I’m now caught up on Not Born Yesterday. So now in sync with Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War. The book club is back on as a dual-core/two-cylinder enterprise.
Thailand reports 829 new coronavirus cases. Thailand seems like it is losing control! I hope not.
Not Yet Desperate, Japan and South Korea Plod Toward Vaccinations. Hard to second-guess Japan and South Korea. They figured things out early.
See this report in WSJ, The NFL’s Covid-19 Finding That Saved the Season. “The virus, in some instances, traveled farther than six feet—especially in small, poorly ventilated areas. And masks, more than the duration of contact, seemed to matter a lot.”
This week I have a podcast with John Hawks up. It’s 1 hour and 40 minutes. We talk about a lot of issues, including what it was like to be multi-regionalism-friendly and arguing for adaptive introgression in humans in the 2000’s, to his stand against the Reich-Willerslev duopoly in ancient DNA. I’ve known John for fifteen years, so we had a lot to talk about.
This is for subscribers, so a two-week delay to being posted on Unsupervised Learning.
Hinduism is not false consciousness , it is “Planet X”. Some Indians have the same fixation as modern Western elites on language as the key to reality, rather than language being a tool to describe reality. Hinduism wasn’t “invented” when it was named. The name put a label on something that was already there.
I was a guest on a YouTube show about ancient history. The episode is titled Sumerian Origins and Ancient DNA. Apparently, Reddit’s anthropology channel refused to post it because they didn’t want to platform me after reading the Undark hit piece. Journalism, isn’t it a great profession?
3-D PCA of world populations (one of the attendees of my recent workshop made this).
Book Review | The Spectrum of Sex: Chapter 1. Colin Wright.
Lessons from A Pandemic Anniversary. Zeynep.
Somatic mutational profiles and germline polygenic risk scores in human cancer.
TikTok Rival’s $5.4 Billion IPO Draws Big Investor Following. In some ways 2021 is stupid. Billions for vines-with-machine-learning.
BTW, Lilly Singh has branched into a parody series of Indian Matchmaker, with herself as Sima, and actually got Aparna to join in.
Joke aside, I think it does show something interesting where Canadian-Indians are much more comfortable actually engaging with their communities, while Indian-Americans like to claim the status, while actually being quite American in their tastes, identity, and psychology.
Could be because Indo-Canadians constitute 4% of the population while Indian-Americans constitute 1% of the population. More assimilation pressure on the latter?
Jesus Christ. Japan and s. Korea didn’t “figure out” anything. They didn’t do shit. Have you learned nothing in the last nine months? Are you ever going to admit you were wrong?
@ Harry Jecs
My understanding is there is also a class difference. Indian-Americans are overwhelmingly from educated/high-caste background, and comfortably slot into the managerial class in the 1st (or at worst 2nd generation). In contrast, Canada has admitted more of a wide diversity of Indians than the U.S. On average Indo-Canadians are still comfortably middle class, but they’re still a bit below average. Probably more socially akin to Vietnamese or Filipino immigrants in the U.S. as a whole than Indian-Americans.
The Indo-Canadian community is also plurality Sikh (about 35%, IIRC) which is quite different from the USA, where only around 5% of the Indian community is Sikh.
That comment left me no more enlightened than I was before. Could you actually make a case?
Due to Chinese Government sanction on Trump administration officials, Pompeo lost his post-trump job with seven digit income at Koch industries. Now he works at Hudson Institute as researcher (about $80k, much higher than others at about $50k). Well, income dropped below six digit white house job. A price to pay for anti-China activities. Ouch!
https://www.npr.org/2021/01/20/958996415/china-slaps-sanctions-on-28-trump-administration-officials-including-mike-pompeo
The sanctioning of individuals for “anti-China” sentiments seems like such political gold for guys like Pompeo; they can just go out there now and say “I’m unimpeachably clean from Chinese influence, and I’ve suffered for it, so you can trust me on the topic”, while diversification away from China in their careers will probably be fairly-easy (contrary to the CCP’s delusions, there is no “indispensable market”, as they’re finding in their attempts at trade war with Australia…).
should have titled it guru https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/razib-khan-pagans-christians-antiwoke-mage/
@Matt
I have another question for you. Do you have any records of ROH for Sunghir indicating how bottlenecked the Sunghir population was especially in comparison to other near contemporary samples like Goyet Q116-1 and Dolni Vestonice?
Razib,
Reading through your American Conservative interview, my question to you is this: Why do you think the best analogy for wokism is the rise of Christianity, and not something more contemporary?
As I have said in the past, I feel like wokism is fundamentally some funhouse mirror version of Victorian morality. Like Victorian morality, wokism is strongest in the upper classes, with the working class paying it no more than lip service. Both are also performative moral frameworks, where appearing “right-minded” in front of peers is seen as more important than private conduct. Victorianism held it as being very important that you spend long periods in self-reflection looking for internal faults (sound familiar?). There was also a strong element of self-censorship (witness Bowdler’s “family Shakespeare”) and “social justice activism” (abolitionism, attempts to regulate child labor and animal cruelty, general patronizing concern over the “less fortunate,” etc.).
I raise this analogy because if you look at things through the lens of a more recent profound shift in elite morality, and not a “fall of Rome” scenario things seem…well…less millenarian.
Anti-Woke Magu of Old Religion: what was old is new again.
The New must fight the New.
@Karl
There’s definitely a strong element of class manners and etiquette to wokeness; some people are even very explicit about this, with “It’s just basic manners!” as if there’s no difference between #BLM and knowing which fork to use for your salad. It’s a part of why Trump, a rich man who flaunted his wealth and behaved like a boor from Queens, so irritated people in elite circles. If you have seen the blockbuster Titanic, he, and other wealthy or successful people who don’t do woke stuff, are akin to the nouveau riche uncouth, folksy woman from Denver who everyone of a finer background, older money, is embarrassed by; ironic because Trump’s family wealth goes back further than those who made their money in tech over the past 30 years or in finance over the past 50.
But obscure Victorian manners, while frequently couched in the language of morality, did not have the character of a religious awakening. This is where I think Razib is coming from in comparing wokeness to Christianity, because it really does seem like people are embracing this to fill a spiritual void in their life in a way that is more than just embracing manners, like how plenty of baby boomers started having Moral Majority-style religious awakenings in the 80s. One of the troubles with comparing wokeness to Christianity (and having read Rod Dreher for nearly 10 years now, he similarly makes comparisons to the fall of pagan Rome), though, is that it lacks transcendental qualities, a similar fault that killed actually-existing communism (and likely would have killed Nazism within a generation had it somehow survived WWII or had WWII never happened). People can only worship the magic of black girl hair or queering Harry Potter so long before they just stop believing, because black girls and their hair and the LGBT community and J.K. Rowling are real people that everyone can experience and interact with, much like people in the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact countries had ceased to believe in communism by the dawn of the Brezhnev era, because communism was all around them. Or, for that matter, how belief in the white man’s burden to bring civilization to the world was mostly a one-and-a-half-generation phenomenon of the end of the 19th Century and the beginning of the 20th, but had collapsed in most polite sectors of society by 1940 after the horrors of the WWI, the chaos of the 20s, and a collapse in European living standards in the 30s. Wokeness looks like a strange inversion of the white man’s burden and pre-WWI a priori world white supremacy, a mirror image of Lothrop Stoddard and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and wokeness’s own complex metaphysics and navel-gazing interiority is sure to crash at some point into empirical reality (let’s hope faster than it took communism to crash).
Christianity, by contrast, was always explicitly transcendental, based in another world; the historical Jesus had been dead for nearly 200 years by the time Constantine converted. It was easy for early Christian martyrs, and those who knew them, to believe that their suffering would be rewarded, because there was absolutely nothing based on Earth or in empirical reality to suggest that they were wrong in their faith.
Not for me to answer of course, but, I don’t know that the purpose of selecting and expressing an analogy is exactly to interrogate whether Woke is apocalyptic and Millennarian and revolutionary in spirit. To find a way of looking at it or a better analytical frame (or one that seems more comforting!). The purpose is to express that it feels like, and is believed to be, those things?
(Though I appreciate the thoughts and extra analytical frame nonetheless).
@DaThang, possibly in the original paper or a supplement in one of the preprints by Ceballos or Ringbauer on ancient RoH detection, last year? Remember the original Sunghir paper had some commentary on inbreeding avoidance. I will have a look when I can.
I don’t think the Ceballos paper or the supplements refer to Sunghir. The other paper’s supplements had Sunghir 1 listed in the steppe section and Vestonice in the Eastern Europe section. Sunghir’s total bar was shorter than Vestonice’s and was roughly as high as that of Ust Ishim. Though there were different color sections of the bars and idk what they represent.
Pompeo was not sanctioned for anti-China *sentiments*. If you think that is all it was, you know nothing.
Well, in any case, the Party speaks for itself, with its usual level of rationality and eloquence:
“Over the past few years, some anti-China politicians in the United States, out of their selfish political interests and prejudice and hatred against China and showing no regard for the interests of the Chinese and American people, have planned, promoted and executed a series of crazy moves which have gravely interfered in China’s internal affairs, undermined China’s interests, offended the Chinese people, and seriously disrupted China-U.S. relations.”
(https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202101/1213458.shtml)
For anyone concerned about their governments running a policy uninfluenced by those kind of punishments (or “consequences” if preferred), that strengthens the case for conscious decoupling.
Decoupling? You’re dreaming. More American capital is flowing into China now than ever before. Guess where most of it is flowing through? Yes, the region that Pompeo tried unsuccessfully to destroy with ample bipartisan support in Congress, targeting individuals with sanctions (which is why he was sanctioned in return), among other things.
Contrary to Razib’s assertion a while ago, that region is not over, it is only just beginning.
You’re wrong about Australia as well. Is there anything you are right about?
Wrong that a trade war exists, or wrong that there is successful diversification away from Chinese markets in response to politically motivated pressure?
It’s not a trade war as far as Australia is concerned because it has no weapons to fight a trade war with and doesn’t want one, but no one is answering the phone, and New Zealand is lecturing to Morrison on how to successfully manage a relationship with your biggest trade partner; and what hurts is that the Kiwis are right. And they continue to be far better at rugby as well. How embarrassing. Australia could easily have avoided shooting itself in the foot without compromising any principles, but didn’t – it was too busy boot licking a gang of thugs that is now no longer in power, for absolutely no benefit. How stupid.
You can ask the barley growers, wine producers, lobster fishermen and coal miners how successful they are in finding alternative markets, and you can ask all of the other producers how nervous they are that they might be next. You can ask the universities how well they are doing without all of those Mainland students. Answer: they are all hurting like hell, and it is a certainty that some of the universities will not survive.
Western Australia is exporting more iron ore to China than ever before, but they are watching very nervously to see how China goes in finding alternative suppliers. Brazil has plenty, the mines just need to be developed. If the iron ore miners lose China as a market, there just isn’t anywhere for all of that to go.
Alternative analyses:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-column-russell-commodities-china-aust-idUSKBN29W0HE – 27/01/2021 – “China is paying a heavy toll for its efforts to punish Australia by banning or restricting certain commodity imports, while conversely Australia seems to have avoided any serious financial ramifications so far…
But the data also show that Australia’s overall exports haven’t really suffered, with December shipments of 33.82 million tonnes being the best month in 2020…
It’s not just coal where Australia seems to be more than holding its own in the trade dispute: exports of cereals rose to A$1.19 billion in December, the highest on record and almost three times the value of shipments in November.
China imposed an 80.5% tariff on imports of Australian barley in May last, collapsing the trade between the two nations. But while Australian barley farmers were initially hit hard, they have successfully managed to switch to alternative markets or plant other crops.”
And they perhaps will think twice in future about pivoting back to a market dependent on the Party’s rash political whims, if they can.
https://www.argusmedia.com/en/news/2174880-australias-chinese-coal-exports-pivot-to-india-update – “Australian thermal coal exports to China slumped to a near decade low in November while shipments to India reached a record high, as Beijing’s informal import ban drove a shift in trade flows.”
We shall see. In general, over the most recent period I have been looking at such things, attempts for large importing markets to use that for their ends in politics or trade negotiations largely fail. The EU got nowhere with Britain, even facing “cliff edge Brexit” on that. Trump got something out of his negotiations, but that seems mostly being willing to renegotiate for his voters’ and backers’ interest; his admin’s attempts to actually use US import market size specifically seem fairly toothless.
If the CCP bet for the future is on using market power to dictate politics, I would say that’s not a strong bet; certainly developed countries really just do not seem to ever feel the need to hand away political and trade initiative for market access. They may have a stronger bet with capturing regulation through market size and setting standards (as EU often does to some degree today) and tech infrastructure. But that probably depends on convincing the world it is not risky.
The Argus? LOL. I was expecting a better class of reading material.
The 5 warmest winters in history, and then they got lucky. That’s like disproving the gambler’s fallacy. Come back next winter.
“If the CCP bet for the future is on using market power to dictate politics, I would say that’s not a strong bet.”
I agree. They weren’t. The various Australian barbs by a couple of clueless Prime Ministers were totally gratuitous. Why do you think New Zealand was lecturing its best mate Australia on how to go about international relations without compromising principles? And a former Prime Minister who has a better understanding of China and the Chinese? Never mind. I know a brick wall when I see one.
A very good piece on Australia and China from the very good Tanner Greer.
The reason I was talking about Sunghir 1’s ROH is because the clavicle of that sample is exceptionally large, and the femur is correspondingly large as well. Femoral head diameter is not the highest, but the clavicle size far exceeds other fossil ancient humans both archaic and modern with larger femur heads. As such a paper which discussed this over half a decade ago speculated that it may be from inbreeding. However the 2017 Sunghir paper indicates possible additional Neanderthal ancestry in the Sunghir genepool, maybe that had a contribution as well.
@DaThang, ah OK, can see why you’re interested to see if that is genetically confirmed.
Well, Ringbauer’s paper gave a .tsv file that lists the RoH identified for their samples – https://www.dropbox.com/s/i23j21g20qdmikb/roh_table_all_inds.tsv?dl=0
I’ve plotted the different RoH measures (SUM & MAX, different lengths) from that against time to visualize if Sunghir1 stands out, or if Sunghir samples did.
Here: https://imgur.com/a/nm3nt9K
I don’t think Sunghir1 looks to be a sample with recent inbreeding of any kind, in this analysis.
They did list 1/5 Sunghir samples as showing close-kin mating in Fig 3a. I worked out that was Sunghir2 as firstly seemed to was the sample that showed the highest on the RoH measures, and also all the samples have diffferent Sum RoH > 4cm and that’s the one with Sum RoH > 4cm in the supplement that matches Fig 3a’s Sum RoH > 4cm Total. (Actually went through their spreadsheet and the figure and identified all the close-kin offspring, can upload my identifications if you want, though I’m inferring these, so I may have somehow got some wrong).
The bars in the Fig3a represent the different Sum of total RoH > 4cm across the genome for samples identified as close-kin offspring; each color is a different class, and they stack to represent total Sum of total RoH > 4cm; an excess of red and beige as a proportion of the bar represents an excess of long RoH (indicating close-kin reproduction).
No Goyet-Q116 sample in their panel. Vestonice16 looks to have pretty high RoH, than others (more bottlenecked) but not in high length RoH categories – they identify close-kin offspring by comparing RoH distribution to expected distribution under different population sizes and if the RoH in long categories are excessive compared to any of those distributions, then infer it is close-kin offspring.
Interesting – https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.28.428703v1 – “The genomes of precision edited cloned calves show no evidence for off-target events or increased de novo mutagenesis”. Editing without increased off target mutations?
Okay, so Sunghir 1’s condition wouldn’t be because of the excess inbreeding in comparison to his contemporaries. Maybe he inherited particular Neanderthal genes for the trait or maybe it isn’t of Neanderthal origin. Either way, the genetic z-score for the clavicle length must high either for AMH or Neanderthal origin genepool.
@Roger – Yeah, I read it at the time (I read most of Greer’s pieces on his blog), but was not convinced. I think Kishore Mahbubani has it more correctly. The SCMP is pay walled, but you should get a free article:
https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/opinion/article/3120234/why-quad-doesnt-spell-future-asias-relationship-china
Greer naturally thinks it’s all about the USA because he’s American, and so thinks everything is always all about the USA.
Meanwhile, the post-Brexit UK is desperately trying to join the TPP, which is truly comical; as comical as despatching its one and only aircraft carrier to the South China Sea – to do what, exactly? Perhaps the resident Pom can enlighten us, preferably in short sentences that don’t end in question marks.
To trade. With the United States.
No, can’t be. Trump pulled the USA out of the TPP, remember?
Plus it’s a much shorter route directly across the Atlantic, and a bilateral trade pact would make much more sense if it was about the UK wanting to trade with the USA.
And the aircraft carrier? Exercising freedom of navigation through a waterway it never uses?
There are news articles on this topic which would be a more productive way to learn about this topic, I’m no particular expert after all – https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-55871373 – and these include comment like “If the new administration in Washington were to reconsider the CPTPP, that would make membership much more attractive to the UK. It could allow a much closer UK-US trading relationship, without waiting for a bilateral trade deal to be negotiated …But the real boost could come in the future, if others join – in particular the US, as President Biden has hinted. That would give the UK that hoped-for trade deal with America – within a trading bloc wielding considerable power on the global stage.”. The general stance is that EU membership no longer prohibits it, it’s not particularly onerous, and could have this specific benefit in the future. Our Parliament will no doubt debate the question and take it’s stance on whether this is compatible with popular will and generally a good idea.
Oh yes, Global Britain. How could I forget that?
@sandgroper Greer naturally thinks it’s all about the USA because he’s American, and so thinks everything is always all about the USA.
When you say things like that, I can’t take you seriously:
1) It is impossible to generalize about 330 million people.
2) It shows intellectual bad faith: Because of where you live, I will not accept what you say.
As stupid as saying, “No one who lives in China can understand what’s happening in China.”
Genetic variation, brain, and intelligence differences
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-021-01027-y
@Roger – I was obviously baiting, or thought it was obvious. I’m currently in the mood for some baiting, which I am not normally.
All generalisations are stupid, but as generalisations go, that’s not a bad one, and it does apply in Greer’s case. He knows a lot about China and he does deep, well argued analyses, but he is a wanker. [Sorry, but anyone who can write “Party tyranny in Hong Kong” when he doesn’t have a clue what actually happened in HK in 2019/20 is a wanker. Pompeo’s excuse is that he is a profoundly evil person. Greer does not have that excuse – he is well meaning, but he’s a wanker.] And in this instance, he is really reaching, and he’s wrong.
As for “No one who lives in China can understand what’s happening in China”, it’s not as stupid as it might seem, for multiple reasons. As generalisations go, that is also not a bad one.
This will probably seem bizarre to an outsider, but what actually happened in HK in 2019 was actually much more akin to what Razib and Twinkie are talking about in the Cancellation Will Lead to Clan piece. You needed to witness the ‘leaderless’ nihilistic domestic terrorism, and get caught up in/be victimised by it to believe it, and the ‘tyranny’ Greer is referring to was that being put down, and it wasn’t by the CCP. And by the standards of many jurisdictions in the West, the put-down was pretty restrained. I don’t expect you to believe that because of the massive propaganda and fakery that went into making you believe otherwise. But I know what happened, because I was in it.
@ sandgroper – I once had a student tell me, “I’m getting along real well with my boyfriend. It’s boring. I’m going to do something to piss him off.” As a male, and a human being, I thought that was so wrong. I feel the same way about “baiting”. Hey, everyone, it’s so boooring trying to find the truth. Let’s insult people we disagree with.”
I am not an expert in the subtleties of British slang but I gather “he’s a wanker” is like an American saying, “He’s a sh*thead.” It doesn’t help in figuring out the truth or falsity of what he’s saying.
I see from your podcast that not much has happened per finding out more about Sumer than the last time I checked in. Hopefully they’ll do some genomes soon, I’d be very interested in what they find out.
Since this is an open thread….
Read this.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B015WJ1CCI/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_d_asin_title_o02?ie=UTF8&psc=1
I think I might have been recommended the book here, so in that case thank you, but if not, this one is a good read.
Looks at European colonialism as a joint effort of all the european organisms that came along, not just the humans. It’s discussion of the British settlement of New Zealand reads like a sci fi book describing the terraforming of a planet. Reads well too.
“Malcom and Marie” on netflix (JD Washington, Denzel Washington’s son) was a pretty clear push back against wokeness. interesting film that i think people will silently take note of and agree with
”
Ayhan
@Ayhanius
Replying to
@razibkhan
Haplogroup H people?”
^ The man who doesn’t read links.
Misc: Paper from last year I missed – https://www.pnas.org/content/117/17/9458 – “Evolutionary history of modern Samoans” – from current dna. Estimates pre-colonial peak population effective population size.
Interesting China reads today: 1) https://unherd.com/2021/02/dont-mess-with-chinas-feminists/ – claims that China’s young feminist women successfully bullied the Party into censuring Weibo, in response to Weibo removing their preferred male-on-male porn from search results, and that they campaign against surrogacy; possibly a bit full of it, 2) via “devarbol” twitter – https://michaelwiebe.com/blog/2021/02/replications – meta-analysis of papers claiming performance driven promotion at prefecture level in Chinese Communist Party (“meritocracy”) finds they fail to replicate; be surprised if China doesn’t have some level of meritocracy, but suggests that evidence for PRC having unusual amounts of meritocracy, unusually low levels of kakistocracy not strong.
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-02-unravel-covid-superspreader.html – Exhaled aerosol increases with COVID-19 infection, age, and obesity – Using data from an observational study of 194 healthy people and an experimental study of nonhuman primates with COVID-19, researchers found that exhaled aerosol particles vary greatly between subjects. Those who were older with higher body mass indexes (BMI) and an increasing degree of COVID-19 infection had three times the number of exhaled respiratory droplets as others in the study groups. … Researchers found that 18% of the human subjects accounted for 80% of the exhaled particles of the group, reflecting a distribution of exhaled aerosol particles that follows the 20/80 rule seen in other infectious disease epidemics—meaning 20% of infected individuals are responsible for 80% of transmissions.
Maybe obesity really did matter in driving pace of epidemics – it always seemed pretty silly to me that people would cite obesity rate as driving large difference in Japan’s outcomes vs Western Europe (since the observed death rates for higher BMI aren’t multiples higher), but maybe the obesity rate does increase chance of superspreader evetnts if obesity rate does end up functionally doubling R0 or something…
Nebulisers are really bad news:
https://theconversation.com/what-are-nebulisers-and-how-could-they-help-spread-covid-19-155032
When Hong Kong got its first cases of SARS1 in 2003, they were treating the patients with nebulisers (American spelling nebulizers) – it’s a more effective way to get medication into their lungs. Outcome: eight doctors and nurses died. Aerosol particles will sail straight through an ordinary surgical mask, and putting someone with SARS1 or SARS2 on a nebuliser will generate 10s of 1,000s of aerosol particles.
People can buy them in pharmacies to use to take their lung medication, so they carry them around invisibly in their luggage, and you can’t tell when someone might be using one nearby in the same building. In enclosed spaces the aerosols hang in the air for hours, and you can’t see them, obviously.
Some papers of potential interest
A double set on adapting the conclusions of Olalde’s paper on mid 3rd millennium population shift in British Isles to finer grained scenarios that synthesize with more archaeology
http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/169610/ – “The return of the Beaker Folk? – Rethinking migration and population change in British prehistory” Armit, Ian and Reich, David
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-archaeological-journal/article/tales-from-the-supplementary-information-ancestry-change-in-chalcolithicearly-bronze-age-britain-was-gradual-with-varied-kinship-organization/5B71BE0F34927E0A7199A6A568DAB3BC – “Tales from the Supplementary Information – Ancestry Change in Chalcolithic – Early Bronze Age Britain Was Gradual with Varied Kinship Organization” Thomas J. Booth , Joanna Brück, Selina Brace & Ian Barnes
Both offer a detailed look at some points that overlap with various things about the sequence of particular samples and their dates I’ve been yammering about in comment sections in the years since Olalde published, so pleased to see both in print from Reich and Booth+Brace and their collaborators. The second is from yesterday and the former is a month or so old but they probably are worth reading together.
PGS related
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.05.21251061v1 – Florian Prive and collaborators looking at PGS score portability within identified ethnic cohorts in UK Biobank, to avoid confounds of examine portability of scores between studies from different times, places, sequencing. They note that PGS predictive power is higher between ethnic groups under this approach but still falls off, and also note that some traits fall off quicker than others with shift in shared latitude and genetics (e.g. hair and skin colour falls off disproportionately quicker, even within Europe, graphs show less predictive for “Italy” identified cohort than “Poland” identified cohort).
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41525-021-00178-9 – big Taiwan Biobank project, familiar structure of Han population.
Some papers of potential interest
A pair on adapting the conclusions of Olalde’s paper on mid 3rd millennium population shift in British Isles to finer grained scenarios that synthesize with more archaeology:
http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/169610/ – “The return of the Beaker Folk? Rethinking migration and population change in British prehistory” Armit, Ian and Reich, David
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-archaeological-journal/article/tales-from-the-supplementary-information-ancestry-change-in-chalcolithicearly-bronze-age-britain-was-gradual-with-varied-kinship-organization/5B71BE0F34927E0A7199A6A568DAB3BC – “Tales from the Supplementary Information – Ancestry Change in Chalcolithic – Early Bronze Age Britain Was Gradual with Varied Kinship Organization” Thomas J. Booth , Joanna Brück, Selina Brace & Ian Barnes
Both offer a detailed look at some points that overlap with various things about the sequence of particular samples and their dates I’ve been yammering about in comment sections in the years since Olalde published, so pleased to see both in print from Reich and Booth+Brace and their collaborators. The second is from yesterday and the former is a month or so old but they probably are worth reading together.
A pair of PGS related papers
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.05.21251061v1 – Florian Prive and collaborators looking at PGS score portability within identified ethnic cohorts in UK Biobank, to avoid confounds of examine portability of scores between studies from different times, places, sequencing. They note that PGS predictive power is higher between ethnic groups under this approach but still falls off, and also note that some traits fall off quicker than others with shift in shared latitude and genetics (e.g. hair and skin colour falls off disproportionately quicker, even within Europe, graphs show less predictive for “Italy” identified cohort than “Poland” identified cohort).
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41525-021-00178-9 – big Taiwan Biobank project, familiar structure of Han population.
@Matt
What do you think about BK-1653’s mtDNA? I think that it looks like a U8 outside of Ub’c (since it is outside of the Otzi (K, subclade of U8b) and DV13 (U8c) clade). Could it be U8a of some kind?
Followup to above post, using the Vahaduo admixture calculator and the Global 25 data, since we have many more samples since the Olalde paper, looking at the Steppe ancestry proportion in transects of all samples from Britain, Netherlands, France and Switzerland: https://imgur.com/a/P9JxaZj
You can see the first samples with Steppe ancestry emerge around 2700-2500 BCE on in Switzerland and France, and there is a bit of diversity in the proportion early on from 2700-2000 BCE which is subsequently reduced. Two of the earliest samples in France and Switzerland have approximately 75% steppe ancestry.
You can also see the same trend of diversity with more high and low steppe ancestry outliers in Britain as well, when the first samples with steppe ancestry emerge after 2400 BCE. Samples from France remain diverse in steppe ancestry proportion through the whole period of sequence from 2500 – 0 BCE, with most samples in a similar range to modern France (about 40%) but some with 30% (as low as Spanish / Basque).
@DaThang, to be honest, the mtdna phylogeny is a bit of a blindspot for me, sorry. Be interested to know what you think about it and what you think it says for bigger picture though.
Well to me it looks like it is at least U8(x bc). I don’t have the mutation info so my U8a guess is mostly based on presence of U8a in other albeit later magdalenian U8a samples. The BK 1653 could be on a goyet-sunghir/para-kostenki cline as well based on a couple of global25 runs of roughly contemporaneous UP Europeans. Piecing it together, my hunch is that whatever ENA mixed (with what I call clade 2 west Eurasians) to make Aurignacians brought with it not only mtdna M (as seen in goyet) but also ydna P (as seen in BK 1653). U8a may have come from either the clade 1 para-kostenki side or from the clade 2 Aurignacian side. I suspect that latter is the case because of the Aurignacian-Magdalenian link.
Now going off on a tangent: Maybe U8 was distributed as U8a among clade 2 and U8b’c among clade 1. U8c is already found in Sunghir (which is mostly clade 1); and U8b (and its descendant K) could have been brought to Anatolia via the proto WHG ancestors of AHG and other west Asian HGs