Been too busy to read much, but Joe Henrich’s The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter, is out. I have read a little bit of Genghis Khan: His Conquests, His Empire, His Legacy. A touch too over-dramatic and credulous in regards to colorful legends for my taste so far to be frank.
Two Neandertal preprints you might want to check out, The Strength of Selection Against Neanderthal Introgression and The Genetic Cost of Neanderthal Introgression. If you haven’t checked out DNA.land, you should. Though not totally clear how it’s much different from openSNP.
Nathan Taylor has a post up, Homo naledi and the braided stream of humanity. It’s miscegenation all the way down. I can agree with it in its broadest strokes. On Facebook I posted a link to some stuff about selection for height in Europe, and a reader asked “what does this mean for white people?” My simple response was nothing, because for much of this period people who we would recognize as white didn’t really exist. The ancestral genetic elements which combine to produce most of the population of Europe did not cohere together into one population until ~4,000 years ago, give or take. And, the most recent data suggest that the pigmentation loci which result in the typical light complexion of Northern Europeans did not arrive at their current allele frequencies until sometime after this period.
This isn’t to make Europeans special. I think this sort of reality probably holds for most of the major world populations. A recent paper on the Ainu seem to confirm that they’re relatively basal in relation to other East Asian populations. My own suspicion though is that this is simply because a lot of groups were absorbed or demographically marginalized by expanding groups of farmers from the region between the Yellow and Yangzi rivers.
Halloween was fun. But boy is it way more regimented than when I was a kid. Trick-or-treating at stores in the afternoon and very early evening downtown seems to be edging out the old traversing blocks at night.
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