Razib Khan’s Content Aggregation Site
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Western Hunter-Gatherer woman, Neolithic farmer man, Yamnaya man
The last day or so I’ve been using Midjourney to create AI art. The reason is not that I’m artistic, I’m not really at all. Rather, I want to create […]
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Proud of Rho Khanna
Recently Ann Coulter mentioned that Indians don’t have the same concept of free speech that Americans do. That is totally true and evident on these message boards. Ann’s concern is that the Indian-enriched tech work-force won’t see any problems with censoring offensive speech since that’s the norm in their society. That being said, my chest…
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The unreal voyages and trials of Madagascar’s Malagasy people
Of rice and men
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You can’t make this up: Madagascar, how our planet’s strangest island was settled
The unreal journeys of Madagascar’s Malagasy People
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Garett Jones: The Culture Transplant – How Migrants Make the Economies They Move To a Lot Like the Ones They Left
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib discusses the new book, The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move To a Lot Like the Ones They Left, with author Garett Jones. Jones is a professor of economics at George Mason Unive…
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Michael Bonner: Iran’s Sassanid Empire
Listen now (64 min) | After Darius before Ali: the Empire forgotten to memory
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First AASI mtDNA genomes from Sri Lanka (2500 and 5500 BC)
The mitochondrial genomes of two Pre-historic Hunter Gatherers in Sri Lanka: Sri Lanka is an island in the Indian Ocean connected by the sea routes of the Western and Eastern worlds. Although settlements of anatomically modern humans date back to 48,000 years, to date there is no genetic information on pre-historic individuals in Sri Lanka.…
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Cody Moser: Universal Baby Talk
How is it that babies across entirely different cultures seemingly elicit one single sort of “baby talk” from adults? To answer this question, Razib talks to Cody Moser, coauthor of a recent paper on the topic, and an evolutionary psychologist and cult…
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Cyber Monday 50% discount, plus who I read and why
Substack savings, reading lists and my must-read newsletters
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Cyber Monday 50% discount, plus who I read and why
Substack savings, reading lists and my must-read newsletters
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So you want to test your DNA
A genomicist tells you what tests are worth it for you, and why
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They came not to bring peace but a sword
Recently there was a debate on Twitter about whether the legacy of the Indo-Aryans, one of the most impactful descendants of the Sintastha culture, was positive, significant and worthy of admiration. More generally, what have the descendants of the Yamnaya culture of the Pontic steppe done for us? This is a complicated question. I think…
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Eurocentrism, the West, and white supremacy
Listen now (85 min) | The rise of the West (and its fall?)
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How Christian Militarism slowed the spread of Christianity
In 1250 AD Mindauguas, the Grand Duke of Lithuania, accepted Christianity. This was to be a “Clovis moment” for the Lithuanian tribes, but history took a different path. Mindaugas’ nobles […]
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Nikolai Yakovenko: a Twitter engineer on machine learning and his former company’s prospects
When Jack Dorsey stepped down as Twitter CEO last year, I wondered what we could expect from the new leader, Parag Agrawal. Luckily, I knew Nikolai Yakovenko, who worked at Twitter on deep neural networks in the mid-teens. Yakovenko told me Agrawal was…
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Will Twitter fail whale come back before December 1st?
I set up a market on Manifold. Thoughts?
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The Todas are more like IVC people than anyone else
I noticed something interesting a few weeks ago in the supplements of the Genomes Asian 1000K paper. Look at where the Toda are on the PCA. Now look at the Indus Valley samples I have…. I don’t have access to the Toda samples. But there’s a lot of evidence that this is a very unique…
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Razib Khan: Anatolia over 10,000 years
On this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib discusses the history and genetics of Anatolia, from the first farmers to the Ottoman conquest of the peninsula. He focuses on the underappreciated reality that prehistoric Anatolia was the fo…
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The varieties of Brahmins (and others)
Sometimes people pass me data. Turns out Rajasthani Brahmins are quite different from UP Brahmins (more northwest-shifted). In this, they are like Pandits. In contrast, Bihar Babhans are just like UP Brahmins, who don’t seem to have much structure. Gujarati Brahmins are between South Indian Brahmins and North Indian Brahmins, and closer to the latter,…
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Garett Jones: The Culture Transplant – How Migrants Make the Economies They Move To a Lot Like the Ones They Left
Listen now (60 min) | Culture and institutions in economic development