The so-called Toba bottleneck didn’t happen
Chad Yost and colleagues have a long and detailed article in the current Journal of Human Evolution about why the Toba volcanic eruption 74,000 years ago did...
All posts tagged with effective population size
Notable: Inheritance of fitness in patrilineal societies
Notable paper: Heyer, E., Brandenburg, J.-T., Leonardi, M., Toupance, B., Balaresque, P., Hegay, T., Aldashev, A. and Austerlitz, F. (2015), Patrilineal popu...
Launching genetic diversity to the stars
Popular Mechanics asks, “How Many People Does It Take to Colonize Another Star System?”. The basic problem is that a multigenerational star voyage requires t...
Inbreeding impression
I ran across an io9 article from 2011, “Why inbreeding really isnt as bad as you think it is”, which is topical for some of the genetics I’ll be teaching ove...
Denisova at high coverage
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. ...
Mailbag: Denisovan diversity
I just watched the National Geographic documentary "Sex in the Stone Age" and was surprised by the reference to the discovery of a 2nd Denisovan tooth, one w...
Link: Effective size through genealogy
Sandwalk: “What William the Conqueror’s Companions Teach Us about Effective Population Size”.
Mailbag: Noah's Ark
From a reader:
Mailbag: mtDNA ancestor and speciation?
I've got a question about something I wrote in a newsgroup in 1995. Okay, that doesn't sound overly urgent, right? The general subject has come up again fo...
From genes to numbers: effective population sizes in human evolution
Demography is the engine of evolution. Changes in allele frequencies require differential births and deaths of the individuals who carry the alleles. Under n...
mtDNA, purifying selection and "distorted" genealogies
I’m going to pass along this paper without much comment, it’s by Jon Seger and colleagues and it came out earlier this year in Genetics Seger:2010:
New data on Ashkenazi population history
Bray and colleagues Bray:Ashkenazi:2010 report on genotyping of 471 people of Ashkenazi Jewish descent. This is one of the largest samples of a single human ...
Return of the Neanderchimps
Back in 2005, I reviewed the first description of fossil chimpanzee teeth, from the Middle Pleistocene of the Kapthurin Formation, Kenya, dating to around 50...
Passing on your fertility to your kids
From the NY Times earlier this spring, a profile of a New York woman with an exceptional legacy:
An insertion into deep history
A couple of weeks ago I noted a new article by Chad Huff and colleagues in PNAS. It wasn’t available yet when I wrote, but I’ve had the chance to study it no...
High Pleistocene human effective population size
Nicholas Wade is reporting on an upcoming paper by Chad Huff and Lynn Jorde: “Genome Study Provides a Census of Early Humans”.
Mutual information between strings of loci
Fourth in a series on mutual information and genetic linkage. If you’re happening upon it for the first time, you can find the entire s...
When genetic drift reduces entropy
This is the third in a series on information theory and tests for recent selection. The first post, “Information theory: a short ...
Cultural impedance, demographic growth, effective population size
This is a complicated story with many interlocking parts. Telling the whole story may well take me fifty posts. There’s a lot of new science hiding in here w...
Were ancient Africans divided into small, isolated bands?
Last week when I wrote about the study of African mtDNA variation by Behar and colleagues, I focused on the issue of population size. To me, that must be th...