Recently I became a patron of the Secular Jihadists podcast. Ten years ago this wouldn’t be a big deal, but as a “grown-up” with three kids I’m much more careful to where I expend my discretionary income. So take that as a stronger endorsement than usual. I think Secular Jihadists is offering a nonsubstitutable good today. By which I mean a robust, but not cliched or hackneyed, critique of the religion of Islam. For various reasons the modern-day cultural Left has become operationally Islamophilic in public, while the political Right isn’t really too concerned with details of fact and nuance when they level critiques against Islam.
On this week’s episode, the hosts talked about the life of Muhammad, focusing some of the rather unpalatable aspects of his biographies as they’ve been passed down in tradition (in the Hadiths), or as can be found in the Koran. Armin Navabi points out that the prophet of Islam married Safiyya bint Huyeiy Ibn Akhtab on the day her father and husband were killed by his forces. Therefore Navabi’s interpretation, which is entirely in keeping with our modern values, is that Muhammad raped a woman on the day her father and husband were killed.
Of course, this behavior is not shocking in the pre-modern world. In the Illiad Hector’s widow, Andromache, eventually becomes the concubine of Neoptolemus. He is the son of Achilles, who killed Hector. And, in many traditions, Neoptolemus is the one who kills Andromache’s infant son by Hector, Astyanax. Eventually, the son of Neoptolemus by Andromache inherits his kingdom.
Obviously, the Illiad plays things up for drama, but I think it correctly reflects the values of a pre-modern tribal society. One of my favorite books is Jonathan Kirsch’s The Harlot by the Side of the Road: Forbidden Tales of the Bible. Like the Illiad, the Hebrew Bible has within it stories that reflect values of pre-modern societies very different from ours. Moses, like Muhammad, was a military and political leader as well as a religious prophet, and so it is entirely unsurprising that he was a participant in and director of what we would today term war crimes.
The question from the perspective of the hosts of the Secular Jihadists podcast is how Muslims will react to the fact that in the Koran itself, which most Muslims take to be the literal recitation of the words of God through Muhammad, documents the founder of the religion engaging in sex and war crimes. I think the truth though is that most Muslims won’t be very impacted by these revelations, because for most Muslims Islam is not reducible to the revelation within the Koran.
“Higher religions” tend to have scriptures and texts which serve as the scaffold for their intellectual superstructure. But most people who believe in these religions never read these texts. That’s because most people don’t read much, period. The organized institutional and multi-ethnic religions which have emerged over the last 3,000 years have a complex division of labor among the producers of religious “goods and services”, as well as among the consumers and identifiers. A minority are highly intellectualized, and these are the types who will record the history of the religion.
There was some question regarding possible Scythian admixture into the early Zhou below. This is possible because of the Zhou dynasty, arguably the foundational one of Chinese imperial culture (the Shang would have been alien to Han dynasty Chinese, but the Zhou far less so), may have had interactions with Indo-European peoples to their north and west. This has historical precedent as the Tang dynasty emerged from the same milieu 1,500 years later, albeit the Tang were descended from a Turkic tribe, not Indo-Europeans.
I looked at some of my samples and divided the Han into a northern and southern cluster based on their position on a cline (removing the majority in between). I also added Lithuanians, Sardinians, Uyghurs, Mongols, and Yakut. As you can see on the PCA the Mongols are two clusters, so I divided them between Mongol and Mongol2.
A comment below suggested another book on Vietnamese history, which I am endeavoring to read in the near future. The comment also brought up issues relating to the ethnogenesis of the Vietnamese people, their relationship to the Yue (or lack thereof) and the Khmer, and also the Han Chinese.
Obviously, I can’t speak to the details of linguistics and area studies history. But I can say a bit about genetics because over the years I’ve assembled a reasonable data set of Asians, both public and private. The 1000 Genomes collected Vietnamese from Ho Chi Minh City in the south. I compared them to a variety of populations using ADMIXTURE with 5 populations.
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You can click to enlarge, but I can tell you that the Vietnamese samples vary less than the Cambodian ones, and resemble Dai more than the other populations. The Dai were sampled from southern Yunnan, in China, and historically were much more common in southern China, before their assimilation into the Han (as well as the migration of others to Southeast Asia).
Curiously, I have four non-Chinese samples from Thailand, and they look to be more like the Cambodians. This aligns well with historical and other genetic evidence the Thai identity emerged from the assimilation of Tai migrants into the Austro-Asiatic (Mon and Khmer) substrate.
Aside from a few Vietnamese who seem Chinese, or a few who are likely Khmer or of related peoples, the Vietnamese do seem to have some Khmer ancestry. Or something like that.
After recording the “India genetics” podcast for The Insight and reading Early China: A Social and Cultural History, I wonder what surprises we’re going to get from China from ancient DNA when it comes online. If there is one thing we are learning by looking closely at DNA, modern and ancient, it’s that at least for humans there are very few ‘primal’ populations from the “Out of Africa” event which haven’t been threaded together from pulse admixtures of continuous gene flow across the landscape.
Early China makes it clear that Erlitou culture which dates from ~1900 to 1500 BC was almost certainly the legendary Xia dynasty. This means that the ethnogenesis of the modern Han Chinese probably dates to the latest ~4,000 years ago. This is centuries before the Indo-Aryans were likely arriving in South Asia, and around the same time that Indo-European groups were pushing into peninsular Southern Europe.
The Y chromosome data does not indicate a Bronze Age ‘star phylogeny’ expansion in East Asia that I know of, so the dynamics were not entirely similar to Western Eurasia. But, it seems quite plausible that the Han themselves are not a chrysalis from the late Pleistocene.
The lower Mekong region is a fascinating zone from the perspective of human geography and ethnography. Divided between Cambodia and Vietnam, until the past few centuries it was, in fact, part of the broader Khmer world, and historically part of successive Cambodian polities. Vietnam, as we know it, emerged in the Red River valley far to the north 1,000 years ago as an independent, usually subordinate, state distinct from Imperial China. Heavily Sinicized culturally, the Vietnamese nevertheless retained their ethnic identity.
Vietnamese, like the language of the Cambodians, is Austro-Asiatic. In fact, the whole zone between South Asia and the modern day Vietnam, and south to maritime Southeast Asia, may have been Austro-Asiatic speaking ~4,000 years ago, as upland rice farmers migrated from the hills of southern China, and assimilated indigenous hunter-gatherers.
But the proto-Vietnamese language was eventually strongly shaped by Chinese influence. This includes the emergence of tonogenesis. Genetically, the Vietnamese are also quite distinct, being more shifted toward southern Han Chinese and ethnic Chinese minorities such as Dai. My personal assumption is that this is due to the repeated waves migration out of southern China over the past few thousand years, first by Yue ethnic minorities, and later by Han Chinese proper. Many of these individuals were culturally assimilated as Vietnamese, but they clearly left both their biological and cultural distinctiveness in what was originally an Austro-Asiatic population likely quite similar to the Khmer.
As I have posted elsewhere it is also clear to me that Cambodians have Indian ancestry. Because unlike Malaysia Cambodia has not had any recent migration of South Asians due to colonialism, the most parsimonious explanation is that the legends and myths of Indian migration during the Funan period are broadly correct. There is no other reason for fractions of R1a1a among Cambodian males north of 5%. Depending on how you estimate it, probably about ~10% of the ancestry of modern Cambodians is South Asian (the Indian fraction is easier to calculate because it is so different from the East Asian base).
Salon is stiffing freelancers of $150. I think this is more a commentary on the market for freelancers than Salon‘s always tenuous finances. The market-clearing price for a lot of web journalism/commentary is pretty low. Salon does this because it knows freelancers will tolerate and accept this behavior more often than not.
This long article from Huffington Post (and boosted on the editor in chief’s Twitter), Everything You Know About Obesity Is Wrong, is being widely shared on Facebook (I haven’t seen it much on my Twitter, but that’s because I follow mostly scientists).
Of course it’s really really light on the science of nutrition. Or should I say “science”? Because the truth is that nutrition science has a lot of problems, so there is space to criticize it. But that being said, this piece is being shared by people who seem to think that there is a conspiracy make it seem like being obese is unhealthy. But most of the article is about how cruel people are to the obese, especially medical professionals. There’s really little evidence presented that being obese doesn’t cause issues with morbidity and mortality. Quotes like this are representative: “But individuals are not averages: Studies have found that anywhere from one-third to three-quarters of people classified as obese are metabolically healthy.” That’s a huge interval. Why?
Ultimately the article should have been titled Everyone Is Cruel to Obese People and That is Wrong and Ineffective.
I bought Early China: A Social and Cultural History. A lot of archaeology. But that’s what you get! I figure I should know more about Zhou China though. I think next I’ll try to read up on Neo-Confucianism, a topic I’ve been lax in because of my leaning toward “Han learning.”
Highly recommend Viet Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present. Most of the book does not deal with the Vietnam War. One curious thing I learned: the Vietnamese identity in the period around 0 AD was strong influenced by the influx of Yue people from southern China, as they imparted their culture and statecraft on the proto-Vietic populace. Of course on top of that came later Chinese migration, which resulted in the emergence of Vietnamese as a tonal language.
Though you’ll probably really want Phở as you read the book….
Also, I knew this, but Viet Nam makes it clear in all the gory details that the Austronesian Cham people of central and southern coastal Vietnam were undergoing the same shift to Islam from Hinduism that was occurring further south in the period after 1500. It seems rather clear that the emergence of a Cham sultanate on the model of Mataram or Johor never occurred because the Vietnamese conquered the Cham kingdom, and then assimilated or exterminated most of the natives. Many Cham fled to Cambodia, where they form the Muslim minority of that nation.
But, a small minority of Cham remain in Vietnam, and amongst these are a substantial Saivite Hindu community. It seems entirely possible that if the Cham had retained their independence as a nationality one would have seen total Islamicization, as occurred among the Malays. As is this, this process was retarded by Vietnamese conquest, and so some Chams still remain Hindu (the same process applies to the Philippines, where the native population was influenced by Hinduism first, and was in the first stages of Islamicization, when the Spaniards conquered the archipelago).
This AJ+ video about “white feminism” is getting a lot of attention. Mostly because AJ+ is backed and owned by a conservative Salafist regime which runs an oligarchic state on the backs of dark-skinned South Asian indentured labor. I’ve spent a week in Qatar at a really nice hotel. I’ve never encountered service staff as solicitous and courteous in the United States. At some point I may write about how certain organizations and institutions use political movements as instruments…but I always feel this is so obvious.
Next week on The Insight we’ll be talking about Indian genetics, again. Partly in anticipation of the ancient DNA paper, which should drop any day now (I have no inside information). Question suggestions welcome.
Individual selection leads to collective efficiency through coordination. The last sentence of the abstract is key: “This finding reveals a general principle that could play a role in nature to smoothen the transition to efficient collective behaviors in all games with multiple equilibriums.” You need to figure out ways to get to cooperation.
Late Pleistocene human genome suggests a local origin for the first farmers of central Anatolia. It seems within the Near East farming spread mostly through cultural diffusion. My suspicion is that that is due to the fact that it didn’t provide that huge of a demographic boost in its primitive form. Once the various farmer groups perfect their toolkit, they expanded into areas dominated by hunter-gatherers, not other farmers.
The Austronesian expansion actually makes me consider the possibility that we may never understand why the modern humans in the Near East ~55,000 years ago “broke out” and absorbed all the other hominin groups.
The above admixture graph is from a new preprint, Paleolithic DNA from the Caucasus reveals core of West Eurasian ancestry. To be honest, if you read the supplementary text there’s almost no point in reading the main preprint, as it is far more in depth when it comes to the methodology as well as spotlighting a variety of particular results. It’s hard to know where to begin with such a preprint so I want to highlight the “this is a simplified model” portion in the figure above. That’s actually the truth. Remember, no admixture graph is the Truth, it is an attempt by humans to capture concisely and informatively the major features of our species’ population history dynamics. The reality was never as clear and distinct as stylized graphical representations would have you think, and the researchers are aware of this.
In any case, if you want to really get at how they arrived at the conclusions they did, really read the supplementary section SI 2, “An admixture graph model of Upper Paleolithic West Eurasians.” The authors have so many potential combinations of ancestral populations that they can’t simply manually and intuitively posit admixtures. Rather, they have to explore a huge number of combinations (trees/graphs)…at which point they run into computational limits. This section explicitly lays out computationally efficient ways to automatically traverse the possibility space, and arrive at the best fitting set of models, within reason.
The title of the preprint says it all, but let me quote the abstract in full:
The earliest ancient DNA data of modern humans from Europe dates to ~40 thousand years ago, but that from the Caucasus and the Near East to only ~14 thousand years ago, from populations who lived long after the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) ~26.5-19 thousand years ago. To address this imbalance and to better understand the relationship of Europeans and Near Easterners, we report genome-wide data from two ~26 thousand year old individuals from Dzudzuana Cave in Georgia in the Caucasus from around the beginning of the LGM. Surprisingly, the Dzudzuana population was more closely related to early agriculturalists from western Anatolia ~8 thousand years ago than to the hunter-gatherers of the Caucasus from the same region of western Georgia of ~13-10 thousand years ago. Most of the Dzudzuana population’s ancestry was deeply related to the post-glacial western European hunter-gatherers of the ‘Villabruna cluster’, but it also had ancestry from a lineage that had separated from the great majority of non-African populations before they separated from each other, proving that such ‘Basal Eurasians’ were present in West Eurasia twice as early as previously recorded. We document major population turnover in the Near East after the time of Dzudzuana, showing that the highly differentiated Holocene populations of the region were formed by ‘Ancient North Eurasian’ admixture into the Caucasus and Iran and North African admixture into the Natufians of the Levant. We finally show that the Dzudzuana population contributed the majority of the ancestry of post-Ice Age people in the Near East, North Africa, and even parts of Europe, thereby becoming the largest single contributor of ancestry of all present-day West Eurasians.
Ancestry from Dzudzuana
Longtime readers know that I hate the American racial term “Caucasians.” It’s pretentious when you could just say “white European,” because that’s what people really mean, judging by the fact that the real people from the Caucasus are marginally Caucasian in the eyes of many Americans. The genealogical origin of the term goes back to Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. And yet this paper takes these two samples, and finds that a lot of the ancestry of modern groups can be attributed to them! (also, a religion interpretation of the results is in the title of the post)
To be fair, they caution that these ancient Caucasian samples are representative of a particular thread of human heritage, not that the center of this thread was necessarily in the Caucasus. This does make me wonder about ascertainment bias in the Near East toward samples from mountainous areas which were colder. But, at the granularity they are attempting to understand human population history, it’s probably not that big of a deal. Ultimately, they conclude that this Paleo-Caucasian population contributes “~46-88% of the ancestry” of modern Europeans, Near Easterners, and North Africans. That’s kind of a big deal.
There are so many results in this preprint, so I think we need to back to the “beginning” of the non-African branch. The Paleo-Caucasian sample is of note in part because it is from before the Last Glacial Maximum, and, about halfway back to the massive diversification of most non-African populations around 55,000 years ago. Using the Paleo-Caucasian samples’ affinities this preprint reinterprets results from last spring on ancient DNA from Northwest Africa. In that paper, the authors conclude that Paleolithic North Africans were a mix between an unspecific Sub-Saharan population and Natufians. Here though the authors suggest that the Natufians and Yoruba both received gene flow from Paleolithic North Africans. And, these Paleolithic North Africans were themselves mixed between something similar to the Paleo-Caucasians (a mix between an ancient West Eurasian ancestry and “Basal Eurasian”), and a “Deep” ancestry which diverged from other non-Sub-Saharan Africans before the Basal Eurasians did.
The reason that the Paleo-Caucasian sample is so important is that it allowed the researchers to see that the early Holocene Near East, where Anatolian and Iranian farmers, as well as Natufians in the Levant, were ancestral to many later groups, was subject to many genetic changes from before the Last Glacial Maximum. The Natufians seem to be well modeled as having ancestry from the Paleolithic North Africans as one of the major ways they are distinctive from the Paleo-Caucasians. This presents us with a reasonable model for the west to east movement of haplogroup E, and, the Afro-Asiatic languages. The gene flow of Paleolithic North African also explains the non-trivial level of Neanderthal admixture which is found in the Yoruba population. This is mediated through the presumed back migration of Paleo-Caucasians from the Near East at some point in the Pleistocene, contributing some Neanderthal ancestry to the genetic background of Paleolithic North Africans.
Additionally, the distinction between western (Anatolian/Levant) and eastern (Iran) farmers during the early Holocene can now be understood as a product of later admixture into eastern proto-farmers of basic Paleo-Caucasian stock. The relative closeness of Anatolian farmers to the Paleo-Caucasian samples is indicative of the fact that there was an “Ancestral North Eurasian” (ANE) admixture cline into the Near East during the Pleistocene, which meant that some populations to the east became rather different from the pre-LGM samples. Probably after the Last Glacial Maximum proto-Siberian ancestry became prominent in the zone between the Caucasus and Iran (additionally, some of the models imply there was eastern Eurasian ancestry). This is in keeping with the fact that ANE ancestry does seem to have been found in places like Khorasan before the expansion south of steppe populations after 2,000 BC.
As noted in the abstract, Paleo-Caucasians had Basal Eurasian ancestry ~30,000 years ago. This increases the likelihood that Basal Eurasians weren’t recent migrants from deep inside Africa. Additionally, for various reasons, the authors are now positing a Deep ancestry which diverged even further into the past. Both Basal Eurasians and Deep populations seem to lack Neanderthal admixture. The authors also repeatedly suggest that Basal Eurasians were part of the Out of Africa bottleneck event. In Who We Are and How We Got Here David Reich presents the model that this bottleneck population had a low effective population size for a long time. This seems plausible because the genetic homogeneity that you see in non-Africans is pretty striking vis-a-vis Sub-Saharan Africans. On the other hand, this work confirms earlier results that imply that Basal Eurasians did not admix with Neanderthals, and also indicates that the divergence has to be greater than 60,000 years before the present from other non-Africans, who diversified more recently.
In contrast, the Deep ancestry group, which nevertheless forms a clade with the new Eurasian lineages (Basal and non-Basal), does not clearly seem to have undergone the bottleneck event according to this preprint. It’s more a matter of what they don’t say, rather than what they say in this case.
The big picture needs to be integrated I think with the new “modern humans emerged through a multi-regional process” within Africa. If you think of modern humans as emerging across an African range which shifted in the Near East based on oscillating climatic conditions, the ancestors of the “non-African” lineages can be thought of as one of the main deeply rooted lineages, probably in the northeast of the continent. During the Pleistocene, the Sahara was even more brutal than today during many periods, so it is not implausible that some of these marginal populations on the edge of Africa were subject to long periods of very small effective population sizes. Most of them presumably went extinct. But one population was probably far enough north and east that it had a little more margin to play with. This population was probably connected along the Mediterranean littoral at some point with the Deep component in North Africa, which had higher effective population sizes because the mountainous terrain of the Atlas region was always going to remain more clement through dry phases.
At some point one a group of the bottlenecked population mixed with some Neanderthals, and began to break out of containment in southwest Asia. If I had to bet money, I suspect there were already other related groups, probably somewhat admixed with local hominin lineages, further east. That is, I believe the archaeological results in Southeast Asia, and think that those in Australia are credible. But these groups were probably small in number, and totally absorbed by the later migration wave.
Also, the timing of the separation of Africans and “non-Africans” is such that I wouldn’t be surprised Qafzeh-Skull people were somehow ancestral to, or closely related to, the ancestors of non-Africans.
Finally, let’s remember that the authors were focusing on North Africa and Western Eurasia in this preprint. Things will get more complicated as East Asia and Africa come “online” in terms of these analyses. Of course, we are going to be helped by the reality that human genetic variation is not arbitrarily and randomly distributed, but reflects real constraints in our evolutionary history and the forces of geography as well as contingency. The non-African story is made simpler in part because of the great bottleneck, and especially the common descent of most peoples from the population that mixed with Neanderthals. The modeling of effective population size changes over time in Sub-Saharan groups does not lead us to believe that it will be so simple in that continent.
The figure above is from a new paper, Estimating mobility using sparse data: Application to human genetic variation, which uses genomic data from late Pleistocene to the Iron Age in western Eurasia, and then infers migration rate considering both spatial distribution and the variable of time (remember that samples apart in time should also be genetically different, just as those apart in space often are).
The empirical results are shown above, but they validated their method first by running some simulations. Interestingly they modeled the migration as a Gaussian random walk. Which is fine. But I wonder how true this is for a lot of the Eurasian migrations of the last 10,000 years. Perhaps the the distribution of distances from the place of birth would turn out be multi-modal, with a minority of individuals tending to make “long jumps”?
With that out of the way, it’s fascinating that migration peaks around the Neolithic transition, the Bronze Age, and then the Iron Age. If you read a book like 1177 BC, you know that there was a major regression in the 13th century BC across the Near East, and for several centuries the region was in a “Dark Age.” In The Human Web William H. McNeill argues that one of the reasons for the length and depth of this Dark Age is that the network of complex societies exhibited less density and so less redundancy to failure.
The authors conclude:
We find that mobility among European Holocene farmers was significantly higher than among European hunter–gatherers both pre- and postdating the Last Glacial Maximum. We also infer that this Holocene rise in mobility occurred in at least three distinct stages: the first centering on the well-known population expansion at the beginning of the Neolithic, and the second and third centering on the beginning of the Bronze Age and the late Iron Age, respectively. These findings suggest a strong link between technological change and human mobility in Holocene Western Eurasia and demonstrate the utility of this framework for exploring changes in mobility through space and time.
Earlier they say:
We find strong support for a rise in mobility during the Neolithic transition in western Eurasia, likely corresponding to a well-established demic expansion of farmers, originating in the Middle East and resulting in the spread of farming technologies throughout most of Western Eurasia
The “demic diffusion” model is an easy one because it relies on the mass-action of individuals and family-groups as they expand in space through high fertility rates. And yet one thing that I think it misses is the socio-political context of that demic diffusion. For prehistoric periods we don’t have writing, and so no socio-political context. This is why in War Before Civilization the author focused on ethnographies of historical societies which came into contact with literate cultures which recorded their organization and folkways. The short summation is that these societies were often very aggressive and well organized for war. Additionally, hunter-gatherers themselves were keen on expanding farmers, and it seems clear they too could mobilize for violence.
The upshot is we need to think of the rise and expansion of strong states and expansionist polities as the context for an increase in the rate of migration. The reality of low migration rates in Pleistocene Europe was pretty evident even before this formal analysis. The pairwise genetic difference due to drift, and therefore low migration rates, for some nearby populations in the Pleistocene and early Holocene indicates that small-scale societies tend to be quite insulated from each other. In contrast, the Iron Age has witnessed a great deal of admixture, as large states and polities, as well as meta-ethnic identities, have broken down genetic barriers.
A regression around 1000 BC correlates neatly with reduced migration, This was almost certainly due to the fact that without larger states much of West Eurasian society, such as in Greece, had disintegrated into smaller tribal units.
Future historians and geneticists will notice that in the period between 1500 and 2000 the distribution of the Y chromosome lineage R1b1a1a2 expanded far beyond Western Europe. They will also understand the political context for this expansion of the lineage…
I didn’t plan to talk about the Munda any time soon, in part because I recently wrote a post, The Munda as upland rice cultivators, which outlined my views. But there is a new preprint with new samples which attempts to estimate admixture times using genome-wide data. You can see the results above, and, also note that they found similar estimates using Y chromosome SNP variation around haplogroup O2a1.
Surrounded by speakers of Indo-European, Dravidian and Tibeto-Burman languages, around 11 million Munda (a branch of Austroasiatic language family) speakers live in the densely populated and genetically diverse South Asia. Their genetic makeup holds components characteristic of South Asians as well as Southeast Asians. The admixture time between these components has been previously estimated on the basis of archaeology, linguistics and uniparental markers. Using genome-wide genotype data of 102 Munda speakers and contextual data from South and Southeast Asia, we retrieved admixture dates between 2000 – 3800 years ago for different populations of Munda. The best modern proxies for the source populations for the admixture with proportions 0.78/0.22 are Lao people from Laos and Dravidian speakers from Kerala in India, while the South Asian population(s), with whom the incoming Southeast Asians intermixed, had a smaller proportion of West Eurasian component than contemporary proxies. Somewhat surprisingly Malaysian Peninsular tribes rather than the geographically closer Austroasiatic languages speakers like Vietnamese and Cambodians show highest sharing of IBD segments with the Munda. In addition, we affirmed that the grouping of the Munda speakers into North and South Munda based on linguistics is in concordance with genome-wide data.
There is a weird pattern of the affinities in f3 statistics in the IBD in this preprint. I think the explanation that they give, that Vietnamese and Cambodians have been subject to later admixture, probably explains it. In the case of the Vietnamese, it’s southern Chinese ancestry. In the case of the Cambodians…it might be Indian ancestry! This might strike you as strange, but the Indian ancestry in the Cambodians may be more enriched for the West Asian component that’s not found in the Munda specifically: the element brought in by the Indo-Aryans.
The peninsular Malay groups are “proto-Malays,” and these groups tend to be somewhat higher in AASI-like ancestry as well as lower in Austronesian ancestry. High shared drift tendencies with Lao and groups in more isolated areas of Malaysia may be a function of the fact that these are less cosmopolitan populations, with less Indian and Chinese ancestry, than other mainland Southeast Asians and Malays proper.
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These results are broadly in line with the Narasimhan et al. preprint, which is cited within it. In that preprint the Reich group outlines its general model, where modern South Asians can be thought of as a compound of several different ancestral populations of different affinities. The Munda in particular are enriched for “Ancient Ancestral South Asian” (AASI) vs. any other group, and the hypothesis is given is that the Southeasts Asian mixed first with with an AASI group which lacked the admixture with West Asians, and then mixed again with “Ancestral South Indians”, which had some West Asian (“Iranian Farmer”) ancestry.
Since ALDER based methods, last I checked, tended to pick up the last admixture event, the more recent time for northern Munda groups makes sense. Looking at the Y chromosomes it is pretty clear to me that some of the East Asian ancestry in Bengali-speaking agriculturalists in the lower Gangetic plain is from Munda groups. Conversely, some of the Munda probably admixed populations from in from the west practicing intensive rice agriculture, which apparently did not become a feature of the landscape until after 1000 BC.
One of my points in the post above I wrote on the Munda is that the common words for Austro-Asiatic languages indicates that they were upland rice farmers. This is exactly the modern distribution of the Munda. One hypothesis, which I now am skeptical of, is that the Munda once occupied the bottomlands and were driven into the hills by people from the west and south. I no longer believe this. Rather, the Munda may always have preferred the uplands, and so traversed the flat lands between the Khasi hills and the Chota Nagpur plateau. This preference for uplands may strike us as strange, but it’s not that rare. Yankee farmers in Ohio preferred upland zones, even though these were less agriculturally rich (farmers moving up from the South didn’t have this aversion).
A point observed and implied in the preprint is that the expansion of Indo-Aryans, Dravidians, and Munda, seems to have happened all rather close in time. Though the northwest region of the subcontinent seems to have developed a settled agricultural society by 3000 BC of long standing, its expansion was limited by climatic restrictions on its crop toolkit. But by 2500 BC it seems pastoralists were already pushing into the Deccan via the dry-zone on the eastern edge of the Thar down from the Punjab. The Toda people of the far south of India are probably representative of the lifestyle of these peoples, who were Dravidian-speaking.
A few centuries after this period is probably when the proto-Munda began pushing out of Southeast Asia. The DNA evidence is pretty strong this was a hugely male-skewed event once it got beyond the Khasi hills. Why? My hypothesis is that these were not quite small-scale peoples. Perhaps the male-mediation of a lot of gene flow in South Asia is due to the emergence of militarized confederacies where elite lineages engaged in conquest of territory from native groups. The Munda have very low frequencies of R1a, and very high frequencies of O2a. The admixture with Dravidian and Indo-Aryan speaking peoples that occurred between 2000 BC and 0 AD was probably overwhelmingly female-mediated.
The narrative above suggests that most of the genetic changes we see in South Asia to result in the landscape of the present occurred in the period between 2500 BC and 500 BC. About 2,000 years. And yet agriculture of some form arrived in Mehegarh in western Pakistan 9,000 to 7,500 years ago, depending on what dates you trust. What took so long? Similarly, millet and rice agriculture in China is 7,000 years old, but only around 4,000 years ago did rice farmers start pushing south (and probably west in the case of the Munda).
I’ll present the hypothesis here that this coincidence wasn’t a coincidence, and that certain things in relation to social complexity have a particular rate of change. In general I agree with economic historians who say that our need to posit an “Industrial Revolution,” or a “Neolithic Revolution,” is somewhat of an imposition because humans don’t want to think quantitatively. It probably takes small-scale societies moving from hunting and gathering to full-brown agriculture a certain amount of time, and then to proceed to greater social complexity that enables migration which is more than due to simple natural increase and Malthusian driven expansion. Mainland India beyond what is today Pakistan and much of Southeast Asia were “filled up” by agricultural peoples around the same time after a long incubation to the west and north because similar social forces were at play.
Reading Indonesia: Peoples and Histories. I selected it because unlike many books it wasn’t incredibly skewed to the early modern and postcolonial period. The author makes the interesting point that the Islamicization of western Indonesia and the rise of the great Javanese Hindu kingdom of Majapahit occurred around the same time. This, in contrast to the skein of Indic civilization which had been layered over maritime Southeast Asia for hundreds of years before the medieval period, starting around 500 AD with polities such as that of Kalingga.
As is usual in these sorts of books, it is emphasized that Indian civilization spread through cultural diffusion (in contrast to the fact that though Chinese trade was evident and present early on, the cultural impact was minimal). Any migrations are dismissed as legends, with the possible exception of a few elite religious functionaries.
I now believe this is wrong. I’ve discussed this extensively in the past, but the Singapore Genome Variation Project (SGVP) data set along with more Southeast Asians allows me to illustrate rather clearly the issues. The short of it is that it is highly likely that substantial South Asian ancestry exists within Southeast Asia, and that that ancestry is not just a function of colonial contact (e.g., as certainly occurred in Malaysia).
On this week’s episode, the hosts talked about the life of Muhammad, focusing some of the rather unpalatable aspects of his biographies as they’ve been passed down in tradition (in the Hadiths), or as can be found in the Koran. Armin Navabi points out that the prophet of Islam married Safiyya bint Huyeiy Ibn Akhtab on the day her father and husband were killed by his forces. Therefore Navabi’s interpretation, which is entirely in keeping with our modern values, is that Muhammad raped a woman on the day her father and husband were killed.
The question from the perspective of the hosts of the Secular Jihadists podcast is how Muslims will react to the fact that in the Koran itself, which most Muslims take to be the literal recitation of the words of God through Muhammad, documents the founder of the religion engaging in sex and war crimes. I think the truth though is that most Muslims won’t be very impacted by these revelations, because for most Muslims Islam is not reducible to the revelation within the Koran.
The lower Mekong region is a fascinating zone from the perspective of human geography and ethnography. Divided between Cambodia and Vietnam, until the past few centuries it was, in fact, part of the broader Khmer world, and historically part of successive Cambodian polities. Vietnam, as we know it, emerged in the Red River valley far to the north 1,000 years ago as an independent, usually subordinate, state distinct from Imperial China. Heavily Sinicized culturally, the Vietnamese nevertheless retained their ethnic identity.
I didn’t plan to talk about the Munda any time soon, in part because I recently wrote a post, 
