The new paradigm of the peopling of the New World
Did the First Americans Arrive via Land Bridge? This Geneticist Says No: …Raff skillfully reveals how well-dated archaeological sites, including recently announced 22,000-year-old human footprints from White Sands, N.M., are […]
When we were monsters
Unraveling ancestry, kinship, and violence in a Late Neolithic mass grave: In 2011, archaeological excavations near the village of Koszyce in southern Poland uncovered a ca. 5,000-y-old mass grave…associated with […]
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 27: Neolithic Massacre
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 27: Neolithic MassacreThis week on The Insight (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and Google Podcasts) Razib talks to an archaeologist and geneticist who were authors of a paper that documented a Neolithic mas…
Anatomy of a prehistoric atrocity
A Neolithic grave pit in FranceWe don’t necessarily see the world of Europe before written history as uniform darkness, despite the lack of texts. Rather, we see some elements of prehistory with crystal clarity, while others remain entirely opaque to u…
Pleistocene rock art in Maharashtra
Ancient Rock Art in the Plains of India-Two amateur sleuths have uncovered a collection of mysterious rock carvings on the Indian coastal plain south of Mumbai: In the evening breeze on a stony hilltop a day’s drive south of Mumbai, Sudhir Risbud tramped from one rock carving to another, pointing out the hull of a …
Echoes of Europe’s Pleistocene Past
Lascaux Cave, 17,000-year-old Magdalenian “paintings”40,000 years ago the first modern humans arrived in Europe. They were the scions of a great scattering of Africans. One branch of the “Out of Africa” migration, from which the vast majority of the an…
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 15: The Prehistory of the Arabian Peninsula
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 15: The Prehistory of the Arabian PeninsulaDhofar, Oman, during the “wet season”This week on The Insight (Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Google Podcasts)we discuss the prehistory of the Arabian peninsula with ar…
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…
The new post-genetic paradigm will come
Oftentimes the domain on which a technical framework is applied matters a great deal. Imagine, if you will, an explicit statistical test for a phylogenetic relationship between a set of extant populations, whereby one infers a group of ancestral populations. If the genus is Drosophila, it’s academic. Interesting, but academic. If the genus is Homo, […]
Do the Amerindians descend from Southeast Asians?
Many people have recommended I read Johanna Nichols’ Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time over the years. I checked out the book in grad school once but didn’t get around to reading it. But today I see it being referenced in Stephen Oppenheimer’s very strange book about Lemuria-I mean Southeast Asia, Eden in the East. Both […]
Before the Indo-Europeans in Ukraine
It’s been ten years since I read The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. It’s a great book, but some of the material was very wrong. The author, David Anthony, helped provide samples which undercut his thesis that Indo-Europeanization in Europe was mostly a matter […]
The revolution which came to archaeology without archaeologists?
The recent letter to Nature, Genetic origins of the Minoans and Mycenaeans, has elicited some response from those outside of genetics. The first author of the paper linked to these two, Who are you calling Mycenaean? and On genetics and the Aegean Bronze Age. One of the common elements to both reactions was that the […]
Our ancestors are part us…or the other way around?
Keeping a close watch on media representations of the new Nature paper on the ancient Siberian genome. Here’s The New York Times, 24,000-Year-Old Body Is Kin to Both Europeans and American Indians. I don’t have a problem with the title, but the roll-out isn’t totally accurate in what it will connote to the audience in […]
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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 human genetic casserole
I haven’t said much about this article in Science, Ancient DNA Links Native Americans With Europe, because it would be an understatement to say I’m digesting it. I would offer up a caution that using terms like “Europeans” and “East Asians” for populations which flourished ~25,000 years ago might be misleading. We are used to […]
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The archaeologist, James Fallows, and Neandertals
A month ago I posted Don’t trust an archaeologist about genetics, don’t trust a geneticist about archaeology, in response to James Fallows at At 5% Neanderthal, You Are an Outlier. Fallows has now put up a follow up, The Neanderthal Defense Com…
The past as a cultural landscape
By now you have read that the Clovis people may have had contemporaries. In case you didn’t know, until about ~10 years the “standard model” of the peopling of the Americas was that around ~13,000 years ago one single population cross…
Genetic variation in the Caucasus
The Pith: There is a very tight correlation between language and genes in the Caucasus region.
If the Soviet Union was the “The Prisonhouse of Nations,” then the Caucasus region must be the refuge of the languages. Not only is this region l…
Live not by visualization alone
Synthetic map
In the age of 500,000 SNP studies of genetic variation across dozens of populations obviously we’re a bit beyond lists of ABO blood frequencies. There’s no real way that a conventional human is going to be able to discern patterns of correlated allele frequency variations which point to between population genetic differences on this […]
The great northern culture war
A new paper in The New Journal of Physics shows that a relatively simple mathematical model can explain the rate of expansion of agriculture across Europe, Anisotropic dispersion, space competition and the slowdown of the Neolithic transition:
The front speed of the Neolithic (farmer) spread in Europe decreased as it reached Northern latitudes, where the Mesolithic […]