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The ground of human evolution trembled with the discovery of a tiny woman on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003.
The X is the second biggest of all the human chromosomes.
mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is only passed from mother to child.
Mitochondria exist in their millions in the busy milieu inside cells, and so the chances of their surviving the onslaught of time is higher.
But the Neanderthals still clocked up a longer run than we have so far. We
anatomically modern humans are generally thought to have evolved primarily in eastern Africa around 200,000 years ago, and emerged out of Africa in our own exodus sometime in the last 100,000 years. This number inches up every few years, as more specimens are found.
descendants. The last common ancestor of us and them is thought to have existed around 600,000 years before today. Svante Pääbo’s digging within Neanderthal 1’s arm bone was the first step in answering this. They extracted 0.4g of matter—the weight of a decent pinch of salt—from the section of precision-butchered bone, and from it pulled fragments of mtDNA. This was, in 1997, the most ancient DNA yet recovered. Much of that first study was devoted to showing that it was possible, and that the DNA extracted was not contamination.
Neanderthal DNA, the age of the divergence between us and them was put at between 550,000 and 690,000 years ago.
We now know that if a Neanderthal came across a frisky boar, he or she would be revolted, unlike me, who remains utterly unmoved.
But what DNA analysis revealed more categorically than anything else was that we had sex with them, repeatedly, probably as soon as these two peoples met, and every time afterward.
Humans are both horny and mobile.
For me, a solid 2.7 percent of my total DNA is drawn from these people (which rather uninterestingly, according to their data, is exactly average for most Europeans;
If you are broadly of European descent, then it is almost certain that you also carry around Neanderthal DNA.
The observation that there is less Neanderthal DNA on our Xs implies that the first encounters we had with them that resulted in procreation were male Neanderthals with female Homo sapiens.
Denisovans.
The discrepancy is found in our chromosome 2—the second largest single chunk of DNA we carry.
The seven billion of us alive today are, according to all the evidence available to us, the last remaining group of human great apes from a set of at least four that existed 50,000 years ago.
This transition to a domestic life fundamentally changed us in our bones and our genes, as we’ll see soon.
All this means is that we made assumptions about patterns of migration that were much more linear and spread like ripples, rather than the picture that has emerged in the last couple of years, which says that we moved in all directions all the time, and laid our hats and flowed our genes in a matted crisscross, instead of a nice clean radiation.
DNA also reveals behavior. Culture can become embedded in our cells just as it gets buried in the floors of caves, bogs, and dwellings.
Except if you’re of European descent. Your lactase continues to work throughout your life.
Genes change culture, culture changes genes.
In Italy and Spain, selection favored the short, possibly because of colder weather and poor diets.
But, according to the genetics, there wasn’t a point where a group of genetically similar people spread into the extremities of the British Isles and settled into a culture that we now call Celtic. That word is a modern invention of a presumed people that isn’t reflected in Britain’s DNA.
There have only been thirty-five generations of Icelanders.
does, but what redundancy is built into our
The mark of the plague is in our genes.
pneumonic and septicemic. The population of Europe
The Taíno were a people spread across multiple chiefdoms around the Caribbean and Florida. Based on cultural and language similarities, we think that they had probably separated from earlier populations from South American lands, now Guyana and Trinidad.
So it was terra firma all the way from Alaska to Russia, and all the way down south to the Aleutians—a crescent chain of volcanic islands that speckle the north Pacific.
Instead, the working theory is that people may well have gone south in boats, bouncing all the way down the western coast; this is faster, and a similar consistency of climates and geography along the western seaboard buffers against a constant need to adapt to ever-changing environments.
howc americasa were populated
All Native Americans, north and south, have versions of genes relating to diet that are suited to their current environments, but born of an ancient population subject to local adaptation in the frozen north, thousands of years ago.
DNA is viewed as part of the body, which of course it is, and this makes it sacred, too. It ties a person’s identity to the land and to their ancestors.
The answer was merely 600 years ago. Sometime at the end of the thirteenth century lived a man or woman from whom all Europeans could trace ancestry, if records permitted (which they don’t).
One fifth of people alive a millennium ago in Europe are the ancestors of no one alive today.
the most recent common ancestor of everyone alive today on Earth lived only around 3,400 years ago.
You are. And you don’t even need to spit in a tube—your majesty.
We’ve been looking for Richard in some
The misidentification of Jack the Ripper
He wasn’t the first serial killer, but is one that coincided with the birth of mass media, and set the ghoulish tone for our modern obsession with murderers.
of her life before moving to England, as so many
As far as genetics is concerned, race does not exist.
In 1883, he invented the word eugenics.
Tay-Sachs is not a Jewish disease.
There’s no such thing as a Jewish disease, because Jews are not a genetically distinct group of people.
Science sets aside the bias that we lug around, and separates what feels right from what is.
There are several problems with the idea that slavery bred superhumans. The first is that 400 years is not enough time to establish particular alleles with that effect.
