Pathan parahistory
Mughal Emperor Akbar
In Strange Parallels Victor Lieberman made a reference to “Turkicized Pathans.” The very term has been gnawing at me. To get some sense of the context, Lieberman was sketching out the impact of Islamic civilization u…
Two South Asian charter polities
Finally finished Strange Parallels: Volume 2, Mainland Mirrors: Europe, Japan, China, South Asia, and the Islands: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c.800-1830. I’ll have a review up at my main blog, though I’m still wondering what the best tack for surveying a 900 page survey is. But there is one point of major relevance to […]
“What if you’re wrong” – haplogroup J
Back when this sort of thing was cutting edge mtDNA haplogroup J was a pretty big deal. This was the haplogroup often associated with the demic diffusion of Middle Eastern farmers into Europe. This was the “Jasmine” clade in Seven Daughters…
‘Indianization’ in the first 1,000 years after Christ
I am in the ‘Indian’ section of Strange Parallels and the author contends that Southeast Asian and South India were ‘Indianized’ at about the same time. By Indianized he means the suite of cultural characteristics which issued out of the Gangetic plain during the first millennium, after the Sangam period but before Mahmud of Ghanzi. […]
First Farmers Facing the Ocean
The image above is adapted from the 2010 paper A Predominantly Neolithic Origin for European Paternal Lineages, and it shows the frequencies of Y chromosomal haplogroup R1b1b2 across Europe. As you can see as you approach the Atlantic the frequency co…
The different dynamics of memes vs. genes
In my long post below, Celts to Anglo-Saxons, in light of updated assumptions, I had a “cartoon” demographic model in mind which I attempted to sketch out in words. But sometimes prose isn’t the best in terms of precision, and almost …
Britons, English, and Dutch
As a follow up to the previous post I’ve spent some of this weekend looking for the results which might shed some more light on the genetic impact of Germans on the British landscape between ~500-600 A.D. There are some problems here even assumin…
In thrall to Abraham’s God
In reading Strange Parallels I am struck by the broad cross-cultural tendencies in mainland Southeast Asia to transition from a Hindu sacral state to a Theravada Buddhist sacral state. Granted, the latter does not seem to be at great rupture with the former, as is evidenced by the “Hindu” aesthetic resonances of Thai and Khmer […]
Of literality and metaphor in the war between Arya and Dasa
Over at Brown Pundits Zach Latif brings up the point that the Indian bias for light skin may date back to the Aryans. And it does seem that such a bias manifests in the earliest texts. But as someone not …
“Gay girl in Damascus” has “esoteric” interests
I’ve been vaguely following the “mystery” surrounding A Gay Girl in Damascus blog. Turns out that “she” is a “he”, a 40 year guy who lives in Georgia. But that’s not why I’m mentioning this. The art…
Man at Bab el-Mandeb
In light of my last post I had to take note when Dienekes today pointed to this new paper in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Population history of the Red Sea—genetic exchanges between the Arabian Peninsula and East Africa signaled i…
The rise and fall of societies in Greenland
I have no idea when the paper will be on PNAS‘s website, so I thought I would at least point to the ScienceDaily release, Climate Played Big Role in Vikings’ Disappearance from Greenland:
Greenland’s early Viking settlers were subject…
Humanity invented in 1800 by the French
A comment from earlier this week struck a nerve with me. I’ll repost it in totality first:
I find it interesting that Fox Keller seems to be assuming that human interest in “nature” began only in the 19th century. Rather, the concept of manki…
The Solutrean hypothesis vindicated?
Here’s the model from Wikipedia:
This hypothesises similarities between the Solutrean industry and the later Clovis culture / Clovis points of North America, and suggests that people with Solutrean tool technology crossed the Ice Age Atlantic by …
The Sandawe: after the demographic flood
Over the past few days I’ve been trying to read a bit on the Sandawe. Most of the stuff I’ve been able to find is in the domain of linguistics, and is basically unintelligible to me in any substantive manner. The crux of the curiosity here …
The islands of genetic uniqueness in the swell
I recall years ago reading Spencer Wells discuss how important it was to sample “indigenous people”* before they were swallowed up by the cresting panmixia. Of course panmixia has to be conditioned on the fact that the vast majority of Han …
The shadow of the Emishi
Randy McDonald just pointed me to a 2008 paper in AJHG, Japanese Population Structure, Based on SNP Genotypes from 7003 Individuals Compared to Other Ethnic Groups: Effects on Population-Based Association Studies. It speaks to an issue I brought up ear…
Swedes not so homogeneous?
Credit: David Shankbone
The more and more I see fine-scale genomic analyses of population structure across the world the more and more I believe that the “stylized” models which were in vogue in the early 2000s which explained how the worl…