The new Rings of Power series debuts on September 2nd, so they have a new trailer out. I’m skeptical, but they pulled all the stops for the effects. My expectation is that this will be to the Tolkien canon what Taco Bell is to Mexican food, but I will be happy to be surprised. It is obvious that they are taking Black Númenóreans a bit too literally, but if they execute well on things unrelated to the identity politics I bet people will be willing to overlook that (it could be that this was just the price they’d have to pay in Hollywood to get this produced).Tad Williams Into the Narrowdark – Last King of Osten Ard Book 3 is good. Williams, in my opinion, is great at navigating between George R. R. Martin’s somewhat excessively gruesome world-building with Brandon Sanderson’s “boy scout” approach. Like R. Scott Bakker he is excellent at the fashioning of human-like elven analogs that push into the uncanny valley territory of “human nature,” very much like us but different in critical ways as to seem alien and fantastic.
A Late Pleistocene human genome from Southwest China. I haven’t had time to read this closely, but thanks for posting the link.
I don’t have time to write up all the ancient DNA that is coming out, but I do try and read it. Keep the links coming; I do appreciate them.
Most of you know I ungated my Substack podcasts after two weeks. The reviews have trailed off, which means that there will be ‘less discovery’ of them. If you have a moment, I would appreciate a five-star (I may mention this on my podcast at some point, I don’t push this heavily).
I’ve been writing on this blog for 20 years. One sad trend is that a huge swath of academics are becoming incredibly conformist, censorious and ideologically motivated. Yes, this tendency was always there in a field like sociology, for example, but now it’s everywhere. The public doesn’t even know the tenth of it from what the stuff I hear. Just keep your skeptical hat on…
Sadly, I have nothing to post here today. I say sadly, because this is the first open thread you have posted at gnxp.com in a couple of months.
I will add that I think your two week policy on freeing your podcasts is too generous. I think two months would be generous as well.
The Lord of the Rings movie series really benefitted relative to the original Tolkien books by inserting hints of a romantic subplot virtually absent in the original. LOTR is pretty dry stuff at times.
Razib, I remember you doing a Clubhouse on the origins of Islam last year. Unfortunately, I couldn’t join because I didn’t have Clubhouse then. Any chance you could do a clubhouse/detailed post on Substack or Gnxp on this topic. Most articles or books on this topic just accept the standard religious view so any alternate views would be very interesting. IIRC you even said in your recent Huns clubhouse, than Islam likeley originated in Petra rather than Mecca.
1. You made me spit out my cocktail.
2. At this point, forget about fealty to the source material – I’d be happy if it turned out to be the Korean-Mexican fusion (“Korean Tacos”) version of the real thing. In other words, hopefully it’ll at least be somewhat entertaining if not authentic. But I don’t hope – just about everything on TV is garbage these days.
3. Did you ever see “Dark” on Netflix? I’d be very curious about your take on it, both as an intelligent consumer and as a geneticist. Time travel in a small town really messes up genealogy!
About Fantasy, what do you think about the Joe Abercrombie novels, the “First Law” world in particular ?
“A Late Pleistocene human genome from Southwest China. I haven’t had time to read this closely, but thanks for posting the link.”
Very upset Anthrogenica is down (possibly for good), I would have loved to share screenshots and surface-level analysis on this paper there https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(22)00928-9
“Here, we sequenced the genome of a Late Pleistocene hominin (MZR), dated ∼14.0 thousand years ago from Red Deer Cave located in Southwest China, which was previously reported possessing mosaic features of modern and archaic hominins. MZR is the first Late Pleistocene genome from southern East Asia. Our results indicate that MZR is a modern human who represents an early diversified lineage in East Asia. The mtDNA of MZR belongs to an extinct basal lineage of the M9 haplogroup, reflecting a rich matrilineal diversity in southern East Asia during the Late Pleistocene. Combined with the published data, we detected clear genetic stratification in ancient southern populations of East/Southeast Asia and some degree of south-versus-north divergency during the Late Pleistocene, and MZR was identified as a southern East Asian who exhibits genetic continuity to present day populations. Markedly, MZR is linked deeply to the East Asian ancestry that contributed to First Americans.”
Also agree with you that groupthink in academia is bad (NB: I am not an academic), even though my personal views are largely aligned with the dominant woke paradigm.
Fun stuff. https://www.salon.com/2022/07/17/jrr-tolkien-describes-the-intensity-of-elf_partner/
@okarinaofsteiner, anthrogenica seems back, though it may be temporary.
On the “Dairying, diseases and the evolution of lactase persistence in Europe” Nature study on the Razib’s pinboard here, a thought I had based on a comment from the author here – https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/07/220727110700.htm –
“If you are healthy and lactase non-persistent, and you drink lots of milk, you may experience some discomfort, but you not going to die of it. However, if you are severely malnourished and have diarrhea, then you’ve got life-threatening problems. When their crops failed, prehistoric people would have been more likely to consume unfermented high-lactose milk — exactly when they shouldn’t.”
That kind of made me wonder if there was a cultural reason why groups in the Bronze Age continued to consume milk. They surely did not experience more famine than other groups who were earlier. So maybe the answer might be that culturally it was more essential to continue drinking the milk?
Perhaps the earlier cultures, when they got to famine, were culturally more able to say “Its crops that we need, not milk” and they’d kill off the animals for meat and hope to restock the herd later, while the Bronze Age cultures were culturally committed to semi-pastoralism.
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(22)01101-0 – “Ancient Yersinia pestis and Salmonella enterica genomes from Bronze Age Crete”
“During the late 3rd millennium BCE, the Eastern Mediterranean and Near East witnessed societal changes in many regions, which are usually explained with a combination of social and climatic factors. However, recent archaeogenetic research forces us to rethink models regarding the role of infectious diseases in past societal trajectories.
The plague bacterium Yersinia pestis, which was involved in some of the most destructive historical pandemics, circulated across Eurasia at least from the onset of the 3rd millennium BCE, but the challenging preservation of ancient DNA in warmer climates has restricted the identification of Y. pestis from this period to temperate climatic regions. As such, evidence from culturally prominent regions such as the Eastern Mediterranean is currently lacking.
Here, we present genetic evidence for the presence of Y. pestis and Salmonella enterica, the causative agent of typhoid/enteric fever, from this period of transformation in Crete, detected at the cave site Hagios Charalambos. We reconstructed one Y. pestis genome that forms part of a now-extinct lineage of Y. pestis strains from the Late Neolithic and Bronze Age that were likely not yet adapted for transmission via fleas. Furthermore, we reconstructed two ancient S. enterica genomes from the Para C lineage, which cluster with contemporary strains that were likely not yet fully host adapted to humans. The occurrence of these two virulent pathogens at the end of the Early Minoan period in Crete emphasizes the necessity to re-introduce infectious diseases as an additional factor possibly contributing to the transformation of early complex societies in the Aegean and beyond.”
Also: It has been suggested that early Y. pestis dispersals across Eurasia followed human migration from the Eurasian steppe.Such a hypothesis followed the observation that all LNBA individuals from whom ancient Y. pestis genomes were isolated carried steppe-related ancestry in their genome and that the phylogeny of the LNBA Y. pestis genomes indicated the same directional spread. To investigate this observed correlation, we additionally enriched the HGC009 and HGC068 genomic libraries, as well as those of HGC004 and HGC040 … In contrast to the evidence from the rest of Europe, this indicates that if the disease reached Bronze Age Crete through contact with mobile peoples from outside Crete and non-related to Anatolia, they were small in number and left no trace in the Early Bronze Age archaeogenetic record of the island.
I’m biased to accept it because it’s already an idea I was favouring, but I think this kind of finding would strengthen to me the idea that the early Indo-European peoples, due to being highly mobile, were able to seize the opportunity on crises in neighbouring societies more than less mobile competitors.
Less invading and destroying competitors, and more once those societies are devastated by disease, agricultural collapse from larger and wider causes, being mobile enough to move in en masse when the opportunity for better land arose. Whereas EEF groups generally seemed less mobile for most of the previous years, with stronger local structure…
“I’ve been writing on this blog for 20 years. One sad trend is that a huge swath of academics are becoming incredibly conformist, censorious and ideologically motivated. Yes, this tendency was always there in a field like sociology, for example, but now it’s everywhere. The public doesn’t even know the tenth of it from what the stuff I hear. Just keep your skeptical hat on…”
What is your opinion of people trying to say the findings of the new Reich paper are politically motivated?
which one?
i know david reich, he’s a scholar’s scholar. not a saint, but closer than almost every other academic.
Sorry, I meant the upcoming three on the Southern Arc. I see some people on the archaeogenetic forums pushing back against them, before even seeing the data firsthand. Some of them have been very vocal about it being biased, and (Left-wing) politically motivated. As some conspiracy to intentionally dismantle the Steppe as the PIE homeland theory. But clearly these are just crazy people on the internet, who haven’t even seen the 731 new samples.
We’d need to actually see the paper itself to evaluate the evidence surely? (I wish it had actually come out over the last few weeks when I had more free time, and not in the near future when I won’t). I think there’s an obvious attraction in pIE layers involving West Asia and the steppe as a compromise solution, but we have to see if the information actually fits. I think Reich is consistent in that where he’s argued that a genetic pulse should be visible for a language spreading migration to be likely, he has stuck to that, whereas there is a lot less of that from other ports (you could argue this is Reich being overly simple, or argue that the other parties are making Just-So arguments.)
david is a human. we all have biases, etc. but unlike a lot of ppl in academia, including in biology, he goes where he thinks the evidence is. doesn’t mean he’s always right. but if every scholar was like him and nick p i’d be a lot more bullish on academia.