The Prehistory of the Arabian Peninsula
Archaeologist Jeff Rose talks about the incredible Paleolithic finds in Oman and their implications for the origins of modern humanity. Show notes: https://pxlme.me/l2uKidYt
The deep origins of East African Hunter-Gatherers
PNAs has a new paper out, Genomic evidence for shared common ancestry of East African hunting-gathering populations and insights into local adaptation. From what I can tell this was never a preprint, so it’s all new…. Or is it? Looking closely at some of the populations sampled, I’m about 85% sure that I saw a […]
Open Thread – Brown Pundits
Please keep the other posts on topic. Use this for talking about whatever you want to talk about.
The rise of the childless class
Due to the recommendation of a reader of this weblog I’ve been listening to the audiobook of John Keegan’s A History of Warfare. I am good at reading a text. I am not so good at patiently paying attention to the narration of someone speaking. But with that said, one passage that stuck out at […]
Arabia between Africa & Eurasia
Arabia between Africa and EurasiaShanidar cave in Iraq, once occupied by NeanderthalsFor hundreds of thousands of years Neanderthals and the ancestors of modern humans interacted in the broad zone of territory we now call the “Middle East.” Neanderthal…
BrownCast Podcast episode 16: Native Americans and a globalized world
Another BP Podcast is up. You can listen on Libsyn, iTunes and Stitcher. Probably the easiest way to keep up the podcast since we don’t have a regular schedule is to subscribe at one of the links above. You can also support the podcast as a patron (the primary benefit now is that you get the podcasts considerably earlier than everyone else…). Would …
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Open Thread, 2/18/2019
Peter Turchin’s Ages of Discord is now a free rental if you have Amazon Prime (otherwise you will be prompted for a Kindle Unlimited subscription). If you are interested in the kind of stuff I talk about, I highly recommend all of Peter Turchin’s work. For readers of this weblog Historical Dynamics: Why States Rise […]
Not happening at genomic speed: diversification of GWAS panels
One of the things that is evident and the norm when you are interested in genetics and genomics is that things happen fast. There are some sciences which proceed at a normal and conventional pace. But, because genomics is fundamentally driven by the …
The end of America as the world as we know it
Today in Variety, ‘Alita: Battle Angel’ No Match for China’s ‘Wandering Earth’ Overseas: The Chinese New Year is bringing in huge business in the Middle Kingdom. China’s sci-fi epic “The Wandering Earth” pulled in a massive $96.6 million from three ter…
The end of America as the world as we know it
Today in Variety, ‘Alita: Battle Angel’ No Match for China’s ‘Wandering Earth’ Overseas: The Chinese New Year is bringing in huge business in the Middle Kingdom. China’s sci-fi epic “The Wandering Earth” pulled in a massive $96.6 million from three ter…
Pakistan’s #1 in newborn mortality rates!?!?!
Sometimes you read things you need to double check on. World is failing newborn babies: 1. Pakistan: 1 in 22 2. Central African Republic: 1 in 24 3. Afghanistan: 1 in 25 4. Somalia: 1 in 26 5. Lesotho: 1 in 26 6. Guinea-Bissau: 1 in 26 7. South Sudan: 1 in 26 8. …
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Europe had a lot of demographic turnover because there were never many humans
Now things are coming into focus. Population dynamics and socio-spatial organization of the Aurignacian: Scalable quantitative demographic data for western and central Europe: Demographic estimates are presented for the Aurignacian techno-complex (~42,…
Why do South Asians have heart disease?
Why Do South Asians Have Such High Rates of Heart Disease?: Some of the most striking findings to come out of Masala relate to body composition. Using CT scans, Dr. Kanaya and her colleagues found that South Asians have a greater tendency to store body fat in places where it shouldn’t be, like the liver, …
Salman Rushdie and me, 20 years on
Readers of this weblog know that I have a peculiar relationship to the Salman Rushdie controversy in the late 1980s. When I first heard the name “Salman Rushdie” and book called The Satanic Verses I was by chance not in the United States. I…
The Vedic People: Their History and Geography
My boss leant me is copy of Rajesh Kochhar’s The Vedic People: Their History and Geography. It’s a short and dense book that covers many fields. I highly recommend it. As usual, don’t take it as gospel, but as a starting point. The a…
Love, oxytocin and evolution
Gibbons form pair-bondsOn some level, most scientists would say that everything is reducible to material and mechanism. But to say that “everything is due to the swerve of atoms” doesn’t get us much further than the ancient Greeks, who were the first t…
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 14: Love & biology
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 14: Love & biologyThis week on The Insight (Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Google Podcasts)we discuss “love” from the perspective of an evolutionary biologist. More specifically, we had a wide-ranging discus…
Love and biology!
This week we talked to evolutionary biologist Steve Phelps about love. Show notes: https://pxlme.me/Qe6cieei
A brain warped by reading
Stanislas Dehaene’s Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read is an excellent book because it shows how we reuse preexistent cognitive architecture to extend our capacities through cultural creativity. There is, for example, a part of …
Why Charles Darwin matters
Charles Robert Darwin was born on February 12th, 1809. He was the son of a prosperous and prominent lineage. His grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, was a physician and public intellectual. Like his more famous grandson, the elder Darwin was a natural philoso…