The First Population Explosion: Human Numbers Expanded Dramatically Millennia Before Agriculture
Ten millennia ago, there were about six million people on Earth. Today, there are six billion. This thousandfold increase in the global population is often thought to be linked to...
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Archaeologists Discover Early Example of Domesticated Camels
Most experts agree that the earliest examples of farming and animal domestication lie in the aptly named Fertile Crescent, in present day Iraq. But still many questions have lingered...
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Recommended Reading: The 10,000 Year Explosion
Almost since the 1871 publication of “The Descent of Man,” in which Charles Darwin applied his theory of natural selection to the human species, biologists have argued over whether the...
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Hidden in Plain Sight: New Genetic Discoveries Shed Light on the Spread of Farming in Eastern Europe
Before genetics came into the picture, researchers interested in the introduction of agriculture to Europe had only the archaeological record to go on – a limited collection of primarily stone...
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Where Today Meets Yesterday: A New Approach to Studying the Genetic History of Southeast Asia
Archaeologists rarely agree on anything. So it’s no surprise that for years two groups of scholars have drawn completely opposite conclusions about the relationship between the ancient people of...
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Genes and Languages: Not So Strange Bedfellows?
Throughout the history of our species there has been one constant: movement. Since the origin of Homo sapiens nearly 200,000 years ago in East Africa, humans have journeyed...
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The Origin of Farming in Europe: A View from the Y Chromosome
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...
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