Socioecology Research Today

The advent of farming around 12 millennia ago was a cultural as well as technological revolution, requiring a new system of property rights. Among mobile hunter–gatherers during the late Pleistocene, food was almost certainly widely shared as it was acquired. If a harvested crop or the meat of a domesticated animal were to have been [...]

Carlos Bustamante wants to know how much of human history is etched in our genomes. A population geneticist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, he and his colleagues have closely examined the DNA of Latinos in South Florida and traced their African, European, and South American ancestries. The team uncovered a stunning record of [...]

The search for ever deeper relationships among the World’s languages is bedeviled by the fact that most words evolve too rapidly to preserve evidence of their ancestry beyond 5,000 to 9,000 y. On the other hand, quantitative modeling indicates that some “ultraconserved” words exist that might be used to find evidence for deep linguistic relationships [...]

When do ethnic cleavages increase the risk of conflict? Under what conditions is a strong common identity likely to emerge, thereby reducing that risk? How are patterns of social identification shaped by conflict? We draw on empirical results regarding the nature and determinants of group identification to develop a simple model that addresses these questions. [...]

There is a consensus that modern humans arrived in the Americas 15,000–20,000 y ago during the Late Pleistocene, most probably from northeast Asia through Beringia. However, there is still debate about the time of entry and number of migratory waves, including apparent inconsistencies between genetic and morphological data on Paleoamericans. Here we report the identification [...]

The Soqotra archipelago is one of the most isolated landmasses in the world, situated at the mouth of the Gulf of Aden between the Horn of Africa and southern Arabia. The main island of Soqotra lies not far from the proposed southern migration route of anatomically modern humans out of Africa ∼60,000 years ago (kya), [...]

Together, empirical and simulation results suggest that genetic divergence between European source populations and European Americans in Central Wisconsin is subtle but already under way. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ejhg.2012.258

Numerous studies of human populations in Europe and Asia have revealed a concordance between their extant genetic structure and the prevailing regional pattern of geography and language. For native South Americans, however, such evidence has been lacking so far. Therefore, we examined the relationship between Y-chromosomal genotype on the one hand, and male geographic origin [...]

Evolutionary geneticist Johannes Krause of the University of Tübingen in Germany, however, wasn’t so sure that a mutation rate calibrated for living humans could be applied so far back in time. He and his colleagues decided to test the idea by sequencing the DNA from the maternally inherited mitochondria (mtDNA), or powerhouses of the cell, [...]

Indonesia, an island nation linking mainland Asia with the Pacific world, hosts a wide range of linguistic, ethnic and genetic diversity. Despite the complexity of this cultural environment, genetic studies in Indonesia remain surprisingly sparse. Here, we report mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and associated Y-chromosome diversity for the largest cohort of Indonesians examined to date—2740 individuals [...]