Razib Khan

Category: History

  • The fall of empires as an exponential distribution

    I was alerted to Samuel’s Arbesman’s new paper, The Life-Spans of Empires, by the fact that he pointed to his research on his weblog. Interestingly I’m not the only one who was interested, as after I pointed to it on my link round u…

  • War in Pre-Columbian Sumeria

    For most of my life I have had an implicit directional view of Holocene human culture. And that direction was toward more social complexity and cultural proteanism. Ancient Egypt traversed ~2,000 years between the Old Kingdom and the fall of the New Ki…

  • Southeast Asian migrations, Indians and Tai

    If you have not read my post “To the antipode of Asia”, this might be a good time to do so if you are unfamiliar with the history, prehistory, and ethnography of mainland Southeast Asia. In this post I will focus on mainland Southeast Asia…

  • The biocultural frog and tortoise

    As many of you know when you have two adjacent demes, breeding populations, they often rapidly equilibrate in gene frequencies if they were originally distinct. There are plenty of good concrete examples of this. The Hui of China are Muslims who speak…

  • Pathan parahistory

    Mughal Emperor Akbar In Strange Parallels Victor Lieberman made a reference to “Turkicized Pathans.” The very term has been gnawing at me. To get some sense of the context, Lieberman was sketching out the impact of Islamic civilization u…

  • Two South Asian charter polities

    Finally finished Strange Parallels: Volume 2, Mainland Mirrors: Europe, Japan, China, South Asia, and the Islands: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c.800-1830. I’ll have a review up at my main blog, though I’m still wondering what the best tack for surveying a 900 page survey is. But there is one point of major relevance to…

  • “What if you’re wrong” – haplogroup J

    Back when this sort of thing was cutting edge mtDNA haplogroup J was a pretty big deal. This was the haplogroup often associated with the demic diffusion of Middle Eastern farmers into Europe. This was the “Jasmine” clade in Seven Daughters…

  • ‘Indianization’ in the first 1,000 years after Christ

    I am in the ‘Indian’ section of Strange Parallels and the author contends that Southeast Asian and South India were ‘Indianized’ at about the same time. By Indianized he means the suite of cultural characteristics which issued out of the Gangetic plain during the first millennium, after the Sangam period but before Mahmud of Ghanzi.…

  • First Farmers Facing the Ocean

    The image above is adapted from the 2010 paper A Predominantly Neolithic Origin for European Paternal Lineages, and it shows the frequencies of Y chromosomal haplogroup R1b1b2 across Europe. As you can see as you approach the Atlantic the frequency co…

  • The different dynamics of memes vs. genes

    In my long post below, Celts to Anglo-Saxons, in light of updated assumptions, I had a “cartoon” demographic model in mind which I attempted to sketch out in words. But sometimes prose isn’t the best in terms of precision, and almost …

  • Celts to Anglo-Saxons, in light of updated assumptions

    Over the past week there have been three posts which I’ve put up which are related. Two of them have a straightforward relation, Britons, English, Germans, and collective action and Britons, English, and Dutch. But the third might not seem relate…

  • Britons, English, and Dutch

    As a follow up to the previous post I’ve spent some of this weekend looking for the results which might shed some more light on the genetic impact of Germans on the British landscape between ~500-600 A.D. There are some problems here even assumin…

  • In thrall to Abraham’s God

    In reading Strange Parallels I am struck by the broad cross-cultural tendencies in mainland Southeast Asia to transition from a Hindu sacral state to a Theravada Buddhist sacral state. Granted, the latter does not seem to be at great rupture with the former, as is evidenced by the “Hindu” aesthetic resonances of Thai and Khmer…

  • Of literality and metaphor in the war between Arya and Dasa

    Over at Brown Pundits Zach Latif brings up the point that the Indian bias for light skin may date back to the Aryans. And it does seem that such a bias manifests in the earliest texts. But as someone not …Read more »

  • Britons, English, Germans, and collective action

    Quite often rather amusing articles which operate in the malleable zone between genetics and nationalism pop into my RSS feed (thanks to google query alerts). But this piece from Spiegel Online article, Britain Is More Germanic than It Thinks, actually…

  • “Gay girl in Damascus” has “esoteric” interests

    I’ve been vaguely following the “mystery” surrounding A Gay Girl in Damascus blog. Turns out that “she” is a “he”, a 40 year guy who lives in Georgia. But that’s not why I’m mentioning this. The art…

  • Man at Bab el-Mandeb

    In light of my last post I had to take note when Dienekes today pointed to this new paper in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Population history of the Red Sea—genetic exchanges between the Arabian Peninsula and East Africa signaled i…

  • The rise and fall of societies in Greenland

    I have no idea when the paper will be on PNAS‘s website, so I thought I would at least point to the ScienceDaily release, Climate Played Big Role in Vikings’ Disappearance from Greenland: Greenland’s early Viking settlers were subject…

  • Humanity invented in 1800 by the French

    A comment from earlier this week struck a nerve with me. I’ll repost it in totality first: I find it interesting that Fox Keller seems to be assuming that human interest in “nature” began only in the 19th century. Rather, the concept of manki…

  • The Solutrean hypothesis vindicated?

    Here’s the model from Wikipedia: This hypothesises similarities between the Solutrean industry and the later Clovis culture / Clovis points of North America, and suggests that people with Solutrean tool technology crossed the Ice Age Atlantic by …

Razib Khan