Material Detail

This video was recorded at 4th European Phd Complexity School. We develop a simple, direct method to infer the phylogenetic tree for the maternal lineage of all humans using principal component analysis and consensus ensemble clustering. Unlike standard methods such as parsimony and maximum likelihood, our method is fast, gives a unique tree, makes no a-priori assumptions, uses all polymorphisms in the data and has high internal branch consensus. It confirms that modern humans came from Africa in at least two migrations and that the common maternal ancestor of humans or "mitochondrial Eve" lived in Africa 200,000 years ago. It also suggests that the so called "R Clade", usually defined by a polymorphism at locus 12705 is too heterogeneous to have derived from a single common ancestor and places haplogroups B/R5/F in the Asian branch of the N Clade in agreement with their current location.

Disciplines:

• Social Sciences