Blog Profile / Dienekes' Anthropology Blog
| URL : | http://dienekes.blogspot.com/ | |
|---|---|---|
| Filed Under: | Academics / Anthropology | |
| Posts on Regator: | 1966 | |
| Posts / Week: | 7.3 | |
| Archived Since: | March 13, 2008 | |
Blog Post Archive
Uruk migrants in the Caucasus
From the paper: The period between the 4th and 3rd millennia B.C. was the time of great cataclysmic events in the Caucasus; its cultural advances were influenced by changes within its boundaries as well as interactions with the outside...Show More Summary
Cosmic impact event ~12.8kya caused the Younger Dryas
PNAS doi: 10.1073/pnas.1301760110 Evidence for deposition of 10 million tonnes of impact spherules across four continents 12,800 y ago James H. Wittke et al. Airbursts/impacts by a fragmented comet or asteroid have been proposed at the...Show More Summary
More population structure in the Netherlands (Lao et al. 2013)
There was a recent article on the topic by Abdellaoui et al., and here is another one.
Investigative Genetics 2013, 4:9 doi:10.1186/2041-2223-4-9
Clinal distribution of human genomic diversity across the Netherlands despite archaeological...Show More Summary
Review on germline mutation rate in humans (Campbell and Eichler 2013)
This is a nice little review of the state of the art in germline mutation rate estimation in humans. This was previously estimated using paleontological calibrations (especially the human/chimp split), but a slower mutation rate emerged on the basis of whole genome data from humans. Show More Summary
An avalanche of Tibetan genetic data (Qi et al. 2013)
A very impressive data dump on Tibetan genetic variation gives us an excellent picture on both the Y-chromosome and mtDNA side. There are two interesting things about Tibetans -at least to me. First, their mtDNA is dominated by haplogroup...Show More Summary
Evolutionary history of Uralic languages (Honkola et al. 2013)
Journal of Evolutionary Biology DOI: 10.1111/jeb.12107
Cultural and climatic changes shape the evolutionary history of the Uralic languages
T Honkola et al.
Quantitative phylogenetic methods have been used to study the evolutionary relationships...Show More Summary
Toba eruption did not cause volcanic winter in Africa ~75ka
PNAS May 14, 2013 vol. 110 no. 20 8025-8029 doi: 10.1073/pnas.1301474110 Ash from the Toba supereruption in Lake Malawi shows no volcanic winter in East Africa at 75 ka Christine S. Lane et al. The most explosive volcanic event of the Quaternary was the eruption of Mt. Show More Summary
mtDNA from Minoan Crete (Hughey et al. 2013)
A very exciting (and open access) new paper on Minoan mtDNA adds new ancient DNA data from the southeastern corner of Europe and from a critical period at the beginning of European history.
The authors are able to reject Arthur Evans's...Show More Summary
Facial reconstruction of 5,600-year old Maltese woman
Source: Revealed...the face of a Maltese woman 5,600 years ago
Links between Mycenaeans and Scandinavia
Three papers on a similar theme. An excerpt from a source mentioned in the second paper: Det visar sig att alla undersökta svenska föremål utom ett enda - en slaggbit - kommer från gruvor och malmfyndigheter från platser på Cypern, Sardinien, Iberiska halvön, Massif Central i nuvarande Frankrike, Tyrolen samt Brittiska öarna. Show More Summary
Lakes in SE Arabia ~60 thousand years ago
From the paper:
From the current archaeological evidence, it seems that after MIS 5, the different lithic traditions within Arabia develop along separate trajectories, with no indication of additional input from Africa. Recent genetic...Show More Summary
Deleterious mutational load and recent population history (Simons et al. 2013)
arXiv:1305.2061 [q-bio.PE] The deleterious mutation load is insensitive to recent population history Yuval B. Simons, Michael C. Turchin, Jonathan K. Pritchard, Guy Sella (Submitted on 9 May 2013) Human populations have undergone dramatic...Show More Summary
Phylogeography of Bantu languages (Currie et al. 2013)
Proc. R. Soc. B 7 July 2013 vol. 280 no. 1762 20130695
Cultural phylogeography of the Bantu Languages of sub-Saharan Africa
Thomas E. Currie et al.
There is disagreement about the routes taken by populations speaking Bantu languages as they expanded to cover much of sub-Saharan Africa. Show More Summary
The Geography of Recent Genetic Ancestry across Europe (Ralph and Coop 2013)
This paper first came out last July on the arXiv and went through four versions there before its final form which has now appeared in PLoS Biology. It's great that its early release allowed other people to read it without having to wait...Show More Summary
Deep common ancestry of Eurasiatic languages (Pagel et al. 2013)
From the paper:
Posterior support at internal nodes of the tree is low, as we might expect of a linguistic tree of this age, but all exceed chance expectations (SI Text) and the internal topology does not affect our estimates of the age of the superfamily. Show More Summary
Small-bodied humans from the Terminal Pleistocene in Tanzania
East Africa is known for the tall and lean physiques of many of its current inhabitants, but there has been speculation -on linguistic or other grounds- that it was once home to people similar to the present-day Bushmen of southern Africa. Show More Summary
Okhotsk and Ainu: linguistic connection?
A genetic connection was hypothesized in the third of the following related links on the basis of ancient Jomon mtDNA that seemed to lack an element of the modern Ainu gene pool. From the current paper: If we accept a view that transmission...Show More Summary
Criticism of Y-chromosome Adam old age
... has just appeared on the arXiv. This refers to the paper by Mendez et al. announcing the basal clade A00 of the phylogeny and estimating a TMRCA for Y-chromosome Adam of 237-581ka. The author argues that such an old age is inconsistent...Show More Summary
mtDNA haplogroup H and the origin of Europeans (Brotherton et al. 2013)
Panel b is particularly interesting, as it clearly shows the Iberian-ness of Bell Beaker mtDNA (BBC), and the South-Eastern-ness of LBK.
From the paper:
From around 2800 BC, the LNE Bell Beaker culture emerged from the Iberian Peninsula to form one of the first pan-European archaeological complexes. Show More Summary
Y-chromosomes of Native South Americans (Roewer et al. 2013)
It would be useful to sequence these South American C3 Y-chromosomes to see how they are related to the C3b-P39 found in some native North Americans as well as other unresolved C3 from Asia. It would also be worthwhile to look at autosomal...Show More Summary