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Only the inner party

Posted on by Razib Khan


For about two decades after the Presidency of Andrew Jackson, the South dominated American politics. True, there were Northerners like Martin van Buren who became President, but they headed a Southern-dominated coalition. By the 1850s this alignment was not stable because the North was developing industrially and outpacing the population of the South. Nevertheless, it took some time for a realignment to occur, where the Mid-Atlantic regions of the North began to vote with Greater New England as a unit, and so would serve as the basis for Republican domination for decades until FDR broke the old parties.

The 1856 election shows the last time that the old alliance won out, as you can see that the Republican candidate had very little support outside of Greater New England. The combination of the moral fervor of the anti-slavery movement, which eventually won over the whole North, and the unreasonable expectations of the numerically inferior South, eventually brought the rest of the North to the Republican party.

Today I feel I see a bit of the reverse. The Liberal Patriot has a post up, Working Class and Hispanic Voters Are Losing Interest in the Party of Abortion, Gun Control and the January 6th Hearings, that shows the Democrat party catering more and more to the interests of college-educated whites, their intelligentsia. One of the arguments you saw around 2010 is that the McGovern coalition of liberal whites and minorities was now actually feasible. But this presupposed that minorities continued to vote Democrat at the same rates as before. The reality is that minorities without college educations are drifting away from the Democratic party.

What’s left then? The Democrats know what it’s like to run a huge and fractious coalition. With fewer and fewer moderates the party will finally have moral clarity. But victory? That I doubt.

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More than 1 year of the steppe

Posted on by Razib Khan

Over at my Substack I’ve spent more than a year writing about the cultural and genetic impact of the Eurasian steppe. I’ve put out a large number of essays, so I want to post them here in case you missed one. In reverse order…

A Hun by any other name – On the genetic trail of Europe’s enduring bête noire:

The specter of these pitiless barbarians swooping in on horseback had haunted the ancients, their horror recorded in histories that filtered down to modern Europeans. In these classical texts, the Huns were the epitome of brutal and alien savages whose raison d’etre was total victory on the battlefield, punctuated by gluttonous orgies of flesh, food and drink. They were the embodiment of the European cultural imagination’s bête noire, the austere and erudite Roman aristocrat contrasting sharply with the brutish barbarian guzzling mare’s milk and gnawing on a hunk of raw meat while in the saddle.

The wolf at history’s door and Casting out the wolf in our midst are more anthropological and focused on the koryos and their role in shaping Eurasian history. I count these two as steppe-adjacent since they lack the chronological focus of the other pieces.

Dark Horse out of the Steppe Fishing the Sintashta, Scythians and Sarmatians out of obscurity.

Steppe 2.0: would you swipe right on a steppe brother? – The biological and social consequences of Yamnaya nomadism:

The Yamnaya-powered transformation of Europe and Asia more than 5,000 years ago was a social and economic revolution, with the explosion of nomadic pastoralism across the Eurasian steppe. Its downstream linguistic and cultural consequences are with us to this very day: billions of us speak Indo-European languages, and we preserve those ancestral religious beliefs both in the shared mythology of the West and in the living religious traditions of India. To premodern minds untouched by science, the rise of obscure tribes to world conquest would have been evidence of divine providence and fate. Theirs was a world of miracles, and the gods always chose favorites. By the 20th century, supernatural explanations had foundered on the shoals of scientific materialism. But unless you were a Marxist, history was a matter of narrow description of particular places and times, rather than general theoretical narratives that explained the arc and ebb of societies and cultures. It was one damn thing after another, with broader patterns attributed to the vague laws of probability.

Hungarians as the ghost of the Magyar confederacy: The cultural legacy of the Magyars far outweighs their genetic impact. Another steppe-adjacent piece, though this one focuses on one nation so it’s more appropriate.

Steppe 1.1a: A nowhere man’s world and Steppe 1.1b: culture vultures descend are two posts about the Corded Ware, Bell Beakers, and the steppe intrusion into Europe.

Steppe 1.0, Going Nomad: The early Indo-Europeans’ great leap forward:

Today 3.5 billion humans speak Indo-European languages, which dominate Eurasia from Spain to the Indian subcontinent. This is the legacy of the pastoralists who roamed the Pontic steppe north of the Black sea 5,000 years ago. They were the original Indo-Europeans. They pioneered the nomadic lifestyle, leaving behind hard toil at the plow and thankless foraging in cold Siberian forests. They chose instead to wander the open grasslands in search of fresh pastures for their herds. They were the first to unleash young warriors raised as roving nomads upon the world, predatory packs marching the breadth of a continent in a few centuries. We don’t know what they called themselves. We don’t know the names of those who led them. But their cultural innovations and the choices they made transformed our world and made us who we are today. These nameless people left no monuments or seminal texts. Instead, we live with their language, their gods and their genes.

Finally, the two introductory posts, Entering Steppelandia: pop. 7.7 billion: Why the steppe matters to me, and why it should matter to you and Library of the Steppe: They didn’t read, but you should.

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Wolf paleogenomics

Posted on by Razib Khan

Grey wolf genomic history reveals a dual ancestry of dogs:

The grey wolf (Canis lupus) was the first species to give rise to a domestic population, and they remained widespread throughout the last Ice Age when many other large mammal species went extinct. Little is known, however, about the history and possible extinction of past wolf populations or when and where the wolf progenitors of the present-day dog lineage (Canis familiaris) lived1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8. Here we analysed 72 ancient wolf genomes spanning the last 100,000 years from Europe, Siberia and North America. We found that wolf populations were highly connected throughout the Late Pleistocene, with levels of differentiation an order of magnitude lower than they are today. This population connectivity allowed us to detect natural selection across the time series, including rapid fixation of mutations in the gene IFT88 40,000–30,000 years ago. We show that dogs are overall more closely related to ancient wolves from eastern Eurasia than to those from western Eurasia, suggesting a domestication process in the east. However, we also found that dogs in the Near East and Africa derive up to half of their ancestry from a distinct population related to modern southwest Eurasian wolves, reflecting either an independent domestication process or admixture from local wolves. None of the analysed ancient wolf genomes is a direct match for either of these dog ancestries, meaning that the exact progenitor populations remain to be located.

Dog stuff makes the headlines, but I think the wolf stuff is the most interesting in this paper.

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Republican dominated states that are more pro-choice than you think

Posted on by Razib Khan

Because our politics have been nationalized, it’s easy to forget there are still regional quirks and variations. Comparing Pew’s 2014 views on abortion by state with 2020 election results, you can see that states like Wyoming, Montana, and Alaska are far more Republican and pro-Trump than they are anti-abortion. That didn’t matter too much…until recently.

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Magna Graecia lives!

Posted on by Razib Khan

Assessing temporal and geographic contacts across the Adriatic Sea through the analysis of genome-wide data from Southern Italy:

Southern Italy was characterised by a complex prehistory that started with different Palaeolithic cultures, later followed by the Neolithization and the demic dispersal from the Pontic-Caspian Steppe during the Bronze Age. Archaeological and historical evidences point to a link between Southern Italians and the Balkans still present in modern times. To shed light on these dynamics, we analysed around 700 South Mediterranean genomes combined with informative ancient DNAs. Our findings revealed high affinities of South-Eastern Italians with modern Eastern Peloponnesians, and a closer affinity of ancient Greek genomes with those from specific regions of South Italy than modern Greek genomes. The higher similarity could be associated with a Bronze Age component ultimately originating from the Caucasus with high Iranian and Anatolian Neolithic ancestries. Furthermore, extremely differentiated allele frequencies among Northern and Southern Italy revealed putatively adapted SNPs in genes involved in alcohol metabolism, nevi features and immunological traits.

This paper finally seems to straightout admit that the statistics for using Greeks as a donor population can be messed up by Slavic migration. There’s heterogeneity though. For example, Maniotes are good donors to eastern Sicily. Maniotes are famous for having been pagan until the 800’s, because their godforsaken peninsula was so isolated from the rest of the world. And, in these data they seem to have less Slavic ancestry, which is what you’d expect if they were so isolated.

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The last glacial maximum bottlenecks and human phylogeny

Posted on by Razib Khan

I’ve mentioned The genomic origins of the world’s first farmers a few times. It’s an intense model-based paper that revises some expectations and models of the origins of diverse human groups on the cusp of the Holocene:

The precise genetic origins of the first Neolithic farming populations in Europe and Southwest Asia, as well as the processes and the timing of their differentiation, remain largely unknown. Demogenomic modeling of high-quality ancient genomes reveals that the early farmers of Anatolia and Europe emerged from a multiphase mixing of a Southwest Asian population with a strongly bottlenecked western hunter-gatherer population after the last glacial maximum. Moreover, the ancestors of the first farmers of Europe and Anatolia went through a period of extreme genetic drift during their westward range expansion, contributing highly to their genetic distinctiveness. This modeling elucidates the demographic processes at the root of the Neolithic transition and leads to a spatial interpretation of the population history of Southwest Asia and Europe during the late Pleistocene and early Holocene.

A few things to note about this paper. First, no mention of Basal Eurasians. This research group doesn’t believe they’re necessary. As you may know, Basal Eurasians were hypothesized because Mesolithic Europeans seem genetically closer to eastern non-Africans than to incoming Early European Farmers (EEF) from Anatolia. One model that can explain this is that there was a population somewhere in N. Africa and W. Asia that split off first from other non-Africans, perhaps more than 60,000 years ago and that eventually merged back with West Eurasians at some point. Lazaridis et al. also believe this might explain why some W. Asia groups have less Neanderthal ancestry; the Basal Eurasians did not admix with them.

The problem, so far, is that nearly a decade after they were hypothesized we haven’t found a mostly Basal Eurasian sample. And, Basal ancestry is found in West Eurasia pretty early. Perhaps they’ll always remain a statistical construct?

Why doesn’t everyone think Basal Eurasians are necessary? If you read the above paper, the key issue is the distortionary impact that bottlenecks can have on the inferred branch lengths of a given phylogeny. They argue that a very strong bottleneck during the LGM 20,000 years ago inflated the divergence of European foragers from other populations and that subsequently, the populations bounced back very well so that their census sizes were likely large. And, they also argue that some of the distinctiveness of EEF from Anatolia is a function of their own bottleneck far more recently, around the beginning of the Holocene. Combined with these bottlenecks there are also various migrations between the branches in the typology, branches differentially impacted by these bottlenecks.

I don’t know how this aligns with earlier models, but I think it’s a serious contender. The key question I wonder is how this fits in with earlier ancient DNA and archaeology.

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New David Reich talk

Posted on by Razib Khan

Eurogenes points me to a new talk by David Reich, that has a nice new long abstract online. I’ll just insert my comments within the blockquote…

We present an integrative genetic history of the Southern Arc, an area divided geographically between West Asia and Europe, but which we define as spanning the culturally entangled regions of Anatolia and its neighbors, in both Europe (Aegean and the Balkans), and in West Asia (Cyprus, Armenia, the Levant, Iraq and Iran). We employ a new analytical framework to analyze genome-wide data at the individual level from a total of 1,320 ancient individuals, 731 of which are newly reported and address major gaps in the archaeogenetic record. We report the first ancient DNA from the world’s earliest farming cultures of southeastern Anatolia and northern Mesopotamia, as well as the first Neolithic period data from Cyprus and Armenia, and discover that it was admixture of Natufian-related ancestry from the Levant—mediated by Mesopotamian and Levantine farmers, and marked by at least two expansions associated with dispersal of pre-pottery and pottery cultures—that generated a pan-West Asian Neolithic continuum [“it was” refers to Cyprus and Armenia? How Mesopatamian farmers related to the Zagros-Levant-Anatolian trichotomy?]. Our comprehensive sampling shows that Anatolia received hardly any genetic input from Europe or the Eurasian steppe from the Chalcolithic to the Iron Age; this contrasts with Southeastern Europe and Armenia that were impacted by major gene flow from Yamnaya steppe pastoralists [I believe Southeastern Europe had both patchy early Yamnaya and later Indo-Europeans? Armenia on the other hand seems unique].

In the Balkans, we reveal a patchwork of Bronze Age populations with diverse proportions of steppe ancestry in the aftermath of the ~3000 BCE Yamnaya migrations, paralleling the linguistic diversity of Paleo-Balkan speakers. We provide insights into the Mycenaean period of the Aegean by documenting variation in the proportion of steppe ancestry (including some individuals who lack it altogether), and finding no evidence for systematic differences in steppe ancestry among social strata, such as those of the elite buried at the Palace of Nestor in Pylos [Mycenanean Greece starts at 1750 BC, so probably at least 500 years at least from the major penetration of Indo-Europeans, so that’s 20 generations or so. That seems enough time for status-gene correlations to breakdown if there’s no endogamous caste-like structure].

A striking signal of steppe migration into the Southern Arc is evident in Armenia and northwest Iran where admixture with Yamnaya patrilineal descendants occurred, coinciding with their 3rd millennium BCE displacement from the steppe itself. This ancestry, pervasive across numerous sites of Armenia of ~2000-600 BCE, was diluted during the ensuing centuries to only a third of its peak value [Looking online, there’s a 2012 paper that indicates that modern Armenians have of the specifically Yamnaya R1b lineage. If this, true might explain why Armenian is so hard to place within a Indo-European tree, as Celtic, Germanic, Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian seem to come out of a broader Corded Ware cultural complex], making no further western inroads from there into any part of Anatolia, including the geographically adjacent Lake Van center of the Iron Age Kingdom of Urartu. The impermeability of Anatolia to exogenous migration contrasts with our finding that the Yamnaya had two distinct gene flows [David of Eurogenes does not like this, but this could mean Anatolian and CHG/Iranian pulses?], both from West Asia, suggesting that the Indo-Anatolian language family originated in the eastern wing of the Southern Arc and that the steppe served only as a secondary staging area of Indo-European language dispersal. The demographic significance of Anatolia on a Mediterranean-wide scale is further documented by our finding that following the Roman conquest, the Anatolian population remained stable and became the geographic source for much of the ancestry of Imperial Rome itself.

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The modern human family tree might be shallower that I’ve been saying

Posted on by Razib Khan

Estimating population split times and migration rates from historical effective population sizes:

The estimation of effective population sizes (Ne) through time is of fundamental interest in population genetics, but the interpretation of Ne as the effective number of breeding individuals in the population is challenged by the effect of population structure. In fact, variation in Ne reported in many studies may be a consequence of changes in migration rates between populations rather than changes in actual population size. We address this long-standing problem here by constructing joint models of population size changes, migration, and divergence that can adjust temporal estimates of Ne and estimate the actual Ne of a local deme connected to another population through migration. We also develop a method for estimating divergence times and migration rates taking into account complex scenarios of changing population sizes. We apply the method to previously published data from humans, and show that, when taking migration and changes in Ne into account, the estimated divergence between the San and Dinka populations is approximately 108 kya, and not 255 kya as reported in a previous study. Using simulations, we demonstrate that the previously reported and surprisingly old estimates of divergence between San and Dinka is in fact caused by a quantifiable estimation bias due to changes in Ne through time.

If you read this blog you know I’ve alluded to really deep structure in Africa for a while. Some work using ancient Khoisan samples from South Africa puts the divergence between this population and other moderns as far back as 300,000 years ago. Privately a lot of geneticists were skeptical of this, but the published record is what it is. But there were many simplifying assumptions in these models. You can see this in Ne calculations on admixed (recently) populations as if they weren’t admixed but ancient groups. If you have an admixed population with higher genetic diversity you’re going to estimate a larger effective population…but really it’s just the pooled population of two distinct ancestral populations (or more than two, depending).

This preprint, along with A weakly structured stem for human origins in Africa, is pushing the divergence times within Africa closer to 100-125,000 years ago, as opposed to 200,000 years ago. They do make an estimate for Eurasians that seems to be corroborated by archaeology and ancient DNA:

For Han-French divergence, the model with the highest composite likelihood was one with a split time of 1505 generations (i.e. 43,645 years ago assuming 29 years per generation) and a mostly unidirectional migration rate of 2.92 from Han to French (Table 1). We also replicate the results from Sj¨odin et al. [2021], in which the TT method infers nonsensical negative split times between Han and French. The unidirectional migration inferred from Han to French is in line with current models of the peopling of Europe through waves of farmers coming from central Eurasia [Haak et al., 2015].

The 43,645 years ago estimate seems broadly correct. Ancient DNA and archaeology I think point to a period definitely before 40,000 years ago, but admixture with Neanderthals and the spread of modern human technologies means it is unlikely to be very much before 50,000 years ago (i.e., not 60,000 years ago). The “Han” to “French” migration is strange, but there is suggestive evidence deep in supplements of East Asian migration into late Pleistocene/early Holocene Europe into Mesolithic foragers. This might be common Ancestral North Eurasian ancestry, or something different. I’m not sure that this model totally checks out and we know what’s going on. Probably one reason it remains in the supplements of these papers.

They’re getting estimates between Sardinians and Africans a bit before 100,000 years ago…though they admit that it’s probably inflated by archaic (Neanderthal admixture). That value seems about right and indicates a long period of incubation of the ancestrally non-African populations within the context of African/perhaps West Asian population structure.

For more complexity/detail, see The genomic origins of the world’s first farmers, which purports to better model Ne variations to get better divergence times within Europe between various forager and farmer lineages. This group has not used “Basal Eurasians” in their human genetics papers the last few times. They don’t believe it’s needed.

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Different views of homosexual sex by demographics (Democrats)

Posted on by Razib Khan

Ethan Strauss has a post up, On Forcing Enemies to Fake Their Beliefs – Why does the sports media want Tampa Bay Rays players to pretend they’re supportive of Pride?, where he comments on the fact that the push in corporate sports to be socially progressive is being driven by college-educated white staff, and probably in contradiction to the personal views of most players. Strauss is a former sports reporter, and he knows these sorts of guys personally, so he’s almost certainly correct.

Impressionistically it does seem that young white liberals sometimes forget that not everyone is at the same point on social issues.

To test that out, I decided to look at the HOMOSEX variable for 2018-2022. Do people think homosexual sex is wrong? And if so, who?

First, let’s look at white non-Hispanics.

Though conservative whites are split, liberal whites are almost totally in agreement that homosexual sex is not wrong at all (the residual are generally very old if you use the COHORT variable).

How bout black Americans? The same size is smaller, so I decided to just look at ideology.

Self-described liberal blacks are only somewhat more liberal on homosexual sex than non-Hispanic white conservatives.

Let’s compare black Democrats to white Democrats.

Black Democrats basically have the same views as conservative non-Hispanic whites. The contrast with college-educated white Democrats is pretty striking.

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The weak shall abide, persist and inherit

Posted on by Razib Khan


To the Melians the Athenians declared “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” This observation from Thucydides 2,400 years ago echoes down to the present because it reflects much of the world we see around us. The ancient Athenian wisdom clearly come naturally to the government of the People’s Republic of China:

At this point, I’ll reiterate the wisdom of Thucydides. It’s not like on a deep level Muslims don’t know how the People’s Republic of China treats its co-religionists. So why the quiet? Because they know that their bleating and remonstrations against China will fall on deaf ears. A nation like Pakistan needs China far more than China needs it, and China and the oil kingdoms need each other mutually and are aligned on other salient geopolitical issues. In contrast, remonstrating against India or the West will obtain results.

Notice with China there are two issues. First, its raw power insulates it from external moral pressures. China’s concessions to morality are a matter of its own choice, its own agency. Second, there is the axis of self-interest. Self-righteous social justice warriors like NBA coach Steve Kerr balk at criticizing China’s atrocious human rights record because the economic carrot and stick dynamics loom large. Rather than a matter of practicality, where protestation would have no effect on China, the calculus of decision-making is on self-interest for much of the American corporate elite. They wish to become richer, so they turn a blind eye. Obviously, these two are often comingled, especially in the case of small Muslim nations who may empathize with the Uyghurs, but know their protests will have only negative impacts geopolitically and economically on themselves.

From this one might conclude that I’m a cold rationalist, espousing Nietzschean amorality. But 2,400 years on, despite all its flaws, the legend of Athens shines brighter than the militaristic ethos of Sparta. The victors lost in the halls of memory.  2,200 years ago the First Emperor of China crushed the power of the classicists and literati, only to have his image and name tarred by their depictions of him in future ages. The Christians were a pacific and marginal group for the first two centuries of their existence, but within a few generations, they captured Rome and became synonymous with Western civilization. The martial ethos of the Vedic Kshatriyas is not what undergirds Hindu civilization, rather, it is the pacific ritualists and the philosophers, the Brahmins, who turned away from animal sacrifice in the first millenium AD.

Blood wins the battles, but ideas win the war.