Category: History
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Diaspora culture are often more conservative
Zach made a comment below about conservatism and Diaspora cultures. There are two trends one has to highlight here. One the one hand Diaspora cultures often exhibit synthesis with host cultures and can be quite novel and innovative. But there is another trend which is a cultural universal: Diaspora cultures often exhibit archaism and crystallize…
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Why Bronze Age steppe people replaced the farmers they conquered
One of the major revisions in my own mind about the demographic and historical processes of the Holocene in relation to humans has been the reality that large and dense agglomerations of agriculturalists could be marginalized by later peoples, to the point of having a smaller genetic footprint in the future than anyone might have…
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Beyond cultural parochialism
A major personal peeve of mine is that the past few centuries of Western colonialism have overshadowed so much that moderns are often unequipped to understand the vast tapestry of human historical and geographical diversity. If you are a modern Indian or Chinese or African person you know your own culture and its history…and its…
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The Jewish people: genetic unity in diversity
The Western WallThe religion of the Jews has had a great influence on the history of the world. Both Christianity and and Islam look to the Jewish tradition. Figures such as Moses are iconic in the Abrahamic context as lawgivers, setting a precedent fo…
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Abraham on the shoulders of Zoroaster (and others)
Yesterday on Twitter I made a quip about “linear Western models of time.” A friend pointed out that that was actually “Judeo-Christian.” I was going to agree…but then I realized something: I vaguely recalled that eschatology and millenarianism were things that some have hypothesized came into Judaism from Zoroastrianism. The historical context is straightforward. The…
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Humanity’s Genes Reveal Its Tangled History
Reality, it turns out, is more complex and interesting than scientists ever imagined.
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Communities only exist only in the Minds of Europeans
I read Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the origins and spread of Nationalism because other people read it. This is a book that is routinely alluded to in discussions by pundits of various stripes. On the back of the 2006 edition, the publisher notes that over 250,000 copies have been printed of this short academic…
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A preview review of Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past
So I read the final version of Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past. It’s good. You can finally set aside The History and Geography of Human Genes, though with the rate of change in the field of ancient DNA I wouldn’t be surprised…
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The first ethical revolution
My maternal grandfather was born in 1896. He died in 1996. He saw a great many changes in his life. If my children live 100 years what changes will they see? To the same extent? In the biological sciences, I suspect so. In particular, in the domain of stell cells and genetic engineering it strikes…
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Preparing for Nero
Richard Elliott Friedman’s The Hidden Face of God grapples with the reality that over time in the Biblical narrative the deity becomes less and less a direct presence. In Genesis, humankind has conversations with the divine, and arguably even wrestles with God himself. This is not what we see in later books. Or more precisely,…
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The general social complexity factor is a thing
The above is the Inglehart–Welzel cultural map of the world, derived from responses to the World Values Survey which are subject to principal component analysis. Basically, you take all the variation and pull out the biggest independent dimensions which can explain the variation. You’ve seen this with genetic data, but the method is pretty common…
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The Truth is that history is not evolving toward Truth
My friend Walter Olson pointed me to this from John Locke: To love truth for truth’s sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues. This is great and inspirational quote, but in most interpretive sieves I believe it is wrong. Hume’s assertion that “reason is…
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The Truth is that history is not evolving toward Truth
My friend Walter Olson pointed me to this from John Locke: To love truth for truth’s sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues. This is great and inspirational quote, but in most interpretive sieves I believe it is wrong. Hume’s assertion that “reason is…
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Black ancestry in white Americans of colonial background
I stumbled upon striking photographs of “white slaves” while reading The United States of the United Races: A Utopian History of Racial Mixing. The backstory here is that in the 19th century abolitionists realized that Northerners might be more horrified as to the nature of slavery if they could find children of mostly white ancestry,…
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Guest Right Is Holocene
With the surfeit of genomic data, whether contemporary or ancient, there is a lot of mileage to be gained by description and inference. That is, looking at the data, generating a result, and drawing some conclusion from that result. But another way to skin the cat is construct an explicit model and then test the…
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Heraclius was a great man, but a dirty old man
The Emperor Heraclius is someone who more people should know. He saved the Byzantine Empire before it truly became the Byzantine Empire in a mature form. When he took power the Persians were on the march, and ruled vast swaths of the Asian and African possessions of the East Roman Empire. Theodore of Tarsus, one…
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Roman cultural history has almost no demographic imprint
Several friends have asked that I weigh in the recent dust-up between Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Mary Beard. I haven’t for a few reasons. First, I can’t really be bothered to go incognito and see every detail of Taleb’s argument, as he has me blocked on Twitter (he called me a fucking idiot or something…
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Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World is a monthly deal
Just a heads up to readers, Amazon Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World is $1.99 right now. I’d highly recommend you get this book if you are interested in this general topic. Here is my review from about seven years ago.
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On the precipice of the Kali Yuga
priests are boring & teens aren’t invested in their faith, said no one who has ever been to a Saturday night at @go2steubenville #SteubieOTL pic.twitter.com/9wq03CYuGZ — KatiePrejean McGrady (@KatiePrejean) July 23, 2017 The idea of decline is an old one. See The Idea of Decline in Western History for a culturally delimited view. But whether…
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The sons of Ham and Shem
Recently I had the pleasure of having lunch with David Reich and he asked me about my opinions in relation to the Afro-Asiatic languages. I thought it was a strange question in that I get asked about that in the comments of this weblog too. Why would I have any particular insight? I gave him…