possible gedmatch visualisation

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

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:

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:

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!

Hunter/gatherer versus farmer

A visual approach to BGA comparisons

It is really fun to follow the developments in Eurogenes and Dodecad from the first attempts at deCODEme, but it is somewhat confusing to always look at numbers and ciphers and to handle each time a different color sytem. I would appreciate to have diagrams, which are selfexplicable without the need to translate them from proportions to columns to pies.

This is a first approach to go for a unified color system, playing around with a K12 series of hunter/gatherers versus farmerset.

The 12 components, shown here as named by David W. are free to download at:
https://docs.google.com/#folders/0B_4jqJn_kICvQV9fLWRISkNpNk0

for those, who want to play with these pics, building their own diagrams. Two add-ons, drawn at eastern in the Eifel:

I will go for other series, do some references and will try to work out a color sytem!

The basic pic is named "musterpic.jpg", containing the scale. One can insert all the necessary pics. Best is the "multiply-option in photoshop".

Longlin 1 again!

The first version of the Longlin 1 skull was still made under the assumption, that this could be part of a new species. But meanwhile I am rather convinced, that he is quite in the middle of a normal range of east asian people.

On a blogsite I found this picture, supporting my estimation:
https://blogs.wellesley.edu/vanarsdale/files/2012/03/Slide2.jpg

in another blog Maju commented:
     " I think that the nose of both Longlin and Mai Da Nuoc have remarkably small triangular nasal holes and neither have the "bridge" of the nose (nasal bone) too prominent. They could well have noses similar to those of modern East Asians: rather flat and small but actually most modern Mongoloids have broader nose holes and these are remarkably small and triangular. I've tried to find comparisons but no luck but they must have got very small noses, probably narrow, as well as very strongly marked cheeks. "

As I offered open to correct me in my partly exeggerated approaches of selfmade reconstructions I made a second version of Longlin 1.

Homo Mousteriensis Hauseri faces

Reflections about the uncertainties of reconstruction

In my first high school year at the age of ten I could enjoy a privileged status concerning Biology. My appreciated teacher Dr. Krieger knew to use my drawing abilities for his lessons at a time without tons of copies and without a beamer, giving me his private books to blow up the illustrations with color charcoal on a board of one to three square meters. I remember gigantic drawings of single cells, plants and insects. In the huge archive of the biology collection I first met the famous skull of one of the latest Neanderthal people, found 1908 in Moustier, Dordogne and considered to have lived about 40000 years ago. I met him again in 2005 in the Anatomy Institute of Cologne, hold him in hands, made a drawing and quickly noticed, that he must be wrong recomposed (done by Hermann Klaatsch, Breslau).

In 2005 I ommited to do a more detailed drawing and added it now, imagining, this could be a half bald man with freckles and full of testosterone. The green sculpture, I found some days ago, obviously is based on the wrong replica too.

I made a second drawing trying to correct the exaggerated prolonging of the face. This replica was probably spreaded throughout Europe a thousand times, being the first complete skull of a Neanderthal man, giving a chance to visualize this new species. Otto Hauser was not only a skilled amateur archaeologue, but also very good at promoting and merchandising his findings.

It was a luck, that they divided the original parts (brown) from the additions (grey - the small skull in the upper left). A study by Thomson, I later found, which worked with computer tomography, recombining all known pieces into a plausible skull, showed no significant difference to my initial sketching. 

After looking for a possible version of the newly found Maludong skull I remembered my own elder reflections about the subjectivity of reconstructions. Even when we face a complete skull without errors like above and can turn him around in hands, we know nothing about all the fleshy and psychic facts, that determine a person. We can only guess, wether he is healthy or sick, vivid or timid, selfconfident, kind or mean, bright or dull, handsome or ugly. The simple fact, that there sometimes is only one version of a head - and often a very expensive one, when a sculpture - can lead to the misleading impression, if you have a scientific method like "Three millimeters flesh on the cheekbones", you will automatically reach an objective version of a skull. The truth is far from that!
The most important determinants for an empathic and real looking version is a well founded prejudice, a guiding idea. I simply played with those possibilities to show, that we could imagine our famous Hauseri skull both as european or rather african or asian.

At http://s4.zetaboards.com/Sciences_and_History/forum/3841977/
I opened up a thread to discuss this and to start a project, I will offer to run series of drawings after your proposals.