Dispatches From Turtle Island

A quite lucid explanation of special relativity and general relativity with a limited vocabulary by Randall Munroe of xkcd fame has been rep...

Investigators have managed to get right to the source of the European Neolithic Revolution with ancient DNA from Greece and Anatolia, which...

The Language Log blog highlights the research of Genevieve Von Petzinger into the use of symbols that may be ideograms as a form of written...

The Data The sum of the three neutrino masses is less than or equal to 110 meV  at a 95% confidence level, according to the latest effort ...

Usually, the abstract of a scientific journal article simply summarizes what the article says in a single paragraph (some longer, some short...

Until now, we had one individual's Denisovan autosomal DNA and Denisovan mtDNA from two individuals.  Renanalysis of one of the teeth us...

Gruda Boljevića tumulus is one of the most important archaeological sites found recently in Europe. The reason why I believe that this tumu...

Almost all of the ordinary matter in the universe (as opposed to "dark matter") is made up of protons and neutrons assembled toget...

The earliest evidence of marijuana use by humans (for its hemp fibers) comes from Jomon Japan . [T]he earliest traces of cannabis in Japan...

Some scientists horde data, on the theory that this gives them an edge that other scientists in the community lack so that they can publish ...

There have been a number of interesting papers on historical genetics and prehistory in the past couple of weeks that I haven't covered ...

The collected works of the mystical Indian mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan are still yielding valuable mathematical insights almost...

Razib Khan has an extended meditation on the genetic origins of the Eurasians. Some key points: (1) Culturally driven punctuated change...

Alexandre Deur is a physicist at Jefferson Labs whom I have previous praised for his work on graviton self-interaction based alternative to...

Dog genetics are most diverse in Mongolia and Tibet and show a roughly clinal trend towards less diversity with distance away from that are...

Siberia and Western Russia are home to over 40 culturally and linguistically diverse indigenous ethnic groups. Yet, genetic variation of pe...

The Mathieson, et al. (2015) paper on " Eight thousand years of natural selection " has few surprises when it comes to the title o...

Razib Khan has tweeted the biggest story of the ASHG 2015 Conference (key points in bold): @iosif_lazaridis revision of paper @mathiesonia...

The Math With Bad Drawing blog has a nice little post explaining very lucidly who the notion of exponents of repeated multiplication was ge...

UPDATE 3 (January 25, 2016): The portion of this paper pertaining to Eurasian admixture in people outside East Africa was due to an IT error...