Category Archives: Native Americans

The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 7: the genetics of Native AmericansAncient BeringiansThis week on The Insight (Apple Podcasts and Stitcher) Razib Khan and Spencer Wells discuss the genetics and history of Native Americans, from the icy shore…

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Many people have recommended I read Johanna Nichols’ Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time over the years. I checked out the book in grad school once but didn’t get around to reading it. But today I see it being referenced in Stephen Oppenheimer’s very strange book about Lemuria-I mean Southeast Asia, Eden in the East. Both […]

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Over the past century history has been approached from many different angles, despite the stereotype of scholars haunting dusty archives. Adventurers once called antiquarians became archaeologists, and inspired the fictional Indiana Jones. Today it is the turn of the geneticists to put their stamp upon history. By tracing patterns of variation they gain insights as to the […]

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A new press release is circulating on the paper which I blogged a few months ago, Ancient Admixture in Human History. Unlike the paper, the title of the press release is misleading, and unfortunately I notice that people are circulating it, and probably misunderstanding what is going on. Here’s the title and first paragraph: Native […]

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A new press release is circulating on the paper which I blogged a few months ago, Ancient Admixture in Human History. Unlike the paper, the title of the press release is misleading, and unfortunately I notice that people are circulating it, and probably misunderstanding what is going on. Here’s the title and first paragraph: Native […]

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Dienekes, in response to Living Anthropologically, Petty identity politics indeed, or, holding a grudge is no excuse for anti-science:

I won’t argue about the veracity or details of this version of history, but surely native Americans from the U…

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By now you have read that the Clovis people may have had contemporaries. In case you didn’t know, until about ~10 years the “standard model” of the peopling of the Americas was that around ~13,000 years ago one single population cross…

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That is the question, and tentatively answered in the affirmative according to a new paper in The American Journal of Physical Anthropology. A new subclade of mtDNA haplogroup C1 found in icelanders: Evidence of pre-columbian contact?:
Although most mtDNA lineages observed in contemporary Icelanders can be traced to neighboring populations in the British Isles and Scandinavia, […]

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Razib Khan