Patrick Wyman’s The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World is out in ten days. He’ll be doing the podcast circuit.
Speaking of which, please leave more reviews on Apple podcasts or Stitcher.
From the Substack: Alex Mesoudi: the origins of cultural evolution, Here be humans, Dragon Man ascending: two geneticists discuss the latest paleoanthropological discoveries, and Out of Africa’s midlife crisis. A lot of people are pointing out introgression, etc. that are not present on the charts I made. But the goal was to expose a broader audience to simplified representations. Life is about trade-offs.
Bayesian inference of clonal expansions in a dated phylogeny.
Richard C. Lewontin, Eminent Geneticist With a Sharp Pen, Dies at 92.
Designing bridges to cross the Fitzroy River (Martuwarra) in the tropical north of Western Australia is a major challenge. It has a huge floodplain with a very low gradient. During the dry season the river is confined to running in deep narrow channels, or in places not running at all, a series of discontinuous pools (it has a multitude of tributary channels). So designing bridges to cross those narrow channels seems like no challenge at all.
But in the wet season, it floods for miles around. Unless you have built the approach roads on embankments, the only part of the road above the floodwater will be your bridge. If you have built your approach roads on high enough embankments, then the floodwater will flow along the upstream side of the embankments to get to the bridge opening, and unless you have armoured the sides of the embankments with rock, will scour and undercut the embankments until they collapse. When it gets to the bridge opening, unless you have also armoured the bridge abutments, they will also be scoured until they collapse. And the floodwater will be carrying large uprooted trees and other debris that will batter the hell out of the bridge unless you have made the opening high and wide enough.
We used to get aerial photos flown of the flood plains to try to map them, and spread the photos out as a mosaic on the office floor – they would cover the whole floor. And the gradient is so low that it was impossible to tell from looking at the air photos which direction the flow would go in.
It was fun, but it was definitely a challenge, and if you were one of the unfortunate engineers who got your bridge knocked out or had your approach road embankments collapse, it was not a good feeling. Not to mention that people would be stranded for weeks before they could get through, which would not endear you to them.
I guess indigenous knowledge about the river could have been good to have, because they are there all the time, and they really need to have detailed knowledge of how the river behaves. But back when I was a young engineer in my early 20s working on this stuff, we didn’t have the contacts with the people, we didn’t have the channels of communication and, in truth, I think it just didn’t occur to anyone to ask them. It should have, although just finding them out there to talk to would not have been an easy task in those days.
Well, hope that Exceptional Expressionists celebrated the birthday, happy that this time was not needed help from R.DeNiro on the roof and it was much better organised than the last time. Instead of losing time to drag the local allies with them, they simply left them to sing Can’t Take My Eyes Off You, before they deal with Talibans.
We are continuing our rough ride over history falsifications, adopting a holistic approach toward some past (and current) events which include genetics, linguistics, archaeology, anthropology, and other disciplines. Some faint-hearted readers are hardly enduring the stormy sea of evidence and they are getting seasick. Unfortunately, there are some fair dinkum disappointments, too. I would expect from Razib who is very critical of us for cowardly keeping our heads down to bravely highlight at least some of the falsifications within the scope of his expertise.
What’s happening right now and right here (RKUL)? There are few recommendations/reviews of some books and podcasts. ‘The fall of Rome’, it seems, is a topic interesting to everyone. It is an inexhaustible source of history falsifications. One comical title is – The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization. However, the reviewer says:
‘Vicious barbarian invasions during the fifth century resulted in the cataclysmic end of the world’s most powerful civilization, and a ‘dark age’ for its conquered peoples. Or did it? The dominant view of this period today is that the ‘fall of Rome’ was a largely peaceful transition to Germanic rule, and the start of a positive cultural transformation. Bryan Ward-Perkins encourages every reader to think again by reclaiming the drama and violence of the last days of the Roman world and reminding us of the very real horrors of barbarian occupation….’
There is also a Patrick Vyman’s podcast’s version where he immediately says something as – Forget everything what you have learnt in the school, this is incorrect (he politically avoided to say – falsification). But, as far as I could see, both (and all others) did not offer anything new although they were blaming the mainstream version for incorrectness.
Also, there is a P.Wyman’s podcast with David Anthony. In one hour, DA said very little, less than in Razib’s podcast. It seems that his heydays passed long time ago and he hit the ceilings of his archaeology. He is aware that archaeology alone cannot give us the whole picture and, although he tries to include genetics and linguistics, he is not very familiar with them.
He repeats the worn-out story about Nazis and aryans but there is neither the beginning nor coherence in his version. He does not know about Sanskrit and shyly leaves an impression that it was a successor of Yamnaya IE language (sometimes used as a plural) but does not want to state this clearly. There is no explanation about sc. Proto-IE period (when, where). He tells about the wheel, but he immediately says that Yamnaya maybe did not invent it. He is unconvincing while speaks about Yamnaya social organisation (‘patron-client’ concept is a real crap). He consistently avoids mentioning the name of Vinca and uses euphemisms ‘replacement’ (for genocide on indigenous Euro people conducted by Yamnaya) and ‘not so nice things’ (for abduction of indigenous Vinca women), although almost everyone knows about this. It is fair to give him a credit for telling that we still searching the PIE story, that 98% of indigenous genes on B.Isles were ‘replaced’ by Yamnaya, and that the solution to sc. ‘Indo-European problem’ is the linguistic problem.
So, we have a lot of things to do. I am still Lonely Joe (am I?), who repeats that the term ‘Indo-European’ is meaningless and creates all this confusion. I can make a short preview of future topics – uncovering the falsifications related to the fall of Rome (and sc ‘ancient’ Greeks), we will find out the meaning of the Rg Veda (since Expressionists simply are not coming, so as in the case of the name of Europe) and the meaning of the STAN in the names of many Asian countries. We have also many other linguistic topics which, according to DA, should finally, after 200 years, resolve the sc. IE dilemma. We have topics for the next two years, 5 times/week, therefore, the Expressionists should fasten their seat belts and prepare for a long rocky ride.
Slightly inspired by recent tweeting by “Random Critical Analysis” (the blogger) was thinking about different ethnic obesity cutoffs for obesity proposed by researchers in UK this year ( https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8587(21)00088-7/fulltext ) and whether that improves prediction of international rates of diabetes and cancer (the main disease burdens conditional on obesity!).
Comparing correlation of diabetes with some wealth and development measures, age, and then 3 BMI related measures; 1) Age-standardized Obesity rates defined by WHO, 2) raw BMI, 3) BMI adjusted for the above different ethnic cutoffs. Some results: https://imgur.com/a/CFKcJT2
The ethnic adjusted BMI does best in terms of correlation while WHO obesity does worst (0.55 vs 0.43). We can then look at the crossplots of the variables, and we see that, there’s a positive relationship between higher weight and country level diabetes in all three variables. However, there is a degree to which Asian populations are outliers in the BMI and WHO Obesity plot, most strongly for WHO Obesity rates (diabetes rates like Europeans, but far lower BMI). When we integrate the BMI specific cutoff, the plots are still somewhat noisy, but Asian populations are no longer obvious outliers.
I also had a look at cancer rates, but it seems like age standardized differences in cancer prevalence is well predicted by country wealth and median age (implying the age-standardization does not really remove the effects of median age). So there’s no room for a BMI contribution. (It’s notable in this data that there is a very large North American residual for cancer prevalence for some reason!).
Therefore it seems like at first blush integrating different levels of obesity cutoff is helpful to understand differences in inter-country diabetes, but does nothing for cancer, because cancer at an international level isn’t well predicted by obesity or overweight anyway. Maybe there are some other traits where this could help.
Another SMBE related comment, the presentation by Mashaal Sohail at the symposium 26 was really interesting – they identifies IBD segments within Mexican populations linked to Native American ancestry, then uses these to reconstruct population history.
Finds a decline in effective population size for many regions of the country *before* Spanish colonisation, and infers patterns specific to the history of particular regions. E.g. societies in Southern Mexico, where NA ancestry is richest today, tends to have a population decline before Spanish colonisation, which mirrors expected declines in Mayans, and then expand in size after during and colonisation, whilst Central and North Mexico increases before Spanish colonisation only to decline afterwards (and is today where European ancestry is relatively strongest). Because most NA ancestry is present in the south, and this was also where pre-colonial population size seems to be largest (about 100,000 by ne so could be up to 1,000,000), aggregating all the blocs means that the decline in Central Mexico wasn’t visible because the decline in Central Mexico was offset by rise in the south. (It seems like colonisation was damaging for the Aztecs but apparently not bad for all Native Americans in Mexico, at least from very narrow effective population size terms.) European and African ancestry in Mexico also showed founder effects and bottlenecks… (Expected for a relatively reduced founding population of both.) Cool use of a Biobank in a heterogenous population.
Some slides from her presentation: https://imgur.com/a/XVRh8EU
I recently finished Ronald Brownstein’s book about the Los Angeles wings of different parts of the entertainment industry coming together in a simultaneous climax in 1974 to announce the city’s arrival on the world stage. In the discussion of the film Chinatown, Brownstein mentions Carey McWilliams’s Southern California Country: An Island on the Land (1946), so I read that next. Given the date of the book and evidence that I believe has been discovered only relatively recently for contacts between peoples on both sides of the Pacific (see here and here), the following passage on page 26 grabbed my attention (emphasis mine, not in the original):
“Richard C. Lewontin, Eminent Geneticist With a Sharp Pen, Dies at 92.”
I took Biology 101 at the U of Chicago in 1967. Lewontin was on the faculty and delivered some of the lectures. He impressed me as an incredibly nasty man. He was also a very hard core leftist at the time.
It was recently a global discussion in Guardian about the meaning of STAN in the names of many Asian countries but without much success. One version was that it came from Town >…> Stan. Well, we have Afghanistan, Pakistan, Hindustan, Rajasthan, Kazakhstan, Kurdistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kirgizstan, etc.
It is obvious that it has a Sanskrit origin. As I said before, Sanskrit and modern Serbian have thousands of identical or almost identical words with only one or two letters of difference.
Well, STAN is a frequently used word in modern Serbian language. The meaning is – the place of living. For example, ‘gde STANujes?’ means, ‘where do you live?’ It is now used in the meaning of apartment/flat/unit. For example, commonly is used as: I live in 2-bedroom STAN, I am renting a STAN in Perth, I bought a STAN facing the nice park, government builds 1000 STAN-s for public servants, etc. Sometimes it has the same meaning as House or Home but not always. Not every Stan is a home, you may have several STAN-s and you may or may not feel that it is your Home.
There are hundreds of words derived from the STAN. For example, STAN-iste, means Habitat, i.e. can be applicable not only for humans then for plants and animals, too.
Ergo, the meaning of Afghanistan, for e.g, is – the place where Afghans (Hindu, Kurds, Kazakhs, etc.) live.
The previous can be a part of sc. Indo-European discussion. Can anyone connect this meaning with Yamnaya (sc. ‘Indo-European’) language or any other language which allegedly succeeded from Yamnaya? It would be a paradox considering that Yamnaya were nomads without fixed place of living.
DA does not have the basic genetic knowledge to defend their increasingly absurd theories about PIE, Yamnaya, social organization (R1a-M417-R1b-L51 commoners), the conquest of Europe etc…The Harvardians have been trying to prove an unprovable theory for 5 years and their prestige and influence in Europe is decreasing. Reich and his people should establish a genetic connection by male line between the steppes and western Europe or recognize the mistakes made and rethink the situation-New data from Ringbauer (IBD) show that the BBC has nothing to do with Yamnaya and although a small genetic connection can be established between CWC and BBC, it is easily explained by exogamy in the regions of contact between the two cultures. The time is approaching to demonstrate that R1b-M269 is a Neolithic marker (with probable origin in the Balkans) and R1b-L51 a marker also linked to Central European Neolithic farmers. The longer they take to recognize it, the harder the fall will be. The whole structure of the steppe theory, as interpreted by Harvard, is collapsing.
Regarding Spanish colonization and the percentage of ancestry shared by Mexicans with Native Americans, I don’t think anyone should be surprised.
Excellent comment by Gaska. Obviously, DA is naked. He does not know only genetics, the same case is with linguistics, mythology, anthropology. He is maybe competent in a narrow archaeology only. He creates a big picture, sc. ‘steppe theory’ having no any solid foundations. Few months ago, I congratulated to C. Renfrew for his bravery and integrity to confess that his sc. Anatolian hypothesis was wrong, that sc. Indo-European language and farming did not come from Anatolia. At the time when the mainstream asserts that farming came to Balkan from Anatolia, Vinca already had populous cities while Mesopotamia was a salty desert.
In this context I asked DA to do the same, to keep the horse if he likes, but to give us back the language (and wheel). His shortcomings are visible when he starts (very rarely) talking about Sanskrit and Aryans while he has no idea how Yamnaya with their social organisation could compose the Rg Veda. He cannot explain where Yamnaya were before 3100 BC and where/when sc. Proto-Yamnaya was developed. Now, it is even less convincing his archaeological finding that the members of the same family were found in Slovakia, on Volga, Samara and Mongolia. What a coincidence!
Excellent remark re Harvardians and likes. For many years they avoided to research sc. Old Europe and they were focussed on Yamnaya and Corded Ware although the previous cultural history is about 7-8000 years and post-Yamnaya till today is less than 5000 years. It seems that Reich lab realised that research should be done on the source and started one of their projects couple years ago in Vinca.
Razib I have read your last comments about the relationship between Yamnaya /CWC/BBC, discarding Anthony’s elitist theory regarding R1a-M417 and R1b-L51 and trying to explain the discontinuity of male markers between those cultures in that they must be hidden in unstudied western Yamnaya sites and in the exogamy between CWC and the neolithic cultures of central Europe. I have also read many comments from “Kurganists” trying to explain why the Basques (and Iberians-Aquitans in general-2/3 of the Iberian peninsula-90%-R1b-P312) still spoke NO-IE languages in Roman times. The theory of the matrilineality of the Basques is still a fairy tale because we do not know if those current customs existed in the Chalcolithic, and we do not even know if we Basques existed as a people at that time. The only thing we know for sure is that there is evidence of migrations originating in the steppes (both males and females), that there are a large number of steppe mitochondrial markers in both the CWC and the BBC (definitive proof of the common practice of exogamy) and that the frequency of those steppe female markers is decreasing as we get closer to Western Europe (France and Spain), although the British Isles are a case apart because there, they are more frequent than in Iberia. My opinion is that as most of the people who participate in genetic debates are men, we always have a very masculine vision of historical events (violence, wars, race superiority, etc.) and we unintentionally minimize the importance of women in all these genetic issues. Studying population movements in the Neolithic and Chalcolithic is an immeasurable task because there were thousands of small population movements (solitary explorers, family groups, tribes), and trying to interpret them in a simplistic way (massive migrations, language changes) will lead us to failure. The important thing is to understand that only genetic continuity in uniparental markers can demonstrate which was the language spoken by the different cultures or civilizations. The Iberians, Tartessians and Basques can demonstrate that continuity in both male and female lines at least since the Chalcolithic (BBC), and the final result, is that none of these peoples spoke an IE language when the Romans arrived in Iberia. Common sense tells us that since there were no subsequent invasions or conquests, there was no reason for those men and women to stop speaking their native language, ergo neither the BBC nor R1b-P312-spoke an IE language. Only if Harvard can extend this genetic continuity to the Yamnaya culture or any other culture of the steppes could we recognize that our male lineage changed its language when it reached the Iberian Peninsula. And this, for the moment, is far from being achieved because the Harvardians have been failing in their attempts for six years and each time, they invent more and more unscientific theories to explain the inexplicable.
DA as an archaeologist has tried to solve the problem with a socio-economic explanation stating that R1a-M417 and R1b-L51 were of low social class, without understanding that only genetics will solve the dilemma-Excuse me, but we have also heard many times the theory that these lineages were very few men practically impossible to discover or that we will find them in deposits not yet analyzed. Do you think that these arguments can be accepted by the international scientific community? I believe that it is only one of many interpretations that must be taken into account.
Surely those lineages were much less numerous during the Chalcolithic and what we are seeing in Europe is a massive founder effect of R1b-P312 in Central and Western Europe and of R1a-M417 in Eastern Europe, but neither this, nor the fact that thanks to the BBC HapY-P312 extended the steppe ancestry throughout Western Europe proves a steppe origin of that lineage. There are many arguments to deny scientifically that possibility, so in my opinion everyone should focus on further research and be more cautious about the conclusions reached.
By the way, as a European I am very surprised at the high degree of racial consciousness in the USA, participating in any genetic forum with fundamentalist Americans is worse than a toothache, they take racial issues too seriously, as if it were a matter of life and death, and when they have no arguments they resort to insulting, harassing and finally banning the dissident. Do not take this as a general criticism, there are many smart, polite and unbiased people who do a great job handling complicated computer tools and trying to find solutions altruistically-Of course, many of them are Americans, that’s the good people we have to deal with.
@Walter Sobchak
It’s well-known that Lewontin, with some aid from Stephen J. Gould (who was a little more fair-minded and kind, but still very much a committed leftist), organized that mid 70s protest at Harvard of a foundational lecture by E.O. Wilson, complete with a condemnatory letter from faculty at top universities and buckets of water thrown on Wilson by grad students, after Wilson published Sociobiology. If I remember Noam Chomsky refused to take part in the whole thing, believing that it wasn’t in the spirit of debate and free exchange of ideas to use the kind of Maoist tactics Lewontin endorsed, ones that had been so popular on campus for antiwar protests.
In any case it seems like another real discovery of invention by the Neolithic people of the Balkans has been identified – https://phys.org/news/2021-07-oldest-cosmetics-ceramic-bottles-balkan.html
Hundreds of them – but by hunter-gatherers. Really weird.
I think that paper talks about Vinca (with whose name we will be now much familiar, is we were not already!) and Lasinja, who are both neolithic-Copper Age populations. The Lasinja group was summarised in a recent adna article as a post Vinca cattle pastoralist focused culture, where the use of Ringbauers IBD and RoH detection methods indicates they had a fairly high population size – https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0247332. Mention of hunters in the article might just be a typo/error.
Oh.
Well, it would not be the first time that particular organ had thoroughly stuffed things up.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/dna-study-ancient-massacre-victims-raises-more-questions-answers
Vinca – the cradle of European civilisation where white race originated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lepenski_Vir
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vin%C4%8Da_culture
Vinca figurines:
https://www.google.com/search?q=Vin%C4%8Danske+figurine&sxsrf=ALeKk03GASaEUZe68MEg3Ne1Uq8yScjqaQ:1626261070264&tbm=isch&source=iu&ictx=1&fir=E4K7v8PMqYTDdM%252CmtSkm2EEg3zdNM%252C_&vet=1&usg=AI4_-kTNHvQyZKe7UfmihdKUNlqh1-RO1w&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiSsJ7LtuLxAhVvzjgGHUgXCrAQ9QF6BAgLEAE&biw=1745&bih=881#imgrc=E4K7v8PMqYTDdM
Starcevo culture:
https://www.google.com/search?q=Vin%C4%8Danske+figurine&sxsrf=ALeKk03GASaEUZe68MEg3Ne1Uq8yScjqaQ:1626261070264&tbm=isch&source=iu&ictx=1&fir=E4K7v8PMqYTDdM%252CmtSkm2EEg3zdNM%252C_&vet=1&usg=AI4_-kTNHvQyZKe7UfmihdKUNlqh1-RO1w&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiSsJ7LtuLxAhVvzjgGHUgXCrAQ9QF6BAgLEAE&biw=1745&bih=881#imgrc=E4K7v8PMqYTDdM
Lepenski Vir figurines:
https://www.google.com/search?q=Vin%C4%8Danske+figurine&tbm=isch&chips=q:vin%C4%8Danske+figurine,online_chips:lepenski+vir:6k9SS-Go6Qc%3D&hl=sr&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjzq67TtuLxAhWonUsFHftoAWQQ4lYoAXoECAEQFA&biw=1730&bih=881
Vinca culture picture:
https://www.google.com/search?q=vincanska+kultura+slike&tbm=isch&hl=sr&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjzq67TtuLxAhWonUsFHftoAWQQrNwCKAB6BQgBENoB&biw=1730&bih=881
Vinca’s lady:
https://www.google.com/search?q=vincanska+dama&tbm=isch&hl=sr&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjzq67TtuLxAhWonUsFHftoAWQQrNwCKAF6BQgBENwB&biw=1730&bih=881#imgrc=HmHOmgxLfvWjRM
Blagotin – first bread in the world, 3000 years before the bread in Ur, first urbanistic plan in the world, the oldest temple in the world, ceramic wheat grain 9000 years old.
https://www.google.com/search?q=blagotin+slike&tbm=isch&chips=q:blagotin+slike,online_chips:arheolosko+nalaziste:6veXEQ3nvEM%3D&rlz=1C1GCEA_enAU802AU802&hl=sr&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj9nMGwv-LxAhVamUsFHUYJBhAQ4lYoAXoECAEQFA&biw=1730&bih=881
That would be my final comment on this blog. All the best and bon voyage!
This new preprint seems potentially essential stuff for anyone interested in East Asian ancient dna – https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-255765/v1 – “Triangulation supports agricultural spread of the Transeurasian languages”
Has genome-wide data from “Bronze Age” Japan, Korea. Finds that Jomon component highly prevalent in Korea as recently as 5000 BCE (though the RC dates in their supplement for the Jomon rich samples in Korea seem highly uncertain!). The average of 3 Yayoi from the southern tip of Japan around 200 BCE to 100 AD seem slightly richer in Jomon component than people today (which may suggest some ongoing migration from mainland), and even one Korean sample from 760-540 BCE from up near the South Korean-North Korean border, seems to have seems to have a richer level of Jomon ancestry than average Japanese today and a level closer to Okinawans. (So migration must be ongoing into Korea and Japan?). Tricky under this scenario to guess how much Jomon component in Japan (and Okinawa) is from Jomon HG people actually living in the islands, similar to analogous problems with HG ancestry in Europe (maybe there is some subtle difference which will shows up in f2 methods that will indicate that actually its from the Korea Jomon or something?). There is a model of ongoing migration in this paper, which includes some migrations from Shandong into Korea later around 1500 BCE (which is basically Shang Dynasty). It’s fascinating that this does not seem to have overturned language in Korea away from the “Transeurasian” group (or so they seem to contend).
(Seems like maybe Jomon, despite hitting quite a large population bottleneck if genome-wide Fst is any judge, hung on quite well in somewhere in the region of Southern Korea and probably Japan at least, during the Last Glacial Maximum. However, maybe they ultimately got displaced from most of their range more than some other NE Asian HG who were more related to populations in North China/Mongolia, because their land was better suited to farming?).
One of the things I found quite interesting in the above paper (adna wise) is that they also found a possibly a 80-100% Jomon person down at one of the southern Ryuykus, the Miyako Island site (Nagabaka) east from Taiwan, at roughly 0AD. (80-100% because I can’t quite work out which is correct from the mix of the paper and supplement). This is probably not surprising really since Ryukyuans are generally Jomon enriched, although it was and is possible that their Jomon enriched ancestry may be from elsewhere (primarily). But did make me wonder about the sort of previous conversations/literature about a “Coastal East Asian” ghost ancestry that links together the north at Amur, Japan, Korea, and then the Out-of-Taiwan Austronesian peoples.
The usual way I’ve had of thinking about this is that a connection between coastal populations reflects some sort of relict population structure that predated a wave of people who are more “East Asian”. I.e. the “ghost” was distributed all along the coast and then was largely replaced with some admixture.
But actually given this finding, maybe an equally plausible or even better model might be that Jomon people simply expanded by water at some point from after the LGM to early-mid Holocene and had arrived in some degree in Taiwan and maybe South China, then were admixed. In which case there isn’t really a need for a “ghost” and its simply Jomon ancestry, or a sister population (which might well have diverged post-LGM).
Although, equally alternatively, in the LGM maybe they could have hopped over on a short hop from Japan then simply walked it (due to a falling sea level)? Not sure if this is more or less plausible. This is assuming that Jomon in Japan were actually in Japan during the LGM though; maybe they were somewhere different like along the coast of what would then be South China and is now underwater / the East China and Yellow Sea, then only got to Japan later (but before the Yayoi people who reached there from Korea). The published Jomon ancient dna only go up to 2300 BCE (younger than the securely dated half Jomon half “East Asian” samples here from Changhang in South Korea at aprpoximately 4500 BCE, setting aside the less securely dated 100% Jomon like samples). So it’s not very clear.
(Maybe I should run some qpAdm/qpGraph to see if any actual Jomon ancestry can be localized in the ancient Taiwan samples as a passing model?)
New paper suggesting PNG highlanders have high-altitude adaptation too – https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-07-papua-guineans-biological-altitude.html . Although it is just looking at anthropometry and not at genetics.
Suggests that the adaptation in PNG highlanders is due to “higher hemoglobin concentration”. I remember some folk who’ve commented on the difference between Andean and Tibetan high altitude adaptations being that Tibetans don’t show increased haemoglobin and instead adaptations more typical of long term high altitude adaptation (like in high altitude animals).
I don’t know if that perhaps supports some complexity in the Denisovan introgressions – if PNG are in highlands but don’t get the Denisovan high altitude adaptation, maybe that’s because their Denisovan ancestors didn’t have it? Or it could alternatively be because they’re not at a high enough altitude but that seems less interesting.
Some other comments on one of the other SMBEs that I watched but didn’t talk about before, using within UK Biobank ascertained loci and effect sizes to estimate PRS and selection in imputed samples with ancient genome wide data: https://imgur.com/a/hSqgLRX
There is probably more question about some of the traits like height and BMR that are more linked to nutrition – we know that the arrival of steppe ancestry wasn’t linked to sudden large increase in skeletal height in Europe, or even any overall increase (from the datasets gathered by Ruff and Cox and Rosenstock and used here by Mathieson – (https://www.pnas.org/content/116/43/21484). Although I do think that when I looked at individual samples and compared measured height to steppe ancestry proportion, there still looked like a 3 inch difference on a regression going from 0% to 100% Steppe_EMBA ancestry (though this might confound selection and ancestry still, a big issue with these analyses).
In general their different methods seemed to me to shows:
1) Steppe_EMBA and Middle/Late Neolithic farmers show similar PRS for skin colour and hair pigmentation to each other while post-BA Europeans are lighter, including the individuals who are from where the Levant set touches samples they’ve labelled as European (i.e. probably Roman and post-Roman Italy?). Steppe_MLBA seem to generally have darker PRS than Europe-post_BA but more light individuals than EMBA. If anything, the terminal end of the EEF cline seems to have a lighter hair pigmented set of individuals than Steppe_EMBA, which may reflect some population structure. Some people have said before that results for some GAC individuals seemed disproportionately fair haired.).
2) The height PRS shows a trend of East->West declining height (between IranN->Barcin, Steppe_EMBA->Europe MN/LN and EHG->WHG).
However the PRS differences don’t seem larger or much larger than within the Europe post-BA between the relative position of present day North Italians and present day North Europeans.
3) In some line with that, another form of PRS testing they did found that the PRS for height for the Steppe_EMBA and Steppe_MLBA was around the same as what they tended to find for the Iron, Viking and Medieval Ages and the Bronze Age Europeans, rather than much higher. (EEF again tend to be a bit smaller, while the results on HG are different than found in the above).
These could be influenced by non-random sample selection (perhaps more of an issue for Steppe_EMBA where cousins seem plentiful), though the height data seems like it could be influenced more by that (since, I don’t know, but it doesn’t seem as plausible that individuals who were darker or lighter pigmented would be preferentially in certain ways or places).
Basal Metabolic Rate PRS seems lower in the steppe than among EEF. That has been suggested to be a trait linked to more lean mass at a given height, so you could interpret it to indicate higher lean mass in steppe peoples. But on the other hand, a study of humeral bending strength and robsticity of this arm bone and some leg bones again didn’t find any increase in strength or robusticity of the bone relative to length during the Neolithic->Bronze Age transition (leg bones became slightly less strong for height, and as we know stature didn’t really change very much).
I guess I interpret it all in a way that suits my biases but it seems to kind of support the sense I have that these studies find that early Bronze Age / late Copper Age steppe groups were probably relatively tall but not genetically inclined to be much more so than Northern European people today while Neolithic people were again likely not genetically too short compared to Europeans today. (Of course, both were likely quite short in realized height compared to present day people, even if steppe rich ancestry individuals might have been noticeably taller). And that neither were a lot darker pigmented than each other but both were somewhat dark on average compared to today.
In (tres)passing…
Wiki: “Persistent attempts have been made to link Beowulf to tales from Homer’s Odyssey or Virgil’s Aeneid.”
Wiki: “The Geats (/ɡiːts, ˈɡeɪəts, jæts/ GHEETS, GAY-əts, YATS;[1][2] Old English: gēatas [ˈjæɑtɑs]; Old Norse: gautar [ˈɡɑu̯tɑr]; Swedish: götar [ˈjø̌ːtar]), sometimes called Goths,[3] were a North Germanic tribe who inhabited Götaland (“land of the Geats”) in modern southern Sweden during the Middle Ages.”
Wiki: ” How the Geats of Sweden were related to the Goths has been debated for centuries. There have also been some attempts by scholars to separate the gēatas in Beowulf from the people in mainland Sweden and instead identify it with other Scandinavian tribes, but these have not received widespread support.”
Wiki’s etymology of Geats (i.e. Goths) are a joke.
>>>> So many falsifications in one place. And related to the Hollywood’s version of the Fall of Rome. I asked before – Who were Goths? Did not get any answer. It is so difficult to fight a whole industry built during the long period on these falsifications. Goths and Vandals for centuries until 1973. were parts of the official royal titles in Denmark and Sweden (e.g. Gustavus Adolphus, by the Grace of God, King of the Swedes, Goths, and Vandals…). King of the Wends? Who were Wends? Who were Vikings? Who were Vandals? Etc…
So, for now, just eye opening (for individual research) and without wider elaboration:
Goths, Vandals, Wends and Vikings were Serbs i.e. Serbian speaking tribes (or, Slavics, for those who cannot digest Serbian name).
So, for the beginning, at least geneticists can confirm (negate) that they were not Germanic tribes before we see how Homer and Aeneid came to this picture (maybe because Trojans and Aeneid were Dardans, i.e. Serbs, too?).
PS: In this context – what does it mean BERG and what is the link with RG Veda?
PPS: Beowulf – what does it mean?
Wiki: ”Henry Sweet, a philologist and linguist specializing in Germanic languages, proposed that the name Bēowulf literally means in Old English “bee-wolf” or “bee-hunter” and that it is a kenning for “bear”.
There are several other humorous Wiki etymologies.
Beo-wulf sounds similar as Beo-grad (i.e. Belgrade, i.e White City).
So – “White Wolf”!
But, why BEO (white), why not ‘Weiß’ (German) or ‘Vit’ (Swedish)?
Some other time about people who revere wolfs. Any idea who are they – Swedes? Danes? Germans?
‘Grad’ is short of ‘Gradina‘ – a type of new settlement of Vinca people who escaped Yamnaya genocide. Before, they had open cities with wide streets without fences and any protection, considering that they did not know for a war for 2000 years. New settlements had houses with fences and protections from potential intruders and aggressors. From this GRADINA originated the English word – Garden.