Sep
03
2008
By Chris Gignoux and Brenna Henn
Early human history was characterized by many rapid, long-distance migrations. But despite our beginnings as travelers, genetic evidence published online last Sunday in Nature indicates that after expanding to all corners of the earth people (at least those in Europe) tended to stay close to home.
Close on the heels [...]
Tags: Europe, genome-wide association study, pca, Switzerland
Aug
13
2008
By Chris Gignoux and Mike Macpherson
It should be no surprise that in general, we are more genetically similar to our neighbors than to people living far away. The reason is fairly simple — until recently in human history it was fairly rare for people from widely separated geographic regions to even meet, much less reproduce.
This [...]
Tags: ancestry, clines, Europe, prehistory
Jul
25
2008
This guest post is by Roy King, who is a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University and a research colleague of Stanford geneticist and 23andMe scientific adviser Peter Underhill. Roy and Peter have been using genetics to trace the spread of agriculture from the Near East to Europe.
The question of how agriculture first arose and [...]
Tags: agriculture, ancestry, Europe, neolithic, Roy King