(The Tracker didn’t get much in this week, what with travel to Boston and back, jet lag, laziness, etc., but here are a few more good ones. Back in stride next week. Have a great weekend everybody.)

Papers in both of the world’s leading general research journals, Science and Nature, provided over the past two days an avalanche of fresh data on human genetic diversity and what it all says about our origins. Not new: We’re a patchwork, we started out in Africa, our migrations and ways that our ancestries affect how we look and somewhat how we handle disease. And, there is more diversity within any specific group than there is average difference among groups. But the details are fascinating and are being sifted out better than ever. So, as one would guess, we’re a lot more alike than different. The armies of researchers relied on data gathered, via the Human Genome Diversity Project, from peoples with little or no recent dilution of ancestries rooted in specific regiions of the world.

The two-journal, three-paper news break provided a good chance for reporters to get confused or miss things. Not everybody scours the advances from both, not all the papers had associated press releases. So some coverage came up a bit scanter than it ought to have. At least, the three papers seem to have the same gist.

There is no new, giant discovery here. Rather, it confirms in an incremental way the presiding, general picture of an African diaspora and genetic radiation in the last 100,000 years or so. Media reports rightly focus on the new details. One detail is a map – in a paper in Nature by a large international team that a Cornell University professor led – of the patchwork of distinquishable aboriginal types or clades. Africa is densest in diversity – makes sense, we’ve been evolving and differentiating longer there than anywhere else. (Nature has a second paper, too, from a NIH-led group futher cementing the overall portrait of how human genetic diversity has grown).

The U. Michigan end of one of the Nature paper’s authorship made the map, centered on Africa and resembling a colorful patchwork quilt. Among those featuring it is Roger Highfield at the Telegraph in the UK. He breaks one implication rather gently, after a few grafs, to his readers: White Europeans carry more harmful mutations than, say, Africans – a result of a bottleneck in population and diversity as humans moved into Europe perhaps 45,000 years ago. Fox News, by contrast, gave this interpretation a bit more dash, with the online hed: “White Genetically Weaker Than Blacks…” (cq) . Well sheesh.

Los Angeles Times Karen Kaplan leads today on the Science journal article’s findings, but quickly enough refers to the corroboration from the Nature studies. She imagines “an ancient band of explorers left what is now Ethiopia” and went on to colonize just about everywhere else. She doesn’t say much about must have been considerable continuing gene flow from Africa, and sloshings back and forth as traders and armies and kidnapings kept the DNA soup bubbling. She also gets enough into SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms) and other detail to suggest the increasing detail that is available to genetic paleohistorian sleuths.

Other stories:

San Jose Mercury News Lisa M. Krieger does just the Science study, with nothing on the large Michigan-Cornell effort in Nature ; San Francisco Chronicle Sabin Russell gets them both in, calling the upshot the “largest and most conclusive” argument yet for a fairly recent Homo sapiens “Out of Africa” model of the origins of modern humanity – and he gives whites some solace for having a weaker collective genome than other populations. The first Europeans kept running into ice ages and those would, one surmises, force them (including The Tracker’s Irish-French ancestral forbears) into small, interbreeding clans of survivors ;HealthDay News via US News & World Report Steven Reinberg ; Washington Post David Brown has a generic but useful lede: “We’re all pretty much the same except, of course, for the little things that make us different,” Bloomberg Ryan Flinn looks only at the study in Science ; Reuters Maggie Fox acknowledges just two of the three studies in the two journals ;

Grist for the Mill:

(Nature paper) Univ. Michigan Press Release and Cornell Univ. Press Release ;

(Science paper) Stanford Sch. of Medicine Press Release ;

This entry was posted on Friday, February 22nd, 2008 at 4:22 pm and is filed under Science Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.