Second, it describes the author's gradual piecing together of how Yanomamö society actually works, a matter of great relevance to recent human evolution.
The paper Dr Moyzis and his colleagues have just published is a ranging shot, but the amount of recent human evolution it has exposed is surprising.
The DNA changes at these sites, researchers believe, mark the turning points in recent human evolution as the populations on each continent diverged from one another.
The Broad team is studying EDAR as part of a larger plan to identify all the genetic variants responsible for recent human evolution.
Inserting some of the other selected genes into mice might help explain why they were favored, and point to critical turning points in recent human evolution, Dr. Sabeti said.
The spread of the new gene, described in January by Bing Su of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is just one instance of recent human evolution and in particular of a specific population's changing genetically in response to local conditions.
My studies have led me to a greater recognition in recent human evolution of the forces of demography (the need for large populations and social networks to make progress), drift and contingency (chance events), and cultural rather than natural selection than I had considered before.
Dr. Stephen O'Brien, a geneticist at the National Cancer Institute, said that having the Neanderthal genome would be "a very exciting prospect" because it would serve as a reference point for deciding which genes had been selected for in recent human evolution.
This latter figure is staggeringly close in terms of recent human evolution and indicates that long after the Neanderthals, our closest evolutionary relatives, had disappeared from the face of the Earth around 35,000 years ago, these tiny, distant relatives of Homo sapiens were still living on remote Flores.
The most striking instances of recent human evolution have emerged from a new kind of study, one in which the genome is scanned for evidence of selective pressures by looking at a few hundred thousand specific sites where variation is common.
It is still hard to say precisely where Cro-Magnons belong in recent human evolution, but they had a culture that produced a variety of sophisticated tools such as retouched blades, end scrapers, "nosed" scrapers, the chisel-like tool known as a burin, and fine bone tools (see Aurignacian culture).
