Should archaeologists really fear and loathe geneticists?
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...
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...
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: Rodriguez-Flores JL, Fakhro K, Agosto-Perez F, Ramstetter MD, Arbiza L, et al. 2016. Indigenous Arabs are descendants of the earliest split fr...
Erika Check Hayden in this week’s Nature reports on a current preprint by Joseph Pickrell and coworkers from David Reich’s lab: “African genes tracked back”
Neandertals have strikingly limited genetic variation. They once lived across a range from Spain to Siberia. Yet when we compare sequences across their whole...
Re: Neandertal gene variants in Yoruba:
Worth amplifying from Dienekes’ Anthropology Blog, “Y chromosomes of the Bahamas”:
Re: “How widespread is Denisovan ancestry today?”
Dienekes comments on a new paper finding another strange mixture of haplotypes in Neolithic-era sample of mtDNA from central Europe (“Unexpected ancient mtDN...
Dienekes links to and discusses a current paper by George Busby and colleagues Busby:peopling:2011 on the Y chromosome chronology for the settlement of Europ...
Razib points today to an article in Der Spiegel about the revival of folk migration as an explanation for the Neolithic in Europe. His post (“Vlkerwanderung ...
I’m reviewing some old viewpoints about the relationships of Neandertals and other peoples. These include mainstream opinions that persisted over decades as ...
Marie-France Deguilloux and colleagues Deguilloux:2010 present a short analysis of ancient mtDNA recovered from a Neolithic burial at Prissé-la-Charrière, be...
Murray Cox and Michael Hammer have a short commentary piece in the current BMC Biology, titled, “A question of scale: Human migrations writ large and small” ...
Peter Heather’s Empires and Barbarians begins with a chapter summarizing grand theories of demography and social transformation among near-prehistoric people...
Re: “Misinformation about brain evolution”
Here’s a nice, symmetrical pair of stories:
Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd are well-known for their studies of processes of culture change. They apply principles from biological evolution to form hypo...
This is the first in a series of essays titled, "Practical Evolution." Here are links to the whole series and the series introduction. I've decided to break ...
Popgen Ramblings:
DavidB at Gene Expression continues his wonderful series on Sewall Wright with a detailed post on the population genetics of migration.