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A friend of mine proudly told me recently that she’d purchased an unabridged edition of The History and Geography of Human Genes. Turns out that there are some affordable used copies floating around (under $50, like the Atari 2600!). Flipping through the old unabridged edition I had to admit: a lot of the assertions derived from classical autosomal markers hold true. It might be that all you really need to get “up to speed” is an annotated version. Also, I’d get rid of the synthetic maps, which no one uses anymore (there are some methodological reasons, as well as the fact that they just didn’t turn out to be a very intelligible visualization).
Of course things have changed between then and now. Thanks to open data you can do much more powerful analysis than you find in The History and Geography of Human Genes on your notebook computer in a few hours. So I had the idea for this post a few hours ago…and thought perhaps I’d accompany it with a few TreeMix plots. Below are the 1000 Genomes data, with 250,000 markers (I pruned by intersecting with HGDP markers as well as those with very low missingness):
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish
Vietnamese
What do all those TLAs stand for? Is there an acronym glossary somewhere?
http://www.1000genomes.org/category/frequently-asked-questions/population
Even aside from the lack of an acronym glossary, I’m at a loss to make sense of these in the raw.
I assume that the red lines are admixture events that are not tree-like. I’m not sure why there is a blue arrow if the first plot, or how the plots differ and what each one represents.
Another to put on my “to read list”. Thanks
Reading Cavalli-Sforza’s big book in the late 1990s, I was struck by how similar his population genetics findings were to Carleton Coon’s “Living Races of Man” from way back in 1965. There was a tiny bit of methodological overlap: Coon included an early graph by Cavalli-Sforza to suggest the future of the field.
So it would be interesting to see what Coon, using mostly physical and cultural anthropological methodologies, got right and wrong in 1965 versus what we now know fifty years later.
One obvious mistake was that Coon figured that Ainu of northern Japan were kind of like the Sami of northern Scandinavia. He thought the Ainu would have Caucasoid links in their ancestry. But that doesn’t appear to have happened.
A more fundamental mistake of Coon was that he thought sub-Saharan Africans and Europeans would be more closely related than Europeans and East Asians.
Anyway, it would be informative to go through the 1965 “Living Races of Man” and the 1994 “History and Geography of Human Genes” to see how they stand up relative to the flood of DNA data available in 2015.
But I'm always hoping Razib will create a giant post for us about all these things.
“One obvious mistake was that Coon figured that Ainu of northern Japan … would have Caucasoid links in their ancestry.”
I had a good Geography teacher in the late fifties/early sixties. She referred to the Ainu as the Hairy Ainu – thus ensuring that they were memorable – and told us that there was a conjecture that they might be more closely related to Europeans than other oriental peoples were. She was also keen on Continental Drift, which had been unfashionable in her formative years. She would have appealed to Steve as she was also a decent golfer. She could make any aspect of geography interesting except Ocean Oozes.
So it would be interesting to see what Coon, using mostly physical and cultural anthropological methodologies, got right and wrong in 1965 versus what we now know fifty years later.
One obvious mistake was that Coon figured that Ainu of northern Japan were kind of like the Sami of northern Scandinavia. He thought the Ainu would have Caucasoid links in their ancestry. But that doesn't appear to have happened.
A more fundamental mistake of Coon was that he thought sub-Saharan Africans and Europeans would be more closely related than Europeans and East Asians.
Anyway, it would be informative to go through the 1965 "Living Races of Man" and the 1994 "History and Geography of Human Genes" to see how they stand up relative to the flood of DNA data available in 2015.Replies: @reiner Tor
It would be good to have a huge book (or even a concise book) similar to “History and Geography…” summarizing all the findings. Someone told me in a comment over at the West Hunter that it would be superfluous since everything’s available on the internet. However, it’s not very user friendly, and I just like the book format way more.
But I’m always hoping Razib will create a giant post for us about all these things.