Hey, I'm in the New York Times today!
It's a story about the Denisova genome and its possible relationships to recent human populations. We have been concentrating here on the Neandertals for the last few months, but I did get some analyses run on Denisova last week (thanks in large part to my grad student, Aaron Sams, who lifted over the genome from the old to new genetic map coordinates). I'll share some of those results soon.
I'm in Bordeaux for the rest of this week, taking part in the meetings of the Société d'Anthropologie de Paris. The city is just as beautiful as I remember!
I will be at the meetings of the American Anthropological Association for the rest of this week, which are being held in Montreal, Canada. I'm presenting in an invited session organied by Karen Rosenberg and Rachel Caspari, titled "The Scars of Human Evolution". It's a great idea for a session focusing on those parts of our biology that one might consider negative legacies of evolutionary change in the past. The title is pulled from a classic article by Wilton Krogman, now published 60 years ago. I'll be talking about pseudogenes, in particular focusing on those cases where a broken version of a gene has had a selective advantage in our recent evolution.
There is much going on, including a session devoted to last year's #AAAfail er...communications breakdown: "Science in Anthropology: An Open Discussion". I'll be there taking notes.
I'm giving a public lecture this Thursday evening at the Wisconsin Historical Society, basically an overview of Denisova Cave in the context of the archaeology of Central Asia. I'll be talking about some of the work we are doing with the archaic genomes, and I'll discuss some of the new results we have.
The lecture is in the Auditorium of the Wisconsin Historical Society building, just off Library Mall, and starts at 7:00 pm. It is sponsored by the Charles E. Brown Archaeological Society.
My essay in Anthropologies ("What's wrong with anthropology") is cited by Monalisa Gharavi in a review for Social Text of David Graeber's new book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years.
I'm pointing to this because (a) one month is a much faster publication-to-citation conversion than is possible in print, and (b) Social Text is just one of those places where I didn't imagine I'd be cited.
I was interviewed last month for the CBC radio broadcast, "Quirks and Quarks". They have done a segment on the Denisova genome, with contributions from David Reich, Peter Parham, Chris Stringer and me, and it's part of this week's episode of the show.
This Friday, October 14, I'll be appearing in Anaheim, CA, at the National Association of Biology Teachers conference. I'm part of a symposium sponsored by the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent), titled "Changing humans in a changing environment."
It's a fantastic set of presentations on human evolution from the behavior of our ape relatives, the origin and evolution of Homo and new insights coming from ancient genomes (that's my part). The other presenters are Jill Pruetz, Rick Potts and Susan Antón. The symposium will be webcast live, and I can share the instructions for seeing it in progress:
Even if you can’t make it to this year’s meeting in Anaheim, you can still watch the symposium via live webcast.Tune in Friday, October 14 from 4:30-8:30 PM EST (1:30-5:30 PM PST).
To view the live, free webcast, simply go to http://dukeuniversity.acrobat.com/nabt2011 at 1:30 pm Pacific/4:30 pm Eastern and log in as a guest. (Note: We suggest you do this in advance to test the connection and make sure you can access the site without problems. When you log in successfully you'll see a "Congratulations" message. If you have problems, please contact eog@nescent.org.)
I think I'm fourth in the order, and my presentation is titled, "New discoveries from ancient genomes". That's pretty much what all of my talks are titled lately, but many discoveries actually are new in each one. I'm reporting things as we figure out how to do them!
I'll be in the U.K. the rest of this week. The University of Birmingham has invited me to give a lecture for their "Great Read" event as they begin the new academic year. If you're in the area, the talk is at 3:30 on Thursday, September 22, in the Concert Hall of the Barber Institute. I'll be appearing after Ken Miller, widely known for his work in evolutionary biology and his advocacy of evolution education in the U.S.
As for myself, I'll be talking about Neandertal and Denisovan DNA and what they tell us about human evolution. All my talks have new, unpublished stuff in them, and this is no exception.
I notice that the topic of evolution education has really hit the news this week in the U.K, as a group of 30 prominent scientists, including Paul Nurse and Richard Dawkins, have signed a letter protesting lax evolution education standards ("David Attenborough joins campaign against creationism in schools", "Scientists demand tougher guidelines on teaching creationism in schools"). Looks like I'll be going there just in time.
My host has planned some exceptional activities later this week for us, and I'll plan to report back when I can.
Dear Dr. Hawks,
In case you don't already know, the current issue of Science has 2 articles on the Denisovans:
Who Were the Denisovans?
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6046/1084.summaryA Denisovan Legacy in the Immune System?
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6046/1086.summaryAlso, their podcast discusses what is covered in the issue:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6046/1167.2.summaryHave a wonderful night!
You'll see I make a brief appearance in the article, and I'll be writing more about the site and my trip there in the next few weeks. Hope everything's going well with you!
Last week, Nature ran a story by Ewen Callaway [1] that hits the highlights of research on ancient genomes this year: "Ancient DNA reveals secrets of human history". The news hook is a bevy of studies trying to estimate the time that Neandertals contributed their genes to recent human populations.
By comparing individual DNA letters in multiple modern human genomes with those in the Neanderthal genome, the date of that interbreeding has now been pinned down to 65,000–90,000 years ago. Montgomery Slatkin and Anna-Sapfo Malaspinas, theoretical geneticists from the University of California, Berkeley, presented the finding at the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution meeting in Kyoto, Japan, held on 26–30 July.
It will be great to dig into the details of these comparisons, which Callaway reports have also been carried out by some other groups. The basic idea is that over time, recombination would have broken up chunks of chromosome inherited from Neandertals. If we know the intensity of recombination across the genome, we should be able to use the lengths of Neandertal-derived blocks to estimate the time that their population contributed to ours. But much depends on the details of the population model. The simplest model supposes that all the gene flow from Neandertals happened at a single moment in time. If we doubt that assumption (as I do) then the estimate will not represent reality. But until we see papers reporting these results, it's hard to know how much they may be affected by different assumptions.
The article turns toward functional insights from the ancient genomes, and my lab puts in an appearance:
Unlike most scientists mining the ancient genomes, Hawks has reported some of his more prosaic findings — Denisovans didn't have red hair, for example — on his blog (see go.nature.com/irclra). "These genomes are publicly available. There's nothing stopping high-school students from doing this, and the kind of stuff that I'm putting out on my blog is the stuff that a smart high-school student could do."
I was really pleased that the article featured some of the research from my graduate student, Aaron Sams, who has been investigating the evolution of celiac disease. What does celiac disease have to do with Neandertals? Short answer: We're feeling our way though the study of gene networks that connect genetic evolution with phenotypes. We can use our knowledge of human evolution during the last 100,000 years to figure out how genes work. And we can use knowledge from living humans about how genes work to investigate their evolution in archaic people. Ancient genomes give us that potential, because genes that work together have evolved in ways that reflect selection on the system as a whole.
