Brotherhood of Kings: How International Relations Shaped the Ancient Near East
Link to review: Diplomacy among the aliens.
Brotherhood of Kings: How International Relations Shaped the Ancient Near East
Link to review: Diplomacy among the aliens.
Pandora’s Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization
Link to review: Pandora’s Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization
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
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.
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.
Historical Dynamics: Why States Rise and Fall
Link to review: Historical Dynamics and contingent conditions of religion
War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires
Cliodynamics, the rise & fall of empires and asabiya
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, […]
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…
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…
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…
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
Live not by visualization alone
Synthetic map
In the age of 500,000 SNP studies of genetic variation across dozens of populations obviously we’re a bit beyond lists of ABO blood frequencies. There’s no real way that a conventional human is going to be able to discern patterns of correlated allele frequency variations which point to between population genetic differences on this […]
The history of us all
I should mention I finished Why the West Rules a few days ago, and Tyler Cowen was spot on. The author is by training a classical archaeologist, and so the first portion of the book which focuses on archaeology, and up to the classical historical period, is thick, dense, and insightful. But as he pushes […]
The great northern culture war
A new paper in The New Journal of Physics shows that a relatively simple mathematical model can explain the rate of expansion of agriculture across Europe, Anisotropic dispersion, space competition and the slowdown of the Neolithic transition:
The front speed of the Neolithic (farmer) spread in Europe decreased as it reached Northern latitudes, where the Mesolithic […]
No Romans needed to explain Chinese blondes
Uyghur boy from Kashgar
Every few years a story crops up about “European-looking” people in northwest China who claim to be of Roman origin. A “lost legion” so to speak. I’ll admit that I found the stories interesting, amusing, if implausible, years ago. But now it’s just getting ridiculous. This is almost like the “vanishing blonde” […]