Anthropology

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

Holly Dunsworth, a physical anthropologist at Penn State, wrote an essay for NPR’s This I Believe project titled I Am Evolution. You can read it, or listen to Holly read it, from NPR’s site. Holly says, in part:

If our beliefs are important enough, we live our lives in service to them. That’s how I feel about evolution. My role as a female Homo sapiens is to return each summer to Kenya, dig up fossils, and piece together our evolutionary history. Scanning the ground for weeks, hoping to find a single molar, or gouging out the side of a hill, one bucket of dirt at a time, I’m always in search of answers to questions shared by the whole human species. The experience deepens my understanding not just about what drives my life, but all our lives, where we came from.

That’s why I’m an anthropologist, and I would imagine most of my labmates feel the same way.

PLoS ONE has a article this month titled The Phylogeny of the Four Pan-American mtDNA Haplogroups: Implications for Evolutionary and Disease Studies. There are several points of interest:

1. The authors make use of data that is publicly available, either through GenBank or other DNA databases.
2. Complete mtDNA sequences (ie., all 16568 bases) were used for phylogenetic reconstruction.
3. Among 265 “novel” mtDNA sequences reported among Hispanics and African Americans in a recent addition to GenBank, 101 were of Native American origin.
4. All four Native American founder lineages (A2, B2, C1, D1) date to between 18,000-24,000 years ago.

Their results suggest that human expansion into the Americas coincided with the decline of the Last Glacial Maximum (Ice Age), knocking another hole in the “Clovis-first” hypothesis. Given that all four lineages give similar coalescent times, this study may also contribute to the “waves of migration” debate.

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Achilli A, Perego UA, Bravi CM, Coble MD, Kong QP, et al. (2008) The Phylogeny of the Four Pan-American MtDNA Haplogroups: Implications for Evolutionary and Disease Studies. PLoS ONE 3(3): e1764 doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0001764

Just a couple of quick items that popped up this week. First, from Ironic Sans, scientist themed Valentine’s cards. The Darwin one is my personal favorite.

And from the “Love in the Animal Kingdom” files, researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology published the first documented proof that wild gorillas, like humans and bonobos, occasionally mate face-to-face.

This suggests that gorillas might use sex, not just for reproduction, but also to reinforce social bonds. An interesting sidenote, the female, Leah, is the same female that was documented using tools.

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Image credit: ©Thomas Breuer – WCS/MPI-EVA

Friedlaender et al. have a recent article in PLos Genetics. Titled The Genetic Structure of Pacific Islanders, the study used 687 microsatellite and 203 indel loci in nearly 1000 individuals from 41 populations in and around Oceania, in order to determine the genetic origins of these populations.

The researchers found

only a modest association between language and genetic affiliation. Oceanic languages were introduced and dispersed around the islands within the last 3,300 years, but there was apparently only a small infusion of accompanying “Austronesian” ancestry that has survived…suggest[ing] that Oceanic languages were adopted by many formerly Papuan-speaking groups, while at the same time there was little genetic influence or marital exchange. At least in Near Oceania, rates of language borrowing and language adoption have been faster and more pervasive than rates of genetic admixture.

Two aspects of this study appeal to me.

1. Whole genome studies appear to be the wave of the future for anthropological genetic research, with the advent of new technologies that make these types of analyses feasible.
2. It was published in an open access journal, by well-respected members of the field. There’s an interesting discussion of open-access publishing at apophenia, in which she emphasizes the importance of tenured faculty supporting open-access.

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Reference: Friedlaender, JS et al. 2007. The Genetic Structure of Pacific Islanders. PLoS Genetics (4)1:173-190, e19 doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.0040019