Monthly Archives: June 2016

I can get as excited about an n log n solution as anyone, but I don’t pretend to be a real expert in algorithmic analysis. But I’m interested. One upon a time, I remember people claiming that more of the … Continue reading →

It never hurts to look at the map. Back around the glacial maximum, the world was a crappy place, with fewer inhabitable areas. Some of the high genetic differentiation in early Holocene populations may have been caused by climate-induced barriers: … Continue reading →

There are lots of toxic ideas that haven’t been implemented solely because I have kept my own counsel – the dark forces that would have enthusiastically welcomed them could never have thought of them by themselves. This is the only … Continue reading →

There’s a new paper (by Iosif Lazaridis and others) out on the genetics of the world’s first farmers in the Middle East. There are a number of interesting points. They find that early farming populations are about half descended from … Continue reading →

There’s a new paper out on the people of the Americas, by Pontus Skoglund and David Reich. The main picture is solidifying: The main Amerindian migration consists of a population that is approximately 40% ancient Siberian and 60% Han-like. Calculations … Continue reading →

It strikes me that in many ways, life was gradually getting harder in the Old World, especially in the cradles of civilization. We know that every now and then a new infectious disease was added to the mix: smallpox probably … Continue reading →

Imagine that we take men from population A, with a distinct set of Y-chromosomes, and have them father children with women from Population C. And their male descendants keep marrying women from population C: eventually we have a population (D) … Continue reading →

We now know that the fraction of Neanderthal ancestry in coding regions has been gradually decreasing with time since the origin admixture, and is now something like half as large as it was originally. There were some useful Neanderthal alleles … Continue reading →

In my experience, they do not play Secret Agent Man in the halls of the CIA, Every Breath You Take at the NSA, or Neutron Dance at Los Alamos.

There’s an effort to put Saudis to work, because of low oil prices and a rapidly increasing population. The goal is to have Saudi Arabia prosperous due to application of Saudi human capital, rather than just from oil It won’t … Continue reading →