The Genetics of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

Between the 16th and 19th centuries, approximately 12.5 million people were violently deported from their homes in Africa to the Americas by slavers. As current events have shown, the destruction of communities, cultures and families have had everlasting ramifications which are felt a century and half later. Some of the less tangible pains is the...

Polynesians Contacted Native Americans Long Before European Contact

We've had some ideas that prehistoric Polynesian expansions made contact with Native Americans before European contact. For example, the sweet potato, a staple of Polynesian diets for hundreds of years, made its way to Andean culture where it was domesticated. And we've identified that some current Rapa Nui people have Native American DNA dating back...

One Genetic Risk Factor for Severe Respiratory Distress from COVID-19 Derives from Neanderthals

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,...

4,000 Years Of Conquerors Left Little Genetic Impact in Near East

Without a doubt, the Near East has been a linguistic, cultural and religious crossroad for many thousands of years. This area has had many different rulers, including the Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Christian European Crusaders, Arabs, and Ottomans. Many of these groups instilled everlasting cultural changes on the local population, including changes to...

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...

A new paper in Nature Communications documents a strange bottleneck event occurring about 7,000 years ago, where the genetic diversity of the Y chromosome completely collapsed leaving about one male to 17 females. We all know the agricultural revolution happened around 12,000 years ago. Societies grew in size and many organized around patrilineal kinships. Turning...

First Native American Population Was Just Around 250 People

No one knows exactly the population of Native Americans when contact with Europeans occured. There are some estimates claiming there were 18 million in North America and upwards to 40 million in the combined continents. It’s estimated that the population in the Americas dropped by almost 90% within a few hundred years after the arrival of...

A Modern Human Genetic Adaptation for Diving

The Bajau people of Indonesia are known as "Sea Nomads," because we've known that for thousands of years they live in houseboats, sustaining their diets after spending hours each day hunting fish or other sea creatures underwater. Bajau divers can spend up to 13 minutes free diving to 70 m depths underwater all with only...

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...

The Yamnaya Horsemen & Root of Proto-Indo-European Language

Proto-Indo-European or PIE is the term coined for a ancestral language to the group of languages from Europe and parts of Asia, like English, Spanish, Hindi, Russian and Persian. No written record of PIE exists. We infer PIE because many of these languages have similar words, like mother, indicating they share a common root language....