The mistery of the origin of Australian languages

Methods used in evolutionary biology show how people spread across the continent, giving birth to new languages

A myth in Australia says that a woman named Warramurrungunji emerged from the sea and that she created children as she moved across the landscape. Warramurrungunji told each child to speak an specific language. This myth has more reason than it seems, in the sense that the peopling and language origins of Australia are closely entwined. Researchers have long puzzled over both. When Europeans colonized Australia 250 years ago, the continent was home to an estimated half-million to 2 million people who were organized into about 700 different grops and spoke at least 300 languages.

Linguits have struggled to work out how these languages were related and when they emerged, but unfortunately each one was spoken by relatively few people and many of them vanished before they could be studied. In recent years researchers have begun to unravel the Australian linguistic puzzle, and this week the approach takes a major step forward, with a combined genetic and linguistic study of the largest Australian language family, led by evolutionary geneticist Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen, and published in this week´s issue of Nature.

Can we see the mankind future in the Neanderthals past?

Climate change affect Neanderthals life pushing them into their extinction.

Neandertharls disappeared from Europe just after 40.000 years ago. There are many hypothesis of the Neanderthals extinction but one of the strongest idea is they live in a glacial age. Recent discoveries show that the climate of that age was so stressful for our ancestors. Analizing the prey animals found out that they extract until the smallest pieces to feed in the coldest times.

Also, they had changed their behaviour to adapt better to the environment but not all the adaptations always have desirable effects. As we know it didnt't work as good as they thought.

But that can happen to us?

Brain evolution as a result of interaction in social groups

Nowadays people forget the importance of help each other when in the past was so essential to the development of the brain according to the research led by Roger M. Whitaker and his colleagues. The research is about a "donation game" and how we act depending on different factors. When we choose two individuals among two different populations the behaviour of each population are not the same one.

A map of human wanderlust

Genetic studies of individuals from geographically diverse human populations help to clarify the dispersal of modern humans from Africa to every corner of the Earth.

From our evolutionary birthplace in Africa, modern humans have migrated to nearly every habitable corner of Earth, from the inhospitable frozen wastelands of Siberia to the muggy African plains.

The number, timing and routes of human dispersals out of Africa have implications for understanding our past and how the past influenced contemporary patterns of human genomic variation.

Three studies online in Nature (Malaspinas et al., Mallick et al. and Pgani et al.) have described 787 new, high-quality genomes of individuals from more tan 270 populations across the globe, providing apportunities to refine and extend current models of historical human migration. Mallick et al. and Pgani et al. made great efforts in cataloguing genetic data from under-studied indigenous populations, which are often difficult to access and are rapidly disappearing. These include African populations, which have considerable genetic, linguistic and cultural diversity. Similarly, Malaspinas et al. describe the first extensive survey of human genetic diversity in the poorly studied Australia.

The phenotypic legacy mixture between archaic hominins and modern humans

Interbreeding between modern humans and archaic hominins is not a legend is a fact! And this have serious consequences in our genome which are exposured nowadays.

Many researchs affirm modern humans interbreeding with archaic hominins, known as Neanderthals. In this new investigation published in Science Journals and led by Corinne N. Simonti, they found out some DNA related to those hominins in Western and  Nothern people and thus hypothesize that some Neandertal's alleles mixed with modern humans . That is because when some groups of anatomical modern humans left Africa and began to spread across Europe and Asia they met each other and some of this groups were related with them in the same time and area. Furthermore, a recent genomic analysis provide not only neandertals and modern humans,