Category Archives: Genetics

Neandertal-human admixture and early Homo

Posted on August 21, 2012 by Adam Van Arsdale

Last week’s pre-publication of a paper addressing the alternative hypotheses of Neandertal-human admixture vs. ancient African population structure, with respect explaining the signal of Neandertal DNA in living humans, has generated a lot of great posts. First, John Hawks has … Continue reading →

Posted in Evolution, Fossils, Genetics | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Links for the new week

Posted on August 20, 2012 by Adam Van Arsdale

Just passing along a number of links to things that, in a world made of more time, I might have written more about: Interested in climate change? Anthropology News is starting a listserv on the topic Sample size issues in … Continue reading →

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Neandertal and modern human admixture

Posted on August 13, 2012 by Adam Van Arsdale

Sriram Sankararaman, Nick Patterson, Heng Li, Svante Pääbo and David Reich have a new paper (open access, via ArXiv here) that tests whether or not genetic similarities between recent humans and Neandertals is the result of recent admixture or ancient … Continue reading →

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More on the Hungarian racial purity story

Posted on June 15, 2012 by Adam Van Arsdale

Anne Buchanan, writing at The Mermaid’s Tale, has more on the Hungarian racial purity story I commented on earlier in the week: It’s important to note that the testing did not precede the racial hatred, but it does serve to … Continue reading →

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Purity is not a genetic reality

Posted on June 12, 2012 by Adam Van Arsdale

Nature has a news story out which highlights the truly frightening dark-side of human genetics research: Hungary’s Medical Research Council (ETT), which advises the government on health policy, has asked public prosecutors to investigate a genetic-diagnostic company that certified that … Continue reading →

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Lineages, species and Michigan, part 2

Posted on May 15, 2012 by Adam Van Arsdale

I will have to follow up with my own comments later, but I wanted to direct you to Ken Weiss’s follow-up piece to his comments on the single-species hypothesis yesterday. I will make one brief observation, though. Ken writes: But … Continue reading →

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Yellow legal pads

Posted on May 14, 2012 by Adam Van Arsdale

Elizabeth Pennisi has a great news story for Science on the development of nanopore sequencing techniques. This is the technology that, at least at the moment, seems best positioned to dramatically decrease the cost of genomic sequencing and spread the … Continue reading →

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Quote of the Day: race, genomics and research

Posted on May 14, 2012 by Adam Van Arsdale

While most researchers do not claim to know the exact root of health disparities, all believe genomics will increasingly play a central role where other fields have failed. Though researchers might want to start with strict genomic populations, with minority … Continue reading →

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Lineages, species and Michigan

Posted on May 14, 2012 by Adam Van Arsdale

One of the posts that I have had in draft form for several months, waiting for the proper motivation and approach to finalize, is titled, “lineages and species in the fossil record.” This week, perhaps, the time and motivation has … Continue reading →

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What personal genomics does and does not mean, part 1

Posted on May 8, 2012 by Adam Van Arsdale

There have been a whole series of interesting blog posts, news stories, and research articles associated with personal genomics lately that I have been meaning to write about but simply have not had the chance. So instead I am going … Continue reading →

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