I’m going to sidestep the new inference that Austronesian expansion may predate the movement out of Taiwan. I’ll revisit. Rather, let’s reflect on the Denisovans. There is strong evidence of more than one admixture from this lineage into modern humans. And, multiple papers now support a model where various Southeast Asian groups have several different pulses. Finally, the “Denisovans” have really deep divergence. Way deeper than anything in modern humans. Some of them split right after the west-east Eurasian hominin split.
All this is curious in light of small hominins in the Philippines and Flores, as well as late ‘erectus.’ I think it is likely that some of the Denisovan lineages have ‘super-archaic’ admixture, while some of the gene flow is mediated by highly admixed moderns with high Denisovan load.
I don’t write much about the culture war because it seems that one side won, and it’s not my side. If my side is going to win, it won’t be through arguing. In the early 9th century the Patriarch of the Church of the East in Bagdhad had to defend Christianity in the court of the Caliph Harun al-Rashid. Obviously, he had to tread lightly. This was not a debate he was going to win. The goal was not to lose too badly. This is where I feel the ‘non-woke’ faction among cultural elites is. Just not losing is the victory. But in the long run, the Church of the East went into decline. If you even feign the shahada, the punishment for apostasy is social death.
So I don’t try to argue in public. Resistance needs to be in private because public attention is an invitation to get targeted.
But sometimes something so ridiculous comes on my radar that it warrants public comment.
Recently, I raised questions about this ideology at a mandatory, whites-only student and faculty Zoom meeting. (Such racially segregated sessions are now commonplace at my school.)
This seems crazy to me. Racial segregation? I wondered on Twitter how common this sort of thing is. It must be an aberration, no? Well, a friend who is faculty at Michigan State screenshotted an email he received (this is on a public page too).
I’m going to blockquote a portion if you don’t want to click to enlarge:
We invite attendees to participate in an affinity group during the Student Success Spring Conference. Affinity (or caucus) groups provide spaces for people to work within their own identity groups. To advance racial equity, there is work for white people and people of color to do separately and together. For white people, an affinity group provides time and space to work explicitly and intentionally on understanding white culture and white privilege and to increase one’s critical analysis around these concepts. For people of color, a caucus is a place to work with peers to address the impact of racism, to interrupt experiences of internalized racism, and to create a space for healing and working for individual and collective liberation.
If you are “woke” you see nothing wrong with this I assume. And that’s fine, we understand each other. On the Last Day, we’re on different sides. There’s no possibility of meeting in the middle. No compromise. I’m marked as to who I am. You know me as an enemy or friend, and there’s really no ambiguity about that. And I will know some of you too! I call you friend now sincerely, but on the Last Day I’ll show you as much loyalty as I’ve received from you.
But what about the rest? There are many academics who find these racial affinity groups disturbing. But they are busy with research. Do they need the hassle of speaking out about these things? Enough. As my friend who sent me the screenshot said: this is being complicit. Other academic friends tell me there is a “hidden majority.” If there is, you are all weak cowards. You count for nothing. The insanity marches and you avert your eyes. Why are you devoting your life to truth, while not confronting the abomination suffocating your institutions? This is evil.
Evil is a strong word. Some of you who are not woke, but moderate, may argue like Abraham haggling with the angels that there is some righteousness in Sodom and Gomorrah. My feelings here are quite personal. I have small children of mixed racial backgrounds. Though the infractions are minor, we’ve encountered strange things in regards to the race of my children. Both my wife and I have been disturbed by requests to clarify our children’s racial identity by school authorities. The only way I can explain what’s going on is it’s like being a Jew in 1980’s Northern Ireland and being asked if your children are Protestant or Catholic. We’re not Christian, and race isn’t super important to our identities (unlike some people). Being asked even implicitly is an imposition and we don’t appreciate our children be asked to racialize themselves (I’m being politic, we were enraged).
But the real problem I have is the white affinity groups. I am not happy with the “people of color” affinity groups either, but in some way, these have been around since the 1960’s. The emergence of white affinity groups seems a nod to the re-racialization of society as the explicit text. The fundamental issue is simple: I do not want white people to think about their race. I do not want white people to think of themselves in racial terms. The history of white Americans thinking in racialized terms is not good for people who look like me. These fools are going to get us killed!
Taking activists who are nonwhite at their word rather than self-interest, they believe white examination and embrace of their racial identity will allow for true anti-racism and justice. My rejoinder is simple: you put far too much faith in the innate goodness of these white people. My wife’s grandparents were good people, yes, but I know for a fact they were opposed to integration. They were good people, but of their time. Most people conform and follow the spirit of the times. Don’t tempt fate to think you can tame the snake of racial identity. It’s evil among all races and all people. It is always with us, but it is sin. As a brown-skinned minority in a majority-white country, I do not want white people to think in racial terms.
More concretely I cannot tolerate resegregation in this country. It would separate me from those who I care about most in the world. It would possibly separate my own children from each other. Today their differences of complexion are matters of happenstance. Perhaps in the future, it would be more important? When on Sesame Street a character says “The color of our skin is an important part of who we are” I feel a cold wind blowing. The context is much more innocuous than some have made it out to be, but for some of us, skin color is an accident.
As a quick aside, this is where some white nationalists freak out and declare “see, his mask has slipped, he’s anti-white!” Fools, I’m brown. My opposition to your kind is on my skin. I was always against you, just like I’m against the Critical Race Theory Bolsheviks. I see you two as the same thing. I always have. I’m a brown-skinned man whose ancestors took the alien name Khan and adopted a foreign religion. I have relatives across the world as we scatter. My whole lineage screams cosmopolitan. It has for hundreds of years. This is my nature, constitutive to me. Since the Axial Age there have been symbol-manipulators who transcend nations and bind peoples together ideologically. That is me and my kind.
The way I differ from some of my kind is I do not expect most humans to be like this, nor do I think it is feasible that we should force others to be like us. Human societies need to operate at some sort of equilibrium so that extreme cosmopolitans (like me) and extreme localists can coexist. The liberal democratic compromises of the late 20th century were good. They established an equipoise for a pluralistic society. What is happening now is cultural radicalism is destroying the social capital and trust that liberalism needs to survive and persist. Once the capital is exhausted people will fall back on other identities. Religion is one possibility. But race is another.
And that is why I think complicity with racially segregated groups is horrible and evil. Most people have no deep beliefs. They have shallow conformities. It’s best not to reawaken affinities and identities that have been submerged and sublimated.
Finally, the universities need to account for themselves. The public fisc will face more stress in the near future. Those of us who feel persecuted by the radicalism bred on these campuses need to stop arguing with the new commissars and ask why we’re subsidizing their livelihood. We need change the course of history or it will run us over. This is not a plea. This is a fact.
Modern humans appeared in Europe by at least 45,000 years ago but the extent of their interactions with Neanderthals, who disappeared by about 40,000 years ago, and their relationship to the broader expansion of modern humans outside Africa are poorly understood. Here we present genome-wide data from three individuals dated to between 45,930 and 42,580 years ago from Bacho Kiro Cave, Bulgaria. They are the earliest Late Pleistocene modern humans known to have been recovered in Europe so far, and were found in association with an Initial Upper Palaeolithic artefact assemblage. Unlike two previously studied individuals of similar ages from Romania and Siberia who did not contribute detectably to later populations, these individuals are more closely related to present-day and ancient populations in East Asia and the Americas than to later west Eurasian populations. This indicates that they belonged to a modern human migration into Europe that was not previously known from the genetic record, and provides evidence that there was at least some continuity between the earliest modern humans in Europe and later people in Eurasia. Moreover, we find that all three individuals had Neanderthal ancestors a few generations back in their family history, confirming that the first European modern humans mixed with Neanderthals and suggesting that such mixing could have been common.
There are two primary points of interest:
More evidence of ubiquitous ‘admixture’ between Neanderthals and ‘modern humans’ who may have been in contact with them.
These earliest European modern humans in Southeast Europe seem to be more closely related to (possibly ancestral to?) people in East Asia than modern Europeans.
On the first point, twenty years ago there were some paleoanthropologists who were arguing there was no admixture between Neanderthals and modern humans. That is, no fertile offspring. To not pussyfoot around it, Neanderthals were barely acknowledged as human in the early years of this century by many scholars. This is evident in Richard Klein’s The Dawn of Human Culture, written in 2002. With hindsight much of this is ridiculous. It really didn’t make any sense that the Neanderthal and modern human lineage were not inter-fertile when you dug into the literature on mammalian hybridization. There just wasn’t that much time for them to be totally incompatible.
In 2010 when it was found that Neanderthal ancestry seems to be found in non-Africans, we updated many of our priors. I think it is clear on some level Neanderthal humanization is driven by the fact of Neanderthal admixture. Nevertheless, there was a plausible case this admixture was rare. Perhaps a single Neanderthal tribe was mixed into expanding modern humans? Perhaps a single Neanderthal? These were ideas that were mooted.
With what we know now I’m not sure this is tenable. There are two primary issues. First, there is variation in Neanderthal ancestry among non-African populations which does not seem to be due to African admixture. East Asians have more Neanderthal admixture (~25% more last I checked) than Europeans who have more than West Asians. South Asian Neanderthal admixture is proportional to their distance from East Asians. The less West Eurasian the South Asian, the more Neanderthal.
There are a few ways to understand this. A simple explanation is that there was a secondary admixture event that impacted people migrating to eastern Eurasia. Another hypothesis is that natural selection reduced the Neanderthal fraction over time, but East Eurasians were less impacted by this due to small effective population size. Then, there is the idea that a non-African population, “Basal Eurasians”, that did not have much Neanderthal admixture later mixed into West Asians and Europeans, reducing the original Neanderthal fraction.
Because of the small fractions and the paucity of ancient DNA more than 10,000 years old, there are still arguments around this. These results increase the probability that there were multiple Neanderthal admixture events. At least in my way of thinking.
The authors found that the Neanderthal fraction seems to have decreased from a higher level relatively early on. Rather than a gradual decrease, the authors found suggestions of strong effective selection in the first few generations. Though there is still room for the Basal Eurasian model, I’m not sure it’s quite as necessary now. Along with Oase, and the existence of a Neanderthal-Denisovan hybrid from Denisova cave, the likelihood of frequent admixture between ancient hominin lineages seems pretty high.
I believe the primary issue at this point is that the admixture event seems to be dated to a narrow time period, before the extinction of Neanderthals, but not too ancient (before 60,000 years ago), and the Neanderthal ancestry is quite similar. Perhaps there isn’t the power to detect multiple secondary admixtures at “around the same time.” From the perspective of today, 45,000 v. 50,000 years ago is “around the same time.” But the reality is 5,000 years is a long time.
In simulations, we find that estimates of the mean time of admixture are largely robust to details in gene flow models. In contrast, the duration of the gene flow is much more difficult to recover, except under ideal circumstances where gene flow is recent or the exact recombination rate is known. We conclude that gene flow from Neandertals into modern humans could have happened over hundreds of generations. Ancient genomes from the time around the admixture event are thus likely required to resolve the question when, where, and for how long humans and Neandertals interacted.
The second major finding of this paper is that the very first modern humans to settle in Europe are more genetically close to East Asians than to modern Europeans. This is in contrast to the Oase sample from Romania, just to the north, and a few thousand years later, that was no closer to East or West Eurasians. Or, a new 45,000-year-old sample from Czech Republic, which also shows no connection to any modern people.
If you read the first paper, you know that years ago the GoyetQ116-1 sample from Belgium that dates to 35,000 years before the present, and which seems to have some ancestral connection to the later Magdalenian people of Pleistocene Europe, had an East Eurasian affinity. Additionally, earlier mtDNA work showed eastern affinities in some Pleistocene Europeans. The authors above make the connection between these eastern-affinity early Europeans and the “Initial Upper Paleolithic” (IUP), which seems to have expanded across a broad swath of Eurasian, from Europe all the way to western Mongolia.
The implication then is that some of the ancestry of East Eurasians comes from a migration that took a route through Europe, and around the Black Sea littoral. This is a bit more complicated than a pure “southern route”, but it’s not crazy, and has long been proposed.
I think at this point we need to take a step back, and acknowledge that the period between 40 and 60 thousand years ago is important, but we look through the glass darkly. Something happened, as all the ancient Eurasian hominin lineages were absorbed by the “Out of Africa” population (which may not have been expanding out of Africa!), and the phylogenetic relationships of some of these people do not make sense in light of the phylogeography of the present.
It is entirely feasible to me that the ancient non-African or proto-non-African populations had already started to develop some internal structure. The putative Basal Eurasian v. “the rest” is one key bifurcation, but there may already have been divisions between the western and eastern branches of Eurasians in northeast Africa or the Near East. We just don’t know yet. Basically, ancient substructure that is getting “blown up” with rapid radiation.
I’ve been lax about the open threads because I’m busy. Remember you can see what I’m up to at razib.com. What’s going on? What are you reading? I’m really behind on a lot of things. But, I can say I’ve read Byzantine State and Society three times front to back.
About five years ago researchers discovered that there was some affinity between people in the Amazon and populations in Australasia. This was very strange but robust. After that, an ancient sample from Brazil also showed this affinity.
Different models have been proposed to elucidate the origins of the founding populations of America, along with the number of migratory waves and routes used by these first explorers. Settlements, both along the Pacific coast and on land, have been evidenced in genetic and archeological studies. However, the number of migratory waves and the origin of immigrants are still controversial topics. Here, we show the Australasian genetic signal is present in the Pacific coast region, indicating a more widespread signal distribution within South America and implicating an ancient contact between Pacific and Amazonian dwellers. We demonstrate that the Australasian population contribution was introduced in South America through the Pacific coastal route before the formation of the Amazonian branch, likely in the ancient coastal Pacific/Amazonian population. In addition, we detected a significant amount of interpopulation and intrapopulation variation in this genetic signal in South America. This study elucidates the genetic relationships of different ancestral components in the initial settlement of South America and proposes that the migratory route used by migrants who carried Australasian ancestry led to the absence of this signal in the populations of Central and North America.
The intrapopulation variation makes me suspicious. If it has been tens of thousands of years I would have expected intra-population variation to disappear.
The statistic looks correct. But we still don’t know what that means. The hypothesis presented about a coastal migration seems reasonable enough. But who knows?
The Scythians were a multitude of horse-warrior nomad cultures dwelling in the Eurasian steppe during the first millennium BCE. Because of the lack of first-hand written records, little is known about the origins and relations among the different cultures. To address these questions, we produced genome-wide data for 111 ancient individuals retrieved from 39 archaeological sites from the first millennia BCE and CE across the Central Asian Steppe. We uncovered major admixture events in the Late Bronze Age forming the genetic substratum for two main Iron Age gene-pools emerging around the Altai and the Urals respectively. Their demise was mirrored by new genetic turnovers, linked to the spread of the eastern nomad empires in the first centuries CE. Compared to the high genetic heterogeneity of the past, the homogenization of the present-day Kazakhs gene pool is notable, likely a result of 400 years of strict exogamous social rules.
This follows up on earlier work on Scythians and Sarmatians. The basic finding seems to be that the classical Scythians, an Iranian-speaking nomadic group, had an ethnogenesis in the eastern Kazakh steppe. And, their origins involve the amalgamation of earlier Bronze Age Eurasian pastoralists, probably out of the Indo-Iranian Andronovo horizon societies, with admixture with Bactria-Margiana populations to the south, and East Asian Bronze Age hunter-gatherers and pastoralists, to the east in Mongolia. The Sarmatians, also presumably Iranian-speaking, are somewhat different in that they had less East Asian ancestry, though they too had more Near Eastern ancestry than earlier Indo-Iranian steppe pastoralists.
The whole paper is worth reading. But I think the key thing to note is that Iron Age steppe pastoralists seem to have been much more interconnected with each other and with the world around them than their Bronze Age predecessors. Though there was some gene flow to the steppe from West Asia and elsewhere during the Bronze Age, it was a marginal phenomenon. By the Iron Age, it was ubiquitous. Additionally, there was now structure and connectedness across the steppe.
By the Iron Age the steppe had become an integrated social-political unit.
Basques have historically lived along the Western Pyrenees, in the Franco-Cantabrian region, straddling the current Spanish and French territories. Over the last decades, they have been the focus of intense research due to their singular cultural and biological traits that, with high controversy, placed them as a heterogeneous, isolated, and unique population. Their non-Indo-European language, Euskara, is thought to be a major factor shaping the genetic landscape of the Basques. Yet there is still a lively debate about their history and assumed singularity due to the limitations of previous studies. Here, we analyze genome-wide data of Basque and surrounding groups that do not speak Euskara at a micro-geographical level. A total of ∼629,000 genome-wide variants were analyzed in 1,970 modern and ancient samples, including 190 new individuals from 18 sampling locations in the Basque area. For the first time, local- and wide-scale analyses from genome-wide data have been performed covering the whole Franco-Cantabrian region, combining allele frequency and haplotype-based methods. Our results show a clear differentiation of Basques from the surrounding populations, with the non-Euskara-speaking Franco-Cantabrians located in an intermediate position. Moreover, a sharp genetic heterogeneity within Basques is observed with significant correlation with geography. Finally, the detected Basque differentiation cannot be attributed to an external origin compared to other Iberian and surrounding populations. Instead, we show that such differentiation results from genetic continuity since the Iron Age, characterized by periods of isolation and lack of recent gene flow that might have been reinforced by the language barrier.
The main takeaway seems to be that Basque distinctiveness dates to the Roman period.
One school of thought in regards to the Indo-European languages suggests that they exhibit a “rake-like” phylogeny. That is, they expanded rapidly and simultaneously in all directions. Aside from the connection between Iranian and Indic branches, there’s no obvious connection across the others (satem-centum distinction aside).
The two main branches of R1a1a are found in the Indo-Iranian and Slavic branches of the Indo-European family. The coalescence is ~5800 years ago.
There are some suggestions that Italic and Celtic form a branch. As it happens, Italy, Celtic and ancient Celtic regions of Europe have very high frequencies of R1b.
What about the Tocharians? The Afanesievo people were basically Yamnaya-east. They had a lot of R1b. Today, a small minority of Uyghurs have R1b. Far more have R1a. But, I think it is important to note that the Tarim basin was mostly Iranian in the southern and western regions, and Tocharian in the north and east. The prevalence of R1a may simply be a function of the nature of the sampling.
Bombay Aloo has a variety of ingredients. Central is the potato. Tomato/tomato paste and chili powder are usually important too. These three ingredients are from the New World.Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors outlines the whole story about how so many different ingredients came to Indian subcontinental cuisines, whether it be from Central Asia, the New World, or Europe. If you want Indian food before Columbus, there are some temples that do serve recipes that date back 1,000 years, and so do not have new ingredients.
The foods of the Indian subcontinent are diverse, and all are synthetic. Bengali food, for example, has Mughal and European influences. And, it was shaped and reshaped by the prevalence of cooks and chefs from the nearby province of Odisha in the 19th century. Therefore, “modern Bengali food” is very different from what it was hundreds of years ago. And one hundred years from now it will be very different.
This context is important to understand the discussion about “cultural appropriation” and food. This is not a serious discussion. There are no serious people who take this topic as worthy of addressing. Rather, it’s something that a 24-year-old food writing intern will crank out “think pieces” on. They’re given a quota of “content” to generate, and so they will write thoughtless and uninformed pablum. That will trigger a reaction from the commentariat. Additionally, a small number of people will take the thoughtless piece seriously.
It is notable that I have never heard an Asian immigrant raised in Asia make note of “cultural appropriation” when it comes to food. Rather, it is always the deracinated children of Asian immigrants, or, highly assimilated immigrants who have internalized the folkways of the hegemonic white American woke culture. In other words, ironically, the preoccupation with “cultural appropriation” is a symptom of assimilation and intellectual colonization. Those who are comfortable with their cultural authenticity don’t mind others borrowing “their” culture, and do not reflect deeply when borrowing the culture of “others.”
So if cultural appropriation isn’t really championed by anyone, why do we talk about it incessantly? It may not reside in individuals, but it is in the air around us. It is a parasite in human nature.
Someone who doesn’t care and is ignorant writes thoughtless copy deploying the buzzwords
This is amplified by the “amen” choir of those participating in “woke Olympics”
There is a counter-reaction by the anti-woke
Which drives polarization between the two camps and “discussion”
This seeds the next round of “think pieces” since lazy writers and busy editors know that they will “travel”
For some pieces on my Substack I’ve been re-reading a lot of the stuff on the ancient genetics and archaeology of Eurasia as they relate to Indo-Europeans. This means I get a different view from usual…as it’s more synoptic. I’m not entirely clear on the dates or archaeology, but here is what I’ve concluded: the Indo-European expansions can be partitioned into “waves.” That is, they weren’t a simple “demic diffusion” where disease (against their rivals) and reproductive excess generated a continuous expansion across their range.
So here’s what I get
1 – An “early phase” where Yamna people push west (Kurgan) and become Corded Ware, and east (far) and become Afanasievo. Date this to right before 3,000 BC, but pretty much “completes” in Europe by 2900-2800 BC, as the broad zone of Central and Northeast Europe is dominated by these people (there are still debates on whether Afanasievo became the “Tocharians”; I think they did)
2 – ~2500 BC, 400-500 years after the initial push west, Indo-European populations push beyond their limits on the Rhine, and breakthrough past the mountains ringing the Southern European peninsulas. The dates are often vague in the south, but it looks to be around 2500 to 2000 BC. For example, the Neolithic farmer descended Remedello Culture in northern Italy ends about 2400 BC. The Bell Beaker Indo-Europeans seem to have arrived in Ireland and England at just about this time, perhaps a century after they came to dominate France.
Though there were obviously islands of exception (often quite literally as in Sardinia and Crete), Europe by 2000 BC was Indo-European.
3 – The third wave dates to after 2000 BC, and it is the “Asia reflux.” Populations used the forest-steppe zone as a stepping stone out to the east. Derived from the same synthesis between Yamna and European farmer as Corded Ware, these populations seem ancestral to the Indo-Iranians. Slavic-speaking people (or the ancestors of those people) occupied the western fringe of this expansion zone, and by the Iron Age had begun to move east, marginalizing Indo-Iranians across much of their core European territory.
It seems that Indo-Iranians had pushed into the margins of northeast Iran, Khorasan, by ~2000 BC. In the period between 2000-1500 BC they clearly began to occupy their historical core zones in Iran and India. Obviously, Indo-European Iranians are present in western Iran by 1000 BC in the historical record, though Indo-European Mitanni are present by 1540 BC at the latest in Syria and northern Iraq.
The Iranians also moved into the Tarim basin, so the cities of the west and southern edge were Iranian-speaking (the cities of the north and east were Tocharian).
What explains these pulses? I don’t know totally, but we know a few things:
– There are star phylogenies on the Y chromosomal associated with these migrations. R1b, R1a, and I1. I think the last is due to the assimilation of non-Indo-European men in Europe, but the first two are clearly primal. The Indo-Europeans were clearly very patrilineal.
– The last, Asian, migration clearly has something to do with chariots and horses. The coincidence in timing seems too much. But the earlier migrations were before chariots (I believe). But, the horse does seem to have come with Indo-Europeans, so there was a level of mobility involved.
– The “Bell Beaker” motif seems to have emerged among non-Indo-Europeans in Iberia, and spread to Indo-Europeans, who expanded outward. I think we’re seeing something related to religion.
Unfortunately for I suspect that the Indo-European advantage was “social technology”, not material technology. Social technology is hard to infer in a preliterate society.
Question for readers: Can you nail down the chronology better? Those who know archaeology?
