Free Republic

How Europeans evolved white skin By Ann Gibbons ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI—Most of us think of Europe as the ancestral home of white people. But a new study shows that pale skin, as well as other traits such as tallness and the ability to digest milk as adults, arrived in most of the continent relatively recently. The work, presented here last week at the 84th annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, offers dramatic evidence of recent evolution in Europe and shows that most modern Europeans don’t look much like those of 8000 years ago. The origins of Europeans...

Half of Western European men are descended from one Bronze Age 'king' who sired a dynasty of elite nobles which spread throughout Europe, a new study has shown. The monarch, who lived around 4,000 years ago, is likely to have been one of the earliest chieftains to take power in the continent... It is likely his power stemmed from advances in technology such as metal working and wheeled transport which enabled organised warfare for the first time. Although it is not known who he was, or where he lived, scientists say he must have existed because of genetic variation in...

The largest ever study of global genetic variation in the human Y chromosome has uncovered the hidden history of men. Research published today (25 April) in Nature Genetics reveals explosions in male population numbers in five continents, occurring at times between 55 thousand and four thousand years ago... analysed sequence differences between the Y chromosomes of more than 1200 men from 26 populations around the world using data generated by the 1000 Genomes Project... involved 42 scientists from four continents... Analysing the Y chromosomes of modern men can tell us about the lives of our ancestors. The Y chromosome is...

The multi-million dollar 1000 Genomes project is set to be finished in a year. The same but different. The 1000 Genomes project aims to catalogue human genetic variation.Punchstock An almost complete catalogue of human genetic variation could be available by the end of 2009, thanks to a massive genome sequencing project that includes academic and industrial partners around the world.Announcing completion of the pilot phase of the 1000 Genomes project, the project's co-chair David Altshuler said last week that it has already successfully catalogued 3.8 trillion bases of sequence — approximately a thousand times the number found in a single...