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Copyright

Marianne Sommer

Published On

2024-07-30

Page Range

pp. 235–248

Language

  • English

Print Length

14 pages

17. Genetic Trees, Admixture, and Mosaics

  • Marianne Sommer (author)
As Julian Huxley and others had done some fifty years earlier, the assumptions underlying the tree-building approach were also criticized, particularly by emphasizing the prevalence of convergent evolution in humans. And already the earliest builders of population-genetic trees like Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza attempted to model admixture. It was only around 2000, however, that new software made it possible to cluster individual DNA samples while visualizing the degree to which such samples and the populations that were constructed on their basis might be the result of admixtures. In these novel diagrams, the human genomes and populations appeared as colorful mosaics, but the notion persisted that there had once existed genetically pure populations the current human groups were admixtures of.

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.