On occasion, I read a book…and forget its title. I usually manage to recall the title at some point. For the past five years or so I’ve been trying to recall a book I read on Asian diplomatic history written by a Korean American scholar. Today I finally recalled that book: East Asia Before the West: Five Centuries of Trade and Tribute.
The reason I’ve been trying to remember this book is that I’ve felt it told a story which is more relevant today than in the late 2000s, when the book was written and published. From the summary:
Focusing on the role of the “tribute system” in maintaining stability in East Asia and in fostering diplomatic and commercial exchange, Kang contrasts this history against the example of Europe and the East Asian states’ skirmishes with nomadic peoples to the north and west. Although China has been the unquestioned hegemon in the region, with other political units always considered secondary, the tributary order entailed military, cultural, and economic dimensions that afforded its participants immense latitude. Europe’s “Westphalian” system, on the other hand, was based on formal equality among states and balance-of-power politics, resulting in incessant interstate conflict.
Here’s my not-so-counterintuitive prediction: as China flexes its geopolitical muscles, it will revert back to form in substance, forging a foreign policy predicated on hierarchical relationships between states, while maintaining an external adherence to the system of European diplomacy which crystallized between the Peace of Westphalia and the Congress of Vienna, that emphasized the importance of equality between states. “Diplomacy with Chinese characteristics” if you will.
I got a question about endogamy and Bangladeshis on of my other weblogs, as well as their relatedness to western (e.g., Iranian) and eastern (e.g., Southeast Asian) populations. Instead of talking, what do the data say? Most of you have probably seen me write about this before, but I think it might be useful to post again for Google (or Quora, as Quora seems to like my blog posts as references).
The 1000 Genomes project collected samples a whole lot of Bangladeshis in Dhaka. The figure at the top shows that the Bangladeshis overwhelmingly form a relatively tight cluster that is strongly shifted toward East Asians. There is one exception: about five individuals, several of which were collected right after each other (their sample IDs are sequential) who show almost no East Asian shift.
A review can only pack in so many things. So if there is something missing that seems obvious, it’s probably something that I cut in the interest of space (e.g., the author is not a fan of the emphasis on football and such at many universities, but I didn’t touch on that in the review). The University We Need is a short book, but it’s very dense in ideas and suggestions. Unfortunately, comments on NRO and Twitter indicate many people haven’t really read the review, so they won’t read the book.
Surely one reason I enjoyed the book is that the author is someone with whom I’m coincidently on the same wavelength. I first encountered his work nearly twenty years ago, when I read A History of the Byzantine State and Society, a ~1,000-page survey of the topic. In many ways a scholarly “core dump”, it has stood me in good stead all these years. But at the time I was totally unaware that the author, Warren Treadgold, and I shared broadly similar politics in the grand scheme of things. That is, we were intellectually oriented people who were also not on the Left.
I don’t consider myself a conservative intellectual. I’m just an intellectual who happens to be conservative because the Left terrifies me (I have real personal reasons!). Treadgold’s work similarly is not informed by him being a conservative intellectual. Rather, he’s a scholar whose views default to the Right as opposed to the center or Left because of where the dominant tendency in academia today is.
Speaking of psychology, there are some really good podcasts in that field out. Part of it is there is so much to talk about with the replication crisis. I really enjoyed Two Psychologists Four Beers, for example. Though not surprisingly they sort of still mischaracterize the views and issues of conservatives or non-liberals in academia…there are so few who are “out” and vocal with their politically normal colleagues that people just don’t know what’s going on in their heads and it’s easy to mischaracterize.
This is the week when you follow the #SMBE2018 hashtag on Twitter. I assume a lot of papers are going to come out in the next few weeks after people present at SMBE.
There was some discussion on ancient DNA and archaeology on Twitter. Has ancient DNA changed everything? Or not?
First, I think it’s important to acknowledge that many of the models which have emerged out of ancient DNA are resurrections of older anthropological, archaeological, and historical frameworks, which emphasize migration. But these were long dismissed within many of these fields. Like David Reich in Who We Are and How We Got Here I believe that there was a political rationale for this. As someone who has read deeply in paleoanthropology and history for twenty years, I reject the idea that ancient DNA is actually not that revolutionary because I remember what passed as conventional wisdom 10-20 years ago.
By utilizing archaeology and generating an inferred cultural history of Carthage, Miles does a great job contrasting the Punic mercantile republic with Rome. Aside from the penchant to name their leading citizens Hanno, Hannibal, and Hamilcar (to the point it’s hard to keep track of who is who), the most notable aspect of ancient Carthage seems to be its tendency to crucify generals who fail in battle. The Carthaginians come off as cartoon villains, even setting aside the child sacrifice. This is probably partly history being written by the winners, but it’s clear that still, Rome, in particular, was unique in its public spiritedness and social cohesion. This, despite the fact that Rome and Carthage had both converged on a system of an oligarchic republic during the height of their rivalry.
Ancient history, and reading about other cultures, is illuminating about the human condition because different peoples in different exigent circumstances seem to react mostly the same but to wildly different outcomes.
For China, I don’t know of a better treatment in survey form than John King Fairbank’s classic. I also have a very soft spot for Jaques Gernet’s A History of Chinese Civilization. Fairbank’s book is more narrative history with some cultural fat on the bones. Gernet is more a cultural history with an exoskeleton of narrative diplomatic history.
For Rome, there are many recent books. But I still really like Michael Grant’s big thick survey, History of Rome. I don’t know about Greece since I haven’t read Greek history much since I was a child. Though Grant has some books on Greece too.
Finally, Michael Axworthy’s Empire of the Mind should be on a “to read” list. It’s a little off the beaten path because it’s a history of Iran. It’s got only superficial coverage of the recent past and tries to go deep into the psyche of what makes Iran Iran. I think it is fair to say that the book ends of concluding that Iran, as we understand it today, is hard to detach from the Safavid period (when it become Shia).
I think these civilizations of the Eurasian oikoumene are good places to start to understand the human condition because so many people were peasants and those ruled by peasants over the past 10,000 years. I would recommend a book on India, but those are mostly religious books. Islam comes a little late, as does Northern Europe. Much of Eurasia and Africa had no written language. If you understand China, Persia, and Rome, you’ll understand a lot. And probably enough.
George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire was striking in the mid-1990s when the first book debuted because it combined the epic aspect which suffused J. R. R. Tolkien’s work with a gritty realism in regards to sex and violence more appropriate for HBO. So it was entirely unsurprising that Martin’s vision has translated reasonably well to HBO.
This wouldn’t work as well with other epic series’ from the era. Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time was certainly epic, but its characters were the sort entirely comprehensible to a twelve-year-old boy.
Now that Amazon has confirmed that the new Tolkien series is going to be based around the early life of Aragorn, some are highlighting what they see as a likely problem with the new series:
While Game of Thrones is often held up as grittier and more cynical than Lord of the Rings – often by people who see the latter as a simplistic, morally two-tone tale of good vs. evil – the biggest difference, when it comes down to it, is the titties (and the characters’ filthy fucking mouths). Lord of the Rings is darker than it’s often given credit for.
There is something about the mood and ambiance of Tolkien’s work which Peter Jackson captured in his first three films. This, despite the fact that the exterior scenes in lush and green New Zealand did not properly reflect the ancient decay of the landscape of the fallen civilization to which Aragorn and his companions were the heirs to.
George R. R. Martin begins A Game of Thrones in a brutal manner. Additionally, the perverted sex is frontloaded. HBO really didn’t have to do much to sensationalize the material that Martin gave them. In fact, I’ve stated many times that some characters, such as Ramsay Bolton, were cleaned up quite a bit for the small screen. Not only is the actor who plays Bolton more handsome than the character described in the book, but he’s less depraved and cruel in comparison to the one Martin sketches out.
But as highlighted in the write-up above, and suggested in my title, I think an epic television show based on the world of Tolkien will stumble in how to depict sex and romantic feelings. A scene where Arwen Evenstar is getting railed by Aragorn from behind would seem a bit out of character. And, the way Tolkien writes about them, I’m pretty sure that his elves did not have anuses, so the real kinky stuff is off the table.
But if the show neglects sex altogether, I suspect many adult watchers will perceive it as a juvenile. In three films it was reasonable that due to time constraints the characters were depicted in a relatively chaste manner. But over five episodic seasons?
In Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past David Reich spends a fair amount of time on Neanderthal admixture into modern human lineages. Reich details exactly the process of how his team arrived to analyze the data that Svante Paabo’s group had produced, and how they replicated some peculiar patterns. In short, eventually, they concluded that modern humans outside of Africa have Neanderthal ancestry, because the Neanderthal genome that Paabo’s group had recovered happened to be subtly, but distinctively, closer to all non-Africans than to Africans. At the time, the group reported that Neanderthal ancestry was relatively evenly spread across non-African populations, which lead them to suggest that it was likely a singular admixture event early on during the expansion phase of modern humans.
Nearly a decade things have changed. There is a consistent pattern of West Eurasians having less Neanderthal ancestry than East Eurasians. That is, Europeans have lower Neanderthal ancestry fractions than Chinese (South Asians are in between, in direct proportion to their West Eurasian ancestral quantum). There have been a variety of arguments and explanations for why this might be, which fall into two classes:
Neanderthal ancestry was purged more efficiently from West Eurasians due to larger effective population sizes (selection is stronger in large populations).
There may have been multiple admixture events into modern humans, or, gene-flow into West Eurasians diluting their Neanderthal ancestry.
Several studies have suggested that introgressed Neandertal DNA was subjected to negative selection in modern humans due to deleterious alleles that had accumulated in the Neandertals after they split from the modern human lineage. A striking observation in support of this is an apparent monotonic decline in Neandertal ancestry observed in modern humans in Europe over the past 45 thousand years. Here we show that this apparent decline is an artifact caused by gene flow between West Eurasians and Africans, which is not taken into account by statistics previously used to estimate Neandertal ancestry. When applying a more robust statistic that takes advantage of two high-coverage Neandertal genomes, we find no evidence for a change in Neandertal ancestry in Western Europe over the past 45 thousand years. We use whole-genome simulations of selection and introgression to investigate a wide range of model parameters, and find that negative selection is not expected to cause a significant long- term decline in genome-wide Neandertal ancestry. Nevertheless, these models recapitulate previously observed signals of selection against Neandertal alleles, in particular a depletion of Neandertal ancestry in conserved genomic regions that are likely to be of functional importance. Thus, we find that negative selection against Neandertal ancestry has not played as strong a role in recent human evolution as had previously been assumed.
The basic argument in the preprint is that the model assumed for the ancestry of West Eurasians and Africans was wrong. Wrong assumptions can lead to wrong inferences. Using two Neanderthal genomes which are from different populations, one of whom directly contributed to the Neanderthal ancestry in modern humans, a new statistic which was insensitive to model assumptions about modern human phylogeny was computed.
The older statistic held that West Eurasians and Africans were distinct clades which had not had gene flow in ~50,000 years. Using simulations the authors argue that the best fit to the statistics that they do see, the earlier flawed one, and the current more robust one, is a situation where a population of West Eurasian origin mixed with Africans starting about ~20,000 years ago.
This explains why there was a consistent decline in Neanderthal ancestry: the earlier statistic’s model assumption got worse and worse over time, and so began to underestimate Neanderthal ancestry more and more. There was continuous gene flow into Africa over the past 20,000 years.
Not everything that came before is wrong. It could still be that there are multiple admixtures. And, the authors do agree that some selection for Neanderthal alleles has occurred. It’s just that it’s not the primary reason for the decline of Neanderthal ancestry in West Eurasians.
As for the other explanation, that Neanderthal-less Basal Eurasian ancestry diluted the European hunter-gatherer fractions, the authors seem very skeptical of that. One point the authors make is that though an early European farmer was estimated to have ~40% Basal Eurasian, its Neanderthal estimate is still quite high. Iosif Lazaridis points out that this is an old estimate, and the Reich group now puts it closer to ~25%. Additionally, another recent preprint put the fraction closer to ~10%. With such low values, it is possible that Basal Eurasians may have had low Neanderthal fractions, but that that was a marginal effect on the aggregate West Eurasian ancestry quantum from Neanderthals.
I think the bigger thing to consider is that our understanding of the relationships of modern humans is roughly right, but there are lots of nuanced details we’re missing or misunderstanding. Ancient DNA from South Africa, for example, shows that modern Bushmen all seem to have exotic ancestry compared to samples from 2,000 years ago. But what about samples from 20,000 years ago?
We have the best temporal transect from Ice Age Europe, and in this region, there are many population turnovers and admixtures. It seems implausible that Europe is entirely exceptional. The West Eurasian gene flow event dated to ~20,000 years ago is curiously coincidental with the beginning of the recession of the Last Glacial Maximum. To get a better understanding of the relationships of Pleistocene people looking at paleoclimate data is probably useful. The ancient DNA will come online at some point…and unless you think ahead, we’re going to be surprised.
A very long piece on the “personal genomics industry.” Lots of quotes from my boss Spencer Wells, since he has been in the game so long.
The piece covers all the bases. I actually think some of the criticisms of direct-to-consumer genetics are on base. I just don’t think they’re insoluble problems, or problems so large that that should discourage the industry from growing. I think part of the problem is that many of the people journalists can talk to who can comment on the industry are based in academia, and academia has a different focus when it comes to comes to genetics than the nascent industry. For rational reasons academics need to be very careful when it comes to ethics. Consumer products I think are somewhat different.
But I do think we need to reflect how far we’ve come in 10 years. Back in the 2000s when I was reading stuff on Y, mtDNA and autosomal studies, I honestly didn’t imagine that I would know my own haplogroups and genome-wide ancestry decomposition. It seemed like science fiction. That all changed rather rapidly over a few years, and I purchased kits in the early years when the price was still high. Today it’s a mass industry, with a sub-$100 price point in many cases.
Yes, there are plenty of cautions and worries we need to consider. But the future is already the present, and the horse has left the stable.
Thanks to everyone for getting us above 100+ reviews. Would be nice to have more than 10 reviews on Stitcher.
War! What Is It Good For? is a good book. Though it’s really more about social complexity than inter-group conflict. In this way, there are obvious resemblances to Ultrasociety. If you really want to read about war, War in Human Civilization is the way to go.
Basically, a British peasant in 1500 was no more poor or rich than a Japanese peasant in 1500 who was no poorer than a Paleolithic hunter-gatherer who lived in 15,000 BC. The reason being that in the pre-modern world economic growth rates were so slow that population growth always caught up, and the populace was back to immiseration on the Malthusian margin. Yes, there were some differences of detail, but not worth mentioning.
In David Warsh’s Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations there is a great deal of emphasis on economic growth being driven by gains in productivity, which are driven by innovation. This is common sense. We all know that people are wealthier and healthier because of technological growth and development over the last few hundred years. But there’s another variable: the demographic transition. After all, modern middle-class Westerners could have huge families and spend all their discretionary income raising children. They don’t.
Malthus’ logic was actually right. He even understood that productivity gains and efficiency were going to occur. But the iron law of human reproductive fecundity seemed to be an inevitability…until it wasn’t. It is always important to move beyond logic. It seems clear that productivity gains in the pre-modern world were low…but there was variation in consumption and quality of life, even though it was nothing like what we see today.
Books like The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire and The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization have convinced me that the Roman Peace wasn’t simply a propaganda coup. That it wasn’t simply a great con by the elites to steal surplus wealth from the masses and channel it into public works which reflected their glorious and status and secured their immortality in the memory of future generations (though it was that!).
This doesn’t necessarily mean you’d rather be a Roman citizen or subject than a barbarian living beyond the frontiers. That depends on how much you value your life as opposed to your freedom. But whereas 10 years ago I would stay that the attraction of Romanitas was simply a function of elites attempting to capture the best extractive institutional mechanisms, I do think there was a “trickle down” in consumption goods through classical dynamics described in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Trade, specialization, and peace did bring dividends, both to the high and the low. On the margin being 25% wealthier on a low base may not seem like much to us, but it was probably a lot to them. How much do you value dishware?
On this week’s podcast on “Isolated Populations” I mentioned offhand to Spencer that I believe it is a bit ridiculous to bracket a host of Southeast Asian populations as “Negritos,” as if they were an amorphous and homogeneous substratum over which the diversity of modern South and Southeast Asian agriculturalists were overlain.There was almost certainly a great deal of population structure which accrued over the Pleistocene. Another issue, which I didn’t mention, is that Southeast Asia is also very geographically expansive. Modern Indonesia alone spans the length of North America.
Of course, you could say the same for Europe, from the Urals to the Atlantic. And yet we know that European hunter-gatherers were relatively homogeneous (albeit, with some structure!) at the beginning of the Holocene. I think the difference though is that Europe was a landscape into which hunter-gatherers expanded during the Last Glacial Maximum, while Southeast Asia, like Africa, has long been a refuge for human populations even during the coldest and driest periods of the Pleistocene.
There are three major classes of “Negrito” peoples in South and Southeast Asia. To the west, are the indigenous peoples of the Andaman Islands. These tribes probably arrived from what is today Myanmar during the Pleistocene, when sea levels were lower. In peninsular Malaysia you have groups such as the Semang. Though physically very different from their neighbors, these people speak the Aslian form of Austro-Asiatic languages. They are not linguistic isolates like the Andaman tribes.
This speaks to the reality that unlike the Andaman Islanders the Negritos of mainland Southeast Asia have long been interacting with local populations. The languages they speak reflect interactions with Austro-Asiatic rice farmers. Curiously though, the dominant people amongst whom they live no longer speak Austro-Asiatic languages. Rather, they speak Austronesian or Tai dialects. These two groups are later arrivals on the Southeast Asian scene, and both seem to have assimilated Austro-Asiatic groups culturally and genetically, except in Cambodia and Vietnam (and to a lesser extent in pockets of Thailand and Myanmar).
Others processes are vaguer and poorly understood. It has long been clear that the Austronesian probably assimilated Austro-Asiatic rice farmers in much of maritime Southeast Asia. And yet unlike mainland Southeast Asia to my knowledge, there are no Austro-Asiatic populations in Indonesia. Additionally, it has been brought to my attention that the ~ 3,000-year-old sample from Myanmar has no clear Austro-Asiatic signature, despite the common sense suggestion that Austro-Asiatic languages must have entered India via that region (it has affinities to modern Tibeto-Burman individuals). And, importantly the Austro-Asiatic populations themselves seem to have been deeply mixed between a dominant element strongly related to the Han Chinese, and a minority component which was basal Southeast Asian, for lack of a better term. This means that the Munda populations within India have several distinct components of ancient South and Southeast Asian substratum.
Aeta family
But speaking of this substratum, probably the best paper recently focusing on these groups is from last year, Discerning the Origins of the Negritos, First Sundaland People: Deep Divergence and Archaic Admixture. In many ways, it just reinforced the results of Reich et al. 2011. All the Negrito groups are only distantly related to each other. The Negritos of the Andaman Islanders and those of peninsular Malaysia seem to be somewhat closer to each other than either is to those of the Philippines. And, the groups in the Phillippines seem to be somewhat closer to the peoples of Melanesia. To some extent, this is just geographically expected, but there are also interesting details.
The Negritos of the Philippines, in particular, those from the northern island of Luzon, have some of the highest fractions of Denisovan ancestry of any human populations outside of Melanesia. No one is clear whether the admixture is from the same event as the one that leads to the high fractions in Melanesians, or whether there were separate mixing events (not implausible). The western Negrito groups have far lower fractions of Denisovan.
Another surprising result is that the Negritos of the southern Philippines seem very distinct from those of the northern Philippines. This may be an artifact of particular admixture history, but I wouldn’t be surprised if these islands preserved a lot of diversity which has been homogenized elsewhere.
Like many people, I believe that human evolutionary genomics will have a lot to say about Africa in the next 10 years. But, outside of Africa Southeast Asia may be one of the most fertile regions in terms of exposing deep history. This was an area that was always amenable to habitation by modern-like Africans. It seems very likely now that the predominant modern human ancestry found in the Negrito substratum, and shared with all other non-Africans, is actually not the signal of the oldest modern humans to be present in Southeast Asia. Second, there seem to be many archaic human species which made their homes in Southeast Asia.
Humans arrived in Southeast Asia a long time ago. Our speciosity and census sizes were high. With more ancient DNA and better deep whole genome sequence analysis, we’ll uncover some surprising things. I guarantee.
On occasion, I read a book…and forget its title. I usually manage to recall the title at some point. For the past five years or so I’ve been trying to recall a book I read on Asian diplomatic history written by a Korean American scholar. Today I finally recalled that book: East Asia Before the West: Five Centuries of Trade and Tribute.
