The Pith: We are now moving from the human genome project, to the human genomes project. As more and more full genomes of various populations come online new methods will arise to take advantage of the surfeit of data. In this paper the authors crunch through the genomes of half a dozen individuals to make sweeping inferences about the history of the human species over the past few hundred thousand years.

Since the integration of evolution and genetics in the early years of the 20th century there have been several revolutions in our ability to perceive the underlying variation which is the raw material and result of evolutionary genetics. The understanding that DNA was the concrete substrate of Mendelian genetics, and the rise to prominence of molecular genetic techniques in understanding evolution the 1970s and 1980s, was one key transition. No longer were geneticists simply tracking the coat colors of mice or the visible mutations of fruit flies. In the 1990s the uniparental loci, the maternal and paternal lineages as inferred from the mtDNA and Y chromosomes, came into their own. Finally, the 2000s saw the post-genomic era, and researchers routinely began analyzing ...