dance, monkeys, dance

Via Anthropology.net, Dance, Monkeys, Dance, a wonderful little clip on being a human. Monkey. The dedication is to Carl Sagan, Douglas Adams, and you. By Ernest Cline.

random links

A terrible sign of laziness, but the two things I want to blog about require brain power and I just can't get that together this afternoon.

From Language Log, Reliable Sources on (Language) Classification.

A USB flash-stick that balloons up with the amount of data stored on it.

From the ever-awesome John Hawks, the unintended consequences of recreational genetics. I have more to say upon this, but it'll be its own post.

New dialects in the East End threatening Cockney. 

bugs up close

From the delightful ladies at InkyCircus, big pictures of bugs! They have such personality at this scale, I don't know why people are scared of critters.

Except ants, of course. That degree of organisation in something with three ganglia is scary.

ashkenazi founder event

The Matrilineal Ancestry of Ashkenazi Jewry: Portrait of a Recent Founder Event
Behar, D. M.; Metspalu, E.; Kivisild, T.; Achilli, A.; Hadid, Y.; Tzur, S.; Pereira, L.; Amorim, A.; Quintana-Murci, L.; Majamaa, K.

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF HUMAN GENETICS VOL 78; NUMB 3 (2006) pp. 487-497 

Both the extent and location of the maternal ancestral deme from which the Ashkenazi Jewry arose remain obscure. Here, using complete sequences of the maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), we show that close to one-half of Ashkenazi Jews, estimated at 8,000,000 people, can be traced back to only 4 women carrying distinct mtDNAs that are virtually absent in other populations, with the important exception of low frequencies among non-Ashkenazi Jews. We conclude that four founding mtDNAs, likely of Near Eastern ancestry, underwent major expansion(s) in Europe within the past millennium.

Link