Warren Treadgold’s The University We Need: Reforming American Higher Education is going to come out in early July, but I’ve written my review. Don’t know when NRO will post it. In general, I’m positive. Though Treadgold has some ideological issues with Leftism in the academy, much of the book is apolitical and shines the light structural problems with contemporary academia.
Bernard Lewis has died. He gets a lot of bad press from people like Edward Said of Orientalism fame, and over the last 20 years has become inextricably connected to neoconservatives who cheered on our nation’s foreign adventures. But a lot of his work is pretty interesting, especially the earlier stuff. I like The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years.
That being said there is a lot of specific detail that’s of interest. For example, the proportion of households with telephones during the Great Depression dropped, but those with radios kept increasing as a fraction of the American populace. The reason is that telephones were rented and required recurrent payments, which many families could no longer afford, while radios were purchased once, after which usage was free.
I don’t know much about Jordan Peterson. Curiously the people who talk to me about him the most are moderate liberals who are annoyed about the demonization of him by the further Left. I don’t have much to say, except it’s shocking how many patrons he has, and, the Left-media attacks on him probably are making him more popular.
The Act, which if not challenged in court and struck down as unconstitutional, will require South Carolina’s public institutions of higher education to “take into consideration the [State Department’s] definition of anti-Semitism for purposes of determining whether the alleged practice was motivated by anti-Semitic intent” when “investigating, or deciding whether there has been a violation of a college or university policy prohibiting discriminatory practices on the basis of religion.”
Heavy-handed suppression of anti-Semitism on campus is going to lead to more, not less, anti-Semitism. You know why.
The plot at the top is from a Peter Turchin post, History Is Now a Quantitative Science. Peter has been on this for more than ten years now. I’ve long been broadly sympathetic, but of late it’s been nice to see his formal and data-intensive approach take hold and make some waves. Using raw data from a PNAS paper on the concentration of lead in Greenland ice caps one can illustrate the theory of secular cycles, as the western edge of the oikoumene went through periods of rise and fall. I don’t say specifically Rome because as Peter observes the first rise probably had more to do with Carthage than Rome, and the last recovery was particular mild probably because its focus was on the eastern Mediterranean, rather than the west.
As readers of this weblog know this lead data is not entirely new. I remember stumbling on it in The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization. It’s just more fine-grained and detailed than what came before. This sort of result definitively convinced me in a flash that the “fall of Rome” was neither fiction nor propaganda, but a true material event.
And yet the materiality is important. Like Song China, the Augustan and Antonine periods were characterized by a phase of intensive coordinated economic activity and productive output that one can’t deny. It’s right there in the material record. But from the perspective of a Christian or a Muslim, the collapse of the power of the Roman state coincided with the rise to power of the most important development in human history: the cultural dominance of singular religious visions.
The point being that when we say that “Rome fell,” it hides within it assumptions of value and importance. History is not fiction and can be understood in all its reality, but it is always critical to expose your assumptions and gain an understanding of the common ground shared between individuals whose viewpoints may differ.
The figure to the left is from The genetic prehistory of the Greater Caucasus. If you are a regular reader of this weblog, or Eurogenes, you can figure out what’s going on, and keep track of the terminology. But in 2018 I think we’re getting to the end of the line in making sense of “admixture graphs” in relation to West Eurasian population structure. The models are just getting too complicated to keep everything straight, and the distinct-populations-subject-to-pulse-admixture seems to be an assumption that may not necessarily hold.
To get a sense of what I’m talking about, the above preprint focuses on populations in and around the Caucasus region. One of the major reasons that this is important is that the Caucasus was and is to some extent a continental hinge, connecting Eastern Europe and the Pontic steppe, to the Near East. The Arab Muslims pushed north of the Caucasus, and came into conflict with the Khazars, while Cimmerians and Scythians moved south from the Pontic steppe.
The elephant in the room is the relevance to the “Indo-European controversy.” Colin Renfrew long ago posited that the Indo-European languages derive from West Asian farmers who expanded into Europe as early as ~9,000 years ago. A rival theory is that Indo-Europeans spread out of the Pontic steppe ~4,000 years ago. In 2015 twomajor papers suggested that the steppe was a major source of Indo-European expansion. Case closed? This preprint suggests perhaps not.
But we’ll get to that later. What do the results here show? The prose is a little hard to tease apart, but the major issues seem to be that in antiquity, or at least the period they’re focusing on, much of the gene flow seems to have been south (Near East) to the north (through the Caucasus, and out to the north slope). To some extent, we already knew this: the Yamna people of the Pontic steppe have “southern” ancestry from the Near East that earlier East European/Pontic people do not. In this preprint, the authors show that groups such as the Maykop of the north slope of the Caucasus carry Y haplogroups such as G2, and not the R1 lineages commonly found in the steppe. David W. suggests that this confirms that Near Eastern gene flow into the steppe was female-mediated. This is plausible, but I would caution that Y chromosomes alone can be deceptive, due to the power of particular patrilineages. We’ll probably rely on the X chromosome to make a final judgment.
The plot below shows many of the relationships as a function of location and time. The green component is modal among “Iranian farmers,” the orange among “Anatolian farmers,” and the blue among “Western hunter-gatherers.”
A major aspect of this preprint is that it has to work hard to differentiate two Anatolian farmer-like signals: the first, from Anatolian farmers proper, and the second from the descendants of European farmers, who themselves are a mix of Anatolian farmers with a minority ancestry among the hunter-gatherers. The answers would probably be totally unintelligible if not for archaeology. It’s clear that the steppe people had contact with both European and Near Eastern farmers and that later East European groups that succeeded the Yamna were subject to reflux from Central Europe, and received European farmer ancestry.
Another curious nugget in their results is that there was early detection of both Ancestral North Eurasian (ANE) ancestry and, some East Eurasian gene flow (related to Han Chinese). One of their individuals carries the East Eurasian variant of EDAR, which today is only found in Finns, though it was found in reasonable frequencies among the Motala hunter-gatherers of Scandinavia. Additionally, Fu et al. 2016 found that the ancestors of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers received some gene flow from Eastern Eurasians as well (also in the supplements of Lazaridis et al. 2016).
The authors admit that there is probably population structure among ANE and undiscovered groups of East Eurasians who were traversing the Inner Asian landscape. I think this is all suggestive of some long-distance contacts, though the intensity and magnitude increased a lot with high-density societies and the mobility of pastoralism.
Much of the genetic mixing in the Near East, and to some extent in the trans-Caucasian region, seems to date to the 4th millennium. This is technically prehistory, but it is also the Uruk period. This was a phase of Mesopotamian culture expansion between 4000 and 3100 BC which resulted in replicas of Uruk style settlements as far away as Syria and southeastern Anatolia. There is even evidence of Uruk-related migration to the North Caucasus.
The Uruk experienced abrupt and sudden collapse. Uruk settlements outside of the core zone of Mesopatamia disappear.
It’s the final paragraph that warrants discussion:
The insight that the Caucasus mountains served not only as a corridor for the spread of CHG/Neolithic Iranian ancestry but also for later gene-flow from the south also has a bearing on the postulated homelands of Proto-Indo-European (PIE) languages and documented gene-flows that could have carried a consecutive spread of both across West Eurasia…Perceiving the Caucasus as an occasional bridge rather than a strict border during the Eneolithic and Bronze Age opens up the possibility of a homeland of PIE south of the Caucasus, which itself provides a parsimonious explanation for an early branching off of Anatolian languages. Geographically this would also work for Armenian and Greek, for which genetic data also supports an eastern influence from Anatolia or the southern Caucasus. A potential offshoot of the Indo-Iranian branch to the east is possible, but the latest ancient DNA results from South Asia also lend weight to an LMBA spread via the steppe belt…The spread of some or all of the proto-Indo-European branches would have been possible via the North Caucasus and Pontic region and from there, along with pastoralist expansions, to the heart of Europe. This scenario finds support from the well attested and now widely documented ‘steppe ancestry’ in European populations, the postulate of increasingly patrilinear societies in the wake of these expansions (exemplified by R1a/R1b), as attested in the latest study on the Bell Beaker phenomenon….
More interesting are the results in West Asia, and the linguistic supplement. In the authors note that tablets now indicate an Indo-Aryan presence in Syria ~1750 BC. Second, Assyrian merchants record Indo-European Hittite, or Nesili (the people of Nesa), as early as ~2500 BC.
As suggested in earlier work Hittite remains don’t suggest steppe influence. David W. says:
The apparent lack of steppe ancestry in five Hittite-era, perhaps Indo-European-speaking, Anatolians was interpreted in Damagaard et al. 2018 as a major discovery with profound implications for the origin of the Anatolian branch of Indo-European languages.
But I disagree with this assessment, simply because none of these Hittite-era individuals are from royal Hittite, or Nes, burials. Hence, there’s a very good chance that they were Hattians, who were not of Indo-European origin, even if they spoke the Indo-European Hittite language because it was imposed on them.
The main aspect I’d bring up with this is that in other areas steppe ancestry has spread deeply and widely into the population, including non-Indo-European ones. It is certainly possible that the sample is not needed enough to pick up the genuinely Hittite elite, but I probably lean to the likelihood that the steppe signal won’t be found. It seems that the Anatolian languages were already diversified by ~2000 BC, and perhaps earlier. Linguists have long suggested that they are the outgroup to other Indo-European languages, though this could just be a function of their isolation among highly settled and socially complex populations.
Two alternative models present themselves for these results. The Anatolian Indo-European languages expanded through elite diffusion, part of the same general migrations that emerged out of the Yamna culture ~3000 BC. The lack of a steppe signal may be due to sampling bias, as David W. suggested, or, more likely in my opinion, simple dilution of the signal. Second, the steppe migrations were one part of a broader palette of population movements and cultural diffusions, and the Anatolian Indo-Europeans are basal to the efflorescence of the steppe derived branches.
The evidence of the explosion of Indo-Aryans in the years after 2000 BC in West and South Asia, as well as the expansion of Iranians across vast swaths of Inner Asia during the same period, suggest to me that Indo-Iranians are most definitely part of the steppe pulse. The connection to the Sintashta charioteers presents itself, and, connections to the Uralic languages indicates incubation in the trans-Volga region.
We next tested a model of the present-day Lebanese as a mixture of Sidon_BA and any other ancient Eurasian population using qpAdm. We found that the Lebanese can be best modeled as Sidon_BA 93% ± 1.6% and a Steppe Bronze Age population 7% ± 1.6% (Figure 3C; Table S6). To estimate the time when the Steppe ancestry penetrated the Levant, we used, as above, LD-based inference and set the Lebanese as admixed test population with Natufians, Levant_N, Sidon_BA, Steppe_EMBA, and Steppe_MLBA as reference populations. We found support (p = 0.00017) for a mixture between Sidon_BA and Steppe_EMBA which has occurred around 2,950 ± 790 ya (Figure S13B).
This needs to be more explored. The admixture could have come from many sources. I am curious about the frequency of R1a1a-z93 among modern-day Syrians and Lebanese.
For me these arguments can only be resolved with a deeper understanding of linguistic evolution. The close relationship of Indo-Aryan and Iranian languages is obvious to any speaker of either of these languages (I can speak some Bengali). A divergence in the range of 4 to 5 thousand years before the present seems most likely to me. But the relationship of the other Indo-European languages is much less clear.
One of the arguments in Peter Bellwood’s First Farmers is that the Indo-European languages exhibit a “rake-like” topology with the exception of Indo-Iranian, which forms a clear clade. To him and others in his camp, this argues for deep divergences very early in time.
It is hard to deny that the steppe migrations between 4 and 5 thousand years ago had something to do with the distribution of modern Indo-European languages. But, it is harder to falsify the model that there were earlier Indo-European migrations, perhaps out of the Near East, that preceded these. Only a deeper understanding of linguistic evolution, and multidisciplinary analysis of regional substrates will generate the clarity we need.
Since I’ll be reviewing The University We Need for NRO I won’t say much more than that, except that Treadgold is most definitely in a “gives no fucks” mood. Yes, he attacks administrators as you’d expect, but he also slams Hillsdale, the professoriate, and students. He also has opinions about cafeteria food!
Italy’s 5 Star, League Reach Deal to Govern Nation. This sort of Left-Right hybrid to me illustrates that we’re in a “crisis of capitalism,” or more precisely a crisis of Western civilization. Italian total fertility rate is ~1.40. The rest is commentary.
Intellectual property is a joke. But it’s also big business.
This week on the podcast we talked about the grandmother hypothesis with Kristen Hawkes. I should have been more aggressive in jumping in to get her to clarify what “life history theory” was. Live and learn.
We are now at 20 podcasts. If you can, please subscribe with iTunes or Stitcher. Also rate us highly and leave positive views if you can! It looks like we’ll get to 100 in iTunes soon, at which point I’ll stop pestering, though we’re only at 6 reviews on Stichter.
Carl Zimmer’s podcast has been recorded already, but won’t be dropped until close to when She Has Her Mother’s Laugh is published. We’re also recording a podcast with Patrick Wyman of Tides of History this week. This should be “evergreen”, at least on the scale of a year, so expect that in June or later. It will be nice to have a historian on.
The next few weeks we’re going to go it alone, covering a few topics Spencer and I are both interested in. It’s a good change of pace. We’ve got some ideas for what we’re going to talk about in June too. I think it is most definitely important to follow-up on the Indo-Aryan podcast, which we actually recorded in July of 2017, though we didn’t drop it until 2018.
There was an interesting fiasco on Twitter recently where some semi-prominent people asserted that Andrew Sullivan was against gay marriage. This is really bizarre because Sullivan was a major proponent of the idea before it was ever mainstream, and for a period also got resistance from the more radical anti-bourgeois faction of the gay rights movement.
Anyway, the mistaken tweets occurred because Sullivan is transforming into a hate-figure on the far left, and a lot of people on Twitter are stupid and ignorant, so they just inferred facts from their theory that Sullivan is right-wing. Some of these people retracted the falsehood grudgingly. But as usual, you can see that retweets and likes are/were more evident on the original tweet.
The point is repeating all this is is how “knowledge” is created now. If you have a prominent Twitter account it’s trivial to inject falsehoods into the debate. I’ve seen people doing this pretty consciously several times (this is really common in anonymous/pseudo accounts).
At the Brown Pundits weblog, I put up a post on this strange Slatepiece on how the 1990s TV show Friends is contributing to sexism and homophobia in India. Though ostensibly about India, and narrated by an immigrant from India, the piece is about a preoccupation within American culture in 2018.
A publication like Slate is going to get a lot of clicks if they post something about misogyny and homophobia in Friends, but how to make it novel? Pretend it’s actually about India! To me, this is to journalism what science fantasy is to science fiction. Even the editor of this piece must have known it was hilarious bullshit, but they were also aware that in 2018 this is what Slate readers want.
Societies and cultures in relative decline and stagnation tend to undergo a period of involution. Narcissism writ-large.
I also wrote a post on Brown Pundits on why India did not become mostly Muslim. Need to think a lot more on this. Not all the comments were dumb. I wish more people would know more things.
Reading the coalescent chapter in Molecular Population Genetics, and it’s amusing to observe that the coalscent’s big advantage over forward-simulations in terms of computational horsepower needed isn’t really that big of a deal today. Even a few years back this was a huge issue. This is like in phylogenetics where everyone runs Bayesian stuff, when 15 years ago people were having a hard time imaging max-likelihood!
While reading Molecular Population Genetics I keep hearing the author’s voice in my head. I think this has to do with the fact that I knew the author before I read his book. This didn’t happen when I read She Has Her Mother’s Laugh because I had read Carl Zimmer before I got to know Carl in person. At least that’s my theory (The 10,000 Year Explosion was all in Greg Cochran’s voice).
A systematic assessment of ‘Axial Age’ proposals using global comparative historical evidence. The argument here is that the “Axial Age” wasn’t a singular time period, but a continous event that spanned thousands of years. I think this is probably right, though “ages” are conceptually useful mental bookkeeping. This is similar to the idea that age cohorts are a real thing, but generations are not.
You know that classic Hart & Risley claim that poor kids are exposed to 30 million fewer words than middle class kids by age 3? Looks like it’s wildly inflated. https://t.co/U4KePPz0XJ
I chose a fortuitous time to read Kyle Harper’s The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire. This is a great book, and a nice compliment to Bryan Ward-Perkins The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization. Where Ward-Perkins attempts to convince you that Rome did indeed fall, and that that fall mattered, Harper takes it as a given that you accept this position. Rather, he tries to show you in The Fate of Rome that a series of contingent and necessary causal factors set the Roman system up for its fall. The fall of Rome is not just an idea, but a material event that was given a strong push by material factors.
As the The Fate of Rome was published in the fall of 2017, so it was written well before recent work which highlights both the nature and role of steppe barbarians in triggering the changes which we dramatically term the “fall of Rome” and the “barbarian migrations.” A few months ago I wrote about a paper which reported that post-Hunnic people of the Balkans were genetically different from typical Europeans in that they exhibited some East Asian admixture. Harper does assume that the Huns were barbarians whose ultimate provenance was somewhere in the region of modern Mongolia, but emphasizes that their peregrinations transformed them.
As so it did. A new paper in Nature, 137 ancient human genomes from across the Eurasian steppes, nails the overall dynamics. As illustrated in the figure above the early steppe was dominated by peoples of a West Eurasian provenance, while the latter steppe shifted toward a more East Asian shifted population.
These early groups go by various names. But the Cimmerians, Scythians, and Sarmatians have origins on the Pontic steppe. Flourishing in the first millennium before Christ, I should precisely label them “Iranian,” but that might mislead readers a bit since some of these groups were never resident within Iran. The Scythians were a presence across a huge zone of Inner Asia and were a force in Eastern Europe, West Asia, South Asia, and in Eastern Asia. Likely emerging out of the Andronovo culture, genetically the results from the paper confirm early work that Scythians mixed with the local substrate where they went. In this way, they prefigure later steppe populations. Being a nomad was a lifestyle, the genetic correlates to some extent an accident.
In The Fate of Rome the Huns have a role to play as a push for the migration of Goths into the Roman Empire, which eventually leads to their rebellion and a collapse in both the prestige and military manpower of the Roman state. The genetic evidence above and elsewhere is strongly indicative of the likelihood that the Huns were originally part of the Xiongnu confederacy. As they moved west they mixed with post-Scythian and other Iranian and Siberian elements, and presumably by the time they arrived on European frontier of Rome they had picked up some Germanic and proto-Slavic ancestry. In 137 ancient human genomes from across the Eurasian steppes the authors also report that the East Asian gene flow was somewhat “male-mediated” in the later steppe. Similarly, earlier work on proto-Iranian peoples in the Altai region is strongly suggestive of male-mediation in West Eurasian gene flow.
The obligate and exclusive Eurasian nomad lifestyle was one dominated by men, though as one can see the importance of Genghis Khan’s wives and daughters women maintained independence as well.
For whatever reason, full-blown nomadism only became a feature of the landscape north of what became China in the last few centuries before Christ. The mobile and militarized nomadic lifestyle that emerged in western Eurasia in the years around 1000 BC seem to have taken five centuries to penetrate the far eastern fringes. Until the crushing of the Dzhungar’s by the Manchus in the 18th century, 2,000 years later, the dynamic between nomad and settled was a defining feature of Chinese statecraft and political culture. And, it was also a major feature of nomad culture, because the wealthy Chinese state was an almost irresistible attraction to steppe elites as a source of plunder and tribute.
But human action is not the only relevant parameter in human history. The Fate of Rome is fundamentally a work of history, but it also takes ecology and evolution seriously. In fact, it foregrounds them. Kyle Harper makes the argument that the expansionary phase of the Roman Empire was not necessarily coincidental, or at least it was lucky indeed because there was a climatic optimum, similar to the one which preceded the demographic expansion of medieval Europe. In contrast, in the 6th century, the world went through some of the coldest years in the Holocene because of a combination of fluctuations in solar radiation and volcanic explosions. I assume that the likelihood of the latter is Poisson distributed, so the combination of decreased radiation and several successive volcanic events can be chalked up to randomness. But its consequences were not random at all.
The climatic changes can have demographic and social consequences obviously. Desperate armed pastoralists can overwhelm states, and change the course of history, just as peasants can rebel from taxes and subordination. And, pastoralists can also bring Yerisina pestis, the plague. Climate is an abiotic pressure which is to some extent an exogeneous shock which occurs randomly, and does not react to human feedbac k.* Disease though is a biotic pressure, and though it may relate to abiotic forces, human interaction and agency matter quite a bit.
The Fate of Rome clearly hinges on abiotic factors as initial drivers: a good harvest is good for the state. But the biotic factors, disease, are partly under the control of the state. The Romans did not have germ theory, and were under constant stress due to the high pathogen load, especially of the cities. Harper presents the evidence of high mortality within Roman society well. Because of the endemic ubiquity of disease even elites were impacted by it. But Rome was not just affected by endemic ailments, it was subject to pandemics and plagues. Three loom large in The Fate of Rome:
The Antonine Plague, which ended the expansionary phase of the High Empire in the middle to late 2nd century.
The Plague of Cyprian of the middle 3rd century which ushered in a period of state collapse.
And finally, the Justinian Plague which marked the end of Late Antiquity and the beginning of the “Dark Ages.”
One of the major insights that Kyle Harper reiterates is that these plagues, these pandemics, are a feature/bug of the Roman imperial system. They are not just the consequence of simply settled agricultural society. As described in books such as Pandora’s Seed, agriculture and settled society transformed the lifestyles of human groups, and many diseases which were rare in hunter-gatherer populations probably became common among farmers. But The Fate of Rome the author argues that pandemics were a novel outcome of complex imperial state-systems with long-distance trade-networks. Small-scale pre-state Neolithic chiefdoms did not have the scale and interconnections to foster plague.
Mass pandemics of smallpox, plague, and influenza are then aspects of civilized life, not, settled agricultural life. This puts the argument of Charles C. Mann in 1493 into greater focus. It wasn’t just more extensive and intensive agriculture in the Old World which left Amerindians vulnerable, it was also that the Old World had thrown up several massive imperial systems which had incubated pandemic producing pathogens (smallpox and influenza epidemics were a major issue in New World societies). These were unleashed at once upon New World societies.
It also suggests to us why adaptation seems to be occurring in the last few thousand years. Bouts of plague which persisted for generations may have driven immunological responses.
Kyle Harper also seems to agree with the general thesis in The Fall of Rome that this period in European civilization was in some ways proto-modern, with economic specialization resulting in a modicum of affluence in ways unimaginable in times before, or after. Trade and some level of mass production allowed British peasants to eat off tableware that was standardized, and not homemade. In contrast after Britain’s post-Roman regression a more local economy had to step in. The most curious fact from The Fall of Rome is that pollution in British ponds did not attain Roman levels until the early modern period, with the rise of industrialization. Again and again The Fate of Rome emphasizes that social and economic complexity achieved in the Roman Empire was not attained in Europe again to the same scale as the early modern period.
Roman wealth was fundamentally due to the returns on scale and specialization that are the hallmark of Smithian growth. Though the Romans did invent a few things, Roman prosperity was not fundamentally driven by innovation. Rather, the Roman peace was a framework for trade and exchange that took advantage of abiotic clement conditions (the Roman climatic optimum highlighted in The Fate of Rome).
But this political system had biotic costs, as well as being subject to biotic shocks. Though Romans may have been wealthier than their Iron Age predecessors in things, and also wealthier than their early medieval successors, they were also a smaller people. Using isotope data Harper suggests that this is not due to Malthusian immiseration as the imperial population pushed up against food supply. Apparently Romans did not subsist on gruel alone, but ate a fair amount of meat, especially pork. Rather it was the high pathogen load enabled by the advancement of Roman urban life and its scale. Rome was a world of intense morbidity.
Unlike physical/abiotic forces biological/biotic pressures on human existence are adaptive. Moderns know this with the rise of antibiotic resistance, it’s the eternal race. The Romans were not aware of the consequences of their means of prosperity, and were not ready for the exogenous shocks of climate and disease which were to perturb their state system.
But The Fate of Rome is not just a story of exogenous factors, climate and disease. Rather, Harper puts into stark relief the variables which might push an empire over the edge, or eat into its seed corn of human capital. That does not negate the fact that endogenous variables matter. The Roman elite of the early centuries exhibited some level of asabiyyah, social cohesion. The Empire was fundamentally not a strong state in comparison to modern ones. It was a thin skein of cities and fortifications binding together an overwhelmingly rural population of villages. Its achievement of peace and prosperity was bound up in an ideology and identity focused project which bound together an elite (or bound together elites).
The origins of this elite were not always arbitrary. Though the Empire was famously cosmopolitan, The Fate of Rome crystallizes something that anyone who had sat back and thought about could see: certain groups bound the imperial state together as a ruling caste. Harper observes that between the reign of Claudius and Phocas, from 268 to 602, 75% of the Emperors were of Illyrian/Balkan stock. That is, 75% of the Emperors were drawn from 2% of the Roman Empire’s territory. The exception being the Theodosian dynasty, which was of Iberian origin and jumped into the breach after the defeat of Valens at Battle of Adrianople.
This is a fascinating fact in and of itself. Harper points out that these Emperors from the Danube frontier did not enrich their own region to the detriment of others. They were ideological heirs of the earlier Roman project, and their identity was as Romans first, Illyrians and Thracians of Latin stock second (or third, after Christianization). But they brought particular skills of administration and an overall martial attitude which served to lead the Empire through a period of greater stress than it had been subject to during the earlier climatic optimum.
The Fate of Rome does not plumb the depths of ideological and social change but emphasizes their interaction with biotic and abiotic factors. Harper observes that public temple building decreases sharply after the Cyprian plague. Why? Perhaps there was a loss of faith in the old religious institutions. Though popular paganism remained dominant, new elite religious ideologies such as the cult of the Invincible Sun and later Christianity came out of the shadows during this period.
These cultural and political aspects remain bit players and mostly offstage in The Fate of Rome. If you are interested in political narrative, then something like Peter Heather’s The Fall of the Roman Empire may be more to your taste. If culture, then Mary Beard’s SPQR. But ultimately social, political, economic, biological, and climatological factors are critical and interconnected. The rise of plague is hard to understand outside of the context of trade, which was enabled by political power and unity. Ecological factors may have driven Yerisina pestis out of its Central Eurasian reservoir, and those ecological factors may have been triggered by climatic variables.
The fall of Rome is a huge topic. I’m just glad that we’re beyond the revision of the previous generation which denied that it happened in the first place. The reason that it occurred is probably contingent in the details, though inevitable over the long-term. All things must end, even the Roman peace.
* This is not totally true, but over the time-scales we’re talking about probably mostly true.
There are those instances when you see a plot that resonates with your experience so much that you don’t need to say anything. You just share it. Those who know, know. Those who don’t know, won’t know until they are in a position to know.
Median household income in the United States today is $59,000. “Household” is a broad category. All families are households, but not all households are families. The median family income is $72,000. If the plot above is correct households in the bottom 25% and somewhere in the top 1% are above demographic replacement. The 1% cut-off is $430,000, and from what I can tell poking around the households making $1,000,000 per year are probably the 0.1%. In other words, between the 75th percentile and 0.10% percentile Americans are below replacement in total fertility.
There is a particular trough between $50,000 and $250,000. From the core of the middle class into the heart of the upper middle class.
From $50,000 a year household income of $250,000 a year may look comfortable, but these are the children of Epictetus. The modern world is filled with those who lack freedom but live with some modicum of comfort, as well as avenues for leisure and self-cultivation. But freedom is reserved for capital, in particular, those with a lot of liquid capital.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a slave with a substantial income remains but a slave at the end of their days. Their comforts persist only at the sufferance of those who have inherited or grasped their freedom.
The Maghreb is an important and interesting place. In the history of Western civilization, the tension between Carthage, the ancient port city based out of modern-day Tunisia, and Rome, is one of the more dramatic and tragic rivalries that has resonances down through the ages. Read Adrian Goldsworthy’s chapter on the Battle of Cannae in The Punic Wars for what I’m alluding to (and of course there was Cato the Younger’s dramatic remonstrations).
Later Roman Africa, which really encompassed northern Morocco, coastal Algeria, and Tunisia and Tripolitania, became a major social and economic pillar of the Imperium. Not only did men such as the emperor Septimius Severus and St. Augustine have roots in the region, but these provinces were a major economic bulwark for the Western Empire in its last century. The wealthy Senators of the 4th and 5th century were often absentee landlords of vast estates in North Africa. The fall of these provinces to the Vandals and Alans in the 430s began the transformation of the Western Empire based in Rome into a more regional player, rather than a true hegemon (perhaps an analogy here can be made to the loss of Anatolia by the Byzantines in the 11th century).
Another important aspect of North Africa is that it is the westernmost extension of the region possibly settled by Near Eastern farmers in Africa. The native Afro-Asiatic Berber languages seem to have been dominant in the region despite the influence and prestige of Punic and Latin in the cities when Muslim Arabs conquered the region in the late 7th century. The genetic-demographic characteristics of the region are relevant to attempts to understand the origins of the Afro-Asiatic languages more generally since Berber is part of the clade with the Semitic languages.
The figure below is the big finding of the Science paper:
They retrieved some genotypes from a site in northern Morocco, Taforalt, which dates to ~15,000 years before the present. This is a Pleistocene site, before the rise of agriculture. The Taforalt individuals are about 65% Eurasian in affinity, and 35% Sub-Saharan African. This confirms that the Eurasian back-migration to northern Africa predates the Holocene, just as many archaeologists and geneticists have reported earlier.
The samples from the preprint date to a later time. IAM in the samples dates to 7,200 years before the present, and KEB to ~5,000 years before the present. It seems pretty clear that the IAM samples in the preprint exhibit continuity with the Taforalt samples. Though it is not too emphasized in the preprint the lower K’s seem to strongly suggest that the IAM samples have Sub-Saharan African ancestry, just like the Taforalt samples which are nearly 8,000 years older. In the KEB samples, the fraction drops, probably diluted in part by ancestry related to what we elsewhere term “Early European Farmer” (EEF), related to the Anatolian farming expansion.
Both the Taforalt and IAM samples, in particular, seem to exhibit strong affinities to Natufian/Levantine peoples. Additionally, many of these samples carry Y chromosome haplogroup E1b, just like some of the Natufians. These results indicate that the Natufian-North African populations were exchanging genes or one cline rather deep in the Pleistocene.
Though various methods have suggested that there is a lot of recent Sub-Saharan African admixture, dating to the Arab period, in North Africa, these results suggest that much of it is far older. The Mozabites, as an isolated Berber group, reflect this tendency. Though some individuals have inflated African ancestry due to recent admixture, much of it is older and evener. And yet the Mozabites seem to have less Sub-Saharan African ancestry on average than the IAM sample.
There aren’t enough data points to make a strong inference about the temporal transect, but these few results imply a decline in Sub-Saharan ancestral component after the Pleistocene with further farming migration, and then a rise again with the trans-Saharan slave trade during the Muslim period. Another issue, highlighted in the preprint, is likely heterogeneity within the Maghreb in ancestry (lowland populations in modern North Africa tend to have more Sub-Saharan ancestry due to where slaves were settled).
In the Science paper the authors make an attempt to adduce the origin of the Sub-Saharan contribution to the Taforalt individuals. The result is that there is no modern or ancient proxy that totally fits the bill. These individuals have affinities to many Sub-Saharan African populations. The Sub-Saharan component is likely heterogeneous, but attempts to model European genetic variation during the Ice Age ran into trouble that divergence from modern populations was quite great. Until we get more ancient DNA there probably won’t be too much more clarity.
On the issue of the Eurasian ancestry, it’s clearly quite like the Natufians. But curiously the authors find that the Neanderthal ancestry in these samples is greater than that found in early Holocene Iran samples. From this, the authors conclude that they may have had a lower fraction of “Basal Eurasian” (BEu) than those populations further to the east. But already 15,000 years ago BEu populations were mixed with more generic West Eurasians to generate the back-migration to Africa. If BEu diverged from other Eurasians >50,000 years ago, then it may have merged back into the “Out-of-Africa” populations around or before the Last Glacial Maximum, ~20,000 years ago.
Finally, the authors looked at some pigmentation genes. Curiously the Taforalt and IAM individuals did not carry the derived variants for pigmentation found in many West and South Eurasians, but the KEB did. This confirms results from Europe, and population genomic inference in modern samples, that selection for derived pigmentation variants is relatively recent in the Holocene.
I do want to add that one possibility about the Sub-Saharan ancestry in the Taforalt, and probably all modern North Africans to a lesser extent, is that it is ancient and local. We now know proto-modern humans were present in the region >300,000 years ago. Northwest Africa may have been part of the multi-regional metapopulation of H. sapiens, as opposed to the Eurasian biogeographic zone that it is often placed, before a post-LGM back migration of Eurasians.
Longtime readers are well aware that A History of the Byzantine State and Society is one of my favorite books. To understand the Middle East right before the arrival of the Mongols and the emergence of the Crusader states, one has to understand the expansion of Byzantium in the early 11th century, and its subsequent regression in the late 11th and 12th centuries. In 2005 I actually did a 10 questions with the author, Warren Treadgold.
Had a chance to read Matt Hahn’s Molecular Population Genetics. The con is that it’s an $80 book that’s 350 pages. This is not a replacement for Principles of Population Genetics or Introduction to Quantitative Genetics. Rather, as alluded to by the title there’s a lot of focus on molecular evolutionary and population genetics. Imagine a population genetics book written with an assumption that you know what a SNP-chip is and have access to genome-wide sequence data. In some ways, it’s similar to Rasmus Nielsen’s (and Slatkin) An Introduction to Population Genetics. But these books reflect the authors.
For example, if you look up “site frequency spectrum” in An Introduction to Population Genetics there are seven pages. In Molecular Population Genetics there is one page on this topic. Anyone familiar with the work of these researchers would totally expect this. If you are a pop-gen nerd, there’s really no debate. You need to get Molecular Population Genetics or steal it from a friend. But a bigger question is why I recommend seemingly esoteric books to my readers. I say seemingly because understanding population genetics in the generality makes a lot of the detailed more specifically interesting stuff much more comprehensible.
The readership of this weblog is small but self-selected. If you consider yourself an intellectual person and have some disposable income and leisure you should be developing yourself in various ways outside of the professional sense. If you are reading this weblog you are likely to be the type of person who wants to understand things not just because one gets paid to understand things, but because understanding things is an end unto itself.
I am privileged to be paid to explore various topics related to certain intellectual interests (human population genomics), but I believe that something would be seriously wrong with me if I limited my inquiries to this narrow topic. Therefore I read a fair amount of history, and take an interest in topics like cognitive science and Biblical scholarship. Part of my attempt on this weblog to is to add population genetics to the list of interests of people who are professionally not engaged with the topic, whether they be in closely related fields (e.g., a theoretical ecologist) or in a totally different line of work (union organizer).
The Neutral Theory in Light of Natural Selection. This review is free. One of the great things about this is that it kind of revived a corner of science Twitter which had started to go into senescence (PatrickPhillips has been at the center of several of these discussions).
Related to our podcast topic from this week, Doc Edge and Graham Coop have the definitive formal take, How lucky was the genetic investigation in the Golden State Killer case? The TL;DR version is not that lucky. They show formally that with a database of ~1 million individuals with SNP-data it’s likely that you’ll get relative matches that might be useful. More precisely, a database of ~1 million means that there is a ~90% chance of at least one 3rd cousin match. There’s even a 25% chance of a 2nd cousin match! A database of ~5 million gives a 75% chance of a 2nd cousin match, and ~10 million gives a 90% chance of a 2nd cousin match. These are around the range of the databases of 23andMe and Ancestry right now.
As the authors say: “it’s a question of deciding the circumstances under which we as a society want these familial searches to be used.”
There are a certain number of traditional liberals with a libertarian bent who I’ve always admired. Nadine Strossen is one of those (Wendy Kaminer is another). Strossen is out with a new book, HATE: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship (Inalienable Rights). It strikes me this is conservative in the literal sense in that she is attempting to defend a late 20th-century liberalism which is now on the wane.
The Liberal Media Can Have Ideological Diversity Without Conservatives. Two sections jump out at me. First, “the social conservative’s view on fetal personhood is unfalsifiable — and does boast a significant constituency — but it doesn’t generally lend itself to novel or engaging debates.” The issue with abortion is not about debating, as much as it is important to not always put forward writers who implicitly assume that the pro-choice position is the only view that one might entertain. I’m skeptical of some of the leaps that pro-life writers make based on their political position…but then, I’m not pro-life. It’s important to at least know the views of other people.
Second, the author suggests that Left-wing socialists who believe that the people should control the means of production (as opposed to simply redistributive socialism as is the case in Scandinavia) should be given a fair hearing, though they observe “concentrating financial power in the state apparatus has often been an invitation to tyranny.” Yeah. That.
Pretty straightforward establishment liberals, such as Matt Yglesias, are starting to assert that publications like The Atlantic and The New York Times are equivalent to National Review, in their ideological valence (the argument being that they shouldn’t have to hire conservatives since they’re liberal publications). Conservative critics have long asserted this, but now liberals are agreeing.
Conservatives have lost the universities and the press. Both these institutions don’t even make a pretense at evenhandedness at this point. The broadly liberal center is eroding. I suspect that people like Nadine Strossen will be viewed in the future like Cato the Younger.
Stuff You Missed in History Class podcast, Mohenjo Daro. People don’t really know much.
Interviewing Carl Zimmer for the podcast this week. Taking suggestions for questions to ask him (we have a finite time so might not get it in….)
Last week Spencer & I took a break from The Insight. We’re at 71 iTunes ratings. I would appreciate it if readers of this weblog could help us make it to 100 (then I’ll stop pestering you). Also, we only have 5 reviews on Stitcher.
This week we’re talking to Roberta Estes about the arrest of the suspect in the “Golden State Killings”. We kind put this together really quickly since it seemed relevant, and Roberta, Spencer and I have some competency in this area (we’ve all been talking to science journalists). The biggest takeaway from our conversation is that we were a little surprised that it took this long to apply 21st century genomics to forensics.
When I first heard about the arrest I told my wife that it probably was due to a relative match on something like GEDMatch. After the media reported that it was a “new method” I dismissed my supposition because relative matches aren’t a new or novel thing. Well, it turned out that’s exactly what they were talking about!
A lot of the story here is how law enforcement snapped a bunch of pieces together that were out there. The horse has left the barn, and everyone is trying to figure out how to deal with it.
Additionally, know that some Mongols also have R1a1a. It’s hard to differentiate different periods of admixture. But to me the presence of R2 and J2 point to a Central/South Asian origin of a lot of the Hui R1a as well.
The University We Need: Reforming American Higher Education is going to come out in early July, but I’ve written my review. Don’t know when NRO will post it. In general, I’m positive. Though Treadgold has some ideological issues with Leftism in the academy, much of the book is apolitical and shines the light structural problems with contemporary academia.
It’s not a secret that I’m a fan of the author’s earlier work, A History of the Byzantine State and Society. So I checked some of the footnotes in The University We Need, and it turns out he’s a skeptic about the accolades given to Chris Wickham’s Framing the Early Middle Ages. Myself, I think both of these huge books are worth reading.
I’m not sure that there’s a single fact yet in The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War that’s surprised me. Is this because so much of this stuff has now percolated across our culture (e.g., the increased demand for horses in the late 19th century due to complementarity with railroads).
Heavy-handed suppression of anti-Semitism on campus is going to lead to more, not less, anti-Semitism. You know why.
