Category Archives: Europe

Patrick Wyman’s book is a compelling historical narrative of Europe from 1490 to 1530, shot through with colorful stories about people and politics.

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Lascaux Cave, 17,000-year-old Magdalenian “paintings”40,000 years ago the first modern humans arrived in Europe. They were the scions of a great scattering of Africans. One branch of the “Out of Africa” migration, from which the vast majority of the an…

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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,…

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On this week’s episode of The Insight I discussed the field of cultural evolution with Richard McElreath. The author of Mathematical Models of Social Evolution, he was in a good place to explain why the field is relatively formal. This is in cont…

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  In L. L. Cavalli-Sforza’s The History and Geography of Human Genes he used between population group genetic distances, as measured in FST values, to generate a series of visualizations, which then allowed him to infer historical processes. Basically the way it works is that you look at genetic variation, and see how much of […]

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  In L. L. Cavalli-Sforza’s The History and Geography of Human Genes he used between population group genetic distances, as measured in FST values, to generate a series of visualizations, which then allowed him to infer historical processes. Basically the way it works is that you look at genetic variation, and see how much of […]

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Pew has a nice new report up, Europe’s Growing Muslim Population. Though it is important to read the whole thing, including the methods. I laugh when people take projections of the year 2100 seriously. That’s because we don’t have a good sense of what might occur over 70+ years (read social and demographic projections from […]

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A few years ago I suggested to the paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer that the first modern humans who arrived in Europe did not contribute appreciable ancestry to modern populations in the continent (appreciable as in 1% or more of the genome).* It seems I may have been right according to results from a 2016 paper, The […]

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Planet Money recently did a report on the difficulty of maintaining high economic productivity in southern Italy. I won’t rehash the specifics of the story, but, I think it is important to get a visual sense of just how large the contrast between…

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Early this year I received an email from Dr. Peter Ralph, inquiring if I might discuss some interesting statistical genetic results from analyses of the POPRES data set which might have historical relevance. I’ve been excitingly waiting for the p…

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A new paper in Science has just been published which in its broad outlines has been described in conference presentations. When examining the autosomal genetic variation of three individuals of the hunter-gatherer Pitted Ware Culture (PWC), and one of …

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The image above come from John Hawks’ weblog. I was thinking today about the resettlement of Europe since the Last Glacial Maximum. It is clear that much of northern Europe was not habitable until the Holocene, after the Ice Age. And those regions which were habitable were often marginal. But, there were zones of southern Europe […]

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Dienekes has a long post, the pith of which is expressed in the following: If I had to guess, I would propose that most extant Europeans will be discovered to be a 2-way West Asian/Ancestral European mix, just as most South Asians are a simple West Asian/Ancestral South Indian mix. In both cases, the indigenous component is […]

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A few people have asked me about the Geert Wilders’ affair. If you don’t know Geert Wilders’ is a right-wing Dutch politician prone to making inflammatory remarks about Islam. He’s been brought to court on the grounds of whether his comments violated the speech laws in much of Europe, which sanction inciting or hateful speech. […]

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I decided to take the Dodecad ADMIXTURE results at K = 10, and redo some of the bar plots, as well as some scatter plots relating the different ancestral components by population. Don’t try to pick out fine-grained details, see what jumps out in a gestalt fashion. I removed most of the non-European populations to […]

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Ole Magga, Norwegian politician
On this blog I regularly get questions about the Sami (Lapp*). That’s because I often talk about Finnish genetics, have readers such as Clark who are of part-Sami origin, and, the provenance and character of the Sami speak to broader questions about the emergence of the modern European gene pool. More precisely […]

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Razib Khan