Has anyone read The Dawn of Everything? What are your opinions? What are the best reviews?
My prior is to be skeptical because economic historians and economists tend not be big fans of the coauthors, and I generally agree with the economistic crowd more often than not. But everyone is reading and reviewing it, and I am probably going to be that in that camp.
This Matt Yglesias ($) post Human history in the very long run wouldn’t surprise or seem novel to readers of this blog, but for a lot of Yglesias’ readers, it probably is. Glad he’s pushing this stuff to the fore.
You should subscribe to Cold Takes by the way, it’s good.
Floating the idea that “Basal Eurasian” common migration source is the reason that a lot of tests show that West Eurasians have more affinity to Sub-Saharans Africans than East Eurasians. Thoughts? After nearly a decade we’re still not there will getting a “pure” Basal Eurasian, but it looks like if they existed they’d have diverged 60-80 Kya and perhaps they mixed with other groups soon after?
There used to be such a Chinese joke on the Internet: What do boys with different salaries think before going to bed?
Monthly salary of 50,000: The team needs to integrate again;
Monthly salary of 30,000: That plan needs to be changed;
Monthly salary of 20,000: what does that customer like;
Monthly salary of 5,000: P40 pixels will definitely hang Apple;
Monthly salary of 3,000: Bentley Bentayga is definitely not as good as Mercedes-Maybach S600；
Monthly salary of 2,000: The influence of Russia’s attitude towards NATO’s eastward expansion on the US global strategy.
Yes, it is joke which fits pretty well in reality both here and China. Most low income friends are mad and extreme at politics. They blame others as cause of their own miserable life. They truly believe politics can change their life. My wealthy friends are less crazy about politics though they do vote dutifully.
I thoroughly enjoyed The Dawn of Everything. It isn’t especially iconoclastic; it just highlights some types of large human settlements that don’t seem to follow certain ossified views of how civilizations develop. The idea that European Enlightenment ideas were influenced by contact with pre-Columbian critiques may be new. The book is clearly pushing back against some orthodoxy, but even though I follow developmental theories, it didn’t gore any oxen of mine.
That may be why there don’t seem to be many reviews. The initial fuss seemed to be more about what people thought the book would say than about what it actually says, so it falls into the quieter realm of historical social study.
@IC
It probably depends on whether or not your wealthy friends are self-made, or owe their money, education and place in society to wealthy parents.
Razib: Floating the idea that “Basal Eurasian” common migration source is the reason that a lot of tests show that West Eurasians have more affinity to Sub-Saharans Africans than East Eurasians. Thoughts?
Depends on the tests we’re talking about? In ADMIXTURE it just seems to be the case that present day West Eurasian groups have higher heterozygosity compared to East Eurasians, so for most population panels, if the model is forced to choose only two populations, it makes more sense to model that by West Eurasians as East Eurasians+African rather than the reverse. More parsimonious and better approximates.
I imagine you’d get a similar thing if you did a panel with purely Africans, Han Chinese and high coverage, high quality WHG genomes, who are more bottlenecked than the Han. (And all in roughly equal numbers in the panel). ADMIXTURE would tell us that if forced to choose a model at K=2, then Han Chinese would be (WHG cluster)+(African cluster). Obviously in both cases it’s a pretty bad model for reality!
(Functionally this is due to the compounding together of more deep branching populations in West Eurasian since rise of agriculture and increases in mobility and not strictly really so much a reduced bottleneck as such?).
Going beyond the sort of functionally reduced bottleneck explanations for affinity between West Eurasians and Africans would take some sort of specific affinity with some African groups more than others, and I don’t think the evidence has been too conclusive. There have been some things found, but there’s not much that isn’t just due to pastoralist / early farmer migration from Levant/Arabia/South Europe?
@Dorothy Robinson: “The idea that European Enlightenment ideas were influenced by contact with pre-Columbian critiques may be new.”
It stuck me as just plain daft. I read the reviews that mentioned that and it struck me that the authors did not consider that putting arguments in the mouths of foreigners was a common literary trope: E.g. Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes (1721), and Diderot’s Supplement au voyage de Bougainville (1772). Of course, no one is that original, and you can point to classical antecedents in Thucydides, Plato, and Tacitus.
I really enjoyed The Dawn of Everything. Even if I disagree with Graeber’s conclusions, his use of well grounded historical detail to remind us that we live in one of many possible human societies, and that we have agency in determining that, is a powerful counterpoint to the great stagnation.
I imagine there will be real opposition to his contention that the philosophers of the Enlightenment drew from Native American thought & ecology. Societies in decline tend to rewrite history so all ideas are from their “primeval” traditions. Unfortunate, but no one even remembers Abelard of Bath anymore.
But I think combined with Albion’s Seed, there is a story here of a uniquely American genesis of libertarian ideas, not derived by academics in the salons of Paris, but rather by the recombination of the northern British culture of the Midlanders & Scotch-Irish, living in close proximity to, and the same ecology as, Native Americans. Of course, academics & pundits have this need to believe that only people like them, cloistered and without horizons, derived all the knowledge of the world.
But I think it was lived first on the American frontier. Which is part of why that libertarian ideal, even if increasingly imperiled in the states, is in our cultural DNA.
The counterargument to Graeber’s general thesis, however, is that almost all the civilizations he names were wiped out/conquered by ones that coordinated violence and military technology through hierarchy.
Maybe this illustrates part of the tension of traditions of liberty – whether libertarianism or Graeber’s anarchism – you may choose to be free, but if you are unwilling or unable to defend that freedom, you yield the world to stultifying orthodox hierarchies.
“there is a story here of a uniquely American genesis of libertarian ideas, not derived by academics in the salons of Paris, but rather by the recombination of the northern British culture of the Midlanders & Scotch-Irish, living in close proximity to, and the same ecology as, Native Americans.”
Robert Pirsig was impressed by that idea.
@Matt
Happy New Year! (and to everyone reading this)
I have also noticed this West Eurasian closer to Africans than East Eurasians in ADMIXTURE (and East Eurasians possibly closer than Native Americans) and I also don’t think it necessarily reflects reality. However, have not SFS-based papers also showed something similar?
To this end, there have been some theories that Basal Eurasians are in a sense some type of African admixture among West Eurasians, and interested what you would think of that (if you happen to see this comment)
But then again, from what I’ve seen so far, at least based on D stats and qpGraphs most West Eurasians don’t seem to be any more “African” than East Eurasians with the exception of ancient North Africans and Levantines (ie Natufians-though some f4 stats also show them symmetrically related to Africans in comparison to other ancient West Eurasians, including those without any inferred Basal admixture).
It also doesn’t seem like there is much recent uniparental sharing Africa-West Eurasia albeit more recent than East Eurasia-Africa (referring to Ydna E here and by Africa meaning non-East Africans).
Using new La Tene and Hallstatt samples from Patterson et al. 2021 to model Italians:
https://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads/42163-La-T%C3%A8ne-Culture-to-Model-Ancient-Modern-Italians
@James, Happy New Year!
Yes possibly re; SFS, although I can’t remember the specific papers.
It does seem possible that Basal Eurasians are some African population (if we define that as “living in Africa at some date after the OoA migration, though could have left Africa tens of thousands of years ago before present”).
If so they must be one that a) split from the proto-Out of Africa population living in Africa and not a long time before that population split from other Africans, and b) one that didn’t have much geneflow / admixture with any other African populations that represent the ancestors of today’s Africans, prior to admixing into Eurasia (probably at Dzudzuana Cave in Caucasus by 26kya, though this is still unpublished), and c) also not left too much legacy in Africa after that time that is today easily distinguishable (even in North Africa). But it seems possible within those parameters?
Under the model of Skoglund (https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(17)31008-5.pdf), where you have this proto-OoA population in East Africa that expands into Eurasia (replacing Neanderthals and Denisovans with some admixture) and expands through Africa too (with more admixing with earlier branches from AMH), the Basal Eurasian would be another branch from the proto-OoA African population, that splits off from the branch than colonizes Eurasia before it reaches Eurasia but after the splits within Africa. Then lives somewhere in NE Africa for some time before reaching Eurasia later, exchanging almost no geneflow with other African populations during this interval. (Early Upper Paleolithic Northeast African?).
@Matt
Thanks for the reply, always interested in your takes!
In your view, how would uniparentals fit into this? Afaik, no real sharing is evinced between African and non-African pops in the period between 40kya and 19kya (or whenever Taforalt is) and although that doesn’t ofc mean contact didn’t take place, Dudzuana was inferred with a high amount of Basal ancestry and assuming Anatolia_N form more or less a clade with Dudzuana I’d expect some mtDNA L and Ydna E among Anatolia_N (and related pops)
That isn’t to say BE can’t be African, I think both scenarios are plausible but since I suggested the BE from Africa scenario earlier I am suggesting the opposite now (rather, an into Africa migration similar to those the papers Razib had posted a month back had found)
Alternatively, I wonder if a scenario where instead of BE you have ENA admixture in West Eurasia could work. Afaik, the concept is defined by Ustishim which ENA have a particular relationship with, excluding his high archaic admixture.
Re: SFS papers I think Harris and Nielsen (2013) had showed some very late African-Eurasian gene flow, possibly centered on West Eurasians, I think it’s this: https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1003521
@James, I think that’s the suggestion re; y-dna anyway; all the Eurasian diversity is nested in CT (presumably OoA) while E1b1 represents a back migration. Doesn’t seem to have a strong connection with Basal Eurasian construct anyway given DE is widely distributed?
I don’t know about the possibility of a pan-Eurasian flow from ENA (or most well represented in the) that effected Near East less rather than Basal Eurasian; I think there are a lot of people running qpGraphs with this possibility and I don’t know if it’s sorted out, or precluded.
…
Separate topic: European Nucleotide Archive suggests new paper on Tibet ancient dna soon: https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/browser/view/PRJEB41752 – “Ancient genomes from the Himalayas illuminate the genetic history of Tibetans and their Tibeto-Burman speaking neighbors” – “Present-day Tibetans have both genetically and culturally adapted to the high altitude environment of the Tibetan Plateau, but fundamental questions about their origins remain unanswered. Recent archaeological and genetic research suggests the presence of an early population on the Plateau within the past 40 thousand years, followed by the arrival of subsequent groups within the past 10 thousand years. Here, we obtain new genome-wide data for 32 ancient individuals from high elevation sites on the southern fringe of the Tibetan Plateau in Nepal, who we show are most closely related to present-day Tibetans. They derive most of their ancestry from groups related to Late Neolithic populations at the northeastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau but also harbor a minor genetic component from a distinct and deep Paleolithic Eurasian ancestry. In contrast to their Tibetan neighbors, present-day non-Tibetan Tibeto-Burman speakers living at mid-elevations along the southern and eastern margins of the Plateau form a genetic cline that reflects a distinct genetic history. Finally, a comparison between ancient and present-day highlanders confirms ongoing positive selection of high altitude adaptive alleles.”