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...
All posts tagged with migration
Link: Essay overview of paleogenetics of ancient migrations
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: Genetic traces of early migration in Arabia
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...
The genetic complexity of recent migration into southern Africa
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”
Taking the mtDNA pulse of Neandertal populations
Neandertals have strikingly limited genetic variation. They once lived across a range from Spain to Siberia. Yet when we compare sequences across their whole...
Mailbag: Neandertal genes across the Strait of Gibraltar
Re: Neandertal gene variants in Yoruba:
Diversity doesn't point reliably to source populations
Worth amplifying from Dienekes’ Anthropology Blog, “Y chromosomes of the Bahamas”:
Mailbag: Denisovan in China and New World habitation
Re: “How widespread is Denisovan ancestry today?”
Neolithic discontinuity in Hungary
Dienekes comments on a new paper finding another strange mixture of haplotypes in Neolithic-era sample of mtDNA from central Europe (“Unexpected ancient mtDN...
Y chronology awry
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...
Neolithic milk fog
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 ...
"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 ...
French Neolithic discontinuities
Marie-France Deguilloux and colleagues Deguilloux:2010 present a short analysis of ancient mtDNA recovered from a Neolithic burial at Prissé-la-Charrière, be...
Migration thinking
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” ...
Quote: Peter Heather, migration is the great Satan
Peter Heather’s Empires and Barbarians begins with a chapter summarizing grand theories of demography and social transformation among near-prehistoric people...
Mailbag: Migration and Malthusianism
Re: “Misinformation about brain evolution”
East meets West, and vice versa
Here’s a nice, symmetrical pair of stories:
Migration and social change
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...
Weed species (part 1)
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 on range dispersals
Popgen Ramblings:
Sewall Wright and migration
DavidB at Gene Expression continues his wonderful series on Sewall Wright with a detailed post on the population genetics of migration.