Introducing Ethio Helix

I have added the blog Ethio Helix to the side bar. In a previous Dispatches from Turtle Island post, I considered Ethio Helix's look at the population genetic structure of Africa using publicly available genomes, which was well done, and a new post at Ethio Helix on the population genetics of Afro-Asiatic populations that I've seen there, is also very good.

A review of the archives of the blog show that the high quality posts are a continuing feature of Ethio Helix. The most elaborate posts rival feature stories in Science News, or rather bare bones and short, but high quality, scholarly journal articles (compare PLOS articles). The assertions are well sourced, well within the mainstream of current, well informed and up to date academic thought in the field, and have more attention to nuance and context than many published scholarly journal articles. The shorter posts are comparable to a typical post at Science Daily or a post from one of the many academic bloggers who publish abstracts of new publications with minimal comment, that arereduced to the essentials that people who blog and comment on these topics really want to know. There are also a smattering press releases and podcasts about Ethiopia and East African in general. The integration of visuals, video and text is exceptional - many big name bloggers are less adroit in that regard.

This has convinced me that these insights deserve to be on my regular hotlist of information sources and analysis in the areas of "A place to gather information on: Population genetics, Ethiopia, East Africa, Linguistics, News, History etc....." that it says it is about in its subtitle. The blog also has a small number of regular, high quality commenters that enhance what this blog has to offer. The proprietor of the blog goes by the username "Etyopis."

This is not a high volume blog: there have been fifteen posts over the since it began on October 21, 2009. But, the pace of the posts has picked up in 2012 to multiple posts every month so far.