You may now call the First Citizen Dominus
He who claims to be the salvation of the notional Populares from the tyranny of the leader of the traditional Optimates holds the keys to the victory of the new order over the old. Through the very means of power by which the plebian faction may grasp the reins of power will destroy the order […]
The Indian Neolithic
To understand the genetic patterning of South Asia more understanding of the archaeology of the Neolithic is necessary. Unfortunately, I don’t have that. The site of Chirand in Bihar has extensive Neolithic features which date to at 4,500 years at the latest (the region seems to have undergone stepwise development for thousands of years earlier). …
Was 2015 like 1965?
I’m old enough to remember an America that wasn’t too far from the 1960s. One of my childhood best friends had a mother who was a “hippy” in a classic sense, dressing like a “flower-child” deep into the 1980s. Basically, her sartorial sense was frozen in the second half of the 1960s, when she was […]
White people did not begin history
Update on the Tutsi genotype project. Many years ago I was given the genotype of an individual who had three Tutsi grandparents and one Hutu grandparent. You can see the result above in comparison to the single Hutu and the dozen or so Tutsi. This individual is shifted toward the Kenyan Bantu groups (while the […]
3,000 years in the Levant
The Insight Show Notes — Season 3, Episode 3: 3,000 years in the LevantThis week on The Insight (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Podcasts) Razib talks to Marc Haber of the University of Birmingham about the genetics and history of the Lev…
3,000 years in the Levant
The Insight Show Notes — Season 3, Episode 3: 3,000 years in the LevantThis week on The Insight (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Podcasts) Razib talks to Marc Haber of the University of Birmingham about the genetics and history of the Lev…
Years of Rice and Lentils
Going back twenty years I have been fascinated by “alternative history” science fiction. This is often termed “Uchronia.” If you want to explore this genre, I suggest the Uchronia website. Probably the biggest breakout into “mainstream” science fiction of this sort of work is Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt. Here the …
Are the Jacobins and Thermidor just in the past?
Being raised as an American in the last quarter of the 20th-century gives one an interesting perspective. The period between 1975 and 1995 was characterized by worries about decline. From the tail end of the post-1965 crime wave to the psychological trauma of the oil shocks, the rise of Japan, and the ever-present threat of […]
An early modern Pax Islamica
The Muslim Empires of the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughal has been in my “stack” for a while. It’s a short and academically-oriented work. What’s great about this book is that it is cross-cultural and comparative. I don’t know about you, but these sorts of narrative frames make recall and retention far easier for me. The …
Social Justice as white self-regard and self-obsession
A few years ago I made a passing reference to the “Kali Yuga” (I had been reading the Mahabharata), and an interlocutor expressed alarm. “Isn’t that an ‘alt-right’ idea?” The truth is that the concept has become entrenched in parts of the Western Right through the influence of Theosophy and Julius Evola, but its origins …
Continue reading “Social Justice as white self-regard and self-obsession”
Indian Ancestry In Thailand During the Iron Age
A follow-up to my previous post, one of the “Iron Age” samples from Thailand seems a definite outlier in comparison to the other Iron Age and Bronze Age samples. There is suggestive evidence again of Indian ancestry, as one sees in the plot above. One of the samples from Thailand overlaps with the Cambodians and […]
To know one must know
I was having a discussion with a young person of subcontinental origin who is completing a STEM Ph.D. An open-minded and curious person and they asked me to exposit to them why a post-colonial paradigm that reduces all non-Western/white peoples to being objects in a narrative driven by Western/white agents is built on false premises. …
The 2020s, the decade of taking everyone seriously but not literally
Adam Serwer in The Atlantic argues that The Fight Over the 1619 Project Is Not About the Facts. This is in response to some controversy because several eminent historians on the Left (there are hardly any historians on the Right in any case) published a pretty strong critique of the 1619 Project. If you don’t […]
Why Aryan Migration Theory (“AMT”) is probably true, but it might not matter
People now and then ask me why JR contributes to this weblog when I think he’s profoundly wrong on some issues. First, being wrong is no sin. Even being offensive is no sin. I am a traditionalist in regards to expression. Second, JR presents what I believe to be the wrong position with a reasonable …
Continue reading “Why Aryan Migration Theory (“AMT”) is probably true, but it might not matter”
Civilization was inevitable, not contingent
Nice review in Nature, When did societies become modern? ‘Big history’ dashes popular idea of Axial Age Humanity’s supposed singular transition to modernity in the first millennium BC was much messier than previously thought, finds sweeping study of historical data. I blogged an earlier paper with a smaller version of the dataset that the book, […]
The Burmese frontier of Bengal
I am reading Thant Myint-U’s The Hidden History of Burma: Race, Capitalism, and the Crisis of Democracy in the 21st Century. In it, he mentions the legends and oral history of some Burmese that much of Bengal was once inhabited by people like the modern Burmese: Buddhist, and East Asian in appearance. I don’t know …
City air makes you less fecund
A follow-up from an earlier post. Looking at a transect of Roman DNA I made the assertion that modern Roman Italian samples reflect the rural hinterlands of Lazio, which repopulated the city after its massive population loss of the 7th-centuries. This separate post is probably warranted because taking into account comments, I have reread and […]
The Indo-Aryan enigma
A friend sent me this piece, Aryan Debate: Do the recent genetic studies validate Aryan invasion theory? The conclusion: To sum up, how exactly the Indo-Aryanization India happened would remain unclear unless we get more ancient DNA samples, especially that of male individuals, from various Harappan sites and Gangetic regions as well. Until detailed studies …
The Chinese customer is always right
Unless you have been sleeping under a rock you are aware that there is a controversy around China and the NBA due to different standards of political speech in the USA and China. Obviously the major issue that looms over the debate is the reality that at some point in the 2020s China will become […]
Anticipating post-postcolonialism
Recently on Facebook, an old friend who is now a professor promoted a new series of essays to which she contributed. She noted that this is a history which “…place enslavement, colonialism, and indigenous removal at the center…” Some of the analyses clearly take postcolonialism for granted, where the contact with and shock of European […]