The Finnic peoples emerged in Baltic after the Bronze Age
A reader in the comments reminds me there has been a preprint which is relevant to the population structure of Baltic Europe which came out a few months ago, Extensive farming in Estonia started through a sex-biased migration from the Steppe: …Here we present the analyses of low coverage whole genome sequence data from five […]
The origin of the Finnic peoples
One of the very first things I wrote about in relation to historical population genetics was in on the origins of the Finnic peoples. The reasons are two fold: – first, the Finns and Estonians speak language is rather peculiar in a Europe dominated by Indo-European tongues (I suspect one reason that Tolkien based […]
The system of the world by William H. McNeill
In the post below on book recommendations I forgot to mention William H. McNeill and John Robert McNeill’s The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History. It’s arguably been one of the most influential works that has percolated in my mind throughout the years. It’s less than 400 pages, and illustrates in broad sketches […]
Books I suggest you read so you won’t be misled as often
People often ask me for history books on a very specific topics often, assuming I’ve read something on an issue because I exhibit some fluency discussing something that might seem abstruse or arcane. The thing is that I haven’t always read a monograph on a singular topic even if I know a fair amount on […]
St. Augustine knew of the Buddha!
St. Augustine is a very influential figure in Western Christianity. Partly this is surely due to the fact that the Latin Church favored a doctor who was of their own cultural persuasion, schooled in their mores and folkways, as opposed to the ‘logic-choppers’ of the Greek world. In the intellectual Protestant tradition his influence on […]
The nadir of genetics in the Soviet Union
A fascinating excerpt in Slate from How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog), : This skepticism of genetics all started when, in the mid-1920s, the Communist Party leadership elevated a number of uneducated men from the proletariat into positions of authority in the scientific community, as part of a program to glorify the […]
The material over the ideological
I come not to praise or bury Max Weber. Rather, I come to commend where warranted, and dismiss where necessary. The problem as I see it is that though a meticulous scholar, Max Weber is the father of erudite sophistry which passes as punditry. Though he was arguably a fox, his genealogy has given rise […]
Ancient Egyptians: black or white?
One of the most fascinating things about ancient Egypt is its continuity, and our granular and detailed knowledge of that continuity. We can thank in part the dry climate, as well as the Egyptian penchant for putting their hieroglyphs on walls and monuments (as well as graffiti!). And we can also thank the fact that […]
The Canaanites walk among us: ancient DNA edition
Ancient DNA from here to there: Ancient DNA has illuminated many things, but there is a logic as to what topics and questions it tackles. The focus on northern Eurasia is clearly a function of the probability of preservation, though techniques of extraction are getting better and better. I can’t imagine how we’d ever get […]
At an inflection point of archaeology and genetics
People always ask me what to read in relation to the field of historical population genetics. In the 2000s there were a series of books which focused on the mtDNA and Y results from modern phylogeographic analysis. Journey of Man, Seven Daughters of Eve, The Real Eve, and Mapping Human History. But there hasn’t been […]
The eternal Axial Age
As I have noted before one of the most interesting aspects of ancient Greek history is that in many ways the socio-political identities and outlook of the Hellenic people before and after the Bronze Age were probably as distinct as that between hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists. That is, the citadel culture of the Mycenaeans was constructed out […]
Dramatization of the arrival of the Beaker people
Normally a conference or a talk related to the Bell Beakers and their spread across Western Europe would involve a few presentation slides with pictures of beakers and shaded maps, and result in the production of a scholarly compendium such as The Bell Beaker Transition in Europe: Mobility and local evolution during the 3rd millennium BC. […]
When conquered pre-Greece took captive her rude Hellene conqueror
When I was a child in the 1980s I was captivated by Michael Wood’s documentary In Search of the Trojan War (he also wrote a book with the same name). I had read a fair amount of Greek mythology, prose translations of the Iliad, as well as ancient history. The contrast between the Classical Greeks, […]
When conquered pre-Greece took captive her rude Hellene conqueror
When I was a child in the 1980s I was captivated by Michael Wood’s documentary In Search of the Trojan War (he also wrote a book with the same name). I had read a fair amount of Greek mythology, prose translations of the Iliad, as well as ancient history. The contrast between the Classical Greeks, […]
The Bronze age demographic transformation of Britiain
In Norman Davies’ the excellent The Isles: A History, he mentions offhand that unlike the Irish the British to a great extent have forgotten their own mythology. This is one reason that J. R. R. Tolkien created Middle Earth, they gave the Anglo-Saxons the same sort of mythos that the Irish and Norse had. But […]
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.
The lesson of Erasmus: the center that could not hold
The return of the civilian “On the coming of evening, I return to my house and enter my study; and at the door I take off the day’s clothing, covered with mud and dust, and put on garments regal and courtly; and reclothed appropriately, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by […]
The great Han Empire in Africa
Howard French’s China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa is a bit cliche. Rather than a scholarly book it’s more an observational travelogue, and it suffers somewhat from the fact that it is focused on Chinese who live in Africa, but are never of it. Chinese are Chinese, […]
The coming of the Milesians: abstract of “The Bell Beaker Paper” (tBBp)
I get asked about this all the time, and promised I’d post something first I heard anything, so here is a foretaste, Western Europe during the third millennium BCE: A genetic characterization of the Bell Beaker Complex: The Bell Beaker Complex (BBC) was the first widely distributed archaeological phenomenon of western Europe, arising after 2800 […]
So what’s point of demographic models which leave you scratching your head
There’s a new paper on Tibetan adaptation to high altitudes, Evolutionary history of Tibetans inferred from whole-genome sequencing. The focus of the paper is on the fact that more genes than have previously been analyzed seem to be the targets of natural selection. And I buy most of their analyses (not sure about the estimate […]