Anthroplogy

Thomas Mailmund is going ape over chimps & humans again, Patterns of autosomal divergence between the human and chimpanzee genomes support an allopatric model of speciation. A review of a paper of the same name.
Interesting review paper on disease and Sub-Saharan African, Neglected Tropical Diseases in Sub-Saharan Africa: Review of Their Prevalence, Distribution, and Disease Burden: The neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) are the most common conditions affecting the poorest 500 million people living in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), and together produce a burden of disease that may be equivalent to up to one-half of SSA's malaria disease burden and more than double that caused by tuberculosis. Approximately 85% of the NTD disease burden results from helminth infections. Hookworm infection occurs in almost…
Anthropology.net points me to a new paper, Convergent genetic linkage and associations to language, speech and reading measures in families of probands with Specific Language Impairment: We analyzed genetic linkage and association of measures of language, speech and reading phenotypes to candidate regions in a single set of families ascertained for SLI. Sib-pair and family-based analyses were carried out for candidate gene loci for Reading Disability (RD) on chromosomes 1p36, 3p12-q13, 6p22, and 15q21, and the speech-language candidate region on 7q31 in a sample of 322 participants…
From page 55 of Empires of the Silk Road: ...Archaeology has shown that every location in Eurasia where Indo-European daughter languages have come to be spoken, modern humans had already settled there long beforehand, with the sole exception of the Tarim Basin, the final destination of the people who are known to us as the Tokharians. I've alluded to this before, the unique hybrid aspect of Uighurs probably is due to the fact that the Tarim basin was only recently settled from both the west and east of Eurasia, closing a gap of settlement which might have existed since the Last Glacial…
There's a new paper in PLoS ONE, Craniometric Data Supports Demic Diffusion Model for the Spread of Agriculture into Europe. That's fine. There are two extreme models about how farming might have spread in Europe. One model suggests that farmers replaced non-farmers genetically. Another model posits that there was no discernible movement of population, but ideas flowed. Apes are not the only ones who can imitate and emulate after all. Peruvians did not move with the potato, so there are cases of the latter. But the genetic data (see links) seem to imply some non-trivial contribution (for…
Update: The author of the paper clears up confusions. Follow up to the post yesterday, here's the paper, Physical attractiveness and reproductive success in humans: evidence from the late 20th century United States: Physical attractiveness has been associated with mating behavior, but its role in reproductive success of contemporary humans has received surprisingly little attention. In the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (1244 women, 997 men born between 1937 and 1940), we examined whether attractiveness assessed from photographs taken at age â¼18 years predicted the number of biological…
BMC Evolutionary Biology has a new paper which will be up soon (not on site), Reconstructing Indian-Australian phylogenetic link. ScienceDaily has a preview: Dr Raghavendra Rao worked with a team of researchers from the Anthropological Survey of India to sequence 966 complete mitochondrial DNA genomes from Indian 'relic populations'. He said, "Mitochondrial DNA is inherited only from the mother and so allows us to accurately trace ancestry. We found certain mutations in the DNA sequences of the Indian tribes we sampled that are specific to Australian Aborigines. This shared ancestry suggests…
Is over at Afarensis.
Social Competition May Be Reason For Bigger Brain: "Our findings suggest brain size increases the most in areas with larger populations and this almost certainly increased the intensity of social competition," said David Geary, Curator's Professor and Thomas Jefferson Professor of Psychosocial Sciences in the MU College of Arts and Science. "When humans had to compete for necessities and social status, which allowed better access to these necessities, bigger brains provided an advantage." The researchers also found some credibility to the climate-change hypothesis, which assumes that global…
On this week's Science Saturday John Horgan interviews Richard Wrangham. The second half of the conversation focuses on Wrangham's new book, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. I've heard pieces of the arguments mooted in the back & forth before, but it looks like in this book they're all brought together. Humans are a large animal with a very small gut, so we need to maximize the bang-for-the buck when it comes to what we eat. Unlike gorillas and to a lesser extent chimpanzees we just aren't able to process enough low quality vegetable matter to keep ourselves going. Part of this…
400-500 years ago in the midst of the Great Dying somewhere the indigenous inhabitants of the New World suffered mortality rates on the order of 90-95%. This was almost certainly due to the facts of evolutionary history; the indigenous peoples had little defense against Eurasian pathogens. A result has been the reality that most of the New World is inhabited by European, African or mixed populations. But there are exceptions. In Mesoamerica there is still an indigenous dominated region from southern Mexico into the highlands of Guatemala. More substantially the highlands of the Andes, and…
Misyar: Prostitution By Another Name: Over the past year many Muslim converts have had the "opportunity" to discover something called a "misyar marriage", or Sunni version of temporary sexual relationship sanctioned by shariah law. From where I stand as a convert, the entire affair appears to be nothing more than prostitution by another name. I just find it interesting how in the over twenty five books on Islamic marriage that I read in English, not once was this little business about temporary marriage mentioned. The fact is that it was hidden from western students and converts to Islam…
The leader author of the PLoS Genetics paper Inferring the Demographic History of African Farmers and Pygmy Hunter-Gatherers Using a Multilocus Resequencing Data Set, which I blogged a few days ago left a clarifying comment: I just have few remarks. I do not expect that the Bantu expansions are responsible for the separation of Western and Eastern Pygmies. In a recent article in Current Biology, Paul Verdu and colleagues showed that the separation of Pygmy groups, but only those from the Western part of sub-Saharan Africa, diverged concomitantly with Bantu expansions (3,000-5,000 years ago…
Early modern human diversity suggests subdivided population structure and a complex out-of-Africa scenario: The interpretation of genetic evidence regarding modern human origins depends, among other things, on assessments of the structure and the variation of ancient populations. Because we lack genetic data from the time when the first anatomically modern humans appeared, between 200,000 and 60,000 years ago, instead we exploit the phenotype of neurocranial geometry to compare the variation in early modern human fossils with that in other groups of fossil Homo and recent modern humans.…
Genetic Future points to a new paper which suggests that inbreeding is declining over time. Their methodology involved surveying different age cohorts and noting the decreased levels of homozygosity among the youth. Dienekes points out that the use of living people might simply be confounding inferred mating patterns with the fact that homozygous individuals have a higher life expectancy. The plausibility of these two hypotheses varies based on how much weight you put on the shifting of mating patterns. In Consanguinity, Inbreeding, and Genetic Drift in Italy the authors used Catholic…
A few years ago PLoS Medicine published Eight Americas: Investigating Mortality Disparities across Races, Counties, and Race-Counties in the United States. The results were: -- Asian-Americans, per capita income of $21,566, life expectancy of 84.9 years. -- Northland low-income rural Whites, $17,758, 79 years. -- Middle America (mostly White), $24,640, 77.9 years. -- Low-income Whites in Appalachia, Mississippi Valley, $16,390, 75 years. -- Western American Indians, $10,029, 72.7 years. -- Black Middle America, $15,412, 72.9 years. -- Southern low-income…
Michael Blowhard is doing a 4-part interview with Greg Cochran on his new book, The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution. Part 1 is up.
Market forces affect patterns of polygyny in Uganda: Polygynous marriage is generally more beneficial for men than it is for women, although women may choose to marry an already-married man if he is the best alternative available. We use the theory of biological markets to predict that the likelihood of a man marrying polygynously will be a function of the level of resources that he has, the local sex ratio, and the resources that other men in the local population have. Using records of more than 1 million men in 56 districts from the 2002 Ugandan census, we show that polygynously married men…
Four Stone Hearth #26.
Check out this Harvard Crimson column on the death of the biological anthropology concentration: The root cause is a language barrier. Faculty members of the sciences and the humanities strongly adhere to the belief that the world can either be exclusively expressed in math or in words. Social science also splits off the world in this manner. Any student who is taking intermediate microeconomics needs to decide if he wants to take a class taught in English or in math. If the former, he is to take Economics 1010a, "Microeconomic Theory." If the latter, Economics 1011a, "Microeconomic Theory."…