Back in the 1990s I read David Wingrove’s Chung Kuo series of future history science fiction.* Set in the year 2200, Wingrove depicts a world in which China is not only ascendant but in some ways the world is China.
For me, an implausible “twist” is that the political and cultural elite of this period falsified history. In this future history, the past 2,000 years has been erased from memory. China under the Han dynasty expanded westward under leaders such as Ban Chao and conquered the Roman Empire. Organized and institutional religion (Christianity and Buddhism), the rise of the West, and eventually the decline of China, never happened. Within the series itself, the rulers know the real history. Additionally, through a process of investigation and deeper analysis, bright individuals can also piece together the past. But the vast majority of humanity is totally unaware that only a few centuries ago the world was radically different.
At the time this was the most unbelievable aspect of Wingrove’s future history. How could the history of the world be so radically rewritten? Today my views are different. I have come to understand that most people do not engage in active critical-rationalism. Rather, they look to authorities from whom they can receive enlightenment, or be initiated into esoteric truths. For them, history is not a set of facts and processes about the past, but a narrative and framework which is a handmaid to an ideological project.
The examples are legion. The American Founders were white supremacists. The American Founders were devout Christians. The American Founders were radical progressives. The truth of the matter of these claims is less important than the symbolic value of the idea of who the American Founders were. The truth is secondary to the utility of the message.
This has always been, and will always be. What I am less sure of is whether today people are more ignorant of the past, or, if more people feel confident in expressing opinions about the past despite little solid knowledge about the past. Either way, this is concerning, because the truth is a critical antidote to totalitarian temptations. A smugly ignorant populace is manipulable populace.
* The original publisher gave up on the series after book seven, and Wingrove wrote a hasty and bizarre eight novel to complete the series. More recently has been rewriting the series to give in a more definitive conclusion.
To investigate the genetic ancestry of the Afrikaner population today (11–13 generations after initial colonization), we genotyped approximately five million genome-wide markers in 77 Afrikaner individuals and compared their genotypes to populations across the world to determine parental source populations and admixture proportions. We found that the majority of Afrikaner ancestry (average 95.3%) came from European populations (specifically northwestern European populations), but that almost all Afrikaners had admixture from non-Europeans. The non-European admixture originated mostly from people who were brought to South Africa as slaves and, to a lesser extent, from local Khoe-San groups. Furthermore, despite a potentially small founding population, there is no sign of a recent bottleneck in the Afrikaner compared to other European populations. Admixture amongst diverse groups from Europe and elsewhere during early colonial times might have counterbalanced the effects of a small founding population.
Afrikaner ancestry is overwhelmingly Northern European. But as you see in the PCA above they are notably African and Asian shifted when compared to their potential ancestral populations (I used Dutch and German individuals above). For me this is the part that is important, if not surprising:
The individual with the most non-European admixture had 24.9% non-European admixture, and only a single Afrikaner individual (out of 77) had no evidence of non-European admixture…Amongst the 77 Afrikaners investigated, 6.5% had above 10% non-European admixture, 27.3% between 5 and 10%, 59.7% between 1 and 5% and 6.5% below 1%.
So about 87% of Afrikaners in their sample had between 1 to 10 percent non-European ancestry. As suggested by genealogical evidence, genetics indicates this is a relatively recent admixture, occurring during the 17th and 18th-century. The early decades of the Cape Colony. It’s a mix of diverse Asian and African components. In some ways, it seems that the non-European ancestry in modern Afrikaners is just the same phenomenon which gave rise to the Cape Coloured population, which is a mix of European, Asian (Indian and Austronesian) and African (Bantu and Khoisan).
Honestly, I think the individuals with more than 10% non-European ancestry, or 0% non-European ancestry, may have recent non-Afrikaner ancestry, and so are not representative (Hendrik Verweord was Dutch and immigrated to South Africa, so he would not have had non-European ancestry). Arguably, the fact that Afrikaners are only ~5% non-European is rather surprising in light of the conditions of the Cape Colony during its early years.
But, this result is more interesting in light of how it contrasts with another case. Also in the 17th-century, there emerged another European settler society on the edge of a vast ocean rooted in a deeply Calvinist faith. By this, I mean the colonies of New England. Though New England has been reshaped by later migrations, between 1640 and 1790 30,000 English settlers expanded and grew into a region with 750,000 Americans. In the early 19th-century, New England spilled out over much of the northern swath of the United States of America, in part due to the fact that the fertility of New Englanders was quite high (the early Mormons were fundamentally a New England-derived subculture).
And yet unlike the Afrikaners or the whites of Latin America, the scions of New England have no non-European ancestry. One might argue here that this is due to the lack of opportunity, as the number of slaves in New England was always very low, and there were no native peoples. King Philip’s War falsifies the latter contention. There were numerous native people. At least initially. But the New Englanders were very efficient and effective at marginalizing and exterminating the native peoples of the region. To a far greater extent than occurred in the South.
There was no New England “Trail of Tears,” because New Englanders eliminated most of the local tribes. There are even records New England militias in the 17th-century drowning native children in the Connecticut River as an ultimate solution (to the chagrin and concern of some ministers who wished these children to be baptized and raised as Christians).
Of course, another distinctive aspect of the New England settlement is that it was the transplantation of a whole English society, men and women, rather than simply men seeking fortune and opportunity. This sex balance from the beginning meant that there was no necessity of looking for partners in the local population, as often occurred in other colonial contexts.
The lack of any local imprint on New England’s genetics, in contrast with almost all other settler and colonial societies, is in keeping with the other peculiarities of the region’s cultures. By the latter portion of the 18th-century New England was unique because it was beginning to see itself as not just a complement of the metropole, but a potential rival.* A potential that would be realized with the intellectual (the emergence of Harvard) and economic (industrialization) developments of the 19th-century.
Today when talking to Patrick Wyman of Tides of History, I suggested that genetics can only be understood in a broader context, even if it is to answer specific questions. Though European settler societies are all predominantly European, both culturally and biologically, New England’s uniqueness genetically in having almost no native input reflects I think a broader cultural reality of the region’s history: it is peculiarly European without much synthesis with the local substrate.
* The South was a traditional commodity-exporting colony. The Mid-Atlantic, focused on New York City, was the center of mercantile activity that operated as a transaction hub of a global trade system.
New Atheism: The Godlessness That Failed. I’ve talked to several people who were strident New Atheists ~2010 who are now disillusioned with the direction most “secular” people have taken in the USA. In fact, some admit to having more sympathy and fellow feeling for religious traditionalists, because they simply can’t keep track of the latest “woke” orthodoxy.
I haven’t said much about coronavirus because I don’t know much more than you. I think the risk is real, but probably not Black Death real. It seems pretty likely we’ll have serious economic adjustments to make. It seems pretty likely we’ll have a worldwide pandemic and serious loss of life. But probably not socially destabilizing in most cases. This is kind of on my mind because I noticed that people have started “prepping” through my Amazon affiliates. That’s how I know “Whole Egg Product” gives you 50,000 nonperishable calories for $189.
Many people are clearly aiming for non-perishable with high-calorie counts. This is the only explanation why someone purchased hundreds of dollars worth of spam with bacon recently.
Gotye’s Somebody I Used to Know if it was a 1980s video. Pretty impressive. I thought perhaps they made an alternative video, but it’s actually a reworking of some random clips.
Spencer and I recorded an episode as guests on Tides of History. It should drop in April. In case you didn’t notice, we’re up to episode 8 on The Insight for season three. We’ll be releasing one on the genetics of ancient Egypt at some point soon.
Framing the Early Middle Ages is a very good book. A bit of a core dump and the author is going to fit everything into his materialist/Marxist framework, but that’s OK.
‘It’s Pretty Brutal’: The Sandwich Generation Pays a Price. Recently I read something about people who choose not to have children. These were discussions with people who were happy. It was interesting that all the people highlighted were in the age range of 45 to 55. I’m sure there are plenty of 70 and 80 year-olds who are happy being childless, but many who are happily childfree at 50 probably have a different perspective at 75. Anyway, life is long.
Over the years one issue I’ve revisited over and over is that paternity certainty is quite high in Western societies (and from the spotty evidence we have, in most Asian and Middle Eastern societies as well). The reason this is interesting or of note is that there is an urban myth that 10% or so is the incidence of misattributed paternity. That is when children and fathers believe that they are biologically related, but they are not. The true rate in Western societies seems to be 1-2% (and, from what I have heard about Y chromosomal studies in Arab countries, it is at least as low in those societies).
Some of the confusion arose because early genetic testing was done in paternity determination laboratories. For obvious reasons, this is not an unbiased sampling of the general population. Even here, in only 30% of the cases did it turn out that “you are not the father.”
But is this universally true? There was already evidence that even in a Western modern context the extra-pair paternity rate was not always 1-2%. The frequency increases the lower down on the socioeconomic ladder you go.
– almost 50% extra-pair paternity rates – extremely high paternity certainty, which seemed to match whether the child was the biological offspring of the father
What I’m getting at here is that this paper is pointing to a situation where the extra-pair paternity rates are high due to non-marital liaisons, but the individuals in the community as a whole are quite clear of the situation. There is no great deception.
In the discussion they conclude:
These data provide a stark contrast to the prevailing opinion in the genetics literature that EPP is negligible in humans. While Himba may be at the far end of the range of human variation on this trait, they are not alone in having frequent concurrent partnerships. To assess the true range of variation, more studies from a wider variety of economic and social settings are needed. In addition, we currently know very little about what factors might contribute to variation in EPP among humans. Higher rates of female concurrency have been linked to matrilineal inheritance, reliance on foraging and horticulture, a male-biased adult sex ratio, and prolonged periods of spousal absence (11, 25). However, causal links between these traits and the rate of EPP are opaque at best.
In the specific case of the Himba, their pastoralist economy may play a role here. There is strong gender segregation insofar as men and women play distinct economic roles, and the men spend a fair amount of time away from their wives. Additionally, women and girls are critical economic producers, and they are placed in arranged marriages at a very young age. It does not take much imagination to entertain the possibility that economically semi-independent young women married off against their free choice to strange men, who are often away, may regularly form other relationships when opportunity and inclination arose.
The more general question and phenomenon being highlighted here is the nature of human cultural variation. There have long been debates around evolutionary psychology and “human universals.” There is clearly something here, but the field of cultural evolution has shed light on the reality of a high degree of plasticity of social forms. But these forms are not arbitrary in their distribution. Many societies seem to have moved toward a lower frequency of extra-pair paternity, combined with more “mate guarding.” Why?
The Alan Rogers paper which includes ideas of “super-archaics”, is finally out, Neanderthal-Denisovan ancestors interbred with a distantly related hominin. It’s open access, so I encourage you to read it. In it, the authors looking at patterns of derived mutations that vary between populations and try and see which models fit the pattern. I’ve added some labels to the figure above for clarity. The raw results in figure 2 are easy enough to understand. But how do they go from that to the model?
I haven’t reread the legofit paper, so honestly, I don’t know the details. Rather, I’m more interested in the discussion:
Our results shed light on the early portion of the middle Pleistocene, about 600 ka ago, when large-brained hominins appear in the fossil record of Europe along with Acheulean stone tools. There is disagreement about how these early Europeans should be interpreted. Some see them as the common ancestors of modern humans and Neanderthals (28), others as an evolutionary dead end, later replaced by immigrants from Africa (29, 30), and others as early representatives of the Neanderthal lineage (6, 7). Our estimates are most consistent with the last of these views. They imply that by 600 ka ago, Neanderthals were already a distinct lineage, separate not only from the modern lineage but also from Denisovans.
These results resolve a discrepancy involving human fossils from Sima de los Huesos (SH). Those fossils had been dated to at least 350 ka ago and perhaps 400 to 500 ka ago (31). Genetic evidence showed that they were from a population ancestral to Neanderthals and therefore more recent than the separation of Neanderthals and Denisovans (9). However, genetic evidence also indicated that this split occurred about 381 ka ago [(2), table S12.2]. This was hard to reconcile with the estimated age of the SH fossils. To make matters worse, improved dating methods later showed that the SH fossils are even older, about 600 ka, and much older than the molecular date of the Neanderthal-Denisovan split (32). Our estimates resolve this conflict because they push the date of the split back well beyond the age of the SH fossils.
Basically, the genetic results have been conflicting with the archaeology in a really strange way for a long time. The geneticists keep saying that the divergence between Neanderthals and Denisovans is relatively recent, and the Neanderthal fossils predate the estimated split. This is a case where I trust the paleoanthropology people, so methods that resolve this problem are welcome.
More broadly, I assume some form of this model is correct, even if not in the details. With what we know today, it seems unlikely that pre-Neanderthal/Denisovan humans did not mix with the newcomers. These results indicate that in fact these earlier archaic groups mixed with the expanding proto-Neanderthal/Denisovan population, the Neandersovans.
Update: A friend who I trust looked closely at the legofit paper. He says “I don’t believe a word of this shit.”
He who claims to be the salvation of the notional Populares from the tyranny of the leader of the traditional Optimates holds the keys to the victory of the new order over the old. The very means of power by which the plebian faction may grasp the reins of power will destroy the order under which the plebians can make their voices heard in a customary manner. The stability and order which the Optimates crave will also crumble the more they grip tightly to the past.
Here I’m making observations. Offering descriptions of what I see. These are symptoms, reflecting an underlying condition. But it strikes me that there is no cure for what ails us. This life is near its end, and all that remains to be decided is who strikes the death blow, which faction can claim the Pyrrhic victory.
History does not repeat. Villains and heroes are not reborn. And yet the dramatis personae of the past suffice to describe the players of the present.
One of the things you notice when you look at genome-wide data are peculiar populations that seem to be shifted on PCA and other metrics in relation to exotic genetic affinities. For example, Sardinians, Japanese, and Taiwanese aborigines exhibit this pattern. When looking at Han Chinese data, many of the southern samples seem a bit further shifted away from West Eurasians than all the northern Chinese. That is, almost all northern Chinese seem to have low levels of West Eurasian affinity. Some of the southern Chinese do not.
When you look at West Eurasian data, you see evidence of East Eurasian gene flow into parts of Eastern Europe. Among Lithuanians, it seems to be there. It’s old and well-mixed, so it doesn’t jump out at you. But it’s there. Even more striking is that many of the Muslim populations in the Near East seem to have some proportion of East Asian ancestry because of the Turkic expansions.
We know the reason for this ancestry in West Asia. The rise of the Turks in the Islamic world is historically attested (thank you al-Mu’tasim!). Similarly, the arrival of Tatars and Magyars in Eastern Europe is also recorded. In China, various Turkic and West Asian populations arrived after the fall of the Han dynasty in the northern half of the country. I’ve documented on this weblog strong evidence of Indian ancestry across Southeast Asia.
As more ancient DNA comes to light I think one phenomenon that will become more clear is that the cultural tookit of humans over the last 10,000 years has allowed for more continuous, constant, and frequent, long-distance gene flow. Pairwise Fst values crashed with the rise of agriculture and larger-scale polities. But the adoption of the horse and the emergence of agro-pastoralism also served as a reciprocal conveyer belt of genes across the two antipodes of Eurasia.
West Eurasians and East Eurasians still remain genetically distinct. But evidence from Japanese and Sardinians gives a clear indication that within the last few thousand years have substantial reciprocal gene flows.*
* I am aware that in some of the work in David Reich’s lab there is evidence of East Eurasian gene flow into Mesolithic hunter-gatherers in Europe.
As a follow-up to the post below, I thought I would make certain expectations and assumptions more explicit on my part. The new methods to infer our species’ population history are quite complicated and require a lot of analytical and computational firepower. They’re predicated on big datasets (e.g., whole genomes, and lots of them) and high-powered computational methods (not just in inference and analysis, but also simulation). All models are wrong, but some give more insight than others. From talking to people who work on this field, no one even working on these models assumes that they’re extremely high fidelity to the past. Rather, they’re pulling out insightful fragments of the truth. We’ll need to bring together both genetics and paleoanthropology to really get what’s going on.
In any case, there is a simpler and more old-fashioned framework that I always keep in mind to which I think is important. The past few million years of hominin evolution are strongly shaped by biogeographic parameters. There are two areas of the world where I see that researchers are digging up a fair amount of complexity for the origins of modern humans. One of them is Africa. But the other is Southeast Asia. For example, last year’s Multiple Deeply Divergent Denisovan Ancestries in Papuans (this paper is an illustration, if you keep track of this field you know it’s not an outlier for this region). Why is this?
I think the answer is simple, and it has to do with geography and climate. During the Pleistocene Africa and Southeast Asia had the greatest area of tropical woodland in the Old World. This is optimal hominin habit in many ways, though clearly hominins can occupy other habits (e.g., the Dminasi hominins). Though Eurasian hominins such as Neanderthals and Denisovans were quite successful as measured by persistence for long periods of time, the extant genomic evidence indicates that at northern latitudes hominins tended to be able to maintain themselves only at low population densities (at least before agriculture). The genetic data from Mesolithic European hunter-gatherers tend to support this proposition as well; they were characterized by low diversity. Similarly, Amerindian populations seem to have gone through a striking bottleneck during their high latitude sojourn.
For various reasons, a lot of genetics, genomics, and ancient DNA, has focused on high latitude hominins. Modern genetics is skewed toward Europeans, while ancient DNA began in the north due to better preservation. But I think high and mid-latitude hominins give a skewed and simple view of the human past due to small effective population sizes and high levels of regional turnover. In contrast, both Africa and Southeast Asia have been characterized by high population sizes of hominins and high speciosity. As we dig deeper into the genomics of these regions for our lineage, we’ll stumble upon “mysteries” which reflect the reality that these regions were home to many different and large numbers of hominins, and we can detect these imprints in the genomes…
Broadly, the results are getting at something which plenty of people have been noticing for many years: when it comes to Sub-Saharan Africans, there is something deeply diverged in West Africans vis-a-vis non-West Africans. These results seem to suggest that the divergence between this outgroup lineage and our own is a bit earlier than the modern-Neanderthal/Denisovan split. There are many abstruse statistical inferences and simulations, and it looks like the reviewers made them do a lot of analyses. But the general result is something other groups have seen as well, so I believe it. Additionally, the admixture of this lineage into West Africans seems to have occurred about 50,000 years ago, suspiciously close to the general expansion of modern humans out of Africa (or the most recent expansion).
From the discussion:
The signals of introgression in the West African populations that we have analyzed raise questions regarding the identity of the archaic hominin and its interactions with the modern human populations in Africa. Analysis of the CSFS in the Luhya from Webuye, Kenya (LWK) also reveals signals of archaic introgression, although our interpretation is complicated by recent admixture in the LWK that involves populations related to western Africans and eastern African hunter-gatherers (section S8) (20). Non-African populations (Han Chinese in Beijing and Utah residents with northern and western European ancestry) also show analogous patterns in the CSFS, suggesting that a component of archaic ancestry was shared before the split of African and non-African populations. A detailed understanding of archaic introgression and its role in adapting to diverse environmental conditions will require analysis of genomes from extant and ancient genomes across the geographic range of Africa.
Finally reading The Last Pagans of Rome, and it is a really good read. The late author, Alan Cameron, is highly erudite and has strong opinions. It reads somewhat like a lawyerly argument, and I doubt many are knowledgeable enough to evaluate it in full (I’m not), but it’s a fascinating anthropology of the changing nature of what religion was in the 4th-century. Read along with The Final Pagan Generation and Pagans: The End of Traditional Religion and the Rise of Christianity.
Many years ago when Edward Snowden released the NSA documents I recall listening to a journalist admit on a radio show that if some of the things reported in those documents were claimed without that evidence they would have just assumed they were a crazy conspiracy theorist. To me, that was a window into the reality that the people we trust and pay to sift through reality are often just rubber-stamping the pronouncements of power.
Daniel Greene is a super nerdy fantasy vlogger. He has a really sincere defense of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series…which was strange to me, since I’d dismissed Jordan’s work as something that would appeal to 12-year-old boys (about when I started reading them). Curiously, I notice that the newest covers of Jordan’s work make it look less like a fantasy.
Back in the 1990s I read David Wingrove’s Chung Kuo series of future history science fiction.* Set in the year 2200, Wingrove depicts a world in which China is not only ascendant but in some ways the world is China.
At the time this was the most unbelievable aspect of Wingrove’s future history. How could the history of the world be so radically rewritten? Today my views are different. I have come to understand that most people do not engage in active critical-rationalism. Rather, they look to authorities from whom they can receive enlightenment, or be initiated into esoteric truths. For them, history is not a set of facts and processes about the past, but a narrative and framework which is a handmaid to an ideological project.
