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Study Shows Humans Are Evolving Faster Than Previously Thought Hannah Devlin 25 March 2015 Humans are evolving more rapidly than previously thought, according to the largest ever genetics study of a single population. Scientists reached the conclusion after showing that almost every man alive can trace his origins to one common male ancestor who lived about 250,000 years ago. The discovery that so-called “genetic Adam”, lived about 100,000 years more recently than previously understood suggests that humans must have been genetically diverging at a more rapid rate than thought. Kári Stefánsson, of the company deCODE Genetics and senior author of...

In a series of histograms (graphs showing the distribution of genome and population data), Hawks shows that Asian and European genomes have significantly more Neanderthal DNA than African genomes. The averages for Asian and European samples are around 3% higher than the average for African samples. Whatever gave Africans some degree of similarity to Neanderthals, non-Africans seem to have received around 3% more of it. Europeans average a bit more Neanderthal DNA than Asians, showing that Europeans probably mixed with Neanderthals as they moved into Europe, adding a secondary mix of Neanderthal DNA into their genome beyond the primary mix...

Mingling of genes four millennia ago suggests continent was not isolated after all. Some aboriginal Australians can trace as much as 11% of their genomes to migrants who reached the island around 4,000 years ago from India, a study suggests. Along with their genes, the migrants brought different tool-making techniques and the ancestors of the dingo, researchers say1.This scenario is the result of a large genetic analysis outlined today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1. It contradicts a commonly held view that Australia had no contact with the rest of the world between the arrival of the...

Seven thousand five hundred fifty-six (7556) haplotypes of 46 subclades in 17 major haplogroups were considered in terms of their base (ancestral) haplotypes and timespans to their common ancestors, for the purposes of designing of time-balanced haplogroup tree. It was found that African haplogroup A (originated 132,000 ± 12,000 years before present) is very remote time-wise from all other haplogroups, which have a separate common ancestor, named β-haplogroup, and originated 64,000 ± 6000 ybp. It includes a family of Europeoid (Caucasoid) haplogroups from F through T that originated 58,000 ± 5000 ybp. A downstream common ancestor for haplogroup A and...

Altai in southern Siberia sits right at the centre of Russia. But the tiny, mountainous republic has a claim to fame unknown until now - Native Americans can trace their origins to the remote region. DNA research revealed that genetic markers linking people living in the Russian republic of Altai, southern Siberia, with indigenous populations in North America. A study of the mutations indicated a lineage shift between 13,000 and 14,000 years ago - when people are thought to have walked across the ice from Russia to America. This roughly coincides with the period when humans from Siberia are thought...

It was 15 months ago that Science carried a story about the completion of a rough draft of the Neandertal genome. Palaeogeneticist Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig was reported as saying "he can't wait to finish crunching the sequence through their computers". It has been quite a long time coming, as it is more than a decade since Paabo first demonstrated it was possible to analyse Neandertal DNA sequences. Earlier reports suggested that Neandertals were sufficiently distinct from humans for them to be classified as a separate species of Homo. The draft genome...

New Delhi: A genetic study has found that Indians are the ancestors of the Chinese and other East Asian populations. The study, a joint project of 10 Asian countries, found that India received a wave of migration from Africa 60,000-70,000 years ago and these early humans subsequently moved to East and Southeast Asia. The earlier belief was that humans from Africa reached India and East and Southeast Asia separately. The study has important implications, especially in the understanding of human migratory patterns and in the investigation of genetics and disease. The findings of the five-year study -- conducted by a...

The mixing of two distinct lineages led to most modern-day Indians. The population of India was founded on two ancient groups that are as genetically distinct from each other as they are from other Asians, according to the largest DNA survey of Indian heritage to date. Nowadays, however, most Indians are a genetic hotchpotch of both ancestries, despite the populous nation's highly stratified social structure. "All Indians are pretty similar," says Chris Tyler-Smith, a genome researcher at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute near Cambridge, UK, who was not involved in the study. "The population subdivision has not had a dominating...

Most Detailed Global Study Of Genetic Variation CompletedA schematic of worldwide human genetic variation, with colors representing different genetic types. The figure illustrates the great amout of genetic variation in Africa. (Credit: Illustration by Martin Soave/University of Michigan) ScienceDaily (Feb. 21, 2008) — University of Michigan scientists and their colleagues at the National Institute on Aging have produced the largest and most detailed worldwide study of human genetic variation, a treasure trove offering new insights into early migrations out of Africa and across the globe. Like astronomers who build ever-larger telescopes to peer deeper into space, population geneticists like U-M's...

The ancestral relationships of people living in the widely scattered islands of the Pacific Ocean, long a puzzle to anthropologists, may have been solved by a new genetic study, researchers reported Thursday.In an analysis of the DNA of 1,000 individuals from 41 Pacific populations, an international team of scientists found strong evidence showing that Polynesians and Micronesians in the central and eastern islands had almost no genetic relationship to Melanesians, in the western islands like Papua New Guinea and the Bismarck and Solomons archipelagos.The researchers also concluded that the genetic data showed that the Polynesians and Micronesians were most closely...

In honor of the Little Black People The Saisiyat tribe of Hsinchu and Miaoli will perform a solemn rite this weekend to commemorate a race of people that they exterminated By Jules Quartly STAFF REPORTER Saturday, Nov 27, 2004. Xiangtian Lake is one of two places to see the ritual. PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES Drinking, singing and dancing are expected to take place deep in the mountains of Miaoli and Hsinchu when the "Ritual of the Little Black People" (¸GÆF²½) is performed by the Saisiyat tribe once again this weekend. For the past 100 years or so, the Saisiyat tribe (ÁÉ®L±Ú)...

New finding denies Chinese ancestor from Africa(Xinhua)Updated: 2007-04-03 09:48WASHINGTON -- Chinese and US researchers have reported the finding of an approximately 40,000-year-old early modern human skeleton in China, indicating that the "Out of Africa" dispersal theory of modern humans may not be as simple as was previously thought. Fossil of a mandible bone found in the Tianyuan Cave, Zhoukoudian, in suburs of Beijing. [Xinhua] The findings were published Monday on the online issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Hong Shang, from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences and Washington University,...

Roots of Human Family Tree Are ShallowRoots of the Human Family Tree Are Remarkably Shallow - All Alive Today Share 1 Common Ancestor By MATT CRENSON AP National Writer Jul 1, 2006 (AP)— Whoever it was probably lived a few thousand years ago, somewhere in East Asia Taiwan, Malaysia and Siberia all are likely locations. He or she did nothing more remarkable than be born, live, have children and die. Yet this was the ancestor of every person now living on Earth the last person in history whose family tree branches out to touch all 6.5 billion people on the...

Postcranial Skeleton of the Minatogawa Man Hisao Baba* and Banri Endo** *Department of Anatomy, Dokkyo University School of Medicine; **Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Science, The University of Tokyo GENERAL DISCUSSION Estimation of the Stature The stature of the Minatogawa man was estimated according to the methods of Peason (1899) and of Fujii (1960). The estimated statures using the femora by Fujii's method are 1532, 1499, 1556, 1499 mm in MI, MII, MIII, MIV, respectively. The value for MIII seems too great when the relative shortness of her tibia is taken into account. In estimating statures by Peason's formula, various...

Scientists generally agree that the first people to reach the New World crossed from Siberia into North America, but just how and when this immigration unfolded remains controversial. Archaeological data indicate the presence of people in the Americas by about 14,000 years ago... and some studies of DNA from cellular structures called mitochondria have suggested that an immigration occurred perhaps 30,000 years ago. To address this disagreement, anthropologists have turned to variations in DNA on the Y chromosome, which passes from father to son. One such polymorphism, called M3, turns up among most Native American men but is absent in...

University of South Carolina archeologist Al Goodyear said he has uncovered a layer of charcoal from a possible hearth or fire pit at a site near the Savannah River. Samples from the layer have been laboratory-dated to more than 50,000 years old. Yet Goodyear stopped short of declaring it proof of the continent's earliest human occupation. "It does look like a hearth," he said, "and the material that was dated has been burned." ...Goodyear, who has worked the Topper site since 1981, discovered the charcoal layer in May.

The most recent common ancestor of all humanity lived just a few thousand years ago, according to a computer model of our family tree. Researchers have calculated that the mystery person, from whom everyone alive today is directly descended, probably lived around 1,500 BC in eastern Asia. Douglas Rohde of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and his colleagues devised the computer program to simulate the migration and breeding of humans across the world. By estimating how different groups intermingle, the researchers built up a picture of how tightly the world's ancestral lines are linked. The figure of 1,500...

By 1997, some 80 earth-science specialists visited Monte Verde, many participated in the excavations, and still others collected samples and conducted laboratory analyses. The results are remarkable: now documented are 70 species of plants collected by Early Man, the remnants of mastodon meat, the remains of wooden canoes, mortars, and hundreds of stone artifacts including projectile points and cutting and scraping tools. Additionally, some 30 radiocarbon dates were obtained from abundant charcoal, wood and ivory found within the artifact-bearing strata. These dates indicate that Monte Verde was occupied about 12.5 ka ago, a full thousand years before Clovis (Meltzer, 1997).

Humans march to a faster genetic 'drummer' than primates, UC Riverside research says *Research runs counter to Darwin's theory of natural selection* A team of biochemists from UC Riverside published a paper in the June 11 issue of the Journal of Molecular Biology that gives one explanation for why humans and primates are so closely related genetically, but so clearly different biologically and intellectually. It is an established fact that 98 percent of the DNA, or the code of life, is exactly the same between humans and chimpanzees. So the key to what it means to be human resides in...

<p>More than half of the class at San Jose's Piedmont Hills High School, students from numerous racial and ethnic backgrounds, are linked in their DNA to the same ancestor, born more than 100,000 years ago in central China or Taiwan.</p>