scholarly journals Tracking modern human population history from linguistic and cranial phenotype

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hugo Reyes-Centeno ◽  
Katerina Harvati ◽  
Gerhard Jäger
Author(s):  
Diyendo Massilani ◽  
Laurits Skov ◽  
Mateja Hajdinjak ◽  
Byambaa Gunchinsuren ◽  
Damdinsuren Tseveendorj ◽  
...  

AbstractWe present analyses of the genome of a ~34,000-year-old hominin skull cap discovered in the Salkhit Valley in North East Mongolia. We show that this individual was a female member of a modern human population that, following the split between East and West Eurasians, experienced substantial gene flow from West Eurasians. Both she and a 40,000-year-old individual from Tianyuan outside Beijing carried genomic segments of Denisovan ancestry. These segments derive from the same Denisovan admixture event(s) that contributed to present-day mainland Asians but are distinct from the Denisovan DNA segments in present-day Papuans and Aboriginal Australians.


2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Antoine Balzeau

Antoine Balzeau critically reviews a recent paper by Hugo Reyes-Centeno, Katerina Harvati, and Gerhard Jäger, “Tracking Modern Human Population History from Linguistic and Cranial Phenotype” that argues for a link between the development of human language and the evolving shape of the human skull.


Science ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 370 (6516) ◽  
pp. 579-583
Author(s):  
Diyendo Massilani ◽  
Laurits Skov ◽  
Mateja Hajdinjak ◽  
Byambaa Gunchinsuren ◽  
Damdinsuren Tseveendorj ◽  
...  

We present analyses of the genome of a ~34,000-year-old hominin skull cap discovered in the Salkhit Valley in northeastern Mongolia. We show that this individual was a female member of a modern human population that, following the split between East and West Eurasians, experienced substantial gene flow from West Eurasians. Both she and a 40,000-year-old individual from Tianyuan outside Beijing carried genomic segments of Denisovan ancestry. These segments derive from the same Denisovan admixture event(s) that contributed to present-day mainland Asians but are distinct from the Denisovan DNA segments in present-day Papuans and Aboriginal Australians.


2016 ◽  
Vol 113 (8) ◽  
pp. 2134-2139 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Gilpin ◽  
Marcus W. Feldman ◽  
Kenichi Aoki

Archaeologists argue that the replacement of Neanderthals by modern humans was driven by interspecific competition due to a difference in culture level. To assess the cogency of this argument, we construct and analyze an interspecific cultural competition model based on the Lotka−Volterra model, which is widely used in ecology, but which incorporates the culture level of a species as a variable interacting with population size. We investigate the conditions under which a difference in culture level between cognitively equivalent species, or alternatively a difference in underlying learning ability, may produce competitive exclusion of a comparatively (although not absolutely) large local Neanderthal population by an initially smaller modern human population. We find, in particular, that this competitive exclusion is more likely to occur when population growth occurs on a shorter timescale than cultural change, or when the competition coefficients of the Lotka−Volterra model depend on the difference in the culture levels of the interacting species.


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