Category Archives: Human Population Genetics

Since I’m flogging Enlightenment Now, I thought perhaps I should remind readers that Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past by David Reich is out in 1.5 months. For years people have asked me about a book to read to understand what genetics has to […]

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Whenever you look at a map which shows the distribution of Y chromosomal haplogroup R1b you see two areas where the frequency seems very high. First, Western Europe has a very high frequency. Before 2010 it was commonly assumed that R1b was the heritage of late Pleistocene European hunter-gatherers. Around 2010 deeper analysis suggested perhaps […]

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I’m proposing on an upcoming episode of The Insight that we should talk about natural selection in the context of humans. The reason is that there seems to be a lot of it. It may even be ubiquitous. But, in most cases which aren’t trivial, we have no good idea what’s going on. By not […]

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If you are American you have probably heard about “Cheddar Man” in Bryan Sykes’ Seven Daughters of Eve. If you don’t know, Cheddar Man is a Mesolithic individual from prehistoric Britain, dating to 9,150 years before the present. Sykes’ DNA analysis concluded that he was mtDNA haplogroup U5, which is found in ~10% of modern […]

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Over the past ten years or so the idea of “adaptive introgression” in the human context has gone from seeming ludicrous to banal. When I first began entertaining this idea in 2006 some commenters literally heckled me, because the idea of admixture with Neanderthals seemed so ludicrous. Then, in 2010 the maturation of the field […]

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  In human populations a SNP in ABCC11 is correlated with two salient traits: 1) wet or dry earwax 2) body odor. When I had my first son sequenced before his birth the main variant of phenotypic consequence that I noticed (aside from him being a heterozygote on KITLG), was that he carried a derived […]

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I have mentioned before that the 1000 Genomes Chinese are heterogenous. Many of the ones sampled in Beijing are North Chinese. But there is structure within the South Chinese samples as well. The PCA above shows it. I’ve pruned some of the data for clarity (it’s probably a cline really, with cut-offs and breaks happening […]

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I feel that for whatever reason that over the past few years that many people have started to exhibit weak intuitions about the magnitude of between population differences on this weblog. Two suggestions for why this might occur. * First, the proliferation of PCA plots with individuals can make it hard to discern averages * […]

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A new preprint in bioRxiv reports on the high likelihood if elevated Sephardic Jewish ancestry in New World populations, Latin Americans show wide-spread Converso ancestry and the imprint of local Native ancestry on physical appearance: …Using novel haplotype-based methods here we infer the sub-populations involved in admixture for over 6,500 Latin Americans and evaluate the […]

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The figure above is from a very important new preprint, Human local adaptation of the TRPM8 cold receptor along a latitudinal cline. A marker in 09TRPM8, rs10166942, seem to be correlated with adaptation to cold. The abstract: Ambient temperature is a critical environmental factor for all living organisms. It was likely an important selective force […]

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Roberta Estes recenty posted about the fact that Spencer & I will be revisiting The Journey of Man, fifteen years after he wrote the book and made the documentary. As part of the preparation, I’m revisiting some uniparental results, in particular, recent ones. This preprint in bioRxiv Carriers of mitochondrial DNA macrohaplogroup L3 basic lineages […]

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The human brain utilizes about ~20% of the calories you take in per day. It’s a large and metabolically expensive organ. Because of this fact there are lots of evolutionary models which focus on the brain. In Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human Richard Wrangham suggests that our need for calories to feed our […]

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The golden of pigmentation genetics started in 2005 with SLC24A5, a putative cation exchanger, affects pigmentation in zebrafish and humans. Prior to that pigmentation genetics was really to a great extent coat color genetics, done in mice and other organisms which have a lot of pelage variation. Of course there was work on humans, mostly […]

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To understand nature in all its complexity we have to cut down the riotous variety down to size. For ease of comprehension we formalize with math, verbalize with analogies, and visualize with representations. These approximations of reality are not reality, but when we look through the glass darkly they give us filaments of essential insight. […]

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Razib Khan