Making the Mesolithic population of Scandinavia
A short article in The Conversation by Jan Apel describes some new research from Mattias Jakobsson’s lab on the population mixture that gave rise to the Meso...
All posts tagged with migrations
Denisovan DNA in the islands, and an Australian genome
David Reich and colleagues today report on the persistence of Denisova-like ancestry in island Southeast Asia and Australia (citation not yet available). Mea...
Double the migrations, double the fun
Several news stories have reported on an article by Ugo Perego and colleagues, titled “Distinctive Paleo-Indian Migration Routes from Beringia Marked by Two ...
Quote: Dating the Y
Dienekes comments on a new paper that attempts to estimate the age of a Y chromosomal clade:
Darwin, languages, and genetics
How are languages and genes related to each other? Anthropology is an interdiscipinary subject, and this is probably the topic that pushes that envelope the ...
Y chromosome migrations and African pastoralism
Sharon Begley covers a recent paper by Joanna Mountain on Y chromosome migrations and African pastoralists:
Timing Y-chromosome STR evolution
Dienekes details his argument for why date estimates based on Y-chromosome STRs are overestimated. I’d like to see him publish it!
Were ancient Africans divided into small, isolated bands?
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...
Did humans face extinction 70,000 years ago?
That was the headline of many of last week's stories about the paper by Behar and colleagues, drawing upon the Genographic Project African mitochondrial DNA...
Diffusion versus migration in North African prehistory
There is a little disagreement in the letters of this week's Science, about mtDNA evidence for migrations from West Asia into North Africa. This is in refer...
The Templeton review
The Yearbook of Physical Anthropology has a new review of the genetic evidence for modern human origins by Alan Templeton. The paper is 27 journal pages, an...
Zimmer on Templeton
Carl Zimmer has a post discussing Alan Templeton's work. It's a good review, covering Templeton's two essential points: history cannot be traced from any si...
More on the Neolithic mtDNA pool
Athena of Rites of Passage has a post critiquing the recent Neolithic aDNA paper (via Palanthsci). Her take is a bit different from mine. It makes good poin...
Early European mtDNA: only mysterious if you want it to be
A paper by Wolfgang Haak and colleagues in this week's Science sequenced ancient mtDNA in 24 Neolithic European skeletons.
The Multiregional Stipulation Society
This morning a good friend wrote me to ask about the "multiregional stipulation of random mating and constant population size." What an odd thing for anyone...