A reader alerted me to Ronald F. Inglehart’s Religion’s Sudden Decline: What’s Causing it, and What Comes Next? Inglehart has been involved in the World Values Survey for decades. This book was published in December 2020, and Inglehart notes that it was necessary because a massive wave of secularization has occurred since 2007.
I skimmed a few chapters, and the general thesis of this short work seems to be that the Nordic states are the model for secularization. As people become more economically secure and the welfare state takes the role of civil society, the need for the social functions of religion diminishes.
The main question in 2021 I have is if COVID-19 serves as a natural experiment that drives reaffiliation of people who lose faith in government.
Large palindromes on the primate X Chromosome are preserved by natural selection.
Genomic islands of heterozygosity maintained across caribou populations despite inbreeding.
Woman the hunter: Ancient Andean remains challenge old ideas of who speared big game. Main question: does upper body strength difference not mattre? To be frank this seems try-hard.
How Perfectionism Has Made the Pandemic Worse.
Pushback on Xi’s Vision for China Spreads Beyond U.S.
“The Spectrum of Sex” Book Review.
“As people become more economically secure and the welfare state takes the role of civil society, the need for the social functions of religion diminishes”
I think the economic angle with the regard to secularization is clearly too reductive, otherwise the Saudis and Gulf countries would be on par with most Western Europe in terms of irreligion. Lots of government provided social welfare, but still lots of organic, ground-level religious fundamentalism. I am aware there are some growing atheist/secularist currents in the Arab world but the amount of social and legal pressure working against active secularists is still massive.
Even in a supposedly “secular” country like Turkey, overt religiosity may not be what it is in places like Saudi or Pakistan but the vast majority of Turks still consider themselves Muslim in an identitarian sense, they’re not at the point (yet anyway) of being post-Muslim in the way that the UK, Scandinavia, Australia are post-Christian.
Re; “Woman the hunter”, when I read this story back in November, I think I was reminded about how someone (Greg Cochran?) suggested that the New World might have been an absolute spree for the Siberian megafauna hunters once they entered it.
If that were true, perhaps some relaxation of constraint there, which was not the case for other humans of their time, who specialized much more into comparative advantage in productivity in food production (women gather and do various types of in-camp work like caring for children/elders and making clothing, men hunt).
Early human hunters, back before Pleistocene extinctions, might have been a bit less specialised at times. Then by the time we get to our sophisticated late Paleolithic / Mesolithic hunters, they’re absolutely much more specialised? I suppose my guess would be that this was something which perhaps happened in some human groups with unusually high amounts of available prey, but probably wasn’t the “optimal solution” on the whole.
I recall in a discussion Greg was involved in someone said that the spears were also found in the graves of children/adolescents, and thus that the spears were not necessarily owned/used by the people they were buried with.
because a massive wave of secularization has occurred since 2007
This isn’t speculation on my part, but rather a question because I don’t know.
Since the 90’s, media portrayals of Christianity and the religious, particularly in American cinema, are almost uniformly negative. More recently Western media seems to often infer that Christianity is responsible for everything from the Atlantic slave trade to historic LGBTQ oppression.
Can much of the decline in the West be attributable to terrible PR?
On your reaction to the Inglehart thesis: is it then that people’s faith in government is the more relevant factor in the strength of religion, or is it that their economic well-being and security that is more relevant? Because those are two separate things.
Case in point, the United States became a significantly more religious society between about 1970 and the early 90s, but aside from a couple recessions and Carter stagflation, most people’s economic well-being and disposable income improved during that time period. However, people lost a great deal of faith in government, between Watergate, the retreat from Vietnam, acceptance of detente with the USSR, the Iran hostage crisis, bad municipal corruption cases, and an inability to tackle crime waves. If we take this period of US as a guide, then it is faith in government which matters more. Economic well-being and faith in government are obviously not entirely unrelated, but it is easy to envision the alternatives of 1) a comprehensive but corrupt welfare state and 2) economic scarcity but a widely loved, popularly moral government (FDR and the New Deal in the 1930s), and that these alternatives may have differing effects on religiosity.
The big quick clay landslide in southern Norway.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTDw8PLo_5U&feature=emb_logo
Australian Aboriginal women hunt. They don’t have the upper body strength to throw a heavy hardwood spear with a spear thrower, but they can run, and what they do opportunistically is run down smaller prey and club it to death. They do this with perenties, which can be quite big and nasty. This evidently doesn’t happen with San and Hadza, so generalisation is obviously dumb. Actually the whole piece is dumb – high altitude adaptation has nothing to do with upper body strength.
About the women hunters – I imagine that, even if men were better hunters than women, could be better to have 20 strong hunters and 20 weak hunters than only 20 strong hunters (having to hunt for 40 people), if there was not a better thing to women do.
Depends on the method of hunting. If herding game towards waiting hunters with killing spears, or even driving animals off cliffs, then women and kids can help (so this is maybe the Middle Pleistocene model). But if stalking and then hitting from distance with bows, or spears with woomeras, like San and Aboriginal men, then it’s a solitary exercise or maybe two guys at most, and women and kids don’t have a role – in fact they are a liability wrt noise, scent.
I did think about atlatl darts, which were a lot shorter and lighter than Aboriginal spears, but even then, upper body strength has to be a factor in how hard you can hurl the thing. So there might have been the occasional woman who was successful at it, but on the mean, they must have been better off gathering stuff or getting small game, and leaving the hunting of the bigger animals to men.
The Nordic shield maiden thing has been shown by archaeology to be mythical. There was that one female grave richly furnished with weapons, but it doesn’t necessarily prove anything; or maybe she was just an exceptionally strong woman – you get the occasional outlier. Scythians had female warriors who fought together with men, but they fought as mounted archers, when upper body strength was much less of a factor.
My conclusion – hunting was never ‘gender neutral’ in the sense that men and women were completely interchangeable, at least among anatomically modern humans.
“Chinese Demography” discusses the obvious issues created by the demographic transition from a high total fertility regime ~6/woman to a sub 2 modern regime. His figures show that the transition began several years before the one child policy. Could be.
An issue he does not discuss is the boy/girl ratio.
https://fat-city-usa.blogspot.com/2019/05/mars-needs-women.html
From the view point of economic development, an issue he does not discuss is the impact of increasing wages for scarcer workers will have on exports.
The idea that any substantial number of people will emigrate to China is laughable.
The regime hates the idea of instability and unmanaged innovation. It is working as hard as it can to turn China into the perfect panopticon. But, demographic transition, including sex imbalances, are a deep source of instability, as would be responses like immigration. They want a static society, but, the world is dynamic.
I would still rather be us, than them.
https://mobile.twitter.com/iosif_lazaridis/status/1345920920762920960 – Iosif Laz commenting on the Henrich Thesis, interesting and encouraging to know that adna researchers at the highest level thinking about this topic and how to test (both by looking at data sources and new approaches from adna), in similar ways that this blog+comments, and in that thread benefits from Laz knowledge of Greece.
Re; Chinese demography, one point I’ve considered is that if East Asia as a whole does “super-age”, but manages to develop technology to mitigate the issues, that will likely have spillover benefits for nations in the West, who won’t so much need to draw on migration and whose older citizens will then have a stronger bargaining position w/ regard to migration (rather than “The price for elder care is *everything*.”). You’ll go from more “One Billion Americans, or else dependency disaster, and so prospective migrants hold the cards”, to “We can take it or leave it (and if we take it, we dictate terms)”.
So from a Western perspective, we would perhaps almost want them to super-age; either they’ll develop tech we can import and adapt to solve the same problem, or it will reduce China’s relative power. Both are “wins” (assuming we still hold the PRC as the “Greater of two evils”).
Dilbert Genomics:
https://dilbert.com/strip/2021-01-04
@Matt:
“and whose older citizens will then have a stronger bargaining position w/ regard to migration”
The pro-immigration argument will just shift even more towards issues of justice (“global south is poor because we’re rich, you can’t have free movement of goods without free movement of people”), making up for colonialism (“Africa can’t be a prison for Africans” – that’s literally the position of many African “intellectuals”) and promotion of openness and diversity as goods in themselves. A lot of the immigration to European countries in recent decades doesn’t make economic sense at all, so I wouldn’t expect anything China-related to change perceptions.
“The main question in 2021 I have is if COVID-19 serves as a natural experiment that drives reaffiliation of people who lose faith in government.”
Unlikely. If anything, COVID-19 will have the opposite effect. If one large scale institution, government, cannot be trusted, the default reasoning is that ALL large scale institutions, including religion, are also inherently corrupt and cannot be trusted.
This fits with Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy as well as the inherent dysfunctional nature of bureaucracy. This is the primary reason why I am even more of a libertarian today than I ever was when I was young. Libertarianism is the only political world-view that recognizes this reality of bureaucracy. All other world-views, both left and right, are based on the assumed efficacy of bureaucracy and are, therefor, wrong.
“the fraction of ancient basal (south) east eurasian (AASI) is really high in south asia. far lower in se asia. why?
i think one hypothesis has to be indigenous shift in mode of production at similar time as farmers push in from NW”
The migration of a southern China population into SEAsia was a movement of farmers which displaced local hunter gatherer populations. Likewise, the migration of a/few Anatolian farmer population(s) into Europe was a more numerous group of farmers (more numerous because of farming) displacing less numerous local hunter gatherers. In south Asia’s case I think the people who started farming were the locals themselves. Once this local farming got big enough to trade with the near eastern and middle eastern farmers.
Where I differ from Razib in this case is I think that the local populations began farming well before there was an appreciable movement of farmers from the middle east to south Asia. This would strengthen the position that the Iran-like ancestry in south Asia predates a large movement of farmers moving into south Asia. I do think the latter had a contribution since there are different ratios of Hotu-like vs Ganj Dareh-like ancestries in Shahr BA1 and Shahr BA2. If you use Ganj Dareh and Hotu as the only Iran-like inputs, then Shahr BA2 seems to have more Hotu than Ganj Dareh while Shahr BA1 seems to have a similar amount of both.
> based on the assumed efficacy of bureaucracy and are, therefor, wrong
Bureaucracy apparently worked fine in Taiwan, Korea, Australia, and other places.
Covid and religion: some of the most cohesive religious groups have rejected social distancing, with tragic results. Those results haven’t shaken the faith of adherents as much as it should, but I expect it’s done some damage, so Razib’s experiment will be affected.
Colin Wright and sex denialism: if it’s so prevalent, he could give some examples. I’ve no doubt the examples exist. I suspect it’s like the criticisms of the 1619 Project – much ado over a few errors, magnified by the 1619 authors’ inability to admit errors.
Women hunters: I’ve heard the criticism that it’s not this high percentage, but some of the same critics accept it could be 10%. Even that strikes me as very high and an interesting contrast to farming civilizations.
Hot off the press: “The Lab-Leak Hypothesis For decades, scientists have been hot-wiring viruses in hopes of preventing a pandemic, not causing one. But what if …?” By Nicholson Baker
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-escape-theory.html
Includes long quotes from Alina Chan.
The significance of this article is not the information it contains. It is that it was written by a homme du gauche (his novels include a fantasy about assassinating George w. Bush) and published by a mainstream media outlet: New York Magazine. National Review, a conservative magazine published a lot about the idea: “The Wuhan Lab-Leak Hypothesis Goes Mainstream” By Jim Geraghty | January 4, 2021
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/01/the-wuhan-lab-leak-hypothesis-goes-mainstream/
links back to articles in the spring.
The Baker Article is about 12,000 words.
Brian Schmidt, one of the central theses of the 1619 project was that slavery/cotton was the driving force behind American industrial capitalism, and the main piece of evidence was a basic accounting error made by one of the authors that led them to overstate cotton’s fraction of US GDP by an order of magnitude (saying it was nearly 50% when it was closer to 5%). They did not just make a few minor errors. The overarching narratives of the project largely hinge on the errors they made.
Razib: and apropos of nothing, but the HTML title of this page is:
Open Thread – 02/03/2021 – Gene Expression
The url says:
https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2021/01/03/open-thread-02-03-2021-gene-expression/
I was a little concerned that it was already February and that I had missed my granddaughter’s birthday and a dentist appointment.
@German_reader, yes there are other arguments, and new technology that reduces dependency on migrants in aging populations won’t help nations that just go full Merkel (or more broadly, most typical of Germanic nations right now) on their migration policy. But I think it would provide at least some balancing factor for those that retain more Canadian, Australian, Japanese (even American, barring illegal migration) systems which largely are not based on that logic and filter quite extensively. If anyone retains such systems in the future (hopefully the Extremely Online Left Wing Millennial people continue to be rejected by reality).
@DaThang, that is one possibility, but remember also: 1) East Asians in the Eastern Steppe weren’t displaced by Western pastoralists, despite being HG, 2) East Africans weren’t genetically completely displaced by Near Eastern agropastoralists, despite being HG. It’s not that the only scenarios where populations were not replaced were those in which they were already beginning to farm / pastoralize.
It may be that South Asia just had some more survival because of being a tougher territory for farmers, climatically, and had a higher population density.
And Euro HG still made up 30% of ancestry in Globular Amphora for ex. Reduced by subsequent migrations which replaced 50% ancestry. That’s not so different from a scenario of, say, being 50% ancestry of South Asians in pre-Indo European times, then replacement being only 30%.
@Matt
Most of what you have listed could be understood as pastoralists moving into HG zones. Pastoralists tend to not have farmer tier population density and are more thinly spread out. Furthermore, the GAC resurgence was a particularly strong resurgence among all HG resurgences in Europe’s neolithic. The fact that we need to go to the extent of finding the most extreme resurgences of HGs in Europe (GAC and if the rumors are true, then some Belgian farmers as well) for a comparable situation to what would be the average in south Asia is telling.
I haven’t shut myself off to other possibilities, but this one, at least to me just seems to be the more likely one of the list as of now.
yeah, i wasn’t posting from the future! thanks walter
@DaThang: Hmm… I don’t know if the GAC are the strongest resurgence per se. Iberian farmers are comparable (though that may not be a totally independent event!), and the Latvia BA population bears a very strong imprint of further HG resurgence. Pitted Ware Culture has even more HG ancestry of course. It’s not an outlier.
There are a number of populations in Insular SE Asia who are admixed with Austronesians and quite a strong imprint of pre-existing insular people who weren’t farming at all – like Batak, Bajo, Agta, Aeta etc. The imprint is particularly low on Mainland SEA because they’ve been repeatedly subject to migrations from China and then India from multiple directions, not just initial dilution. Less the case along the lines of Austronesian expanse (where they enter territories with just no people)
It’s not so hard for me to imagine a situation where you have some ASI population with 2x as much AASI input as we find among HG among MN European farmers. I don’t think there’s so good a reason to assume that European HGs were at the maximum possibility for relative HG density relative to farmers. I don’t think you could impute from this that populations must have started agriculture – direct evidence is kind of the king there. If there’s direct evidence, great, and I am open-minded to that but the genetics doesn’t really strengthen my confidence level too much.
The overall HG resurgence in Europe ends up at around 20%. Cases of more than that like the rumored nearly 50% of Belgium form outliers on levels comparable to populations that would be much more common in south Asia like Shahr BA3. The least AASI enriched population looks like a periphery/outgroup (Shahr BA1) and the other local-looking population aside from Shahr BA3 (Shahr BA2) can be modeled as being over 30% simulated AASI. Those numbers for the more regular locals are quite a bit higher than the regular number for late resurgence in Europe.
The Batak and Aeta that you mention are clearly outliers and have been classified as distinct even on an outright physiological level in comparison to regular south-east Asian populations. Maybe it is because they are relics? Looking at south east Asian late neolithic to bronze age samples, the fits aren’t good but the results are under 30% pre-migration ancestry. Still, this is a little more comparable to the less AASI admixed bronze age south Asians than the regular European cases are, but notably less than people like Aeta who are obvious outliers. But of course the BA/late neolithic fits were bad so who knows.
>It’s not so hard for me to imagine a situation where you have some ASI population with 2x as much AASI input as we find among HG among MN European farmers.
Sure you can have similar ratios between the most and the lest admixed ones, but the basal level admixture of one group looks more like the high end admixture in the other group, which in general indicates that the basal level admixture was higher in south Asia than in Europe. Though this isn’t a knock down argument because-
>I don’t think there’s so good a reason to assume that European HGs were at the maximum possibility for relative HG density relative to farmers.
This is a good argument. I don’t have any estimates for the number of HGs in south Asia, so I cannot build a solid case against it, all I can say is that I haven’t read a paper that describes an unusually high density. In effect this alone can counter the argument of Iran/AASI ratios to a neutral stance.
> I don’t think you could impute from this that populations must have started agriculture – direct evidence is kind of the king there.
This is not the only indication Matt. Another indication is grains of the early neolithic of Pakistan being overwhelmingly local undomesticated wild grains, at over 90% of the total. Then there is the rise of the frequency of grains domesticated in the near east later on going through the bronze age. If the movement of most middle easterners was through farmers and not through HGs, they gave up the use of their own grains, only to bring it back later on, which didn’t make much sense. And while I haven’t dug as deeply with the EEF material culture, most of their grain were from the near East. Feel free to post proof to the contrary if it exists. Of course, this is once again, only one of the arguments for a pre-neolithic migration. The last of the major 3 arguments is the diversity of cranial types in the north Indian sites, there are what seem to be 2 types: a mesocranic/dolicho-mesocranic and chamaecranic type and the other being a hyper-dolichocranic/low dolichocranic and ortho-hypsicranic type. I suspect that the more chamaecranic type is inherited from AASI (since paleolithic Sri Lankans have been described as chamaecranic) while the higher and more dolichocephalic skulls could be inherited from the Iran HGs. I am aware of the counter being just local adaptation making some skulls look more like the Hotu skulls.
Of course, that isn’t the end of it, and if DNA indicates no Iran-like ancestry prior to the neolithic, then I will not hold this view.
In summary for this post, there are 3 arguments:
-The Iran/AASI ratio which can be currently neutralized by an agnosticism of the HG density in south Asia.
-The grain distribution which could be neutralized by either it taking very long to get the near eastern package adapted locally or the farmers just making life harder for themselves I guess? The former is weird since I haven’t heard of a lot of differences between Indian and near Eastern wheat, though do bring up something if you know about it.
-The diversity of local cranial types which could be neutralized by it being a local differentiation of unknown specific causes.
I link to a couple of articles on how geography and economics influences regional cultures in lasting way. The full papers are both worth reading.
“local soil heterogeneity limited the ability of American farmers to learn from the experience of their neighbors, and that this contributed to their “traditional individualism.” Consistent with this hypothesis, I establish that historically, U.S. counties with a higher degree of soil heterogeneity displayed weaker communal ties. I provide causal evidence on the formation of this pattern . . . documenting a reduction in the strength of farmers’ communal ties following migration to a soil-heterogeneous county, relative to farmers that moved to a soil-homogeneous county. Using the same design, I also show that soil heterogeneity did not affect the social ties of non-farmers. The impact of soil heterogeneity is long-lasting, still affecting culture today.”
“we find that areas with greater historical exposure to homesteading are poorer and more rural today.”
http://washparkprophet.blogspot.com/2021/01/geographic-causes-for-american-culture.html
DaThang: Another indication is grains of the early neolithic of Pakistan being overwhelmingly local undomesticated wild grains, at over 90% of the total.
Evidence of early farming but not grains related to Near East varieties and appear to be local wild type, and definitely farming not just extensive gathering of grains (a la Natufian)?
If so that itself sounds like good evidence for farming subsistence before migrations from Near East… Direct evidence. I just don’t think the local HG proportion tells us v much either way as lots of ways that could’ve happened.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160303221610/http://archaeology.up.nic.in/doc/mn_jfj.pdf
“Though the exact dating of the beginning of the settlement is still difficult to assess, we can say that the first levels of the Neolithic period at Mehrgarh provides us, as early as the 8th millennium BC, with the first evidence of the progressive setting of a farming economy in the north western part of the Indo-Pakistani subcontinent.
Lorenzo Costantini has shown that the plant assemblage of Period I is dominated by naked sixrow barley which accounts for more than 90% of the so far recorded seeds and imprints. He has also pointed out the sphaerococcoid form of the naked-barley grains with a short compact spike with shortened internodes and small rounded seeds. According to him, such characteristics in the aceramic Neolithic levels can be ascribed to probably cultivated but perhaps not fully domesticated plants. Domestic hulled six-row barley (H. vulgare, subsp. vulgare) and wild and domestic hulled two-row barley (H. vulgare subsp. spontaneum and H. vulgare subsp. distichum) have also been recorded, but in much smaller quantities. According to Zohary quoted by R.H. Meadow, the distribution of wild barley extends today to the head of the Bolan Pass. It is therefore likely that local wild barleys could have been brought under cultivation in the Mehrgarh area. Costantini has also identified a small amount of domestic einkorn (hulled: Triticum monococcum), domestic emmer (hulled: T. turgidum subsp. dicoccum) and a
free-threshing form which can be referred to as Triticum durum (Fig. 10). So far no morphological wild wheat has been identified in South Asia.
Therefore the small amount of wheat seeds at Mehrgarh, Period I, needs further explanation since obviously wheat has not a great significance in the agricultural activities of the aceramic period.”
Additionally:
“In the early levels of Period I, hunting activities provide most of the meat.10 As we have already mentioned it, Mehrgarh is situated on the margins of foothill, plain and riverine environments. Quoting Meadow11 “”the wild animal remains that dominate the earliest levels of the “”aceramic
Neolithic”………reflect this situation with 12 forms of “”big game” represented: wild sheep (Ovis orientalis) and goats (Capra aegragrus) from the hills, gazelle (Gazella bennetti) from the foothills
and plain (Fig. 11), wild asses (Equus hemionus) and blackbuck (Antilope cervicapra) from drier plains, and nilgai (Boselaphus tragocamelus), large
deer (Cervus(?)duvauceli), smaller deer (Axis (?)axis), boar (Sus scrofa), water buffalo (Bubalus arnee), wild cattle (Bos namadicus), and possibly elephant (Elaphas maximus) from better-watered
areas.”
Goats also pop up in the 2nd and 3rd levels. The earliest layer has evidence of hunting and evidence of grain exploitation, most of them were local, while some were non-local. I suspect that in such an early stage, these were likely from trade, while a western Iran component may have moved in to contribute to Shahr BA1 and a little bit to Shahr BA2 later on. Whether it was full agriculture or just wild grain exploitation isn’t relevant because most people, when talking about the neolithic of south Asia and it’s origin in the middle east use Mehrgarh as one of the earliest locations of a middle eastern spread. But this location’s earliest layer has subsistence strategies which don’t make much sense in the farmer/cultivator migration scenario.
As I have stated earlier, there seems to be a west-Iran component in both Shahr BA1 and Shahr BA2, less in 2 than 1 even though both have similar amounts of Hotu/eastern Iran mesolithic ancestry. I think that this west Iran component arrived later on, perhaps in the copper age. Regardless of the details of what happened later on, the origin of the neolithic and post-mesolithic subsistence in south Asia are both almost entirely local. I think that an eastern Iran population moved into northern south Asia in the early mesolithic or just before the north India mesolithic and mixed with AASI to produce the mesolithic north Indian mixed population. This population then moved towards a different mode of food production on its own to make the earliest level of north India’s neolithic. Then, trade started and near eastern domesticated crops long with some near eastern animals arrive. Eventually, perhaps by the copper age, there was demographic/genetic input from western Iranians. The reason I say copper age is because eastern Iranians of the copper age show a lot of the western Iranian farmer ancestry around that time. In fact, copper age eastern Iranians were mostly western Iran late neolithic in their ancestry with only a little bit of the local mesolithic hunter-gatherer ancestry remaining (perhaps because the migrant farmers were more numerous). In my view, if northern south Asian mixed mesolithic HGs didn’t come up with the new food production which boosted their numbers, then there would have been a much greater demographic turnover, on the level of what is seen in Europe and eastern Iran.
Basically the whole south Asia’s prehistory was very similar to Europe’s prehistory claim only makes sense in an alternate scenario where the later copper age migrations produce a large demographic turnover of local mesolithic HGs, with it being followed by the steppe invasions. As it stands, I think the actual scenario was more like a mesolithic migration, local incubation, followed by a local population boom with a neolithic which increased numbers enough not to be flooded by copper age Iranians. This of course is later on followed by bronze age steppe invasions.
I have posted a rather lengthy comment regarding neolithic south Asia. Just posting this message because it wasn’t spam.
@DaThang, OK, thanks for the details!
…
New paper by Kilinc and collaborators – https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/7/2/eabc4587
Includes some relatively old Northern East Asian adna with a 16.9kya (14900 BCE!) date, one of the earliest representatives of post-LGM Northern East Asia. Seems to be east and north of Lake Baikal – more East Asian ancestry than Mal’ta boy (MA-1) from 24kya, possibly less East Asian ancestry than Native Americans, but it’s a bit unclear as they don’t do any sort of qpGraph modelling that I can see for whatever reason (unfortunately).
In another point they measure heterozygosity among some ancient samples.
Interesting that the early 6000 BCE Trans-Baikal sample has quite a large heterozygosity / Conditional Nucleotide Diversity compared to Loschbour, and also true for 4000 BCE Cis-Baikal hunter gatherers.
Some comparison of CND/heterozygosity (from papers by Kilinc and others) – https://imgur.com/a/Zmj8JuI
Tentatively seems like those HG groups in East Asia (who did have some innovations like pottery) may have been evolving in relatively larger and/or less bottlenecked populations than pre-Neolithic populations in West Eurasia (where individuals maintained more heterozygosity).
Possibly the Last Glacial Maximum really fragmented and reduced population sizes in West Eurasia much more?
Perhaps Ringbauer’s methods used in the recent paper on Caribbean to estimate population size will be helpful here.
(Science media coverage: https://phys.org/news/2021-01-genome-people-asia-stone-age.html)
https://phys.org/news/2021-01-tasmanian-tiger-pups-extraordinary-similar.html .
Turns out not thylacine and wolf not just a shared morphology and adults, but as infants too and a shared ontogenetic trajectory. Claims that marsupials limited in morphology by requirements of early life stages turns out not to matter too much for this.
Always interested in commonalities between thylacine and wolves. Classic example of convergent evolution. (I always think about whether marsupial hominids were possible).
…
Other things worth reading today perhaps worth reading David Shot on power of non-violent protest (though he claims it is more favourable to enhancing left wing, anti-law and order agenda… Let’s see if that’s true)…
Mark S., I said a “few errors” not a few “minor errors” and I agree that one’s an error, which I recall was primarily featured in a single article in the series.
While not minor, it doesn’t matter that much to me – cotton and slavery was still an important part of the American economy, especially the South, and therefore a driving part of our history for economic as well as ideological and cultural reasons.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.08.425895v1 – Human nuclear dna from Upper Paleolithic (26kya) Satsurblia cave, from *sediment* alone. (In a sense an advance on sampling copious human mtdna from sentiment).
Pretty amazing. *Very* low quality (which prevents many formal stats), but seems like the roughly contemporary Dzudzuana cave samples, much more than akin to the later Iran_N like CHG from the Mesolithic/Late Upper Paleolithic.
However also note that in their Fig 2, the Dzudzuana sample (and this sediment sample) plots *much* closer to the Iran_N/CHG than in Lazaridis pre-preprint. Look more “pan-Near East” and less Anatolia affine.
Excited to see what the upper limits of this technique will be, particularly if we can enter another era of crashing sequencing costs. Will it be possible to get decent, if coverage samples of sediment from Tibet that reveals “Denisovan” lineages, or to sample later periods which are currently “dark” in adna due to practice of cremation, and where we can’t really see transition (e.g. Britain around 3000-2600 BCE for’ex)?
I have not read the 1619 Project, but would comment that many of the folk economic ideas that seem associated the same ilk of enthusiasts, which stress the role of slavery and colonialism in present day wealth, just seem completely economically foolish.
Say the profits from slavery, colonies, etc. had been absolutely decisive in funding initial phases of industrialisation or generating supplies (raw materials) or demand (markets) for that. It’s not really historically true at all as far as I know (sums were generally small as total of economies and were not particularly crucial to funding early industrialisation). But assume for argument that it was.
Well, even then, the industrial machinery and the energy revolutions generated by the initial phases of industrialisation still steadily dropped in price and was available to any later industrialising country to complete catchup industrialisation. Typically by specialising in agriculture, or freeing up a workforce for industry and attracting investment, then using accumulated capital to purchase or copy industrial machinery freely and rather cheaply available on world markets (for some mix of export and protected domestic consumption), taking advantage of locally low wage levels in labour absorbing industries. This is what happened in Europe, in Japan/Taiwan/Korea, etc. Where countries failed to do so, it is mostly up to the capacity of their post-colonial institutions to understand and take advantage of those possibilities (revolutionary socialists with wacky ideas about development, dominance by rentier landlords with little interest or expertise in productive business, kleptocrats, etc).
The profits that actually existed from slavery or colonies (where any of this stuff was actually profitable, which was not always, frequently limping on with crony state support), they did not just sit with the people who made them, and accumulate and compound steadily to their descendents for hundreds of years. Rather were paid out in the form of rising prices (just as Spain’s colonial gold and silver bounty did not sit in Spain), or otherwise distributed through the economy in the form of funding businesses which competed on price and so on, and the results of all this was all distributed through the global economy, far *away* from anyone who actually had anything to do with the initial enterprise.
Add: Part of the reason I worry about this is because chalking all accumulated economic progress up to colonialism and inheritance, and taking it away from institutions gives a great excuse to ransack those institutions and redistribute their power and resources.
And in the West at the moment we seem to a fairly huge class of now middle-aging college educated persons who are basically upset that there isn’t that much world demand for their skills, while there is great world demand for Western housing assets as a safe port of call for investment – for the savings glut in East Asia, for oligarch wealth from Russia, for older people in West who’ve accumulated wealth and who find no safe port of call for investment in retirement nest eggs in zero and negative interest rates, for the “Best and Brightest” Asian migrants to Western countries. So relatively low increases of income relative to housing asset price rises, and rents become a proportionately larger share of their income, or housing becomes unaffordable.
More and more among this class of folks seem like they would be happy tear up existing institutions in order to fund the illusions of a “solid Middle Class” owner-occupier lifestyle for themselves. Giving them any excuse to do so is pretty dangerous. Particularly one that they can use on social media to be “performatively Woke” and claim shows a commitment to the emerging values of activism and openness as the highest moral good.
In that new pca, pc1 showed 0.8% variance and pc2 showed 0.4%. Is it because of the low coverage?
@DaThang, I don’t think so. It may be because some papers label these axes with “% Total Variation Explained” in an absolute sense, while others label axes with “% of the Total Variation Explained by dimensions identified by PCA”. Like PC1 may explain 50% of the variation that is explained by PCA dimensions, but this is only actually 1% of the total variation. You could always comment to the authors to check.
I wonder how they align with the rest on global25.
As for this technique it will provide more instances of ancient DNA but they will likely be lower coverage than the conventional methods.
It’ll be interesting if Global25 has enough overlap to look at the samples. I expect that the sample, if it gets on, will be like other largely non-ancestral Upper Paleolithic samples; generally related to present day regional populations, but compressed to the centre of PCs. I still really want Salkhit on G25 (https://science.sciencemag.org/content/370/6516/579.abstract).
Yeah, per unit of cost the coverage will always be lower, but I’m wondering if costs of sequencing really dropped whether it’s in theory possible to start converging on what we would currently consider good coverage by current standards or whether the technique is just limited. If it’s good coverage then that opens up to some contexts where we know people were about but we have no surviving intact unburnt bone evidence.
It can definitely at least open up cold trails.
Literally cold trails given the temperatures at which sediment is mostly likely to preserve ancient dna ; )