This post is slightly off the beaten path for a drug discovery consultancy, but these two articles were just too juicy to pass up. One paper in PNAS claims to have identified “ultra-conserved words” in a study of Eurasian languages. It used a statistical analysis to propose a superfamily to all Eurasian languages that evolved ~15,000 YBP. The implications to this are that if you met a hunter-gatherer from that time, you would be able to speak the sentences: “You, hear me! Give this fire to that old man. Pull the black worm off the bark and give it to the mother. And no spitting in the ashes!” and they would at least have some idea of what you were saying. I know the “lumpers” in the historical linguistic camp have a bad rap because of Joseph Greenberg’s disciple Merritt Ruhlen’s claim the proto-human word for the number one was ‘dik’. I actually sort of buy into the hypothesis. I have to admit one of my hobbies is reconstructing Proto-Indo-European roots, so I am biased.
The second article in Nature, does a convincing job in showing through evolutionary bioinformatics (something I again admit to practicing as a hobby, in the spirit of full disclosure) that the hepatitis B virus entered eukaryotes ~83 million years ago. The oldest viral relic in a genome is the 99% conserved sequence for avian Hep-B in Zebra Finches. Chickens don’t have a relic of Hep-B. Since their oldest common ancestor lived ~82 million years ago, the virus must have entered the genome before that time. Bob’s your uncle!
Read both papers. They are entertaining as well as quite possibly true.
The second article in Nature, does a convincing job in showing through evolutionary bioinformatics (something I again admit to practicing as a hobby, in the spirit of full disclosure) that the hepatitis B virus entered eukaryotes ~83 million years ago. The oldest viral relic in a genome is the 99% conserved sequence for avian Hep-B in Zebra Finches. Chickens don’t have a relic of Hep-B. Since their oldest common ancestor lived ~82 million years ago, the virus must have entered the genome before that time. Bob’s your uncle!
Read both papers. They are entertaining as well as quite possibly true.
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