Science and Humor

The wife is at her monthly book club meeting, and the local PBS station is doing its auction, and it isn’t quite time for the boxing matches.

Hence, bonus blogging time!

Science There were some interesting articles about human evolution.
First, here is a somewhat technical take on this from Antropology.net

Dienekes, Blaine, Razib, and Simon have all chimed in introducing us to a new paper from the American Journal of Human Genetics. It seems like a really interesting one, one that takes mtDNA to construct a phylogeny used to investigate what was happening to early Homo sapiens genetic diversity and populations within Africa. This study focuses on what was going on before the migrations out of Africa. The paper is titled, “The Dawn of Human Matrilineal Diversity,” and is open access. The research has already made it all the way onto some of my favorite news sources, such as Digg and Slashdot, but the big timers like CNN, BBC, the Economist, and the AFP are also carrying word.

The researchers constructed a mitochondrial phylogeny of 624 sub-Saharan individuals. They paid close attention to what’s going on with the phylogeny of the Khoisan, because previous research like Knight et al.’s study on another loci, the Y-chromosome has shown that the Khoisan are carriers of oldest-diverging Y haplogroup, the Y-haplogroup A, indicating they may represent the deepest clade of modern humans. Recent research identified that the pygmy Khoisan populations share an ancestral and indigenous lineage of mtDNA with a neighboring population, the Bantu and this new study confirmed this. [...]

The press is suggesting that this phenomenon indicated humans “started down the path of evolving into two separate species.” But that’s not true, they missed the part of the paper where populations came back together as a single, pan-African population about 40,000 years ago [...]

What this ultimately indicates is that eastern Africa may have truly been the cradle of humanity, at least the maternal cradle of modern humans. Which matches the fossil record, since some of the oldest remains of early human remains are also found in Eastern Africa, such as BOU-VP-16/1 and Omo 1 from Ethiopia.

I like this blog: though the jargon is a bit over my head at times, the writing is good enough to where I can at least get a flavor of what is going on and to see where popular accounts are in error.
Interestingly enough, this popular account makes the statement that the antropology.net author doesn’t like, but indeed quotes the section of the article that shows that the African populations indeed merged back together.

Of course, LiberalsMustDie has their own take on things; they claim that we indeed split!

Here is another “fun” BBC science article that points out that we almost didn’t make it here!

The study suggests that at one point there may have been only 2,000 individuals alive as our species teetered on the brink.

This means that, for a while, humanity was in a perilous state, vulnerable to disease, environmental disasters and conflict. If any of these factors had turned against us, we would not be here.

The research also suggests that humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) made their first journey out of Africa as recently as 70,000 years ago.

Unlike our close genetic relatives – chimps – all humans have virtually identical DNA. In fact, one group of chimps can have more genetic diversity than all of the six billion humans alive today.

It is thought we spilt from a common ancestor with chimps 5-6 million years ago, more than enough time for substantial genetic differences to develop.

The absence of those differences suggests to some researchers that the human gene pool was reduced to a small size in the recent past, thereby wiping out genetic variation between current populations. [...]

Some Humor: