When scientists first made contact with an isolated village of Yanomami hunter-gatherers in the remote mountains of the Amazon jungle of Venezuela in 2009, they marveled at the chance to study the health of people who had never been exposed to Western medicine or diets. But much to their surprise, these Yanomami’s gut bacteria have already evolved a diverse array…
Scientists who study canine origins seem to fight about everything: where dogs arose, when this happened, and even the best way to find these answers. But there’s one thing most of them agree on: how dogs became domesticated. Still, it’s taken almost a century to get here, and the details are still emerging. So what did happen? Most experts now think dogs…
Studies of hunters and gatherers — and of chimpanzees, which are often used as stand-ins for human ancestors — have cast bigger, faster and more powerful males in the hunter role. Now, a 10-year study of chimpanzees in Senegal shows females playing an unexpectedly big role in hunting and males, surprisingly, letting smaller and weaker hunters keep their prey. The results do…
A special section of commentaries and reflections on epigenetic inheritance has been published in the International Journal of Epidemiology, centered on the reprint of the 1989 article “Inheritance of Acquired Epigenetic Variations” by Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb. ISG faculty members Aaron Panofsky and Hannah Landecker both contributed invited commentaries to the issue, which is now available in advance online…
Big data: It’s a term we read and hear about often, but is hard to grasp. Computer scientists at Washington University in St. Louis’ School of Engineering & Applied Science tackled some big data about an important protein and discovered its connection in human history as well as clues about its role in complex neurological diseases. Through a novel method…
Today, the journal Nature Genetics released a set of four papers based entirely on the genetic sequences of Icelanders. Their results, which range from the identification of a new Alzheimer’s-associated gene to the age of the most recent male ancestor shared by all humans, are part of a long history of genetic discoveries from deCODE, a company that has been…