Month: March 2021

The rise and fall of the Scythians

Posted on by Razib Khan

A new paper on Scythians in Science, Ancient genomic time transect from the Central Asian Steppe unravels the history of the Scythians:

The Scythians were a multitude of horse-warrior nomad cultures dwelling in the Eurasian steppe during the first millennium BCE. Because of the lack of first-hand written records, little is known about the origins and relations among the different cultures. To address these questions, we produced genome-wide data for 111 ancient individuals retrieved from 39 archaeological sites from the first millennia BCE and CE across the Central Asian Steppe. We uncovered major admixture events in the Late Bronze Age forming the genetic substratum for two main Iron Age gene-pools emerging around the Altai and the Urals respectively. Their demise was mirrored by new genetic turnovers, linked to the spread of the eastern nomad empires in the first centuries CE. Compared to the high genetic heterogeneity of the past, the homogenization of the present-day Kazakhs gene pool is notable, likely a result of 400 years of strict exogamous social rules.

This follows up on earlier work on Scythians and Sarmatians. The basic finding seems to be that the classical Scythians, an Iranian-speaking nomadic group, had an ethnogenesis in the eastern Kazakh steppe. And, their origins involve the amalgamation of earlier Bronze Age Eurasian pastoralists, probably out of the Indo-Iranian Andronovo horizon societies, with admixture with Bactria-Margiana populations to the south, and East Asian Bronze Age hunter-gatherers and pastoralists, to the east in Mongolia. The Sarmatians, also presumably Iranian-speaking, are somewhat different in that they had less East Asian ancestry, though they too had more Near Eastern ancestry than earlier Indo-Iranian steppe pastoralists.

The whole paper is worth reading. But I think the key thing to note is that Iron Age steppe pastoralists seem to have been much more interconnected with each other and with the world around them than their Bronze Age predecessors. Though there was some gene flow to the steppe from West Asia and elsewhere during the Bronze Age, it was a marginal phenomenon. By the Iron Age, it was ubiquitous. Additionally, there was now structure and connectedness across the steppe.

By the Iron Age the steppe had become an integrated social-political unit.

Basque against the Romans

Posted on by Razib Khan


Genetic origins, singularity, and heterogeneity of Basques:

Basques have historically lived along the Western Pyrenees, in the Franco-Cantabrian region, straddling the current Spanish and French territories. Over the last decades, they have been the focus of intense research due to their singular cultural and biological traits that, with high controversy, placed them as a heterogeneous, isolated, and unique population. Their non-Indo-European language, Euskara, is thought to be a major factor shaping the genetic landscape of the Basques. Yet there is still a lively debate about their history and assumed singularity due to the limitations of previous studies. Here, we analyze genome-wide data of Basque and surrounding groups that do not speak Euskara at a micro-geographical level. A total of ∼629,000 genome-wide variants were analyzed in 1,970 modern and ancient samples, including 190 new individuals from 18 sampling locations in the Basque area. For the first time, local- and wide-scale analyses from genome-wide data have been performed covering the whole Franco-Cantabrian region, combining allele frequency and haplotype-based methods. Our results show a clear differentiation of Basques from the surrounding populations, with the non-Euskara-speaking Franco-Cantabrians located in an intermediate position. Moreover, a sharp genetic heterogeneity within Basques is observed with significant correlation with geography. Finally, the detected Basque differentiation cannot be attributed to an external origin compared to other Iberian and surrounding populations. Instead, we show that such differentiation results from genetic continuity since the Iron Age, characterized by periods of isolation and lack of recent gene flow that might have been reinforced by the language barrier.

The main takeaway seems to be that Basque distinctiveness dates to the Roman period.

Proto-Indo-European and haplogroups

Posted on by Razib Khan

One school of thought in regards to the Indo-European languages suggests that they exhibit a “rake-like” phylogeny. That is, they expanded rapidly and simultaneously in all directions. Aside from the connection between Iranian and Indic branches, there’s no obvious connection across the others (satem-centum distinction aside).

In The Indo-European homeland: introducing the problem Thomas Olander produces the above chart. It is not rake-like. What jumped out at me are correspondences/connections to Y chromosomes.

The two main branches of R1a1a are found in the Indo-Iranian and Slavic branches of the Indo-European family. The coalescence is ~5800 years ago.

There are some suggestions that Italic and Celtic form a branch. As it happens, Italy, Celtic and ancient Celtic regions of Europe have very high frequencies of R1b.

What about the Tocharians? The Afanesievo people were basically Yamnaya-east. They had a lot of R1b. Today, a small minority of Uyghurs have R1b. Far more have R1a. But, I think it is important to note that the Tarim basin was mostly Iranian in the southern and western regions, and Tocharian in the north and east. The prevalence of R1a may simply be a function of the nature of the sampling.

The Demons of Cultural Appropriation

Posted on by Razib Khan


Bombay Aloo has a variety of ingredients. Central is the potato. Tomato/tomato paste and chili powder are usually important too. These three ingredients are from the New World. Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors outlines the whole story about how so many different ingredients came to Indian subcontinental cuisines, whether it be from Central Asia, the New World, or Europe. If you want Indian food before Columbus, there are some temples that do serve recipes that date back 1,000 years, and so do not have new ingredients.

The foods of the Indian subcontinent are diverse, and all are synthetic. Bengali food, for example, has Mughal and European influences. And, it was shaped and reshaped by the prevalence of cooks and chefs from the nearby province of Odisha in the 19th century. Therefore, “modern Bengali food” is very different from what it was hundreds of years ago. And one hundred years from now it will be very different.

This context is important to understand the discussion about “cultural appropriation” and food. This is not a serious discussion. There are no serious people who take this topic as worthy of addressing. Rather, it’s something that a 24-year-old food writing intern will crank out “think pieces” on. They’re given a quota of “content” to generate, and so they will write thoughtless and uninformed pablum. That will trigger a reaction from the commentariat. Additionally, a small number of people will take the thoughtless piece seriously.

It is notable that I have never heard an Asian immigrant raised in Asia make note of “cultural appropriation” when it comes to food. Rather, it is always the deracinated children of Asian immigrants, or, highly assimilated immigrants who have internalized the folkways of the hegemonic white American woke culture. In other words, ironically, the preoccupation with “cultural appropriation” is a symptom of assimilation and intellectual colonization. Those who are comfortable with their cultural authenticity don’t mind others borrowing “their” culture, and do not reflect deeply when borrowing the culture of “others.”

So if cultural appropriation isn’t really championed by anyone, why do we talk about it incessantly? It may not reside in individuals, but it is in the air around us. It is a parasite in human nature.

  • Someone who doesn’t care and is ignorant writes thoughtless copy deploying the buzzwords
  • This is amplified by the “amen” choir of those participating in “woke Olympics”
  • There is a counter-reaction by the anti-woke
  • Which drives polarization between the two camps and “discussion”
  • This seeds the next round of “think pieces” since lazy writers and busy editors know that they will “travel”

Indo-Europeans!

Posted on by Razib Khan


For some pieces on my Substack I’ve been re-reading a lot of the stuff on the ancient genetics and archaeology of Eurasia as they relate to Indo-Europeans. This means I get a different view from usual…as it’s more synoptic. I’m not entirely clear on the dates or archaeology, but here is what I’ve concluded: the Indo-European expansions can be partitioned into “waves.” That is, they weren’t a simple “demic diffusion” where disease (against their rivals) and reproductive excess generated a continuous expansion across their range.

So here’s what I get

1 – An “early phase” where Yamna people push west (Kurgan) and become Corded Ware, and east (far) and become Afanasievo. Date this to right before 3,000 BC, but pretty much “completes” in Europe by 2900-2800 BC, as the broad zone of Central and Northeast Europe is dominated by these people (there are still debates on whether Afanasievo became the “Tocharians”; I think they did)

2 – ~2500 BC, 400-500 years after the initial push west, Indo-European populations push beyond their limits on the Rhine, and breakthrough past the mountains ringing the Southern European peninsulas. The dates are often vague in the south, but it looks to be around 2500 to 2000 BC. For example, the Neolithic farmer descended Remedello Culture in northern Italy ends about 2400 BC. The Bell Beaker Indo-Europeans seem to have arrived in Ireland and England at just about this time, perhaps a century after they came to dominate France.

Though there were obviously islands of exception (often quite literally as in Sardinia and Crete), Europe by 2000 BC was Indo-European.

3 – The third wave dates to after 2000 BC, and it is the “Asia reflux.” Populations used the forest-steppe zone as a stepping stone out to the east. Derived from the same synthesis between Yamna and European farmer as Corded Ware, these populations seem ancestral to the Indo-Iranians. Slavic-speaking people (or the ancestors of those people) occupied the western fringe of this expansion zone, and by the Iron Age had begun to move east, marginalizing Indo-Iranians across much of their core European territory.

It seems that Indo-Iranians had pushed into the margins of northeast Iran, Khorasan, by ~2000 BC. In the period between 2000-1500 BC they clearly began to occupy their historical core zones in Iran and India. Obviously, Indo-European Iranians are present in western Iran by 1000 BC in the historical record, though Indo-European Mitanni are present by 1540 BC at the latest in Syria and northern Iraq.

The Iranians also moved into the Tarim basin, so the cities of the west and southern edge were Iranian-speaking (the cities of the north and east were Tocharian).

What explains these pulses? I don’t know totally, but we know a few things:

– There are star phylogenies on the Y chromosomal associated with these migrations. R1b, R1a, and I1. I think the last is due to the assimilation of non-Indo-European men in Europe, but the first two are clearly primal. The Indo-Europeans were clearly very patrilineal.

– The last, Asian, migration clearly has something to do with chariots and horses. The coincidence in timing seems too much. But the earlier migrations were before chariots (I believe). But, the horse does seem to have come with Indo-Europeans, so there was a level of mobility involved.

– The “Bell Beaker” motif seems to have emerged among non-Indo-Europeans in Iberia, and spread to Indo-Europeans, who expanded outward. I think we’re seeing something related to religion.

Unfortunately for I suspect that the Indo-European advantage was “social technology”, not material technology. Social technology is hard to infer in a preliterate society.

Question for readers: Can you nail down the chronology better? Those who know archaeology?

Open Thread – 03/08/2021 – Gene Expression

Posted on by Razib Khan

Reading chapter 9 of Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe. Lots of stuff about the Nazis, so juicy. Will put the post up soon.

5,300-word piece up now on Substack: They came, they saw, they left no trace…except for all of Western Civilization. This is focused on Italy from 1000 BC to 1000 AD. I interleave genetics and history. Even if you are not tempted to become a paid subscriber, do consider signing up for free. I’m devoting more and more of my content generation to Substack, and some of it is not paywalled (for example, my recent piece on the Uyghurs).

In Hawaii, Reimagining Tourism for a Post-Pandemic World. I don’t believe it. But who knows?

Human challenge trials with live coronavirus aren’t the answer to a Covid-19 vaccine. From June 2020. I don’t think this ages well.

NASA’s Perseverance Rover Lands on Mars to Renew Search for Extinct Life.

I’m experimenting with a site called Indie Ocean. It’s basically a physical book storefront. You’ll recognize the list. Here is some information on the project. I’ve been talking to them for months, so this isn’t out of the blue.

It looks like the pandemic is finally ending?

The maternal grandmother effect and the rise of patriarchy

Posted on by Razib Khan

Virpi Lummaa’s group has another paper, Offspring fertility and grandchild survival enhanced by maternal grandmothers in a pre-industrial human society:

Help is directed towards kin in many cooperative species, but its nature and intensity can vary by context. Humans are one of few species in which grandmothers invest in grandchildren, and this may have served as an important driver of our unusual life history. But helping behaviour is hardly uniform, and insight into the importance of grandmothering in human evolution depends on understanding the contextual expression of helping benefits. Here, we use an eighteenth-nineteenth century pre-industrial genealogical dataset from Finland to investigate whether maternal or paternal grandmother presence (lineage relative to focal individuals) differentially affects two key fitness outcomes of descendants: fertility and survival. We found grandmother presence shortened spacing between births, particularly at younger mother ages and earlier birth orders. Maternal grandmother presence increased the likelihood of focal grandchild survival, regardless of whether grandmothers had grandchildren only through daughters, sons, or both. In contrast, paternal grandmother presence was not associated with descendants’ fertility or survival. We discuss these results in terms of current hypotheses for lineage differences in helping outcomes.

The basic finding is that in Finland maternal grandmothers increase the fitness of their grandchildren. This is a big finding in Lummaa’s work but in the discussion this paper notes in other cultures a paternal grandmother effect may be operative. So how general is this result? Do we believe in the maternal grandmother effect?

Also, despite the possibility of a maternal grandmother effect, societies in the last 5,000 years seem to have shifted to strong patrilocality and patrilineality. Is this a multi-level selection problem? Basically, inter-group competition between groups hash out so that patrilineality wins on that scale, but within the groups, maternal grandmothers are more important?

Week 9, Gene Expression Book Club, Autumn In The Heavenly Kingdom

Posted on by Razib Khan

The armies of the Taiping and Imperial forces race to and fro, to and fro. To say that this part of the narrative does not feel linear to me is understating the issue.  Much of the action continues to be centered on the lower Yangzi, but there are some deviations. This section of the book would benefit from maps. Lots of maps.

The key thing that stands out for me is the victories or losses. We already know the Taiping are going to lose. The question is how. But the brutality on all sides. And honor as well. An Imperial office is offered a position with the Taiping, he refuses and eventually is allowed to go back to his own side. Then, they execute him on suspicion of being a traitor. Captured soldiers are routinely massacred. Imperial generals berate their subordinates for not being brutal enough.

The chapter ends with a victory for the Imperial forces under Zeng Guofan despite a long night of the soul in various parts. The captured city has turned to cannibalism, and the civilians are mostly slaughtered because they had sided with the Taiping. The generals leading the Imperial side seem to justify their lack of mercy. Victory is a hard thing. But the fact that they write down justifications indicates that they’re not totally at peace with the brutality.