Happy Mother’s Day!
Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s ouvre is appropriate, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding, The Woman That Never Evolved and Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species.
Luxury Beliefs are Like Possessions: The way we treat objects can be generalized to the way we treat beliefs. Subscribe to Rob’s newsletter.
Nick Patterson’s newsletter. May not post frequently, but probably worth a read if he does…
Migration, Ancient DNA, and European Prehistory: Interview with Kristian Kristiansen.
I had some thoughts about the previous post, coming from the unique position of someone who once aspired to being an academic, but instead works at an academic institution in a blue collar position, but the thread got closed.
I’d elaborate on it now, but I’m actually at work and just got a call to break down yet another homeless encampment, so I’ll let that be just a teaser of life at the base of the Ivory Tower.
I hope to one day see an American Henry VIII who enacts the Dissolution of the Universities.
Since you like fantasy Razib, I thought I would recommend what I’ve been reading in my spare time – Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen series. The core series is 10 novels, and I’m most of the way through the 8th book (I picked up the entire series as a single ebook). It’s exactly the sort of fantasy that you’ve indicated liking in the past – dense with loads of characters and worldbuilding which would even put Tolkien to shame. The author has a background trained as an archeologist and anthropologist and it shows (as an example, one of the “elder races” of the series are essentially undead Neandertals). The author’s prose is quite dense, and the series begins in media res (there are no lore dumps anywhere, you have to figure out the world by context), but once you can get past that, it’s clearly the most ambitious (and successful) epic fantasy series that I have ever read.
“Finally, just as some people buy objects they don’t really like just to impress other people, they also espouse certain beliefs for the same reason.”
Such behavior has deep evolutionary basis among most animals including birds.
In human society, ultra riches are often out of sight, who do not need to impress public anymore, according to Paul Fussell. They have truly independent individualism. It is middle class insecure about their status, who need to signal others about their above average status. It is sign of certain degree of dependence.
Both Adam Smith and Le Bon found out that western societies have true sympathy and admiration for the rich class over the poor. Juries with any backgrounds in the West show consistent sympathy for the rich. The result is independent of judge, lawyers, or locations.
Interesting preprint on the pinboard, “Primate mothers promote proximity between their offspring and infants who look like them | bioRxiv”. Well, at a closer look it appears that the authors’ facial recognition algorithm is primarily sensitive to the mandrill age, and much less so, to parentage. Most likely the primate mothers just prefer their babies to play with someone close in age 🙂
Also on the pinboard, the Tajik genetic makeup paper. Any thoughts on the nature of the South Asian admixture which is present in all Tajik populations and is estimated to be a millennium old?
al-biruni talks about huge numbers of ‘black’ slaves in the cities of aghanistan around this time. so it’s probably that.
So it was the plunder of Mahmud Ghaznavi’s conquests and raids of the early 1000’s? But they also controlled much of today’s Iran at the time? Does it mean that we should also expect to see South Indian ancestry in today’s Iranians?
pretty much yes to all of that. you do see low levels of ‘south asian’ ancestry in some Iranians in fact. less in western Iran, but yes in eastern Iran (khorasan)
Razib will have seen this already, but you other guys might find this interesting – https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.05.13.491805v1 – “Genome-wide data from medieval German Jews show that the Ashkenazi founder event pre-dated the 14th century” – “We report genome-wide data for 33 Ashkenazi Jews (AJ), dated to the 14th century, following a salvage excavation at the medieval Jewish cemetery of Erfurt, Germany. The Erfurt individuals are genetically similar to modern AJ and have substantial Southern European ancestry, but they show more variability in Eastern European-related ancestry than modern AJ.”
Basically the samples look along the modern cline, but more diverse in position. See here for a comparison between the paper’s figure and the data on EurogenesG25 – https://imgur.com/a/C84DAbv
But lots more interesting details in the preprint, where they try to reconstruct the runs of homozygosity and consanguinity in the population to reconstruct the bottleneck, and try to look at whether the pathogenic variants associated to founder effects are yet present in the population. (That would help to test the theory that Jewish groups have deleterious variants that are heavily selected because of strong positive correlated with EDU).
I believe there is more ancient dna from early Central / Northern European Jewish communities coming, for instance from (sadly) some massacre sites, possibly from some massacre site/cementary in Britain as well (don’t quote me on that one though).
(Some contrast to another paper recently which found high mobility in the Roman and post-Roman period with many represented outliers – https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.05.15.491973v1?rss=1 – but also found that these seem to make little/no contribution to modern populations.
This needs some testing with maybe some higher resolution methods, but it’s an interesting contrast to Jewish groups because the proposed mechanism for the “transient” signs of mobility and change are that individuals died disproportionately in cities and/or moved back after the ends of expansion periods, presumably using the same mobility via Roman roads etc that moved them in. All things considered the Roman Era seems like mobility per generation could even be as high as the steppe expansion period, but its not sustained in impact, so more like circular mobility or subject to urban high death rates that cancel the effect of mobility on the general population. A big contrast to Ashkenazi Jews, the community that in the European record seems to have been best able to thrive and grow in urban conditions, and grew as urbanization grew, with the Roman/Mediterranean town model spreading even more into Northern Europe in the post-Roman period?)
A tooth from a young child, probably Denisovan, probably female, found in Laos, dated to 164-131 kyr.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-29923-z
New paper: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(22)00705-9 – “Ancient Maltese genomes and the genetic geography of Neolithic Europe”
“Archaeological consideration of maritime connectivity has ranged from a biogeographical perspective that considers the sea as a barrier to a view of seaways as ancient highways that facilitate exchange. Our results illustrate the former. We report three Late Neolithic human genomes from the Mediterranean island of Malta that are markedly enriched for runs of homozygosity, indicating inbreeding in their ancestry and an effective population size of only hundreds, a striking illustration of maritime isolation in this agricultural society. In the Late Neolithic, communities across mainland Europe experienced a resurgence of hunter-gatherer ancestry, pointing toward the persistence of different ancestral strands that subsequently admixed. This is absent in the Maltese genomes”
They look at wider sites:
“We observe the highest within-site values for samples from small islands, with Xagħra (Malta) producing the most extreme result, followed by Ansarve (Gotland), Holm of Papa (Orkney), and Isbister (Orkney), supporting restricted population histories for insular Neolithic societies.”
Another paper that is not yet published but was released as EAA2021 also points to consanguinity in the Neolithic / Bronze Age / Iron Age / early historical period as being more often linked to isolation, and not so much to widespread social practices – https://submissions.e-a-a.org/eaa2021/repository/preview.php?Abstract=2323: “Insights into admixture history and social practices in the prehistoric Aegean from ancient DNA” – “We present insights from ancient DNA (genome-wide) analyses on Early Neolithic and Bronze Age individuals from Mainland Greece, Crete and the Aegean islands … we also found that Bronze Age Aegeans exhibited endogamy in high frequencies so far unobserved in the rest of the ancient West Eurasia. These close-kin marital practices, likely equivalent to first-cousins unions, were substantially higher in Crete and other Aegean islands than in Mainland Greece.”
Providing some evidence against the idea of a “great outbreeding” event that happened after the early Medieval due to the Christian Church, and that the reverse effect was more profound within the world of Islam instead (and hence against the idea that a sudden increase of outbreeding, at least to the resolution detectable in ancient dna, made post-medieval Europeans different from predecessors in a way that set them on course to modernity; though this does not preclude the idea that a great increase in a “great inbreeding” may perhaps have stopped the world of Islam on a course to modernity, instead).
Been thinking more about the paper on Malta that I mentioned above, and what their findings mean for European prehistory and maybe for Indo-European expansions.
Although I didn’t mention it above, one of the most interesting things about the paper – and they kind of buried the lede on this one – is that they are able to use imputation to reconstruct the IBD sharing between neolithic populations in Europe. And something that was also done in the big Stone Age Eurasia paper, and which from presentations, Reich lab seems to have hoped to do via Harald Ringbauer’s work (although he’s moved to Max Planck?) on their much larger ancient dna capture set (whereas both the Stone Age Eurasia paper and this one primarily concentrate on higher coverage shotgun sampled adna).
So when they look at this, and after they map it, they find that the expansions via the sea and via island-hopping tend to have much reduced population sizes during expansion compared to the overland routes via Central and Southeast Europe, where the population seems to stay in contact and not reduce in size. (One thing they do that’s cool is they use a method called EEMS, which maps effective migration rates across geography, and this finds some sharp barriers in the English Channel and in SW Europe across the sea.
This is fascinating in part because it seems exactly what Cavalli-Sforza thought would happen as early farmers expanded out… although for the main conclusions he underweighted both the demographic impact of the Indo-European expansion, and the persistence of HG ancestry in NE Europe with the simple perpendicular expansion. (But you can’t have everything!)
One thing this makes lots of sense about is why the absorption of Euro HGs seems to have made a much bigger impact, in terms of y-dna and the autosome, in the Cardial-Atlantic route compared to “Old Europe” in the South-East. It makes sense if we think that both populations encountered HG groups on the frontier and admixed with them (because we have actual examples of this), but in the case of the Cardial-Atlantic route, the frontier people then tended to be cut off, so the HG dna couldn’t be diluted by later waves. (An analogy in the US context might be if the first colonists for the US had mixed at 10-20% with Native Americans, and then there’d been no more boats and primarily high natural population growth… rather than the continuous waves of migration that the US saw? We’d see a continuous proportion).
It also might help offer one possibility why the population replacement in Late Neolithic Britain, by Bell Beakers, was so high. If the early colonizations were very chance-y affairs by some group of pioneers who prehaps spread a generally patrilineal megalith burial tradition out of North France (possibly travelling using basic canoes and/or rafts for animals?), and weren’t followed by anyone much, then if their population collapses, then no-one is coming in from France to replenish their population. Or at least not until the very mobile and growing Indo-Europeans come in.
The big gap in this study of course, is that they are a Western European group with a very Atlantic focus and have many more genomes from early neolithic SE Europe and later neolithic Central-to-Eastern Europe. They haven’t integrated the Globular Amphora culture into this picture, or the later farmers from Germany and Central Europe (like Wartberg and TRB/Funnelbeaker and so on). One notable thing I found when looking at their dataset is that the latest farmer they have from Germany, I0172 from Esperstedt Bernburg Culture Late Neolithic, actually does cluster closer to the Spanish samples rather than earlier German LBK samples. We also see that on their models and the tree the Swedish TRB samples they have do cluster somewhere between the Cardial-Atlantic group and the SE group, or within the Cardial-Atlantic group.
So it may be that the Cardial-Atlantic route ancestry, via a branch off going east from Northern France, contributed a good bit to the Globular Amphora, and this might in turn explain some of why there is sometimes stronger matching (of reconstructed/imputed IBD) between present day Western Europeans/Scandinavian groups and MN Farmers (even when those particular farmers probably aren’t much ancestral to them), which seemed to be the case in results from Martiniano 2017 5 years ago, which used this technique. Compared to Balto-Slavic groups who might have got more of their HG ancestry and Anatolian farmer ancestry relatively directly from later surviving nearly unadmixed populations in NE and SE Europe respectively (although in ultimately roughly similar proportions of their long term ancestors).
Some quick graphics using their supplementary data on this in PAST4: https://imgur.com/a/nxIa7Wo