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Copyright

Marianne Sommer

Published On

2024-07-30

Page Range

pp. 211–214

Language

  • English

Print Length

4 pages

Part IV. The Tree, the Map, the Mosaic, and the Network in Genetic Anthropology

  • Marianne Sommer (author)
While the shape of a tree could capture important theoretical and methodological elements of some of the approaches treated in Part II and III, it is harder to account for the diagram’s success in human population genetics, a field that works with very different concepts and theories, such as statistical and genetic populations. However, around 2000, a certain shift in focus took place from the genetic differentiation of populations towards studies of admixture. New theoretical, statistical, and computational approaches could be applied to an unprecedented amount of human genomic data. Global genome-wide data was visualized as colored bar plots that showed individual genomes and clusters of such genomes to be mosaics made up of different contributions from several ‘ancestral populations’. While I argue that also these relating diagrams still carry notions like originally pure populations, with the advent of ancient DNA studies, the phylogenetic trees of human populations have acquired more and more connecting arrows. Since these have even come to connect living humans with archaic lines such as the Neanderthals, the human family tree is more than ever in jeopardy.

Contributors

Marianne Sommer

(author)
Chair of Kulturwissenschaften at the Department for Cultural and Science Studies at University of Lucerne

Marianne Sommer holds the chair of Kulturwissenschaften at the Department for Cultural and Science Studies at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland. Prior to that, she has held postdoctoral positions and professorships at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Pennsylvania State University, the ETH Zurich and University of Zurich, and has been a guest at many institutions, including Stanford University. For her research in the history of earth, life, and human sciences, encompassing processes of narration, visualization, and exhibition, she has received the Swiss National Latsis Prize. Her monograph History Within (published with The University of Chicago Press in 2016) engages with the science, politics, and culture related to reconstructions of human evolutionary histories; it traces the generation and circulation of such knowledge from the late nineteenth century to the present, including through venues like the museum, the zoo, literature, or the web. Among her monographs are also Bones and Ochre: The Curious Afterlife of the Red Lady of Paviland (published with Harvard University Press in 2007) and Evolutionäre Anthropologie (published with Junius in 2015). Bones and Ochre tells the scientific and cultural history of paleoanthropology and to a lesser degree archeology through the ‘biography’ of the most likely first fossil human skeleton discovered in 1823. Evolutionäre Anthropologie is an introduction to the history of evolutionary anthropology for scholars, students, and the interested public.