DNA Sequencing Megathread! Neanderthals, Denisovans and other ancient DNA!

[Malthus]

That's a pretty shitty travel company.

If you think that's bad, the Ontario brother's descendant now lives in Saskatchewan.

Obviously a trace of insanity lurks in your genetic heritage. 

[Caliga]

Clearly I am descended from the smartest brother.  He moved to what would eventually become a tax haven.

[grumbler]

If you think that's bad, the Ontario brother's descendant now lives in Saskatchewan.

And his luggage ended up in Murmansk!

[jimmy olsen]

This movie looks terrible, movie wise and history wise. This is not how wolves were domesticated. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMjSsPMfoqM

Also, these hunters are dumb. If you want to stampede a herd off a cliff, set the grass on fire.

[dps]

This is not how wolves were domesticated.

You know that because grumbler gave you a first-hand account, right?

[jimmy olsen]

This is not how wolves were domesticated.

You know that because grumbler gave you a first-hand account, right?

First of all, hunter gatherers were not bleeding hearts, especially in an ice age when they were all living one bad season from the brink of disaster. One is not going to spare a wolf that tried to kill him.

Second of all, a wolf that old is not tameable.

The traditional idea is that someone (probably a woman) came across a dead mother and adpoted the cute pups.

But it was way more complicated than that.

Wolves today are aggressive and shy, and it's understandable why. Humans are dicks out to murder the competition and have wiped them out from large swaths of their range. But, obviously, back in the paleolithic there was a vastly larger and more diverse wolf population.

It is believed that a pack of particularly bold wolves started trailing a human band, scavenging from their hunts and garbage dumps. To do this they had to get closer to people than most animals would. Humans obviously noticed this and tried to kill them, focusing on the dangerous looking ones.

We know from Russian experiments on domesticating the gray fox, that in canids, agression correlates with a massive number of behavior and physical traits. The more agressive a canid is the farther away it wants to be from people unless it is trying to eat them. The less agressive it is the more likely it will tolerate human presence.

So these wolves were under pressure for less agression on two fronts. They needed to get close to humans to eat. And they had to look nonthreatening so humans wouldn't attack them.

It just takes a handful of generations of strong selection against agression for them to get spotted coats, curly tails, and a puppish look into adulthood. It's at this point if you bring up pups in the company of people that they become attached to them for life.

Basically this pack of wolves self domesticated themselves. And once the people in that group took the dogs in and started using them to hunt, their population exploded and they had a huge expansion that spread their dogs around the world with them.

[dps]

Tim, it was a joke about grumbler's allegedly ancient age, not an invitation for you to go all pedagogue on us.

[jimmy olsen]

Tim, it was a joke about grumbler's allegedly ancient age, not an invitation for you to go all pedagogue on us.

This is the DNA sequencing megathread. What better place to nerd out? 

[garbon]

Alone in your room with any internet capable devices turned off.

[Eddie Teach]

Tim, you should punish these guys with a half dozen articles about space flight and renewable energy use.

[The Brain]

Wind turbines in space.

Someone mentioning solar wind in 3, 2, 1...

[derspiess]

Alone in your room with any internet capable devices turned off.

[jimmy olsen]

 Good recent scholarly article on the subject of ancient dog dna can be found here.

https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms16082

Absract

Europe has played a major role in dog evolution, harbouring the oldest uncontested Palaeolithic remains and having been the centre of modern dog breed creation. Here we sequence the genomes of an Early and End Neolithic dog from Germany, including a sample associated with an early European farming community. Both dogs demonstrate continuity with each other and predominantly share ancestry with modern European dogs, contradicting a previously suggested Late Neolithic population replacement. We find no genetic evidence to support the recent hypothesis proposing dual origins of dog domestication. By calibrating the mutation rate using our oldest dog, we narrow the timing of dog domestication to 20,000–40,000 years ago.

Interestingly, we do not observe the extreme copy number expansion of the AMY2B gene characteristic of modern dogs that has previously been proposed as an adaptation to a starch-rich diet driven by the widespread adoption of agriculture in the Neolithic.

[jimmy olsen]

Aryan invasion of India circa 2000 BC confirmed by ancient DNA.

http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/how-genetics-is-settling-the-aryan-migration-debate/article19090301.ece

[Grinning_Colossus]

A migration is confirmed. It may not have taken the form of blond beasts on horseback sacking Harappa to the tune of Wagner.