Category: Paleolithic
-
Europe had a lot of demographic turnover because there were never many humans
Now things are coming into focus. Population dynamics and socio-spatial organization of the Aurignacian: Scalable quantitative demographic data for western and central Europe: Demographic estimates are presented for the Aurignacian techno-complex (~42,…
-
18,000 years BC (the film)
Alpha, set 20,000 years ago in Europe, was apparently originally titled “Solutrean.” The change is probably for the best. It will come out next spring. I really hope that this movie is good and does well. It isn’t often that you have something which takes place during the Last Glacial Maximum. The plot seems to…
-
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…
-
“What if you’re wrong” – haplogroup J
Back when this sort of thing was cutting edge mtDNA haplogroup J was a pretty big deal. This was the haplogroup often associated with the demic diffusion of Middle Eastern farmers into Europe. This was the “Jasmine” clade in Seven Daughters…
-
First Farmers Facing the Ocean
The image above is adapted from the 2010 paper A Predominantly Neolithic Origin for European Paternal Lineages, and it shows the frequencies of Y chromosomal haplogroup R1b1b2 across Europe. As you can see as you approach the Atlantic the frequency co…
-
Live not by visualization alone
Synthetic map In the age of 500,000 SNP studies of genetic variation across dozens of populations obviously we’re a bit beyond lists of ABO blood frequencies. There’s no real way that a conventional human is going to be able to discern patterns of correlated allele frequency variations which point to between population genetic differences on…