Post by Trog on Feb 11, 2019 12:05:02 GMT
Easily one of the most fascinating articles I've read in a long time:
NYT Magazine
The Indo-European part is hardly revolutionary - it is basically the consensus opinion held by Indo-European scholars for at least the past 50 years. Whatever it was they (Reich) had demonstrated was basically a genetic confirmation of a well established theory arrived at and thoroughly corroborated through other means. Which is good. It's just that the article creates a monumentally wrong impression.
There are actually 3 main themes in the article. The most visible one, and in fact the least important one, is about the genetic heritage of the Polynesians, the significance of Vanuatu in their history and their relationship to the present day inhabitants of these islands. (Not that I do not find it extremely interesting in its own right, it's just that I don't think that it's the most important aspect of the article).
The second and more important theme is how politics impact on science, in multiple ways. Not just ideologically driven, secular politics, but also politics within science itself, as in establishing dominance and consequently the right to truth-speaking.
The third and most important theme is also about ideology and politics, but I think in a way substantially different from the one above - probably because it also contains elements of philosophy. Up until the 1950's archeologists and historians habitually assigned observed changes in culture to the movements and migrations of people, sometimes huge numbers of people. But then it became politically incorrect to do so. The author of the article actually explains why it has become politically incorrect. He fails to make the final leap, however, which is that the driving force behind this sentiment of political incorrectness derives from cultural Marxism, i.e. the imperative that all people are basically the same, and that the only thing that distinguishes us from each other is the culture and the circumstances we were born into. Archeologists have, very particularly and very deliberately, been trained for half a century to believe that it was not people who moved, but ideas, and to accept actual migration only with severe reluctance and under duress. I expect that Reich will increasingly become the target of increasingly toxic attacks from this quarter, which, incidentally, also includes the author.
Reich asserts the existence of genetic evidence of the following:
This cannot possibly ride well with those who want to perpetuate the myth of the noble savage.
(Okay, I suppose there is one more important take-away from this, which is the huge impact paleogenomics is making on paleontology, archeology and history. And even politics).
NYT Magazine
Ancient DNA’s “big bang,” as more than one geneticist described it to me, came with the 2015 publication, in Nature, of a Reich paper called “Massive Migration From the Steppe Was a Source for Indo-European Languages in Europe.” On the basis of genetic information culled from 69 ancient individuals dug up by collaborating archaeologists in Scandinavia, Western Europe and Russia, the paper argued that Europeans aren’t quite who they thought they were. About 5,000 years ago, a “relatively sudden” mass migration of nomadic herders from the east — the steppes of eastern Ukraine and southern Russia — swept in and almost entirely replaced existing communities of hunter-gatherers and early farmers in Central and Northern Europe. These newcomers were known to exploit many of the cutting-edge technologies of the time: the domestication of horses, the wheel and, perhaps most salient, axes and spearheads of copper. (Their corpses sometimes featured cutting-edge wounds.)
The Reich team inferred that the major source of contemporary European ancestry — and probably Indo-European languages as well — was not, in fact, from Europe but from far to the east. And this discovery, confirmed by the near-simultaneous publication of almost identical results from a competing ancient-DNA lab in Denmark, had monumental implications for science’s understanding of the whole ancient world. Great migration events — like the movement of Siberian peoples into North America or the spread of voyagers into the Pacific — were not outliers but the norm.
The Reich team inferred that the major source of contemporary European ancestry — and probably Indo-European languages as well — was not, in fact, from Europe but from far to the east. And this discovery, confirmed by the near-simultaneous publication of almost identical results from a competing ancient-DNA lab in Denmark, had monumental implications for science’s understanding of the whole ancient world. Great migration events — like the movement of Siberian peoples into North America or the spread of voyagers into the Pacific — were not outliers but the norm.
The Indo-European part is hardly revolutionary - it is basically the consensus opinion held by Indo-European scholars for at least the past 50 years. Whatever it was they (Reich) had demonstrated was basically a genetic confirmation of a well established theory arrived at and thoroughly corroborated through other means. Which is good. It's just that the article creates a monumentally wrong impression.
There are actually 3 main themes in the article. The most visible one, and in fact the least important one, is about the genetic heritage of the Polynesians, the significance of Vanuatu in their history and their relationship to the present day inhabitants of these islands. (Not that I do not find it extremely interesting in its own right, it's just that I don't think that it's the most important aspect of the article).
The second and more important theme is how politics impact on science, in multiple ways. Not just ideologically driven, secular politics, but also politics within science itself, as in establishing dominance and consequently the right to truth-speaking.
The third and most important theme is also about ideology and politics, but I think in a way substantially different from the one above - probably because it also contains elements of philosophy. Up until the 1950's archeologists and historians habitually assigned observed changes in culture to the movements and migrations of people, sometimes huge numbers of people. But then it became politically incorrect to do so. The author of the article actually explains why it has become politically incorrect. He fails to make the final leap, however, which is that the driving force behind this sentiment of political incorrectness derives from cultural Marxism, i.e. the imperative that all people are basically the same, and that the only thing that distinguishes us from each other is the culture and the circumstances we were born into. Archeologists have, very particularly and very deliberately, been trained for half a century to believe that it was not people who moved, but ideas, and to accept actual migration only with severe reluctance and under duress. I expect that Reich will increasingly become the target of increasingly toxic attacks from this quarter, which, incidentally, also includes the author.
Reich asserts the existence of genetic evidence of the following:
With the relatively recent rise of everything we associate with “culture” — technologies like agriculture, metallurgy and eventually writing — much of this continuous “admixture” began to give way, it seemed, to discontinuous episodes better characterized as “replacement” or “turnover.” That is, about 5,000 to 9,000 years ago, human history was, at least in a few crucial places, less about various groups coming together and more about some groups blotting out their neighbors.
(Okay, I suppose there is one more important take-away from this, which is the huge impact paleogenomics is making on paleontology, archeology and history. And even politics).