Blog of the Week - "Dienekes' Anthropology Blog"

Dienekes' Anthropology Blog

Mmm, Bear Fat!

I followed a link from Instapundit, and found this article on how human lipid metabolism in Europeans and Asians (but not Africans)  has a large contribution of genes from the Neandertal genome:

They found that Europeans inherited three times as many genes involved in lipid catabolism, the breakdown of fats to release energy, from Neandertals as did Asians. (As expected, Africans did not carry any of these Neandertal variants.) The difference in the number of Neandertal genes involved with lipid processing was “huge,” Khaitovich says. The study also offers another example of the lingering genetic legacy left in some people today by the extinct Neandertals.
...
The team found that Europeans had differences in the concentration of various fatty acids in the brain that were not found in Asians or chimpanzees, which suggests they had evolved recently. The Europeans also showed differences in the function of enzymes that are known to be involved with the metabolism of fat in the brain.

So as a white European, a good high fraction of my ability (or inability) to catabolize fats comes from my Neandertal ancestors?  I'm building up this layer around my middle to help keep me warm in the in next glaciation?  Who knew? Thanks, guys (and gals)!

I started looking around on the older posts, and found: Oldest modern human genome from Siberia ~45 thousand years ago

In 2008, Siberian ivory carver Nikolay Peristov was searching for ancient mammoth tusks eroding from the banks of the Irtysh River in western Siberia, when he found fossilized bones instead. Back in his workshop in Omsk, he showed the bones to local paleontologist Aleksey Bondarev, who recognized a human thighbone. Bondarev in turn showed it to an anthropologist friend, and it was passed on up the chain to some of the world's top experts in human evolution. They dated it to 45,000 years ago, making it one of the oldest known modern humans in northern Asia and Europe.
. . .
Because all living people in Europe and Asia carry roughly the same amount of Neandertal DNA, Pääbo's team thought that the interbreeding probably took place in the Middle East, as moderns first made their way out of Africa. Middle Eastern Neandertal sites are close to Skhul and Qafzeh, so some researchers suspected that those populations were the ones that mingled. But the team's analysis favors a more recent rendezvous. The femur belonged to an H. sapiens man who had slightly more Neandertal DNA, distributed in different parts of his genome, than do living Europeans and Asians. His Neandertal DNA is also concentrated into longer chunks than in living people, Pääbo reported. That indicates that the sequences were recently introduced: With each passing generation, any new segment of DNA gets broken up into shorter chunks as chromosomes from each parent cross over and exchange DNA. Both features of the Neandertal DNA in the femur suggest that the Ust-Ishim man lived soon after the interbreeding, which Pääbo estimated at 50,000 to 60,000 years ago.

So back 50-60 thousand years ago in Siberia, either Neandertal women looked good to "modern" men, or "modern" women looked good to Neandertal men.  Figures.

And another: Back-migration of Yeniseian into Asia from Beringia

Recent arguments connecting Na-Dene languages of North America with Yeniseian languages of Siberia have been used to assert proof for the origin of Native Americans in central or western Asia. We apply phylogenetic methods to test support for this hypothesis against an alternative hypothesis that Yeniseian represents a back-migration to Asia from a Beringian ancestral population. We coded a linguistic dataset of typological features and used neighbor-joining network algorithms and Bayesian model comparison based on Bayes factors to test the fit between the data and the linguistic phylogenies modeling two dispersal hypotheses. Our results support that a Dene-Yeniseian connection more likely represents radiation out of Beringia with back-migration into central Asia than a migration from central or western Asia to North America.

Beringeria in it's time must have been quite a place.  A low, wide land connecting Western Alaska to Eastern Russia, populated and a number of extinct giant mammals, mammoths and mastodons, sabre-toothed cats, camels, horses, and elk,  it provided the means for men to travel from Asia to the Americas to become established.  But it's entirely reasonable, and typically human for some of them to change their mind and go back the other way.

Now it's just a great place to grow crabs and fish.

Anthropology has always been an interest of mine, even though I pursued work in an entirely unrelated field.  But it's hard to keep up on the interesting developments.  Dieneke's Blog looks like a good way to do it.

Wombat-socho has the the long awaited, post tax day, triple stuffed  edition of "Rule 5 Sunday: Ricochet" up at The Other McCain.