Razib Khan

Category: Agriculture

  • One diabetes gene to explain it all?

    President William Howard Taft It is the best of times, it is the worse of times. On the one hand the medical consequences of human genomics have been underwhelming. This is important because this is the ultimate reason that much of the basic research is funded. And yet we’ve learned so much. The genetic architecture…

  • Men at work: hoes, ploughs, and steel

    Ancient Egyptian farmer ploughing a field Recently several weblogs have pointed to a new working paper on the role of plough-based agriculture vs. hoe-based agriculture in shaping cultural expectations about male and female labor force participation specifically, and the differentiation of gender roles more generally. My first reaction was: “doesn’t everyone know this already?” I…

  • Pandora’s Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization

    The cockroach as we know it has been around for ~140 million years. That’s a rather long run. The evolutionary design of the cockroach seems to be well suited to avoiding obsolescence; it’s withstood the test of time. I suspect that the particular example of the roach is often used to illustrate the blindness of…

  • Völkerwanderung back with a vengeance

    The German magazine Der Spiegel has a rather thick new article out reviewing the latest research which is starting to reintroduce the concept of mass folk wanderings into archaeology. The title is How Middle Eastern Milk Drinkers Conquered Europe. In the story you get a good sense of the recent revision of the null model…

  • Agriculture & health in the pre-Columbian period

    I’ve been interested in the transition toward agriculture, and its relationship to human health, for a while. There seem to have been two dominant paradigms in anthropology over the past century. The first is that agriculture spread because it was supe…

Razib Khan