Friday's Elk, February 13, 2018

A Book Giveaway!
Some good news for loyal readers of Friday's Elk: to celebrate the coming publication of She Has Her Mother's Laugh, my publisher is going to give away free copies of the book to five randomly chosen subscribers. We'll make the pick on March 15 and be in touch!

 
England's Lost Roots
In 1903, archaeologists discovered a 10,000-year-old skeleton in a British cave. Found near the village of Cheddar, it came to be known as Cheddar Man. Over a century after its discovery, scientists have figured out how to extract Cheddar Man's entire genome from his bones. Working with Ceylan Yeğinsu, a Times reporter in the London office, I wrote a piece for the New York Times on this study. The big excitement over the research swirls around Cheddar Man's skin, shown here in a reconstruction at the Natural History Museum in London. It's now possible to look at genetic variants and predict people's skin color. And it turns out Cheddar Man was probably dark brown.

This is cool, but it's not terribly surprising. I wrote a few years ago about how the hunter-gatherers who lived in western Europe before the rise of farming had dark skin. Cheddar Man turns out to have belonged to those people--and so he had the same pigmentation. What is most intriguing is that Cheddar Man has very little kinship with living Brits, thanks to two later waves of immigrants that swamped his island home. (I write in more detail about the complexity of skin color's history in She Has Her Mother's Laugh.)
 
People Love The Mutant Crayfish
It's always a pleasure to discover other people share my odd obsessions. My story last week about a new species of all-female crayfish clones seems to have struck a note. I got tons of queries on Twitter and Facebook about how they taste. (I haven't eaten them myself, but they're getting cooked up in Madagascar since their spread there from Germany.) The story also climbed the charts at the Times, and even earned a "short imagined monologue" in McSweeney's: "I'm Just a Misunderstood Marbled Crayfish (Overlord) Who Is Certainly Not Planning World Domination." Meanwhile, species expert Jerry Coyne questions whether the new species is a new species at all--mainly because our concepts of species are blunt instruments.
  Hello Rochester!
On Thursday, February 15, I'll be in Rochester, New York, to give a public talk. It's called "A Voyage to the Center of the Brain." Details here



My latest book, She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Power, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity, comes out in May. You can pre-order it here. You can find information and ordering links for my other books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads. LinkedIn, and Google+. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl