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Anthropological Genetics in the Genomic Era: A Look Back and Ahead
Author(s) -
O′Rourke Dennis H.
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
american anthropologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.51
H-Index - 85
eISSN - 1548-1433
pISSN - 0002-7294
DOI - 10.1525/aa.2003.105.1.101
Subject(s) - population genetics , biological anthropology , evolutionary biology , biology , human evolutionary genetics , population , variety (cybernetics) , genealogy , anthropology , genetics , history , phylogenetics , sociology , demography , gene , computer science , artificial intelligence
The use of genetic methods and data has a long history in anthropology. Following dramatic growth in anthropological genetic field studies in the 1960s and 1970s, the revolution in molecular genetic methods during the 1980s spurred another period of growth and expansion. The earlier emphasis on examination of the role of alternative evolutionary mechanisms in structuring allele frequency variation within and between populations is reflected today in a renewed focus on unraveling demographic history using highly informative molecular markers. The existence of large, publicly available molecular genetic databases, coupled with advances in analytical methods, makes it possible to tackle a wide variety of problems in human evolution not possible with classical markers and traditional analytical methods, These recent advances will help frame the nature of research in the discipline in the near term. [Keywords; human evolutionary genetics, phylogenetics, molecular markers, genetic variation, population structure]