The surprising connectedness of human genealogies over centuries
A new article by Adam Rutherford in Nautilus may be a good one for students in my genetics course this upcoming semester: “You’re Descended from Royalty and ...
All posts tagged with population dynamics
Dmanisi ‘single species’ claim draws critics
Last week Science printed an exchange of technical comments on the topic of the Dmanisi skull 5. The skull was described in a paper last fall (Lordkipanidze ...
The new skull from Dmanisi
It smells like ashes. Holding it and examining it is really not like the other fossil crania I’ve studied. The other Dmanisi crania strike me as being very l...
Muriquis and human behavior
Smithsonian magazine has a long profile article about my UW-Madison colleague Karen Strier: “Humans would be better off if they monkeyed around like muriquis...
New Denisova and Neandertal DNA results reported
Elizabeth Pennisi reports from the Biology of Genomes conference at Cold Spring Harbor, New York: “More Genomes From Denisova Cave Show Mixing of Early Human...
Riparo Mezzena and the Neandertal transition
A paper by Silvana Condemi and colleagues examines the anatomy of a partial mandible from Riparo Mezzena, Italy Condemi:Mezzena:2013. The mandible is a relat...
LRJ as a transitional industry
I was reading this morning an interesting paper from last year by Damien Flas Flas:2011, who considered the context of archaeological assemblages grouped as ...
Human population history makes a difference
Alon Keinan and Andrew Clark have a short report in the current Science examining the effects of recent human population growth on the expected spectrum of h...
Polytypism and complexity
Adam Van Arsdale considers whether a “bushy”, speciose phylogeny is actually evidence of evolutionary “complexity”: “Linearity and simplicity in the fossil r...
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: Noah's Ark
From a reader:
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...
Orangutan dynamics of Borneo
Bornean and Sumatran orangutans are the most highly divergent subspecies within any of the living species of great apes. The two farther apart even than chim...
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” ...
Mailbag: Invasive species growth phases
Re: “Lag times in biological invasions:
Lag times of biological invasions
A biological invasion occurs when a species rapidly colonizes a new geographical area. The new area is often very far from the regions considered to be part ...
Wobst’s population model
Reference: