Africa
The homeland of our lineage, Africa encompasses a fossil hominin record across the last 6 million years or more. The genetics of African populations give us insights into the evolutionary history of humans across the last few hundred thousand years.
Ghostbusters of human origins
Humans tend to mix and interact with each other. Geneticists are once again starting to take that seriously, changing their view of our origins.
Kabwe: A famous fossil unearthed amid the human costs of mining
Mining led to the skull's discovery, destroyed its context, and left a century-long legacy of lead poisoning.
How much Neandertal DNA do today's African peoples have?
New research shows that today's populations in Africa have around one third the Neandertal ancestry as people in Eurasia.
The transition to Middle Stone Age from Acheulean did not make humans more deadly
Reading a meta-analysis of faunal data by Geoff Smith and coworkers that concludes that all Middle Pleistocene African peoples hunted the same prey animals.
Three big insights into our African origins
Recently, I delivered a lecture to the American Society for Human Genetics, focusing on the African record of human origins. It was a great privilege to speak to more than 5000 members of this professional organization, together with other distinguished experts on African genetic variation and health. Here I share
Growing genetic data suggest a two-phase model for prehistoric population expansions in Africa
I describe results from two papers of African genetic variation, which show that the population growth from agriculture followed an earlier demographic expansion.
Modern human origins was more interesting than a single point of dispersal
A study of SNP variation across Africa enables us to look at a structured ancestral population long before 100,000 years ago.
Gertrude Caton Thompson within the history of archaeology in Africa
As I read through the 20th-century archaeologist's memoirs, I find the flavor of the field in the 1920s and 1930s.
