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...
All posts tagged with hybridization
Fossil profile: Skhūl 1 and the mixing of populations
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...
Fitness in hybrid baboons
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...
How much have baboons and geladas hybridized during their evolution?
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 ...
Are three-rooted molars evidence of Denisovan introgression in Asia?
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...
Quote: Loren Eiseley on Neanderthal hybridization
Loren Eiseley was an anthropologist well known in the mid-twentieth century for his popular writing about human evolution and science more generally.
A Denisovan news article
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...
Genomes and the complicated history of baboons
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...
Hybrid origins of the straight-tusked elephants
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...
A genomic look at hybridization in citrus fruits
I just love this article about hybridization and the origins of different varieties of citrus fruits: “Genomics of the origin and evolution of Citrus”.
Yaks in Mongolia have more than 1 percent cattle DNA despite male hybrid sterility
Last year an interesting paper by Ivica Medugorac and coworkers presented data on introgression in domesticated yaks in Mongolia: “Whole-genome analysis of i...
The newfound respect for hybridization and introgression in mammals
An article in Quanta magazine in August by Jordana Cepelewicz is a very readable account of scientists’ newfound respect for hybridization and introgression ...
Genomes of straight-tusked elephants
Earlier this month in eLife, Matthias Meyer and colleagues published a cool paper: “Palaeogenomes of Eurasian straight-tusked elephants challenge the current...
Link: Geese hybridization
Just a note that ducks provide many great examples of hybridization dynamics, particularly invasive ducks. This recent paper on geese by Jente Ottenburghs an...
Brief thoughts on Upper Paleolithic ‘hybrids’
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...
Some thoughts on Dorothy Garrod and celebrity fossils
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...
Should we be surprised that Neandertals, Denisovans, and modern humans didn’t form stable hybrid zones?
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...
Mitochondrial evidence of introgression among North American mammoths
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...
Link: Hybridization between lineages separated in the Mesozoic
Last year, Nicholas Holland and colleagues examined an interesting case of hybridization between lineages separated for more than 100 million years. Lancelet...
What is the ‘braided stream’ analogy for human evolution?
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...
Link: The variable genetic mixes of the coywolf
From Roland Kays in The Conversation: “Yes, eastern coyotes are hybrids, but the ‘coywolf’ is not a thing”.
Quote: Bartholomew and Birdsell on introgressive hybridization
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...
The Manot 1 skull and how we now look at Neandertal ancestry in early modern humans
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: Gorilla genomes illuminate phylogeography
Notable paper: Kimberly F. McManus, Joanna L. Kelley, Shiya Song, et al. 2015. Inference of Gorilla demographic and selective history from whole genome seque...
Butterfly genetic theft
The Heliconius butterfly genome paper Dasmahapatra:2012 is supercool for many reasons. Most important from my point of view is the attention to introgression...
No Neandertal safe sex
Laurent Excoffier and colleagues’ work has investigated how range expansions may have affected human genetic diversity. I’ve commented on this work several t...
A problem of fuzzy mammoths
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...
"Neandertal stimulation": Weckler and biogeography
I’m reviewing some old viewpoints about the relationships of Neandertals and other peoples. These include mainstream opinions that persisted over decades as ...
Mailbag: Zorse pigmentation
Re: Horse-zebra hybrids
Babi yaga
Tetrapod Zoology writes about the mysterious babirusa:
Mailbag: More on coywolves
Regarding coywolves:
Coywolves
Another case of large mammal evolution by introgressive hybridization:
Independent hybridization of lager yeast
New Scientist reports on the parallel evolution of Budweiser and Heineken:
Introgression, Neandertals, and species concepts
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...
King Kong humanzee trivia
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...
Look to the baboons; there will you your insights find!
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...