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 […]
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 12: The New York Times takes on Ancient DNA
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 12: The New York Times takes on Ancient DNAThis week on The Insight (Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Google Podcasts)we discussed the controversy that has erupted over a 12,000-word piece in The New York Times Ma…
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 11: Cultural Evolution
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 11: Cultural EvolutionThis week on The Insight (Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Google Podcasts)we discussed the field of cultural evolution with Richard McElreath of Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthrop…
Hawaii: complicated a journey to paradise
The extent of Austronesian DiasporaAsk any American what they think when you say the word “Hawaii,” and certain words will no doubt reoccur from person to person. That’s because certain images, feelings, come to mind. A gentle breeze, beaches, and volc…
Season 2, Episode 1: The Legacy of L. L. Cavalli-Sforza
L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, 1922–2018This week on The Insight (Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Google Play) we discussed the life and legacy of L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, who died on August 31st, 2018. See the Stanford obit. From John Hawks, The man who tried to cat…
The Insight Show Notes: Episode 32, So you want to be a geneticist…
DrosophilaThis week on The Insight (Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Google Play) we talk to an “early career” geneticist, Austin Reynolds. A graduate of Indian University and University of Texas-Austin, he is currently a post-doctoral fellow at University…
On the rectification of names and religion
A major influence on my thinking about human social phenomenon is Scott Atran’s In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion. Atran, along with other scholars such as Dan Sperber and younger researchers such as Harvey Whitehouse, work within a “naturalistic” paradigm, as opposed to the more interpretative framework currently ascendant within American anthropology. … Continue reading “On the rectification of names and religion”
Post-Neolithic revenge of the foragers
If I have something to share, why not share it? Over the past few weeks I’ve been ruminating on some of the possible intersections between historical population genetics and anthropology, especially in light of the discussion that I’ve had …
Out of the agricultural hearths
Dienekes has an important post up, The womb of nations: how West Eurasians came to be. He outlines a scenario where a rapid expansion of a farming population has overlain much of Western Eurasia, atop aboriginal substrata. A few years ago you’d have laughed at such a model, mostly due to the authority of archaeologists […]
Australia on fire
Fascinating, Orbital cycles, Australian lake levels, and the arrival of aborigines: But the other big feature is that the lake-filling events that occurred after 50,000 years ago were much smaller than those which occurred before. Climactically, the conditions 10,000 years ago should have been the same as the conditions 115,000 years ago. But the lake […]
Out of Africa onward to Wallacea
There are two interesting and related papers out today which I want to review really quickly, in particular in relation to the results (as opposed to the guts of the methods). Taken together they do change our perception of how the world was settled by anatomically modern humans, and if the findings are found to […]
Horses, not people (sort of)
I have criticized the “pots not people” paradigm on this weblog before. In short, the idea is that material cultural changes reflected in the archaeological record are an indicator of memetic, not genetic, evolution. So a shift from pottery…
War in Pre-Columbian Sumeria
For most of my life I have had an implicit directional view of Holocene human culture. And that direction was toward more social complexity and cultural proteanism. Ancient Egypt traversed ~2,000 years between the Old Kingdom and the fall of the New Ki…
Grain, disease, and innovation
I just finished reading a review of the literature since 1984 on the bioarchaeology of the transition to agriculture. Stature and robusticity during the agricultural transition: Evidence from the bioarchaeological record:
The population explosion that …
There was scale and structure before history
Until relatively recently the spread of agriculture in Europe, and to some extent the whole world, was pigeon-holed into two maximalist models: cultural or demographic diffusionist. Neither of these models were maximalist in that they denied the impac…
How the “fierce people” came to be
The pith: there are differences between populations on genes which result in “novelty seeking.” These differences can be traced to migration out of Africa, and can’t be explained as an artifact of random genetic drift.
I’m not …
South Asian endogamy predates the British
One of the things that happens if you read ethnographically thick books like Nicholas Dirks’ Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India is that you start to wonder if most castes were simply created by the British and for the Brit…
Foragers to farmers: a tale of collective action?
The economist Samuel Bowles recently had a paper out in PNAS which caught my attention, Cultivation of cereals by the first farmers was not more productive than foraging. This naturally begs the question: why did farming conquer foraging as a lifestyle…
Why Some Like It Hot: Food, Genes, and Cultural Diversity
Link to review: Slow and diverse food.
Pandora’s Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization
Link to review: Pandora’s Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization