In the centuries around and before 1000 A.D. there was a “Viking international” of sorts. Harald Hardrada may have died in England trying to become king of that nation, but he served for a time in the Varangian Guards in Constantinople. His connections to Kievan Rus were such that priests in the Eastern Christian tradition were brought in to aid in the conversion of Norway. The book The Vikings talks about much of this.
Speaking of Kievan Rus, as I noted in the comments below the Y chromosomal lineage of the Rurikids is clearly one of Finns, not Scandinavians. But the Primary Chronicle indicates that the recent ancestors of Vladimir the Great were Scandinavian, so the cultural assimilation must have occurred earlier.
And Kievan Rus itself was more connected to other parts of Europe than Russia itself later would be. Anne of Kiev was the mother of a future king of France
An Expanded View of Complex Traits: From Polygenic to Omnigenic. Everyone is talking about this. Have not read it. A lot of the discussion is going on on Twitter. Jonathan Pritchard has been very active in the discussions.
Punctuated evolution shaped modern vertebrate diversity. This paper is about morphology, but still cool.
How genetics is settling the Aryan migration debate. The author follows me on Twitter and quotes me in the piece (from one of my blog posts in 2009). He clearly knows his stuff and seems to have read my posts, so nothing new. But he does get some scientists to put into the record that they don’t believe things they believed in the late 2000s. One problem is that Indian “Out of India” proponents keep citing papers from the late 2000s which the authors themselves likely don’t stand by anymore.
Reading a bit of A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution. I feel the field of human behavioral ecology gets short shrift, though to be fair before Joe Heinrich started writing books there really weren’t any popularizers (both David Sloan Wilson and E. O. Wilson do do some on the side in this area).
Berkeley Says It’s Standing Up to Trump, But It’s Actually Busy Arguing About Zucchini. Median home price in Berkeley is now $1,100,000.
Over the past year for various reasons I’ve gained 10 pounds. My waste has gone from 29-30 inches to 31-32. They did a measurement at the gym and my body fat is now 17%.
So I’m going on a ketogenic diet to cut some of the fat. Any advice is welcome.