Category: Anthroplogy
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When sociology meets statistical genetics
In Dr. Daniel MacArthur’s post on Roots into the Future Blaine Bettinger left an interesting comment: It will be interesting to see how 23andMe deals with the pool of people that respond to the 10,000 free kits. Doesn’t seem like they can p…
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War in Pre-Columbian Sumeria
For most of my life I have had an implicit directional view of Holocene human culture. And that direction was toward more social complexity and cultural proteanism. Ancient Egypt traversed ~2,000 years between the Old Kingdom and the fall of the New Ki…
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Why the human X chromosome is less diverse
The Pith: The human X chromosome is subject to more pressure from natural selection, resulting in less genetic diversity. But, the differences in diversity of X chromosomes across human populations seem to be more a function of population history than …
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Southeast Asian migrations, Indians and Tai
If you have not read my post “To the antipode of Asia”, this might be a good time to do so if you are unfamiliar with the history, prehistory, and ethnography of mainland Southeast Asia. In this post I will focus on mainland Southeast Asia…
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Asian Negritos are not one population
Negrito, Philippines. Credit: Ken Ilio In the post below I mentioned that the Malaysian and Philippine Negritos seem to be two very distinct populations. This was something I wanted to explore in more detail, so I naturally decided to poke around the…
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Bacteria tell the tale of human intercourse
The Pith: the genetic relationships between bacteria in our stomach can tell us a lot about the relationships between various groups of people. Additionally, the distribution of different strains of bacteria may have significant public health implicat…
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What did red-haired Neanderthals look like?
So asks a commenter below in relation to the question above. First, why would one even presume that they were red-haired, see my 2007 post, or the paper in Science: A Melanocortin 1 Receptor Allele Suggests Varying Pigmentation Among Neanderthals. In …
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Neanderthal-human mating, months later….
Image credit:ICHTO Recently something popped up into my Google news feed in regards to “Neanderthal-human mating.” If you are a regular reader you know that I’m wild for this particular combination of the “wild thing.” Bu…
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To the antipode of Asia
Markers show populations sampled by HUGO Pan-Asian SNP Consortium The Pith: Southeast Asia was settled by a series of distinct peoples. The pattern of settlement can be discerned in part by examination of patterns of genetic variation. It seems like…
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What one (or more) genomes can tell us
The Pith: We are now moving from the human genome project, to the human genomes project. As more and more full genomes of various populations come online new methods will arise to take advantage of the surfeit of data. In this paper the authors crunch …
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How did modern humans settle the world?
In lieu of lots of text, above is a stylized representation of the routes which Neo-Africans took ~50 thousand years ago from their point of departure to parts unknown. The two colors represent two models. The red lines show two major streams issuing …
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Marry far and breed tall strong sons
The Pith: When it comes to the final outcome of a largely biologically specified trait like human height it looks as if it isn’t just the genes your parents give you that matters. Rather, the relationship of their genes also counts. The more diss…
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When will the first Jehovah’s Witness be sequenced?
An amusing article, Dr Atta-ur-Rehman, first Pakistani to have genome mapped: Prof Dr M Iqbal Choudhary, Director International Centre for Chemical and Biological Sciences (ICCBS), Karachi University (KU), disclosed on Thursday that former Chairman, Hi…
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“What if you’re wrong” – haplogroup J
Back when this sort of thing was cutting edge mtDNA haplogroup J was a pretty big deal. This was the haplogroup often associated with the demic diffusion of Middle Eastern farmers into Europe. This was the “Jasmine” clade in Seven Daughters…
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Reify my genes!
BEHOLD, REIFICATION! In the comments below Antonio pointed me to this working paper, What Do DNA Ancestry Tests Reveal About Americans’ Identity? Examining Public Opinion on Race and Genomics. I am perhaps being a bit dull but I can’t figure …
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Grain, disease, and innovation
I just finished reading a review of the literature since 1984 on the bioarchaeology of the transition to agriculture. Stature and robusticity during the agricultural transition: Evidence from the bioarchaeological record: The population explosion that …
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Present genetic variation is a weak guide to past genetic variation
As I’ve been harping on and on for the past few years that the patterns of contemporary genetic variation are probably only weakly tied to past patterns of genetic variation (though Henry Harpending warned me about this as far back as 2004). A …