Still reading Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War. The narrative is hard for me to keep track of. I wish there was more cultural/social commentary to scaffold the battles and forced marches. Will post on chapter 9 soon.
NASA’s Perseverance Rover Lands on Mars to Renew Search for Extinct Life.
Books on deck in 2021 – Six books in the queue. Substack piece from me (it’s free, like my China one).
Dinosaurs Rediscovered: The Scientific Revolution in Paleontology. A lot has happened since the 1980’s, and my kids are obsessed so I need to learn more.
I’m RazibKhan on Clubhouse. Follow me when you get on. I have a members-only “Club” I’m inviting my followers to. I’m going to use it to have conversations and “rooms”. But I can only add members in batches of 10-50 right now, so going through it manually. If you follow me on Clubhouse and want to be a member, just leave a comment with your handle, and I’ll add you manually.
If you haven’t read Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past you should. People keep asking if I know of any books that talk about the topics that they’re interested in relating to history and ancient DNA, and this is the book. Still.
About the time our daughter was born, I read Bob Bakker’s Dinosaur Heresies. Among the ideas he was pushing were that birds had descended from one branch of dinosaurs and that many dinosaurs were warm-blooded. The book included his detailed sketches, many of agile, birdlike creatures.
One sleep-deprived morning, I was carrying our daughter around and we looked out the back window. A bird flew down, took a few hops, and took off again. But I didn’t see a bird; I saw one of Bakker’s dinosaurs. Well, actually, kind of both. Lack of sleep can make your brain do funny things.
(I discovered later that Bakker was one of the inspirations for Jurassic Park.)
I (@akhipill) am interested in joining your group on Clubhouse. Thanks!
When I saw that the Aeon article cited Graeber & Wengrow, I wanted to reply by linking Peter Turchin’s commentary on their piece:
https://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/an-anarchist-view-of-human-social-evolution/
Unfortunately, there was no comments section there. I think I might have come across Turchin’s reply via Razib, but can’t remember for sure.
Hey, I’m @h_feltenstein on clubhouse. I’d be happy to join your group.
Growing up as a dinosaur-obsessed kid who loved the Jurassic Park movies, I had never realized until much later that these films’ portrayal of dinosaurs as fast, mobile, and bird-like was a scientific phenomenon scarcely more than a decade old at the time, and that popular portrayals of dinosaurs, including how their fossils were posed in museums (T. Rex as bent over with its tail up to stabilize instead of standing like a kangaroo with its tail on the ground), had only recently incorporated what at the time was cutting edge (and controversial!) research in paleontology. Had I been born just 15 or 20 years earlier, I would have grown up with the classical view of dinosaurs as large, lumbering lizards like in a Ray Harryhausen film.
Only makes sense that eventually the cutting-edge portrayals I grew up with are now scientifically passe too. At least the special effects in Jurassic Park still hold up.
This question is prompted by your explanation for reading Dinosaurs Rediscovered. You read Harris’s The Nurture Assumption long before becoming a father, so it makes no sense to ask how it has changed your parenting practices. Rather, have you reflected on how your behavior as a father would be different had you not read the book? Anything other than more deliberate attempts to shape your children’s peer groups (or a realization that there was no need to urge your wife to listen to Mozart during her pregnancies 😉 )?
On the topic of dinosaurs, a paper with an interesting analysis of why there are no 100-1000 kg sized predator dinosaurs (juvenile mega-dinos fill the ecological niche while growing up).
http://dispatchesfromturtleisland.blogspot.com/2021/03/the-ecological-impact-of-adolescent-t.html
So, here is a headline:
“LGBT Identification Rises to 5.6% in Latest U.S. Estimate”
https://news.gallup.com/poll/329708/lgbt-identification-rises-latest-estimate.aspx
Maybe they are lying. But, if they are telling the truth, it blows a hole in the “Born That Way” theory.
“WASHINGTON, D.C. — Gallup’s latest update on lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender identification finds 5.6% of U.S. adults identifying as LGBT. The current estimate is up from 4.5% in Gallup’s previous update based on 2017 data.
* * *
“One of the main reasons LGBT identification has been increasing over time is that younger generations are far more likely to consider themselves to be something other than heterosexual. This includes about one in six adult members of Generation Z (those aged 18 to 23 in 2020) [15.9%].
“The vast majority of Generation Z adults who identify as LGBT — 72% — say they are bisexual. Thus, 11.5% of all Gen Z adults in the U.S. say they are bisexual, with about 2% each identifying as gay, lesbian or transgender.
“About half of millennials (those aged 24 to 39 in 2020) who identify as LGBT say they are bisexual. In older age groups, expressed bisexual preference is not significantly more common than expressed gay or lesbian preference.”
I’m not on Twitter but with regard to Kipling being a topic of discussion lately, just 3 years ago I was in a meeting with a client’s CFO, who was a middle aged black woman, and she made an allusion to Kipling’s poem “If”. I was first of all impressed since that kind of literary knowledge isn’t all that common in the general population, but also a little confused; I wasn’t sure if she knew about his other work and just didn’t care or what.
I was a paleo-geek long before I was interested in genetics. I kept pretty well abreast of what was going on 10-20 years ago. But the same thing happened to the online paleo scene as happened with science writing in general. Most of the bloggers (both professional scientists and educated laymen) either stopped posting or cut way back, discussion moved to twitter, and a lot of more informal long-form discussion more or less vanished. Essentially an emptying out of “middlebrow” discussion which is more advanced than pop-science, but less specialized than technical papers with lots of dry language about bone measurements and stratigraphy.
Regardless, although it’s now 14 years old, I still think Tom Holtz’s book on dinosaurs is the best children’s book on the subject by far. It’s written for older-age readers (say around a 10-year old) but I know your kids are bright, and I’m sure they will be able to absorb the content.
Another thing I would suggest is you let your children watch the PBS Eons Youtube channel (it’s accessible through Youtube kids if you set the filters for older children). It’s not intended for kids, and is more broadly about paleontology rather than just dinosaurs, but my seven-year old son loves it. The other day he was in class telling his teacher about Archaea, and she was all like “what is that?” He in turn responded “It’s a prokaryote!” It was a proud – and amusing – moment.
@ Walter Sobchak,
I saw that statistic about Gen Z bisexuality as well. I don’t really think it’s that surprising though. I remember back in the 1990s roughly one in three adults said in polls they had a same-sex encounter at some point in their life – though the vast majority considered themselves straight. I presume a lot of this is thus not really a shift in orientation, but a shift in self-labeling – people with minor/incidental levels of same-sex attraction openly embracing the bisexual label rather than shunning it.
Dinosaur Podcast kept at a fairly basic level by someone well known within field
https://terriblelizards.libsyn.com/website
In his Wall Street Journal column Best of the Web, James Freeman (Monday, March 1, 2021) featured some quotes from Warren Buffett’s annual letter to his shareholders. I wanted to share them with you because I agree with Buffett, and in order to counter some of Razib’s gloom:
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Over the years, we have purchased four additional businesses from Omaha families, the best known among them being Nebraska Furniture Mart (“NFM”). The company’s founder, Rose Blumkin (“Mrs. B”), arrived in Seattle in 1915 as a Russian emigrant, unable to read or speak English. She settled in Omaha several years later and by 1936 had saved $2,500 with which to start a furniture store.
Competitors and suppliers ignored her, and for a time their judgment seemed correct: World War II stalled her business, and at year end 1946, the company’s net worth had grown to only $72,264. Cash, both in the till and on deposit, totaled $50 (that’s not a typo).
One invaluable asset, however, went unrecorded in the 1946 figures: Louie Blumkin, Mrs. B’s only son, had rejoined the store after four years in the U.S. Army. Louie fought at Normandy’s Omaha Beach following the D-Day invasion, earned a Purple Heart for injuries sustained in the Battle of the Bulge, and finally sailed home in November 1945.
Once Mrs. B and Louie were reunited, there was no stopping NFM. Driven by their dream, mother and son worked days, nights and weekends. The result was a retailing miracle.
By 1983, the pair had created a business worth $60 million. That year, on my birthday, Berkshire purchased 80% of NFM, again without an audit. I counted on Blumkin family members to run the business; the third and fourth generation do so today. Mrs. B, it should be noted, worked daily until she was 103 – a ridiculously premature retirement age as judged by Charlie and me.
NFM now owns the three largest home-furnishings stores in the U.S. Each set a sales record in 2020, a feat achieved despite the closing of NFM’s stores for more than six weeks because of COVID-19.
A post-script to this story says it all: When Mrs. B’s large family gathered for holiday meals, she always asked that they sing a song before eating. Her selection never varied: Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.”
* * * * * * * * * * * *
When you next fly over Knoxville or Omaha, tip your hat to the Claytons, Haslams and Blumkins as well as to the army of successful entrepreneurs who populate every part of our country. These builders needed America’s framework for prosperity – a unique experiment when it was crafted in 1789 – to achieve their potential. In turn, America needed citizens like Jim C., Jim H., Mrs. B and Louie to accomplish the miracles our founding fathers sought.
Today, many people forge similar miracles throughout the world, creating a spread of prosperity that benefits all of humanity. In its brief 232 years of existence, however, there has been no incubator for unleashing human potential like America. Despite some severe interruptions, our country’s economic progress has been breathtaking.
Beyond that, we retain our constitutional aspiration of becoming “a more perfect union.” Progress on that front has been slow, uneven and often discouraging. We have, however, moved forward and will continue to do so.
Our unwavering conclusion: Never bet against America.
https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/letters.html
@Walter
As I recall, the numbers for gay and lesbian people have not changed all that much in the past 20 years. This makes me think that there is some kind of nature, rather than nurture, at work. Transgender people are now 4x as common in Gen Z as they were in Millennials (again, going on memory here), and I think that increase can be attributed to a decrease in stigma, as well as the addition of a handful of coattail riders hitching onto a social phenomenon. Some kind of functional bisexuality has been around for all of human history, as you allude to.
This non-binary stuff, on the other hand, is pretty ridiculous. Friends in varying cities have reported to me anecdotally that there is a suspicious preponderance of White and East-Asian “AFAB” (XX) people amongst them, and were I to hazard a guess based on personal observations in social encounters, I’d say that a lot of them are women embracing a pseudo-feminist aesthetic of androgyny and half-hearted masculinity in an attempt to both free themselves of traditional social structures (monogamy, motherhood, etc.) and insulate themselves from the oncoming tidal wave of non-white and non-“white adjacent” critical theorists. In the game of “Oppression Olympics”, White and East Asian women can no longer win arguments by playing their base hand. It must now be augmented by both a simultaneous implicitly sexual and gendered “queerness” that approaches the inconvenience and distance from culturally-bestowed identity of being transsexual. I feel kind of bad for the people who are arguably of a more natural sexual or gendered minority, because all these others are riding the woke wave, trying to get in on the social benefits (which are present only in their little bubble) of masquerading as queer, diluting the concerns, grievances, and miseries of the former few.
I say this coming from the perspective of a guy with Asperger’s, who has endured many years of sexual/romantic partners and annoying friends asking him to legitimize their self-diagnoses of OCD or autism, in search of confirming their status as snowflakes. This mental illness is fucking debilitating, I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. It’s also uncommon, thankfully, at 1-2%. Likewise, I’m sure some guy who has never felt anything more than an attraction to men is probably not in love with his psychology, and the isolation that comes with it.
I’m @magilnick on Clubhouse and would like to be added to the group.
New talk from David Reich from Wednesday (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoGmPJJS3X8) has some interesting points.
One minor point is his figure at 53:00 actually seems to subtly change, from Narasimhan’s paper, the nature of the model of Indian/South Asian population and the associated cline.
Graphics here: https://imgur.com/a/kwxw54D
In the published “triangle” of ancestry from Narasimhan ‘s paper, it presents a kind of model where the “start” of the ANI-ASI cline is represented by a compound mix of Steppe and the least AASI Indus_Periphery sample, then the “end” of the cline is represented by the “most AASI” population. (I’d guess Rakhigarhi sample is the green dot btw.)
The model in the presentation is subtly different; the “start of the cline here is defined by a mix between the average of the Indus Periphery set (by the looks of it) and a Steppe related source, while the “end” of the cline is defined by a typical ASI population, not the most ASI related one. That seems potentially more parsimonious than the model of Narasimhan where you need this two-stage thing where the Indus_Periphery samples that are present are not really representative or something and only the least AASI one is, of the initial population that mixes to form “ANI”.
This is interesting to me in that it slightly shifts the position of “priestly groups” as outliers on their ancestry ratio. In the old triangle, the “priestly” were outliers in ratio of Iran:Sintashta related. But in the new graphic, there are a lot more “AASI” rich groups who present a similar shifted cline.
The new graphic is more notable for the *absence” of Iran enriched populations at the West Eurasian end of the cline than the presence of Sintashta enriched populations at either end of the cline. Barring the Balochis and Sindhis and Bandaris (who are not included in the fig and may perhaps have different ancestry from Iran, more recently).
That seems to potentially tell a similar but perhaps subtly difference story of population and language affinity.
Reich’s talk also has a new section on Britain results. Looks like Nick P has a very large set of new samples from there, though it looks like the vast majority of them are from the Iron Age/Roman Period.
DR talks about a new pulse migration at approximately 1300 BCE (EEF rises so they think new migration into England).
I’m not really sure from the talk why they use a pulse migration rather than a continuous function of time. To me it looks like a continuous sort of thing, similar to the slow increase of EEF ancestry at the Lech Valley site. Not a bunch of discrete plateaus.
But perhaps there are a lot of enriched first-degree relatives, new y-dna clades, etc which speak for a pulse migration and Nick P will reveal to us in the paper itself 🙂 …
Graphics from talk, and a comparison estimated from the Eurogenes Global 25 PCA + Vahaduo distance fitting method, which produces pretty similar results for overlapping samples, although slightly more variance in Anatolian vs WHG in EEF in the results Reich cites (perhaps because some new ancient Orkney samples too): https://imgur.com/a/HYJZLfv
(Though note I’m fitting with early Corded Ware samples who have probably about 2-5% EEF, so proportions would probably be even closer with a comparable set. I’d also note that I believe genetic distance as meansured by the Eurogenes PCA also shows continous, very gradual reductions, and even after I separately control for ancestry proportions using Vahaduo model, which is again not totally what I’d expect from a pulse).
One thing of other note about the results from Nick P’s paper that DR cites is that it looks like they have sampled another sample from Amesbury Down landscape, the famous “Amesbury Archer”, the so-called “King of Stonehenge”, and it seems that he is like another of the Boscombe / Amesbury samples, I2416, and has an enriched level of EEF ancestry, higher than typical for Beaker people in the following period.
There’s some interesting stuff from DR on third and fourth cousin detection in ancient dna including some specific cousin links of Corded Ware samples to Globular Amphora people, although this does not quantify the degree of relationship and they exclude all other MN Northern Europeans from the sample, only include Switzerland and Balkans comparisons.
This graphic by Ringbauer also indicates that some, but not all, Yamnaya had direct relationships with the Maikop Group, which somewhat belies the idea that there was zero connection between them (though it was likely very low and possibly mediated by a chain of communities and the directionality would be unclear). However, it’s interesting in that Ringbauer finds no link between Balkan Neolithic and Yamnaya, nor Globular Amphora and Yamnaya (despite these being putatively the reasons for slight Western shift in Yamnaya relative to Eneolithic Steppe). Although note, if these were much larger populations, cousin detection might be difficult. See – https://imgur.com/a/vsIHv2z
So it will be interesting to see if there is anything which can be detected in the series of entrants into Britain that suggests they had local ancestors (as we’d expect from enriched EEF in some of them, and some of the models, where there is preference to top up outliers with British Neolithic), or conversely, that they did not! (e.g. Amesbury Archer shows enriched neolithic… but was thought to be born in Central Europe, from isotopes). The problem with this may be that the British Neolithic samples are still too remote – Reich’s plot still doesn’t show much in the post 3000 BCE era for British Neolithic, which may be too early to match to people at around 2400 BCE.
One of the things about Yamnaya->CWC intense “cousin” connections (at any rate relatively recent intense direct ancestry sharing of some kind) is that it makes it relatively more likely that the Yamnaya, proto-BBC and proto-CWC (whoever these all were) were part of a single marriage community/network. Thus more likely that they probably spoke minimally diverged language (1000years?), and were part of a ongoing linguistic network which shared and spread shared new linguistic innovations through contact (like how the satem and ruki innovations spread into proto-Balto-Slavic, proto-Armenian and proto-Indo-Iranian through contact despite no special ancestral relationship).
That probably pushes away from the likelihood of (already not so parsimonious) arguments that any of CWC / BBC / Yamnaya were “the true IEs” and the other cultures were instead a truly massive set of phantom proto-Vasconic / proto-Uralic / proto-North Caucasian &c. speaking spread zones (delete as appropriate per group) which were later IEized and leave no records today (nor ever left any written record or direct evidence whatsoever). That is somewhat (not a lot, but somewhat) more tenable if the argument is “Actually these populations look autosomally similar, but probably split back 10k or earlier from some common ancestor”, but less so under ongoing intense recent ancestry sharing.
(It is also, I guess in a sense a blow for Kossina style “find a new pot, find a new ancestrally distinct people” archaeology. Just in a different way than is often typical. Fracturing cultures dominated by different patrilineal expansions adopted and innovated markedly different material ceramic and burial cultures from peoples they encountered.)
Hey Razib, I was wondering what is your take on Genetiker’s work. In particular what he has posted about the Chinchirros, and whether both Eurasians (West and East) came from Vedic Adivasi people. Im not that astute when it comes to genetics as you. I have posted his two works here:
https://genetiker.wordpress.com/2018/02/10/higher-resolution-k-11-analysis-of-the-european-admixture-in-chinchorro-dna/
https://genetiker.wordpress.com/2013/12/02/more-analyses-of-the-tianyuan-genome/
I would very much like to know the validity of these claims.
person is full of shit. ignore
@Razib
I wanted to know what is wrong with the two links I gave you. Surely there is some reality to this. Have you posted something against this, which I can look at. That would be easier for you.
the guy posts a lot of weird shit. not going to reread him after all these years.
Matt, do you think that’s Maykop or Steppe Maykop specifically though? Both have specific sites from within Russia that produced 3 samples on their own if I’m not mistaken. We might expect Steppe Maykop to have greater sharing with all these steppe groups, at least considering the overall ancestry, but still curious which of the two it is. Seems to show some greater sharing with the earlier Ekaterinovka individuals too. 38 total samples from the Eneolithic of the Volga area, compared to the 3 Khvalynsk ones we currently have, are interesting on their own too to potentially further clarify things especially considering the variation in the currently available Khvalynsk set…As for Yamnaya, a comparison with e.g. Tripolye, which seems quite relevant, would be nice to see since what Reich presents doesn’t seem exhaustive anyway but more of a sneak peek into their ongoing research.
As for the Yamna-Beaker-Corded comment, I completely agree. I’d say that we now also have samples from populations that we basically know spoke different varieties of IE (from western, northeastern and southeastern Europe) that require all three of them to have been IE-speaking, at least initially; as in later on and more locally some non-IE varieties won out despite perhaps significant Y-DNA replacement and steppe autosomal admixture. Still, knowing more about how they’re exactly related to each other would be interesting because things are still quite unclear in that area, if anything to potentially give some plausible answers to the harder to investigate, intermediate linguistic period between “PIE” and “historically attested branches that we know definitely existed” and the like.
Re: the UK, from what I can tell, on the graph there are increases in the EEF fraction marked at ~ 1500, 1300 (though Reich himself mentions “around 3200 years ago” more specifically so it probably has more to do with the less fine aspect of the visual representation) and 800 BCE for England and Wales and 1500 and 800 for Scotland. At the same time, before these dates the EEF fraction is higher in the Scottish average so there’s also the usual point to be made there about sampling density as well which is much higher in England and Wales apparently, and how that might influence interpretations in subtler cases (even if the assumed replacement is large). The apparent non-increase in Scotland during that middle event is described by Reich as well: “around 3200 years ago…we see a further increase in farmer ancestry in southern Britain but not in northern Britain”
The potential use of these newly applied methods aside, perhaps the event is described more as a pulse migration because at the LBA we are also (likely) not dealing with further constant admixture with “locals” like in the post-Beaker EBA but with new, outright continental arrivals who are already significantly steppe-admixed? “Event 4” is described as “50% replacement in Middle to Late Bronze Age” on the graph and by Reich in the video after all. Makes it sound potentially a bit more dramatic and punctuated compared to the previous post-Beaker events.
These kinds of later dates also might bias one (well, me at least) towards central European cultures like Urnfield and Hallstatt due to traditional considerations about the spread of proto-Celtic but it will be interesting to see what these show anyway, a priori biases aside.
I’d suggest that the currently available samples from England that are included in the Eurogenes dataset already do show a subtle shift towards the continent between the MBA-LBA samples and the IA-Roman ones, on average. Each set also seems to be much more homogeneous than the very varied post-Beaker EBA set, which also adds to my thinking that while the EBA -> MLBA shift is likely more due to ongoing admixture with locals, some of whom still very EEF-rich, the MLBA -> IA-Roman one is perhaps more due to new arrivals from the continent that might have relatively/more similar levels of steppe and EEF related ancestry, all things considered (and so the actual replacement perhaps also more dramatic as in the video). All this is tentative still without more samples, like in the video, but my two cents from what I see there by “lumping” rather than the finer look you took which might show subtler, ongoing events.
To add a bit to the Maykop vs Steppe Maykop comment above, I also notice that “Romania PreYamnaya”, which I assume refers to individuals like the ROU_BA set in the Eurogenes Global25, who are shifted towards Steppe Maykop and Lola-like/WSHG-rich populations compared to a Steppe_EBA-Balkan-like mix, also shows increased sharing with only the Romanian Yamnaya individuals rather than across the board which makes me wonder even more which exact “Maykop” population is being referred to.
@Forgetful: Yeah, that is a good point, it could represent either Maikop or Steppe Maikop (in any case it’s 3 samples, which is fewer than these sets have so clearly some subset?). I don’t have a strong reason to prefer either – probably you’re right that Steppe Common Ancestor -> Yamnaya & Steppe Maikop would be autosomally easier, although of course you can get some unexpected stuff going on with IBD detection in the absence of any major population autosomal shift – e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-64007-2 – 1400 AD Spanish woman, very high quality adna, IBD blocks shared with present day Lithuanians 600 years later. Not sure who the Romania pre-Yamnaya are; I’d guess some unpublished samples that are EEF, but you could be right that this the ROU_BA set?
@Forgetful: Re; shifts in GBR, definitely I’m gonna keep an open mind to what Patterson and Reich have come up with. One suggestion elsewhere was that perhaps very large sample sizes allowed for finer ancestry decomposition within the EEF ancestry proportion (types of EEF) and perhaps that allowed a detection of a pulse with qpAdm, and that seems like a possible one. (There were some differences in f3 and f4 stats for difference farmer groups between Iron Age and LBA when David ran some for me, where IA showed some attraction to Atlantic farmers, but those I think were potentially and probably confounded by shotgun vs capture data issues; hopefully with their new dataset which will all be capture that won’t be an issue).
I think your scenario on difference phases of why EEF ancestry would increase in different phases seems to make sense (but hard to test really either way I reckon for the first phase, while the second is almost certainly gonna be why). Definitely looks like population homogenity increases over time which could be because either A) both effects of mobility and isolation and any ongoing collapse of population structure generally declines as time goes by, with increasing size of the size of the settled population (which makes sense with agricultural recovery?) B) more of the population getting normal burial is easy to see as time goes by (survivorship bias).
As a quick final comment on the EEF shift, I did also try fitting a PAST “smoothing spline” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoothing_spline) over the values of EEF ancestry against time, to see a smoothed moving average of samples. As a check in case we thought we might be visually misled by the distribution.
So (and adding the Cassidy Neolithic pre-Beaker Irish samples and couple of EBA, to extend the Neolithic set, and because splines don’t respond well to gaps) – https://imgur.com/a/vPC2lJU
Still don’t really see any sudden jump in EEF ancestry with the spline. It’ll be interesting to repeat some more samples, and also see what extra evidence there is for this in published/preprint paper. But yeah, keeping an open mind that there’s a good solid idea going on there that he just didn’t have time / didn’t want to spoiler in the lecture :).
@Matt
I assumed ROU_BA because “PreYamnaya” seems like the wording you’d use for “steppe-related culture that precedes Yamnaya in the region”, while using something like “Romania C” (akin to “Bulgaria C”, though no Bulgarian Yamnaya samples are included to see if there’s that consistency in the choices) for EEF ones.
Good point either way, shouldn’t be guessing that far ahead.
Absolutely, that’s possible; those samples indicate that such people were about so it’s entirely possible and the name does give that impression, so that may well end up being the right guess.
@Forgetful, as one other note about the Reich talk that I didn’t think anyone would be too interested in, but may as well mention, is that he actually mentioned a specific point estimate for Mesolithic British Isles HG contribution to living British people today at >0.5% (less than 1 in 200 ancestors, but presumably not enough less than this to say 0.3% or something).
I thought that was interesting in light of how Cassidy’s paper last year was able to demonstrate with their high coverage PB675 sample from the Parknabinha site, had specific enriched haplotype sharing with the Mesolithic Irish HG, even to the exclusion of other NW HG like Bichon and Loschbour, and even closely related Cheddar Man from Britain.
Although this isn’t by very much! The sample only has about 30% HG (my estimate from Eurogenes data) against an average of 22%, including PB675’s relative PB357, so that’s possibly less than 1 HG great-grandparent (maybe more, maybe less, given some degree of random inheritance, and variable proportion estimates within population).
Putting that together with how some of the Scottish Western Isles Argyll cave samples from Olalde’s big study who show more like 33-40% HG ancestry were sampled to pretty good coverage by the Allen project (not super high, but like 4.24, 4.12x, 3.36x), it seems like it’s possible they may have tried to do some work to really identify specifically how much ancestry from first post-glacial HG really survives. I may be off base with this, but seemed worth a guess.
(<1 in 200 really isn't very much, set aside what might have been thought in the heady days of Bryan Sykes and so on. But on the other hand, these were vanishingly small populations expanding from a radically small base at the end of the Ice Age, as Cassidy put “Irish hunter-gatherers also exhibit the largest degree of short runs of homozygosity (Fig. 3b) described for any ancient—or indeed modern—genome”. So more or less 400,000-500,000 virtual descendants in Britain today would not be doing *too* bad, even if from the more impressive population expansions in human history).
On another note, looking at that Cassidy 2020 paper again, it might be fun to see what Ringbauer’s population size methods make of her sample set of Late Neolithic Irish samples. Part of ideas presented by that paper is quite sensibly to note “Oh, there are all these late Neolithic folks at Passage Tombs, just at the pre-Beaker time, who seem to share more haplotypes with each other, and seem to be eating a lot of meat. Well, maybe they’re a social elite with a meat rich diet (and also they have some ancestry connection with earlier passage tomb Newgrange 10 – ‘incest king’, so this fits)”.
But if they’re actually just cousins (of some degree) because they’re living in a smaller population (and we can tell this from distribution of RoH), we might have a different story that is somewhat congruent with the combination of continued monumentality but shifts to smaller, more pastoralist populations in the neighbouring island of Great Britain. (I don’t think there was any explicit modelling of population size in that paper, so could add something.)
@Matt
I noticed that <0.5% part but took it to be more throaway than that, since Reich didn't pay too much attention to that period there (plus other lines that also went less into detail like "almost like sub-Saharan Africans" which is sorta true but not the whole story as we know, with apparent selection going on in SSA too etc. so him just giving the general picture) but worthwhile that you dug into it that much. I had forgotten many of the specifics of the Cassidy et al. paper tbh, like the kind of comparison in Fig. 8 that you mention, so it was a useful reminder for me at least.
Couple Links:
https://techxplore.com/news/2021-03-beauty-brain-ai-personally-images.html – “Beauty is in the brain: AI reads brain data, generates personally attractive images”. Could go to some cultural strange places if applied. OTOH, could also do some interesting sci-fi stuff to achieve better couple matching (identify unique variance of individuals preferences isolated from main component of attractiveness and match individuals based on preference and similar main component?).
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.05.433935v1 – More within sib group GWAS – “We demonstrate that existing GWAS associations for height, educational attainment, smoking, depressive symptoms, age at first birth and cognitive ability overestimate direct effects.” Correlation structure in population.
“We show that estimates of SNP-heritability, genetic correlations and Mendelian randomization involving these phenotypes substantially differ when calculated using within-sibship estimates. For example, genetic correlations between educational attainment and height largely disappear.”
One causality for educ+height was “Taller people bigger brained/genetically healthier, so smarter, so higher education”. Not implausible but this suggests that’s probably wrong, at least when it comes to common SNPs in this analysis (rare / DNM mutations could still hit both phenotypes together?)…
Probably more a function of “Taller men social dominance or desirability (at some point in the past), so assortatively mated with also socially surgent smart women (high edu / g) ppl”, plus nutritional legacy stuff (smarter->better nutrition quality). They suggest mainly assortative.
Genetic BMI and waist-to-height correlation with genetic education likewise drops right down (“genetically fatter” siblings not on average less clever; any population wide genetic correlation is assortative mating, not shared functional influence.) Since there’s no effort to sift out cognitive-nervous system variants linked to BMI from directly physiological ones, suggests little overlap between cognitive variants linked to BMI and low education.
The assortative height+educ indicators found is European not found in a Han Chinese Biobank sample. Possibly pairing-up in Han has less favoured tall-but-average (male?) and smart (girl?) a bit less… Be interesting to compare some big South Asian cohorts with different partnering going on, like arranged cousin marriage or arranged endogamous marriage (perhaps these are less assortative traditions, perhaps more).
On the contrary to the above, genetic education and genetic age at first birth within siblings are slightly *more* correlated than at the population level… Genetic cognition scores are correlated with genetic education within sibs (so education and cognition share some functional basis, surprising no one), but there’s still decline, suggesting some of link between genetic cognitive ability and genetic education years is due to assortative mating. Stuff like this is cool because it allows us to separate genuine generic linkages between traits from assortative and population structure nonsense that stops us findings variants and genes which are actually relevant to diseases and traits.
@Razib
But common, just respond to the Tianyuan samples he has posted about then.
https://genetiker.wordpress.com/2013/12/02/more-analyses-of-the-tianyuan-genome/
It is frustrating to know what is correct. Just a few dot points why it is wrong is enough for me.
Read Turchin’s response, but the idea that hunter-gatherers were less egalitarian and more hierarchical if they enjoyed better harvests (game and foraged foods) makes sense. I don’t know a ton about Australian hunter-gatherers, but it seems they were more hierarchical than bushmen and pygmies. Anthropological and historical record describes warfare and raids in Australia vs murders only (usually over women) with the bushmen. Also it seems as if the various cults and initiatory societies amongst the aborigines were more exclusionary, especially of women. Whereas the Bushman Trance Dance is open to all, but apparently more men become Trance Dancers than women because the experience of entering trance can be harrowing and painful. Being overly general here though, Australia is big and not all groups had the same practices.
https://traditionsofconflict.com/blog/2018/3/20/the-violent-history-of-peaceful-societies
There were some equestrian bushmen in the 1800s (in the Maloti-Drakensberg range) who had an advantage against farmers, like their equestrian hunter-gatherer counterparts in the American west. Khoisan-speaking foragers did make war, unlike the relict groups anthropologists visited more recently.
Seems the most hierarchical foraging societies were fishers. The two examples in the article are Florida and Pacific Northwest tribes. The Pacific Northwest even had slavery, human sacrifice, and monumental architecture. Makes me wonder what the Green Sahara Aquatic ancestors of the later Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan speakers were up to- what kinds of societies they had (wooden monuments like so-called totem poles wouldn’t survive in the agricultural record) before the desert and its Sahel expanded and the Afro-Asiatic, fish-tabooing hordes arrived on scene.
Khoisan speakers probably also descend from maritime foragers: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-the-sea-saved-humanity-2012-12-07/ . There were still beachcombers when Europeans landed at the Cape, called the Strandlopers, but they were considered low-status by the pastoralist Khoikhoi.