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...
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...
Notable paper: Heyer, E., Brandenburg, J.-T., Leonardi, M., Toupance, B., Balaresque, P., Hegay, T., Aldashev, A. and Austerlitz, F. (2015), Patrilineal popu...
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...
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...
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. ...
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...
Sandwalk: “What William the Conqueror’s Companions Teach Us about Effective Population Size”.
From a reader:
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...
Demography is the engine of evolution. Changes in allele frequencies require differential births and deaths of the individuals who carry the alleles. Under n...
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:
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 ...
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...
From the NY Times earlier this spring, a profile of a New York woman with an exceptional legacy:
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...
Nicholas Wade is reporting on an upcoming paper by Chad Huff and Lynn Jorde: “Genome Study Provides a Census of Early Humans”.
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...
This is the third in a series on information theory and tests for recent selection. The first post, “Information theory: a short ...
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...
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...