It Now Only Costs $100 To Know Everything About
Your DNA
Thanks to
an investment from a high-ranking employee at Google, Sergey Brin, 23andme.com
is now offering its genome sequencing for $100. They offer information about
how susceptible you are to certain diseases. They hope the lower price would
take price out of the decision and allow interest to be the driving factor in
whether or not you want to get your genome sequence. However, the results just
boil down to percentages, so you don’t receive any concrete answers.
Tracing Humanity's
African Ancestry May Mean Rewriting 'out of Africa' Dates
A
University of Alberta archeologist’s research is leading anthropologists to
rethink the ‘out of Africa’ theory. Evidence included artifacts that point to
human occupation of Africa at least 200kya, which encompasses a late Ice Age
time where a “genetic bottleneck” likely occurred. Methods used to date these
findings include radiocarbon dating as well as spin resonance. The importance
is that they may be able prove that people lived through the bottleneck period.
Africa's
Homo Sapiens Were the First Techies
A search
for finding the beginning of modern human behavior and technological
advancement has led anthropologists to South Africa. Wits University professor,
Christopher Henshilwood, has written a paper about the Still Bay techno-traditions
from 70-75kya and the Howiesons Poort from 60-65kya. He has found evidence of
the first abstract art, jewelry, and bone tools that were used to make spears. Henshilwood
said, "All of these innovations,
plus many others we are just discovering, clearly show that Homo sapiens in
southern Africa at that time were cognitively modern and behaving in many ways
like ourselves. It is a good reason to be proud of our earliest, common
ancestors who lived and evolved in South Africa and who later spread out into
the rest of the world after about 60,000 years.” He also mentioned that climate
change as well as the rising sea levels could have led to these innovations. His
goal is to prove the “Neanthropic Man” originated in Africa and led to the
modern behavior in Europe.
No comments:
Post a Comment