Anthropology.net

Inspired by the Dodecad Ancestry Project by Dienekes Pontikos and Eurogenes Ancestry Project by David Wesolowski, Zack Ajmal (with the help of Razib Khan) has started the Harappa Ancestry Project. Zack explains the motivation behind this project,

“It is a project to analyze (autosomal) genetic data of participants of South Asian origin for the purpose of providing detailed ancestry information. So the focus of the project is on South Asians: Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Sri Lankans.

The project will collect 23andme raw genetic data from participants to better understand the ancestry relationships of different South Asian ethnicities.

I have named it after Harappa, an archaeological site of the Indus Valley Civilization in Punjab, Pakistan.”

There was a nice deal running on 23andme about a month ago for their ancestry & health kit that worked out to be $160 for 1 year. I hopped on board, got my kit, spat in the tube and sent it off. It is currently being analyzed. My ancestry is one of the populations Zack is looking for — so I’ll be sending my data to him. I can’t wait.

If you have had a 23andme genetic testing, you should consider participating in this project. It looks to be very interesting.

I haven’t bothered to translate this page, but I’ve stumbled across a collection of 56 family portraits from East Asia that I wanted to share with you. The images give us a quick glimpse of all the different cultures and ethnicities that make up the far East, along with the lat/long of where these people are found. Check it out.

Ethnic Mongol

Somewhere in PNAS‘ list of upcoming publications will be a study on the jade trade, specifically an analysis of nephrite jade pieces dating back to 3000 B.C. from Asia.

The study was lead by Hsiao-Chun Hung of the Australian National University. These guys sampled ear pendants spanning around 1,000 years. These earrings were from around the South China Sea: coastal Cambodia and Vietnam, peninsular Thailand, western Philippines, southern Taiwan and Sarawak in Borneo.

Doing some structural and chemical analysis on the mineral composition, the researchers found that most of these earrings were made of jade from one location in eastern Taiwan, Fengtian. They suggest that the jade was distributed as blanks and that itinerant craftsmen may have traveled among the coastal lands, fashioning these decorative pendants for wealthy locals. I don’t know how they know that because the image to the right of earrings for Vietnam and the Phillipines have a remarkably similar style, indicating they may have originated from one source culture.

However the items were made, their distribution from one source across hundreds of miles of ocean represents an extensive trading networks of a single mineral among ancient peoples. It is only rivaled by the stone adzes, I described several months ago.

A new study of over 600 mtDNAs from 20 American and 26 Asian populations is shedding some unique insight on how the Americas were peopled. As you may have been taught, it was thought that the Americas were founded by a not so diverse founding population or two. Before this paper, only about 70 left their genetic print in modern descendants, a very small but effective founder population.

But, there are new results, which were published almost two months ago, that show that there was much more genetic diversity in the founder population than was previously thought. I didn’t catch it until I saw both Razib and Science Daily report on it a couple days ago.

The paper, “Beringian Standstill and Spread of Native American Founders,” was published in the freely accessible PLoS One. Beringia is a fancy way of naming the Bering Land Straight that once connected the north east Asia continent to north west America continent.

One of the more interesting lines of evidence they found from their sequence comparison and their revised phylogenetic map is that the ancestral population literally chilled out in Beringia for a long time. The authors estimate about 15,000 years. That’s long enough so that specific mutations accumulated which separated the New World founder lineages from the Asian sister-clades.

The other more interesting thing that was uncovered was that the founding haplotypes are uniformly distributed across North and South America. They do not show a nested structure from north to south. That means that after what the authors are terming the Beringian standstill and what I’m calling the Beringian chillout, the initial North to South migration was very swift. It was not a gradual diffusion.

And as Razib pointed out in his post, during the last 30,000 years, there was a lot more bouncing back and forth from Northeast Asia and North America. The analysis shows that there was a series of back migrations to Northeast Asia as well as forward migrations to the Americas from Beringia, “more recent bi-directional gene flow between Siberia and the North American Arctic.”

Overall, this study tells us a lot on how people were moving about in the northern hemisphere. But what about oceanic travel, and the recent chicken population genetic similarities? They seem to have made some cultural if not genetic contribution to populations here.

Related sidenote, I like how this study one ups an older PLoS paper, which I reffered to above (the 70 people one). If you want, check out that paper, “On the Number of New World Founders: A Population Genetic Portrait of the Peopling of the Americas.”