Beyond bones & stones
A paper published this past Friday in the journal Science Advances, shared the reports from a team of paleoanthropologists who found the fourth Denisovan individual known to us. Viviane Slon, a doctoral candidate at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and lead author of the study, reported the finding in the form... Continue Reading →
New ancient DNA discoveries from an ancient 124,000-year-old Neanderthal femur suggests modern human ancestors interbred with Neanderthals between 470,000 and 220,000 years ago. This is much earlier than previously thought. Cosimo Posth at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History led analysis of mitochondrial DNA from an ancient Neanderthal thigh bone discovered 80... Continue Reading →
Many cultures existed in Europe about 40-45,000 years ago. About 42,000 years ago, in southern Europe, the Protoaurignacian developed and the culture that followed marked a turning point in modern humanity. They made the earliest instruments, the earliest art, and possibly the first representation of a human figure. It has been hard to conclusively prove that the Protoaurignacians... Continue Reading →
Very rarely is an entire family group of hominins buried and fossilized at the same time. It is even rarer for paleoanthropologists to discover such an assemblage. Fortunately for science but unfortunately for the hominins, caves occasionally collapsed on entire social groups. At a site known as El Sidrón in Spain, excavations have been ongoing... Continue Reading →
The American Journal of Human Genetics has published an article titled, "Correcting for Purifying Selection: An Improved Human Mitochondrial Molecular Clock," in which a more accurate method of dating ancient human migration, even when no corroborating archaeological evidence exists, is announced. How does was this done? The authors started with a sample of 2,000 fully... Continue Reading →
If you're a regular reader of Dienekes blog, you'd know he's consistently raised concerns that calibrations of molecular clocks don't quite fit the bill. Yesterday, he posted an addendum and shared a new paper in which authors advocate that molecular clock can be calibrated upon an archaeological context (not phylogeny-based) and human mtDNA estimates of... Continue Reading →
Last month I was excited to share some research about the chemical composition of Ötzi, the 5,000 year old Tyrolean Iceman that has captured my attention for quite sometime. Today, I'm even more excited to share that the complete mitochondrial genome of Ötzi has been sequenced using a combination of PCR amplification and 454 sequencing.... Continue Reading →
The other day Dienekes pointed out a paper on ancestral human population dynamics within Africa before the out of Africa migrations. The paper is very similar to one I reviewed in April, which also focuses on the diversity of the mitochondrial haplogroup L -- one of the oldest mtDNA haplogroups out there. The new paper,... Continue Reading →
Ivan Nasidze and Mark Stoneking, along with a half dozen or so other colleagues, have studied the mitochondrial and Y-chromosome diversity of the Talysh. They've published their analysis in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. The paper can be found under this title, "mtDNA and Y-chromosome variation in the Talysh of Iran and Azerbaijan." The... Continue Reading →
