Reading Julia Galef’s The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t. I’ve known Julia for a decade now, and I really respect her. She’s a good-faith actor.
Less time for this blog, but I’ve been posting a lot on the Substack. If you don’t like newsletters (but you should!), I’m still pushing stuff to razib.com, with a total-content-feed RSS.
I’m rebooting the South Asian Genotype Project. Email me at razib.com.
There are 2,438 articles on bioRxiv when you look for China, genetics, and genomics. For India, the figure is 923. Pretty sad.
The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World. Another book on my “to-read.”
The promise of disease gene discovery in South Asia.
Untapped opportunities for rare disease gene discovery in India.
Admixture dynamics in colonial Mexico and the genetic legacy of the Manila Galleon.
A Genomic Perspective on the Evolutionary Diversification of Turtles.
https://i.imgur.com/9aJyCVE.png
https://i.imgur.com/JL1lDkc.png
The PCA from the upcoming Campania paper Greek Colonist show that they plot between R437 and R850 (so-called IA Roman outliers). If you use those two samples as a proxy for Aegean_IA; When you model Tuscans-to-South Italians with R1 and this combo, the fit seems good.
R1 was a protovillanovan who was found in Abruzzo in the early Iron Age, who has clear affinity to Croatia_IA/BA.
Olalde et al. 2021 used Slovenia_IA and Aegean_IA as a model for the Balkan_IA cline, which plot over Tuscany to Southern Italy.
Slovenia_IA is similar to Croatia_IA/BA which is similar to R1.
Ergo, R1 and Aegean_IA, both found in Italy in the same era, is IMHO a good model for Italians as well.
See images above.
Razib, your second (repeated) ‘Manila Galleon’ link takes me to something about turtles.
Not that I have anything against turtles. And no, I don’t eat them. I don’t know anyone who does, although I know of people who have done in the past. Those that come ashore to lay eggs in Hong Kong are strongly protected. The beaches where they do that are kept secret, as far as possible, to deter well-intentioned people going to watch them and inadvertently interfering with them. I know, but I’m not telling anyone.
People with higher socioeconomic status have lower emotional intelligence, especially at high levels of inequality
https://www.psypost.org/2021/10/people-with-higher-socioeconomic-status-have-lower-emotional-intelligence-especially-at-high-levels-of-inequality-61942
Howard Marks: “The Great Investors Are Unemotional People”. Charlie Munger agrees:”Yes. Absolutely”. “Warren is wired that way , too,” Munger says, “We are quite similar in the way we are wired.” Emotion is the enemy of rationality.
Warren Buffett never lose temper in his life. Natural stoic.
@ IC – There is of course the question of exactly what “emotional intelligence” tests actually measure.
Hedge-fund billionaire Ray Dalio asked Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Reed Hastings and other top leaders to take a one-hour personality test — and they all scored low in one key area (emotional intelligence)
https://www.businessinsider.com/bridgewater-associates-ray-dalio-asked-bill-gates-and-elon-musk-to-take-a-personality-test-2019-4
Bill Gate score zero on EQ test.
High IQ low EQ are the features of upper class people.
@Jovialis
R850 and R437 aren’t exactly Empuries2-like (i.e. the only actual IA Greek population we have so far), they seem to be formed via somewhat different populations. They plot relatively similarly, though the two outliers are still distinctively more “eastern” on average. I don’t see how you can make that kind of case without samples showing that it’s a possibility during the “Iron Age” though, since right now the samples we have make the opposite case of what you’re arguing. If we reasonably assume the IA Campanian set you linked to is Empuries2-like, you can see the differences to those two Italian outliers even using a set of basic/ultimate sources on Vahaduo. It might not be and instead end up being R437+R850-like but I don’t see why we should assume so a priori rather than the opposite which is more likely if anything.
Even then your model ends up assuming south (which is more reasonable) and even central Italy are overwhelmingly Balkan-like with much less mainstream Italic-Etruscan-related, almost none in most except Tuscany and if you add the Celtic-like outliers from the recent paper the Italic-related drops a lot even there with a much better resulting distance. We need more Italian Adriatic samples but that Proto-Villanovan individual looks fresh off the Balkans, like you state. That might be the case in most of the Adriatic coast of Italy but it might not and we’re basically assuming anyway that the putative Adriatic-like part must have taken over the western-like Italic-Etruscan part in terms of ancestry.
The distances you get for half of the regions aren’t that great, either, when you can get much better ones using the exact kinds of admixture sources we see appearing within Italy later on in both papers. And the resulting distances even seem to vary a lot when you can get much more consistent and consistently lower ones using that somewhat different model, which might make you wonder about its general application.
In general, it’s clear that there are two reasonable, broad ways to get to the modern central Italian position from the ancient Italic-Etruscan one: an Italic-Etruscan base with a decent amount of Near Eastern related ancestry alongside some other less prominent admixtures from Balkan like and Celtic (and Germanic) like sources or a mostly Balkan/Adriatic-like base with some, but less than the previous model, Near Eastern and Celtic and very little actual Italic/Etruscan. Your kind of model there is basically going with the second option.
The one point I’ll stick to is that yeah, we do obviously need some more samples from certain unsampled regions and time periods. And the early outliers are of course interesting, even if they likely represent a more transitional state of affairs (not unlike the Ashkelon IA1 set, say) compared to the later period.
“The Aristocracy of Talent” – seems to get positive reviews from our self envisioned “Aristocrats of Talent”. But no comments from actual real working economic historians as to whether its really true that “Meritocracy Made the Modern World”! Whether it really was a shift to a regime of social rank being determined by tests that actually created modern growth. Shame! It seems like they’d be the ones who know, and not the political editor of the Economist. I await their verdict!
I’ve made my view on this known before; I expect that mobility in patronage networks is probably a bit more correlated than we might think with performance and ability, and even rudimentary knowledge tests added to that probably close much of the remaining gap. In the grand scheme of things, probably not too much untapped potential and diminishing returns beyond that to things like SAT that aim to be culture-fair, fluid g (a bit, but hardly enough to make the difference between a developed and non-developed country). Plus family businesses and a bit of parental knowledge and contacts transmission might have some plausible advantages. So I don’t think testing matters too much for modern economic growth the way Wooldridge and other Economist sorts might want it to. If it does matter, it’s by providing a motivation to get education and learn useful things, and not actually so much because it gives us elites with that much more raw potential. More of an incentives story and less of a talent selection story (the rich probably come from the same families either way, and untapped talent from the bottom of society is mostly fake, but let’s give the rich an incentive to learn maths and not just learn grouse shooting).
That said, the idea of functioning patronage networks is all assuming that the people involved are not crazy. Testing as an alternative to ideological purity based network is a different thing than as an alternative to more functional, material quid-pro-quo, “Let’s you and me make us some money” patronage networks.
New ancient horse DNA paper just dropped – https://www.science.org/content/article/ancient-dna-reveals-long-sought-homeland-modern-horses
Have to read the paper in full, but the Science article notes the following interesting points:
– The expanding lineage circa 4200 BCE (Potapovka / early Sintashta) was a descendent of earlier PC steppe horses (DOM2), but…
– The Corded Ware didn’t bring steppe horses to Europe – “But samples from the new study show that once they got to Europe, the Yamnaya” (Corded Ware?) “used earlier European horses rather than the DOM2 variety”. Complicates the idea that they travelled with herds rather than tamed what was about…!
– This also seems to make the idea of ‘Early equestrian steppe elite Anatolian speakers’ even more questionable.
– And also “One of the oldest dates, about 5400 years ago, comes from a horse’s leg bone buried with a small child in a kurgan built by the Maykop culture at Aygurskiy, in southern Russia.” Steppe_Maykop with strong West Siberian genetic influence seemingly did *not* use Botai horses, but the same clade present later in the PC Steppe (and related to or ancestral to the expanding horse lineage).
Full paper – https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04018-9
Btw, I think if Yamnaya were horse people but opportunistic horse tamers and not horse breeders, then it might explain why there is relatively little consistent evidence for equestrianism with the early IE expansions… Sometimes they were lucky to be in regions where there were herds of horses about to tame, and sometimes they were not and that element of the cultural package got dropped?
Also might explain why the Yamnaya were replaced, *first* by this highly genetically heterogenous Potapovka formation around 2200 BCE, *then* by the Sintashta.
The Sintashta samples we have are all from around 1800-1700 BCE in their mean dating, actually quite a bit later than this expansion. The steppe samples we have from this time, the Potapovka, the actual immediate successor to the Yamnaya, dated 2150 BCE to 1960 BCE, are about 5 samples, a highly heterogenous bunch, with fair amounts of West Siberian admixture – https://imgur.com/a/Iibvy8K. This would not be the first time we see a new mobility “technology” being associated with drawing in people from a wide sphere across Central Eurasia (e.g. Steppe_Maykop are the first steppe wagon users and the first with the DOM2 horse, slightly pipping the Repin culture to the post). Only one of the Potapovka samples in that 5 was actually like a Sintashta person, genetically…
Both Potapovka and Sintashta have DOM2 horses in this study, at about the same time (some overlap between cultures). (Also, wiki – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potapovka_culture – “The Potapovka culture is especially distinguished by the presence of bone cheek-pieces for controlling horses.”)
Though also note from paper: “genetic continuity with DOM2 was rejected for all horses predating about 2200 bc, especially those from the NEO-ANA group (Supplementary Table 2), except for two late Yamnaya specimens from approximately 2900 to 2600 bc (Turganik (TURG)), located further east than the western lower Volga-Don region (Figs. 2a, b, 3a).”
“By around 2200–2000 bc, the typical DOM2 ancestry profile appeared outside the Western Eurasia steppes in Bohemia (Holubice), the lower Danube (Gordinesti II) and central Anatolia (Acemhöyük), spreading across Eurasia shortly afterwards, eventually replacing all pre-existing lineages (Fig 2c, Extended Data Fig. 3c) … Of note, the DOM2 genetic profile was ubiquitous among horses buried in Sintashta kurgans together with the earliest spoke-wheeled chariots around 2000–1800 bc7,9,23,24 (Extended Data Fig. 6). A typical DOM2 profile was also found in Central Anatolia (AC9016_Tur_m1900), concurrent with two-wheeled vehicle iconography from about 1900 bc. However, the rise of such profiles in Holubice, Gordinesti II and Acemhöyük before the earliest evidence for chariots supports horseback riding fuelling the initial dispersal of DOM2 horses outside their core region, in line with Mesopotamian iconography during the late third and early second millennia bc27. “
Expansion of DOM2 ancestry was *really* fast! These new horses were of obvious utility. Horses and chariots spread in West Asia well before substantial Indo-Iranian expansions which from the genetic data in South Central Asia seems more around 1400 BCE? Or at least there are no ancestry disturbances at the BMAC and post-BMAC complex until after this time. The first sample in Turkmenistan with secure Steppe_MLBA ancestry is at 800 BCE, and the samples at Sumbar and Parkhai at approximately 1400-1200 BCE don’t seem to me to have it. (One outlier at Sumbar, but doesn’t look Steppe_MLBA admixed).
Not farming, but more rather division of labor is possibly facilitating brain-size reduction since the Pleistocene:
“We propose that ants can provide diverse models to understand why brains may increase or decrease in size due to social life. Understanding why brains increase or decrease is difficult to study using only fossils,” explained Traniello.
“Studying computational models and patterns of worker ant brain size, structure, and energy use in some ant clades, such as the Oecophylla weaver ant, Atta leafcutter ants, or the common garden ant Formica, showed that group-level cognition and division of labor may select for adaptive brain size variation. This means that within a social group where knowledge is shared or individuals are specialists at certain tasks, brains may adapt to become more efficient, such as decreasing in size.”
“Ant and human societies are very different and have taken different routes in social evolution,” Traniello said. “Nevertheless, ants also share with humans important aspects of social life such as group decision-making and division of labor, as well as the production of their own food (agriculture). These similarities can broadly inform us of the factors that may influence changes in human brain size.”
“Brains use up a lot of energy, and smaller brains use less energy. The externalization of knowledge in human societies, thus needing less energy to store a lot of information as individuals, may have favored a decrease in brain size.”
“We propose that this decrease was due to increased reliance on collective intelligence, the idea that a group of people is smarter than the smartest person in the group, often called the ‘wisdom of the crowds,'” added Traniello.
“DeSilva concluded, ‘We look forward to having our hypothesis tested as additional data become available.'”
https://phys.org/news/2021-10-human-brains-decrease-size-years.html
Found by chance, an interesting archaeological podcast from September: https://foreigncountries.podbean.com/e/51-archaeology-of-later-prehistoric-europe-bronze-age-state-societies-in-spain-crete-1630718368/
Dr Roberto Risch (who has been a contributing author on several adna papers before) talking about how new large scale excavations in Spain in the last 10 years are finding the rise of what appear to be early state societies in both El Argar in Southeastern Iberia, and parallels with the Unetice Culture in Central Europe.
Particularly relevant to ancient dna (for anyone hungry for new info) are Risch’s comments at 10:40: “We are now doing systematically genetic analysis on the ancient dna, which we extract from the (petruous bone) of the skulls and this is working very well, we have about 60% success rate, in this so, (in every 10 burials we get 6 in the dna). And the dna shows us in relations, (and this will be published very shortly), how was El Argar formed as a society, which populations came together in Southeast Iberia to form.
In Central Europe we know, the Central Europe Bronze Age, the Unetice, is a mixture of the Bell Beaker communities and the so-called Corded Ware communities. And these two communities, which both have their ancestry in Eastern Europe, they intermingle and stop producing Bell Beaker and Corded Ware pottery and produce undecorated pottery, which is typical Unetice pottery. (That compares to El Argar in that) the typical pottery is also undecorated. We have the Bell Beaker period before and we have symbolic Los Millares (Spanish Copper Age Culture) decorated bowls and suddenly at 2200 BCE there is no more Los Millares, no more Bell Beaker culture, and we have a new type, which, now we see genetically is the coming together of two or even three different groups which have different origins, and create in a small territory a new political system, which slowly becomes a state society.”
Then some more comments about mapping kinship at these sites.
Potentially quite exciting as this may solve the question of “Why did these non-Indo-European, Iberian languages persist?”. Well, this may have been the language of these late Iberian CA Los Millares groups… One of the interpretations of El Argar has been of an arriving society that replaces Los Millares, however it seems like a bit more, as Risch describes it, perhaps this yes, but also some form of cultural synthesis.
I actually think Unetice may be more complex than he describes, as from the Bohemian paper we have lots of I2 and even some G2 in the Unetice population – it’s not just R1b-M269 Beakers and R1a-M417 Corded Ware, but more diversity. (The Unetice sites we have are obviously dominated by R1b-M269, but then theres a fair bit of I2 as well). It’s speculatively very interesting to think that there may have been these situations where the post-early IE expansion societies took on more characteristics of complexity, and moved away from being simple patrilineage societies, and that involved some shifts away from the variants of the single burial rite (even if they did not seem to be able to make these very sustainable in the longer term).
Some of Risch’s comments about the formation of states and the possibility of seeing the effect of the growth of states in the kinship structures in adna in almost in ‘real time’ are very interesting; another use for the technology, to tell us how really these changes did (or did not!) change kinship relationships at least in El Argar. Also discusses as a big question, why the “states” in El Argar (and Unetice) were short lived.
(Related – https://www.heritagedaily.com/2021/10/face-to-face-with-the-prehistoric-inhabitants-of-el-argar/141591 – article from this month on reconstructions of faces of El Argar inhabitants, and comparison with adna kinship, to sort of test how well kinship can be inferred from facial shape in ancient sets in an archaeological context).
Btw, related to my comment above, this will probably be the relevant paper for the adna data Risch describes – https://pure.mpg.de/pubman/faces/ViewItemOverviewPage.jsp?itemId=item_3342061 – “Genomic transformation and social organization during the Copper Age – Bronze age transition in Southern Iberia” – Villalba-Mouco, V et al
@Matt
Is there an email through which I can communicate with you? I don’t remember if I’ve asked this before.
@DaThang, I’ll see if I’ve got one. (No offence to you, I want to keep it separate from my normal emails). You got one I can send to?
…
Also, the paper with the odd North Eurasian middle Bronze Age Tarim Basin Mummies has dropped – https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04052-7
(Data leaked out to Eurogenes ages ago, so kinda seen samples, but just gonna read it now).
@Matt
You can contact me on earthquake344@gmail.com