Piraha Indians, Recursion, Phonemic Inventory Size and the Evolutionary Significance of Simplicity
Daniel Everett has a new book out that will surely stir more controversy around Piraha Indians, Chomskyan recursion and the evolution of human language. I haven’t read this book yet, but The Chronicle of Higher Education has an extensive coverage…
American Indian Uniqueness: Linguistics and Genetics
Journal of Linguistic Relationship 5 (2011): 130-134. Similarities among Languages of the Americas: An Exploration of the WALS Evidence Wichmann, Søren, Eric W. Holman, Dietrich Stauffer, and Cecil H. Brown. Abstract. An exploration of WALS (i.e. the World Atlas of…
The Origin of mtDNA haplogroup B: 9-bp deletion in America, Asia and Africa
PLoS ONE 7(2) 2012: e32179. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0032179 Complete Mitochondrial DNA Analysis of Eastern Eurasian Haplogroups Rarely Found in Populations of Northern Asia and Eastern Europe Derenko M., Malyarchuk B., Denisova G., Perkova M., Rogalla U., et al. Abstract. With the aim…
American Indians, Neanderthals and Denisovans: PCA and ADMIXTURE
Dienekes continued his search for “archaic admixture” in world populations. This time he blended ADMIXTURE and PCA approaches to plot 5 composite populations detected by ADMIXTURE in the Harvard HGDP set. American Indians are back in. The ADMIXTURE plot replicates…
American Indians, Neanderthals and Denisovans: Insights from PCA Views
Dienekes posted a SNP PCA showing the relative position of a sample of modern human populations from the Harvard HGDP along the axes formed by Chimpanzees, Denisovans and Neanderthals. On the broad-view PCA, the red dot indicates Chimpanzees, the green…
American Indian HLA Genes on Easter Island
Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 19 March 2012 vol. 367 no. 1590 812-819 doi: 10.1098/rstb.2011.0319 The Polynesian Gene Pool: An Early Contribution by Amerindians to Easter Island Erik Thorsby Abstract. It is now generally accepted that Polynesia was first settled by…
Archaic Morphology and American Indian Biological Variability
On the heels of my last post about the possibly systematic trend to ignore American Indian samples in the studies of worldwide variation, there’s a new paper dealing with the discovery of human remains with archaic morphology as late as…
Are American Indian Populations Subject to Sampling Bias in Human Origins Research?
The latest post by Dienekes re-kindled an observation that I wanted to make for a long time. Dienekes applied TreeMix software to ADMIXTURE components derived from HapMap-3 populations and created a tree with Sub-Saharan, East African, Northwest African, Gedrosia, Southwest…
Admixture: An Amerindian Component in Eurasian Populations
About a year ago, one of genome bloggers, Diogenes, discovered, using ADMIXTURE, an intriguing “Amerindian” component in a wide range of East and West Eurasian populations. Here are the results of his ADMIXTURE runs. Grey represents the component that’s modal…
Solutrean and Clovis
John Hawks complains about the hype around the book by Dennis Stanford and Bruce Bradley’s long-awaited book Across Atlantic Ice: The Origin of America’s Clovis Culture. Posing as an honest academic only interested in facts and not hype, Hawks writes…
Recent Comments