groups. A, B, and O, along with Rhesus factor. Read L. L. Cavalli-Sforza and William Bodmer’s The Genetics of Human Populations, the first edition of which was written in the […]
The complex origins of our species in Africa
The figure to the right illustrates a model that is put forward in a new paper, Recovering signals of ghost archaic introgression in African populations. This was originally a preprint, Recovering signals of ghost archaic introgression in African populations. So we’ve discussed the implications extensively. Carl Zimmer has covered the story in The New York […]