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  • Editorial
  • Evelyne Heyer, Franz Manni, and Guido Barbujani

According to tradition, only the Editor-in-Chief should sign this editorial, but we have overlapping roles and responsibilities and this is why you will find three signatures at the end. Although we started our action in September 2008, we decided to postpone this editorial in order to include it in the first pages of volume 81. Founded in 1929 by Raymond Pearl, Human Biology is now 80 years old, and we are proud to edit one of the oldest journals in all the biological sciences.

Anthropology, in its wider sense, is the area to which Human Biology has always belonged—and in which it should grow and develop in the years to come. The new editorial focus of the journal mirrors such intent. Our main scientific interest is understanding all aspects of human biological variation and evolution through a broad range of approaches.

Nowadays and thanks to impressive technical improvements, the production of data has become increasingly undemanding and the amount of information available is growing fast. This is why we think that a more ambitious interpretation of such data should be encouraged and wider questions, such as the nature of the relationship between our biological diversity or similarity and the social phenomena that influence our lives, should begin to be addressed. Because variation in our genes depends on interactions with the environment, its pattern also reflects our history, social life, and demography, all three of which are related to cultural practices. This explains why, while encouraging investigators to submit any study on human biological diversity seen through an evolutionary or adaptive prism, we will give priority to interdisciplinary studies. For several years now, anthropologists have considered data about linguistic variability, ethnological diversity, archaeological evidence, historical demography, and other disciplines, but, to our knowledge, a journal emphasizing the interaction of such factors with our human biological diversity never existed before. To reach a wider readership and contribute to the growth of this body of work, we will publish studies that are essentially descriptive or that concern only a limited geographic area only when they have a deeper relevance to understanding human biological variation.

Submitted manuscripts may cover any of the following disciplines, once the anthropological focus is apparent: human population genetics, evolutionary and genetic demography, quantitative genetics, evolutionary biology, cognitive sciences, ancient DNA, and biological diversity interpreted in terms of adaptation (biometry, physical anthropology). Although epidemiological studies addressing population history in the described anthropological frame are welcome, we will seldom consider for publication papers that primarily address medical issues.

Human Biology publishes original scientific articles, brief communications, letters to the editor, review articles, and book and software reviews on the general topic of biological anthropology. Moreover, we encourage authors to submit [End Page 1] methodological papers because new ways to explore and interpret already available data are nowadays essential, as are new computational approaches intended to summarize cultural variation.

To correspond to the wider focus of Human Biology, the Editorial Board of the journal has changed. Scholars belonging to disciplines outside classical anthropology support our editorial action with new ideas and different backgrounds. In this way, we will be able to secure more insightful reviews for papers addressing more than one discipline.

To conclude, we thank Wayne State University Press for its remarkable commitment to the journal, and we are happy to see that a new electronic editorial process and wider Internet access to the content of Human Biology are now available. For further details, please connect to our website: http://www.humbiol.com .

We express our gratitude to the previous Editor-in-Chief of the journal, Dr. Sarah Williams-Blangero, for the smooth editorial transition and the continued support, and we are very excited to start such a new adventure. We wish Human Biology 80 more years! [End Page 2]

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