Ancient genetic introgression between cave hyenas and spotted hyenas
I’ve been writing about ancient mixture between species for a long time now. Since the reporting of the first Neandertal genome in 2010, a lively field of an...
I’ve been writing about ancient mixture between species for a long time now. Since the reporting of the first Neandertal genome in 2010, a lively field of an...
The British geneticist Bryan Sykes has died, and The Guardian has an obituary from Georgina Ferry: “Bryan Sykes obituary”.
Nature Reviews Genetics has a short piece discussing the current landscape of ancient DNA sampling in Africa: “African ancient DNA research requires robust e...
In 2000, Igor Ovchinnikov and coworkers sequenced part of the mitochondrial genome of an infant’s skeleton from Mezmaiskaya Cave, Russia: “Molecular analysis...
Goat domestication may provide another example in which introgression brought new genetic variations conferring advantages for immunity into a population. A ...
Marc de Manuel and coworkers have a new paper in PNAS that presents some new findings about lion population history from whole-genome sequencing. The paper h...
Earlier this year, Lu Chen and coworkers from Joshua Akey’s research group published an assessment of the amount of Neandertal ancestry in the genomes of pre...
Last week in Nature, Laurits Skov and collaborators from Aarhus University and from Kari Stefansson’s research group in Iceland gave a high-resolution look a...
Ludovic Orlando has a great review of recent research into the origins and evolution of domesticated horses: “Ancient Genomes Reveal Unexpected Horse Domesti...
Three years ago, Liisa Loog and coworkers published a fascinating paper quantifying natural selection from ancient DNA data in chickens: “Inferring Allele Fr...
Last week, Cell published a new paper by David Gokhman and coworkers that tries to infer the skeletal form of Denisovans from signatures of methylation in th...
Yesterday a fascinating story came out in Nature Communications about the skeletons of Roopkund Lake, in northern India: “Ancient DNA from the skeletons of R...
Harvard geneticist David Reich recently was awarded a prize in Molecular Biology from the National Academy of Sciences. On the occasion, PNAS has done an int...
Nature has a news feature by Matthew Warren that provides a nice background to recent work on proteomics of fossil hominins: “Move over, DNA: ancient protein...
A nice article by Ewen Callaway has just come out in Nature looking at the current scientific scene regarding the mysterious Denisovans: “Siberia’s ancient g...
This week the talk of archaeology and human genetics is a long feature article in the New York Times Magazine about the academic struggles of ancient DNA: “I...
Recently, I delivered a lecture to the American Society for Human Genetics, focusing on the African record of human origins. It was a great privilege to spea...
A new paper from Anja Furtwängler and coworkers finds that the usual way of estimating contamination fraction in ancient DNA samples may fall short: “Ratio o...
Chip Colwell writes in The Conversation about the questionable ethics involved in some ancient DNA sampling: “Rights of the dead and the living clash when sc...
Ancient DNA is following its Moore’s Law-like progression toward greater and greater sample sizes from past populations. Until this year, it may not have see...
Lizzie Wade has a news story in Science that provides a review of a new paper by Hannes Schroeder and colleagues, who have sequenced the genome of 1000-year-...
A short article in The Conversation by Jan Apel describes some new research from Mattias Jakobsson’s lab on the population mixture that gave rise to the Meso...
A paper in Nature this week presents analysis of the ancient genome of an infant skeleton from Alaska, some 11,500 years old: “Terminal Pleistocene Alaskan g...
Neandertals ate mushrooms. That’s the conclusion of new work examining the DNA remnants in ancient dental calculus. Can we believe it?
Last September, Aeon published a useful essay by science writer Jacob Mikanowski, touching on many of the ways that ancient DNA is changing the way we look a...
Notable paper: Stefanie Grosser, Nicolas J. Rawlence, Christian N. K. Anderson, Ian W. G. Smith, R. Paul Scofield, Jonathan M. Waters. 2016. Invader or resid...
Denisova Cave is one of the most fascinating places in the story of human origins. The cave is in the northern wall of the Anuy River valley, within the Alta...
Some nice coverage of Svante Pääbo in the Washington Post on the occasion of him winning one of the 3-million dollar “Breakthrough Awards” last week: “3 scie...
On October 2, I will be participating in a public symposium at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, titled “The Past, Present, a...
Notable paper: Bos, K. I., Harkins, K. M., Herbig, A., Coscolla, M., Weber, N., Comas, I., … & Krause, J. (2014). Pre-Columbian mycobacterial genomes rev...
Qiaomei Fu and colleagues from Svante Pääbo’s lab have reported on a genome from northern Siberia that dates to 45,000 years ago. The genome comes from a hum...
Ann Gibbons reports from a recent conference in Spain about new work that has sequenced a whole genome from a 45,000-year-old femur from Siberia: “Oldest Hom...
The rapidly changing field of ancient DNA has settled into a kind of normal science, as several teams of researchers have coalesced around a set of approache...
Here’s my inaugural infographic, illustrating what we know about mating relationships from ancient DNA:
I direct your attention to a new paper by Mattias Meyer and colleagues describing a mitochondrial DNA sequence from Sima de los Huesos, Spain (Meyer et al. 2...
A new paper by Meredith Carpenter and colleagues describes a novel method that can greatly enrich the yield of DNA from ancient samples:
Jesse Dabney and colleagues, including Svante Pääbo from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, report on the assembly of a complete mitocho...
Ewen Callaway covers the active area of dog domestication research in a new Nature News article (“Dog genetics spur scientific spat”) Callaway:dog:2013.
An increasing number of authors of scientific papers are writing good blog summaries of their work. The really great part is that the authors tend to give ba...
I really like this ScienceNOW account by Traci Watson of new work that has uncovered ancient DNA in deep-seafloor contexts: “Ancient DNA Found Hidden Below S...
Science today has released the new paper on the Denisova high-coverage genome by Mattias Meyer and colleagues from Svante Pääbo’s group Meyer:Denisova:2012. ...
UPDATE (2015-10-21): This post has gotten some attention from social media recently, because Ötzi has been in the news. Later analyses have made clear that o...
Molecular archaeologist Christina Warinner gave a TED talk and the main ideas are now in a CNN article: “Why your dental plaque is valuable”.
Re: Denisova
Last month, David Reich and colleagues Reich:Denisova:2011 reported on estimates of Denisovan ancestry for island and mainland Asian populations. Their most ...
Mark Stoneking and Johannes Krause present a review article in the current Nature Reviews Genetics Stoneking:Krause:2011 that gives an overview of the scienc...
We don’t really know the extent of territory that might have been occupied by the population represented by the Denisova genome. The signs of mixture into th...
Paleogenomics is changing the way we study evolution. In a number of cases, it now allows us to study extinct organisms with the same methods as we study liv...
Speaking of Jo Marchant, she has a long article in the current Nature about the mummy DNA controversy (“Ancient DNA: Curse of the Pharoah’s DNA”).
Mummies are always trouble. I hate to say it. You see, in my line of work we can do an awful lot with a skeleton. We’re usually down to a few pieces of bone,...
Every so often, a reader asks me if I know any new rumors about DNA sampling of “Homo floresiensis”. I’m not holding out much hope for success given the trop...
In this week’s copy of Nature, Johannes Krause and colleagues Krause:Denisova:2010 report on the complete mitochondrial sequence of a pinky bone from Denisov...
Now that we have looked at the DNA of the Tarim Basin mummies, when is somebody going to do the same for the mummies found at Paracasa, Peru? I know that an...
I was really busy meeting awesome people and making new friends in Georgia this week. So, although I got to read and think about the Greenland ancient genome...
Here’s a nice, symmetrical pair of stories:
I was just talking in class today about how people want to back-breed aurochsen out of extinction. Here’s a new story about the idea, from the Telegraph:
Here’s an example of a really incomprehensible press release:
Dienekes, on a new study of early Neolithic and earlier mtDNA variation in Europe:
Hi, It is often claimed that ancient genes that were once very adaptable are discarded over time by drift, bottle necks etc. What if an ancient trait wer...
In “Dawn at the museum”, Olivia Judson points to the huge potential of ancient DNA techniques to wring new answers out of old taxidermied specimens.
Ancient DNA technology may make it possible to test some very interesting hypotheses about recent evolutionary change in human populations.
OK, so they’ve identified the body of Copernicus.
An interesting story:
Jennifer Viegas writes an interesting story about a new study that shows the extinction of Christmas Island rats was driven by black rat diseases:
So, they’ve resurrected 45-million-year-old yeast from amber, and are using it to brew beer under the “Fossil Fuels” label:
Mitochondrial phylogeography is a useful tool for the study of wild populations. But applying phylogeography to domestic species is more complicated....
There's a fun paper in last month's Molecular Biology and Evolution by Georgina Bowden and colleagues, investigating whether the Viking influence on surname...
That's the strand of this LiveScience article:
Nicholas Wade writes to answer the mammoth cloning question. I know, nobody cares about anything else. It's always, "Clone, clone, clone!"
It's another week, which means it's time for another of the mysteriously-not-yet-appeared PNAS papers. But this time, a friendly source sent me the paper (w...
An article by science writer Henry Nicholls in PLoS Biology covers a lot of ground. Most of the attention goes to Alan Cooper, with Svante Pääbo i...
What's behind the headline about "resurrecting an ancient virus"?
Ummm...
The NY Times gave a short writeup earlier this week to a paper about ancient DNA from arctic foxes:
Saw this today from The Onion, it's an oldie but a goodie:
The story about blonde mammoths has been making the rounds, based on this paper by Holger Römpler and colleagues in Science. The abstract:
This strikes me as a problem:
I was reading through next month's Discover, and there is an article covering the work of Rodolfo Acuna-Soto, who has proposed that some of the most major e...
A paper by Wolfgang Haak and colleagues in this week's Science sequenced ancient mtDNA in 24 Neolithic European skeletons.