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 Mugharat es Skhūl is today quite a small cave or rock shelter in the side of the Nahal Me’arot, a wadi running from Mount Carmel, Israel. The archaeologi...
It’s rare to have good data on fitness of individuals in wild populations of animals. It’s even more rare to have data on fitness of hybrid individuals in na...
A recent paper from Jerilyn Walker and coworkers in the journal BMC Mobile DNA reports that today’s baboons and geladas may have mixed in their history more ...
During the 1980s and 1990s, the idea of multiregional evolution of modern humans was based upon the observation that today’s people living in various regions...
Loren Eiseley was an anthropologist well known in the mid-twentieth century for his popular writing about human evolution and science more generally.
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...
Today, Science Advances has released a paper by Jeffrey Rogers and coworkers on the genome diversity of six species of baboons: “The comparative genomics and...
Elephants are one of the most important comparisons for human origins. Like humans, they’re long-lived animals that have complex social behavior, they requir...
I just love this article about hybridization and the origins of different varieties of citrus fruits: “Genomics of the origin and evolution of Citrus”.
Last year an interesting paper by Ivica Medugorac and coworkers presented data on introgression in domesticated yaks in Mongolia: “Whole-genome analysis of i...
An article in Quanta magazine in August by Jordana Cepelewicz is a very readable account of scientists’ newfound respect for hybridization and introgression ...
Earlier this month in eLife, Matthias Meyer and colleagues published a cool paper: “Palaeogenomes of Eurasian straight-tusked elephants challenge the current...
Just a note that ducks provide many great examples of hybridization dynamics, particularly invasive ducks. This recent paper on geese by Jente Ottenburghs an...
Science News has a long feature article by Bruce Bower that recounts the new wave of examining hybridization in human origins: “Animal hybrids may hold clues...
Lydia Pyne’s new book, Seven Skeletons: The Evolution of the World’s Most Famous Human Fossils is a reflection on how fossils become worldwide celebrities. I...
We’ve come a long way toward recognizing the complexity of modern human origins and dispersal. Ten years ago, I was one of a relative few who still maintaine...
Hendrik Poinar and colleagues have a new paper in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution that reports new mitochondrial genomes from 67 North American mammoth sp...
Last year, Nicholas Holland and colleagues examined an interesting case of hybridization between lineages separated for more than 100 million years. Lancelet...
Two years ago, I pointed to a year-end retrospective that Clive Finlayson had done for BBC News: “Viewpoint: Human evolution, from tree to braid”. He reflect...
From Roland Kays in The Conversation: “Yes, eastern coyotes are hybrids, but the ‘coywolf’ is not a thing”.
I was surprised to find this quote from George Bartholomew, Jr. and Joseph Birdsell (1953:495), explicitly mentioning the possibility that the spread of homi...
Israel Hershkovitz and colleagues report in Nature today on a partial cranial vault from Manot Cave, Israel. The key arguments in their paper are well-expres...
Notable paper: Kimberly F. McManus, Joanna L. Kelley, Shiya Song, et al. 2015. Inference of Gorilla demographic and selective history from whole genome seque...
The Heliconius butterfly genome paper Dasmahapatra:2012 is supercool for many reasons. Most important from my point of view is the attention to introgression...
Laurent Excoffier and colleagues’ work has investigated how range expansions may have affected human genetic diversity. I’ve commented on this work several t...
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...
I’m reviewing some old viewpoints about the relationships of Neandertals and other peoples. These include mainstream opinions that persisted over decades as ...
Re: Horse-zebra hybrids
Tetrapod Zoology writes about the mysterious babirusa:
Regarding coywolves:
Another case of large mammal evolution by introgressive hybridization:
New Scientist reports on the parallel evolution of Budweiser and Heineken:
A key issue (at least for some paleo folks) is whether the term "introgression" gives aid and comfort to the idea that Neandertals were a distinct species f...
I'm coming late to this story, but it's still timely! The New York Times has an op-ed by Clive Wynne linking the inspiration for the original King Kong to S...
Clifford Jolly's review article in the 2001 Yearbook of Physical Anthropology pretty much covers every aspect for which baboons make an analogy for human ev...