Desmond Tutu
razib | February 17, 2010To the left I've juxtaposed the images of the four Bushmen males whose genomes were analyzed in the recent Nature paper and compared to Desmond Tutu. I've added to the montage a photo of a Swedish and Chinese man. The Nature paper looked at the HapMap data sets which had within them whites from Utah, northwest Europeans, and Chinese from Beijing, and compared these populations to the Bushmen and Desmond Tutu. One important point that this paper emphasized was that the rule-of-thumb that African populations have the most extant genetic diversity of all human groups, and that the Bushmen have…
edyong | February 17, 2010
Meet !Gubi, the tribal elder of a group of Bushmen (or Khoisan), one of the oldest known human lineages. He lives the life of a hunter-gatherer in the Namibian part of the Kalahari Desert. But he also has a strange connection to James Watson, the British American scientist who helped to discover the structure of DNA. For a start, they're both around 80 years old. But more importantly, they are two of just 11 humans to have their entire genomes sequenced.
Along with Archbishop Desmond Tutu, !Gubi is one of two southern Africans, whose full genomes have been sequenced by Stephan Schuster and…