With 1.3 billion people and 35 medals ever, India remains an Olympic mystery:
Scroll, and scroll, and scroll, down the Olympic medal table, and let the eyeballs reach 47th place. There glows maybe the most curious case on the whole kaleidoscopic chart.
That would be India, fascinating in every regard while also baffling regarding Olympics. It has the world’s silver medal population tally (1.339 billion), its gold medal population of exuberance (581 million people between ages 0 and 24) and chronic trouble getting medals (35 in its Olympic history, or seven more than Michael Phelps). When it up and beat the curtain drop here and snared its first Tokyo gold medal on Saturday night, Neeraj Chopra’s exhilarating win in the javelin, it vaulted from a 66th-place logjam with Armenia, the Dominican Republic and Kyrgyzstan, whose populations add up to roughly that of metro Mumbai, to a 47th-place spot tucked between Romania, Venezuela and Hong Kong, whose populations add up to less than five percent of India.
… In a telephone interview, he outlined five explanations for how India has numbers such as just 10 gold medals across 121 Olympic years (eight of those from field hockey).
First, the India of yore never much linked sport and nationalism. “The emphasis was not really on sporting excellence or sporting nationalism, which happens in a country like China or in a way the Soviet bloc,” he said (and could have included the United States as well). He told of an old ethic: “‘The point is to play the sport. The point is not winning.’”
Second, as far as a national project such as China’s Project 119, well, “India never really had anything like that,” Sen said.
Third, the socioeconomic, the “poor health, infrastructure, nutrition,” Sen said, which mean: “The participation is very low. A very small amount of the population has the luxury of taking part in sport.” He said, “There was also, among Indian elites, those who certainly had access, you might add that is the sort of culture, parents would emphasize more doing well in academics.” And for the middle class: “If I want to survive, if you want to have a living, don’t focus on sports. I think that was, for a long time, part of the middle-class ethos.”
Fourth: “India did not have a sort of winning tradition in one particular sport,” Sen said, referring to individual sports and calling to mind the way Australia’s excellence in swimming helps generate energy toward Australia’s excellence in general.
And fifth: “As incubators of sport, India did not have anything like the university system in the United States.”
(Bangladesh is the most populous country never to medal)
An Indian friend once remarked to me: “we just like cricket.”
They show great good sense if you ask me. It’s remarkable how nationalism is out of favor with the “elite” in all ways but Olympic medal counts.
I wrote before more extensively and, surprise, did not win many friends. I decided not to write about this anymore but there are few highlights. The cricket is the worst thing that could happened to subcontinental people. This anachronic, colonial, Swedish syndrome repetitive and brain damaging activity which requires amazing infrastructure and moronic maintenance is detrimental to nation’s mental and physical health. It has neither head nor tail, you don’t know when the beginning is and when is the end, played by days and weeks under meaningless banners and you never know who is ahead and who loses, which occupies the time of hundreds of millions who passively watch and once or twice a day jump with number 9 written on their cardboards. While it may have a sense in Australia where it is used as a good opportunity to take time off from work and tirelessly drink as banana benders do, fighting enormous heat in cooling shallow water pools next to the cricket pitch and where is still a virtual preserve of racism. But, they have many other world class sports including the swimming mentioned in the text which positively influenced other sports. In the subcontinent is the opposite situation, the cricket killed all other sports. There is more than enough of ‘genetic’ material to reach the world levels in many sports which, unlike the cricket, require some physical and mental ability and efforts and without any additional investments. I, myself, could make a half-page program for e.g. for development of the national basketball which could be executed by few primary school teachers and to be competitive in one year with top 5 Euro countries. In meantime, we will be watching preposterous umpiring by guys who do not move for a whole day (why they don’t give them a chair?) and only have to keep the hat and sunglasses of the spin bowler. It is not strange that from such environment come sc. oit theories and Jazzargo-comments.
How would the USA fare w/o African Americans?
@skid, quite a few come from African-Americans but probably not as many as we might think. Full list is here – https://olympics.com/tokyo-2020/en/news/usa-s-tokyo-2020-olympics-medal-winners
Looking at the list I’d make a guess that not more than 20% of the US medals are from African-American winners (including Nigerian-Americans and Ethiopian-Americans and such), who are about 13% of the US population (and slightly more under 30 years old).
So I guess I’d naively estimate the US would win about only 92% as many medals per capita without African-Americans. If I’m guessing under and about 30% of US wins (about 1 in 3) come from that quarter, then 80%.
But this is sort of dependent on how the cultural stuff moved around that; it might be that in some of the categories where there is currently an African-American guy or girl, the US would invest more in a Euro/Latino/Asian American if they were the top talent available. Only in some categories like sprinting or medium long distance would you probably have a complete lack of ability to compensate, so things might adapt a bit more.
Also the US might lobby for more medals in shooting or whatnot, and that would even things out a bit too. That’s what sort of makes this a bit of a nonsense really as medal tallies don’t really reflect “overall athleticism” so much as how many different events the Olympic Committe can be persuaded to make. Under a measure that prioritized the most athletically loaded events, African-Americans might be more important.
Large countries generally seem to perform worse in per capita terms as though. I get the impression US medals are lower than even summing UK, Germany, Netherlands, Italy, France which is a similar sort of population level (about 300 million) but double the amount of medals. Canada also has about 2x medals per capita compared to the USA.
@JMcG maybe not so surprising as a lot of today’s ostensible “anti-nationalism” seems really to be judging nationalism very differently depending on whether it’s pro-elite or anti-elite.
“Anti-nationalist” sentiment that is about trashing the previous elites who today’s elite replaced (tear down their statues, revile their names), and generally confirming that today’s bureaucratic elite has more merit than those who came before, is fairly popular among them. While “anti-nationalist” sentiment that is against the current experts or whatnot and, which constrasts them and American society negatively to their predecessors or overseas leaders has a strong counter-reaction (“You’re just idealizing Russian strongmen leaders!” etc).
Similarly any pro-nationalism that’s about trying to restrict labour supply and so boost average wages for median workers tends to get a strong elite counter-reaction. Likewise trying to implement a low-volume, high-skill based migration system that, would ideally achieve a beating down of elite wages into something like what “a Pakistani doctor would consider prosperity” (to slightly alter a Neal Stephenson quote!) gets negative press or at least very little enthusiasm. While anything that’s openly nationalistic in rhetoric with the goal of supporting elites tends to be approved. E.g. “Forgive all college debt to release the talent of the educated and make our national economy strong against its enemies”, “Build cheap or free housing in ever-denser cities for social elite aspirants to make a strong urban middle class to make the nation strong”, “More immigration to provide cheap services to elites to make the nation strong” and such. (See Yglesias’ recent openly “Freedom Fries” esque posting in the last week for an unusually transparent version of all this).
Medals are taken as a sign of the prestige of the system that elites are presiding over, so they tend to approve of such “medal nationalism”.
@Matt
There is a limit to the number of athletes a country can send to Olympics (max 3 per country for individual events). That tends to give smaller countries an advantage in terms of medals per capita. If the UK, Germany, Netherlands, Italy, and France competed as one European team, it would win a lot less medals than those countries competing separately. Similarly, if the 50 states competed separately, the US as a whole would win a lot more medals.
@Harry, yes that’s why I thought the pattern was the case too. Having more entrants is more advantageous than a larger talent pool.
Yeah well it’s mostly genes. India is a diverse country but most ethnicities are on average low on every athletic measure, including strength, speed, height, and stamina. The clearest indicator is cricket. India has more players (and resources) than the rest of the cricketing world combined but is generally not the best team in the world. Even in cricket power and speed have a place (big hitting batsmen and fast bowlers) and India does not produce these type of players at an elite level.
If there are medals for climbing corporate ladder, brown men will win.
Even President Biden acknowledges south Asians taking over everything in politics and established business. Due to evolution pressure in high human density environment, south Asians developed fantastic social skill, rich emotional express, strong verbal ability. Those skills are typical for salespeople. The survival does not depend on muscle power very much but social skill.
Opposite end of this are arctic people who live in low human density with vast distance from each other. Social skill is basically useless. It is the individual ability in muscle power, spatial intelligence, long term planning that determine the survival. Thus Mongol and Finns have almost mask like faces with little emotional express, awkward social skill, very few words. But these individual survival abilities are good for most sports activities.
Most East Asians and northern europeans preserve most arctic evolution nature despite of recent increasing population density.
Also Olympic medals are function of national wealth. Training athletes cost a lot of money. Example: swimming pool, jump platform, coaches, ice rings, horses, specific sports facilities, training time, more. Just think about it, almost everything cost a lot money. No wonder gold medals counts goes up with national GDP per capita. Japan went through it before. Now China.
Let me add a cultural argument to the mix: Indian society is not perfectionist and actively works against perfectionism. For us, getting past others is good enough. Why bother shooting for the stars? This attitude, on one hand, is quite healthy. It works for the vast majority of people and keeps them on an even keel (psychologically). But to those who have the potential for excellence, it’s a body blow. They may still end up being good, but the chances of them being the best on a global scale are very low.
@The Truth:
I remember seeing a few years ago a series of papers about regional populations’ grip strengths and the frequency of alleles associated with ability to build muscle, muscle density. South Asians scored pretty low on each measure, in each paper. I’d also wonder if, in the case of the former, nutrition plays a role. The studies I saw were assembled by a guy I later discovered through some research was a fervent Chinese nationalist, which later made it apparent he might’ve been pushing an “East Asians are athletically superior” narrative.
@Otanes
Did he include this as well:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2873180/
One thing that does seem at particular contrast with the Olympic record is that India seems to be somewhat disproportionately interested in Guinness World Records – https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/25/magazine/why-is-india-so-crazy-for-world-records.html
Some of these are physical of course. (For instance, a recent pushup record – https://www.republicworld.com/india-news/general-news/indian-athlete-does-85-four-finger-push-ups-in-one-minute-sets-world-record.html ).
I’m an outsider here but it seems like there’s maybe a wider cultural thing of Indians having quite an individualistic approach to what they want to achieve, and generally being somewhat interested in “bizarre feats” that are achieved through some kind of cleverness akin to stage magic and practice, rather than the more pedestrian or normal world of achievement within sports. Even the Spelling Bee culture has a bit of this flavour (“Roll up people! Witness the remarkable feats of yer phonological-morphological mental skill! Roll up!”). My sort of stereotypical thing here as an outsider is that this hearkens to a sort of particular cultural heritage of vaguely mystical figures who do miraculous and surprising but often strange activities… (The sort of thing that in literary terms finds its way into Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children” and other such things.) Maybe that’s a bit “orientalist” though ;-).
Did notice one study from last year – https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cen.14342 – supposedly in UKBiobank, South Asian ethnicity in men associated with lower serum (free) testosterone levels. Some of the other correlations are expected (marriage, meat eating, low exercise, higher waist circumference). Unusually lower education level is also associated with lower t. I don’t know if that has any athletic effect or not though – they note that “We found Chinese men had the highest cFT, reflecting lower SHBG concentrations.” (although to some degree that regressed out on some of their models). Inter-ethnically this may have some different correlations.
I can’t read the whole article, but that extract appears to miss one key point: India does poorly at the Olympic Games because there’s no cricket, no kabaddi, and only two gold medals for field hockey. If they gave out medals for all four forms of cricket (Test, one-day, Twenty20 and The Hundred) then India’s position would look much healthier.
Ancient origins of low lean mass among South Asians and implications for modern type 2 diabetes susceptibility
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-46960-9
“Evidence that South Asian low lean mass is strongly heritable might indicate a still-unidentified genetic basis. There is evidence for natural selection near the Myostatin (MSTN or GDF-8) gene among South Asians44, which decreases skeletal muscle mass in fetal and postnatal life, but the nature and effect of any changes to this gene in South Asians remain to be clarified. In a sample of north Indian adults, variants at this locus were associated with variability in lean mass and (abdominal) obesity45. Alternatively, the heritability of low lean mass may originate from an intense cycle of inter-generational plasticity that is hard to break: low maternal lean mass may be the strongest predictor of low offspring lean mass at birth46, and low birth weight (associated with lower lean mass) predicts low adult lean mass47.”
Positive selection of the Myostatin gene has also been identified in (Niger-Congoid) Africans, albeit with the seemingly exact opposite phenotypic expression than in Indians.
Authors speculate in this paper that lower lean mass in South Asians may have been selected for in response to intense undernourishment caused by climatic variability leading to unstable food supply. I don’t think I buy this – I recall seeing another paper a while back (don’t have time to look for it now) that argued that the Indian sub-continent has had a remarkably stable range of major mammalian fauna over the past several hundred thousand years. India is essentially Eurasia’s own East Africa – elephants, rhinos, lions, leopards, gaurs (not to mention tigers, bears, etc.). I would think should have been plenty of game availble for ancient humans in the sub-continent, so I can’t see how Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene Indians would be particularly underfed compared to anywhere else on Earth at the time to drive this particular selection outcome.
Indians aren’t the only people who seem to have unusually low lean mass – the paper mentions Australian Aborigines and East Africans. Nilo-Saharans seem to be just as much of ectomorphs as Indians to me, and I wonder if there’s some unique genetic linkage between their above average height and low lean mass operating in them in particular.
All three regional groups listed are from equatorial to tropical places with arid climates. Perhaps it’s not about a single major instance of contraction, but repeated minor droughts through which these traits were selected for. As Matt noted in the other post on WHG-ancestry correlated traits, early European HG’s were huge, while later ones were smaller. Seems like a reduction in size occurred everywhere, as the megafauna disappeared and Bergmann’s rule became less important. Since the latter was never going to be needed as far South as the Indian subcontinent, perhaps they downsized early and then developed further resistance to specific processes of cyclic environmental stress. I don’t know about the historical climate though? Was it more or less arid at the time? I’ll go look it up.
Back in India, there’s problems with malnutrition (with maybe hygiene/disease losses playing a bigger role now than actual intake), bad air, and an utter lack of playing spaces even if you have money. Let’s look at the NRI’s, who don’t have these disadvantages and in general have wealth and resources.
How many blacks live in the UK and how many South Asians live there? And yet, how many blacks are playing professional Euro soccer or on the Olympic team vs. South Asians?
I feel like the only Indian in America who never played tennis. Every Indian kid here has played high school tennis, which unlike basketball takes pretty much anyone who wants to join. There’s a good number that play college tennis as well. And yet, how many Indians have any success at pro tennis? Yeah I don’t need you start naming people off Wikipedia. The numbers are low.
Baseball’s comparable to cricket, but what kills it for Indians that the former needs a lot more power whereas in the latter a 5’6″ 140 pound guy can substitute with technique. There’s not many sports like that actually. Size and power usually count for a lot.
Who’s playing on Fiji’s rugby team?
The few Indians with some success in sports in the Western world tend to be mixed race like the chick who was on the Olympics gymnastics squad or the new guy whose going to play for the NY Mets.
Let’s be honest. Indians lack the genetics to be good at sports.
If I were to guess reasons:
Usual tendency of same species being smaller in warmer regions.
Long history of being sedentary farmers which has eliminated hunter/herder pressures for size and strength. Didn’t they dig up bones of people in UP from 4000 years ago (probably AASI) who were averaging 5’10” or so? Average height there now is maybe 5’6″. The presumed tall Steppe contribution (see Razib’s recent post) obviously didn’t help when the evolutionary pressure was going in the opposite direction.
Recurring famines which select for smaller size. If you should doubt this, watch Survivor or Naked and Afraid and see what happens to the big 6 footer guys and never happens to little skinny women.
Arranged marriage maybe? Read on a Jewish blog sometime ago that within the community being big and tall wouldn’t help one’s marriage prospects as well as being economically successful, which is why they’re noticeably shorter than Northern Europeans who they’ve lived among for a thousand years. Same for Indians certainly, perhaps to an even greater degree.
@Otanes
While WHGs were shorter than pre-LGM European HGs, the post LGM BMI was considerably higher. As for South Asian downsizing, there isn’t a proper record for it, but as you said it was likely in the opposite (lateral) direction.
Re; lean mass in ancient populations (if that’s part of the discussion), it seems to me like its difficult to know exactly what was the case there because we just have the bones, which are sort of correlated but independent (generally if you’re doing more strenuous activity across your life and have more lean mass and strength you also tend to develop more robust bones, but its not a 1 to 1 thing?).
We do know that when it comes to the bones, what are preserved the femur and tibia bending strength (in leg) phenotype declines during the Neolithic (and doesn’t seem to increase at all with the appearance of steppe ancestry) and there’s not as strong a trend in the humerus (arm) but seems like there’s a bit more of a trend in women than men in arm bone (while men have a stronger trend in leg.)
(Few papers on that – https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/116/43/21484.full.pdf and https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0305440314003331 and https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/112/23/7147.full.pdf and https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/11/eaao3893)
All tends to make sense since people are probably moving around less with the start of agriculture, or if they’re pastoralists, they’re using horses and wagons and not really going to be actually doing that much more walking or running than farmers etc. Particularly men who are hunting less. While strenuous activities involving the arm might fall a bit more for women (maybe more specialization into sowing, and sewing, cooking, preservation, pottery making, and away from more strenuous gathering etc.).
Doesn’t tell us much about genetic potentials though under the same stimulus/environment.
Of course like most things, I think there’s only really a good or half decent European sequence for most of these things because of where the wealthy world is, and different soils and such. So reconstructing what happened across the world is tricky.
@Mick,
Regarding the study cited by you which speculates about ancient origins of low lean mass among south asians
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-46960-9, i noticed that the only modern samples were from the state of west bengal (and from the island country of sri lanka). Given the region and ethnicity wise variation we see in india, it would have been better if they had samples from the north-west part of the subcontinent which has more well-built people compared to eastern and southern part.
I am sorry but I can see a lot of speculative nonsense being discussed here by people who have no clue about South Asia.
South Asians in general are quite averse to sports once they reach adulthood. Sports and games are considered to be only worth your time when you are growing up. This is the cultural aspect that forbids South Asians from pursuing any sport as a profession. As adults, there is a dangerously serious lack of physical activity among modern South Asians which is compounded by a very unhealthy diet. All these factors, continued over a few generations, will, unsurprisingly have a genetic effect as well.
This cultural aspect is also a big factor at the institutional level since neither the Govt, central or state, nor the private sector, patronise sporting institutions. There is no career to look forward to in sports. Obviously, it is different now in cricket but even that is just a recent phenomenon.
The good news is that things might be changing now for the better. The recent Nationalist BJP Govt under Modi, which is so reviled globally by the liberal elite, disappointed by the abysmal Indian performance in Rio 2016, decided to do something about it. It is just a start but it has already paid dividends as India has managed to garner 7 medals this time around, its highest in any olympics so far. We also won our 1st medal in athletics, a gold medal in men’s javelin, no less.
There is no genetic basis for Indian underperformance at Olympics, it is a cultural thing. As I said, an Indian 23 year old won the men’s javelin gold. A Pakistani came 5th in the same event. North and NW Indians and Pakistanis, are physically more robust then the rest of South Asians and if they are trained well, they can definitely give a good account of their abilities with the world’s best. The NE Indians are also good in low weight category competitions while the South Indians are good sprinters. I do not think either the East Asians or the Europeans hold any decisive genetic edge over us Indians. The Blacks are a different matter. In the athletics of the last Asian Games, Indians performed quite well and in this Olympics in the 4*400 men’s replay qualification, they set an Asian record.
And just for the record, North Indian Mesolithic HGs from Gangetic plains were much taller than their European counterparts, in fact by as much as 20 cms when compared to Western Europeans.
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/5105466.pdf
Average Male Height was around 180 cms avg. This continued during the Harappan period where most Male samples hover around 170 cms and above.
This should therefore dispel the myth that South Asians are genetically predisposed to underperform in acts of physical strength and stamina. It all boils down to culture which we South Asians need to change. I choose to remain optimistic.
@Jaydeepsinh Rathod
You points about northern Indians are probably fair, as they are a mixed population
But the Indian diaspora, especially from the south, are also bad at sports so it’s clearly more than cultural. Indeed the genetic component can be seen looking at mean stature (even for those on western diets).
It also can be seen in cricket, India has far more players and money than the rest of the world combined. Yet is not the current champion in any format nor is it dominant historically like the WestIndies or Australia.
The harrapan civilisation was more than 3500 years ago, which is plenty of time for traits like stature speed etc to be selected for or against btw.
@JR
The Ganga mesolithic heights have been corrected to 178 cm, but yeah that is still taller than mesolithic European HGs. They were also lighter than European HGs in terms of lean body mass, probably indicating an endurance type build (like Ethiopians and Kenyans). Heights in IVC remains are interesting: the eastern zone is taller than the western zone. The eastern zone male stature averages are over 170 cm, while the ones from the western zone like Harappa and Mohenjo Daro average just below 170 cm. Sexual dimorphism in stature is greater in western IVC meaning that the females are disproportionally shorter than males in comparison to the eastern zone.
To be honest I think there’s a really interesting question here as well about how diverse or substructured the Mesolithic groups in India were, and how different they could have been from each other.
On the one hand, India’s not a very large place compared to Europe in land area (let alone Africa), but on the other hand, we find that there’s quite a bit of differentiation in Southeast Asia and Southern China (the Guangxi pre-Neolithic population is completely different to Hoabinhians from further south *and* people from South China – https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/880074), and while I don’t know if India was well-populated during the Ice Age, there were no glaciations like in Europe.
So there could be some scope for different groups to have lived in India, and may the ones that got incorporated into the expanding population more (who formed “ASI”) were not the Gangetic People and perhaps tended not to be so tall and were more medium statured and more robust framed. Besides selection. Bit of an unknown. Multiple sources of AASI ancestry never seems to be necessary in models of Indian groups today, but sometimes these things can become very overlapping.
(To qualify in above comment, by Europe, I’m including European Russia, and by “Not very large” I mean, “About the same land area” and not greatly larger).
The low lean mass paper cites data with same lean low mass phenotype in Pakistani origin UK born babies. This phenotype is present in the NW too. These are among the most NW shifted of the subcontinent, birdari Pak Miripuri Punjabis. Yet they are small. See the intro section for the citation.
Low lean mass is all over S Asia. Perhaps maybe a bit less in N and NW but I don’t think by much. So called called martial groups are still small bone structure wise on average compared to other groups globally.
@thewarlock
Agreed but last time I checked pak biradaris were like north Indian general castes but with less aasi and more iran like ancestry.
@Dathang
True. On another note,
Why do you think AASI confers small strucutre when it is recent hunter gatherer origin?
@thewarlock
I am not sure, we may be missing details for an explanation. I know the mesolithic HGs were lighter in terms of body mass vs body height, but even those mesolithic samples are also generally from the holocene, with maybe, just maybe some of Mahadaha samples originating just before the Holocene (at most 12,600 years ago). I tried to look at the supplementary info of the south Asian low body mass paper but the results were in the form of z-scores only. Mahadaha and Sarai Nahar Rai had positive z score for bone lengths but the weight z-score was around 0 if summed up. I know even in the graph there is a distribution, but if you average mesolithic (particularly SNR and Mahadaha) breadth values, it should be close to the average of all of the bones being compared (south asian + non south asian combined). They weren’t absolutely light, just relatively light. So a reduction in height, resulting in a near proportional reduction in the rest of the body caused the final low lean mass. Otherwise, the lean mass may have been like the global average, just distributed over a greater height.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-46960-9#Sec9
Again, this might not even be pure AASI, these could be Iran HGs mixed with AASI. Balangoda is probably closer to pure AASI but idk about info on their remains.
A similar thought had crossed my mind recently however, in comparison, India’s record at the CWG 2018 doesn’t look so dismal. In fact it was ranked in the top five.
There must be multiple factors at play but from the interesting comments Matt and DaThang have made now and in previous threads, it almost seems like there’s a certain ANE-related contribution towards greater height, though lower robusticity compared to the western end of Eurasia/Europe? Do we know what those Siberian populations were like anthropologically, were they relatively tall and relatively gracile, the latter at least by “Northern Eurasian” standards?
Incidentally wrt Matt’s bringing up those recent, various studies about height prediction lately that also mention the physical anthropology within Mesolithic Europe etc. and how they pan out, I’m reminded of Gimbutas’ argument, as she interpreted the physical anthropology, about the intrusion of a new taller but less robust population (of likely eastern provenance in her view) in the “Dnieper Donets” territory of shorter but more robust populations that resulted in “Sredni Stog” (scare quotes because there seem to have been some differences in how archaeologists of the area considered those cultures). Probably roughly what we’d refer to as the Eneolithic steppe “EHG+CHG” vs Ukraine_N “EHG+WHG” populations now.
@Forgetful
In the recent Estonian paper, lower wait and hip circumference was associated with selection from Anatolian ancestry so that can be another source for gracility.
Hmm.. I don’t know that I’d expect the Yamnaya ancestry people to be more gracile for height really – it kind of seems like the height changes a bit in my analysis but the bone robusticity in the studies measures don’t, however I haven’t really looked at it. I guess to me the more clear point seems like clear that the Early European Farmers were pretty robust at least in their limbs compared to present day people, and at least relative to their height, rather than being much more gracile than the people who followed them (which seems more like one of the popular impressions?).
It would be cool if there are enough femurs of the Botai people about to get an idea of the height and skeletal form of a mostly near 100% ANE population, but as far as I know there aren’t enough remains that this seems too likely.
Even though most Indians are of smallish stature, that shouldn’t be an insurmountable barrier to excel in certain sports. Soccer / Football would be a great sport for India, as it requires little to no investment in equipment, any reasonably flat surface suffices and small stature is not a serious handicap, but India adopted cricket instead of soccer because the British Raj tended to be from the upper crust with whom cricket is more popular. Some of Brazil’s best players came from dirt poor backgrounds.
Some of the greatest soccer players in the world were/are not tall or of big build: Lionel Messi, Diego Maradona, Wayne Rooney, Michael Owen, Pele, Neymar, Jorge Campos, Xavi, Garrincha, Gerd Muller, Lothar Matthaus and many more.
Another sport Indians could try is surfing, but I have no idea on the quality of waves in India. Skateboarding is one more.
India’s problems are not being into the right sports, malnourishment, cultural indifference to sports and no central government aid to excel in sports.
@Matt
Do you have sources for early EEF limb measurements?
Think I put it some links in a comment upthread, if those are the kind of measurements you’re interested in.
Couple datasets are here:
https://web.utk.edu/~auerbach/GOLD.htm
“The Goldman Data Set consists of osteometric measurements taken from 1538 human skeletons dating from throughout the Holocene.”
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/fae/cbr.html
“Excel file with modern human data set used in Ruff et al., 2020, Am. J. Phys. Anthropol. DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.24090
European data set: Excel file and Notes (see Ruff, C.B. (ed.). (2018) Skeletal variation and adaptation in Europeans: Upper Paleolithic to the Twentieth Century. Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell) “
Are they labelled as male and female?
I think they should be, not on a computer right now to check but seems like a basic thing that would be included.
NVM it does show the sex of the samples, they labelled it as 0s and 1s.
I have seen the ones labeled as Neolithic but are there any neolithics not labeled as that?
@DaThang, to be honest, although I’ve pointed you to these datasets, for the analysis in my comments in the Razib’s post (relating to the Estonian results), I didn’t actually use any of these databases directly, but I used the supplements in Marciniak 2021 (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.31.437881v1) and Mathieson 2021 (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.31.437877v1), which have tables that match estimated heights to specific samples for which we have ancient dna.
Part of the reason, relating to your question, is that although we these databases label samples as “Neolithic”, “Bronze Age”, etc, they’re not necessarily what we would always call “genomically Neolithic”. That is, you’re going to see a fair few samples that are labelled Neolithic, but actually because they’re from Sweden, and in Sweden the Corded Ware is called Neolithic, they’re actually mostly steppe ancestry… Similarly, you might also might find “Neolithic” people from the Baltic who are actually HGs. and so on. Hence going only for the samples we have adna for and can estimate ancestry for, to try and eliminate the issue.
“Part of the reason…..eliminate the issue.”
Yeah the bigger dataset that was linked earlier didn’t even show the dates so neolithic was the only thing to go off of. These ones show the dates and the context, though out of place genetic individuals can still exist, but they shouldn’t have a big impact as long as the set is big enough.