Skeletons from the Himalayan lake
Yesterday a fascinating story came out in Nature Communications about the skeletons of Roopkund Lake, in northern India: “Ancient DNA from the skeletons of R...
All posts tagged with mtDNA migrations
The H preparation
Razib Khan comments on the current round of Henry Louis Gates ancestry programming: “Finding fake roots”, and “Reification is alright by me! Razib notes that...
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...
The sign of four
Gene Expression this morning is worth some thought, a post about the mtDNA of Andaman Islanders and their connections to mainland Asian populations. “Present...
Agriculture, population expansion and mtDNA variation
Earlier this spring, I wrote about a paper by Brenna Henn and colleagues that presented new data on SNP variation in recent African hunter-gatherer populatio...
mtDNA, purifying selection and "distorted" genealogies
I’m going to pass along this paper without much comment, it’s by Jon Seger and colleagues and it came out earlier this year in Genetics Seger:2010:
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 ...
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...
Mailbag: mtDNA "out of whack"
Re: “Time to revise the mtDNA timescale?”:
Time to revise the mtDNA timescale?
Krzysztof Cyran and Marek Kimmel (2010) have presented a revised set of estimates of the human mtDNA most recent common ancestor (MRCA). It’s an interesting...
The other story about the mammoth DNA
I got to writing about a story a couple of years ago, and then stalled out. That happens every so often – remember, most of my research-related entries are m...
Genetics and archaeology, 2
I’ve just received the book, Climate Change in Prehistory: The End of the Reign of Chaos, by William Burroughs. I’ll be reading it and reviewing it during th...
African-American mtDNA and regional populations of Africa
I’m attending a symposium on genetics and genealogy of the African Diaspora this morning. Fatimah Jackson is here giving a very interesting talk about her ge...
SNPs and culture history
Razib lists a taxonomy of culture-gene historical scenarios. Real worked examples for several of these would be worthwhile.
Genes and archaeology
Current Biology has released a special issue titled “Global genetic history of Homo sapiens”. There is much of interest in this issue, with seven papers, mos...
East meets West, and vice versa
Here’s a nice, symmetrical pair of stories:
Mailbag: mtDNA mutation rates
Regarding frozen penguin mtDNA and mutation rates:
The Finnish line
A new paper by Jukka Palo and colleagues investigates the population history of Finland:
When history gets complicated
Razib posts some thoughts on how the study of human migration history has gotten more and more complex during the last fifteen years.
"The worm in the fruit of the mitochondrial DNA tree"
François Balloux (2009) has a polemic in the online access area of Heredity presenting references about mtDNA selection, and arguing that the use of this sin...
Today's Europeans different from Paleolithic and Neolithic predecessors
Dienekes, on a new study of early Neolithic and earlier mtDNA variation in Europe:
Neandertals and bears
For most of their prehistory, humans were highly mobile hunter-gatherers. We can expect that Neandertals were also highly mobile, at least compared to sedent...