Caught in the act

The fossil record is sparse. Let me try to explain that. We have at most a few hundred Neanderthal skeletons, most in pretty poor shape. How many Neanderthals ever lived? I think their population varied in size quite a bit – lowest during glacial maxima, probably highest in interglacials. Their degree of genetic diversity suggests an effective population size of ~1000, but that would be dominated by the low points (harmonic average). So let’s say 50,000 on average, over their whole range (Europe, central Asia, the Levant, perhaps more). Say they were around for 300,000 years, with a generation time of 30 years – 10,000 generations, for a total of five hundred million Neanderthals over all time. So one in a million Neanderthals ends up in a museum: one every 20 generations. Low time resolution!

So if anatomically modern humans rapidly wiped out Neanderthals, we probably couldn’t tell. In much the same way, you don’t expect to find the remains of many dinosaurs killed by the Cretaceous meteor impact (at most one millionth of one generation, right?), or of Columbian mammoths killed by a wave of Amerindian hunters. Sometimes invaders leave a bigger footprint: a bunch of cities burning down with no rebuilding tells you something. But even when you know that population A completely replaced population B, it can be hard to prove that just how it happened. After all, population A could have all committed suicide just before B showed up. Stranger things have happened – but not often.

He said he was high-caste

but that was just a lie.

The Vasconic Program

The idea is that there used to be a related set of languages all over Europe, spoken by those early Sardinian-like farmers (Cardial Culture, LBK) before the Indo-Europeans showed up and trashed them. How to study that language family? How to become a succesful Pan-Vasconicist, the analog of an Indo-Europeanist? (some of my best friends are Indo-europeanists)

It’s not gonna be easy. There is today a single living language that seems likely to be a member of that family – Basque.

But there may have been others (in southern Europe) that survived long enough to leave a possibly-useful written record. Etruscan: Minoan: if we could crack them.

The Indo-European languages of Europe must have have picked up a Vasconic substrate – while Tocharian probably did not.

We know quite a bit about the genetics of this expansion – and from that (which means ancient DNA) we can probably definitively locate the Vasconic urheimat, which is one advantage over the early Indo-europeanists. We know that a particular archaeological culture is associated with this expansion (Impressed Ware) – that may help us trace it back in time.

Using the location of the urheimat, and associated gene movements, we may be able to find other languages in this family that stayed in the Middle East, and, again, survived long enough to leave a written record. Hattic, Hurrian, Sumerian, even Semitic are candidates. Check out the Caucasus, the rubble-heap of history.
This is the sort of work in which cracking Linear A and Etruscan would just be a warmup.

We need more aDNA: more archaeology: more work on recovering lost Classical literature (x-ray scanning burnt scrolls at Herculaneum, etc). We need to crush Isis and pacify Iraq, n order to get some serious archaeology done (like finding the Mitanni capital and reading their cuneiform archives.) We need to translate all the stuff from Bogazkoy. Wouldn’t hurt to scour Iran in search of lost Sassanid literature – we could always claim to be nuclear inspectors. Maybe hiring a few archaeologists who were also mercenary tankers would help cure archaeology’s Kumbayah syndrome – we’re not going to get this done without straight thinking.

Linguists, geneticists, archaeologists, and a whiff of depleted uranium. It’s a million to one shot –
but it just might work.

Perils of Incorrect Thought

A colleague pointed me to this essay by an academic who mentioned in a submitted paper that the possibility of biological differences among human groups ought to be considered.  His submission was firmly rejected in the face of “… expletives and exclamation points to give the most venomous and dismissive feedback I have ever encountered” from the reviewers.  This essay ought to be read by anyone concerned about the sorry state of our social and behavioral sciences.  The author also points us to a  website at Heterodox Academy with useful comments and discussion.

Long ago when I was in graduate school I attended a “workshop” sponsored by an outfit called the “Foundations’ Fund for Research in Psychiatry.”  The attendees were mostly chairs of Psychiatry at US and Canadian medical schools.  Each had been invited to bring along a promising graduate student or postdoc, hence my presence.  The meeting, to my innocent eyes, was hilarious.  The opening session led by David Hamburg outlined the theme of the meeting, the movement to rid psychiatric education of analysis and all its baggage and to replace all of it with biological psychiatry.  It was a carefully thought out session with a lot of emphasis on evidence and the scientific method.

The afternoon session featured the analysts and they completely torpedoed the meeting without providing a trace of substance.  The talks were variants of “let us think about why you feel this way and understand the source of your antagonism”.  They were a smooth talking lot and, sure enough, nothing at all was accomplished.  I didn’t know much at that time but I knew enough to recognize a faith-based cult of true believers.

Our social and educational sciences are, much of them, in the hands of a cult like this, devout creationists all with their heads in the sand of social science as it was envisioned half a century ago.  We recently had an experience much like Anomaly’s.  Over a year ago Mike Weight (an undergraduate) and I posted a draft of a manuscript about using quantitative genetic theory to evaluate changes over time in traits. We had in mind a technology useful for distinguishing cultural from genetic transmission. Many readers of our blog made helpful comments and, to our shame, found a large number of typos.  I shudder when I reread that old post.  It was written shortly after I had my temporal lobe bleed and the whole part of my brain that was capable of proofreading seems to have been knocked out.

 We thought we should submit it somewhere where social scientists would read it.  We got back, from a succession of three journals, a stunning set of ignorant and irrelevant reviews.  For example the first sentence of the first one we read said “this is really about race and it ought to be made clear”.  Another said “they are trying to push genetics where it has no place”.  The tone of all of them was like this, angry and scornful.  One reviewer told us that our views were outdated and discredited since epigenetics had swept the field!

We had two and one half mildly sensible reviews, one about technical aspects of quantitative genetic theory and another by a reviewer unhappy with the level of detail and statistical aspects of the treatment of Amish test results.  Since we regarded the Amish data as a toy set of data, we made no changes. The other reviewers were all hostile and angry at what we had written, several convinced that the paper must be racist but they didn’t quite understand how or why.  We could only laugh at the collection of reviews because none of them had any idea what they were talking about.  None  made it so far as to read and understand the central point of the paper.  With the exceptions mentioned above, they were pig ignorant and proud of it.

In a recent post here, Greg’s conclusion about the social sciences was that “they’re just no damn good”. It is easy to come up with social scientists who are excellent— Steve Pinker and Charles Murray and Dalton Conley and Jonathan Haidt pop to mind — but my sample of reviewers suggests that for most of them Greg is right on the money.  We surrendered to the collective social science wisdom and submitted the paper to our friends at the Journal of Biosocial Science where it is in press, out any day now, as an open access article.

 

 

 

 

Reparations

Some prominent pinheads have recently suggested racial reparations. I think it’s a hard sell, unlikely to happen – but I haven’t seen much talk of the likely consequences, probably because our public intellectuals have no idea what those consequences would be. They just don’t know.

But I do.

One can make a close analogy with the results of that land lottery in Georgia back in 1832, and with the outcomes in families that won the lottery in Scandinavia. David Cesarini’s work strongly suggests that reparations would have no effect on infant health, drug consumption, or scholastic performance. The recipients would be no more literate, their occupational status no higher. There would be economies of scale: because of the size of the pot, swarms of the world’s most skillful and voracious grifters and con-men (Goldman Sachs) would immediately descend upon the black community and begin to extract the winnings, somewhat more rapidly than would have happened to a single individual receiving the same sum. I’m not sure whether more of the capital would simply be wasted or end up in the Cayman islands ( economically preferable).

It might only cost a couple of trillion dollars. A lot like Iraq – but way funnier!

The Birth of Britain

Recent studies considering modern and ancient DNA show that about 25-40% of British ancestry is Anglo-Saxon, with a high in East Anglia and gradual decreasing as you move north and west. While the Britons of Roman times look like the Welsh.

Winston Churchill wrote about this, in The Birth of Britain, the first installment of his history of the English-speaking peoples. He mentions that place names in Sussex suggested total replacement, while the West Saxon legal code made provision for the rights of Welshmen.. But he didn’t know how much replacement had occurred. Still, he said “.. we may cherish the hope that somewhere a maiden’s cry for pity, the appear of beauty in distress, the lustful needs of an invading force,would create some bond between victor and vanquished. Thus the blood would be preserved, thus the rigours of subjugation would fade as generations passed away. The complete obliteration of an entire race is repulsive to the human mind. There should at least have been, in default of pity, a hearing for practical advantage or the natural temptations of sex.”

However, being repulsive doesn’t stop something from happening. This time, it didn’t. Perhaps Churchill’s ghost, or his ghost’s ghost, is pleased by this result.

Timing the Wave

A recent paper in PNAS talks about ancient DNA results in Ireland. The story is getting to be a familiar one: 5000 years ago Ireland was inhabited by a Sardinian-like population, 4000 years ago by people pretty similar to the Irish today. Looks like near-total replacement. Since the Corded Ware culture was in place by 4900 years ago, we know that the replacement process in northern Europe took less than 900 years, maybe a lot less. Ongoing ancient DNA investigations should give us a pretty good chronology in the next few years.

Some questions are going to be harder to answer. Why near-replacement in northern Europe, but not in southern Europe? Obviously Indo-Europeans imposed their languages, lots of Y-chromosomes, and made an autosomal contribution to southern Europe, but it doesn’t look like replacement. Sometimes these things boil down to choices, as when the Mongols started taxing the southern Chinese rather pursuing extermination. Maybe a prehistoric Yelü Chucai convinced the invaders that the EEF population was good for something (pizza?), or on the other hand, maybe some of those southern populations put up stronger resistance. Yet the G2a Y chromosomes, once dominant, are very much reduced in number.