Scientists Find Genetic Root of Opposable Thumb, Upright Gait (2)
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Brandon Keim (90)
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Wired: Wired Science (11)
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A patch of DNA once regarded as "junk" may hold the key to upright walking and opposable thumbs. When the DNA was spliced into mice, it activated genes in their thumbs and big toes. Known as HACNS1, the sequence is located in a genomic stretch ignored by early geneticists. Many of these seemingly non-functional sequences have since been found to regulate gene activity. After comparing the human genome to chimpanzees', researchers noticed that HACNS1 had ...
Toumai in the hotseat (1)
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John Hawks (2)
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john hawks weblog (2)
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Hey, I never said it was a vulgar ape... A fresh storm has broken out over an ancient fossil presented by its defenders as a forebear of humanity and dismissed by its critics as the remains of a vulgar chimp. Controversy has swirled around Toumai, the name given to the nearly-complete skull, ever since it was found in the Chadian desert in 2001. ... But the man who discovered Toumai, Alain Beauvilain, of the University ...
Long term cultural selection for male dominance traits? (1)
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Yann Klimentidis (2)
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Yann Klimentidis' Weblog (2)
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Male dominance rarely skews the frequency distribution of Y chromosome haplotypes in human populations J. Stephen Lansing, Joseph C. Watkins, Brian Hallmark, Murray P. Cox, Tatiana M. Karafet, Herawati Sudoyo, and Michael F. HammerPNAS August 19, 2008 vol. 105 no. 33 11645-11650 Abstract: A central tenet of evolutionary social science holds that behaviors, such as those associated with social dominance, produce fitness effects that are subject to cultural selection. However, evidence for such selection is ...
European genes mirror European geography (12)
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Ed Yong none@example.com (33)
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ScienceBlogs Select (37)
5 days, 14 hours
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Within a drop of blood, you can find all the information you need to reasonably guess where a person came from, without ever having to look at their face, name or passport. Small variations in our DNA are enough for the task. They can be used to pinpoint someone's place of origin to a remarkable degree of accuracy, often to within a few hundred kilometres. The new discovery comes from a team of Swiss and ...
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Noemí said:
Curiosamente los mapas genéticos y políticos coinciden...
Notes on Sewall Wright: the Adaptive Landscape (1)
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davidb (2)
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Gene Expression (12)
5 days, 16 hours
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My series of posts on the work of Sewall Wright is now approaching its (anti?)climax. The next post, on the shifting balance theory, should be the last. The present note deals with a closely related subject. Wright introduced the concept of the 'adaptive landscape' largely in order to illustrate the shifting balance theory. It does however have great interest in its own right, and there is a substantial literature on the concept of adaptive landscapes. ...
Geography and Genetic structure in Europe (again) (1)
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dienekesp (4)
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Dienekes' Anthropology Blog (4)
5 days, 21 hours
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A new letter in Nature has appeared online with an almost identical conclusion with the Current Biology paper I blogged about earlier. The new study included 3,192 individuals from POPRES, genotyped with the Affymetrix 500K chip. The newer study included a wider sampling of populations, including Cypriots, Turks, and Eastern Slavs among others. Hence, the correspondence with the map of Europe is
The Acheulean massive scrapers of Gesher Benot Ya‘aqov—a product of the biface chaîne opératoire (1)
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Genetic map of Europe; genes vary as a function of distance [Gene Expression] (2)
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Razib none@example.com (5)
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ScienceBlogs Select (37)
6 days
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My post The Genetic Map of Europe drew a lot of interest, but there's even a cooler paper on the same topic out, Genes mirror geography within Europe: ...Despite low average levels of genetic differentiation among Europeans, we find a close correspondence between genetic and geographic distances; indeed, a geographical map of Europe arises naturally as an efficient two-dimensional summary of genetic variation in Europeans. The results emphasize that when mapping the genetic basis of ...
Another European genetic structure paper (1)
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n/a (5)
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race/history/evolution notes (2)
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I was alerted to this study through a post by one of gnxp's competent (i.e., most likely white) posters, and I haven't yet read it. The findings appear to be similar to those of the study released earlier this month (I would guess--based on another recent paper by some of the same authors--they even use some of the same samples). But there are a few new data points: samples from Latvia, Russia, Ukraine, Cyprus, and ...
Genetic map of Europe again (3)
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p-ter (4)
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Gene Expression (12)
6 days, 3 hours
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On the heels of the previous paper describing the "genetic map of europe" comes a new paper that makes the same general observation that genetic data contain information about geography. These authors also develop a model that does reasonably well at predicting the country of origin of an individual based on genetics alone. It's worth considering why this is possible. A previous paper by some of these same authors proved that under a simple isolation ...
Interested in Lithic Analysis? (1)
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Afarensis (2)
6 days, 8 hours
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Kambiz has an excellent post on the recent news about the recent research comparing Middle and Upper Paleolithic tool sets. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...
The taxonomic status of KNM-ER 42700: A reply to Baab (2008a) (1)
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Admixture mapping in Uyghurs (1)
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dienekesp (4)
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Dienekes' Anthropology Blog (4)
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This is a followup to this earlier study. Note that the "European" label for the Caucasoid component in Uyghurs is inappropriate, since this is composed of two distinct "European" and "Caucasoid Central Asian" elements. From the paper: Figure 3A shows summary plot of individual admixture proportions based on the highest-probability run of ten STRUCTURE runs. The results show that individuals
How does gene duplication allow evolutionary innovation? (1)
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R. Ford Denison (2)
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This Week in Evolution (2)
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Genes with new functions do not magically appear from nowhere, or so most scientists assume. (If I thought that evolution, perhaps especially human evolution, was being guided by some supernatural individual or group, I would be looking for such “genes from nowhere” rather than whining that theories with no evidence should get equal time. Not that they want schools to teach all theories that lack evidence, of course, just ones favored by their particular religion ...
Two African ‘Lost Tribes’ Discovered Deep in the Sahara (2)
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Digg (1622)
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The two tribes lived there in a plum lakeside community when the Sahara Desert, as we know it, was a lush, green country, but were separated by effects of climate change over a time line of 1,000 years.
ScienceDirect Publication: Journal of Human Evolution (8) permalink
Publication year: 2008N., Goren-Inbar , G., Sharon , N., Alperson-Afil , I., LaschiverShared by Kambiz (19)Contribute comment
