Stem-human gene flow into Neanderthals
The evolutionary history of human spindle genes includes back-and-forth gene flow with Neandertals: Proteins associated with the spindle apparatus, a cytoskeletal structure that ensures the proper segregation of chromosomes during […]
Ancient humans had a lot of sex with each other
Have you taken my Steppelandia Quiz yet? A new ‘must read’ paper on Neanderthals, Initial Upper Palaeolithic humans in Europe had recent Neanderthal ancestry: Modern humans appeared in Europe by at least […]
Neanderthal Y chromosomes are paleo-modern?
I don’t have time to blog in detail today so I’ll point you to Ann Gibbon’s story, How Neanderthals lost their Y chromosome. You can find the link to the paper in there. The big issue here is that both mtDNA and Y chromosomes were replaced due to introgression from a population closer to modern […]
High-coverage Neanderthal genome and gene flow with Denisovans
Two new preprints on Neanderthals, A high-coverage Neandertal genome from Chagyrskaya Cave and 100,000 years of gene flow between Neandertals and Denisovans in the Altai mountains. The first preprint is an empirical one focused on a new high-coverage Neanderthal genome, which allows for more powerful inferences. To me, the most interesting insight is that Neanderthals […]
Neanderthals as a reservoir of paleo-modern human heritage
A new preprint reports on the peculiar Y chromosomal patterns that one finds in Neanderthals, Denisovans, and modern humans. Spencer Wells has told me that Y and mtDNA are actually much more informative now that we have an ancient DNA autosomal scaffold. I think that’s right. The strange result from Neanderthals is both their Y […]
Denisovans and the human story
The Siberian cave where a new human species was discoveredWe are all aware of the iconic fossil finds which mark the various milestones of our understanding of human evolution. The story of how our species became what it is today. Raymond Dart’s Taung …
How your Neanderthal functions in the human genome
What does it mean that you have Neanderthal ancestry? Everyone agrees now that that ancestry exists, but does it make you any different from what you’d be otherwise? From a scientific perspective, one might ask what the function of Neanderthal genetic …
To understand Neanderthals we need to understand ourselves
In 2010 researchers sequenced the whole genome of a single Neanderthal. From comparing this genome to that of humans alive today they concluded, to their surprise, that many modern human populations had Neanderthal ancestry! More specifically, all popu…
What Neanderthals tells us about modern humans
In Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past David Reich spends a fair amount of time on Neanderthal admixture into modern human lineages. Reich details exactly the process of how his team arrived to analyze the data that Svante Paabo’s group had produced, and […]
The Loneliest Neanderthal
Neanderthals are in the news again! This is good for me personally, as my company is selling Neanderthal trait analysis. Ooga-booga! In any case, the two papers which have triggered the current wave of Neandermania are The Contribution of Neanderthals to Phenotypic Variation in Modern Humans, and A high-coverage Neandertal genome from Vindija Cave in Croatia. […]
The Species Barriers Between Neanderthals and Anatomically Modern Humans
A new paper in The American Journal of Humans Genetics, The Divergence of Neandertal and Modern Human Y Chromosomes, reports on possible reasons why we don’t see Y chromosomes in modern humans from this archaic lineage, despite exhibiting detectable le…
The species barriers between Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans
A new paper in The American Journal of Humans Genetics, The Divergence of Neandertal and Modern Human Y Chromosomes, reports on possible reasons why we don’t see Y chromosomes in modern humans from this archaic lineage, despite exhibiting detectable levels of autosomal admixture. As you might recall the clear lack of deep branching Y and […]
The species barriers between Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans
A new paper in The American Journal of Humans Genetics, The Divergence of Neandertal and Modern Human Y Chromosomes, reports on possible reasons why we don’t see Y chromosomes in modern humans from this archaic lineage, despite exhibiting detectable levels of autosomal admixture. As you might recall the clear lack of deep branching Y and […]
Neandertal population structure
There’s a new paper out, Partial genetic turnover in neandertals: continuity in the east and population replacement in the west. The primary results are above. Basically, using 13 mtDNA samples the authors conclude that it looks as if there was a founder effect for Neanderthals in Western Europe ~50 K years ago, generating a very […]
The sons of Adam: spirit, not blood
Hominin increase in cranial capacity, courtesy of Luke Jostins A few years ago a statistical geneticist at Cambridge’s Sanger Institute, Luke Jostins, posted the chart above using data from fossils on cranial capacity of hominins (the human lineage). As you can see there was a gradual increase in cranial capacity until ~250,000 years before the present, […]
How Archimedes’ lever explains human evolution
Last August I had a post up, The point mutation which made humanity, which suggested that it may be wrong to conceive of the difference between Neanderthals and the African humans which absorbed and replaced them ~35,000 years ago as a matter of extreme differences at specific genes. I was prompted to this line of […]
Neandertal introgression and admixture
Ed Yong has a good good review of a new Neandertal introgression/admixture paper in PNAS. It’s not live on the web yet, so let me quote Ed: Even if the odds of successful interbreeding were just 5 percent, Neanderthal genes would make up the majo…
The point mutation which made humanity
Steve Hsu points me to a piece in The New Yorker on the science and personality of Svante Pääbo. The personality part includes references to Pääbo’s bisexuality, which to me seemed to be literally dropped into the prose to spice it up. Of cou…
The hunt for ancient DNA
Ewen Callaway has a good survey of what’s been going down in ancient human genomics over the past year in Nature, Ancient DNA reveals secrets of human history. It’s not paywalled, so read the whole thing. Most of it won’t be too surpr…
Non-zero sum transitions in the human past
A few people have pointed me to the recent paper in Science, Tenfold Population Increase in Western Europe at the Neandertal–to–Modern Human Transition. The basic result is obvious, and not totally revolutionary: anatomically modern humans may simp…