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Meta
Monthly Archives: August 2017
Not without honor
Jared Diamond spends a lot of time in GGS making excuses for groups that didn’t do much domestication of animals and plants. Sometimes the excuses are valid: farming was hard for Eskimos. Mostly they’re not: the wild ancestors of horses … Continue reading
Posted in GGS, Uncategorized
37 Comments
Bushmen palate: it’s all about the clicks
“it has been observed by several researchers that the Khoisan palate ends to lack a prominent alveolar ridge.”
Posted in Uncategorized
11 Comments
Same Old
We now know ( from ancient DNA) that Bushmen split off from the rest of humanity (or we from them) at least a quarter of a million years ago. Generally, when you see a complex trait in sister groups, you … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
56 Comments
Age of Discovery: Pandora
In the Age of Discovery, Europeans were playing with fire. Every voyage of exploration risked bring back some new plague. From the New World, syphilis, probably typhus and rheumatoid arthritis. From India, cholera. HIV, recently, from Africa. Comparably important new … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
25 Comments
Domesticated animals and human disease
Jared Diamond considered the disastrous impact of Eurasian and African diseases on the inhabitants of the New World, contrasted with a much smaller impact in the opposite direction, and concluded that a major factor had probably been transmission from domesticated … Continue reading
Posted in GGS
54 Comments
Regional change
Jared Diamond thinks that people in different parts of the world can and have evolved in different directions, depending on local selective pressures. He thinks that people in Eurasia and Africa evolved resistance to various crowd and tropical diseases, and … Continue reading
Posted in GGS
69 Comments
Psychometrics
Jared Diamond says ” Sound evidence for the existence of human differences in intelligence that parallel human differences in technology is lacking.” In short, he dismisses the entire field of psychometrics. Doesn’t even bother to argue about it. The word … Continue reading
Posted in GGS, Uncategorized
63 Comments
Something changed
Jared Diamond notes (p 161) that the wild ancestors of domesticated animals are spread unevenly – only two are in South America, while none come from North America, sub-Saharan Africa, or Australia. He then argues that only a few special … Continue reading
Posted in GGS, Uncategorized
90 Comments
mtDNA capers
There’s an interesting pattern in the mtDNA of archaic humans. Neanderthals have mtDNA that’s a lot closer to that of anatomically modern humans than to Denisovans, although Neanderthals and Denisovans are close if you look at nuclear DNA. While really … Continue reading
Posted in Archaic humans, Denisovans, Genetics, Neanderthals
6 Comments
Persistence
Jared Diamond notices that early development of complex civilizations had ongoing consequences: peoples that developed such things way later or not at all continue to do poorly today, even if they encountered Western technology and technologists several hundred years ago. … Continue reading
Posted in GGS, Uncategorized
65 Comments
West Hunter 