Understanding Models of Human Evolution Using Genetic Data

September 13th, 2007 · No Comments

So Jeff Wall came to Berkeley today, and spoke to The Department of Integrative Biology on his recent work..

As many of you may be aware, Jeff is a Professor over at the Institute For Human Genetics at UCSF. His recent publication on PLoS Genetics, “Inconsistencies in Neanderthal genomic DNA Sequences“, has received a lot of attention not only from the popular press, but also from the scientific community. Last year Johannes Krause (The Greene Paper) of Svante Paabo’s lab came to Berkeley to present the Neanderthal DNA sequence data…. He was well received, but there were significant concerns about human contamination… Krause seemed to be confident that they was appropriately dealt with.. I guess not.

So briefly, for those of you not familiar with the Neanderthal DNA “inconsistencies” issue… 2 papers were published last year on Neanderthal genomics. Both projects used the same fossil, carried out similar analysis, but had completely different results….

	Noonan	Green
Modern Human-Neanderthal sequence divergence date	706 Kya	560Kya
Modern European-Neanderthal Population Split	325Kya	35Kya
Neanderthal Contribution to Human ancestry	0%	94%

Anyway… You know that contamination is likely to be a problem in most of these projects.. Not a huge surprise…

Turns out that Jeff Wall has a pretty interesting research program. He uses population genetics to test predictions on human evolution… About 2/3 of his talk was focused on using genetic data to refute the Multiregional model of human evolution, and to support the Out of Africa model.

I won’t bore you with the details, but there seems to be pretty convincing genetic data to support the Out of Africa model.. This is in agreement with the mountain of paleo-anthopological data that mostly supports the same…

Tags: biology · genetics