The great Eurasian explosion
Dr. Joseph Pickrell has updated his preprint, The genetic prehistory of southern Africa, with some more material on the Sandawe. I’ve explored the genetics of the Sandawe a bit using ADMIXTURE, so I jumped straight to the section on ROLLOFF:
R…
The Alawite analogy
Analogies exist to convey information. But too often all they do is add rhetorical flourish. For an analogy to have power there needs to be a genuine mapping of the structure of the source and target. And perhaps more crucially your target audience nee…
America, these are (some) your graduate students
If you haven’t, you should check out The Shadow Scholar, The man who writes your students’ papers tells his story. This is the conclusion:
“Thanx u so much for the chapter is going very good the porfesser likes it but wants the folloi…
Cultures & genes: Paleolithic to the Neolithic
Spatial linguistic variation
Spatial genetic variation
Temporal linguistic variation
Temporal genetic variation
Paleolithic
Very high
High
Moderate-to-high
Moderate-to-low
Neolithic
Moderate
Moderate-to-low
Moderate
High
Bronze Age
Mod…
Rise of the planet of the Indo-Europeans
In response to my post below a friend emailed me the above sentence. As I suggest below it sounds crazy, and I don’t know if I believe it. But here’s an abstract from the Reich lab from June:
Estimating a date of mixture of ancestral South…
The Age of Heroes
Sometimes when you read reviews or papers you need to look very closely at what people say in a tentative speculative fashion. That’s because though the prose may be as such when read plainly and without context, you often have more prior informa…
Hindus invented the missionary religion
A comment below: To be honest with you, being of a Hindu background I’ve never ever understood the concept of conversion. It seems so alien to me and seems to be prevalent only among the monotheistic religions, to me it … Continue reading →
Historical Dynamics & contingent conditions of religion
Below is a long essay I wrote four years ago which I’m reposting. It may be a useful guide for readers who are not aware of my various non-genetic interests….
Peter Turchin’s Historical Dynamics: Why States Rise and Fall showed up…
We are all Anglo-Saxons now
I’m kind of wary of getting into political debates at this point because it’s not my primary interest (additionally, people with stronger political views often end up willfully misrepresenting me because they think I’m taking specific…
British class differences persisting down centuries?
People with Norman names wealthier than other Britons:
Research shows that the descendants of people who in 1858 had “rich” surnames such as Percy and Glanville, indicating they were descended from the French nobility, are still substantial…
The many Americas
One of my main hobbyhorses is that in the United States today the identities of race and religion get so much emphasis that it is easy forget the divisions among white Anglo-Protestants which persist, and to some extent serve as the scaffold for the re…
Iranian religious distinctiveness is not primal
Dienekes has a discussion up of a new paper on Iranian Y-chromosome variation. My post isn’t prompted by the genetics here, but rather a minor historical note within the text which I want to correct, again, because it isn’t totally minor in…
Identity by descent & the Völkerwanderung
Early this year I received an email from Dr. Peter Ralph, inquiring if I might discuss some interesting statistical genetic results from analyses of the POPRES data set which might have historical relevance. I’ve been excitingly waiting for the p…
Continuing the search for Indo-Europeans
Dienekes P. is often rather laconic in commentary on the papers he links to, but of late he has “come out of his shell.” He has two posts which are important “weekend reading”:
– Population strata in the West Siberian plain (Bar…
Still not understanding the nature of affairs
I’m primarily science blogger, with an amateur interest in history. But I’m still disturbed that over 10 years after 9/11 elite media still can’t be bothered to be precise and accurate about the affairs of the Muslim world. As a neo-I…
Has Dienekes Pontikos found the signature of the Indo-Europeans?
I don’t know the answer to the question posted in title above, and I’m moderately skeptical that he has. But I wanted to give him full credit in the public record if researchers confirm his findings in the next few years. You can read the f…
Remembering failed engineering
When I was growing up in the 80s and 90s “hippies” were figures of amusement and the 1960s was all The Wonder Years. As a child you’re not told of the “dark side,” the true history, which may seem disturbing. When I was i…
The sea as it was
I haven’t mentioned that a few months ago I read an incredible book, The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean. It weighs in at ~650 pages of dense narrative text, and you’ll want to jump to the footnotes as well! There isn’…
The sea as it was
I haven’t mentioned that a few months ago I read an incredible book, The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean. It weighs in at ~650 pages of dense narrative text, and you’ll want to jump to the footnotes as well! There isn’…