“Out of Africa” bottleneck is what really matters for mutations
At least in relation to mutational load, if you read a new preprint in biorxiv, The demographic history and mutational load of African hunter-gatherers and farmers: The distribution of deleterious genetic variation across human populations is a key issue in evolutionary biology and medical genetics. However, the impact of different modes of subsistence on recent […]
Pygmies: “old” populations, and a new “look” (?)
Over the years one issue that crops up repeatedly in human evolutionary genetics and paleoanthropology (or more precisely, the popular exposition of the topics in the media) is the idea that is that “population X are the most ancient Y.” X …
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…
Pygmies are short because nature made them so
Aka Pygmies
The Pith: There has been a long running argument whether Pygmies in Africa are short due to “nurture” or “nature.” It turns out that non-Pygmies with more Pygmy ancestry are shorter and Pygmies with more non-Pygmy …
The men of Africa
Khoikhoi on the move….
Dienekes mentioned today a new paper, Signatures of the pre-agricultural peopling processes in sub-Saharan Africa as revealed by the phylogeography of early Y chromosome lineages. Because of the recent comments in this s…