Category: History
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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…
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The great Bantu expansion was massive
Lots of stuff at SMBE of interest to me. I went to the Evolution meeting last year, and it was a little thin on genetics for me. And I go to ASHG pretty much every year, but there’s a lot of medical stuff that is not to my taste. SMBE was really pretty much my…
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Rome fell fast, and so did we
The fall of Rome has obviously been a topic of much interest and discussion. It is, after all, a conversation about the fall of civilization as we knew it. If you read my blog you are probably aware that I lean toward a thesis of genuine and rapid fall. One of the most revelatory books…
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Indian genetics, part n of many
I put up close to definitive piece for me in relation to South Asian historical population genetics. At least until new research is published. I did leave out some stuff about my own vague thoughts…but I think the takeover of Hattian and Hurrian cultures by the Nesha (Hittites) and Haryannu (Mitanni) have something to teach…
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Indian genetic history: before the storm
Over at Brown Pundits I’ve mentioned the continuing simmer of controversy over a recent piece, How genetics is settling the Aryan migration debate. This has prompted responses in the Indian media from a Hindu nationalist perspective. One of these notes that the author of the piece above cites me, and then goes on to observe…
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The Finnic peoples emerged in Baltic after the Bronze Age
A reader in the comments reminds me there has been a preprint which is relevant to the population structure of Baltic Europe which came out a few months ago, Extensive farming in Estonia started through a sex-biased migration from the Steppe: …Here we present the analyses of low coverage whole genome sequence data from five…
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The origin of the Finnic peoples
One of the very first things I wrote about in relation to historical population genetics was in on the origins of the Finnic peoples. The reasons are two fold: – first, the Finns and Estonians speak language is rather peculiar in a Europe dominated by Indo-European tongues (I suspect one reason that Tolkien based…
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The system of the world by William H. McNeill
In the post below on book recommendations I forgot to mention William H. McNeill and John Robert McNeill’s The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History. It’s arguably been one of the most influential works that has percolated in my mind throughout the years. It’s less than 400 pages, and illustrates in broad sketches…
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Books I suggest you read so you won’t be misled as often
People often ask me for history books on a very specific topics often, assuming I’ve read something on an issue because I exhibit some fluency discussing something that might seem abstruse or arcane. The thing is that I haven’t always read a monograph on a singular topic even if I know a fair amount on…
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St. Augustine knew of the Buddha!
St. Augustine is a very influential figure in Western Christianity. Partly this is surely due to the fact that the Latin Church favored a doctor who was of their own cultural persuasion, schooled in their mores and folkways, as opposed to the ‘logic-choppers’ of the Greek world. In the intellectual Protestant tradition his influence on…
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The nadir of genetics in the Soviet Union
A fascinating excerpt in Slate from How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog), : This skepticism of genetics all started when, in the mid-1920s, the Communist Party leadership elevated a number of uneducated men from the proletariat into positions of authority in the scientific community, as part of a program to glorify the…
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The material over the ideological
I come not to praise or bury Max Weber. Rather, I come to commend where warranted, and dismiss where necessary. The problem as I see it is that though a meticulous scholar, Max Weber is the father of erudite sophistry which passes as punditry. Though he was arguably a fox, his genealogy has given rise…
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Ancient Egyptians: black or white?
One of the most fascinating things about ancient Egypt is its continuity, and our granular and detailed knowledge of that continuity. We can thank in part the dry climate, as well as the Egyptian penchant for putting their hieroglyphs on walls and monuments (as well as graffiti!). And we can also thank the fact that…
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The Canaanites walk among us: ancient DNA edition
Ancient DNA from here to there: Ancient DNA has illuminated many things, but there is a logic as to what topics and questions it tackles. The focus on northern Eurasia is clearly a function of the probability of preservation, though techniques of extraction are getting better and better. I can’t imagine how we’d ever get…
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At an inflection point of archaeology and genetics
People always ask me what to read in relation to the field of historical population genetics. In the 2000s there were a series of books which focused on the mtDNA and Y results from modern phylogeographic analysis. Journey of Man, Seven Daughters of Eve, The Real Eve, and Mapping Human History. But there hasn’t been…
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The eternal Axial Age
As I have noted before one of the most interesting aspects of ancient Greek history is that in many ways the socio-political identities and outlook of the Hellenic people before and after the Bronze Age were probably as distinct as that between hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists. That is, the citadel culture of the Mycenaeans was constructed out…
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Dramatization of the arrival of the Beaker people
Normally a conference or a talk related to the Bell Beakers and their spread across Western Europe would involve a few presentation slides with pictures of beakers and shaded maps, and result in the production of a scholarly compendium such as The Bell Beaker Transition in Europe: Mobility and local evolution during the 3rd millennium BC.…
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When conquered pre-Greece took captive her rude Hellene conqueror
When I was a child in the 1980s I was captivated by Michael Wood’s documentary In Search of the Trojan War (he also wrote a book with the same name). I had read a fair amount of Greek mythology, prose translations of the Iliad, as well as ancient history. The contrast between the Classical Greeks,…
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When conquered pre-Greece took captive her rude Hellene conqueror
When I was a child in the 1980s I was captivated by Michael Wood’s documentary In Search of the Trojan War (he also wrote a book with the same name). I had read a fair amount of Greek mythology, prose translations of the Iliad, as well as ancient history. The contrast between the Classical Greeks,…
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The Bronze age demographic transformation of Britiain
In Norman Davies’ the excellent The Isles: A History, he mentions offhand that unlike the Irish the British to a great extent have forgotten their own mythology. This is one reason that J. R. R. Tolkien created Middle Earth, they gave the Anglo-Saxons the same sort of mythos that the Irish and Norse had. But…