What-ography?!?

[DCDave]

Don't want to.

Then stay home.

[Wally]

Don't want to.

Then stay home.

Don't want to.

[Wally]

Man, I'm like the U.S foreign policy of the photo thread.

[jebreject]

BOOOORREEEEDDDDDD

[girl]

Is your hair pulled back in that photo, jeb? It's hard to tell from that angle. Looks good.

[jebreject]

yes. i wear that shit in a bun.

also, thanks.

[jebreject]

my beard is bigger than that though

[girl]

 

[G.C.R]

 
Hawt
 

[FreddyKnuckles]

Judging by your blond mustache, you and i are probably distant relatives.

[jebreject]

o, how i hate the blond 'tache

[jebreject]

tho i expect it'd have to be like adam-and-eve distant, knucks, as i don't think we share any ancestry

[Greg Nog]

Someone call the Genographic Project, stat!

[peacocks]

Someone call the Genographic Project, stat!

is this the thing that showed how Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are all cousins?

[Greg Nog]

What's this now?

It's the big genetic project that aims at figuring out how humans migrated where by looking at where certain tell-tale DNA markers are found.  The best part is that any old person can get their DNA analyzed!  The downside is that the results are frequently pretty vague.

[elpollodiablo]

Nog have you seen these home DNA paternity tests? You can find out if you were really bought from gypsies!

[C of heartbreak]

I'm pretty sure the #1 consumer of those tests is guests on Maury.

[Greg Nog]

Nog have you seen these home DNA paternity tests? You can find out if you were really bought from gypsies!

When Westphal was a kid, his mom used to tell him that he'd better behave, or else The Gypsies would come and take him away.

Oh, those Roma!  Such a delightfully earthy, repulsive people!

[Wally]

Nog have you seen these home DNA paternity tests? You can find out if you were really bought from gypsies!

When Westphal was a kid, his mom used to tell him that he'd better behave, or else The Gypsies would come and take him away.

Oh, those Roma!  Such a delightfully earthy, repulsive people!

In my pre-uni course last year there was a girl who did a presentation about a community of gay men in India. According to the presentation these were the only gay men in India, and they dressed as women at all times, and had some fairly colorful habits. For example, apparently they stole babies. Yep, the young woman who gave this presentation, who is of Indian parentage but had only visited a handful of times, explained to the class that there were a group of amateur drag queens who slept with one another by day and stole babies from houses at night. These babies were then either held for ransom, or trained to be street thieves much in the style of Fagin I imagine.

[Andrew_TSKS]

whoa, how credulous do you have to be to get that far in life and still believe the wild stories your parents told you as a child? even i would have long since called bullshit on that one.

[Greg Nog]

I think if I were raised with stories of a magical commune of flashy Oliver-Twist-style drag queens, I would be crushed if I ever found out it was false.  I could also imagine devoting a significant portion of my adolescence to trying to join their circus-like inner circle.

[andronicus]

It's the big genetic project that aims at figuring out how humans migrated where by looking at where certain tell-tale DNA markers are found.  The best part is that any old person can get their DNA analyzed!  The downside is that the results are frequently pretty vague.

Can anyone here tell me if Science has any tricks to determine the age of a migration pattern by looking at DNA?  Reconstructing a hypothetical y-chromosome say and I don't know maybe there is some average rate of decay they could look at?  I have some revisionist theories about early Islamic history that would sound significantly less-insane if, when my professor asked me why I thought that, I could answer, "Because Science."

[peacocks]

I think if I were raised with stories of a magical commune of flashy Oliver-Twist-style drag queens, I would be crushed if I ever found out it was false.  I could also imagine devoting a significant portion of my adolescence to trying to join their circus-like inner circle.

[diesel_powered]

Geez, he's got you there.

[C of heartbreak]

It's the big genetic project that aims at figuring out how humans migrated where by looking at where certain tell-tale DNA markers are found.  The best part is that any old person can get their DNA analyzed!  The downside is that the results are frequently pretty vague.

Can anyone here tell me if Science has any tricks to determine the age of a migration pattern by looking at DNA?  Reconstructing a hypothetical y-chromosome say and I don't know maybe there is some average rate of decay they could look at?  I have some revisionist theories about early Islamic history that would sound significantly less-insane if, when my professor asked me why I thought that, I could answer, "Because Science."

Well, the way they (more or less) traced our ancestry back to Africa was by looking at random mutations in mitochondrial DNA. The mutations are roughly constant in time and have no evolutionary influence, so if you wanted to tell how far back a common ancestor of a population is, you would sample the mtDNA of the population and look at the amount of mutations, then use the rate of mutation to see how far back that common ancestor was.

Of course, if you're going to apply it to a specific migration, you've got to introduce significantly less science-y data, such as assumptions/historical records about how much variation there was among the initial group, whether they interbreeded with whatever group(s) they interacted with, and a host of other variables, which may or may not give you a comfortable margin of error, you'd have to look into it.