Inbreeding
It has long been known that inbreeding is bad for you. A new paper in Nature (Directional dominance on stature and cognition in diverse human populations) finally gives us a good quantitative estimate...
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The Water-Crossers
One interesting and puzzling question is when and how humans developed the ability to make ocean crossings. Although much of the Indonesian archipelago turns into a peninsula during the glacial...
View ArticleFundraiser
It’s that time again, time to contribute. You can send funds via Paypal, by check (to me or to West Hunter Incorporated if you’re after deductibility). West Hunter’s purpose is the advancement of...
View ArticleBrain Topography
Although Richard Nisbett has written about long-term differences in cognitive style between East and West, he is, I think, dismissive of the possibility that biology might explain such differences, or...
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Baby Steps
Very early settlers of North America had at least some ability to make water-crossings, since there is evidence of early human activity on the Channel Islands off California (Santa Rosa, for example)....
View ArticleFirst* Peoples
There are two new papers out on the early colonization of the Americas, one in Science and one in Nature. The Science paper claims that all Amerindians stem from a single Siberian population that...
View ArticleTLRs, PAMPs, and Alley Oop
I hear that some Eurasians – probably more than some – have Neanderthal or Denisovan versions of TLRs. Not surprising: we’ve already seen this happen with other immune system genes – HLA variants ,...
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