Purported Yeti scalp at Khumjung Monastery (source). Has DNA been retrieved from it for the Oxford-Lausanne Collateral Hominid Project? Over a year ago, geneticist Bryan Sykes launched the Oxford-Lausanne Collateral Hominid Project: The aim was to retrieve DNA from alleged remains of Yeti, Bigfoot, and the like. At the time, I was skeptical that anything... Read More

Just horsing around? Or is there also a political message? It’s year’s end, and to date I’ve written nothing on the three themes I promised to blog about back in January. One reason was the need to comment on certain unforeseen events, like Phil Rushton’s death and the confirmation that Europeans became white-skinned long after... Read More

Remains of archaic hominins from southwest China (Curnoe et al, 2012). They were around when villages and towns were arising in the Middle East. Recent findings have confirmed the ‘Out of Africa’ model of human origins, but only in part. The model diverges from actual prehistory on two main points. One is that modern humans... Read More

“Neanderthal� admixture seems to be higher in West Africans than in East Africans. How come? (Source) When modern humans began their expansion from a small core somewhere in East Africa, the continent probably had several different archaic populations. It now seems that one of them was related to the Neanderthals in Europe. In an ongoing... Read More

Modern humans entered the Americas from northern Eurasia. As they entered tropical environments farther south, they had to evolve new genetic adaptations from scratch. They no longer had the ones their remote forbearers had back in Africa. (Source) OK, so modern humans have archaic admixture, and the degree of admixture seems to be highest among... Read More

Broken Hill (Kabwe) skull. In Africa, very archaic hominins persisted into recent times. Were archaic hominins still roaming over parts of Africa when farming villages began to form in the Middle East? I raised this question in my last post. But others are now raising it too: A new convert to this view is the... Read More

Map of Nigeria, showing the location of the Iwo Eleru rock shelter and the Iwo Eleru skulls. (Harvati et al., 2011) Sub-Saharan Africans have an unusual complex of dental features: The two low-frequency traits appear to be “derived.� They seem to have developed in sub-Saharan Africa after modern humans began to spread to other continents.... Read More

Yakuzas (Japanese mafia). The largest Yakuza syndicate is over 70% Burakumin. Source Here are a few themes I wish to write about during 2012: Archaic admixture: A wild goose chase? With the discovery that Europeans and Asians are 1 to 4% Neanderthal, there has been a rush to learn more. What genes are involved? Does... Read More

Andaman Islanders. Related peoples once inhabited the coastal regions of southern, southeastern, and eastern Asia. The past year brought two major advances: the long awaited sequencing of the Neanderthal genome and the genetic sequencing of an another archaic human, the Denisovans of East Asia, whose existence had previously been unsuspected. The bottom line comes down... Read More

With the onset of the glacial maximum c. 20,000 years ago, and the ponding up of the Ob River, humans circulated less easily from one end of the steppe-tundra belt to the other. This barrier separated ancestral Europeans from ancestral East Asians. Outside Africa, people seem to have the same amount of Neanderthal admixture, be... Read More

Expansion of modern humans out of Africa and within Africa. Mellars (2006). When we discuss the origins of modern humans, the term ‘Out of Africa’ is a bit misleading. Our common ancestors came not from Africa as a whole but from a relatively small area somewhere in East Africa. Beginning around 80,000 years ago, this... Read More

How did archaic humans evolve into the different populations of Homo sapiens we see today? The answer has long divided anthropologists. Some opt for the ‘out-of-Africa’ model; others for the multiregional model. According to the out-of-Africa model, we all descend from a small group that existed some 100,000 to 80,000 years ago somewhere in eastern... Read More