Landmark ancient-genome study shows surprise acceleration of human evolution

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01204-5

24•unsuspecting•1h ago

Related: Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47791282 (64 comments)

https://x.com/doctorveera/status/2044679999450664967 (https://xcancel.com/doctorveera/status/2044679999450664967)

Comments

A_D_E_P_T•53m ago

Not that surprising when you consider, as the paper does, the explosion of very meaningful traits such as the ability to digest lactose and various anti-malaria adaptations e.g. Sickle Cell and the Duffy-null mutation.

It's just controversial for obvious reasons. The notion that human groups may have meaningfully evolved in different ways over the past 10,000 years, and may still be evolving, is an unpopular one on both ends of the political spectrum.

AlotOfReading•4m ago

The reason no one wants to talk is that these discussions are always co-opted by racists wanting to affirm their beliefs, regardless of the underlying science. Reich in particular is borderline deliberate about attracting those sorts with his lab's research, because of how badly he chooses to handle the topic and terminology of race.

mohamedkoubaa•25m ago

"To supercharge the search, Reich, Ali Akbari, a computational geneticist at Harvard Medical School, and their colleagues amassed the largest-ever collection of genomic data from ancient humans — from a total of 15,836 individuals from western Eurasia — including more than 10,000 newly sequenced genomes."

Without commenting on the content of this sentence or article, I will say that it is refreshing to see sentences like this in the wild after being regularly and constantly subjected to LLM slop.

sho_hn•24m ago

And yet you managed to center AI in the discussion.

There is no you in your brain – your identity is a "society of the mind"

OpenAI Says Codex Agents Are Running Its Data Platform Autonomously

Release PiClaw v1.8.1 – Heat

Vibecheck: AI Web Design Slop Fingerprinter

Can a browser with user and clickbait queries protect from the attention economy

John Wick, Madara Uchiha, characters that take on entire armies by themselves

Healing the Invisible Scars of Gen Z's Over-Sanitized World

Stop using naive RAG – adding relationships to AI context

New German search engine lets people check whether their relatives were Nazis

Shuttered startups are selling old Slack chats and emails to AI companies

Investors salivate over SpaceX's mega IPO, the company reportedly lost $5B

Japan's Cherry Blossom Database, 1,200 Years Old, Has a New Keeper

OSS code review, in the era of LLMs

Free tool for WebP and SVG optimization. Privat data

A private space company has a new plan to bag an asteroid

Show HN: AI agents should browse your site, not call your API

Maine Said No to New Data Centers. Other States Are Racing to Follow

If you want into Anthropic's Claude club, you may have to show ID

Cisco Wi-Fi boxes are filling their disks with 5MB of undeletable data every day

Intel eases reliance on TSMC with 'Merica-made Core Series 3 processors

Does the brain make its own DMT? New study ignites debate

From Endless Frontier to Enemy of the People: The Assault on Public Science

Show HN: codeburn-rs; CodeBurn but 600x faster in Rust [view coding token usage]

Post-quantum cryptography migration at Meta: Framework, lessons, and takeaways

NASA's X-59 Completes First Wheels-Up Flight

Gmail label bridge on Claude Cowork just broke

How to Develop a Career Path Framework in 10 Steps

Proteus: Heterogeneous FPGA Virtualization [pdf]

How to Host a Blog on a Subdirectory Instead of a Subdomain

A win–lose mindset affects political and policy preferences