Quotulatiousness

April 30, 2024

DNA and India’s caste system

Filed under: History, India, Religion, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Earlier this month, Palladium published Razib Khan‘s look at the genetic components of India’s Caste System:

Though the caste system dominates much of Indian life, it does not dominate Indian American life. At slightly over 1% of the U.S. population, only about half of Indian Americans identify as Hindu, the religion from which the broader categories of caste, or varna, emerge. While caste endogamy — marrying within one’s caste — in India remains in the range of 90%, in the U.S. only 65% of American-born Indians even marry other people of subcontinental heritage, and of these, a quick inspection of The New York Times weddings pages shows that inter-caste marriages are the norm. While tensions between the upper-caste minority and middle and lower castes dominate Indian social and political life, 85% of Indian Americans are upper-caste, broadly defined, and only about 1% are truly lower-caste. Ultimately, the minor moral panic over caste discrimination among a small minority of Americans is more a function of our nation’s current neuroses than the reality of caste in the United States.

But this does not mean that caste is not an important phenomenon to understand. In various ways, caste impacts the lives of the more than 1.4 billion citizens of India — 18% of humans alive today — whatever their religion. While the American system of racial slavery is four centuries old at most, India’s caste system was recorded by the Greek diplomat Megasthenes in 300 BC, and is likely far more ancient, perhaps as old as the Indus Valley Civilization more than 4,000 years ago. Indian caste has a deep pedigree as a social technology, and it illustrates the outer boundary of our species’ ability to organize itself into interconnected but discrete subcultures. And unlike many social institutions, caste is imprinted in the very genes of Indians today.

Of Memes and Genes

Beginning about twenty-five years ago, geneticists finally began to look at the variation within the Indian subcontinent, and were shocked by what they found. In small villages in India, Dalits, formerly called “outcastes,” were as genetically distinct from their Brahmin neighbors as Swedes were from Sicilians. In fact, a Brahmin from the far southern state of Tamil Nadu was genetically closer to a Brahmin from the northern state of Punjab then they were to their fellow non-Brahmin Tamils. Dalits from the north were similar to Dalits from the south, while the three upper castes, Brahmins, Kshatriyas and Vaishyas, tended to cluster together against the Sudras.

Some scholars, like Nicholas Dirks, the former chancellor of UC Berkeley, argued for the mobility and dynamism of the caste system in their scholarship. But the genetic evidence seemed to indicate a level of social stratification that echoes through millennia. Across the subcontinent, Dalit castes engaged in menial and unsanitary labor and therefore were considered ritually impure. Meanwhile, Brahmins were the custodians of the Hindu Vedic tradition that ultimately bound the Indic cultures together with other Indo-European traditions, like that of the ancient Iranians or Greeks. Other castes also had their occupations: Kshatriyas were the warriors, while Vaishyas were merchants and other economically productive occupations.

Brahmins, Kshatriyas, and Vaishyas were traditionally the three “twice-born” castes, allowing them to study the Hindu scriptures after an initiatory ritual. The majority of the population were Sudras (or Shudras), India’s peasant and laboring majority. Shudras could not study the scriptures, and might be excluded from some temples and festivals, but they were integrated into the Hindu fold, and served by Brahmin priests. A traditional ethnohistory posits that elite Brahmin priests and Kshatriya rulers combined with Vaishya commoners formed the core of the early Aryan society in the subcontinent, with Shudras integrated into their tribes as indigenous subalterns. Outcastes were tribes and other assorted latecomers who were assimilated at the very bottom of the social system, performing the most degrading and impure tasks.

The caste system as a layered varna system with five classes and numerous integrated jati communities.
Razib Khan

This was the theory. Reality is always more complex. In India, the caste system combines two different social categories: varna and jati. Varna derives from the tripartite Indo-European system, in India represented by Brahmins, Kshatriyas, and Vaishyas. It literally translates as “color”, white for Brahmin purity, red for Kshatriya power, and yellow for Vaishya fertility. But India also has Shudras, black for labor. In contrast to the simplicity of varna, with its four classes, jati is fractured into thousands of localized communities. If varna is connected to the deep history of Indo-Aryans and is freighted with religious significance, jati is the concrete expression of Indian communitarianism in local places and times.

April 9, 2024

Checking in on the front lines of paleontology research

Filed under: History, Politics, Science — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Sarah Hoyt is amazed and surprised at some recent revelations about the latest paleontological discoveries:

Yesterday I did something I used to do more often, and looked into the latest discoveries in paleontology and archaeology and such.

And shortly after remembered why I no longer do it every month.

Apparently the latest, greatest news is that — yo, this is amazing — they’re finally not studying pre-history through the eyes of racism and sexism, and as such have determined that pre-historic hunting parties were as much as 80% female.

This is a discovery that of course makes perfect sense. No doubt the males were all back at base camp, chest-feeding the babies. Thereby freeing the pre-historic girl bosses to go and hunt them some mammoth.

If you’re staring at the screen with dropped jaws, I haven’t gone insane. I know this is utter and complete nonsense. It’s not my fault that the people running all our intellectual institutions, including research are morons studying to be idiots.

Applying the Heinlein filter for the actual reason they have to believe that up to 80% — 80%! — of pre-historic hunters were female, i.e. “Again and again, what are the facts?” we get that they found one grave — one — where the DNA of the remains are female (and here we’ll keep quiet about the strange idea that 6000 (I think) year old DNA is easily extracted, non-contaminated, etc. We’ll pretend we don’t know all the times they walked back “new species” because the DNA amplification techniques CREATED those discoveries.)

Let’s assume they’re correct and this was a female, buried with hunting implements. Sure, maybe she was a hunter. There will always be one or two in a large enough band, for the reason that in primitive societies some women are brought up as male: lack of a son, need to support the family, etc. (It is rarely a sexual thing, or because the person WANTED this. In fact it’s often decided for them before they are weaned. In fact, in primitive/ancient societies including the ones of our ancestors that we know about in detail, there was remarkably little room for self expression, self-conception or self interest. When you live close to the bone, such things are subjugated to the needs of the family, the clan, the tribe, more or less in that order. Because survival is hard.) We’re also informed, in BREATHLESS tones that it’s now thought that spear throwers were used to make sure women could throw spears fast enough! That’s why they exist.

But spear throwers are made and used by males, the world over. Go look at the tubes of you and you’ll see videos of people making them and using them, and they’re all male.

Further there is no society today of the ones still surviving more or less in a stone age way that has that kind of distribution for hunters. More importantly, there is no record of them, going as far back as we can.

Maybe this is because yes indeed, the past (being much closer to the bone, and therefore less willing to indulge in story telling) viewed things through a racist and sexist lens. Why not? After all I grew up in an intensely patriarchal society that still hadn’t adapted to the idea of women taking any hand in intellectual pursuits. And yes, that was unwarranted sexism. And every society is racist against every other (Actually culturist, but it’s often couched in terms of race.)

But still … You’d think that here and there there would be a race of valiant Amazons, whose men stay home and pound the taro while they go out and hunt, right?

But the truth is that if you put this notion to the remaining stone age people, they will laugh till they pee themselves. Yes, I know, I know, they internalized sexism from the evil white colonizers whom they’ve met three times in the last 100 years. That’s how powerful and evil whiteness is.

Or, listen, okay? I know this is just crazy talk, but maybe males and females are different and have evolved to fulfill different reproductive functions. And the reproductive function of females is more onerous than that of males. Women in our natural state, and unless something has gone seriously wrong — which of course makes us of less use to the tribe — spend most of our lives pregnant, nursing or carrying for children too young to care for themselves.

April 4, 2024

QotD: What we mean by the term “indigenous”

Filed under: Africa, Americas, Asia, Europe, History, India, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Well, if by indigenous we mean “the minimally admixed descendants of the first humans to live in a place”, we can be pretty confident about the Polynesians, the Icelanders, and the British in Bermuda. Beyond that, probably also those Amazonian populations with substantial Population Y ancestry and some of the speakers of non-Pama–Nyungan languages in northern Australia? The African pygmies and Khoisan speakers of click languages who escaped the Bantu expansion have a decent claim, but given the wealth of hominin fossils in Africa it seems pretty likely that most of their ancestors displaced someone. Certainly many North American groups did; the “skraelings” whom the Norse encountered in Newfoundland were probably the Dorset, who within a few hundred years were completely replaced by the Thule culture, ancestors of the modern Inuit. (Ironically, the people who drove the Norse out of Vinland might have been better off if they’d stayed; they could hardly have done worse.)

But of course this is pedantic nitpicking (my speciality), because legally “indigenous” means “descended from the people who were there before European colonialism”: the Inuit are “indigenous” because they were in Newfoundland and Greenland when Martin Frobisher showed up, regardless of the fact that they had only arrived from western Alaska about five hundred years earlier. Indigineity in practice is not a factual claim, it’s a political one, based on the idea that the movements, mixtures, and wholesale destructions of populations since 1500 are qualitatively different from earlier ones. But the only real difference I see, aside from them being more recent, is that they were often less thorough — in large part because they were more recent. In many parts of the world, the Europeans were encountering dense populations of agriculturalists who had already moved into the area, killed or displaced the hunter-gatherers who lived there, and settled down. For instance, there’s a lot of French and English spoken in sub-Saharan Africa, but it hasn’t displaced the Bantu languages like they displaced the click languages. Spanish has made greater inroads in Central and South America, but there’s still a lot more pre-colonial ancestry among people there than there is pre-Bantu ancestry in Africa. I think these analogies work, because as far as I can tell the colonization of North America and Australia look a lot like the Early European Farmer and Bantu expansions (technologically advanced agriculturalists show up and replace pretty much everyone, genetically and culturally), while the colonization of Central and South America looks more like the Yamnaya expansion into Europe (a bunch of men show up, introduce exciting new disease that destabilizes an agricultural civilization,1 replace the language and heavily influence the culture, but mix with rather than replacing the population).

Some people argue that it makes sense to talk about European colonialism differently than other population expansions because it’s had a unique role in shaping the modern world, but I think that’s historically myopic: the spread of agriculture did far more to change people’s lives, the Yamnaya expansion also had a tremendous impact on the world, and I could go on. And of course the way it’s deployed is pretty disingenuous, because the trendier land acknowledgements become, the more the people being acknowledged start saying, “Well, are you going to give it back?” (Of course they’re not going to give it back.) It comes off as a sort of woke white man’s burden: of course they showed up and killed the people who were already here and took their stuff, but we’re civilized and ought to know better, so only we are blameworthy.

More reasonable, I think, is the idea that (some of) the direct descendants of the winners and losers in this episode of the Way Of The World are still around and still in positions of advantage or disadvantage based on its outcome, so it’s more salient than previous episodes. Even if, a thousand years ago, your ancestors rolled in and destroyed someone else’s culture, it still sucks when some third group shows up and destroys yours. It’s just, you know, a little embarrassing when you’ve spent a few decades couching your post-colonial objections in terms of how mean and unfair it is to do that, and then the aDNA reveals your own population’s past …

Reich gets into this a bit in his chapter on India, where it’s pretty clear that the archaeological and genetic evidence all point to a bunch of Indo-Iranian bros with steppe ancestry and chariots rolling down into the Indus Valley and replacing basically all the Y chromosomes, but his Indian coauthors (who had provided the DNA samples) didn’t want to imply that substantial Indian ancestry came from outside India. (In the end, the paper got written without speculating on the origins of the Ancestral North Indians and merely describing their similarity to other groups with steppe ancestry.) Being autochthonous is clearly very important to many peoples’ identities, in a way that’s hard to wrap your head around as an American or northern European: Americans because blah blah nation of immigrants blah, obviously, but a lot of northern European stories about ethnogenesis (particularly from the French, Germans, and English) draw heavily on historical Germanic tribal migrations and the notion of descent (at least in part) from invading conquerors.

One underlying theme in the book — a theme Reich doesn’t explicitly draw out but which really intrigued me — is the tension between theory and data in our attempts to understand the world. You wrote above about those two paradigms to explain the spread of prehistoric cultures, which the lingo terms “migrationism” (people moved into their neighbors’ territory and took their pots with them) and “diffusionism”2 (people had cool pots and their neighbors copied them), and which archaeologists tended to adopt for reasons that had as much to do with politics and ideology as with the actual facts on (in!) the ground. And you’re right that in most cases where we now have aDNA evidence, the migrationists were correct — in the case of the Yamnaya, most modern migrationists didn’t go nearly far enough — but it’s worth pointing out that all those 19th century Germans who got so excited about looking for the Proto-Indo-European Urheimat were just as driven by ideology as the 21st century Germans who resigned as Reich’s coauthors on a 2015 article where they thought the conclusions were too close to the work of Gustaf Kossinna (d. 1931), whose ideas had been popular under the Nazis. (They didn’t think the conclusions were incorrect, mind you, they just didn’t want to be associated with them.) But on the other hand, you need a theory to tell you where and how to look; you can’t just be a phenomenological petri dish waiting for some datum to hit you. This is sort of the Popperian story of How Science Works, but it’s more complex because there are all kinds of extra-scientific implications to the theories we construct around our data.

The migrationist/diffusionist debate is mostly settled, but it turns out there’s another issue looming where data and theory collide: the more we know about the structure and history of various populations, the more we realize that we should expect to find what Reich calls “substantial average biological differences” between them. A lot of these differences aren’t going to be along axes we think have moral implications — “people with Northern European ancestry are more likely to be tall” or “people with Tibetan ancestry tend to be better at functioning at high altitudes” isn’t a fraught claim. (Plus, it’s not clear that all the differences we’ve observed so far are because one population is uniformly better: many could be explained by greater variation within one population. Are people with West African ancestry overrepresented among sprinters because they’re 0.8 SD better at sprinting, or because the 33% higher genetic diversity among West Africans compared to people without recent African ancestry means you get more really good sprinters and more really bad ones?) But there are a lot of behavioral and cognitive traits where genes obviously play some role, but which we also feel are morally weighty — intelligence is the most obvious example, but impulsivity and the ability to delay gratification are also heritable, and there are probably lots of others. Reich is adorably optimistic about all this, especially for a book written in 2018, and suggests that it shouldn’t be a problem to simultaneously (1) recognize that members of Population A are statistically likely to be better at some thing than members of Population B, and (2) treat members of all populations as individuals and give them opportunities to succeed in all walks of life to the best of their personal abilities, whether the result of genetic predisposition or hard work. And I agree that this is a laudable goal! But for inspiration on how our society can both recognize average differences and enable individual achievement, Reich suggests we turn to our successes in doing this for … sex differences! Womp womp.

Jane Psmith and John Psmith, “JOINT REVIEW: Who We Are and How We Got Here, by David Reich”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-05-29.

    1. aDNA works for microbes too, and it looks like Y. pestis, the plague, came from the steppe with the Yamnaya. It didn’t yet have the mutation that causes buboes, but the pneumonic version of the disease is plenty deadly, especially to the Early European Farmers who didn’t have any protection against it. In fact, as far as we can tell, in all of human history there have only been four unique introductions of plague from its natural reservoirs in the Central Asian steppe: the one that came with or slightly preceded the Yamnaya expansion around 5kya, the Plague of Justinian, the Black Death, and an outbreak that began in Yunnan in 1855. The waves of plague that wracked Europe throughout the medieval and early modern periods were just new pulses of the strain that had caused Black Death. Johannes Krause gets into this a bit in his A Short History of Humanity, which I didn’t actually care for because his treatment of historic pandemics and migrations is so heavily inflected with Current Year concerns, but I haven’t found a better treatment in a book so it’s worth checking it out from the library if you’re interested.

    2. I cheated with that “pots not people” line in my earlier email; it usually gets (got?) trotted out not as a bit of epistemological modesty about what the archaeological record is capable of showing, but as a claim that the only movements involved were those of pots, not of people.

September 2, 2023

QotD: Ancient DNA

Filed under: Americas, Asia, Books, Europe, Germany, History, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… you know I’m always up for the humiliation of a dominant scientific paradigm. I especially like examples where that paradigm in its heyday replaced some much older and unfashionable view that we now know to be correct. It’s important to remind people that knowledge gets lost and buried in addition to being discovered.

The wonderful thing about ancient DNA is it gives us an extreme case of this. Basically, the first serious attempt at creating a scientific field of archaeology was done by 19th century Germans, and they looked around and dug some stuff up and concluded that the prehistoric world looked like the world of Conan the Barbarian: lots of “population replacement”, which is a euphemism for genocide and/or systematic slavery and mass rape. This 19th century German theory then became popular with some 20th century Germans who … uh … made the whole thing fall out of fashion by trying to put it into practice.

After those 20th century Germans were squashed, any ideas they were even tangentially associated with them became very unfashionable, and so there was a scientific revolution in archaeology! I’m sure this was just crazy timing, and actually everybody rationally sat down and reexamined the evidence and came to the conclusion that the disgraced theory was wrong (lol, lmao). Whatever the case, the new view was that the prehistoric world was incredibly peaceful, and everybody was peacefully trading with one another, and this thing where sometimes in a geological stratum one kind of house totally disappears and is replaced by a different kind of house is just that everybody decided at once that the other kind of house was cooler. The high-water mark of this revisionist paradigm even had people saying that the Vikings were mostly peaceful traders who sailed around respecting the non-aggression principle.

And then people started sequencing ancient DNA and … it turns out the bad old 19th century Germans were correct about pretty much everything. The genetic record is one of whole peoples frequently disappearing or, even more commonly, all of the men disappearing and other men carrying off the dead men’s female relatives. There are some exceptions to this, but by and large the old theory wins.

I used to have a Bulgarian coworker, and I asked him one day how things were going in Bulgaria. He replied in that morose Slavic way with a long, sad disquisition about how the Bulgarian race was in its twilight, their land was being colonized by others, their sons and daughters flying off to strange lands and mixing their blood with that of alien peoples. I felt awkward at this point, and stammered something about that being very sad, at which point he came alive and declared: “it is not sad, it is not special, it is the Way Of The World”. He then launched into a lecture about how the Bulgarians weren’t even native to their land, but had been bribed into moving there by the Byzantines who used them as a blunt instrument to exterminate some other unruly tribes that were causing them trouble. “History is all the same,” he concluded, “we invaded and took their land, and now others invade us and take our land, it is the Way Of The World.”

Even a cursory study of history shows that my Bulgarian friend was correct about the Way Of The World. There’s a kind of guilty white liberal who believes that European colonization and enslavement of others is some unique historical horror, a view that has now graduated into official state ideology in America. But that belief is just a weird sort of inverted narcissism. I guess pretending white people are uniquely bad at least makes them feel special, but white people are not special. Mass migration, colonization, population replacement, genocide, and slavery are the Way Of The World, and ancient DNA teaches us that it’s been the Way Of The World far longer than writing or agriculture have existed. It wasn’t civilization that corrupted us, there are no noble savages, “history is all the same”, an infinite history of blood.

Land acknowledgments always struck me as especially funny and stupid: like you really think those people were the first ones there? What about acknowledging the people that they stole it from? Sure enough one of the coolest parts of Reich’s book is his recounting the discovery that there were probably unrelated peoples in the Americas before the ancestors of the American Indians arrived here, and that a tiny remnant of them might even remain deep in Amazonia. So: what does it actually mean to be “indigenous”? Is anybody anywhere actually “indigenous”?

Jane Psmith and John Psmith, “JOINT REVIEW: Who We Are and How We Got Here, by David Reich”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-05-29.

June 1, 2023

Recent discoveries in ancient DNA

Filed under: Africa, Americas, Asia, Books, Europe, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Psmiths, John and Jane, decided to jointly review a book by David Reich called Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past. This is Jane’s first contribution to an extended email thread between the Psmiths:

The problem with history is that there just isn’t enough of it. We’ve been around for, what, fifty thousand years? Conservatively.1 And we’ve barely written things down for a tenth of that. Archaeological excavation can take you a little farther back, but as the archaeologists always like to remind us, pots are not people. If you get lucky with a society that made things out of durable materials in a cold and/or dry environment (or you get very lucky with anaerobic preservation of organic materials, like in ice or bogs), maybe you can trace a material culture’s expansion and contraction across time and space. But that won’t tell you whether it’s a function of people moving and taking their stuff with them, or people’s neighbors going “ooh, using string to make patterns on your pots, that’s cool” and copying it. It certainly doesn’t tell you what their descendants were doing several thousand years later, potentially in an entirely different place and probably using an entirely different suite of technologies. Trying to understand what happened in the human past based on the historical and archaeological records is like walking into a room where a bomb has gone off and trying to reconstruct the locations of all the objects before the explosion. You can get some idea, but it’s all very broad strokes. And actually it’s worse than that, because it wasn’t just one explosion, it was lots, and we wouldn’t even know how many if we didn’t have a way of winding the clock back. But these days we do, and it’s ancient DNA.

Sometime between when my grandfather gave me a copy of Luca Cavalli-Sforza’s Genes, Peoples, and Languages for my birthday and when you and I decided to read Reich’s book together, two big things happened: humans got really, really good at sequencing and reading genomes, and Svante Pääbo’s lab in Leipzig got really, really good at extracting DNA from ancient bones. (How they developed their procedures is actually a really interesting story, which Pääbo retells in his book, but Reich — whose lab uses the same techniques on an industrial scale — gives a good, brief summary of how it works.) Together, these two advances unlocked … well, not quite everything about the deep past, but an absolutely enormous amount. Suddenly we can track the people, not just the pots, and the story is more complicated and fascinating than anything we might have expected. I’ve written elsewhere about some of the aDNA discoveries about human evolution (Neanderthal admixture, the Denisovans, etc.), but I’m even more excited about what ancient DNA reveals about our more recent past. Luckily, that’s what Reich spends most of the book on, with discussion of ancient ghost populations who now exist only in admixture and then chapters on the specific population genetic histories of Europe, India, North America, East Asia, and Africa, each of which contains some discoveries that would make (at least the more sensible) archaeologists and historical linguists go “well, duh” and others that are real surprises.

One of the “duh” stories is the final, conclusive identification of the people who brought horses, wagons, and Indo-European languages to Europe with the Yamnaya culture of the Pontic Steppe and their descendants. (David Anthony gives a very good overview of the archaeological case for this in The Wheel, the Horse, and Language, including some very cool experimental archaeology about horse teeth; you have my permission to skim the sections on pots.) My favorite surprising result, though, comes from a little farther north. People usually assume that Native Americans and East Asians share a common ancestor who split from the ancestors of Europeans and Africans before dividing into those two populations, but when Reich’s lab was trying to test the idea they found, to their surprise, that in places where Northern European genomes differ from Africans’, they are closer to Native Americans than to East Asians. Then, using a different set of statistical techniques, they found that Northern European populations were the product of mixture between two groups, one very similar to Sardinians (who are themselves almost-unmixed descendants of the first European farmers) and one that is most similar to Native Americans. They theorized a “ghost” population, which they called the “Ancient North Eurasians”, who had contributed DNA both to the population that would eventually cross the Bering land bridge and to the non-Early European Farmer ancestors of modern Northern Europeans. Several years later, another team sequenced the genome of a boy who died in Siberia 24kya and who was a perfect match for that theorized ghost ANE population.

But we’ve already established that I’m the prehistory nerd in this family; were you as jazzed as I was to read about the discovery of the Ancient North Eurasians?

    1. That’s the latest plausible date for the arrival of full “behavioral modernity” in Africa, though our genus goes back about two million years, tool use probably three million, and I think there’s a good case that Homo was meaningfully “us” by 500kya. (That’s “thousand years ago” in “I talk about deep history so much I need an acronym”, fyi.)

May 9, 2023

Uncancelled History with Douglas Murray | EP. 03 Thomas Jefferson

Filed under: History, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Nebulous Media
Published 6 Dec 2022

Jean Yarbrough joins Douglas Murray on this episode to discuss Thomas Jefferson’s life and legacy. They talk about the Declaration of Independence, his presidency, and the various controversies that have surrounded him. Should Thomas Jefferson stay cancelled?
(more…)

April 2, 2021

The science must bow to the political narrative yet again

Filed under: Americas, Cancon, History, Science — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Quillette, Bruce Bourque outlines some fascinating archaeological discoveries on Canada’s east coast and how the scientific findings are being actively blocked to avoid offending First Nations people for undermining or even contradicting their beliefs:

One of the major North American archaeological discoveries of the 20th century was made in 1967 by a bulldozer crew preparing a site for a movie theater in the small fishing village of Port au Choix (PAC), on Newfoundland’s Northern Peninsula. It was a vast, 4,000-year-old cemetery created by a complex maritime culture known among researchers as the Maritime Archaic. The graves contained beautifully preserved skeletons covered in a brilliant red powder called red ocher (powdered specular hematite). Buried with the skeletons were many finely crafted artifacts. A few similar ones had previously turned up in earlier field surveys on the island, but no archaeologist had suspected that such a large and magnificent ceremonial site existed in the North American subarctic.

Had the discovery been made only a few years earlier, it is likely that no trained archaeologist would have taken over from the bulldozer crew. But fortunately, Memorial University in St. Johns had just added archaeologist James (“Jim”) Tuck (1940–2019) to its faculty. The American-born scholar set out to explore the cemetery, eventually excavating more than 150 graves spread over three clusters (which he referred to as loci).

[…]

In regard to the Red Paint People, Reich’s lab at Harvard Medical School analyzed material from the Nevin site in Blue Hill, Maine — the only known Red Paint cemetery that is likely ever to produce well-preserved human remains. Reich’s analysis was not confined to mDNA (which, unlike nuclear DNA, is transmitted through the maternal line, and so cannot address paternal ancestry), and focused instead on autosomal DNA (aDNA) found in cell nuclei, thereby adding information on the paternal line. (This addition can be critically important because, as Reich’s lab had demonstrated, a population can be founded by males and females with very different origins.) The Reich team has yet to publish comprehensive results of its Nevin site analysis. But from what I have heard, their work will confirm the existence of genetic discontinuities between the Red Paint People and later populations in the region, much as with Duggan’s work in regard to the Maritime Archaic.

But this is where events took a strange turn: It was when Duggan’s group announced that they’d gained the capacity to analyze aDNA, and made known their plans to apply this technology to the male genome of their Labrador/Newfoundland skeletal sample, that a sense of apprehension seemed to spread through some quarters of the paleogenetic community.

During the summer of 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests, Duggan’s project went noticeably quiet. I inquired among team members with whom I regularly communicated, but received oblique and evasive responses about the pace of research and publication. Suspecting that this might be related to sensitivities surrounding Indigenous populations (a topic that has consumed Canadian academia in recent years), I contacted Duggan directly, expressing concern that her valuable work might not be published.

[…]

When the Maritime Archaic tradition vanished, it was replaced, as noted earlier, by unrelated Paleoeskimos, an Arctic people who had then recently derived from Siberia. Following their own disappearance, more recently arrived inhabitants migrated from Labrador, these probably being ancestors of the historic Beothuk, who still lived in the region when Europeans arrived. The last surviving Beothuk, a woman named Shanawdithit, died of tuberculosis in 1829. And since that time, there has been no descendant Beothuk community with whom Duggan, or anyone else, could engage in the “discussions and agreements” she’d described to me.

And even if there were, moreover, Duggan’s own research has demonstrated that the Beothuk were not descended from the Maritime Archaic people of Port au Choix. The only community Duggan might be referring to is the (genealogically unrelated) Newfoundland Mi’kmaq community, whose ancestors arrived on Newfoundland from Nova Scotia in the 18th century, several hundred years after the arrival of Europeans.

January 23, 2021

QotD: “Genetics is interesting as an example of a science that overcame a diseased paradigm”

Filed under: Health, Media, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

This side of the veil, instead of looking for the “gene for intelligence”, we try to find “polygenic scores”. Given a person’s entire genome, what function best predicts their intelligence? The most recent such effort uses over a thousand genes and is able to predict 10% of variability in educational attainment. This isn’t much, but it’s a heck of a lot better than anyone was able to do under the old “dozen genes” model, and it’s getting better every year in the way healthy paradigms are supposed to.

Genetics is interesting as an example of a science that overcame a diseased paradigm. For years, basically all candidate gene studies were fake. “How come we can’t find genes for anything?” was never as popular as “where’s my flying car?” as a symbol of how science never advances in the way we optimistically feel like it should. But it could have been.

And now it works. What lessons can we draw from this, for domains that still seem disappointing and intractable?

Turn-of-the-millennium behavioral genetics was intractable because it was more polycausal than anyone expected. Everything interesting was an excruciating interaction of a thousand different things. You had to know all those things to predict anything at all, so nobody predicted anything and all apparent predictions were fake.

Modern genetics is healthy and functional because it turns out that although genetics isn’t easy, it is simple. Yes, there are three billion base pairs in the human genome. But each of those base pairs is a nice, clean, discrete unit with one of four values. In a way, saying “everything has three billion possible causes” is a mercy; it’s placing an upper bound on how terrible genetics can be. The “secret” of genetics was that there was no “secret”. You just had to drop the optimistic assumption that there was any shortcut other than measuring all three billion different things, and get busy doing the measuring. The field was maximally perverse, but with enough advances in sequencing and computing, even the maximum possible level of perversity turned out to be within the limits of modern computing.

(This is an oversimplification: if it were really maximally perverse, chaos theory would be involved somehow. Maybe a better claim is that it hits the maximum perversity bound in one specific dimension)

Scott Alexander, “The Omnigenic Model As Metaphor For Life”, Slate Star Codex, 2018-09-13.

October 21, 2020

Aryan invasion, migration theory (Truth or fiction) India documentary

Filed under: History, India, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Epimetheus
Published 24 Jan 2018

Aryan invasion, migration theory (Truth or fiction) India documentary

Epimetheus on Patreon
https://www.patreon.com/Epimetheus1776

David Frawley Aryan invasion videos
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qych3…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyz_S…

Tags:
Aryan invasion india, india history, indian history, documentary, history of india, india,history, india documentary, hindi, 2018, ancient india, indus valley civilization, 5,000 Years History of India documentary, Aryan migration theory, Aryan invasion theory, indo-aryan, indo Aryan migration

June 21, 2020

QotD: “[T]he fascinating modern science of high-tech grave robbing”

Filed under: Books, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Since then, an endless stream of anthropologists have assured us that race is just a social construct, that ancient peoples made pots not war, that Aryan conquests in India and Europe were Nazi delusions, that the caste system was imposed on the egalitarian Indians by British colonialists, and many other agreeable suppositions.

As Fitzgerald’s friend Hemingway ended The Sun Also Rises, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

But now the brilliant Harvard geneticist David Reich has published a bombshell scientific book, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past, whose revelations would have been found congenial by a smarter version of Buchanan (such as Fitzgerald himself).

Despite Reich’s occasional need to stop his otherwise lucid narrative to spew irrational rage against his fellow race-science heretics such as James D. Watson, the genome expert conclusively demolishes the post-Boasian anthropologists’ conventional wisdom.

[…]

Reich learned the fascinating modern science of high-tech grave robbing from Svante Pääbo. This Swedish biologist invented the techniques for extracting from ancient skeletons their DNA. (Interestingly, the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act makes it hard to get hold of ancient American Indian skeletons, but other races’ ancestors appear to be fair game.)

Reich applied to Pääbo’s breakthrough the traditional American knack for vast industrial scale. Assisted by English code-cracker Nick Patterson’s innovations in extracting meaning from bits and pieces of ancient genomes, Reich’s factory-like lab at the Broad Institute has been churning out a tsunami of papers on fascinating questions of prehistory.

Steve Sailer, “Reich’s Laboratory”, Taki’s Magazine, 2018-03-28.

April 20, 2020

Prehistory Summarized: Early Life

Filed under: Humour, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 1 Dec 2015

Blue’s back with more sweet, sweet prehistory! Today, Bruce explores the wonders of life.

March 19, 2018

Prehistoric migrations

Filed under: Europe, History, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In a Science article from last year, Ann Gibbons discusses the ancient migrations that can now be traced using DNA analysis:

After World War II, many scholars recoiled from studying migrations, in reaction to the Nazi misuse of history and archaeology. The Nazis had invoked migrations of “foreign” groups to German territory to justify genocide. “The whole field of migration studies was ideologically tainted,” says archaeologist Kristian Kristiansen of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. Some researchers also resisted the idea that migration helped spread key innovations such as farming, partly because that might imply that certain groups were superior.

Nor did researchers have a reliable method to trace prehistoric migrations. “Most of the archaeological evidence for movement is based on artifacts, but artifacts can be stolen or copied, so they are not a real good proxy for actual human movement,” says archaeologist Doug Price of the University of Wisconsin in Madison, who tracks ancient migration by analyzing isotopes. “When I started doing this in 1990, I thought people were very sedentary and didn’t move around much.”

Today, however, new methods yield more definitive evidence of migration, sparking an explosion of studies. The isotopes Price and others study are specific to local water and food and thus can reveal where people grew up and whether they later migrated. DNA from ancient skeletons and living people offers the “gold standard” in proving who was related to whom.

The new data confirm that humans have always had wanderlust, plus a yen to mix with all manner of strangers. After the first Homo sapiens arose in Africa, several bands walked out of the continent about 60,000 years ago and into the arms of Neandertals and other archaic humans. Today, almost all humans outside Africa carry traces of archaic DNA.

That was just one of many episodes of migration and mixing. The first Europeans came from Africa via the Middle East and settled there about 43,000 years ago. But some of those pioneers, such as a 40,000-year-old individual from Romania, have little connection to today’s Europeans, Reich says.

His team studied DNA from 51 Europeans and Asians who lived 7000 to 45,000 years ago. They found that most of the DNA in living Europeans originated in three major migrations, starting with hunter-gatherers who came from the Middle East as the glaciers retreated 19,000 to 14,000 years ago. In a second migration about 9000 years ago, farmers from northwestern Anatolia, in what is now Greece and Turkey, moved in.

That massive wave of farmers washed across the continent. Ancient DNA records their arrival in Germany, where they are linked with the Linear Pottery culture, 6900 to 7500 years ago. A 7000-year-old woman from Stuttgart, Germany, for example, has the farmers’ genetic signatures, setting her apart from eight hunter-gatherers who lived just 1000 years earlier in Luxembourg and Sweden. Among people living today, Sardinians retain the most DNA from those early farmers, whose genes suggest that they had brown eyes and dark hair.

H/T to PaleoAnthropology+ for the link.

March 30, 2017

You can now have beer brewed to your taste (as encoded in your genome)

Filed under: Business, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:07

For those with a taste for custom-brewed beer (and a very big budget), you can now have a batch of beer created to match your taste preferences, scientifically:

London-based Meantime Brewing Company, acquired a year ago by Belgian beverage multinational Anheuser-Busch InBev, wants to sell you beer tuned to your taste.

To do so, the company plans to direct willing customers to genetic testing service 23andMe – the Silicon Valley personal genomics biz that’s slowly emerging from its near death experience at the hands of US health regulators – to evaluate their genetic taste proclivities.

For a mere £25,000 (~$31,200), beer lovers who prefer entrusting purchasing decisions to science rather than self-knowledge can buy 12 hectolitres (about 2,100 Imperial pints or 2,500 US pints) of ale tailored to taste preferences encoded in their genome.

Customers supply their saliva, 23andMe sorts the genes, and Meantime crafts a beer to fit inborn affinities.

“Pioneering personal genetics company 23andMe will assess hereditary variations in your oral taste receptors (the TAS2R38 gene) to reveal the genetic variants that could explain personal preferences towards specific flavour profiles within beer, such as sweetness and bitterness,” the company explains on its website.

And if the genetically dictated balance of flavors doesn’t align with actual taste preferences, Meantime has left itself an out – customers get a consultation with Brewmaster Ciaran Giblin to adjust the flavors if necessary.

That’s almost certainly for the best since, as 23andMe points out, the role of genetics in taste preferences is uncertain. “Scientists aren’t yet sure how much of our taste preferences are genetic, but estimates are generally around 50 per cent,” the company says in the Taste report it offers subscribers.

November 26, 2016

The war on science

Filed under: Environment, Food, Health, Politics, Science, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

In City Journal, John Tierney explains why the most serious threats to science come not from the right’s creationist bitter clingers, but from the left’s highly selective “pro (some) science” activism:

I know that sounds strange to Democrats who decry Republican creationists and call themselves the “party of science.” But I’ve done my homework. I’ve read the Left’s indictments, including Chris Mooney’s bestseller, The Republican War on Science. I finished it with the same question about this war that I had at the outset: Where are the casualties?

Where are the scientists who lost their jobs or their funding? What vital research has been corrupted or suppressed? What scientific debate has been silenced? Yes, the book reveals that Republican creationists exist, but they don’t affect the biologists or anthropologists studying evolution. Yes, George W. Bush refused federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research, but that hardly put a stop to it (and not much changed after Barack Obama reversed the policy). Mooney rails at scientists and politicians who oppose government policies favored by progressives like himself, but if you’re looking for serious damage to the enterprise of science, he offers only three examples.

All three are in his first chapter, during Mooney’s brief acknowledgment that leftists “here and there” have been guilty of “science abuse.” First, there’s the Left’s opposition to genetically modified foods, which stifled research into what could have been a second Green Revolution to feed Africa. Second, there’s the campaign by animal-rights activists against medical researchers, whose work has already been hampered and would be devastated if the activists succeeded in banning animal experimentation. Third, there’s the resistance in academia to studying the genetic underpinnings of human behavior, which has cut off many social scientists from the recent revolutions in genetics and neuroscience. Each of these abuses is far more significant than anything done by conservatives, and there are plenty of others. The only successful war on science is the one waged by the Left.

October 3, 2016

QotD: Nitpicking sexual issues in Middle Earth

Filed under: Books, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Warm Beds Are Good fails to grapple with the most interesting question of all, however, which is how Arwen and Aragorn could possibly have developed the hots for each other in the first place. It turns out to be rather hard to come up with any theory of Elvish reproductive biology under which Arwen’s behavior makes any sense at all.

Aragorn’s end isn’t that much of a mystery. He’s an alpha male of a warrior culture, chock full o’ testosterone and other dominance hormones guaranteed to make him into a serious horn-dog. She’s a beautiful princess, broadcasting human-compatible health-and-fertility signals in all directions. If she doesn’t actively smell bad, tab A fits slot B just fine from the point of view of his mating instincts.

No, the fundamental problem is Arwen’s lifespan. She is supposedly something like two thousand, seven hundred years old when she meets Aragorn. That’s an awful lot of Saturday nights at the Last Homely Disco West of the Mountains; if she has a sex drive anything like a normal human female’s, she ought to have more mileage on her than a Liberian tramp steamer. On the other hand, if her sexual wiring is fundamentally different from a human female’s, what’n’the hell is she doing with Aragorn? He shouldn’t look or smell or behave right to trigger her releasers, any more than a talking chimpanzee would to most human women.

“B-b-but…” I hear you splutter “This is fantasy!”, to which I say foo! Tolkien was very careful about logical consistency in areas where he was equipped by temperament and training to appreciate it; he invented a cosmology, thousand of years of history, multiple languages; he drew maps. He lectured on the importance of a having convincing and consistent secondary world in fantasy. Furthermore, Tolkien never completely repudiated the intention that his fiction was a mythic description of the lost past of our Earth, and that therefore matter, energy and life should be consistent with the forms in which we know them.

Therefore, it is entirely appropriate to analyze Middle-Earth as though it were a science-fictional creation, to assume Elves and Men both got DNA, and to ask if the freakin’ biology makes any sense at all under this assumption.

And one of the facts we have to deal with is that humans and elves are not just interfertile, they produce fertile offspring. That means they have to be genetically very, very similar. If there are dramatic differences between elf and human reproductive behavior, the instinctive basis for them must be coded in a relatively small set of genes that somehow don’t interfere with that interfertility. In fact, technically, Elves and Men have to be subspecies of the same stock.

When this came up on my favorite mailing list just after the first movie came out, my hypothesis was that elves (a) have only rare periods of vulnerability to sexual impulses, and (b) imprint on each other for life when they mate, like swans. This pattern is actually within the envelope of human variation, though uncommon — which makes it a plausible candidate for being dominant in another hominid subspecies.

This ‘swan theory’ would be consistent with Appendix A, which (a) has Arwen meeting Aragorn when he was garbed like an elven prince and (as near as we can tell through Tolkien’s rather clotted chansons-de-geste style) falling for him hard right then and there, and (b) has Arwen’s family apparently operating under the assumption that once that had happened, the damage was done and she wouldn’t be mating with anyone else, noway, nohow.

One of the techies on the list shot the swan theory down by finding a canonical instance of an Elf remarrying (Finwe, father of Feanor; first wife Miriel, second Indis). In subsequent discussion, we concluded that it wasn’t possible to frame a consistent theory that fit Tolkien’s facts. The sticking-point turned out to be the half-elven; Tolkien tells us that they get to choose whether they will have the nature of Men or Elves, and it is implied that they do so at puberty.

Since that’s true, the difference between Men and Elves can’t properly be genetic at all. It must be in the cloudy realm of spirit, magic, and divine interventions. This is not an area in which Tolkien (a devout Catholic) gives us any rules or regularities at all. Elvish sexual behavior could be arbitrarily variant from human without any reasons other than that Eru keeps exerting his will to make it so, and He very well might be intervening to keep elf-maidens’ hormones from getting them jiggy Until It’s Time.

Helluva way to run a universe, say I. Inelegant. A really craftsmanlike god would build his cosmos so it wouldn’t require constant divine intervention to function. It’s a serious weakness in Tolkien’s fiction, one that runs far deeper than anachronisms like domestic cats (which didn’t reach northern Europe until late Roman times) and tea (to Europe in 1610) in the Shire.

Eric S. Raymond, “Sex and Tolkien”, Armed and Dangerous, 2003-12-18.

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