Monthly Archives: September 2018

A new shirt, Vaccines Cause Adults. I think that’s pretty funny. Since I don’t have that sort of human, it wasn’t my idea. Obviously, Photo 51 t-shirts are still on the  DNAGeeks website. Patrick Wyman does not recommend The Silk Roads: A New History of the World. The killer observation for me is that whenever Patrick knew […]

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As ancient DNA becomes a more standard part of archaeological science it’s going really yield up some doozies. You’ve probably read Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past, and how it’s upended old paradigms. But with the human past we probably have a better […]

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Over ten years ago I read Adam K. Webb’s Beyond the Global Culture War with some skepticism. In it, Webb outlined the future revitalization of non-Western societies and cultures and their ultimate face-off with global liberalism.  It’s a really strange book, which talks positively about the Iranian Revolution and Rabindranath Tagore. But I think elements … Continue reading “Global alliances and wheels within wheels”

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The author of Early China: A Social and Cultural History occasionally engages in asides which analogize his own domain of study to other societies and histories. In the process, he illustrates how China is in some ways nonpareil. When discussing the emergence of philosophical thinking during the Spring and Autumn Period there is a connection made to […]

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Most “old hands” in the discipline of historical population genetics remember when grand narratives were constructed out of Y chromosomal haplogroup distributions. One of the most distinctive ones is that of haplogroup R1b, which exhibits very high frequencies in the west of Europe, as high as more than 80% among the Basques. Because the Basques […]

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Recently I became a patron of the Secular Jihadists podcast. Ten years ago this wouldn’t be a big deal, but as a “grown-up” with three kids I’m much more careful to where I expend my discretionary income. So take that as a stronger endorsement than usual. I think Secular Jihadists is offering a nonsubstitutable good […]

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There was some question regarding possible Scythian admixture into the early Zhou below. This is possible because of the Zhou dynasty, arguably the foundational one of Chinese imperial culture (the Shang would have been alien to Han dynasty Chinese, but the Zhou far less so), may have had interactions with Indo-European peoples to their north […]

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A comment below suggested another book on Vietnamese history, which I am endeavoring to read in the near future. The comment also brought up issues relating to the ethnogenesis of the Vietnamese people, their relationship to the Yue (or lack thereof) and the Khmer, and also the Han Chinese. Obviously, I can’t speak to the […]

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This week’s episode of The Insight dug deeply into the current scientific understanding of the genetic origins of the peoples of the Indian subcontinent. Recent publications and media coverage have caught the science in midstream, as scholars have to d…

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A scene from an ancient Indian epicThis week on The Insight (Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Google Play) we discussed how the genetics of 25% of the world’s population, the people of South Asia, came to be. It’s a journey of thousands of years.We cited t…

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This week, Razib and Spencer discuss the history, genetics and anthropology of India. Show notes: https://pxlme.me/lMHHXFZb  

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After recording the “India genetics” podcast for The Insight and reading Early China: A Social and Cultural History, I wonder what surprises we’re going to get from China from ancient DNA when it comes online. If there is one thing we are learning by looking closely at DNA, modern and ancient, it’s that at least […]

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As you may know, Reihan Salam, who I would consider a friend (albeit, one I see in person three years or so!), has a new book out, Melting Pot or Civil War?: A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case Against Open Borders. It won’t be a surprise to know that I generally agree with him … Continue reading “This is America”

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Please keep the other posts on topic. Use this for talking about whatever you want to talk about.

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The lower Mekong region is a fascinating zone from the perspective of human geography and ethnography. Divided between Cambodia and Vietnam, until the past few centuries it was, in fact, part of the broader Khmer world, and historically part of successive Cambodian polities. Vietnam, as we know it, emerged in the Red River valley far to […]

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As some of you know I co-host a podcast on genetics and history with Spencer Wells. The very first podcast we recorded in late June of 2017 was about India, but we were still getting the hang of it to be honest, and we didn’t cover much territory. A lot has happened between then and … Continue reading “Podcast on South Asian genetics this week”

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Curious how many readers recognize the reference on the shirt to the left? You probably know if you’ve read The Double Helix. On the DNAGeeks website now. Salon is stiffing freelancers of $150. I think this is more a commentary on the market for freelancers than Salon‘s always tenuous finances. The market-clearing price for a […]

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  The above admixture graph is from a new preprint, Paleolithic DNA from the Caucasus reveals core of West Eurasian ancestry. To be honest, if you read the supplementary text there’s almost no point in reading the main preprint, as it is far more in depth when it comes to the methodology as well as […]

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The figure above is from a new paper, Estimating mobility using sparse data: Application to human genetic variation, which uses genomic data from late Pleistocene to the Iron Age in western Eurasia, and then infers migration rate considering both spatial distribution and the variable of time (remember that samples apart in time should also be […]

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I looked at traffic from Jan 1 of 2018. Here are the top 30 cities, standardized by the # of users from the 30th, Indore: City User # Bengaluru 6.6 London 5.7 Mumbai 5.7 New Delhi 4.3 San Jose 4.3 New York 4.1 Lahore 3.9 Pune 2.9 Karachi 2.8 Chennai 2.7 Mountain View 2.4 Islamabad … Continue reading “Where readers come from”

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Razib Khan