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How widespread is Denisovan ancestry today?
Synopsis: A new paper contradicts earlier work, by suggesting a widespead Denisovan legacy in south China Last month, David Reich and colleagues [1] reported on estimates of Denisovan ancestry for...
View ArticleA story behind Manis
A couple of weeks ago, I pointed to new research dating a mastodon kill site from Manis, Washington, to around 13,800 years ago ("Bone of the victim mastodon"). Today I ran across an interesting...
View ArticleAn e-book library
Libraries have gone into e-book lending in a big way recently, and now Amazon is getting into the act with its Amazon Lending Library. I've been watching e-books pretty closely, and this seems like an...
View ArticleBraiding Denisovans into our ancestry
Dalton Luther reflects on the Denisovan admixture paper [1] that I wrote about earlier this week ("How widespread is Denisovan ancestry today?"), by referring to John Moore's work on ethnogenesis [2]....
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A reason for practical genomic education
Synopsis: A NY Times article explores the causes for STEM dropouts Photo credit: Graham Stanley on Flickr, creative commons. The New York Times devotes a long article to understanding why such a high...
View ArticleLooking for pseudo-books
Jason Baird Jackson posts some insights on how traditional journals can turn to open access tools (if not become open access), and how a startup online journal can strategize archiving for permanence:...
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Phylogeny capitulates to ontology
I was genome browsing this morning and noticed something strange going on at UCSC. Whoa, I thought! What's Denisova doing there listed with the yeasts? Just an accident of how they have categorized, of...
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The radiocarbon dating paper without a radiocarbon date
Synopsis: A redating of a maxilla from Kent's Cavern, UK, has a surprising omissionNature this week released two papers about European archaeological sites that come near the end of the Neandertals and...
View ArticleSocial texting
My essay in Anthropologies ("What's wrong with anthropology") is cited by Monalisa Gharavi in a review for Social Text of David Graeber's new book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years. I'm pointing to this...
View ArticleDiversity doesn't point reliably to source populations
Worth amplifying from Dienekes' Anthropology Blog, "Y chromosomes of the Bahamas": I like the line about there being substantially more Y-STR variation in E1b1a7a-U174 and E1b1ba8-U175 in the Bahamas...
View ArticleHow many scholars are copyright pirates of their own work?
Ryan Anderson has been interviewing anthropologist Jason Baird Jackson about open access publication ("Anthropology & Open Access: An Interview with Jason Baird Jackson (Part 2 of 3)". I like his...
View ArticleTuring and the apple
Folklorist Alan Garner has a poignant, short remembrance of Alan Turing: We had one thing in common: a fascination with Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, especially the transformation of the...
View Article"False-positive psychology"
Synopsis: Three psychologists look for solutions to researcher biases in publishing results.Razib Khan conveys a list of suggestions from a recent paper by Joseph Simmons and colleagues [1], concerned...
View ArticleDog won't hunt
Jerry Coyne points to the extreme changes made possible by artificial breeding of dogs within the last 150 years: "Dog breeding: the debasement of the American cocker spaniel". One can look at the...
View ArticleAnnals of self-experimentation
Mental Floss: "11 Scientists Who Experimented on Themselves". Werner Forssmann: In 1929 in the basement of the Eberswaled Hospital in Germany, surgical resident Werner Forssmann inserted a ureteral...
View ArticleMedieval methods
Psychologist Alison Gopnik, in MacLeans "In conversation: Alison Gopnik". Q: What’s the traditional approach to learning at a university, and how does it square with what experts know about how people...
View ArticleUpcoming appearance at AAA meetings
I will be at the meetings of the American Anthropological Association for the rest of this week, which are being held in Montreal, Canada. I'm presenting in an invited session organied by Karen...
View ArticleValue within, not unto
Anthropologies continues to publish some provocative essays. This month's edition focuses on anthropologists working in Appalachia. One of the themes of my essay, "What's wrong with anthropology?" is...
View ArticleAAA recap
I'm now back from the AAA meetings and mostly recovered. Daniel Lende's recap of many people's coverage of the meetings is an interesting place to start your morning. I'll post my own thoughts sometime...
View ArticleBones from the Torres Strait Islands
The BBC has an interesting article about the repatriation of skeletal remains from Torres Strait Islanders, held at the Natural History Museum, London: "Torres Stait islanders reclaim their ancestral...
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