Category: History
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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 …
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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 …
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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…
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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…
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Brotherhood of Kings: How International Relations Shaped the Ancient Near East
Link to review: Diplomacy among the aliens.
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Brotherhood of Kings: How International Relations Shaped the Ancient Near East
Link to review: Diplomacy among the aliens.
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Pandora’s Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization
Link to review: Pandora’s Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization
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Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present
Link to review: Who’s the barbarian now? Empires of the Silk Road
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Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?: Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century
Link to review: The wheel of history turns to the gods.
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Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?: Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century
Link to review: The wheel of history turns to the gods.
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Historical Dynamics: Why States Rise and Fall
Link to review: Historical Dynamics and contingent conditions of religion
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War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires
Cliodynamics, the rise & fall of empires and asabiya
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American history in broad strokes
A comment below inquired about “good books” on American history. Unfortunately I don’t know as much about American history as I do about Roman or Chinese history. But over the years there have been several books which I find to have been very value-add in terms of understanding where we are now. In other words,…
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The genomic heritage of French Canadians
Image Credit: Anirudh Koul One of the great things about the mass personal genomic revolution is that it allows people to have direct access to their own information. This is important for the more than 90% of the human population which has sketchy ge…
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The rise and fall of great powers is stochastic
Long time readers know well my fascination with quantitative history. In particular, cliometrics and cliodynamics. These are fields which attempt to measure and model human historical phenomena and processes. Cliometrics is a well established field, in…
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The Assyrians and Jews: 3,000 years of common history
2 Kings, 17: [5] Then the king of Assyria came up throughout all the land, and went up to Samaria, and besieged it three years. [6] In the ninth year of Hoshea the king of Assyria took Samaria, and carried Israel away into Assyria, and placed them in H…
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The empires of American English
Over the past few days a website which maps American English dialects has gone around the blogs (I found it via Kevin Zelnio). Michelle has some suggestions for improvements of the map in Ohio. Here’s a cropped and resized dialect map: One thing that immediately stood out is the latitudinal banded pattern of the dialects.…
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The Axial Age & world population
A few days ago Robin Hanson brought this chart of world population to my attention: On the x-axis you have time, 12,000 years ago to the present. On the y-axis an estimate of the total world population log-transformed. The data is derived from the US Census low estimate. Granting the data’s accuracy for the purposes…
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Not misunderstanding the past requires suspicion
In my post on African farmers someone responded: It was famously reported last winter that Bushmen seem to differ genetically amongst themselves more than Europeans and Asians do. These two latter groups have been separate for at least 40,000 years. At least? Razib, you are way off on the separation time of Europeans and East…
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Some of the Indo-Europeans found?
School girls in Hunza, Pakistan A few days ago I observed that pseudonymous blogger Dienekes Pontikos seemed intent on throwing as much data and interpretation into the public domain via his Dodecad Ancestry Project as possible. What are the long term implications of this? I know that Dienekes has been cited in the academic literature,…