Friday, March 1, 2013

Citizen Science Helps to Rewrite the Y Chromosome Tree..

 
Yesterday the first scientific paper was published by the American Journal of Human Genetics on a very interesting discovery that I previewed back in November on this blog: http://blog.ddowell.com/2012/11/your-paternal-line-just-got-much-longer.html. This was the discovery that an African-American in South Carolina had a Y-chromosome DNA sequence that is far older than any previously documented in fossils or in living individuals in Africa. This discovery was initially stumbled into in the course of a "routine" genetic genealogy project by citizen scientist, Bonnie Schrack. It has since been verified and documented by academic scientists from a variety of disciplines.

Today CeCe Moore explains this find in her usual complete and understandable way. Be sure to check out this story on her blog post linked below:


Citizen Science Helps to Rewrite the Y Chromosome Tree and Illuminate the Ancestral Roots of African American Project Members: 

The academic paper describing the discovery of a new root of the human Y chromosome tree, An African American Paternal Lineage Adds an Extr...