Several days ago, Carl Zimmer, wrote a piece on a curious segment of the human genome, spanning 6 genes on Chromosome 3. This segment is unique in that 63% of Bangladeshi's carry at least one copy, and about 1/3 of of South Asians carry this variant. In Europe, only 8% of people carry this segment,... Continue Reading →
European Women with Neanderthal Progesterone Receptor Gene Are More Fertile
Hugo Zeberg, at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the Karolinska Institutet, published an interesting study with colleagues Janet Kelso and Svante Pääbo on Neandertal admixture and its impact on modern day fertility. Diverging from a common human lineage over 600,000 years ago, Neandertals and modern humans began an exchange of genetic material... Continue Reading →
The Discovery of a 3.8 Million Year Old Australopithecus anamensis
The discovery of a mostly intact a 3.8 million year old fossil skull found buried within sandstone, from the Waranjo-Mille site in the Afar region of Ethiopia, was announced last week in Nature. Based on the size and shape of its canines, which has certain anatomical features that make it stand out from A. afarensis and other... Continue Reading →
The Presence of the Frontal Opercula in Homo naledi
When it comes to the evolution of the human brain, size isn't everything. In fact, shape is a huge determinant. A new study from Hawks in PNAS suggests that morphology may proceeded size in the evolution of hominin brains. Hawks and team performed a comparative anatomy study of Homo and Australopithecus brains based on endocasts. Endocasts... Continue Reading →
Growing ‘Mini-Brains’ With Neanderthal DNA
Svante Pääbo, director of the genetics department at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany wants to grow brain organoids from human stem cells that are edited to contain "Neanderthalized" versions of several genes. These blobs of brain are incapable of thoughts or feelings, but replicate basic structures of the brain, such... Continue Reading →
Al Wusta Phalanxes Document Humans Travel East of Africa Earlier
Earlier this year we learned about the Misliya maxilla which pushed our understanding of out of Africa by 50,000 years. Last week, the discovery of a 87,000-year-old human intermediate phalanx (Al Wusta-1 (AW-1)) from the Nefud desert in Saudi Arabia was published in Nature Ecology and Evolution. The importance of both discoveries show that modern humans existed outside Africa... Continue Reading →
Five Neanderthal Genomes Tell Us More Than Ever
We've been quite limited by our ancient DNA of Neanderthals due to limited sample size from the fossil record and then compounded with degradation and contamination of DNA. Last week, Nature, published a fantastic article ultimately from Svante Pääbo and Janet Kelso on a novel way to extract more DNA from less fossil sample; using... Continue Reading →
Denisovans & Modern Humans Introgressed At Least Twice
Sharon Browning and colleagues published a paper in Cell last week that shows there are uniquely different Denisovan genomes in the DNA of East Asian individuals, indicating that interbreeding with Homo sapiens happened in two independent episodes. See we already knew Aboriginal genomes from Australia and Papua New Guinea contain fragments of Denisovan DNA. Introgression of... Continue Reading →
The Hidden Life of Neolithic Women Seen Via Their Humeri
In this week's journal Science Advances, University of Cambridge researchers compared the bones of women. Their sample included Central European women living in the first 5,000 years (or about 7,400-7,000 years ago) of agriculture those those of typical college students and college athletes including those that row in crew. As you know bone is a living... Continue Reading →
Neanderthal Introgression Gave Us Back Even More Ancient DNA
Tony Capra of Vanderbilt University in Nashville hypothesized last week at the annual meeting of The American Society of Human Genetics that genes we have considered to variant of Neanderthals and inherited to modern humans outside of Africa are not particularly Neanderthal genes, but rather, represent ancestral humans. In other words, we can thank Neanderthals... Continue Reading →
