The largest study to date of ancient DNA from Jewish individuals reveals unexpected genetic subgroups in medieval German Ashkenazi Jews and sheds light on the “founder event” in which a small population gave rise to most present-day Ashkenazi Jews.
The findings, spearheaded by geneticists from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Harvard Medical School, were published Nov. 30 in Cell.
About half of Jewish people around the world today identify as Ashkenazi, meaning that...
"The new paper, “The diverse genetic origins of a Classical period Greek army,” published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, takes a genomic look at those foreign fighters. A previous study used isotopes to identify three-quarters of those in the mass graves as “non-local.” Now, the archaeologists from that study — including Professor of Genetics and Human Evolutionary Biology David Reich, co-first authors ...
Abstract: "Human between-group interactions are highly variable, ranging from violent to tolerant and affiliative. Tolerance between groups is linked to our unique capacity for large-scale cooperation and cumulative culture, but its evolutionary origins are understudied. In chimpanzees, one of our closest living relatives, predominantly hostile between-group interactions impede cooperation and information flow across groups. In contrast, in our other closest living relative, the bonobo, tolerant between-group associations are observed. However, as these associations can...
"Humans display a capacity for tolerance and cooperation among social groups that is rare in the animal kingdom, our long history of war and political strife notwithstanding. But how did we get that way...
"Daniel Lieberman, the Edwin M. Lerner II Professor of Biological Sciences and an expert in the evolution of physical activity and exercise, says that the difference in activity levels between Western adults and hunter-gatherers is significant throughout the lifespan, but grows particularly glaring as we age. Western adults slow down with age while elders of today’s hunter-gatherer tribes — whose daily exercise is already significantly higher — chalk up six to 10 times more activity than their Western counterparts." (...
"Terence D. Capellini has been interested in how joints work for almost three decades. Part of it is due to personal experience, as he suffered several joint injuries as a college ice hockey player and...
From the Harvard Gazette:
"Laura Lewis, who received her PhD in human evolutionary biology from Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) last May, says we can learn a lot about our own behavior by studying the cognition of primates, particularly the way they pay... 
From the Harvard Gazette:
From the Harvard Gazette:
