Evolution
New research has identified the first genetic evidence of Africans having lived amongst "indigenous" British people for centuries. Their descendants, living across the UK today, were unaware of their black ancestry.
The University of Leicester study, funded by the Wellcome Trust and published today in the journal European Journal of Human Genetics, found that one third of men with a rare Yorkshire surname carry a rare Y chromosome type previously found only amongst people of West African origin.
The researchers, led by Professor Mark Jobling, of the Department of Genetics at the University of…
New research has identified the first genetic evidence of Africans having lived amongst "indigenous" British people for centuries. Their descendants, living across the UK today, were unaware of their black ancestry.
The University of Leicester study, funded by the Wellcome Trust and published today in the journal European Journal of Human Genetics, found that one third of men with a rare Yorkshire surname carry a rare Y chromosome type previously found only amongst people of West African origin.
The researchers, led by Professor Mark Jobling, of the Department of Genetics at the University of…
The human brain underwent explosive growth after we split from our chimp cousins, but the pace of evolutionary change among the thousands of genes expressed in brain tissue has since slowed, says a new study in PLOS Biology.
The researchers involved speculate that the higher complexity of the biochemical network in the brain places strong constraints on the ability of most brain-related genes to change.
"We found that genes expressed in the human brain have in fact slowed down in their evolution, contrary to some earlier reports," says study author Chung-I Wu, at the University of Chicago…
How did our evolutionary ancestors make sense of their world? What strategies did they use, for example, to find food? Fossils do not preserve thoughts, so we have so far been unable to glean any insights into the cognitive structure of our ancestors.
Padana, a young female orangutan at the Leipzig Zoo, who was one of the research subjects. (Image: Knut Finstermeier, MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology)
However, in a study recently published in Current Biology (September 5, 2006), researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and their colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for…