{"id":40978,"date":"2011-05-24T23:54:17","date_gmt":"2011-05-25T07:54:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/?p=11958"},"modified":"2011-05-24T23:54:17","modified_gmt":"2011-05-25T07:54:17","slug":"is-the-university-of-california-putting-politics-before-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/2011\/05\/24\/is-the-university-of-california-putting-politics-before-science\/","title":{"rendered":"Is the University of California putting politics before science?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Kennewick_Man\">Kennewick Man<\/a> produced a cottage industry of journalism ~10 years ago, thanks to the political controversy around the science. Today the stakes are different. Consider this from <a href=\"http:\/\/johnhawks.net\/weblog\/reviews\/genetics\/mtdna_migrations\/gignoux-agriculture-expansions-2011.html\">John Hawks, &#8220;Agriculture, population expansion and mtDNA variation&#8221;<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>I am less sanguine about their results for Europe. They show a gradual period of growth associated in time with the Younger Dryas (around 12,000 years ago), which could make sense in the archaeology. But I am not convinced that the &#8220;European&#8221; haplogroups here are really European to that time depth. We know that the Neolithic and post-Neolithic saw some large-scale shifts in the frequencies of mtDNA haplogroups in Central and Western Europe. Some Upper Paleolithic Europeans probably contributed mtDNA to this later population, but I have no confidence that the proportion was great enough to accurately infer the demography of that pre-Neolithic population. (This is also a problem with the current paper in\u00a0<em>Current Anthropology<\/em> by Peter Rowley-Conwy. I&#8217;ll discuss this sometime soon.)<\/p>\n<p><strong>The next frontier in reconstructing the population history of Europe will be ancient DNA. A good sample of Neolithic and pre-Neolithic whole mtDNA genomes would settle this question and allow inferences about the kind of demographic recovery Europe underwent after the Last &#8230;<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~r\/GeneExpressionBlog\/~4\/00NOLUvIJjM\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\"\/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Kennewick Man produced a cottage industry of journalism ~10 years ago, thanks to the political controversy around the science. Today the stakes are different. Consider this from John Hawks, &#8220;Agriculture, population expansion and mtDNA variation&amp;#&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,514],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthroplogy","category-paleontology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40978","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40978"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40978\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41027,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40978\/revisions\/41027"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}