A new paper is getting a lot of press, Reconstructing Indian population history. I will probably have something up on ScienceBlogs tomorrow (have to read the supplements). But I thought I'd highlight a paragraph in the text:

We warn that 'models' in population genetics should be treated with caution. Although they provide an important framework for testing historical hypotheses, they are oversimplifications. For example, the true ancestral populations of India were probably not homogeneous as we assume in our model, but instead were probably formed by clusters of related groups that mixed at different times. However, modelling them as homogeneous fits the data and seems to capture meaningful features of history.

This caution did not percolate to the level of the press releases from what I can gather. John Hawks has some criticisms up....

Labels: Genetics