Category: History
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Random and inevitable forces in world history: the 6th century
In Science Anne Gibbons reports on new ice-core evidence for why the middle of the 6th century A.D. was so difficult in much of Europe: Historians have long known that the middle of the sixth century was a dark hour in what used to be called the Dark Ages, but the source of the mysterious…
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The 20,000 year adventur eof the
The great adventure of the Native AmericansComanche warriors in 19th century TexasIn 1492 Christopher Columbus made definitive and lasting contact between Europe and the New World. This was not the first contact. We know for a fact that Greenland Norse…
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The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 7: the genetics of Native Americans
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 7: the genetics of Native AmericansAncient BeringiansThis week on The Insight (Apple Podcasts and Stitcher) Razib Khan and Spencer Wells discuss the genetics and history of Native Americans, from the icy shore…
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The rise of printing and the populist republic
The media needs clicks and people are rather myopic. This explains patently false pieces such as this in Buzzfeed, This Is How We Radicalized The World. It is a rather unorganized list of facts, but they are assembled in a way to convince and persuade the reading audience that modern information technology has facilitated the…
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The expansion of the polar people
The expansion of the polar peopleSami in the far north of EuropeSince the development of agriculture 12,000 years ago, the cultural and genetic landscape of our world has been transformed by the emergence of peasants as the dominant demographic. For mo…
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The leisure class of the ancient world
The years before 1914 and the First World War are often termed the “first age of globalization” (with our current era the second). But that’s a little short-right, even though arguably correct in some sense. Books such as The Fate of Rome and The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization make it quite…
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How the Greeks came to be
Sing, Goddess, Achilles’ rage, Black and murderous, that cost the Greeks Incalculable pain, pitched countless souls Of heroes into Hades’ dark, And left their bodies to rot as feasts For dogs and birds, as Zeus’ will was done. Who are the Greeks? Where did they come from? We have enough ancient DNA now to answer…
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Postcolonial imperialism
Rereading Edward Said’s Orientalism I am struck by the fact that he’s a very good writer compared to his heirs in postcolonial studies. As someone who cites Foucault, it is natural that there is a fair amount of vapid but lexically textured passages in Orientalism (you can open up any page and stumble upon a polished…
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India is eternal but Indians are not
This week’s episode of The Insight dug deeply into the current scientific understanding of the genetic origins of the peoples of the Indian subcontinent. Recent publications and media coverage have caught the science in midstream, as scholars have to d…
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The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 3: ANI, ASI, IVC and The Genetics of India
A scene from an ancient Indian epicThis week on The Insight (Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Google Play) we discussed how the genetics of 25% of the world’s population, the people of South Asia, came to be. It’s a journey of thousands of years.We cited t…
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Season 2, Episode 1: The Legacy of L. L. Cavalli-Sforza
L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, 1922–2018This week on The Insight (Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Google Play) we discussed the life and legacy of L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, who died on August 31st, 2018. See the Stanford obit. From John Hawks, The man who tried to cat…
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The passing
In 1998 Bill Clinton stated: Today, largely because of immigration, there is no majority race in Hawaii or Houston or New York City. Within five years, there will be no majority race in our largest state, California. In a little more than 50 years, there will be no majority race in the United States. No…
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The coming genetic invasion of history, and the rage to come
About ten years ago I reviewed Bryan Sykes’ book Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland. It was what it was, a product of the Y/mtDNA era. Therefore, there were a fair amount of conclusions which in hindsight turn out to be wrong. Sykes, and other genetic historians, such as Stephen…
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The Muslim world stands upon the shoulders of the Ummah
The two plots above are from a new working paper, On Roman roads and the sources of persistence and non-persistence in development. The basic argument is that good Roman infrastructure correlates with modern patterns of prosperity. An ingenious way the authors tested the predictive power is to contrast Europe, where carts and therefore roads, remained…
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The new post-genetic paradigm will come
Oftentimes the domain on which a technical framework is applied matters a great deal. Imagine, if you will, an explicit statistical test for a phylogenetic relationship between a set of extant populations, whereby one infers a group of ancestral populations. If the genus is Drosophila, it’s academic. Interesting, but academic. If the genus is Homo,…
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The “Islamic world” was not invented by Europeans
Aeon has published a piece, What is the Muslim world? Islamists and Western pundits speak of ‘the West’ and ‘the Muslim world’ but such tribalism is dangerous colonial propaganda. The piece itself is more subtle and textured than the headline and subhead. Unfortunately, I’m 99% sure that 90% of readers will simply take the headline…
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Render unto Caesar worldly goods
At Tanner Greer’s recommendation, I purchased a copy of Imperial China 900-1800. Now that I’ve received it I realize that I read a few chapters of Imperial China 900-1800in 2008, before abandoning the project due to sloth. Older and wiser. As I’m reading this book, I’ve been giving thought how I would respond to this…
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Japan as a natural cultural experiment
History of Japan is a good survey for anyone curious about the topic because it is short enough to not be intimidating (this was a complaint from friends who I recommended read The Making of Modern Japan), but dense enough to actually be much more informative than a Wikipedia entry. Unlike many surveys of Japanese history, it…
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The Insight show notes: Episode 29, The Genetics of China, Han & Beyond
This week Razib and Spencer discussed the genetics and history of China on The Insight (iTunes, Stitcher and Google Play).Chinese history looms large in the podcast, and there are many books one can read on the topic. In particular, John King Fairbank’…
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History and genetics of the Han
About 20 percent of the world’s population lives in the People’s Republic of China.Taking their name from the Han dynasty of ancient China, they are the core ethnicity of the People’s Republic of China: making up about 90% of the total population. When…