Month: June 2018
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Genetical observations on caste
One of the more interesting and definite aspects of David Reich’s Who We Are and How We Got Here is on caste. In short, it looks like most Indian jatis have been genetically endogamous for ~2,000 years, and, varna groups exhibit some consistent genetic differences. This is relevant because it makes the social constructionist view…
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The Insight, Episode 17: Patrick Wyman, Barbarian Genetics
This week on The Insight we talk to Patrick Wyman of Tides of History. Patrick is now a professional podcaster for Wondery, but I got to know him originally through comments on this weblog. A historian of Late Antiquity, we originally encountered each other in 2010 after I had just finished a period where I…
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Barbarian Genetics
This week Spencer and Razib talk to Patrick Wyman, host of the podcast ‘Tides of History,’ about the genetics of the barbarian invasions during the fall of the Roman Empire.
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The fall of Rome and the wandering of peoples
The feat of Atilla“…The people of the Huns, but little known from ancient records, dwelling beyond the Maeotic Sea near the ice-bound ocean, exceed every degree of savagery. Since there the cheeks of the children are deeply furrowed with the steel from…
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Open Thread, 06/05/2018
The Cultural Brain Hypothesis: How culture drives brain expansion, underlies sociality, and alters life history. I keep suggesting to everyone that they need to read more cultural evolution! But to be honest it’s hard for me to keep up. So much earlier reading evolutionary genomics, since I know the literature and the models far better.…
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The great bottleneck after the post-Eemian separation
I’ve been thinking about effective population size. Basically it’s the inferred breeding population you estimate in the present, or in many cases the past, based on the genetic variation you see within the population. Another way to say it is that it’s the population size that can explain the genetic drift that you see in…
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The 4,000 year explosion
The figure above shows a most interesting result from a new preprint, FADS1 and the timing of human adaptation to agriculture. It shows the allele frequency change using ancient Eurasian genomes for the derived allele at FADS1. In case you don’t know why FADS1 is important, it’s been implicated in variation long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids (LC-PUFA) metabolism. The derived allele,…
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Results of 2018 Reader Survey
There are currently 104 people who have responded in various degrees to the reader survey. If I limit to South Asians only, the modal reader is an Indian national, though not overwhelmingly so: In terms of religious identity, Hindus are modal, but those who are not religiously identified are very common (I selected this latter…