An Age of Miracles is Inevitable
Growing up with a lot of Mormons I was exposed to their culture a fair amount. Though Mormonism is really distinct as a culture, with folkways and mores (jello!), there are a lot of weird beliefs there too. One of the arguments presented as supporting the validity of the religion is that the Book of […]
The European invention of taxonomy?
One of the temptations of rejecting Eurocentrism in modern scholarship is to confuse the semantic terms for reality. Europeans have reshaped the semantic landscape over the past few centuries, but that does not mean that what the terms were pointing to did not exist in some form before. Last year Aeon published What is the […]
The maritime origins of the Munda
A reader pointing me to a paper whose hypothesis is novel to me. But, I have to say that reading the paper, I am now convinced this is highly likely. The paper is The Munda Maritime Hypothesis: On the basis of historical linguistic and language geographic evidence, the authors advance the novel hypothesis that the …
The fall of man
It is well known that in the 5th and 6th centuries of the Common Era the social complexity and economic productivity of the Roman cultural zone underwent a regression. There were two areas in particular where massive transformation occurred. The interior Balkans and Britain were ethnically and religiously changed in totality from their Roman-era state. […]
Our history is serious and not a game
Some of you are probably not amused by the jokes I try to make about AIT and Lord Indra. I hope it’s pretty clear I’m not serious about all of this…it’s just that people take these issues so seriously. I’ve changed my mind on the “peopling of India” question several times since I began to …
This is your independence day!
Twitter tells me that this is India’s independence day. Since I didn’t know that this was the case until this morning, I obviously have nothing deep to say. Except let me enjoin the people of India and its leadership class to one thing: do not be haunted by the past, look to the future. The …
They’ll protest more the more they are wrong
A friend seny me the above clip. Some comments: * The affect, style, and mannerism is very familiar to me. It reminds me of Muslim and Christian Creationist public speakers, who exhibit an air and manner of incredible confidence to audiences who want what they have on offer. Validation. Confirmation. * The citations of the …
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India After Gandhi: $1.99 Kindle Deal
I know many people are critical of Ramachandra Guha’s India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy (e.g., my friend Reihan Salam is not a big fan), but Amazon is running a Kindle Deal on it (at least in the USA). So it’s $1.99 currently. The original book was published in the 2000s, …
Genetic change, cultural coherency, and social structure
A stupid commenter (SC) below keeps opining that the high frequency of R1a across South Asia is due to non-paternity events (NPE). I’m not quite sure SC knows what NPE is. It is, “when someone who is presumed to be an individual’s father is not in fact the biological father.” The hypothesis presented seems to …
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What The All-Father Means
Readers of this weblog may sometimes notice that I break out in pompous and self-important declarations of being a “scion of the All-Father.” This is basically a joke. But, it’s a joke that draws from a legitimate basis of science and mythology. The “All-Father” is another name for Odin. I’m really talking about Indra, who …
Between Marx and the mullah
There is a lot of talk on this weblog about deaths in premodern conflicts. I want to clarify a few points, at least from my perspective. Both ancient DNA and conventional history and archaeology indicate that massive population turnovers occurred in the past. If you read a book like Genghis Khan: His Conquests, His Empire, …
The end of the universal Western civilization
During a conversation with Carl Zha (already posted for BrownCast patrons) I inquired about Chinese views of the rest of the world and China’s relationship to other nation-states. I reflected offhand in some ways we don’t know how to deal with this “multi-polar” world, where Asian powers are again relevant after many centuries of being […]
The rise of the steppe (on PBS)
David Anthony’s The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World is a bit dated, but it’s still a useful read. Papers such as Population genomics of Bronze Age Eurasia and Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe come out of […]
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 27: Neolithic Massacre
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 27: Neolithic MassacreThis week on The Insight (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and Google Podcasts) Razib talks to an archaeologist and geneticist who were authors of a paper that documented a Neolithic mas…
Anatomy of a prehistoric atrocity
A Neolithic grave pit in FranceWe don’t necessarily see the world of Europe before written history as uniform darkness, despite the lack of texts. Rather, we see some elements of prehistory with crystal clarity, while others remain entirely opaque to u…
Why the Uyghurs as we didn’t know them didn’t exist until after 1000 AD
The period between 300 AD about 750 AD is sometimes termed the “Buddhist Age.” The reason for this is is that this was the period when Buddhism was established in China, and, was still a force in mainland South Asia. It is also when Buddhism was arguably the dominant religion in much of Central Asia. […]
Pleistocene rock art in Maharashtra
Ancient Rock Art in the Plains of India-Two amateur sleuths have uncovered a collection of mysterious rock carvings on the Indian coastal plain south of Mumbai: In the evening breeze on a stony hilltop a day’s drive south of Mumbai, Sudhir Risbud tramped from one rock carving to another, pointing out the hull of a …
Rumbles in religion and cultural evolution
A few months ago I posted Society Creates God, God Does Not Create Society, which was a write-up of a paper in Nature, Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history. The study was of interest to me because it seemed to test the hypothesis and argument presented in Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation […]
An Islamic view of the Crusades
I should say a thing or two about The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades. It turns out that the Islamic perspective on the Crusades and Muslim-Christian conflict is pretty much exactly what you might infer from the Christian perspective. That is, the narrative in The Race for Paradise is surprisingly unsurprising. […]
The shadow of the Hun
Short of stature, with a broad chest and a large head; his eyes were small, his beard thin and sprinkled with grey; and he had a flat nose and tanned skin, showing evidence of his origin. – Jordanes, describing Atilla the Hun When I was younger (think age 10) I had a period when I […]