Reading two books this month in prep for two podcasts, The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move To a Lot Like the Ones They Left and Don’t Be a Feminist: Essays on Genuine Justice. I consider both authors, Garett Jones and Bryan Caplan (both of GMU), friends.
What are you reading?
Given that Caplan is a big Open Borders guy, seems like he’d have an interesting review of Jones’ book.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-022-01914-9 – “Admixture has obscured signals of historical hard sweeps in humans” – Potentially kind of important
I guess its OK to pick on feminists because they are TERFs and herefor objectively MAGA.
therefore. What happened to the edit button?
Eh, Caplan is just being a libertarian who is opposed to all forms of collective identity (although some more than others; collective identity and political organization as a businessman or immigrant, he probably wouldn’t oppose so much or at all). No Road to Damascus conversion on feminism there from him; same in 2022 as in 2010.
It’s the guys who used to would’ve (quite rightly) mocked radical feminist ideologies in the ’90s or ’00s, who are now open to reading arguments rooted in radical feminist philosophy because they’re “gender critical” (and sometimes even more oddly see these arguments as “Not Woke”) and regarding these women as allies that have made the real big Road to Damascus conversion on this one.
“The Story of Russia” by Orlando Figes
https://www.amazon.com/Story-Russia-Orlando-Figes/dp/125079689X/ref=sr_1_1
Begins with the early Slavs and the Kievan Rus’ and goes through Putin. It is a mere 368 pages, so it is a high level view. But the author does an excellent job of showing the continuity of Russian history.
As a fellow 80s/90s brown kid who grew up in NA, any thoughts on how much of the Leicester riots land to a lesser extent, issues elsewhere are driven by the ‘FOBification’ of the Indian diaspora?
@NK
Very much so. I wouldn’t be surprised if in a few years there is a major riot between Sikhs and Hindus in the Greater Toronto Area. Canada is going insane, planning to take 500K immigrants per year and I bet a large portion of these immigrants will be coming from India, particularly UP and Bihar.
Greeks:
https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/browser/view/PRJEB56216
“Ancient DNA reveals admixture history and endogamy in the prehistoric Aegean”
“The Neolithic and Bronze Age were highly transformative periods for the genetic history of Europe, but for the Aegean -a region fundamental to Europe’s prehistory- the biological dimensions of cultural transitions have been elucidated only to a limited extent so far. We have analyzed newly generated genome-wide data from 102 ancient individuals from Crete, the Greek mainland and the Aegean Islands, spanning from the Neolithic to the Iron Age.
We found that the early farmers from Crete shared the same ancestry as other contemporaneous Neolithic Aegeans. In contrast, the end of the Neolithic period and the following Early Bronze Age were marked by ‘eastern’ gene-flow, which was predominantly of Anatolian origin in Crete. Confirming previous findings for additional Central/Eastern European ancestry in the Greek mainland by the Middle Bronze Age, we additionally show that such genetic signatures appeared in Crete gradually from the 17th to 12th centuries BC, a period when the influence of the mainland over the island intensified.
Biological and cultural connectedness within the Aegean is also supported by the novel finding of consanguineous endogamy practiced at high frequencies, unprecedented in the global ancient DNA record. Our results highlight the potential of archaeogenomic approaches in the Aegean for unraveling the interplay of genetic admixture, marital and other cultural practices.”
Same as https://submissions.e-a-a.org/eaa2021/repository/preview.php?Abstract=2323 from EAA.
Poles:
https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/browser/view/PRJEB53670 –
Patrilocality and hunter-gatherer-related ancestry in Middle Bronze Age East-Central Europe
The post-Neolithic demographic history of East-Central Europe, despite this region being on the confluence of various ecological zones and cultural entities is poorly explored. Here, the descendantsof societies associated with steppe pastoralists form Early Bronze Age (EBA 2400-1800 BC) were followed by Middle Bronze Age (MBA 1800-1200 BC) populations displaying unique characteristics. Particularly, the predominance of collective burials, the scale of which, was previously seen only inthe Neolithic.
To study kinship of those MBA societies and to test whether the re-emergence of those old traditions was a result of genetic shift or social changes, we generated and analyzed 91 genomes from individuals associated with EBA and MBA from modern day Poland and Ukraine.
Our results indicate that while EBA people in East-Central Europe were most likely direct descendants of the preceding populations, the MBA populations were formed by an additional admixture event involving a population with relatively high proportions of genetic component associated with European hunter-gatherers.
Additionally, our data shows that MBA collective burials contained numerous individuals related to each other, and the prevalence of close kinship among adult male descendants over adult female suggests that patrilocality was dominating form of marriage arrangements in these societies.” (ADAM MICKIEWICZ UNIVERSITY, POZNAN, POLAND )
@Matt,
Looking forward to that Greek study being published, and the public data being released.
Here are all of the current Ancient Greek samples we have along with the new HO samples from the Himera paper.
PCA:
https://imgur.com/kgTx3wH
This might be an interesting one for you Razib:
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(22)01602-5 – “The loss of biodiversity in Madagascar is contemporaneous with major demographic events“
“An Asian population of few hundred individuals was isolated for more than 1,000 years
This isolation ended around 1,000 years ago by admixture with a small African population
The newly admixed Malagasy population underwent a rapid demographic expansion
The population growth coincides with extensive changes in Madagascar’s landscape”
Some press – https://phys.org/news/2022-11-human-expansion-years-linked-madagascar.html
We also know that the admixture even between Austronesian and Bantu expansion peoples in Madagascar had this insane malaria introgression and selection that actually drove up genome wide Africa proportions over time.
So maybe the finding here could be explained that the first Austronesians to arrive kept a small population might be because malaria was just too tough for them to deal with and limited their habitats on the island quite sharply? I.e. very few people arrived by sea (it’s a long journey) and then stayed demographically compressed for a long time because it was just too hard to build demographically against that pressure. Also maybe low population sizes meant they could rely more on hunting, which itself would trap them back into a low population equilibrium.