Articles tagged Human Evolution and Variation
(11 results)

Congratulations to the winners of the Editors’ Choice Awards for outstanding articles published in GENETICS in 2021! The journal’s Editorial Board considered a diverse range of articles, finding many papers worthy of recognition. After much deliberation, they settled on one exceptional article for each of the three award categories: molecular genetics, population and evolutionary genetics,…

Machine learning and access to ever-expanding databases improves genomic prediction of human traits. In theory, a scientist could predict your height using just your genome sequence. In practice, though, this is still the stuff of science fiction. It’s not only your genes that affect height—environment also plays a role—but the larger problem is that height…

Study of huge Ancestry.com pedigree suggests assortative mating may have inflated previous estimates of life span heritability. Although long life tends to run in families, genetics has far less influence on life span than previously estimated, according to a new analysis published in GENETICS.  Ruby et al. used a data set of over 400 million…

Watch presentations from the conference, including talks from Katie Peichel and Jonathan Pritchard. Now that the dust has settled from the whirlwind of the first ever standalone GSA Population, Evolutionary, and Quantitative Genetics Conference (PEQG18), we’re delighted to be able to share the audio and synched slides from the Keynote and Crow Award sessions. We’re…

Archaeologists have long known how to extract millennia-old stories from a single tooth buried in an ancient ruin—and now geneticists have the tools to join them. Advances made in the last several years have enabled researchers to sequence tiny amounts of DNA preserved in very old specimens, such as the material inside a tooth from…

Over three centuries, as many as a million enslaved people were shipped to the Colombian port of Cartagena. From this hub of the slave trade, European colonists took Africans to labor in many places across the Americas, including the gold mines of the Chocó region. Today, people from Chocó often proudly identify as Afro-Colombian, while…

Despite being covered by a massive, permanent ice sheet, Greenland has been continuously inhabited by humans for over a thousand years. Most modern Greenlanders are Inuit whose ancestors migrated eastward from Canada around 1000 AD, bringing technology like kayaks and dogsleds. They eventually settled on the coasts of the world’s largest island, hunting whales and…

Well over 15,000 years ago, a man and a bear died in a cave in the Jura Mountains in modern-day Switzerland. That was the end of the story for millennia—until their remains were discovered in 1954 by researchers investigating the cave. Further work in the 1990s uncovered the fact that the man had, in fact,…

Geography and ecology are key factors that have influenced the genetic makeup of human groups in southern Africa, according to new research discussed in the journal GENETICS, a publication of the Genetics Society of America. By investigating the ancestries of twenty-two KhoeSan groups, including new samples from the Nama and the ≠Khomani, researchers conclude that…

The Neanderthal genome included harmful mutations that made the hominids around 40% less reproductively fit than modern humans, according to estimates published in the latest issue of GENETICS. Non-African humans inherited some of this genetic burden when they interbred with Neanderthals, though much of it has been lost over time. The results suggest that these harmful…

Short-read sequencing has fueled the acceleration of genetic research But though these next-generation methods are fast and efficient, they can’t do everything well. One important area in which short-reads fall short is detecting structural variants (SV), where chunks of the genome are deleted, inserted, repeated, inverted, or in some other way shuffled around compared to…