May 8, 2013
The story of H is really the story of people in modern Europe. H refers to a maternal lineage — also known as a maternal haplogroup — that originated long ago in the Near East but expanded into Europe with the recession of the last Ice Age. H —with its dozens of subgroups — is the most prevalent [...]
September 9, 2009
About 10,000 years ago, the prehistoric hunter-gatherers of Europe began meeting some new neighbors. These farmers spread gradually at first, expanding from the Near East through Anatolia and the Balkans. Then agriculture exploded, reaching present-day Britain within a few thousand years. The farmers [...]
April 15, 2009
Over the past decade, there has been no shortage of studies focused on the relationship between Neanderthals and our own species, Homo sapiens. Researchers have dug deep into the fossil record and our genomes to uncover how closely related we are to the Neanderthals, whether we interacted with them, and even [...]
September 3, 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) [...]
August 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, [...]
July 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 [...]
