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Landmark ancient-genome study shows surprise acceleration of human evolution

117 points by unsuspecting

by like_any_other

13 subcomments

Is there any species, other than humans, that is found all across the globe (i.e. geographically separated), and has not differentiated into subspecies? Wolves, elephants, tigers, bears, and foxes have all been categorized into multiple subspecies each, distinct but able to interbreed.

by green_wheel

2 subcomments

It seemed unlikely that ancestral populations had so many physiological differences, but not cognition. This seems like the last piece to compliment observed IQ differences between groups and levels of civilizational attainment.

by NelsonMinar

1 subcomments

Every time I read about ancient DNA work, it's about Reich's research. Can anyone expert in the field shed light on that? He certainly seems to have a successful research group. And he's a good communicator, I got a lot out of his 2018 book. Who else should I be reading or reading about?

by Henchman21

0 subcomment

by A_D_E_P_T

2 subcomments

Not that surprising when you consider, as the paper does, the explosion of very meaningful traits such as the ability to digest lactose and various anti-malaria adaptations e.g. Sickle Cell and the Duffy-null mutation.
It's just controversial for obvious reasons. The notion that human groups may have meaningfully evolved in different ways over the past 10,000 years, and may still be evolving, is an unpopular one on both ends of the political spectrum.

by vivzkestrel

1 subcomments

funny how racists on twitter havent learnt that skin color is a function of natural selection, how do we get this message to them in a non offensive yet informational enough way to change their perceptions of colored people

by vomayank

0 subcomment

by kevinten10

0 subcomment

by stefantalpalaru

0 subcomment

by idiotsecant

0 subcomment

by Mikhail_K

1 subcomments

From the article:
We finally observed signals of selection for combinations of alleles that today are associated with three correlated behavioural traits: scores on intelligence tests (increasing 0.74±0.12), household income (increasing 1.12±0.12) and years of schooling (increasing 0.63±0.13). These signals are all highly polygenic, and we have to drop 449–1,056 loci for the signals to become non-significant(Extended Data Fig.10). The signals are largely driven by selection before approximately 2,000 years , after which tends towards zero.
That's the part that the speech police is afraid of.

by mohamedkoubaa

2 subcomments

"To supercharge the search, Reich, Ali Akbari, a computational geneticist at Harvard Medical School, and their colleagues amassed the largest-ever collection of genomic data from ancient humans — from a total of 15,836 individuals from western Eurasia — including more than 10,000 newly sequenced genomes."
Without commenting on the content of this sentence or article, I will say that it is refreshing to see sentences like this in the wild after being regularly and constantly subjected to LLM slop.