Donnerstag, 24. Mai 2012

possible gedmatch visualisation

pie charts don't seem to go with my ancestry avatars, but perhaps columns in some way:

Dienstag, 22. Mai 2012

Genetic avatars

Figurines like the "Venus of Willendorf" ( 22 kybp ) always had a fascination for me, standing in a totally different aesthetic and cultural context. Whether they are a product of male fantasy or a ritual addition in a maternal surrounding, guarding the tent or an idol for fertility will perhaps never be complete cleared. But in a period of determining genetic components for an admixture analysis, I thought, it would be great to associate such female mother/goddess figurines with a certain population component. It would just be helpful, if at the end of an experimental process we could fix a component to a limited region and a certain timeframe, which could be represented by an icon in a senseful colour.
The oldest known figurines, including the new recent finding of the german "Venus of Hohler Fels" (35 - 40 kybp) are tied together in a belt, reaching from Southwest France to Sibiria.





After this homogenous paleo- and mesolithic area, which could have lasted for more than 30000 years, more abstract and diverging types are popping up.





Genetic data are globally not distributed equal like Descarte's "common sense" (Nobody ever has claimed to have herited less of it than others) nor are these figurines. They are clearly clustering in a neolithic period in the Neareast, the Danube bassin and the amerindian high cultures of Inca and Maya.









Even examples of the japanese Jomon culture are numerous, while early pieces for China and a lot of other parts of the world are still lacking. But perhaps we get enough of them covering what we need.





some additions:


Sonntag, 20. Mai 2012

Genetic landscape 1

Using eurogenes K6 comparison



Images should explain themselves without too many annotations, but I wanted to add the complete used avatars and an example, how the figures develop with a scale at the beginning. This is DE22, my mother.


here is the map with a selected set of references:


Freitag, 11. Mai 2012

Colours in genetics

In all the joy and appreciation for genetic comparison there had always been left an annoying rest about the used color sets, changing each time. I tried to imagine a unified system, which could help to identify a certain position, tying specific components to visual avatars. No matter, what representants we choose, a genetic neighbourhood will create similar colours. We could do maps for specific reference populations and see, what kind of distribution they produce.
The first idea was to head for the triangle structure of the "Global similarity" tools of 23andme and deCODEme. I tried to create a triangle set of colours, using the CMYK system and combine them:




I made a collection of 35 drawings, focussing ancient mother figures of the paleolithic, mesolithic until early neolithic period, which could be used as representants for specific ancestry components (will be presented in more detail in the next blog). To determine the colours, I did a sort of genetic bush after roughly evaluating a whole bunch of detailed BGA-plots, mostly done by David W.


After this I tried to give each avatar the appropriate colour, placing them in a map, I once developed as a background for the east-west korridor, describing the distribution of certain haplogroups.





This is a first approach, so any comments are welcome!