The measurement of diversity seems to be % of nucleotide difference, does that account for how some nucleotides may be more significant than others? I.e. quantity vs. quality? Does that matter?
If person A and person B have 1000 phenotypically irrelevant genes different, and person A and person C have 5 very significant genes different, who is really more similar?
Awesome article. Are there any credible hypothesis about why there was a population bottleneck - famine, disease, war/inter-group violence? The genetics stuff is so interesting but I wish there were more to fill in the blanks about how our ancient ancestors lived.
So fascinating about Denisovan genes and autism. Anything else you'd recommend on immunity and our ancestral DNA, like a book?
Question: Are you aware of any work looking at phenotypic diversity among the the genotypically "very-diverse" group? Especially for traits that we know to be very heritable? Before reading this piece, I would have guessed there would be more phenotypic diversity in the "very-not-diverse" group that expanded and adapted to so many different environments around the globe. But I would also expect phenotypic and genotypic diversity to be correlated.
Awesome read and very fascinating.
The measurement of diversity seems to be % of nucleotide difference, does that account for how some nucleotides may be more significant than others? I.e. quantity vs. quality? Does that matter?
Might be an ignorant way of putting it, but:
If person A and person B have 1000 phenotypically irrelevant genes different, and person A and person C have 5 very significant genes different, who is really more similar?
Awesome article. Are there any credible hypothesis about why there was a population bottleneck - famine, disease, war/inter-group violence? The genetics stuff is so interesting but I wish there were more to fill in the blanks about how our ancient ancestors lived.
So fascinating about Denisovan genes and autism. Anything else you'd recommend on immunity and our ancestral DNA, like a book?
no recs so far. re bottleneck, there's no good hypothesis imo. perhaps stuff on the other side of the sahara?
Thanks, this was a fascinating read.
Question: Are you aware of any work looking at phenotypic diversity among the the genotypically "very-diverse" group? Especially for traits that we know to be very heritable? Before reading this piece, I would have guessed there would be more phenotypic diversity in the "very-not-diverse" group that expanded and adapted to so many different environments around the globe. But I would also expect phenotypic and genotypic diversity to be correlated.
One of these intuitions must be wrong, right?
Is it a 60ka time point for the expansion or 120ka-60ka? I see both quoted I think. And is this mostly evidenced by mitochondrial clocking?
I am African and Neanderthal!
Why was there only one out of Africa event for modern humans?
there were more than one. the earlier ones left no impact
1. Why weren't there later out of Africa events? Especially during the era when the Sahara was savanna grassland.
2. Did the Neanderthals and Denisovans originate in Africa also?
Convergent evolution is always a confounding aspect of judging phylogeny from appearances.