Tag: Carl Zimmer

  • Millions of people living on the islands today inherited genes from the people who made them home before Europeans arrived.

  • Our genetic code cannot be treated as a matter of simple fractions.

  • A Single Migration From Africa Populated the World, Studies Find The New York Times 2016-09-21 Carl Zimmer The KhoiSan, hunter-gatherers living today in southern Africa, above, are among hundreds of indigenous people whose genetic makeup has provided new clues to human prehistory. Credit: Eric Laforgue/Gamma-Rapho, via Getty Images Modern humans evolved in Africa roughly 200,000…

  • Tales of African-American History Found in DNA The New York Times 2016-05-27 Carl Zimmer The history of African-Americans has been shaped in part by two great journeys. The first brought hundreds of thousands of Africans to the southern United States as slaves. The second, the Great Migration, began around 1910 and sent six million African-Americans…

  • Agriculture Linked to DNA Changes in Ancient Europe The New York Times 2015-11-23 Carl Zimmer The agricultural revolution was one of the most profound events in human history, leading to the rise of modern civilization. Now, in the first study of its kind, an international team of scientists has found that after agriculture arrived in…

  • White? Black? A Murky Distinction Grows Still Murkier The New York Times 2014-12-24 Carl Zimmer In 1924, the State of Virginia attempted to define what it means to be white. The state’s Racial Integrity Act, which barred marriages between whites and people of other races, defined whites as people “whose blood is entirely white, having…

  • DNA Double Take The New York Times 2013-09-16 Carl Zimmer From biology class to “C.S.I.,” we are told again and again that our genome is at the heart of our identity. Read the sequences in the chromosomes of a single cell, and learn everything about a person’s genetic information — or, as 23andme, a prominent…