Notable: Penguin population turnover from ancient DNA
Notable paper: Stefanie Grosser, Nicolas J. Rawlence, Christian N. K. Anderson, Ian W. G. Smith, R. Paul Scofield, Jonathan M. Waters. 2016. Invader or resid...
All posts tagged with phylogeography
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...
Cave bear DNA from Sima de los Huesos
Jesse Dabney and colleagues, including Svante Pääbo from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, report on the assembly of a complete mitocho...
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...
Diversity doesn't point reliably to source populations
Worth amplifying from Dienekes’ Anthropology Blog, “Y chromosomes of the Bahamas”:
Leprosy evolution in humans
Where did leprosy come from as a human pathogen, and how did it spread through the world? Two years ago, this new research would have merited a whole book. N...
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...
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...
Neandertal races?
There’s a new paper in PLoS ONE by Virginie Fabre, Silvana Condemi and Anna Degioanni, titled “Genetic evidence of geographical groups among Neanderthals.” I...