King Charles III heralds a new(ish) Y-chromosome era: a genetic genealogy thread. 🧬🇬🇧🧵 With Charles' accession we will see a new Y-chromosome lineage on the British throne for the first time since 1901, when Edward VIII became king. His son, George V, and grandson George VI (Elizabeth's father) carried his Y-chromosome. But where did it come from?

Fantastic drive eastward into the Norwegian heartland today. First stop: Borgund stave church, built ~1200 AD. Amazing. 🇳🇴 (only have access to iPhone photos right now - will post an interior shot when I can download from my real camera). Second stop: the Einangsteinen, oldest rune stone in Norway, dating to ~400 CE. The vertical rune inscription is an early example of the Elder Futhark runic script used in pre-Christian Scandinavia.

As I shot this the song ‘Apple Bottom Jeans’ came on from a speaker down below. It is what it is… 🍎🇳🇴 And as I roll back through a playlist from that era, I’m pretty sure that was the best America ever achieved as a country. R.I.P.

Lærdalstunnelen - Worlds longest road tunnel 🚙🇳🇴 Just drove this, as part of a 3-hour trip from Bergen to Laerdal that was >50% underground between all of the tunnels. Absolutely crazy trip - felt like being the train driver on Snowpiercer… visitnorway.com/listings/l%c3%… So nice to be here, though - a town of beautiful wooden houses dating to the 18th-19th centuries. Our B&B on the right was built in 1880. Time for a beer and some chillaxing in the midsummer sun…

Love the medieval houses in Bergen - a perfect place to stroll around and recover…🇳🇴 Favorite aquarium denizen: the Atlantic wolffish

First ferry ride, en route to Bergen ⛴🇳🇴 Absolutely stunning.

The Opera House never fails to impress 🇳🇴 Short stroll to the Ingensgate Sunday market…

Internasjonalen, an eastern bloc functionalist-style bar - cool vibe. 🍺🇳🇴 And now Himkok - an amazing distillery/speakeasy. Fabulous…

Norway first impressions. It’s been a decade or so since I was last here, and this is the first western country I’ve been in since February 2020, so here goes…🧵🇳🇴 This - while expected - will take some getting used to.

Ancient genomes from the last three millennia support multiple human dispersals into Wallacea 🧬🇮🇩🌏 Cool paper - well worth a thread… (1/n)
biorxiv.org/content/10.110… 16 genomes were sampled in Wallacea, spanning a temporal range of ~2600 to ~250 years before present (YBP). The oldest sample is from Liang Bua on Flores, the same cave where H. floresiensis was discovered. Samples came from NTT, Sulawesi and the North Moluccas. (2/n)

Shipping update: After a brief stop in Busan, the ship has now arrived in Shanghai. Here the container will be loaded onto another ship in a day or so to make the journey to Surabaya, on the north coast of Java. Chinese ports always remind me of the mysterious story... 🚢 ...of how Peking Man's remains disappeared. Peking Man was discovered in Zhoukoudian Cave near Beijing in a series of digs in the 1920s. Swedish geologist Johan Andersson and American paleontologist Walter Granger were directed to the site by locals who referred to it as...

Now that the Americas are headed into what will become known as 'the darkest days of the 2020-2022 SARSCoV2 pandemic', a few pieces of advice: 1. Don't listen to advice from your governments - they don't have your best interests at heart. Especially in countries currently in an election year, all they care about is the economy, not saving lives.

So, I tweeted this the other day, saying it was critical for understanding the origins and possible vaccine(s) for SARSCoV2. It encompasses two things: phylogeny and range. The Asian species form a tight clade, very diverged from the African clade. How diverged? 40M years in pangolin generations is equivalent to ~150M years in human generations, which would put us back roughly at the Monotreme-Placental mammalian split (I know that’s...

LOL. China is so far ahead of America in biotech it’s not even a fair race. First CRISPR in living humans. BGI, the world’s largest DNA sequencing center. A facility in Yunnan that has created transgenic monkeys with every human gene. I could go on... npr.org/2020/05/11/853… In case you think I'm making up the last one (Bing Su used to work with our Chinese Genographic team): technologyreview.com/2019/04/10/136…