I’ve been looking at some European genotype data. So I have some samples from Greece. One of the things I noticed is that there seem to be two clusters of Greece. You can see it above. The Italian sample is really a southern Italian one (not Sicilian though). The Balkan sample are Serbs, Bulgarians, and Romanians. You can see that they are shifted toward the Poles. And so are the Greeks, in comparison to the Italians. This is not entirely surprising. What was surprising to me was that there were a number of Greeks who in the same cluster at the Italians.
The historical context for this are the Sclaveni migrations. These were Slavic peoples who pushed south, as far as the Peloponnese, after the Byzantine Empire ceded the Balkans to barbarian groups due to threats in the east from Persians and then Muslims. In fact the demographic basis of the Byzantine Empire between the loss of the Levant and Egypt and the Battle of Manzikert was Anatolia in 1056, though there were fortifications around major cities such as Thessaloniki. After the loss of their Anatolian heartlands to the Seljuks the Empire turned back toward the Balkans, which had been conquered by Basil II in the first decades of the 11th century.
These results, and others, indicate the impact of the Slavic migrations on the Balkans, and Greece proper. But, what they also suggest is that there is population structure within Greece. Why? I can think of two hypotheses. First, some of the islands in the Aegean were never touched by Slavs, and may have maintained endogamy until the modern period. Even if the Slavs never conquered the cities, their impact would be felt by migration from rural areas. But in a pre-modern era barriers such as water and mountains often serve as potent obstacles to continuous gene flow. The second, to me more plausible, scenario is the second cluster without much Slavic genetic impact are those who descend from Anatolian Greeks, who arrived in the early 20th century due to the population exchange with Turkey. These western Anatolian Greeks would have shielded from the Sclaveni migrations obviously.
To tease the relationships apart I decided to run TreeMix 20 times. As per reader suggestion, I won’t give you all the plots. But you can download them. Below is a representative one. The various Jewish groups form their own clade. The affinity of Cypriot Greeks with Anatolians is a function I believe of the fact that they are culturally Hellenized (the ancient Bronze Age polity of Cyprus was part of the orbit of Egypt, and was not Greek), even if that is an ancient occurrence. I separated the Greeks into two cluster, the major one being “Greece” and the minor one clustering with southern Italians as “GreeceItaly.” What is pretty obvious is that GreeceItaly has much less of the Slavic admixture. In this tree the Greeks proper are placed near the Balkan and Polish position on the graph, but with a huge migration arrow from nearly the GreeceItaly position. The Balkan node has a smaller migration parameter. The Greeks tend to flip from being near the Poles to being near the GreekItaly cluster, and swapping the migration arrow direction.
Yesterday I tweeted out an article, Coca-Cola Funds Scientists Who Shift Blame for Obesity Away From Bad Diets. The title, and frankly, the story is a bit slanted. I wasn’t totally comfortable about the piece…but I really hate the soft drink industry. So much of our obesity problem would go away if people stopped drinking the stuff. The funding does not necessarily entail a particular conclusion. Rather, conclusions can lead to funding. But, we’ve all seen the research which suggests that pharmaceutical companies do trials which have suspiciously high success rates. And scientists are human beings,and it seems that even unconsciously biases can slip in. We need to balance the tensions and not get carried away by an extreme perspective about the nature of human motivations. Scholars are no saints.
But the ultimate focus should be on the science. That’s really what’s at the heart of the matter. My friend Kevin Klatt, who studies nutrition at Cornell, outlines his own concerns at length about The New York Times piece, Funding: Tales of Defamation:
Until the industry funded research argument is balanced by an equally loud message that non-industry funding is highly limited, those shouting the loudest do little to address their own issue. This notion that researchers seeking industry money are doing conflicted research does little but subtly suggest that academic researchers find a new job or risk having their reputations threatened due to their funding source (no, I’m not being dramatic – go look at article’s written about Susan Jebb). Keeping up with the academia lifestyle is busy enough without a bunch of people who aren’t in your field telling you how you should fund yourself. If you get the time, I’d also urge you to consider educating individuals’ to encourage NIH to fund nutrition research that has been established as a priority by organizations like ASN. As evidenced by the seemingly consistent stream of low-fat vs low-carb studies in the literature, NIH doesn’t seem to be paying attention to these.
What’s a scientist to do? This is a fallen world, and we are of it. Obviously there are cases where the conflict of interest is extreme. But often funding from private sources is what researchers have to do to keep their work afloat. If money was what scientists were after…they would actually go work for their funders.
Second, I want to point you to what’s going on with Kevin Folta. He’s a passionate researcher at University of Florida who works on GMOs. You know where this is going. The Radical Activist Attack on a Teacher:
When asked about my speaker fees I always just say, “Take what you think would be customary and donate it to my outreach program.” We’re talking thousands of dollars here.
In Fall of 2014 the Monsanto company offered support for the program, and I thought that was great. Love ’em or hate ’em, my workshops were teaching everyone from kids to scientists, so I was glad to welcome their support.
It never was a secret. At universities, our records are public, and people know where our funding is from. You can probably find it online if you look hard enough, but just ask and I’m glad to tell you about who sponsors my research or who sponsors my outreach.
Last week the public information voluntarily hit the right activist ear, and they went ballistic. Screams of “Shill!” could be heard everywhere from drum circles, to hackeysack games, to the Whole Foods Gluten Free Bisque Repository. After all, $25K is a lot of money, so to most people this was the smoking gun of high collusion they always suspected. Heck, anyone that talks about science must be getting paid off.
Kevin’s been put on blast by activists. It’s Mon$santo all the time. He’ll persevere, because he didn’t do anything wrong and untoward. But now those who are not heavily engaged on the topic are going to have to discern whether Monstanto is poisoning our crops and buying our scientists.
I guess it shows that sometimes the substance of science matters less than style. No one really knows anything about nutrition. I exaggerate for effect, but you know of what I speak. In contrast, we know a fair amount about GMO. But in both cases there are passionate public debates, and egos being bruised and reputations shredded.
As you can see from the Tweet above some people are trying to score political points about off Sundar Pichai being tapped to lead Google. I joked in response that these CEOs “sure don’t look like America.” Excessive focus on whom/whom issues inevitably gets knotty and difficult to navigate. I don’t personally care who makes good products as long as the products are good. But reading a Time magazine piece, Everything You Need to Know About the New CEO of Google, made me reconsider an assumption I’d had. The article ends: “He’ll join Microsoft chief Satya Nadella as one of the few minority CEOs in Silicon Valley.” This is a pretty strong assertion. My impression is that at large firms like Apple the management does tend to be white males, while the engineering talent is Asian or Asian American to a much higher degree. But I’d never bothered to check.
If you go to the Wikipedia entry for “Silicon Valley” it has an entry for notable companies. In particular, I looked at the ones which were “Fortune 1000.” Some are very well known. Google, Yahoo, and Apple, for example. Others are lower key, but not obscure. Juniper Networks is probably one of those. Then there’s Xilinx and Maxim Integrated Products, which occupy opposite poles of distinctiveness and lack thereof of corporate names, despite being obscure to the general public. I don’t recall hearing of them before I saw them on the list.
It’s not that hard to look up CEOs, and that’s what I did. The results are below.
To my surprise there’s actually a fair number of minorities as CEOs at large firms with a a presence in Silicon Valley. This went against my expectation. 5 out of 32 CEOs in “Fortune 1000” Silicon Valley firms were of Indian ethnicity. That’s ~16%. As ~1% of the American population is Indian American, that means they are more than an order of magnitude over-represented among CEOs. 21 out of the 32 CEOs were white, 23 if you include the two Middle Eastern men (if they had Southern European names they would definitely be categorized as white). So whites are actually barely over-represented among these CEOs in comparison to the general American population (~63% for non-Hispanic whites). Of course I don’t deny that in comparison to their representation in professional ranks at these types of firms people of Asian origin do seem under-represented in management overall. But, I’d challenge the null hypothesis that society can or should aim for perfect proportionality in all facets of life, and deviations are only due to invidious discrimination, implicit or explicit (there’s very little explicit discrimination, but there is some implicit discrimination when people use words like “corporate culture”). We don’t know all the various factors which result in these sorts of statistics, and Silicon Valley is too important to American productivity to tinker with too much.
I was having a discussion on Twitter with Jessica Chong about the nature of Chinese genetic variation. There’s been a fair amount of work on it. But, I have the 1000 Genomes data, in addition to others, and wanted to place them in their proper context myself. First, I did a preliminary PCA, and it was clear that the 1000 Genomes Northern Chinese (CHB) had a lot of Southern Chinese, and the Southern Chinese (CHS) were two distinct clusters (CHB was collected at a university). Looking up the provenance of these samples, it turns out that CHS were collected in Hunan and Fujian. So from these probably corresponded to two clusters I found in the data.
In History and Geography of Human Genes L. L. Cavalli-Sforza reported that Southern Chinese formed a clade with Southeast Asians, while Northern Chinese formed one with Northeast Chinese. Genome-wide results don’t seem to support this inference. The Han do exhibit north-south structure. But, they’re not that diverse for more than one billion individuals (Fst lower than Intra-European). As observed in whole genome sequence analyses the Han Chinese have undergone massive demographic expansion over the past 5,000 years.
I decided to run TreeMix to explore this issue further. I was prompted by the observation that North and South Chinese often show gene flow from northern and southern East Asian ethnic groups. I pushed the data set’s number of migrations to 10. This is high, I wouldn’t normally do this, but I wanted to see if there was any consistent gene flow to Han Chinese, even if it wasn’t one of the marrow edges. The results are below in the plots.
This what I can say:
1) The North Chinese have a faint migration edge from nonspecific northern Asians. Probably this is a composite signal of the past few thousand years. Or, they’re an old signal of the absorption of groups from antiquity such as the Rong and Di.
2) The Southern Chinese do have closer affinities to southeast Asian groups and ethnic minorities in the south. The group I labeled “South_China2” is more Southeast Asian in affinity than “South_China.” These are probably Hunanesse and Fuijianese respectively. I drew these conclusions from the fact that the “South_China” group is often near a node close to the She minority, which is present in Fuijian. In contrast, the “South_China2” cluster is often near the Tuija group, which is present in Hunan.
3) Though the North and South Chinese groups are placed on different branches of the graph in these trees note the strong migration edge, especially into the Fuijian cluster. They’re genetically not that far apart. Observe that on the PCA the southern groups seem between Southeast Asians proper, and Northern Chinese.
4) The Yakut are donors to lots of groups in North China. I’m pretty sure that this is a signal of the Turkic expansions, which the Yakut have affinities too because they’re Turkic.
5) Many of the native ethnic groups of China proper don’t seem to be that different than Han Chinese. In fact, they resemble Han in their own region. This might be gene flow, or, it might just be that the Han for whatever reason were the demographic winners over the last 4,000 years in China proper and marginalized the other groups.
Not much to say. Just a minor note to reiterate: if you are going to leave a long comment I am liable to just not post it if I have no idea what you are saying. If it’s short I might let it go, though I prefer you not be cryptic if you don’t have to be.
I got this email last week from a reader, and wonder what people think:
Dear Razib:
I am 19 years old and I am a freshman in college. I am not sure which direction I should go in terms of track/major. Whatever I do, I want to play to my strengths.
My strengths:
High verbal IQ (top 4%) -Higher scores on Reading (31) and English (30) than science (26) and math (28). I tend to do well in school regardless of class(3.9)
My Weaknesses: -Low average performance IQ (90) -Chronic Illnesses (Crohns and Bipolar)
What would be the ideal path that would make me the most money while utilizing my strengths?
I told him I have a hard time believing the score of 90 given his other results (they’re ACT). But there are I suppose people with wildly uncorrelated cognitive skill sets.
One of the more interesting things about reading a book like The Making of Modern Japan, which is a relatively deep dive into the political and social history of Japan from 1600 on, is that it gives you an interesting window onto your own country. For example, I know from American history that there was a period of Southern dominance from the early 1800s down to the decades before the Civil War, followed by marginalization of the South in national politics. I had not known that for 50 years after the Meiji Restoration Japanese politics was dominated by a group of men who emerged from the Choshu and Satsuma domains, which were at the far west of Honshu and in southwest Kyushu respectively. These men were arguably the founders of modern Japan, and they were geographically and socially (i.e., they came from the samurai class by and large) very narrow in their origins. I had assumed that Japanese history, and the loci of power, had shifted gradually east in a unidirectional sense, from Kansai to the Kanto plain and what became Tokyo (Edo).
A fair amount of DNA evidence seems to suggest that the Ainu and Jomon are connected and that some of the ancestry of modern Japanese descend from the Jomon. Additionally, the Yayoi were probably rice farmers from Korea. I have some Korean data, so I ran TreeMix a bunch of times. As you can see usually the Japanese and Koreans are rather close. Japan is placed closer to the Yakut though. This makes sense if the Jomon were Siberian.
In May there was a publication that confirmed using Bayesian methods that the Japanese are a dual origin population. Instead of simple inspection and confirmation of a particular pattern, they tested an explicit set of models; replacement of Jomon by Yayoi, Jomon to Yayoi continuity, and Yayoi absorption of the Jomon. They found that the hybridization model was 29 to 63 times more likely than the replacement and continuity models. It’s great precision on what we already knew. And, if you look at their dates, the Yayoi begin to admix with the Jomon thousands of years before they show up in Japan archaeologically! They have some clever ways around this, but it seems that they’re trying to square a circle.
Kalash women in traditional clothingAyub Khan with a German general
If you read Nell Irvin Painter’s The History of White People you will learn that the white race is a social construction of relatively recent vintage. When I read her work in 2011 I was a touch annoyed by it, because a lot of interesting empirical data was shoehorned into her thesis and preferences. In relation to her putative topic, she wasn’t a big fan (I don’t doubt that Painter likes white people as humans, but she obviously thinks that the invention of the white race was not a good thing). I have serious reservations and objections to these sorts of Manichaean frameworks. And yet over the last few years I have come to a very different but new perspective: I believe white people emerged biologically only in the past 5,000 years, on the edge of history and prehistory. I think a plain reading of the race concept in biology is entirely defensible so long as you integrate population thinking. But, human races are not primordial. They aren’t even Pleistocene.
This brings us to the Kalash of Pakistan. They are pagans who live in the fastness of the Chitral. Their cousins on the other side of the border, in Afghanistan, are the Nuristanis, who were foricbly converted to Islam in the last decade of the 19th century. The Man Who Would be King takes place among the Nuristanis, who were then termed Kafirs. It was written in 1888, before the conversion to Islam. The Kalash were in British India, so spared from conversion. It seems unlikely that they will persist beyond this generation due to the social-political milieu of modern Pakistan, where religious toleration only exists for economic elites who can withdraw into their own private world. It was this context which drove Gerard Russsell to include the Kalash in his book Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys Into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East. The Kalash are not Middle Eastern, and are very different from various heterodox groups of the Middle East (who often have connections to the astral religion of Late Antiquity), but there is an urgency in recording their culture before it disappears.
Another major salient aspect of the Kalash is that they are mostly white. That is, if you took a Kalash man and dressed him in jeans and a baseball cape wouldn’t think twice if you saw him in a country music video. Let me quote from Man Who Would be King:
“‘In another six months,’ says Dravot, ‘we’ll hold another Communication and see how you are working.’ Then he asks them about their villages, and learns that they was fighting one against the other and were fair sick and tired of it. And when they wasn’t doing that they was fighting with the Mohammedans. ‘You can fight those when they come into our country,’ says Dravot. ‘Tell off every tenth man of your tribes for a Frontier guard, and send two hundred at a time to this valley to be drilled. Nobody is going to be shot or speared any more so long as he does well, and I know that you won’t cheat me because you’re white people — sons of Alexander — and not like common, black Mohammedans. You are my people and by God,’ says he, running off into English at the end — ‘I’ll make a damned fine Nation of you, or I’ll die in the making!’
And later:
… Dravot gives out that him and me were gods and sons of Alexander, and Past Grand-Masters in the Craft, and was come to make Kafiristan a country where every man should eat in peace and drink in quiet, and specially obey us. Then the Chiefs come round to shake hands, and they was so hairy and white and fair it was just shaking hands with old friends. We gave them names according as they was like men we had known in India — Billy Fish, Holly Dilworth, Pikky Kergan that was Bazar-master when I was at Mhow, and so on, and so on.
The genetics on the pigmentation loci make it clear why the Kalash are so fair. They are fixed at SLC24A5 for the derived variant. In fact their pigmentation genes are rather similar in allele frequency distribution to Sardinians (check SLC45A2 and OCA2/HERC2). In a European context the Kalash are not notably fair skinned, but a substantial number can clearly pass as white without difficulty because for all practical purposes they are white physically. The observations of Kipling’s narrator in Man Who Would be King holds true today, white Western journalists who need to pretend to be native in Afghanistan take on a Nuristani identity. Even if most Nuristanis and Kalash are not blue eyed and blonde haired, enough are that it is not totally implausible that a fair Northern European could pass as one of them.
Though the Nuristanis and Kalash are at one end of the distribution in South Asia, they’re not total aberrations. Many Pathans, for example, basically look white. Above I posted the photo of Ayub Khan, military dictator of Pakistan in the 1960s. He was an ethnic Pathan. Khan loomed large in my father’s recollection of this period. When he arrived in Pakistan to complete his master’s degree he was surprised that most people were not white like Ayub Khan!
Which brings me to the question, if a subset of people on the Northwest fringes of the Indian subcontinent are physically white, are they then related to the peoples of Europe to an inordinate level? In the 19th century the presumption was they were, insofar as these were “Lost White Races,” with some theorists positing connections between high caste Indians and Europeans as Aryans. These sorts of mental frameworks are not particularly unique to Europeans. I’m mostly finished with The Making of Modern Japan, and the Japanese immediately made an analogy in appearance between the Europeans entering their waters and the Ainu people to their North. And then there is the legend of Alexander. In particular, that the Kalash are descended from the Macedonians and Greeks who marched with Alexander. That in truth they are a lost European tribe. I get questions about this pretty much every three to four months. I always answer in the negative. There is no strong evidence of a specific connection. I’ve even made it into the Wikipedia entry for the Kalash:
Discover Magazine genetics blogger Razib Khan has repeatedly cited information indicating that the Kalash are an Indo-Iranian people with no Macedonian ethnic admixture.[47][48][49] A study by Hellenthal et al. (2014) on the DNA of the Kalash peopl evidence of input from Europe or the Middle East (the researchers could not pin down a precise geographic location) between 990 and 210 BC, a period that overlaps with that of Alexander the Great.[50][51]
The paper cited to offer up an opening to the possibility of Kalash connections to the Macedonians comes up frequently. It’s known to me, and though the group associated with it is top notch, and the results are certainly impressive, their interpretations are not bullet proof (and the authors are reasonably tentative). I went back and re-read the Hellenthal et al. paper, and checked out their awesome website where you can repeat their analyses. The screenshot to the left shows the Kalash admixture event. They have Greeks and Bulgarians in their data, but the gene flow is from Northern Europe.
Enough talk though. I have data, and will do some more analyses myself. The preliminaries. I took the Reich lab Haak et al. data set (it’s a subset of this), and yanked out a bunch of populations. Additionally, I took the four Yamnaya samples with the best quality genotypes, and created a data set where all their genotypes are included and those that they are missing are excluded (the –mind option in Plink). What I’m saying here is that the variation in the data set is skewed toward the good SNP calls in the ancient Yamnaya samples. After some more quality control I got down to 85,000 SNPs.
Lipson, Mark, et al. “Reconstructing Austronesian population history in Island Southeast Asia.” Nature communications 5 (2014).
There was a question below about the relationship of the Cambodians to the Vietnamese. Both these groups speak Austro-Asiatic languages. As can be inferred from the figure to the left, these languages are predominant in Indo-China. In particular, Cambodian and Vietnamese are both Austro-Asiatic. Traditionally, as noted in the comments, Cambodian is classed with the Mon language of Burma, under Mon-Khmer (as is faintly evident on the map Mon languages seem to have been spoken in what is today central Thailand before their replacement by Thai). There are also Austro-Asiatic languages on the fringes of southern China, though again the map is very illuminating, as the pattern of fragmentation is often indicative of marginalization and language replacement. Finally, there are Austro-Asiatic languages spoken in India, and among the indigenous people of central Malaysia, who are often termed Negritos (as well as the Nicobarese). As I have explored in depth elsewhere, there is now strong suggestive evidence from the genetics that the Austro-Asiatic languages are intrusive to South Asia from Southeast Asia. As the Negritos of the Phillipines also speak the language of nearby Austronesian agriculturalists, as do the Pygmy of the Congo, it seems likely that Malaysian Negritos received their language from agriculturalists.
Peter Bellowood fleshes out most of the details in First Farmers of how agricultural came to Southeast Asia (highly recommended, though it’s a little out of date now in some areas). At an archaeological site in northern Vietnam Bellwood describes burial grounds dating to 4,000 years in the past where two distinct groups are evident in the remains. One set of skeletons resembles modern East Asians morphologically, while the other element exhibits broad similarities to Near Oceanian peoples. He terms these “Austro-Melanesians.” Frankly, I think this is a confusing term. Though it seems likely that these groups are part of the broader range of populations which gave rise to modern Southeast Asian Negritos, like Papuans and Australian Aborigines they were in no way diminutive. So terming them “Proto-Negrito” would seem misleading. Therefore, I will term then “Ancestral Southeast Asians,” or ASA. The genetics points to the likelihood that as substantial minority of the ancestry of modern Southeast Asians derives from the ASA, in various quanta.
The best paper I know of in relation to the genetic history of Southeast Asia, maritime and mainland, is Reconstructing Austronesian population history in Island Southeast Asia. They used the PanAsian data set, which is somewhat thin on SNPs (<100,000), and also spotty in population coverage. The figure above shows one of the primary results. It seems that agriculture came to Southeast Asia in two major waves. First, with Austro-Asiatic peoples. And later, with Austronesians. The latter seem to have settled maritime Southeast Asia, where archaeological evidence of agriculture is thin to nonexistent before they arrived. But, as you can see from the figure many maritime Southeast Asian peoples also have signatures of Austro-Asiatic ancestry. The likely case then is that they picked this up en route, though there may also have been indigenous people in the islands when they arrived. But curiously, not in the east. There a Melanesian ancestral component is present, which has affinities to that contributed to modern Filipino ancestry from Negritos. The 2011 paper which posits two distinct elements before agriculture between mainland Southeast Asia and Papua would make sense of this pattern. The division probably followed Huxley’s Wallace Line.
As I said above, the PanAsian data set is spotty on population coverage. There are lots of obscure tribes, but not so much when it comes to the numerous people of mainland Southeast Asia. I have some data to probe these questions. Unfortunately not all of it is public, so I can’t release it (though some of it is from the 1000 Genomes, Estonian Biocentre, and HGDP, so you can find much of it it elsewhere).
The data set has 150,000 SNPs, with ~0 missingness (I just removed anything that had missing calls). I labeled samples from countries without ethnic provenance by those nation names. Additionally, I already did some preliminary outlier removal (e.g., removing Filipinos with non-trivial European ancestry, etc.).
Let me give you plots of PC 1 to 4 below. Click to enlarge.
The first plot shows Indians and Papuans away from a cluster of Southeast and Northeast Asians. There are a lot of Southern Chinese from the 1000 Genomes, as well as Koreans. The Burmese are the first out toward Indians. The cluster that pushing itself toward Papuans are Filipinos. This makes sense in light of what we know bout Philippine Negritos. They are probably not descended from ASA, but rather a sister population, highly diverged, and with greater affinities to the peoples of Near Oceania. While the first plot shows PCs which separate both Southeast and Northeast Asians from Indians an Papuans, the second plot separates Southeast Asians among themselves. The north to south axis seems to align with a cline of Austro-Asiatics. The axis east to west runs toward Austronesians. Intriguingly there are three Indonesian samples which span the two axes, exactly in lines with the results of the paper above. Vietnamese and Dai are pulled more toward the Cambodians. Toward the top of the plot are Koreans, while the very dense cluster includes Southern Chinese, as well as assorted Southern Chinese ethnic minorities. There’s a few Malaysian samples in there. Unlike the Indonesians they are drawn much closer to the Southern Chinese cluster, but not quite in it. These may be Baba Chinese. I was surprised there weren’t more Overseas Chinese in these data. But there were some. It’s interesting that the Indians are close to the Chinese cluster, rather far from the Cambodians. I think that the Cambodian cline is probably indicative of ASA ancestry fraction.
I’ve been traveling a lot this summer. So I’ve had to have a “go-to” hot sauce that I can have on my person. A lot of restaurants have the standard trio of Sriracha, Tabasco, and Tapatio (and like free wi-fi, the higher end restaurants are the least stocked with the sauce). They’re serviceable, but they are to hot sauce what Wendy’s, McDonald’s, and Burger King, are to hamburgers. So often I try and make it to a market with a large Mexican food section and see if there’s anything that is palatable. The worst situations you encounter are when you go into a Food Co-op, because some of the buyers seem to think that carrot juice with a tincture of paprika will suffice as long as it is organic and locally sourced. Well, I settled on El Yucateco Green Habanero Hot Sauce for this trip. I’ve had it before, and it’s not the most distinctive in flavor, but I’d give it a straight B. It has a kick, it doesn’t have conflicting tastes, and the aftertaste doesn’t linger excessively.
So as you might know, I like my hot sauce. I’m the Ronda Rousey of hot sauce consumption. If you think you can handle it, bring it. I’ll be at ASHG 2015 in Baltimore in a few months. I threw down the gauntlet. I’m game if anyone who wants to challenge me in downing sauce or pepper, with the proviso that they can’t be double null on TRPV1. The “puny human” David Mittleman rashly took up my challenge. We’ll see if he’s all talk.
Study participants were enrolled between 2004 and 2008 in a large Chinese health study, and researchers followed them for an average of more than seven years, recording 20,224 deaths. The study is in BMJ.
After controlling for family medical history, age, education, diabetes, smoking and many other variables, the researchers found that compared with eating hot food, mainly chili peppers, less than once a week, having it once or twice a week resulted in a 10 percent reduced overall risk for death. Consuming spicy food six to seven times a week reduced the risk by 14 percent.
This is a Chinese study. The sample sizes are large. I went to the original paper. It’s ungated, read it, Consumption of spicy foods and total and cause specific mortality: population based cohort study. I wanted to check out how robust this result was. Well, look at the figure at the top of this post. I wouldn’t say it’s a slam-dunk. The effect is weak in some subgroups, and goes away for those who drink. But the general trend is clear. There does seem to be a negative correlation between mortality and higher spice consumption across many subpopulations. They claim to have controlled for a lot of demographic variables, and I sort of trust them. But it’s really nice to see this sort of figure that lays it all out.
I’m not sure that they really smoked out all the correlations. After all, those who like the taste of spice could simply be superior human beings. How can you control for that confound? But in any case, I did stumble on this interesting related paper, Mice That Feel Less Pain Live Longer:
To investigate further, researchers from the University of California (UC), Berkeley, bred mice without a pain receptor called TRPV1. Found in the skin, nerves, and joints, it’s known to be activated by the spicy compound found in chili peppers, known as capsaicin. (When you feel like your mouth is burning after eating a jalapeño, that’s TRPV1 at work.) Surprisingly, the mice without TRPV1 lived on average 14% longer than their normal counterparts, the team reports today in Cell. (Meanwhile, calorie restriction—another popular way of lengthening mouse lifespans—can make them live up to 40% longer.) When the TRPV1-less mice got old, they still showed signs of fast, youthful metabolisms. Their bodies continued to quickly clear sugar from the blood—a trait called glucose tolerance that usually declines with age—and they burned more calories during exercise than regular elderly mice.
…Already, diets rich in capsaicin have been linked to lower incidences of diabetes and metabolic problems in humans, he notes. So might spicy foods be a way of extending life? Maybe, Dillin says, but you’d have to eat a lot of them over a long period of time. “Prolonged exposure to capsaicin can actually kill the neuron” that transmits signals from TRPV1, he explains. Knocking out those signals might mimic the effects of being born without TRPV1 in the first place and, therefore, could lead to a longer life.
Yes, a friend of mine with a neuroscience background told me he suspected that I’ve knocked out all the neurons that handle signals from TRPV1. The 14% mortality reduction is interesting, because it’s in the same range as the human study above. But, you aren’t going to live 40% longer if you engage in calorie restriction. There’s only so much you can extrapolate from mice.
People have been worried and curious about my spice consumption for years. When people ask if there’s a reason I put this stuff in my mouth my response is straightforward: it tastes good.
When I was a kid shrimp was my favorite food. I’m Bengali at least to that extent. Today shrimp is still my favorite food (and I can report that the preference is heritable). But, shrimp is high in cholesterol. When I was growing up people were scared of cholesterol and fat. Doctors advised my mom to reduce our shrimp intake. It really made me sad, and I’m not a particularly food obsessed person. Give me shrimp, hot sauce, and some fruit, and I’m good.
Results: Forty studies (17 cohorts in 19 publications with 361,923 subjects and 19 trials in 21 publications with 632 subjects) published between 1979 and 2013 were eligible for review. Dietary cholesterol was not statistically significantly associated with any coronary artery disease (4 cohorts; no summary RR), ischemic stroke (4 cohorts; summary RR: 1.13; 95% CI: 0.99, 1.28), or hemorrhagic stroke (3 cohorts; summary RR: 1.09; 95% CI: 0.79, 1.50). Dietary cholesterol statistically significantly increased both serum total cholesterol (17 trials; net change: 11.2 mg/dL; 95% CI: 6.4, 15.9) and low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol (14 trials; net change: 6.7 mg/dL; 95% CI: 1.7, 11.7). Increases in LDL cholesterol were no longer statistically significant when intervention doses exceeded 900 mg/d. Dietary cholesterol also statistically significantly increased serum high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (13 trials; net change: 3.2 mg/dL; 95% CI: 0.9, 9.7) and the LDL to high-density lipoprotein ratio (5 trials; net change: 0.2; 95% CI: 0.0, 0.3). Dietary cholesterol did not statistically significantly change serum triglycerides or very-low-density lipoprotein concentrations.
Nutritional science in general doesn’t kill directly. Perhaps some people have type II diabetes because of the fat fear years when they gorged on Snackwells. But the biggest impact is that overreaction, and to a great extent craven behavior in the face of politicians looking for The Answer, results in reduced quality of life for tens millions. That matters. You sure as hell are going to get more skepticism from me about how something that I put in my mouth is good or bad from me now.
Do I hope that eating a lot of spice is healthy for me? Yes. Do I believe that this is a true result that will hold over time? Hell if I know. I’m just going to continue eating tasty food. End of story.
Angkor Wat is an icon of architecture. Arguably one can speak of it in the same breath as the pyramids of Giza or the Taj Mahal. Angkor Wat is a concrete manifestation of the apogee of Khmer civilization, which extended to the Chao Praya to the west, and the estuary of the Mekong to the east, at its height. As is evidenced by the fact that it began its life as a Hindu temple complex, Indian influences bled deeply into the high culture of much of mainland Southeast Asia during the centuries before 1000 A.D.. The king who initiated the building of Angkor Wat had the throne name Suryavarman. Its South Asian cadence is pretty unmistakable.
Today mainland Southeast Asia to the west of Vietnam is dominated by Theravada Buddhism, not Hinduism. But the Indian tincture persists. Theravada Buddhism is the dominant religion outside of Southeast Asia in only nation, Sri Lanka, in South Asia. Additionally, Southeast Asia harbors the world’s only native Hindu ethnic groups outside of the Indian subcontinent. Famously the Balinese of Indonesia, and less well known, the Hindu Cham of Vietnam, as well as various Javanese communities such as the Tenggerese (there are animist groups which are aligning with Hinduism in Indonesia, but that’s a recent phenomenon). The kings of Thailand strongly support the Theravada Buddhist religion, but their courts also sponsor the services of Hindu Brahmins. And the native scripts of Southeast Asia tend to have to South Indian origins.
This world of “Greater India” shattered in the centuries between 1000 and 1500 A.D. The rise of Islam along the Straits of Malacca in the century or so after 1000, and the eventual spread of the religion until it broke through to the interior of Java in the 16th century, is well known. But nearly contemporaneous with the rise of Islam in maritime Southeast Asia mainland Southeast Asia was subject to a massive migration of Tai warbands. Anyone curious about the whole story is recommended to read Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in a Global Context, c. 800-1830. The author works through the slow process of nation-state formation in the 2,000 years between prehistory and modernity. The varied indigenous polities dealt with the challenge ways. In the west the Tai established a foothold, but could not overwhelm the Burman or Mon societies and political institutions. The Shan states were born. In the east, in Vietnam, the Tai were repelled or assimilated in totality. In fact, the Vietnamese absorbed Champa on the central coast, and began their long push toward the Mekong delta, expanding Sinic civilization at the expense of Indic (the Vietnamese emulated the Chinese model, and their popular religious cults were based on Mahayana Buddhism). In the center the Tai were victorious in near totality. Modern day Thailand, like modern day France, takes the name of its conquerors. And like the Franks the Thai absorbed most of their high culture from the Khmer and Mon whom they defeated. Unlike the Vietnamese, the Thai did not emulate Sinic forms of governance or promulgate Confucian ideology. Rather, the Tai warriors took on the mantles of the Khmer kings, and became sacral kings in an Indian sense, just as the long-haired Merovingians became bathed in Romanitas with their conversion to Catholic Chrisitanity. Though unlike the Franks, and like the Anglo-Saxons, the militarized bands maintained their linguistic identity, until their language superseded the Mon and Khmer dialects previous dominant. Modern day Cambodia only exists in large part because European colonialism sheltered it from total absorption into the Siamese Empire, which was digesting it in pieces when the French absorbed the Khmer monarchy.
These results, and others, indicate the impact of the Slavic migrations on the Balkans, and Greece proper. But, what they also suggest is that there is population structure within Greece. Why? I can think of two hypotheses. First, some of the islands in the Aegean were never touched by Slavs, and may have maintained endogamy until the modern period. Even if the Slavs never conquered the cities, their impact would be felt by migration from rural areas. But in a pre-modern era barriers such as water and mountains often serve as potent obstacles to continuous gene flow. The second, to me more plausible, scenario is the second cluster without much Slavic genetic impact are those who descend from Anatolian Greeks, who arrived in the early 20th century due to the population exchange with Turkey. These western Anatolian Greeks would have shielded from the Sclaveni migrations obviously. 
There was a question below about the relationship of the Cambodians to the Vietnamese. Both these groups speak 
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