Search Results for: neanderthal

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The (Not so) Secret Life of our Inner Neanderthal

We’re still grappling with the astonishing 2010 discovery that Neanderthals had mated with modern humans [1]. Now two new studies published earlier this year [2, 3] have identified the Neanderthal contributions to our present-day genomes, and also provided evidence that our Neanderthal legacy may be a mixed bag of beneficial and deleterious traits. Neanderthal-Homo sapiens Sex: Does it Matter? The sequencing of the complete Neanderthal … Continue reading The (Not so) Secret Life of our Inner Neanderthal

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Blog, Special Edition: What does a scientist do?

What Does an Evolutionary Biologist Do?

How do you introduce yourself, scientifically? My name is Mia Miyagi, and I’m an evolutionary biologist, which means that I study how the process of evolution works and how that process has generated the incredible biodiversity that we have today. More specifically, I’m a theoretical population geneticist. Population genetics is how we think about evolution and variation across entire populations. In other words, how individuals … Continue reading What Does an Evolutionary Biologist Do?

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Blog, Opinion

How Science and Genetics are Reshaping the Race Debate of the 21st Century

by Vivian Chou figures by Daniel Utter Donald Trump’s election as the 45th President of the United States has been marked by the brewing storms of racial conflicts. A rise in racial incidents ensued in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s victory in November 2016. Since the beginning of 2017, over 100 bomb threats have been made against Jewish community centers and schools. Trump’s travel ban, signed in … Continue reading How Science and Genetics are Reshaping the Race Debate of the 21st Century

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Blog, Uncategorized

Earliest stone tools discovered don’t sink current theories

Human evolution is a tricky subject, with very little information on who our ancestors were and what they were like. By convention, researchers have defined the evolutionary group Homo (the genus of modern humans) as the first of our ancestors to make and use stone tools; the oldest members of this group, Homo habilis (literally ‘skillful man’) are thought to have existed around 2 million … Continue reading Earliest stone tools discovered don’t sink current theories

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Can we send a message to the future with DNA?

Ever wonder how we can relay messages to future populations? So do scientists. Recent news suggests DNA embedded in glass might be the answer to efficiently storing information for millions of years! Yet, storing large amounts of information is still limited by the price of DNA synthesis. And who knows what infrastructure we’ll have to read DNA millions of years from now? DNA is currently … Continue reading Can we send a message to the future with DNA?

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Tibetans adapted to high altitudes thanks to an extinct group of humans

How did groups of modern humans inhabiting high-altitude environments adapt to live in such low oxygen levels? Some, such as the Andeans, cope with these conditions by increasing their capacity for oxygen. Tibetans have adapted by doing the opposite but have evolved ways to use the scarce oxygen more efficiently. They have a unique version of a gene called EPAS1 that is thought to reduce … Continue reading Tibetans adapted to high altitudes thanks to an extinct group of humans

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Past human-like species were even more diverse than previously thought

A DNA sequence from a hominin in Northern Spain 400,000 years ago reveals the diversity of human-like species living in Eurasia just prior to the evolution of modern humans. Excitingly, the specimen is more similar to the Denisovans, previously thought to live only in central Asia, than the Neanderthals known to live in Europe and Western Asia. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute reveal a … Continue reading Past human-like species were even more diverse than previously thought

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The Dawn of Homo Sapiens: Our Family Tree Grows Messier Still

— To unearth the secrets of our human origins, scientists are delving deep into the prehistoric record to find the last common ancestor of great apes and humans, while simultaneously looking in more recent history to define when and where modern humans (modern in terms of anatomy and behavior) first appeared. This endeavor, which has traditionally entailed years of painstaking digging for fossils and archaeological relics in often far-flung places, has lately received a welcome boost from the advent of novel genetic tools that enable the reconstruction of complete human genomes (a genome being the complete set of genetic material contained in an organism). Newly published work in the journals Nature and Science describing novel human fossils and genomes have now added to our small but growing appreciation of the complexity of our common evolutionary ancestries. Continue reading The Dawn of Homo Sapiens: Our Family Tree Grows Messier Still

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