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review of scientific and news articles on dna testing and popular genetics

Bradshaw Foundation, Stephen Oppenheimer, INORA

Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Bradshaw Foundation
www.bradshawfoundation.com

A Phoenix business contact recently turned me on to the most fascinating website I have yet encountered devoted to prehistoric times and the migrations of humans. Named after the age-old and stunning Bradshaw rock art inscriptions in Australia, the Bradshaw Foundation focuses on rock art around the world and the brilliant discoveries of Oxford geneticist Stephen Oppenheimer. Its website even offers films and podcasts. Here is how the organization describes itself:

The Bradshaw Foundation until now has been discovering, documenting and preserving ancient rock art around the world. In October 2004 it received the Science & Technology Web Award 2004 (Anthropology and Paleontology) from Scientific American Magazine. The award coincides with the launch of the Bradshaw Foundation's latest development on its website: "The Journey of Mankind -The Peopling of the World". The Foundation has created an interactive map charting the global journey of modern humans over the last 160,000 years. It demonstrates the interactions of migration with climate over this period. Based on a synthesis of the mtDNA and Y chromosome evidence with archaeology; climatology and fossil study; Stephen Oppenheimer has tracked the routes and timing of migration, placing them in context with ancient rock art around the world.

Another delight I discovered at the Bradshaw Foundation's site was INORA, International Newsletter on Rock Art.

With 3 publications per year, in French and English, INORA presents an international forum on ancient rock art and associated areas of archaeology, paleaontology and anthropology.

Edited by Dr Jean Clottes, Former Director of the Chauvet Research Team, funded (or subsidized, or sponsored) by the Ministère de la Culture and the Département de l’Ariège, the newsletter presents the latest discoveries of rock art from around the world. It provides a platform for discussion and debate of current theories and controversies. It examines past, present and future documentation and dating techniques, and their interpretation. It provides online database sources for related literature. The bound copy contains photography, illustrations and bibliographies.

DNA Consultants customers and especially those who have taken the DNA Fingerprint Test will want to check out these resources for understanding human prehistory posthaste! The Bradshaw genetic journey is far more detailed, absorbing and convincing than National Geographic's National Genographic Project. 

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Newest Research Confirms Beachcomber Route to Asia out of Africa

Thursday, December 10, 2009
Other Companies Must Revise Their Human Migration Maps

Since Stephen Oppenheimer's The Real Eve suggested that the main out-of-Africa migration of humans proceeded across the mouth of the Gulf of Suez and around the coasts of Arabia, India and Southeast Asia (the "beachcomber route"), controversy has raged about the origin of Asians, whether they split off from the first out-of-Africa groups, sometimes called macro-haplogroup M, in the north central Asian highlands or the Middle East or elsewhere. A massive project spearheaded by the Chinese has put that question to rest. The 40-institution HUGO Pan-Asian SNP Consortium "strongly concludes the southern route made a more important contribution to East and Southeast Asian populations than the northern route," says Li Jin, a population geneticist at Fudan University in Shanghai, China. Jin was one of the lead authors of a study reported in Science, vol. 326, no. 5959, p. 1470, "SNP Study Supports Southern Migration Route To Asia," by Dennis Normile.

DNA Consultants has always followed Oppenheimer's model of the settlement of Asia, but other companies, including the National Geographic Genographic Project with over 200,000 customers purchasing their product, inform their customers differently. Most human migration maps displayed by DNA companies and the news media show Asians splitting off from Europeans and Native Americans in the northern latitudes of Central Asia and do not depict a southern "beachcomber" route at all.

Newly proven southern migration routes.

In July of this year, DNA Consultants discovered ethnic markers it released in its 18 Marker Ethnic Panel that prove a southern divide and origin for Asian populations as in the new study.

According to the Science report, "Anthropologists, ethnographers, and linguists have long struggled to understand the patchwork-quilt diversity of Asia.  Indonesia alone claims some 300 ethnic groups; the Philippines has 180 native languages and dialects. Where did they all come from?"

So the previously dominant theory of two major waves of migration from the Middle East must now yield to just one initial migration along the coastal route with populations moving north into East Asia from India and Southeast Asia (see map).

The new study is vindication for the Chinese genetics community, which has often been dismissed and rejected by European and American geneticists. Vincent Macaulay, co-author with Martin Richards of the seminal paper followed by most DNA testing companies, " Tracing European founder lineages in the Near Eastern mtDNA pool," (American Journal of Human Genetics, 67, 1251-1276), when asked about the new findings admitted that the southern coastal route now "seems very strong," as quoted in Science.






















Human Migration Map from DNA Consultants' 18 Marker Ethnic Panel.

The study used samples from more than 1900 individuals representing 73 populations and involved 93 researches at 40 institutions in 11 countries and regions in Asia. It was "conceived by Asians in Asia and executed, funded, and completed by an Asian consortium," said Edison Liu, executive director of the Genome Insitute of Singapore. Researchers screened each individual for more than 50,000 SNPs.
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Sarah James commented on 11-Dec-2009 01:51 AM

I seem to recall that the debate about the beachcomber and other possible routes has been knocking around in anthopological circles for a while - at least since the 80s when I was studying anthropology in London. What's wonderful is that the beachcomber route has now been verified, but in the meantime one wonders how many NGGP clients, for example, may believe their ancestral migrations differed, and how widely this scientific breakthrough will be dissemintaed in the public media.

But well done DNA Consultants, and congratulations to the HUGO Pan-Asian SNP Consortium!

Dan commented on 11-Dec-2009 08:30 AM

Makes sense really. What would a regular person do other than follow the warm beach. It seems less likely that a person would go to a cold climate and say "aaahhh this is the place" unless the beach was already taken by someone else.

Nancy Sparks Morrison commented on 11-Dec-2009 03:01 PM

Don,
very interesting research. Makes sense. Explains a lot and glad you were able to realize it before most! :-) Good going!

I intend to do the rest of the DNA next year~ Have loved what you found for me so far!
Nancy

M. Moore commented on 15-Dec-2009 01:43 PM

While I can not extend my knowledge or understanding to the level of Sarah James, I can certainly agree with her comment. Very well written and explained. New discoveries or corrected history?

James R Carney commented on 23-Dec-2009 01:05 PM

This is a very interesting finding. As we have studied the coastal settlements in the south for quite sometime, your research has been fascinating and very plausible with the oral traditions of settlement of the Gulf Coast States in pre American (English Atlantic Coast Settlements). In this New DNA Study Science there is much to learn and most is theory. As students of any science, or academics, we must all keep an open mind and allow for discussion of all possibilities, otherwise we might miss the one great aha Moment. Your openness to research is very refreshing and rewarding.
Keep it up
DJ

Bookmakers commented on 30-Mar-2011 01:01 PM

Hello,I love reading through your blog, I wanted to leave a little comment to support you and wish you a good continuation. Wishing you the best of luck for all your blogging efforts

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Does deCODE's Bankruptcy Signal False Promise of Genetic Medicine?

Sunday, December 06, 2009
Future Shock or Future Letdown?

New York Times reporter and DNA author Nicholas Wade raised an interesting question in his report on the bankruptcy last month of Iceland's deCODE Genetics, which attempted to make it possible for an ordinary consumer to buy the latest applicable information on the connection between their personal genes and their personal disease risk. The article was titled "A Genetics Company Fails, Its Research Too Complex."

In the November 17 edition in the Science and Technology section, Wade wrote:  "The company's demise suggests that the medical promise of the human genome may take much longer to be fulfilled than its sponsors had hoped." But there may be more to the story. "The discovery that major diseases do not have any simple genetic pattern of causation has dealt a serious setback to the gene-hunting field as a whole," he added.

Signs of the deflation of the field of "gene hunting" over the past 10 years since the Human Genome Project was completed and the second phase of the HGP was announced as focusing on the "conquest" of disease are:

  • Discovery that genes are not found in continuous sequences or segments or even on the same chromosome.
  • Realization no DNA can be considered "junk DNA" and even "non-coding" loci have at least place-holder functions and hence their values are not neutral.
  • Greater respect for the role of environment in inheritance, including the nano-environments within the cell where DNA is stored and replicates.
  • Jumping the gun on numerous claims concerning genome-wide association studies in scientific journals like Nature and Science, and subsequent retractions by editors and authors.
  • Ever increasing sample sizes with ever increasing lack of robustness for the data and clarity for conclusions.
  • A push for extending genetic surveys to rare and under-represented populations, with few surprises in the analysis of the implications for medical research or consequent benefit for public health.
  • Diminishing returns on research investment (ROI) on nearly every front.
  • Not a single viable gene therapy product ever introduced.
  • Realization that only very rare genes are discoverable and selection usually takes care of them and extinguishes them over time; hence the bulk of medical research funds goes toward the rarest of cases and not widespread disease such as cancer or diabetes.
Harvard biology professor Richard Lewontin maintained as long ago as the 1960s, and continued to warn even on the eve of the completion of HGP I in 2000, that gene hunting was essentially a scientific fetish with little true power or efficacy. In 1992, he wrote "The Dream of the Human Genome" as a review article in response to The Code of Codes:  Scientific and Social Issues in the Human Genome Project, edited by Daniel J. Kevles and Leroy Hood, and seven other recently published books on the subject of genetics and medicine. The essay was reprinted in Lewontin's own book It Ain't Necessarily So (second edition, New York Review, 2001). 

I think it is time to elevate gene hunting to the danger of something beyond a harmless fetish for the members of a narrow profession or scientific sect. Its waste and failures have taken on the proportions of a national form of folly and collective denial. While huge expense and sensational efforts continue to be thrown away on the molecular biology revolution, the need to renovate our neglected infrastructure and reform political mechanisms goes unanswered. Resources that might be better allocated keep dwindling. The supposedly most advanced society in history turns a blind eye on such relatively easy measures of public health as universal health care and uncontaminated chemical-free food and water supplies. While geneticists continue to cackle about inch-sized strides in their progress toward scaling the distant peaks of genetic medicine we are slipping into the abyss of logical disconnects. 



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naturopathic physician commented on 06-Dec-2009 02:34 PM

The area of personalized genomics for health intervention has not really panned out. For example, the BRCA 1 and BRCA2 genes were hailed with great fanfare a few years ago as causal agents of breast cancer. But the true percentage of BRCA 1 and 2 mutations contributing to breast cancer are between 5 and 10%, leaving an astounding 90-95% of breast cancer due to other environmental factors. It is those factors that bear looking into, not the "faulty" genes.

The available personalized SNP (single nucleotide polymorphism) panels that are available today for use without a physicians input, are leading people into unproven territory as the true associations between these SNPs and the disease they purport to contribute , is not supported by science.

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FOX News Showcases DNA Consultants

Thursday, December 03, 2009
Dr. Yates was interviewed by WBRC reporter Jeh Jeh Pruitt of FOX News Alabama at the company offices in Phoenix on October 22. The report was broadcast on affiliate stations in late November. Watch it on MyFoxAlabama.com.


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M. Moore commented on 15-Dec-2009 01:44 PM

I hope there are many more interviews with DNA Consultants. Kudos and Cheers!

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