Category Archives: Archaic humans

Call Him George

Posted on June 11, 2014 by gcochran9

  One thing leads to another. I hear that Rasmus Nielsen (speaking at SMBE 2014) has evidence that Tibetans picked up some of their altitude adaptation (EPAS1) from Denisovans. Who could have imagined that?

Posted in Altitude adaptations, Denisovans, Genetics | 14 Comments

Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes

Posted on April 7, 2014 by gcochran9

Svante Pääbo has a book out, Neanderthal Man, in which he recounts his adventures sequencing ancient DNA.  He has had three big successes: the first successful sequencing of Neanderthal mtDNA in 1997, the first sequencing of the Neanderthal nuclear genome, … Continue reading →

Posted in Archaic humans, Book Reviews, Denisovans, Genetics, Neanderthals | 118 Comments

Ethiopian altitude adaptations

Posted on February 27, 2014 by gcochran9

I said a while ago that the altitude adaptations in Tibet were too damn good, more effective than those seen in Andean Amerindians, and so must have originated in a population that lived at high altitude for a long time.  … Continue reading →

Posted in Altitude adaptations, Archaic humans, Genetics | 46 Comments

Silver Blaze

Posted on February 17, 2014 by gcochran9

The recent paper on three ancestral European populations has some truly interesting stuff buried deep in the supplements.   This is not the first time that this has happened: if you read the supplements to their big Neanderthal paper, back in … Continue reading →

Posted in Amerindians, Ashkenazi Jews, Denisovans, European Prehistory, Genetics, Indo-European, Linguistics, Neanderthals | 422 Comments

Adaptive Neanderthal admixture

Posted on January 30, 2014 by gcochran9

Finally, there are papers  out on the long-term consequences of Neanderthal admixture – one by Sriram Sankararaman in Nature, the other by Benjamin Vernot in Science. The general picture is that anatomically modern humans exiting Africa mixed, to a degree,  … Continue reading →

Posted in Genetics, Neanderthals | 97 Comments

Earl Grey

Posted on January 7, 2014 by gcochran9

In a previous post, I speculated that that Denisovans might stem from from Homo erectus, at least in part, rather than being a sister group to Neanderthals as suggested in the paper by Reich and Patterson.  It now looks as … Continue reading →

Posted in Archaic humans, Denisovans, homo erectus, Neanderthals | 21 Comments

Denisovans in Wallacea?

Posted on October 23, 2013 by gcochran9

In Science, Cooper and Stringer discuss the distribution of Denisovan ancestry. Before I say anything else – their map is great. We don’t see any Denisovan ancestry in populations living in mainland Southeast Asia, or Indonesia, or indeed in any … Continue reading →

Posted in Archaic humans, Denisovans | 44 Comments

All One Species ?

Posted on October 18, 2013 by gcochran9

There is a new paper about a recently discovered skull from Dmanisi, Georgia, an early Homo erectus.  Compared with a set of other erectus skulls from the same area and from about the same time, it looks as if this … Continue reading →

Posted in Archaic humans, Denisovans, homo erectus, Neanderthals, Uncategorized | 40 Comments

What’s the catch?

Posted on January 25, 2013 by gcochran9

if someone were to try to create a Neanderthal a few years from now, starting with ancient DNA, they’d have to have worry a lot about data errors, because such errors would translate into mutations, which might be harmful or … Continue reading →

Posted in Genetics, Neanderthals | 64 Comments

Fascinatin’ rhythm

Posted on July 10, 2012 by gcochran9

At the recent SMBE meeting in Dublin, there was an interesting talk (judging from the abstract) about archaic genes in modern humans.  The  authors were Sriram Sankararaman, Nick Patterson, Swapan Mallick,, Svante Paabo, and David Reich. They believe that they … Continue reading →

Posted in Genetics, Neanderthals | 11 Comments