
A golden age of ancient DNA science begins - diodorus
http://phys.org/news/2016-03-golden-age-ancient-dna-science.html
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noname123
I attended a really good guest lecture by Dr.David Reich (with additional work
also by Dr.Nick Patterson) on analyzing ancient DNA.

"Massive migration from the [Anatolian] steppe is a source for Indo-European
languages in Europe"

I can't find the slides/video recording anywhere (it's a shame because it was
the most accessible presentation on genetics I found to everyone).

Dr.Reich didn't go into too much technical details during the lecture; the
audience was to a bunch of undergrad and first year grad students interested
in computational biology; and guest lecturers are PIs around the Boston area
who are trying to recruit for students into their labs.

However, he did hint some of analysis they did to construct the migration path
came from the distribution of particular classes of metabolic genes for
different diets; meaning, early human beings can be classified as farmers
(grain-based diet), hunter-gatherers (raw meat) and nomadic people (consume
more animal products, lactose); by collecting samples collected in Europe,
carbon-dating them and constructing phylogeny tree (most percentage of shared
single nucleotide polymorphism are classified as siblings, least likely amount
of base mutations to the target offsprings are labeled as parents) amongst the
samples and classifying them amongst these three diet-based cohorts and
sample-collection sites, you can begin to construct a likely migratory path.

Also Dr.Riech also made an interesting point that the reason why most ancient
DNA research is done in Europe and not really in Africa which would seem more
logical is because: most grants to do the work come from European scientific
agencies who have mandates to fund their own anthropology and culture studies
(an unintended "Eurocentric" side-affect of research grants).

Here is the Nature article instead:
[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v522/n7555/abs/nature14...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v522/n7555/abs/nature14317.html)

Non-paywall version:
[http://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.02783.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.02783.pdf)

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danieltillett
One of the other reasons is DNA survives best at low temperature.
Unfortunately there are not many places in Africa where the temperature is low
enough to have DNA survive 10,000s of years.

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gardano
As a rank amateur, I have a question. Is the question of speciation a useful
construct anymore? I mean, birds are dinosaurs and (some) dinosaurs were
birds.

There is Neanderthal and Denisovian DNA in Homo Sapiens. Is the definition of
what is a species tantamount to the legendary medieval argument of how many
angels can dance on the head of a pin?

I'm not trying to be snarky. I'm curious as to the usefulness of the way we're
approaching categorisation.

Genuine, but ill-informed, question.

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danieltillett
Species is a complex concept which does not always fit into nice simple
buckets. You might find ring species interesting [1].

1\.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species)

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gardano
Fascinating. Thanks!

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tokenadult
I'd appreciate comments from someone who follows this research about what John
Hawks says about ancient DNA studies and their recent findings. I get the
impression that he is reaching some different conclusions from the author
whose essay was kindly submitted here.

[http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/neandertals/neandertal_d...](http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/neandertals/neandertal_dna/neandertal-
early-modern-gene-flow-kuhlwilm-2016.html)

~~~
danieltillett
Not really - they are just focusing on different aspects of the story.

What I find most amazing is the author can present scientific evidence that
Neanderthals were different species and the consequence of what this means is
completely ignored.

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amasad
If Humans and Neanderthals are that far apart does it mean that higher
intelligence evolved independently in multiple species? If Neanderthals had
languages capabilities (which I think is debated) then that may mean that
human-like intelligence is not all that rare that we think it is. What
implications does this have on intelligence evolving somewhere else in the
galaxy (if any)?

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r0muald
Original article here: [https://theconversation.com/a-golden-age-of-ancient-
dna-scie...](https://theconversation.com/a-golden-age-of-ancient-dna-science-
begins-56582) with more than a few comments raising questions about the actual
meaning of the x% figures given in this article.

