HENRY - The human evolution news relay
Entries in the ' africa ' category
Written July 9, 2008 in africa, americas, anthropology, europe, genetics, human prehistory, mtDNA
Scientific American covers the human diaspora in a nice broad-brush overview:
Fifty or sixty thousand years ago a small band of Africans—a few hundred or even several thousand—crossed the strait in tiny boats, never to return.
The reason they left their homeland in eastern Africa is not completely understood. Perhaps the climate changed, or once abundant shellfish [...]
John Hawks has a nicely detailed discussion about handling exponential growth in demographic models. Very interesting, and hopefully he’ll keep them coming:
Exponential growth is a feature of current human populations, and was may represent how the human population behaved during some episodes of its demographic history. However, “exponential” can mean different things to different people, [...]
Out in the AJHG, is the next in the National Genographic line of studies. This one, by Behar et al. assesses 624 mitochondrial genomes from Khoisan hunter gatherers in Africa (doi). The abstract says:
The quest to explain demographic history during the early part of human evolution has been limited because of the scarce paleoanthropological [...]
Written March 31, 2008 in africa, anthropology, books, evolution, fossils, genetics, human prehistory, people, stupidity
No doubt you’ve all seen some of the hype surrounding the new book, Big Brain: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence by Gary Lynch and Richard Granger. The book argues that a long-extinct hominin species, the “Boskops”, were much smarter then we are:
Our big brains, our language ability, and our intelligence make us uniquely [...]
Through the magic of the internet (via), I’ve come across this posting where “DarkSoul” posts some photos of a modern day skirmish between the Kalenjin and Kisii tribes in Kenya. There’s an associated news story here, but I think the pictures can speak for themselves:
Written February 21, 2008 in africa, anthropology, europe, evolution, genetics, papers-I-should-read
No time to read this now, but it looks very interesting: Proportionally more deleterious genetic variation in European than in African populations (doi). Abstract says -
Quantifying the number of deleterious mutations per diploid human genome is of crucial concern to both evolutionary and medical geneticists. Here we combine genome-wide polymorphism data from PCR-based exon resequencing, [...]
Written January 24, 2008 in africa, anthropology, genetics, human prehistory, mtDNA, phylogenetics
Out in PNAS - Maternal traces of deep common ancestry and asymmetric gene flow between Pygmy hunter–gatherers and Bantu-speaking farmers (doi:10.1073/pnas.0711467105):
Two groups of populations with completely different lifestyles—the Pygmy hunter–gatherers and the Bantu-speaking farmers—coexist in Central Africa. We investigated the origins of these two groups and the interactions between them, by analyzing mtDNA variation [...]
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