Month: August 2018
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The “clash of civilizations” is a thing, just not the only thing
A few days ago I put up a post, The “Islamic World” Was Not Invented By Europeans. Since then, I have been reading the author’s book, The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History. It’s an interesting work with a lot of facts. Though so far no facts have been surprising to me, and,…
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Why I don’t accept the para-Munda hypothesis
There has been a discussion of Michael Witzel’s ideas in the comments below. Long familiar with his thesis that a Munda-like language was dominant in the northern Indus valley and in the Gangetic plain, I have also been long skeptical of it. The reason for me is simple: I have leaned to the position that Munda…
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What if everything that’s not a disease is polygenic?
In the early 2000s FOXP2 was dubbed the “language gene”. It was a sexy story. Humans exhibited accelerated adaptive evolution on this locus in relation to our relatives. Additionally, vocally oriented lineages such as birds and whales were also subject to the same process. But over the past five years or so I’ve heard a…
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Rakhigarhi sneak-peaks
Over at my other weblog, noting that the Indian press is finally starting to simply report the substantive contents of the Rakhigarhi results. As we all know the media can distort and misrepresent, so we need to be cautious and wait on the final paper, mostly because with that the authors can speak freely and…
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DNA results from Rakhigarhi are now being reported (really!)
It looks like Outlook India is the first out of the gates to start reporting on the results from Rakhigarhi in northwest India, We Are All Harrapans. This is a “mature phase” Harrapan site that dates to about 2250 BC or so. Media reports have always been garbled on this topic, so anything that is…
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The “Islamic world” was not invented by Europeans
Aeon has published a piece, What is the Muslim world? Islamists and Western pundits speak of ‘the West’ and ‘the Muslim world’ but such tribalism is dangerous colonial propaganda. The piece itself is more subtle and textured than the headline and subhead. Unfortunately, I’m 99% sure that 90% of readers will simply take the headline…
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Ancient pigmentation pathways and modern genomics
Piebald horses emerge out of common pigmentation pathways found in humansUnlike most mammals humans are highly dependent on our sense of sight. This is due to the diurnal nature of many primates. Our ancestors foraged for bright fruit, and so we develo…