Braiding Denisovans into our ancestry
Dalton Luther reflects on the Denisovan admixture paper [1] that I wrote about earlier this week ("How widespread is Denisovan ancestry today?"), by referring to John Moore's work on ethnogenesis [2]....
View ArticleDiversity doesn't point reliably to source populations
Worth amplifying from Dienekes' Anthropology Blog, "Y chromosomes of the Bahamas": I like the line about there being substantially more Y-STR variation in E1b1a7a-U174 and E1b1ba8-U175 in the Bahamas...
View ArticleMailbag: Spuds and mutts
Re: "How widespread is Denisovan ancestry today?" and "Potato sack race": Question about Denisovan DNA. Once introduced into a population, beginning many millenia ago, what keeps it from being in the...
View ArticleThe risk gradient
Ann Gibbons reports [1] from the International Congress of Human Genetics, on papers that examine GWAS risk alleles for type 2 diabetes: "Diabetes Genes Decline Out of Africa" (paywall). At the poster...
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Measuring differences between populations
Synopsis: Fst and its relationship to the number of migrants among populationsWhen individuals mate locally, different populations tend to diverge from each other in the frequencies of their alleles....
View ArticleUnderstanding population differentiation
Synopsis: Devising a story problem to illustrate Fst as a measure of population differentiationThis lab has a take-home assignment, which is worth three points when you turn it in at next week's lab...
View ArticleMailbag: Neandertal derived SNP alleles
Re: Neandertal introgression, 1000 Genomes style: Long-time reader of your blog, non-paleo/anthro/genetics person, here. But please read on:Just a couple of brief questions. (i) It seems that it would...
View ArticleThe H preparation
Razib Khan comments on the current round of Henry Louis Gates ancestry programming: "Finding fake roots", and "Reification is alright by me! Razib notes that the criteria that tell many subjects that...
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Neandertal similarity in the HapMap samples
In my last installment on Neandertal introgression in present-day human samples, I covered whole genome data from the 1000 Genomes Project ("Which population in the 1000 Genomes Project samples has the...
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Neandertal ancestry "Iced"
I've been mobbed with e-mails from readers asking about my reaction to the new paper by Anders Eriksson and Andrea Manica in PNAS, titled "Effect of ancient population structure on the degree of...
View ArticleDenisova at high coverage
Science today has released the new paper on the Denisova high-coverage genome by Mattias Meyer and colleagues from Svante Pääbo's group [1]. There is a lot of material in the supplements of the new...
View ArticleThe North African Neandertal descendants
A new paper by Federico Sánchez-Quinto and colleagues reports on comparisons of North African population samples with the Neandertal DNA project data [1]. The paper shows that North African populations...
View ArticleASHG notes on Gene Expression
Razib Khan has started writing up his notes on this week's conference of the American Society of Human Genetics: "Reflections on the evolution at ASHG 2012". He includes some reactions on the...
View ArticleMailbag: North and South China
I read with interest your post on:http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/neandertals/pigmentation/neandertal-...in particular:"People of Han Chinese ethnicity sampled in Beijing appear to have on average...
View ArticleNeandertal anti-defamation files, 17
Let no one say that I'm an uncritical voice about the many advantages of releasing preprints. They do have their downsides. Lack of editing is one.Here's a passage from a new preprint from Peter...
View ArticleNew Denisova and Neandertal DNA results reported
Elizabeth Pennisi reports from the Biology of Genomes conference at Cold Spring Harbor, New York: "More Genomes From Denisova Cave Show Mixing of Early Human Groups". The article describes a talk by...
View ArticlePopulation structure and chimpanzee malaria
A new paper examines the parasite load of a group of wild chimpanzees for Plasmodium, the parasite that causes malaria [1]. Several strains of Plasmodium are endemic in wild chimpanzees, but their...
View ArticleARG is the word
Adam Siepel has written a very useful explainer about a new preprint he has posted with Matthew Rasmussen on the arXiv preprint server: "Our Paper: Genome-wide inference of ancestral recombination...
View ArticleHunting the Denisovan belt
The other day I was having a long conversation about Denisovans and human origins. My friend suggested that "Denisovans" sound like some kind of Star Trek civilization. I have to admit, he had a point....
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