When it comes to the architecture of the human genome, it’s only a matter of time before harmful genes — genes that could compromise future generations — arise in a population. These mutations accumulate in the gene pool, primarily affected by a population’s size and practices like marrying within a small community. New research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) journal provides rare direct evidence showing that increased homozygosity — meaning two identical alleles in a genome — leads to negative effects on fertility in a human population.
In testing the genetic material of current populations in Africa and comparing against existing fossil evidence of early Homo sapiens populations there, researchers have uncovered a new model of human evolution — overturning previous beliefs that a single African population gave rise to all humans.
Distinguished Professor Emeritus Geerat Vermeij, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, will deliver the upcoming New Emeriti Distinguished Lecture scheduled for Feb. 15.
The next time you feel your heart racing and your blood pressure rising, try this: Go outside and gaze at a body of water. Research by a UC Davis psychologist suggests that contemplating water — even if it’s a swimming pool — may be good for psychological well-being.
The transition of human societies from hunter-gatherers to farmers and pastoralists is a more nuanced process than generally thought, according to a new study of peoples living in the highlands of southwest Ethiopia. The work was published March 9 in Current Biology.
Between the time when early modern humans emerged in Africa and when they spread around the globe, they developed complex behaviors that enabled them — and us — to adapt and thrive in new environments.
The Tibetan Plateau has long been considered one of the last places to be populated by people in their migration around the globe. A new paper by archaeologists at UC Davis highlights that our extinct cousins, the Denisovans, reached the “roof of the world” about 160,000 years ago — 120,000 years earlier than previous estimates for our species — and even contributed to our adaptation to high altitude.
Many people mistakenly think of evolution as progress. But humans, despite their ability to manipulate objects and change their environment, are not “on top” of the world’s species. Research by Lynn Isbell, chair of the UC Davis Department of Anthropology, suggests that ancestral humans and other primates developed different strategies to find food and avoid predators.
Stone tools uncovered in Mongolia by an international team of archaeologists indicate that modern humans traveled across the Eurasian steppe about 45,000 years ago, according to a new University of California, Davis, study. The date is about 10,000 years earlier than archaeologists previously believed.
The FOXP2 gene has been associated with uniquely human language abilities. But a UC Davis scientist and colleagues did a study with a wider variety of people and found no evidence of selection for FOXP2 in modern humans, challenging previous of how we think humans acquired language.
