Razib Khan’s Content Aggregation Site
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Some of the Indo-Europeans found?
School girls in Hunza, Pakistan A few days ago I observed that pseudonymous blogger Dienekes Pontikos seemed intent on throwing as much data and interpretation into the public domain via his Dodecad Ancestry Project as possible. What are the long term implications of this? I know that Dienekes has been cited in the academic literature,…
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The season
I used to love the stop action animation specials which would be replayed around Christmas….
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Open Thread – December 18th, 2010
I really enjoy Frederick Pohl’s The Way the Future Blogs. If Isaac Asimov had made it to the internet age I’m sure he would have blogged quite a bit.
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South Asians too are sons of the farmers?
I mentioned a few days ago that a friend was trying to get together some data to analyze the genetic variation of South Asians. By a strange coincidence Dienekes just published a more detailed analysis of South Asians…and uncovered something very interesting, though not that surprising. Some technical preliminaries: A note of caution: The reduced…
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Friday Fluff – December 17th, 2010
1. First, a post from the past: Grooming => Language ~ Larger Social Groups. 2. Weird search query of the week: “scottish hair”. 3.Comment of the week, in response to
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Sons of the farmers, the origins of Africans
Most readers at this point are aware that I am very curious as to the origin of Europeans at the interface of hunter-gatherer populations and Neolithic farmers. What we thought we knew around the year 2000 does not seem to align very well with the conflicting results coming out of recent analyses. There is no…
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Goodbye Delicious
Delicious is shutting down. Since I use it a fair amount, can anyone recommend alternatives?
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Arise culturnomics!
First, read Ed Yong’s post. There’s real reporting in it. Such as: There’s also an issue with attitudes among people in the field. “Biologists were already convinced that genes and genomic variation were key to understanding problems in their field,” he adds. “Social scientists and humanists do not now work with large digital text collections,…
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Sons of the farmers, the story of Japan
Ainu in 19th century Hokkaido, and rice paddies Unlike some islands Japan has a long history of human habitation. More interestingly, under the Jomon culture the Japanese archipelago was home to one of the earliest, if not the earliest, societies which used pottery. The Jomon do not seem to have been intensive agriculturalists. Rather, with…
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“Genome blogging”
Nature profiles Dodecad, the Pickrell Affair, and the emergence of amateur genomicists in a new piece. Interestingly David of BGA is going to try and get something through peer review. In particular, the relationship of Assyrians and Jews. So we have Genomes Unzipped, Dodecad, and BGA. What next? Who next? I hope Dienekes doesn’t mind if…
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To classify humanity is not that hard
In my post below I quoted my interview L. L. Cavalli-Sforza because I think it gets to the heart of some confusions which have emerged since the finding that most variation on any given locus is found within populations, rather than between them. The standard figure is that 85% of genetic variance is within continental…
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Re-visualizing European ancestry
I decided to take the Dodecad ADMIXTURE results at K = 10, and redo some of the bar plots, as well as some scatter plots relating the different ancestral components by population. Don’t try to pick out fine-grained details, see what jumps out in a gestalt fashion. I removed most of the non-European populations to…
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The face of Ariadne
In response to my post from this weekend positing that the Sardinians are a particularly pristine distillation of the genetic heritage of Europe’s first Neolithic farmers, a friend suggests that I compare & contrast Sardinian actress Caterina Murino and the depictions of women which one sees on the walls of Minoan palaces. The Minoans being…
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Ron Bailey Unzipped
Over at Reason Ron Baily has an excellent piece up, I’ll Show You My Genome. Will You Show Me Yours? He reviews his results from two genotyping chips, and has placed his results online. I doubt readers of this weblog will learn anything that new, though the article might prove illuminating to friends & family.…
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To study humankind, AAA responds
This morning I received an email from the communication director of the American Anthropology Association. The contents are on the web: AAA Responds to Public Controversy Over Science in Anthropology Some recent media coverage, including an article in the New York Times, has portrayed anthropology as divided between those who practice it as a science…
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Around the Web – December 13th, 2010
Estimating Heritability Using Twins. Luke Jostins lays out the A’s, E’s, and C’s. Very informative. This part was kind of funny though: “Interestingly, the Bioscience Resource Project post cites this paper, which makes their mistake somewhat surprising.” Wonder if Luke is making a reference to the tendency for people not to read papers they cite…
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Live not by visualization alone
Synthetic map In the age of 500,000 SNP studies of genetic variation across dozens of populations obviously we’re a bit beyond lists of ABO blood frequencies. There’s no real way that a conventional human is going to be able to discern patterns of correlated allele frequency variations which point to between population genetic differences on…
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The study of humankind: questions, answers, and good faith
John Hawks, Anthropology in transition: Of course, by the 1980’s, anthropology was already disowning many of the central figures of its early development. If they had not themselves been tools of the colonialist oppressors, they were dupes of their knowing research subjects. Lewis is quite correct — many students of anthropological theory were no longer…