Genetic ‘Adam never met Eve’

Testing is being done on indigenous populations for free. However, there have been some difficulties, e.g. in New Zealand. The first I heard about the project was a report in the New Zealand Herald about the Maori being reluctant to take part. See for example here and
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/location/story.cfm?l_id=148&ObjectID=10338311
(that one won’t come up as a link for some reason).

They “know” their roots, and regard this as “scientific imperialism”. I think there may be similar problems with other populations. This article mentions a group called Indigenous People’s Council on Biocolonialism, who have similar concerns for native American populations. Hopefully enough people will volunteer to take part to ensure the study has sufficient data.

Still, a century spans about five generational jumps, and the whole back to the 70000 years bottleneck (or whathever) is 2800 gene jumps, and perhaps only about 1000 meme jumps.

1) Is $100 a fair price? Doing PCR certainly won’t cost that much per sample, although I’m sure there are other costs for analysis and running the project.

2) Won’t there be a problem of over- or under-representation of some populations by collecting samples from people who can afford and are willing to pay $100?

3) How useful is it to collect samples from non-native people of America or Australia, whose populations migrated very recently and have been mixing? Are they going to be categorized just as Americans/Austrarians of unspecified ancestry? Or are they going to be categorized as English, Irish, Italian, African etc. to understand migration of these sub-populations? What should people of mixed ancestries do?

4) I guess getting information on ancestry of a population is different from getting information on ancestry of an individual. Suppose I have a genetic marker that is rare among my ethnic group. It’s difficult to know if this particular case means that one of my recent ancestors came from outside of the group or that my ancestors were rare carriers of the marker in the group. I can imagine that you can tell more about the population than an individual using statistics. But I suspect that many people who participate in this project are more interested in their particular ancestry (“my ancestors came from X and Y.”) than, say, how English and Scandinavians are related as populations.

Is this really all about science, or is this also a business?

Even though I doubt this about today’s world, it probably won’t be many more centuries until someone (maybe, in fact, a European from the past few thousand years) dethrones the current MRCA, who I’d guess had had about a 50,000 year reign.

By the way, does anyone know which *living* person is thought to have the most living descendants? Any guesses? There must be a pretty short short-list.

Now it can be sumized that at the time of sparse co-habitions, there must have been a lot of genetic malfunctions, and for a great period of time in evolution terms?.. due to the population not really travelling great distances, to connect with another population, and thus another genetic (new) pool.

This must have had a stumbling effect on all of societies?..due to isolations and the seclution of ancient tribes, there must have been a large number of deformaties?..and life expectancy must have been low due to the available genetic pool being “to-close”, in family terms that is. It was not until societies branched out and explored, and thus comunicated with new tribes, did the surviability of Man start to increase.

What I am stating, is in the far distant past, the genetic pool was to tightly bound, to few peoples in isolation, and would have had a baring on the survivors to need travel and find “new” genetic partners?

Without a great urge to move away and find new genetic code barers, Man would not be here today?

Our ancestors had no knowledge of “inter-breeding”, dangers, which excludes the notion really that we could evolve from a single family of “brother+sisters”..”father+Daughters”?

There must have been enough tribes, of certain isolations, to provide Man with just enough variation to evolve genetically?

Sean mentions the theory that Homo Sapiens evolved several times and what that means for whom we cnsider to be human. Somewhat related is that there is a movment afoot to reclssify humans and the two chimps as all the same genus. Since the rules of zoological claissification require that the “oldest” name gets priority it means the chimps and bonobos are likely better described as genus Homo and not genus Pan. Welcome to the monkey house folks:) I for one am glad to welcome our new brothers and sisters and maybe we can stop killing them, infecting them and destroying their habitats. However based on how we treat other humans it seems unlikely.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/05/0520_030520_chimpanzees.html

Plato, I think that most browsers give you the option of opening a link in a new window. I’d rather leave that choice up to the user, rather than force it on them.

The History and Geography of Human Genes by Paolo Menozzi, Alberto Piazza (Contributor), Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza

The Great Human Diasporas: The History of Diversity and Evolution by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Francesco Cavalli-Sforza, Sarah Thorne, Heather Mimnaugh (Editor)

Genes, Peoples, and Languages by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Mark Seielstad (Translator)