It was a busy week for me: a talk in Boston, a shoot for an upcoming Science Happens video, and a lot of time spent burrowing deep into my next book. On Thursday I’ll resurface in Alabama to give a lecture at UA about evolution in our own time. So, Alabamians, I hope to see you there! Here are the details about this free lecture. Continue reading “Friday’s Elk, September 30, 2016”
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”
The New York Times, September 21, 2016
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.
Continue reading “A Single Migration From Africa Populated the World, Studies Find”
Greetings! As you may have observed, there was no newsletter last Friday. I didn’t have anything to point you to, and I was also swamped with stuff that wasn’t yet ready for prime time.
But now I’m out of that knot. And so, without further ado…
STAT, September 12, 2016
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.