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While there may be broad public support for a technique that solved serial murders, just because technology allows for a new type of investigation doesn’t mean the government should be allowed to use it in all cases.

90 percent of Americans of European descent will be identifiable from their DNA within a year or two, even if they have not used a consumer DNA service

As for easy access, GEDmatch’s website provides exactly this opportunity. Consumers can take profiles generated from other commercial genetic testing services, upload them free and compare them to other profiles. So can the police.

before researchers could start analyzing that genetic material, they had to get it. DNA degrades over time, so extracting it from ancient human remains is difficult and costly.

In the end, they had data from 51 individuals — a tenfold increase over the measly four that once gave researchers their only glimpses into this period.

"Trying to represent this vast period of European history with just four samples is like trying to summarize a movie with four still images," Reich said. "With 51 samples, everything changes; we can follow the narrative arc; we get a vivid sense of the dynamic changes over time.

t's seems the height of arrogance for any paleoanthropologist to assume that the bones they have in hand represent all knowledge. That what is certainly the vast majority of still-existing bones and materials still hidden in earth doesn't represent anything they they don't already know from the relative scraps they have found.

On the other hand, the geneticists don't have "evidence", they have hints or suggestions. Sure, they can see existing genes in a modern DNA sampling that have similarities to genes from an older sampling dug from the earth, but how those genes came to be in the modern specimen is completely assumptive guesswork. The geneticists are looking at two end points and are 1. assuming they are of the same linear history and then 2. are assuming all the points in between. Rather grand assumptions.

evolution isn't something you "believe" in it is something you understand.

Chacón-Duque and his colleagues pieced together the genetic record by sampling DNA from 6,500 people across Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru, which they compared to that of 2,300 people all over the world. Nearly a quarter of the Latin Americans shared 5 percent or more of their ancestry with people living in North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, including self-identified Sephardic Jews. DNA alone cannot prove that conversos were the source of this ancestry, but it fits with the historical record.

This pattern of widespread but low North African and eastern Mediterranean ancestry in the population suggests that its source is centuries old, putting the date around the early days of New Spain.

Geneticists have also noticed rare genetic diseases prevalent in Jews popping up in Latin America. “It’s not just one disease. It’s like, wow, this isn’t a coincidence,

In less than a century, the number of people living in Mexico fell from an estimated 20 million to 2 million. “It’s a massive population loss. Really, it’s impressive,” says Rodolfo Acuña-Soto, an epidemiologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. What can even kill so many people so quickly?

Now, DNA from 16th-century cocolitzli victims has offered up a somewhat unexpected new candidate: Salmonella enterica, or the bacteria that cause paratyphoid fever. The DNA evidence comes from the teeth of 11 people buried in a large Mixtec cemetery in southern Mexico

Bos’s team repurposed a method called metagenomics that sequences all of the DNA in a sample, generating a long list of all bacteria present in the teeth. One researcher went through the list by hand, and a specific strain of Salmonella enterica popped up repeatedly. Dental pulp samples from five people who died before European contact but buried in the same site contained no significant amounts of S. enterica.

“The colonization of the Americas involved multiple technologically divergent, and possibly genetically divergent, founding groups.”

Indeed, new genetic evidence described in the current issue of the journal Nature shows that the Americas appeared to be first populated by three waves of migrants from Siberia: one large migration about 15,000 years ago, followed by two lesser migrations. Such a pattern had been hypothesized 25 years ago on the basis of Native American language groups spoken today, but had not been widely accepted by linguistics scholars.

human DNA from the cave, extracted from coprolites, or dried feces, pointed to Siberian-East Asian origins of the people.

A group of leading biologists on Thursday called for a worldwide moratorium on use of a new genome-editing technique that would alter human DNA in a way that can be inherited.

The biologists fear that the new technique is so effective and easy to use that some physicians may push ahead before its safety can be assessed. They also want the public to understand the ethical issues surrounding the technique, which could be used to cure genetic diseases, but also to enhance qualities like beauty or intelligence. The latter is a path that many ethicists believe should never be taken.

a technique invented in 2012 makes it possible to edit the genome precisely and with much greater ease. The technique has already been used to edit the genomes of mice, rats and monkeys, and few doubt that it would work the same way in people.

Llamas and his colleagues figured out when the initial American settlers left Siberia via the land bridge over what is now the Bering strait. Their answer: roughly 23,000 years ago.

From there, it seemed that a group of about 2,000 child-bearing women (suggesting a population of some 10,000 people total) spent the next 6,000 years in genetic isolation — meaning that they weren’t intermarrying with other groups or branching off into separate ones. They just hunkered down together, and lived as their ancestors did.

That matches most scientists’s understanding of the early colonization of the Americas. In 20,000 BC, Alaska and pretty much all of Canada would have been encased in a vast ice sheet. Traversing it was impossible — nothing could survive the 3,000 mile trek across a barren glacier, let alone a motley crew of prehistoric humans.

Who Killed the Men of England? The written record of history meets genomics, evolution, demography, and molecular archaeology.

more than a million men vanished without a trace. They left no descendants. Historians know that something dramatic happened in England just as the Roman empire was collapsing. When the Anglo-Saxons first arrived in that northern outpost in the fourth century a.d.--whether as immigrants or invaders is debated--they encountered an existing Romano-Celtic population estimated at between 2 million and 3.7 million people. Latin and Celtic were the dominant languages.

Yet the ensuing cultural transformation was so complete, says Goelet professor of medieval history Michael McCormick, that by the eighth century, English civilization considered itself completely Anglo-Saxon, spoke only Anglo-Saxon, and thought that everyone had “come over on the Mayflower, as it were.”

tartar is very durable. Just ask these Neanderthals, whose 40,000-year-old tartar scientists recently analyzed to figure out the real paleo diet. Tartar grows in layers—almost like tree rings—entombing DNA from tiny bits of food as well as bacteria in the mouth. Forty thousand years later, scientists can analyze that DNA to reconstruct what was going on in the mouths of long-dead Neanderthals.

Having traveled so far back in time using ancient tartar, some of the same scientists have embarked on a more ambitious project: using the DNA from the bacteria in tartar to figure out how humans settled the 10 million square miles of Polynesia.

Humans first reached the Society Islands, in the center of the Polynesian Triangle, perhaps around 1,000 AD. Then in the span of just a couple hundred years, they took canoes across vast tracts of open ocean to find specks of inhabitable rock as far-flung as Hawaii, New Zealand, and Easter Island. How Polynesians navigated these waters in the 11th century is a subject of considerable fascination. But even more basically, archaeologists are not sure exactly when the islands were settled and in what order. That’s where the tartar comes in.

In March 2008, Dennis Richmond Jr. watched “Roots” with his father, and it changed his life. It was a Sunday, the Richmonds’ day for leafing through family photographs in their apartment in Yonkers, N.Y., looking at relatives going back about a century. “Roots,” Alex Haley’s semifictional account of his family’s journey from West Africa, posed a challenge: How far back could young Dennis trace his own ancestors?

When he thought about his grandmother having parents, who in turn had parents, he was floored. “It blew my mind,” he said. “The seed was planted. And I’ve been steadfast ever since.”

For Dennis, finding his ancestors became a refuge from his school life, where classmates bullied him both physically and verbally for his studiousness and the way he carried himself.

The other day, while teaching a lecture class, one of us mentioned in passing that the average African American, according to a 2014 paper, is about 24 percent European and less than 1 percent Native American. A student responded that these percentages were impossible to measure, since “race is a social construction.”

the fact that race is a social invention and not a biological reality cannot be repeated too much.

However, while race is socially constructed, genetic mutations — biological records of ancestry — are not, and the distinction is a crucial one.

“It is clear from archaeological artifacts and historical documents that they also took captives,” he said, adding that the new study suggests the number of slaves brought back to Scandinavia by the Vikings was enough to influence genetic composition of the region.The study revealed, too, that primarily females were moved into Scandinavia from the east during this time—which “suggests that the Vikings may have preferentially targeted women and girls as slaves,” Dr. Collard said.

The researchers found that, following the Viking Age, there was a notable decline in Baltic and British-Irish ancestries among Scandinavians. While there remains some genetic influence from these regions today, it is “not as much as we would expect,” Dr. Götherström said.

“The only credible way I can explain that is a lot of these people that came into Scandinavia during the Viking period didn’t build families and weren’t as efficient in getting children as the people who were already living there,”

Bush and Obama have built infrastructure any devil would lust after. Behold the items on an aspiring tyrant's checklist that they've provided their successors:A precedent that allows the president to kill citizens in secret without prior judicial or legislative reviewThe power to detain prisoners indefinitely without charges or trialOngoing warrantless surveillance on millions of Americans accused of no wrongdoing, converted into a permanent database so that data of innocents spied upon in 2007 can be accessed in 2027Using ethnic profiling to choose the targets of secret spying, as the NYPD did with John Brennan's blessingNormalizing situations in which the law itself is secret -- and whatever mischief is hiding in those secret interpretationsThe permissibility of droning to death people whose identities are not even known to those doing the killingThe ability to collect DNA swabs of people who have been arrested even if they haven't been convicted of anythingA torture program that could be restarted with an executive order

we're allowing ourselves to become a nation of men, not laws. Illegal spying? Torture? Violating the War Powers Resolution and the convention that mandates investigating past torture? No matter. Just intone that your priority is keeping America safe.

This isn't a argument about how tyranny is inevitable. It is an attempt to grab America by the shoulders, give it a good shake, and say: Yes, it could happen here, with enough historical amnesia, carelessness, and bad luck. We're not special. Our voters won't always pick good men and women to represent us.

From Ireland to Turkey, Europeans are all related, sharing a link with ancestors who were alive just 1,000 years ago, according to a new genetic study.

Peter Ralph and Graham Coop of the University of California used genomic data for 2,257 Europeans to conduct the first such study of an entire continent.

A separate study, based on DNA recovered from ancient skeletons, revealed last month that the genetic makeup of modern Europe was established by a wave of newcomers to the continent 6,500 years ago, more recently than previously thought.

researchers showed photographs of the skeleton as they found it, stuffed into a grave without a coffin, clearly displaying curvature of the spine as chronicled in contemporary accounts of Richard III’s appearance.

DNA samples from the remains had been compared with the DNA of two descendants of the monarch’s family. One of them, Michael Ibsen, is the son of a 16th-generation niece of King Richard’s. The second descendant wished to remain anonymous, the researchers said. The researchers said that the body displayed 10 wounds, 8 of them in the skull and some likely to have caused death, possibly by a blow from a halberd, a kind medieval weapon with an ex-like head on a long pole. Other wounds seem to have been inflicted after his death to humiliate the monarch after his armor was stripped and he was paraded naked over the back of a horse, the researchers said.

“Celtic” languages were not imports to the region but instead were developed somewhere in the British Isles or the Iberian Peninsula — and then spread eastward into continental Europe.

His doubts about the traditional view arose as he was studying inscriptions on artifacts from southern Portugal. The inscriptions on those artifacts strongly resembled the languages known as Celtic, yet they dated as far back as 700 B.C. This placed Celtic languages far from the Celt homelands in the middle of Europe at a very, very early date.

“What it shows is that the language that became Irish was already out there — before 700 B.C. and before the Iron Age,” Koch said. “It just didn’t fit with the traditional theory of Celtic spreading west to Britain and Iberia.”

The first evidence to raise significant questions about the Clovis model emerged in the late 1970s, when the anthropologist Tom Dillehay came across a prehistoric campsite in southern Chile called Monte Verde. Radiocarbon dating of the site suggested that the first campfires were lighted there, all the way at the southern tip of South America, well before the first Clovis tools were made

Professor Waters announced finding dozens of stone tools along a Texas creekbed. After using a technique that measures the last time the dirt around the stones was exposed to light, Professor Waters concluded, in a paper in Science, that the site was at least 15,000 years old — which would make it the earliest reliably dated site in the Americas.

Having compared the DNA of modern American Indians with that of groups living in Asia today, scholars have estimated that the last common ancestor of the two peoples probably lived between 16,000 and 20,000 years ago. That figure doesn’t square with the arrival of the Clovis people from Asia only 13,500 years ago.