The maternal grandmother effect and the rise of patriarchy
Virpi Lummaa’s group has another paper, Offspring fertility and grandchild survival enhanced by maternal grandmothers in a pre-industrial human society: Help is directed towards kin in many cooperative species, but […]
Patrick Tierney’s ultimate victory
Alice Dreger has a remembrance of Napoleon Chagnon in The Chronicle Review. This part jumped out at me: The reason he was willing to work with me for over a year was not because he had a big ego — which he did. It was because he knew the “closest approximation to the truth” would […]
Between Terence and incommensurability
One of my favorite quotes is from the Roman playright Terence. He asserted: Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. I know of it through the English translation, “I am human, and I think nothing human is alien to me.” This truth was brought home to me in the early 2000s when I read […]
The one directional conveyer belt of lifestyles?
Though we are taking a hiatus for the summer for The Insight podcast, we have many episodes already recorded and ready to go. The current plan is to launch season 3 with a discussion between Spencer and myself on the Tocharians. One of the things I brought up is an observation about the changing lifestyles […]
The one directional conveyer belt of lifestyles?
Though we are taking a hiatus for the summer for The Insight podcast, we have many episodes already recorded and ready to go. The current plan is to launch season 3 with a discussion between Spencer and myself on the Tocharians. One of the things I brought up is an observation about the changing lifestyles […]
Ancestral proto-Eurasians may have had wavy hair
The above chart is from The Simons Genome Diversity Project: 300 genomes from 142 diverse populations. The basic outlines of this tree were evident as far back as L. L. Cavalli-Sforza. But there were always small details that caused issues. In particular, were East Asians a more natural clade with Australasians or with Europeans? Today […]
How the fall of the Roman state and persistence of Roman culture led to the modern world
The above map is from a new preprint, The Origins of WEIRD Psychology. If you don’t know, WEIRD refers to “western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic.” And, it focuses on the problem that so much of psychological research has been done through surveys and experiments on university students, who tend to be from the more […]
Most people have always thought human sacrifice was bad
A few days ago a minor controversy about the cultural context of human sacrifice in Mesoamerica cropped. A writer at Science, wrote a piece, Feeding the gods: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital. The article was good. But it elicited some emotional responses from readers. As one sees in […]
Bell Beaker going to crash-land and blow our minds soon?
Lovers of European prehistory and ancient DNA should stay tuned to @biorxivpreprint this week #BeakTheInternet — Pontus Skoglund (@pontus_skoglund) May 9, 2017 I’m pretty sure that the Beak part is not a typo…. (if it is, Pontus better delete it)
Women hate going to India
For some reason women do not seem to migrate much into South Asia. In the late 2000s I, along with others, noticed a strange discrepancy in the Y and mtDNA lineages which trace one’s direct male and female lines: in South Asia the male lineages were likely to cluster with populations to the north an […]
The revenge of the cavemen
In 2012 I wrote Post-Neolithic revenge of the foragers. There were two proximate rationales for my thoughts at the time. First, I thought Peter Bellwood’s thesis of agricultural based demographic expansions in First Farmers was being vindicated in the broadest sketch, but there were many countervailing details. Second, there were already suggestions that genetic data […]
The reality of cultural hitchhiking
The figure to the left is from a paper, The mountains of giants: an anthropometric survey of male youths in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which attempts to explain why the people from the uplands of the western Balkans are so tall. Anyone who has watched high level basketball, or perused old physical anthropology textbooks, knows that […]
Why only one migrant per generation keeps divergence at bay
The best thing about population genetics is that because it’s a way of thinking and modeling the world it can be quite versatile. If Thinking Like An Economist is a way to analyze the world rationally, thinking like a population geneticist allows you to have the big picture on the past, present, and future, of […]
Sex bias in migration from the steppe (revisited)
Last fall I blogged a preprint which eventually came out as a paper in PNAS, Ancient X chromosomes reveal contrasting sex bias in Neolithic and Bronze Age Eurasian migrations. The upshot is that the authors found that there was far less steppe ancestry on the X chromosomes of Bronze Age Central Europeans than across the whole […]
How a Eurasian “band of brothers” shaped the world
When I was eight years old I saw a map which genuinely confused me. I had opened up deluxe dictionary at my elementary school and saw a map of the world’s language families, and noticed that there were a group of dialects which spanned the Bay of Bengal to the North Sea. In fact, according […]
Why are so many of us “star-men”
Seven years ago I wrote 1 in 200 men direct descendants of Genghis Khan. It’s the most popular post I’ve ever written. As of now there have been 630,000 “sesssions” (basically visits) on that page alone. I suspect that many more have read my summary of The Genetic Legacy of the Mongols, the original paper […]
How Indians are a lot like Latin Americans
Pretty much any person of Indian subcontinental origin in the United States of a certain who isn’t very dark skinned has probably had the experience of being spoken to in Spanish at some point. When I was younger growing up in Oregon I had the experience multiple times of Spanish speakers, probably Mexican, pleading with […]
Ancestry inference won’t tell you things you don’t care about (but could)
The figure above is from Noah Rosenberg’s relatively famous paper, Clines, Clusters, and the Effect of Study Design on the Inference of Human Population Structure. The context of the publication is that it was one of the first prominent attempts to use genome-wide data on a various of human populations (specifically, from the HGDP data set) […]
The long First Age of mankind
“What it begins to suggest is that we’re looking at a ‘Lord of the Rings’-type world – that there were many hominid populations,” says Mark Thomas, an evolutionary geneticist at University College London who was at the meeting but was not involved in the work. – Mark Thomas, as reported by Nature This is in […]
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The color of life as a coincidence
I do love me some sprouts! Greens, bitters, strong flavors of all sorts. I’ve always been like this. Some of this is surely environment. My family comes from a part of South Asia known for its love of bracing and bold sensation. But perhaps I was born this way? There’s a fair amount of evidence […]
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