Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past

by David Reich (Author)

(REQUIRED READING)

–Collected Comments–

IT”S NOT SO MUCH OUT OF AFRICA BUT RECOMBINATORY

the elegantly simple account of humanity unidirectionally branching out from central Africa to the rest of the globe is overly simple, that it was more like multiple vines intertwining in some places, and even doubling back to Africa after the Neanderthal branch had become extinct. “Human Genetic History Is Analogous to a Trellis Not A Tree.”

(SEVEN GENERATIONS OF DIRECT INHERITANCE, INFINITE NUMBER OF KIN INHERITANCE)

-The number of genes you have is finite – about 20,000, based on current estimates. You get an almost equal number from both mom and dad, but for ancestors prior to your parents, the random shuffling of recombinant dna make it unlikely you will have exactly 25% of your genes from each of your four grandparents. Still, the odds are very high that you will inherit at least some genetic material from everyone in your direct ancestral line back to about seven generations.(you are kin back seven generations). – Beyond the seventh generation, however, the odds of your having genetic material from any one specific remote ancestor rapidly diminishes, until by the time you get back to the fifteenth generation of your genealogical ancestry, there is only about a 3% chance you are related to any one of them genetically. (Unless you have a lot of cousin marriage in your tree).

There really can be dramatic divergences between human populations in a short amount of time. (Ashkenazi Jews and Amish are only several hundred years old.)

(RACES EXIST)

-The BIG PICTURE is this: Peoples come, peoples go. These groups can be done-in by natural disasters, diseases, famine, war, or some combination of the above. Old races merge together, creating new races. Races sometimes die out, or are subsumed into larger groups which are themselves the result of previous mixings of earlier races. And, yes, according to the author there are such things as biologically distinct races, though they are mutable and blendable over time.

(RACES BRING TECHNOLOGICAL/BEHAVIORAL CHANGE)

-The succession of early modern human cultures in Europe after 37,000 BC (Aurignacian, Gravettian, and Magdalenian) represent events in which culture changed because the underlying racial or ethnic population substantially changed.

(Demographics are more likely the cause of archeological change than technologies – i.e.: replacements are more common than adaptations.)

RACE AND IQ ARE TIED

race and IQ. The author goes through more pages than he needed to to talk away what it’s pretty obvious.

(RACIAL CONQUEST IS A NORM)

-The genetic history of modern people indicates that throughout history and prehistory there have been many warlike events in which one group of people conquers another. The men from the losing side are typically killed, and their women are often taken as wives or concubines by the leaders of the victorious side. These leading men produce an outsized number of children relative to other men. The evidence shows up clearly in our genome.

Total or near-total population displacement has been much more common than the more benign model of populations slowly assimilating and melding.

Population replacement is something that is neither a rarity nor a miracle. ( All of this anguished hand-wringing about the population replacement of Native Americans in the United States at the time that the first European settlers colonized it is really misplaced. And that’s because the Native Americans who were displaced at that time themselves just displaced someone else some number of centuries earlier. The melodramatic screeching of Arabs from Jordan over what they have confabulated to be their “ancestral homeland” in what-is-now-Israel is also extremely inappropriate. And that’s because they themselves displaced somebody who was probably there before.)

(COINCIDENCE OF EVENTS CREATES OPPORTUNITY FOR RACIAL EXPANSION AND CONQUEST)

-A supervolcano in southern Italy (Campi Flegrei) massively erupted about 39,000 years ago, and the resulting multi-year-long winter was probably the ultimate cause of neanderthal extinction, as well as that of the first wave of early-modern Europeans. (The decimation of the population coincided with the later invasion by early moderns.)

(LOST RACES – RACIAL ARTIFACTS EXIST)

“Ghost populations”, which are common ancestors of mutiple ethnic groups living today but which themselves are neither intact nor preserved in any cultural or archeological manner outside of residual DNA. And more specific facts about populations today and in the past.

(THE WHITE RACE IS 5000 YEARS OLD)

-After the end of the last Ice Age, farmers from Anatolia expanded into Europe, largely replacing the earlier hunter-gatherers, especially in the south. Mixing between the two groups occurred gradually in the north, so that by about 5,000 years ago most Europeans were primarily descended from Anatolian farmers, with a lesser degree of ice-age hunter gatherer ancestry. -It was not until after 5,000 years ago that the European genetic mix began to resemble modern populations. This was the result of a massive Indo-European migration into Europe from the eastern steppes. A combination of diseases (including Bubonic Plague) and warfare resulted in a huge replacement of the first farmers by the invading Indo-Europeans , especially in the north: a 90% turnover in Britain, a 70% turnover throughout Central Europe (The Corded Ware Culture), and a 30% turnover in Iberia. The evidence from this time also indicates a significant influx of Indo-European bloodlines throughout India, especially in the north.

(CHINESE AND WHITES ARE RACES, INDIA AND ARICA MULTI-RACIAL)

-China and India are two Asian countries with huge populations, but they have vastly different genetic population dynamics. In China, there tends to be one vast, relatively undifferentiated population pool, whereas in India, there is no one Indian population at all, but rather a huge number of small caste and sub-caste populations which have seldom intermarried for the past 4,000 years, and each of which have developed their own unique genetic signatures and set of genetic proclivities, including diseases and other health problems.

North Indians have far more Central Asian farmer ancestry than South Indians – these differences have been preserved for thousands of years due to the strict Indian caste system that favored Northern Indians.

India is the same size that it has always been, and so the people there solidified into cast a long time ago and may have stayed that exact same thing for thousands and thousands of years. China is someplace that has expanded a great deal over the last 20 centuries, and one of their tactics for conquering people has been to interbreed with them. And so the people have been mixing freely for that entire amount of time, and the genetic bottlenecks are nowhere comparable to what are found in India. (Incidentally, those genetic bottlenecks are several times stronger than the genetic bottleneck for Ashkenazi Jews.)

THE JAPANESE ARE 80/20 KOREAN/AINU

-It appears the Japanese people are the result of an 80/20 blend of Korean and Ainu bloodlines. But don’t tell them that.

NATIVE AMERICANS CONSIST OF TWO POPULATIONS

For Native Americans one learns that there was an earlier crossing by early humans before the land bridge was fully formed and thus there were two ancient people who compose all of native North and South American people. (As far as I know the latter all but exterminated the former)

Aug 17, 2018 10:39am