In the deer family, genetic variability is greater within some species than between some genera. Does Fst tell us what we think it tells us? At almost any genetic marker (blood types, serum proteins, enzymes, mtDNA, etc.), a typical gene varies much more within than between human populations. And this is true not only for... Read More

Tay-Sachs child. In the 1980s, there was concern that Tay-Sachs heterozygotes might be mentally handicapped to a lesser degree. What is the evidence that Tay-Sachs heterozygotes have higher-than-normal intelligence? To date, it is inferential. Ashkenazi Jews have unusually high incidences of several genetic diseases that have similar effects on neural tissue. Such “diseases” may have... Read More

Drinking from the wrong chalice? By his mid-40s, Michael Jackson had skin like parchment. The end of 2010 is drawing nigh, and the time has come to review my predictions from last year. Brain growth genes Back in 2005, it was found that human populations vary considerably at two genes, ASPM and microcephalin, that control... Read More

Spread of farming in Europe. Der Spiegel This recent Der Spiegel article has stirred up comment in the blogosphere (Hawks 2010, Khan 2010, Sailer 2010). It argues that Europeans do not descend from the reindeer hunters who once roamed the continent during the last ice age. Nor do they descend from the more recent hunter-fisher-gatherers... Read More

A composite map of human genetic variation appeared on the cover of Cavalli-Sforza’s tome The History and Geography of Human Genes (1994). With the sudden end to his work on gene-culture co-evolution, Cavalli-Sforza returned to population genetics. Actually, he had never left it. He had always been looking for new population data and adding it... Read More

Inuit man making a soapstone carving. The 1970s saw L.L. Cavalli-Sforza become a renowned human geneticist. His meteoric rise was made possible by two textbooks co-authored with Walter Bodmer: The Genetics of Human Populations (1971) and Genetics, Evolution, and Man (1976), as well as several joint articles in leading journals. Nonetheless, his collaboration with Bodmer... Read More

Guido Orefice (Roberto Benigni) explaining Italian race science to a class of schoolchildren. La vita è bella What were Cavalli-Sforza’s initial views on race? The question does not come up in his publications before the 1960s, so we can only presume that his beliefs were like those of his peers, particularly Italian anthropologists. But just... Read More

Germ warfare was a priority for both Allied and Axis scientists. Was one of them a young L.L. Cavalli-Sforza? With an academic life spanning almost half a century, L.L. Cavalli-Sforza has become perhaps the foremost authority on human population genetics. He first entered this field in the early 1940s. As a medical student at the... Read More

Cavalli-Sforza with Kistler Prize (2002). The paths of Glory lead … Human Biology has interviewed Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, probably the best-known human geneticist (Manni, 2010). His worry? The growing rift between anthropology and biology: Why this retreat from biology? Ask almost any anthropologist. You’ll be told that there is much more genetic variation within human... Read More

How long have Europeans been in Europe? Clearly, their ancestors were not Neanderthals, except for an admixture of 1 to 4%. What about the modern humans who came about 35,000 years ago as hunter-gatherers? Or did they too die out? Were they replaced by Middle-Eastern farmers some 9,000 to 3,000 years ago? This is an... Read More

The online journal Evolutionary Psychology has published my article “The Roman State and genetic pacification.” The following is the abstract: Please feel free to offer your comments. Reference Frost, P. (2010). The Roman State and genetic pacification, Evolutionary Psychology, 8(3), 376-389, http://www.epjournal.n

Expansion of modern humans out of Africa and within Africa. Mellars (2006). When we discuss the origins of modern humans, the term ‘Out of Africa’ is a bit misleading. Our common ancestors came not from Africa as a whole but from a relatively small area somewhere in East Africa. Beginning around 80,000 years ago, this... Read More

Did the Neanderthal gene pool overlap with the modern human gene pool? In other words, are some modern humans genetically closer to some Neanderthals than they are to other modern humans? The answer is ‘yes’ if we look at individual DNA sequences, as shown in the first graph (above): Thus, the largest difference observed between... Read More

This year, look for advances in the following areas: Brain growth genes Back in 2005, it was found that human populations vary considerably at two genes, ASPM and microcephalin, that control the growth of brain tissue. The finding seemed to be ‘huge’ in its implications. Then, it all fizzled out. No correlation could be found... Read More

On December 6, 1989, a 25-year-old man walked into Montreal’s École polytechnique and murdered fourteen women. The event is still being debated … twenty years later. We know the immediate cause. The murderer, Marc Lépine, felt that places like the École polytechnique were training women to take jobs that had been mainly held by men... Read More

I once knew an African student who told me that his language had no words for “good” or “evil”. When the missionaries translated their materials into his language, they had to write “Jesus is beautiful” instead of “Jesus is good.” This sort of semantic evolution has occurred in all human languages. People have expressed new... Read More

Dienekes is arguing that Middle Eastern farmers demographically replaced Europe’s original population between 8,000 and 3,000 years ago. This argument seems to be proven by two recent papers that show no genetic continuity between Europe’s late hunter-gatherers and early farmers. The continent’s current gene pool seems to owe very little to the original Upper Paleolithic... Read More

Natural selection has altered at least 7% of our genome over the last 40 thousand years. And it has been doing so at an accelerating rate, particularly after agriculture replaced hunting and gathering less than ten thousand years ago. At that time, the rate of genetic change may have risen over a hundred-fold (Hawks et... Read More

One of the mysteries of anthropology is the reported presence of ‘blond’ Inuit in the western Canadian Arctic, specifically on and around Victoria Island. They were first noticed by the explorer Sir John Franklin and by Alaskan whalers. These impressions were confirmed by the anthropologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson for Victoria Island and by the anthropologist Knud... Read More

Human genomics The Neanderthal genome will be fully sequenced. There will be no evidence of interbreeding with modern humans (although proponents of the multiregional model will remain unconvinced). By comparing this genome with ours, we may reconstruct the genome of archaic humans who lived almost a million years ago and who were ancestral to Neanderthals... Read More