Friday’s Elk, September 23, 2016

Posted on by Matt Kristoffersen
Out of Africa: What the Genomes Say

Back in December, when I was working on a profile of the geneticist Eske Willerslev, he told me off the record that he and his colleagues had a huge new genome paper in the works that would offer a lot of clues about human history. But it would take a while to come out because similar papers were going to be published at the same time by other scientists.

Well, the wheels turn slowly, but they were worth the wait. On Thursday’s front page of the New York Times, I reported on four new studies that give an unprecedented look at our origins. There was a whole lot to write about–more than can fit in one article, so I focused on one of the most contentious questions in paleoanthropology: how did humans emerge out of Africa and settle the rest of the world? Some fascinating possibilities emerge from these new studies on hundreds of genomes. Continue reading “Friday’s Elk, September 23, 2016” →

A Single Migration From Africa Populated the World, Studies Find

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The New York Times, September 21, 2016

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Modern humans evolved in Africa roughly 200,000 years ago. But how did our species go on to populate the rest of the globe?

The question, one of the biggest in studies of human evolution, has intrigued scientists for decades. In a series of extraordinary genetic analyses published on Wednesday, researchers believe they have found an answer.

In the journal Nature, three separate teams of geneticists survey DNA collected from cultures around the globe, many for the first time, and conclude that all non-Africans today trace their ancestry to a single population emerging from Africa between 50,000 and 80,000 years ago.

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The surprising history of the war on superbugs — and what it means for the world today

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STAT, September 12, 2016

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We may come to the end of antibiotics. We may run clean out of effective ammunition, and then how the bacteria and moulds will lord it.”

If you had to guess where those words came from, you might well say a recent news segment on TV, or perhaps an op-ed published by a frantic doctor. After all, these days there’s a lot of talk about our antibiotic resistance crisis. Bacteria that have evolved to withstand antibiotics kill 700,000 people each year, and ever more powerful strains are spreading around the world.

Continue reading “The surprising history of the war on superbugs — and what it means for the world today” →

Friday’s Elk, September 2, 2016

Posted on by Matt Kristoffersen
A Life (And Death?) In the Trees

You’ve probably heard about Lucy. She’s a 3.2-million-year-old relative of ours, a bipedal ape who only stood three feet tall. She’s famous for the discovery of her partial skeleton in 1974, a discovery that enabled scientists to learn a lot about her life, and about her species, Australopithecus afarensis. Now a team of scientists has put forward evidence about how she died: by a long fall from a tree. If they’re right, her death might actually tell us a lot about her life, too–and about how we evolved to walk upright. But hold on–as I wrote in the New York Times on Monday–a number of other experts don’t think the scientists have made a compelling case. Regardless of how she died, however, this research has led to something pretty exciting: you can download the 3-D scans of some of Lucy’s bones and print out replicas.
 

Continue reading “Friday’s Elk, September 2, 2016” →