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When Surya left Olga of the Birch Forest

Posted on by Razib Khan


In the recent film The Northman the protagonist, Amleth, has a romantic relationship with a woman, “Olga of the Birch Forest.” Amleth was a Viking who raided Kievan Rus, and Olga was a Slavic woman who was captured in a raid.

Birch trees flourish across the temperate zone, but they’re particularly dominant in the north, due to being hardier. When I wrote about Finnish genetics, history and culture last year I stumbled upon the fact that early Finns who arrived in America (usually they were identified as “Swedes” because they were ruled by the Swedish Crown) often found an immediate affinity with northern Native American tribes. One explanation is that Finns and northern Native Americans are both “birch forest people.” Many aspects of their culture were similar, down to their moccasins.

As it happens, a long long time ago, and far far away, my forefathers were also birch forest people. Long before Olga’s kith and kin occupied the birch forests of northwestern Russia, they were occupied by the Fantyanovo-Balanovo culture. Until recently this cattle-raising society on the northern edge of the Indo-European world was assumed to perhaps be Baltic-speaking due to local hydronyms, but ancient DNA retrieved from Fatyanovo-Balanovo suggests a different answer. The vast majority of the men in their burial grounds carry Y chromosomal haplogroup R1a-Z93. This lineage is now found overwhelmingly in Indo-Iranian people, as well as in the Altai region.

The ancient DNA transect and succession is clear
– Fatnyanovo-Balanovo expanded eastward
– Turned into the Abashevo copper miners west of the Urals
– Gave rise to the Sintashta on the southern slope of the Urals into northwest Kazakhstan

At this point the Sintashta around 2000 BC exploded and turned into the Andronovo Horizon that covered much of Central Eurasia between 2000 and 1500 BC:

At some point Olga of the Birch Forest was left behind. A recent paper estimates that about 8% of the mtDNA lineages among populations like the Kalash and Pashtun in northern Pakistan is of steppe provenance. This is in contrast to about 2% to the south and east in “mainland” South Asia. This is contrast to the frequency of R1a in this region of Pakistan, about 50%, and 25% in mainland South Asia. In terms of total genome ancestry, about 25-30% of the ancestry in northern Pakistan among these groups is steppe, with an average across the subcontinent a bit below 15% (I did a weighted calculation a while ago).

What you see here is a massive drop off in maternal lineages of steppe Indo-Iranians, and a strong persistence of Y chromosomes, with total genome content being about in the middle. Figure 4c of Narasimhan et al. shows the same thing, with R1a fractions way higher than total genome content of steppe heritage.

This sex-specific admixture is not limited to South Asia. It can be found in the European context as well, though rarely as extreme.

So what’s going on here? One thing to note about Indo-European people is that on the whole they are patrilineal and patrilocal and exogamous. That is, one’s identity was determined by one’s father. Women moved into the household’s of their husband, and tended to be unrelated to them. This seems to be a perfect recipe for the assimilation of women into a society. But that’s not the reason all of these culturally and genetically different women are being brought into Indo-European societies. It is because the men are moving, and migrating very long distances.

In a podcast last year with myself and Patrick Wyman David Anthony claimed that they have detected Yamnaya individuals buried in western Mongolia and in Europe who are clearly related to each other. This means that Yamnaya cultural and social networks spanned Eurasia due to their mobility. In The Northman Olga was shipped from Russia all the way to Iceland. But this was the exception, not the rule. As Indo-European men expanded out of the core Eurasia zone, they moved as bachelor groups, and assimilated local women.

And not just Indo-Europeans. Among Uralic people, as well as some Siberians, a particular Y chromosome is very dominant from the Baltic all the way to eastern Siberia.

It’s a branch of N, and it is clearly East Asian in origin. It seems to have shown up in the Baltic region about 2,500 years ago, and it’s now the dominant haplogroup in Finland, and the Baltic countries. And yet the total genome content of modern day Finns that is East Asian is about 5% or so, even if N3a (TAT-C) is about 70%. There are almost no Siberian mtDNA lineages among Finns (OK ~1%). Among the Saami, about 25% of the genome is Siberian, but less than 10% of the mtDNA. Just like the Indo-Europeans, there seems to have been a male-mediated migration west. Why didn’t they bring women?

Can you imagine women and children moving fast across the zone of Eurasia north of the birch forest???

I think the common thing that connects the Indo-European groups here and the Uralic people is that there was a period when they were highly mobile over very long distances. This does not mean that women and children could never be involved. Some women were moving with their men judging by the mtDNA here and there. But, on the whole these were strongly male biased migrations. These were young and robust groups of men with few ties that moved rapidly across territory. There wasn’t time or inclination to have a baggage train.

Another way to look at it is from the gene’s-eye first view. Let’s look for explosive punctuated clusters within haplogroups.

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The Greece cline

Posted on by Razib Khan


Periodically I get asked about Greek genetics. I check the literature, and it doesn’t seem like a deep survey has been performed on the modern populations yet. Yes, there are a few samples that the Estonian group has made public, but I don’t see an equivalent to the sort of stuff you see for Italy or Spain. Why? One speculation, which a Greek friend suggested wasn’t totally crazy, is that there may be nervousness if they found “too much” Northern European ancestry in northern Greece. In other words, Slavic ancestry.

The ancient DNA work shows that 2 to 3 thousand years ago the Hellenes weren’t more Northern European than they are now. But a big issue is there is as “Greek cline” in the modern populations. I have a lot of private samples I can’t ever share, but I can look at them. I have a bunch of individuals whose four grandparents were born in Greece, and some samples labeled from Thessaly. Check out the PCA, admixture, and a Treemix below.

I’ll let you draw your conclusions.
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Shield-maidens, fact and fiction

Posted on by Razib Khan


Ed West has a post up about the pervasiveness of shield-maidens in modern dramatizations of the Viking culture: The hunt for the kick-ass Viking girlboss. In terms of how it is depicted, there is a ludicrousness to it all. At least in Game of Thrones Gwendoline Christie is 6’3 and not particularly delicate of build. West points out how unrealistic it is that Scarlett Johansson’s “Black Widow” character can take down men far larger than her, but Johannssen is aware of how stupid it all is. When asked by a fawning late-night talk show host (I believe it was Steven Colbert) how she did all those things, she stated plainly that they made it seem like she could do all those things. At 5’3 Johannssen must be conscious of the physical differences between men and women.

Here’s a paper on arm strength differences between men and women:

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Happy DNA Day (and whole genome sequencing yourself)

Posted on by Razib Khan

Today is “DNA Day,” I checked Nebula Genomics website to see if there was a deal. So I got the 30x whole genome sequencing for $199+$24.99/month subscription. The deal is you have to get the subscription, but you can cancel at any time. What I plan to do is just download my data when the results come back and the subscription starts ticking, and cancel after that. The other options are more expensive. But, they won’t let you add more than 1 item unless you get the most expensive upfront deal, so what I did was just started separate carts and sent the order to separate email addresses.

And yes, I have my own DNA sequenced. This is for friends and family.

If you want to download my whole genome sequence, from raw reads to bam files to vcf’s, go here.

Update: It was pointed out to me that quarterly would charge $75 as it will be $25 per month quarterly (3 months).

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Open Thread – 4/24/2022

Posted on by Razib Khan

The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann is worth reading. It’s mostly science, and not too much about von Neumann’s personal life, though there is some that is there. The only negative I’d give is that because von Neumann died early the author includes some discussion about people who extended and furthered von Neumann’s legacy near the end of the book.

Survival of Late Pleistocene Hunter-Gatherer Ancestry in the Iberian Peninsula. Southern Spain was a refuge for Neanderthals, and it looks like it was for Magdelanian people as well.

Patterns of genetic differentiation and the footprints of historical migrations in the Iberian Peninsula. I forgot that most of Spain’s genetic variation was west-east instead of north-south. Pretty strange.

Do members of Homo floresiensis still inhabit the Indonesian island where their fossils helped identify a new human species fewer than 20 years ago? This piece in The Scientist is triggering a massive media frenzy, but as the British would say, it’s “rubbish.” Basically an anthropology chooses to put weight on eyewitness accounts of local people. It’s really hard to hide medium-sized mammals, especially on an island like Flores. I doubt they’re still around.

Euro Vision (part 1). Second part out very soon.

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In defense of behavior genetics

Posted on by Razib Khan

Stuart Ritchie, the author of Intelligence: All That Matters and Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth, has written a trenchant critique of The New York Review of Books critique of The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality at his Substack. Titled, Scientific Nihilism: A review of a review of Kathryn Paige Harden’s “The Genetic Lottery”, Ritchie goes into a lot of detail on why he disagrees with the critique. In the old blogosphere, we would call this a “fisking.”

Probably the most immediate issue I had with the review, and critiques of the science in The Genetic Lottery, is that the skepticism of the robustness of the inferences from the methods used in behavior genetics is so often lacking when it comes to the rest of the social sciences, in particular those areas that are normatively aligned with the views of the critics. For example, in the 1970’s some of the harshest critics of behavior genetics and later sociobiology were Marxists. Marxism of course purports to be scientific and based on a particular model of the universe. But the harsh skepticism that these Marxist scientists applied to the behavioral sciences that might utilize genetics they seem to have no use for in their own personal commitments.

Interestingly, Ritchie highlights something I missed, a Q & A with the co-authors of the review, where the historian of science Jessica Riskin says the following:

JR: I’m writing a book about the history of evolutionary theory focusing on the life and career of the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, in which I’ll follow the fortunes of Lamarck’s science from his lifetime up to the present. His ideas were foundational to modern biology—in fact, he coined the term “biology” in 1802, defining the science of life as a discrete field, and he also proposed the first theory of species change, or what we now call evolution. The emblem of Lamarckism became the giraffe, who, in stretching to reach high branches, lengthened its neck and forelegs by tiny amounts; these incremental changes, Lamarck proposed, added together over many generations, produced the giraffe’s distinctive form. Lamarck’s theory languished in exile for over a century, from roughly the 1880s until the 1990s, when the possibility that organisms might transform themselves heritably began re-entering mainstream biology in areas such as epigenetics.

Inter-generational heritability of epigenetic marks is a controversial area. It isn’t pseudo-science, but its validity seems to be tenuous in most cases, and most people who work in epigenetics don’t accept that it occurs in humans despite a paper or two that suggests that it does (I know this because I ask them this in private to get their candid view). The conflation of epigenetics as a pretty standard part of molecular genetic processes with what is basically neo-Lamcarkianism has made it so that many epigeneticists don’t even want to define themselves as such. Riskin’s allusion to the inter-generational heritability of epigenetic forces is certainly eyebrow-raising and makes me wonder at the variation in her epistemological standards…

Finally, Stuart Ritchie is a friend. You should support his Substack with your money if you can afford it. He believes the truth is important.

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The werewolves were the koryos of yore

Posted on by Razib Khan

The London Review of Books has a review of a book between two scholars, Old Thiess, a Livonian Werewolf: A Classic Case in Comparative Perspective. The crux is the case of a 17th-century werewolf:

On​ a spring day in 1691, in what is now the town of Cēsis in Latvia, a group of local men waited to give testimony in a provincial courtroom. The case was unremarkable: a theft from the local church. One by one the men were called up by the judges, who were wealthy members of the German-speaking elite. When an old man called Mātiss took the stand, the judges noticed that the local innkeeper, who had already been questioned, was smiling. Asked why, he replied that he was amused to see ‘Old Thiess’, his neighbour and tenant, swearing on the Bible, since ‘everyone knows he goes around with the Devil and was a werewolf.’

That he was a werewolf seems to have been common knowledge and Thiess himself freely admitted it – in fact, he said, it wasn’t even the first time it had been mentioned in court. Ten years earlier, he had been questioned about his broken nose and had explained to the court that a neighbour had struck him with a broomstick while they were both in Hell. The judges then had laughed and let him go. But in Cēsis, the court changed tack from the church theft and embarked on an interrogation of the werewolf.

The review discusses the contrasting views of the authors, Carlo Ginzburg, who argues that belief in werewolves is evidence of a pan-European pagan substratum that persisted down to early modernity, and Bruce Lincoln, who suggests that these individuals are “persons of a subaltern group, accused by a powerful court,” and they by asserting their werewolf status they are “affirming their own dignity and benevolence.”

Ginzburg represents an old-fashioned view that magic and non-Christian traditions represent folk paganism, while Lincoln seems to make recourse to more modern ideas relating to structural relations of class and ethnicity. The elite of Livonia at the time was German-speaking, while the peasants were invariably Estonian or Latvian (as we’d call them today).

On Twitter, Francis Young, who is a scholar of Lithuanian paganism, argues that it is likely that the idea of shape-shifters comes from the Estonians (Thiess seems to have been a Latvian). He says there are no traditions of werewolves in his study of native Baltic (Lithuanian and Latvian) paganism. This matters obviously in light of Ginzburg’s assertion of a pan-European pagan tradition that likely goes back to the early Indo-Europeans. If it was a local borrowing from Finnic people, then Ginzburg is wrong in the proximate sense.

I have a slightly different take. In Tracing the Indo-Europeans Dorcas Brown and David Anthony have a chapter where they document a ritual sacrifice of 50 dogs and half a dozen wolves by the Srubna people nearly 4,000 years ago. This was probably an initiation of a koryos, an Indo-European “Mannerbund” (though these would be adolescents). The koryos are commonly depicted as wolves or dogs in Indo-European folklore and are described as such in sources as diverse as the Vedas and the custom of the Greek ephebeia. Young is surely correct about Baltic pagans, this is after all his specialty. But, I would note that werewolves have an ancient Indo-European basis, and the Finnic people were influenced by Indo-Europeans, in particular Balto-Slavs and Indo-Iranians. The Finnish sky-god Ukko is clearly Baltic Perkunas and Vedic Varuna. Though it is unparsimonious, the idea of werewolves among the Latvians might have come proximately from the Estonians, but ultimately from the Indo-European substrate!

In sum, I think in the details Ginzburg is likely incorrect, but broadly I do think there is something to the idea that a skein of Indo-European folklore did persist submerged under the Christian beliefs of Europe at the time. Lincoln’s modernist assertions are fashionable, and likely most of the readers of The London Review of Books will assume he is closer to the mark, but they have the unfortunate characteristic of almost certainly being totally wrong.

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Dan Davis prehistory YouTuber par excellence

Posted on by Razib Khan


I’ve been on the record of being skeptical of a lot of content being generated on YouTube, but I think the author Dan Davis does a really great job. The topics overlap with a lot of my interests. For example, he has videos on the Corded Ware, the Sintashta, and the koryos. Since he relies on a lot of the primary scholarship I do I can evaluate his representation and it’s all true, and all accurate. Of course, it’s video, so I recommend you read the primary sources at some point. But Davis’ 15-30 minute videos are a reasonable length and relatively well-produced, so an excellent introduction.

Davis is the author of two novels about the early Indo-Europeans, Godborn and Thunderer. You can also get the prequel novel free on his website.

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Games within games

Posted on by Razib Khan

Many years ago I read Adin Steinsaltz’s The Essential Talmud. Steinsaltz was a Charedi (Chasidic more specifically) rabbi who spoke about the text and work from the perspective of an insider. One of the major insights I recalled is that to obtain esteem, eminence and status, rabbinical scholars would engage in deep exegesis of Jewish law, and work to extend the purview of Halakah. Steinsaltz was very precise that the process always involved extension, not retraction. The law grew more ornate and restrictive over time, explaining why there is a pre-modern basis for the recent vogue for veganism among very pious Jews, as a plant-based diet is by definition kosher. Some observant Jews are skeptical that any contemporary form of animal slaughter can adhere to the letter of God’s law.

From the perspective of a devout Jew, as Steinsaltz was, there is nothing more important than the law handed down from God. He was quite dismissive of secular philosophical inquiry, reiterating that the most learned rabbis imbibed such wisdom only so long as it furthered their understanding of scripture and the commentaries of their predecessors. The quest for learning undertaken by religious scholars was the most important task in the whole world for Steinsaltz, with everyone else taking on a supportive role in supporting the scholars. The production of a more unwieldy Halakah was the price one paid for getting closer to the intent behind God’s law.

But from the outside one can observe other dynamics. Arguably Jewish law was essential for maintaining the cohesion of the Jewish people for thousands of years. With the exception of schismatics, after the rise of Christianity Jews all across the world were united by their adherence to the written and oral Torah, and the rules and regulations of Halakah kept them distinct from their gentile neighbors, more, or less. In this way, religious commentary served a functional role on the scale of the community. But competition between scholars occurred in the context of a zero-sum game. There could only be one most eminent rabbi in a city. Over time individual rabbis produced more and more ornate interpretations of the law that rendered Rabbinical Judaism somewhat an odd fit in early modern Europe. There was no way that a pious Jew could integrate into the social and professional world of the gentile, so there emerged Reform Judaism (which did involve retraction of Jewish law from the lives of Jews).

The moral of this lesson is that a functional characteristic that has a group-level utility, furthering cohesion and forwarding some collective aim, can produce perverse incentives when individuals compete among each other to be the more clever and devout of all and then impose their new norms on the whole population.

I did read The Essential Talmud. But my point isn’t about Orthodox Jews, it’s about American academics. As the high priests of the hall monitor caste like to opine, “this too is problematic.”

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Open Thread – 4/9/2022 – Gene Expression

Posted on by Razib Khan

I’ve been reading The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann before I go to sleep. Not sure I would recommend this, as the author, Ananyo Bhattacharya, does get a bit into the mathematical questions von Neumann explored in his early life. But overall, very readable, and so far von Neumann is sketched out as a very human individual (he was mediocre at chess, for example).

I talked about immigration (US) and migration with regards to Ukraine in particular with Alex Nowrasteh. It was a good conversation, in part because we are friendly with each other off the interwebs. I plan on posting a discussion with someone less amenable to “open borders” in the near future (stay tuned!).

The von Neumann book has made me push A Dominant Character: How J. B. S. Haldane Transformed Genetics, Became a Communist, and Risked His Neck for Science: The Radical Science and Restless Politics of J. B. S. Haldane up my stack. Despite Haldane’s political radicalism, I do want to note that on the science he was very much aligned with the conservative, R. A. Fisher.