Category: History
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Live not by visualization alone
Synthetic map In the age of 500,000 SNP studies of genetic variation across dozens of populations obviously we’re a bit beyond lists of ABO blood frequencies. There’s no real way that a conventional human is going to be able to discern patterns of correlated allele frequency variations which point to between population genetic differences on…
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The history of us all
I should mention I finished Why the West Rules a few days ago, and Tyler Cowen was spot on. The author is by training a classical archaeologist, and so the first portion of the book which focuses on archaeology, and up to the classical historical period, is thick, dense, and insightful. But as he pushes…
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The great northern culture war
A new paper in The New Journal of Physics shows that a relatively simple mathematical model can explain the rate of expansion of agriculture across Europe, Anisotropic dispersion, space competition and the slowdown of the Neolithic transition: The front speed of the Neolithic (farmer) spread in Europe decreased as it reached Northern latitudes, where the…
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No Romans needed to explain Chinese blondes
Uyghur boy from Kashgar Every few years a story crops up about “European-looking” people in northwest China who claim to be of Roman origin. A “lost legion” so to speak. I’ll admit that I found the stories interesting, amusing, if implausible, years ago. But now it’s just getting ridiculous. This is almost like the “vanishing…
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Taking the end of the age seriously
I am about two-thirds of the way through Why the West Rules-for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future, and I have to agree with Tyler Cowen’s assessment so far. The author is an archaeologist, and though a little less shy in regards to general theory than most in his…
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The rise of men & the fall of the non-men
Dienekes Pontikos ruminates on the changes in human genetic variation on a world-wide scale over the past 10,000 years based on an MDS plot of East Eurasian genetic variation which he generated. I’ve taken his plot and added geographical labels, so you can see the difference in scale between geography and genetics in terms of…
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15 ancestral components to bind them all
Dienekes Pontikos keeps chugging along, and has cranked out a new bar plot from the ADMIXTURE program with 15 putative ancestral components. He has “69 populations, and 1,189 individuals in total.” Most of these were assembled from public data, but some of them are particular to the Dodecad Ancestry Project. He contends: In comparison to…
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Icelanders descended from Native Americans?
That is the question, and tentatively answered in the affirmative according to a new paper in The American Journal of Physical Anthropology. A new subclade of mtDNA haplogroup C1 found in icelanders: Evidence of pre-columbian contact?: Although most mtDNA lineages observed in contemporary Icelanders can be traced to neighboring populations in the British Isles and…
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Privacy as a bourgeois privilege
Ruchira Paul has her own reaction to Zadie Smith’s pretentious review of The Social Network. One of the aspects of Smith’s review which Ruchira focuses upon is her concern about the extinction of the “private person.” I have mooted this issue before, but I think it might be worthwhile to resurrect an old hobby-horse of…
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European man of many faces: Cain vs. Abel
When it comes to the synthesis of genetics and history we live an age of no definitive answers. L. L. Cavalli-Sforza’s Great Human Diasporas would come in for a major rewrite at this point. One of the areas which has been roiled the most within the past ten years has been the origin and propagation…
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What intra- & inter- population genetic variance tells us
The figure to the left is a composite merged from two different papers. One analyzes the patterns of genetic variation within African Americans, and the other the patterns within the East Turkic ethnic group, the Uyghurs. The bar plots show the ancestral element which is similar to two parent populations which resemble Europeans and Africans…
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Around the great northern circle
Recently there’s been some talk about how the Mercator projection distorts our perceptions of the world, in particular how it makes Africa seem very small in relation to North America, and about the same size as Greenland. But there’s another artifact of the Mercator projection as well: it misleads us in terms of our perception…
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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…
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Assyrians & Finns in a worldwide genetic context
Dienekes is now allowing people to “out” themselves in terms of their ancestry on a comment thread over at the Dodecad Ancestry Project. One of the major purposes of the project has been to survey variation in under-sampled groups which could give us insights into human genetic history. Yesterday I pointed to an analysis of…
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The genetic heritage of Europe’s north
If you haven’t, you should keep an eye on Dienekes‘ Dodecad Ancestry Project (RSS). The pilot phase of data collection is over, and the first population level statistics are now coming out. Of particular interest to me is a new analysis of various northern European ethnicities just published. The samples used in this analysis are:…
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Japan’s end of history
A rather depressing piece in The New York Times, Japan, Once Dynamic, Is Disheartened by Decline: But perhaps the most noticeable impact here has been Japan’s crisis of confidence. Just two decades ago, this was a vibrant nation filled with energy and ambition, proud to the point of arrogance and eager to create a new…
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The rise and crash of civilizations
One of the questions of interest in the study of the evolution of culture is whether there is a direction in history in terms of complexity. As I have noted before in the pre-modern era many felt that the direction of history was of decline. That is, the ancients were wise and subtle beyond compare…
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Farmers, foragers, and us
At the Overcoming Bias weblog Robin Hanson has been ruminating on the shifts in human values and behaviors driven by transitions in modes of production. In particular, the dichotomy between foragers (hunter-gatherers) and farmers. Last week I pointed to Eric Michael Johnson’s review of data which indicate that modes of production may influence the normative…
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Ancient Rome as a death pit
One of the assumptions that I’ve made on this weblog repeatedly based on ancient literary references is the idea that before 1900 urban areas were population sinks. In Blessed Among Nations: How the World Made America the historian Eric Rauchway asserts that ~1900 in the USA urban health and life expectancy surpassed that of rural…
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Polygamy and human evolution: maybe it’s agriculture
Eric Michael Johnson has a fascinating piece in Psychology Today, Sex, Evolution, and the Case of the Missing Polygamists. I want to spotlight a few paragraphs: Keep in mind that in terms of interpreting such genetic evidence we are of necessity confined to a fairly recent time depth (and remember, by “recent” someone like me…