Dan Davis prehistory YouTuber par excellence
I’ve been on the record of being skeptical of a lot of content being generated on YouTube, but I think the author Dan Davis does a really great job. The […]
Multiple hearths of agriculture in ancient South Asia
Patrick Wyman’s Tides of History podcast is tackling South Asia and prehistory. He wrote up a Substack for it too, Ancient South Asia – Farming and People in India and Pakistan. I agree with Patrick here, though my confidence is low: …It seems unlikely that a group living 1400 miles to the east would have …
Continue reading “Multiple hearths of agriculture in ancient South Asia”
The new post-genetic paradigm will come
Oftentimes the domain on which a technical framework is applied matters a great deal. Imagine, if you will, an explicit statistical test for a phylogenetic relationship between a set of extant populations, whereby one infers a group of ancestral populations. If the genus is Drosophila, it’s academic. Interesting, but academic. If the genus is Homo, […]
Ancient India, archaeology, etc.
I think I have asked before, but I’m soliciting suggestions about a book on Indian prehistory, with a focus on the period between 10 and 2 thousand years ago. India: The Ancient Past: A History of the Indian Subcontinent from c. 7000 BCE to CE 1200 looks decent, but I don’t have an ability to … Continue reading “Ancient India, archaeology, etc.”
When do people forget where they come form?
When it comes to the arrival of Indo-Aryans to South Asia a major question Indians always post is “if they are invaders why don’t they mention that in their mythology?” My standard rejoinder is straightforward: we have plenty of paleogenetic evidence that many populations are intruders, but their mythology doesn’t indicate that. If the Indian […]
The war between the Aesir and Vanir
In Snorri Sturluson’s preservation of pre-Christian Scandinavian mythos, he outlines two groups of gods, the Aesir and the Vanir. Though ultimately presented as a united pantheon in comparison to beings such as the giants, there are references to a war between these two divine factions. But, there is still scholarly debate as to the significance […]
The great Eurasian explosion
Dr. Joseph Pickrell has updated his preprint, The genetic prehistory of southern Africa, with some more material on the Sandawe. I’ve explored the genetics of the Sandawe a bit using ADMIXTURE, so I jumped straight to the section on ROLLOFF:
R…
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 […]