Tag Archives: Neandertals

What I am attempting to read today…

…before returning to the field. Properties and rates of germline mutations in humans (C.D. Campbell, E.E. Eichler) Trends in Genetics, 17 May 2013, 10.1016/j.tig.2013.04.005 ABSTRACT: All genetic variation arises via new mutations; therefore, determining the rate and biases for different … Continue reading

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My talk at the AAAs

If you are in the San Francisco area and interested in human evolution, you should stop by our session at the AAAs this afternoon. There is a great group of panelists who have agreed to contribute and I am excited … Continue reading

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Population level extinction in human prehistory readings, part 1

One of my current research projects is investigating the potential impact of population level extinction in human evolutionary history. I am focusing my efforts on Late Pleistocene Europe because it is a time and a place that we have a … Continue reading

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Neandertal-human admixture and early Homo

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

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Neandertal and modern human admixture

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 Neandertal anti-defamation files

Randomly found in the grocery store check-out aisle in a cancer research fundraiser used-book pile: Maybe not your mother exactly, but somebody’s mother at some point in time…

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Neandertal anti-defamation files

Kyle Jarrard has a piece at The Huffington Post on changing attitudes about Neandertal competence: No more can we say that old Neanderthal — prototype of shaggy man with absolutely zero smarts — didn’t know what he was doing. And … Continue reading

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Lineages, species and Michigan, part 2

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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Neandertal demographic collapse

Love Dalén, Anders Götherström and colleagues have an interesting short article available in advance view in Molecular Biology and Evolution. The article argues, on the basis of Neandertal mtDNA data, for a distinction between Western and Eastern Neandertals, with the … Continue reading

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Cannibalism, not just for Neandertals anymore

Everyone’s favorite topic, cannibalism, is in the news today because of a a report in the journal Arctic of cannibalism in polar bears. The abstract, from I. Stirling & J.E. Ross, says this: We report three instances of intraspecific killing … Continue reading

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