“Out of Africa” in 2019
The figure to the left is from Paleolithic DNA from the Caucasus reveals core of West Eurasian ancestry. It is a graph which captures general features of human population historical relationships as we understand them today. Or at least the model fits the data (remember, many models may fit the data!). The graph is complex…but […]
David Reich strikes back!
David Reich submits Five Corrections to The New York Times. As you know, in the fact-checking process I was sent more than 100 statements of which a very high proportion (more than half) were incorrect. For example, as I mentioned to you in my letter o…
David Reich drops the mic
Didn’t mean to post so much about that crappy piece in The New York Tines Magazine. But there’s so much tendentious crap in it. That being said, I am probably not going to post much more on this, because David Reich’s response is up: …
The ancient DNA oligopoly and the stories people tell about David Reich
There is a very long piece in The New York Times Magazine, Is Ancient DNA Research Revealing New Truths — or Falling Into Old Traps?. It’s the talk of DNA-Twitter for obvious reasons. The very fact that you have a long piece in The New York Times…
The phylogenetic trees falling on the tundra
A massive new ancient DNA preprint just dropped, The population history of northeastern Siberia since the Pleistocene: …Here, we report 34 ancient genome sequences, including two from fragmented milk teeth found at the ~31.6 thousand-year-old (kya) Yana RHS site, the earliest and northernmost Pleistocene human remains found. These genomes reveal complex patterns of past population […]
Nomads, cosmopolitan predators, and peasants, xenophobic producers
Ten years ago when I read Peter Heather’s Empires and Barbarians, its thesis that the migrations and conquests of the post-Roman period were at least in part folk wanderings, where men, women, and children swarmed into the collapsing Empire en masse, was somewhat edgy. Today Heather’s model has to a large extent been validated. The recent […]
Do the northern Chinese have Scythian ancestors?
There was some question regarding possible Scythian admixture into the early Zhou below. This is possible because of the Zhou dynasty, arguably the foundational one of Chinese imperial culture (the Shang would have been alien to Han dynasty Chinese, but the Zhou far less so), may have had interactions with Indo-European peoples to their north […]
Vietnamese are not that much like the Cambodians
A comment below suggested another book on Vietnamese history, which I am endeavoring to read in the near future. The comment also brought up issues relating to the ethnogenesis of the Vietnamese people, their relationship to the Yue (or lack thereof) and the Khmer, and also the Han Chinese. Obviously, I can’t speak to the […]
Avars across a sea of grass
That sound you hear is the rumbling of the earth caused by the rippling tsunami that’s coming. The swell of ancient DNA papers focused on historical, rather than prehistorical, time periods. Some historians are cheering. Some are fearful. Others know not what to think. It will be. The illiterate barbarians of yore shall come out […]
The genetics of Afrikaners (again)
I personally get asked about the genetics of Afrikaners, because I’ve written about/analyzed the issue before. The main outlines seem to be established, but I thought I might go and revisit it again. The main reason is that we have ancient South African DNA, and I’ve been adding it to my personal analyses for […]
Live not by the haplogroup alone
In The population genomics of archaeological transition in west Iberia the authors note that “the population of Euskera speakers shows one of the maximal frequencies (87.1%) for the Y-chromosome variant, R1b-M269…” In the early 2000s the high frequency of R1b-M269 among the Basques, a non-Indo-European linguistic isolate, was taken to be suggestive of the possibility […]
Why the Y chromosome is coming back
Last week Spencer and I talked about chromosomes and their sociological import on The Insight. It was a pretty popular episode, but then again, my post on the genetics of Genghis Khan is literally my most popular piece of writing of all time which wasn’t distributed in a non-blog channel (hundreds of thousands of people have […]
Migration at the roof of West Asia
The figure to the left is from The genetic prehistory of the Greater Caucasus. If you are a regular reader of this weblog, or Eurogenes, you can figure out what’s going on, and keep track of the terminology. But in 2018 I think we’re getting to the end of the line in making sense of […]
Is American genetic diversity enough?
When we sampled 200 people in Queens for the Genographic ‘Human Family Tree’ Project in 2008 we even found a Khoisan lineage – part of what was effectively a microcosm of global genetic diversity in a single urban US population. — Spencer Wells (@spwells) May 1, 2018 In the nearly 20 years since the draft […]
Are Turks Armenians under the hood?
Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism is one of those books I haven’t read, but should. In contrast, I have read Azar Gat’s Nations, which is a book-length counterpoint to Imagined Communities. To take a stylized and extreme caricature, Imagined Communities posits nations to be recent social and historical constructions, while Nations sees […]
Mesolithic and Paleolithic, Of Cheddar and Bread
It’s been a big week for “Cheddar Man” and the science around him. I already talked about the issue blog-wise for my day job. Additionally, Spencer and I did a podcast on the topic (if you haven’t, please subscribe and leave positive reviews and ratings on iTunes and Stitcher; next we’ll post our conversation with Chris […]
The “Finns” are probably an Iron Age intrusion into the East Baltic
One of the first things I wrote at length about historical population genetics, in late 2002, happened to be a rumination on the Y chromosomal phylogeography of Finnic peoples. At the time there was debate as to the provenance of the N1c Y chromosomal haplotype (this is the haplotype of the Rurikids by the way). […]
Function & phylogeny, where the twain shall diverge
Every few years I get asked about Nuristanis and Kalash. The reason is that these people are often white. By white, I mean that some Nuristanis and Kalash are fair-skinned, blonde-haired, and blue-eyed. Entering “Nuristani” into Google images returns some very white faces. And you have weird news stories about ‘white’ Taliban, because non-locals don’t […]
The eastern edge of the sea of grass
A new preprint, Mitogenomic data indicate admixture components of Asian Hun and Srubnaya origin in the Hungarian Conquerors, throws a rather large sample of medieval mtDNA samples at the question of the ethnogenesis of the Magyar people. The context here is that Maygars speak a non-Indo-European language, with a distant relationship to the Finnic ones, […]
The Beaker is breaking!
The link is up, The Beaker Phenomenon And The Genomic Transformation Of Northwest Europe, but the paper is still processing: I’ll update the post when I can read the paper.