Videos of the week
I've been sent two videos this week by several readers. I post them here together -- I've never embedded video before, and after some experimentation I didn't get it to load very well on the blog, so...
View ArticleLate Miocene fossil apes from Africa
Time for some attention to the Miocene apes. I've neglected them for the last few years, and there have been some interesting finds. I don't mean the stuff that most people find interesting --...
View ArticleBeneath the dawn chumans
Thomas Mailund covers some recent modeling of the human-chimpanzee divergence: "Doubts about complex speciation between humans and chimpanzees". Here's the bottom line: Voilà! No more need for a...
View ArticleMolecular systematics and species trees
I'd like to point readers to a recent essay in Evolution, by Scott V. Edwards, titled, "Is a new and general theory of molecular systematics emerging?"Edwards covers some of the recent progress and...
View ArticleArdi snippets
The Discovery Channel has posted some short video snippets of the upcoming Ardipithecus special. I was sent a link to Owen Lovejoy telling us a "Genetic Caution". I thought it might be about the...
View ArticleReviewing the clock, and phylogenomics
After reading yesterday's penguin post, one of my readers thought I'd given up the ghost on the molecular clock. But notice the bottom line of that message: those ancient penguins didn't tell us any...
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Unbelievable Y chromosome differences between humans and chimpanzees
Holy crap!Indeed, at 6 million years of separation, the difference in MSY gene content in chimpanzee and human is more comparable to the difference in autosomal gene content in chicken and human, at...
View ArticleA low human mutation rate may throw everything out of whack
Last week, a paper looking for the genetic causes of Miller syndrome reported the whole genomes of four members of a single family: two siblings with the disorder and their two parents without. The...
View ArticleReturn of the Neanderchimps
Back in 2005, I reviewed the first description of fossil chimpanzee teeth, from the Middle Pleistocene of the Kapthurin Formation, Kenya, dating to around 500,000 years ago. At the time, I noted that...
View ArticleWere there Cretaceous anthropoids? Part 1. The problem in a nutshell
The evolution of early primates is a field that has developed rapidly in the last fifteen years. Many of the central issues were reviewed earlier this year by Blythe Williams, Richard Kay and E....
View ArticleWere there Cretaceous anthropoids? Part 2: What is an anthropoid?
This is the second post in a series, "Were there Cretaceous anthropoids?"Before I go too far, I think I'd better make sure everybody knows what an anthropoid is. The living anthropoids include Old...
View ArticleArdipithecus challenge explication: the molecular clock
I've had a chance to mull over the exchange between Esteban Sarmiento and Tim White and colleagues in Science this week (Sarmiento 2010, White et al. 2010). It is not really fair to rely on brief...
View ArticleTime to revise the mtDNA timescale?
Krzysztof Cyran and Marek Kimmel (2010) have presented a revised set of estimates of the human mtDNA most recent common ancestor (MRCA). It's an interesting theoretical paper, written for the purpose...
View ArticleWhat is the human mutation rate?
Last spring I wrote about a study that used whole-genome comparisons between parents and offspring to estimate the rate of per-genome mutation in humans ("A low human mutation rate may throw everything...
View ArticleMore on the mutation rate
I've received several questions over the last few weeks about human genome-wide mutation rates. Some people are noticing heterogeneity in mutation rate estimates among family trios (spurred by a recent...
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