* In the episode “Ginger Kids” of the always-brilliant cartoon South Park, one of the lead protagonists, Eric Cartman, who is possibly the most evil creation in the history of fiction, is tricked into thinking he is a redhead when his friends dye his hair as punishment for stating that redheads are inhuman and have no souls. True to form, he switches his position and proposes that all non-gingers be exterminated. Had his plan come to fruition, the resulting gene pool would only contain homozygotes for MC1R ginger alleles. In other words, this would work.

* In March 2016, the first comprehensive study of the genetics of head and facial hair was published, and revealed a suite of alleles, of genes mostly already known to us, that associated with characteristics such as monobrow, density of beard, male pattern baldness, and tendency to go gray. At the time of writing, these variants were not yet added to the commercial genome testing databanks, though I suspect they will be sooner or later. The fact that the genes were known, and have multiple known functions already, further reveals that genes do many things in our bodies, and though my (or your) graying might be influenced by genetics, it is part of a typically complex interaction between biology and our environment.

* I wish he hadn’t. Creationists frequently cite Piltdown Man as evidence of the imagined folly of human evolution, despite the fact that it was formally repudiated in 1953 and not a single scientist alive thinks it is real.

* Chris Stringer, the doyen of human evolution in Britain, thinks it likely that these feet belonged to Homo antecessor, a human that lived between 1.2 million and 800,000 years ago, known primarily from caves in the Atapuerca mountains in central Spain. He’s usually right about these types of thing.

* I am not the first Dr. Adam Rutherford to comment on the founding of the Icelandic nation. My namesake was a well-respected twentieth-century scholar of Egyptology. Twice I’ve been mistaken for him, which is both physically and intellectually disappointing, given that he a) has been dead for decades, and b) was a devout Christian biblical literalist. In 1937, he wrote a pamphlet detailing the foundation of the Icelandic people not being the tale of the Sagas, nor of modern genomics, which were of course then unknown. Instead, as part of his misguided attempts to evangelize his fundamentalist Christianity, he attributed the Icelandic origins to the twelfth tribe of Israel, that of Benjamin. Alas for that Adam Rutherford, evidence for Icelandic trolls is more robust.

* There were almost certainly people on Iceland before the Norsemen arrived, probably Gaelic monks, who didn’t stay, and maybe left no descendants, as monks are supposed not to. A cabin might have been occupied in the eighth and ninth centuries, but was abandoned by the time the Icelanders arrived to stay in the 870s. It is their story that is enlightened further by the recent forays into the genome, and so I must set aside those earlier monkish wanderers.

* They are now, I am told, up to 10,000 complete genomes, though these have not been published yet.

* Who is an incomparable genius.

* It’s often said that the nursery rhyme “Ring a Ring of Roses” is a plague incantation, with the roses being reddened marks preceding buboes, “a pocket full of posies” some kind of traditional herbal protection and, of course, “we all fall down” (and also possibly “ashes, ashes”) being representative of an inevitable death. However, this is almost certainly a twentieth-century post hoc analysis, and is rejected by most academic folklorists.

* Drosophila researchers have no such formal nomenclature compunction. Many genes are initially discovered in these flies because we can manipulate and mutate them so much more easily than in bigger animals, and with fewer ethical barriers than necessarily exist for humans. Often, though, mammalian geneticists would then look for a similar or equivalent gene in mice or humans and, more often than not, the name for the human equivalent would be derived from the original—and often descriptive or just plain fun—moniker given to the fly. The stellar Nobel prize–winning embryologist Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard discovered the Toll family of genes in drosophila in the 1980s, and the name was given after she was heard to exclaim, “Das ist ja toll!” which in English means, “That’s fantastic!”

* There are many ways to do this statistical trick, with different power and reliabilities, but Rasmussen used one called a Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo in software called BEAST 2. We may not be very good at naming human genes, but we make up for it in analytical algorithms.

* In autumn 2015, a tremendous paper was published in the journal Science, in which the first ancient African genome was retrieved from a man who had died and was buried in a cave in the highlands of Ethiopia. The Mota cave is wide and leafy these days, with a pretty sheet of waterfall running for part of the year over the entrance, and into the river the cave overlooks. The man was given the name of his burial site: Mota was a dark-skinned man with dark eyes, lived around 4,500 years ago, died in unsuspicious circumstances, and was buried face up, lying straight with his hands tucked under his chin. His genome was sequenced by a team led by Andrea Manica at Cambridge University, and the paper described revelations, including that there had been a European backflow of anatomically modern humans that had spread and penetrated the genomes of people all over Africa. This was news. It was also news in January 2016, when Manica and his colleagues announced that they had made a mistake. They had, by accident, omitted a step in the statistical computer analysis, which meant that the extent of the backflow was vastly overestimated. The mistake was identified by colleagues and Manica admirably took full responsibility. The genome data itself remains valid, and we await further analysis of Mota’s genome. This is science working, and deserves recognition as such—a self-correcting way of acquiring knowledge and understanding.