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Razib Khan 🧬 ✍️

@razibkhan

Jul 27

since ppl keep asking me about mesolithic european foragers, ima do a tweet thread on it...i've followed this lit pretty closely, and also the pigmentation literature since the mid-2000s when it was pretty clear that it was gonna be one of the first successes of human genomics

the pic is my attempt to get kind of close. possibly browner. probably even more 'robust' featured. european hunter-gatherers they didn't eat gruel every day. their jaws were big due to intense mastication.

one of the features of farming societies is gracility.

re: pigmentation. trait is polygenic. like height. or IQ. but there's polygenic, then there's polygenic. largest 'effect' pigmentation genes have a massive impact.

there is a mutation in slc24a5 that is 35% of skin color diff btwn europeans and africans

Read 22 tweets

Razib Khan 🧬 ✍️

@razibkhan

Jul 15

over the last nearly 5 years of my substack i've written a lot about the eurasian steppe. the posts below...

Genghis Khan, the Golden Horde and an 842-year-old paternity test razibkhan.com/p/genghis-khan… In 1697, Peter the Great became the first Tsar in a century to leave Russia. He traveled incognito to Western Europe to see how the more advanced continental nations ran their affairs. Since the Tsar was 6 foot 8 (over 2 meters), his identity was an open secret in the nations where he traveled. The “Grand Embassy,” as the mission was called, is more important as an historical marker than an actual fact-finding foray for the way it illustrates the new Tsar’s desire to reorient Russia towards the west. Thus began the centuries-long internal debate between Westernizers and Slavophiles about whether their nation should orient itself toward the West or continue to identify as the core of a separate civilization, the two wolves within the Russian soul that continue to grapple to this day.

For most, Peter the Great is an exemplar of the handful of famous Russian rulers who demanded that their subjects join the community of European nations, as opposed to viewing themselves as a civilization apart, liminal between the East and West. The Tsar reputedly even demanded that his nation’s cartographers include European Russia in any maps nominally of the European continent. But ‌in his own genealogy he exemplified the Russian people’s complex antecedents, and in particular its ruling class. As a Romanov, on his paternal line, Peter descended from conventional Russian nobility. But the Tsar’s mother, on the other hand, had a more exotic background; Natalya Naryshkina was from a family of nobles descended from a 15th-century Crimean Tatar named Mordko Kurbat Naryshko. His descendants, the House of Naryshkin, accepted Orthodox Christianity, and so were fully integrated into the Russian aristocracy. The old Western European quip that Russians were just Tatars if you scratched the surface was not entirely wrong about its ruling class, even for most Western-oriented members like Peter.

To begin to wrap your mind around Russia, it helps to go back to Kievan Rus, and Vladimir the Great’s 988 AD conversion to Christianity, which marked the heretofore backward and tribal peoples of Europe’s far eastern fringe’s entrée into civilization. Kievan Rus became Christian Europe’s bulwark against the various Turkic people menacing the continent, the last outpost of the civilization that saw itself as heir to Rome. But Peter’s Russia was not purely a product of Kievan Rus, whose rulers intermarried with the reigning dynasties of early medieval England, Norway and France.

But to really understand its history, culture and even its elite, recall that for centuries the Russian principalities were extensions of the empires of the steppe, subject to the powers that ruled the lands Westerners called Tatary. Though the term Tsar of all the Russians has Classical roots in the title Caesar, the Russian rulers only took up that mantle in 1547, centuries after the formative experience of the Grand Princes of Moscow, as vassals to rulers of the Golden Horde, the territory ruled by the descendents of Genghis Khan’s eldest son, Jochi. What the Russians term the “Tatar Yoke,” the period between the mid-13th and mid-15th centuries during which their rulers were subordinate to and paid tribute to Jochi’s descendants, transformed Russia from a state on Europe’s eastern edge, to a civilization intent on spanning Eurasia from the Baltic to Siberia.

Genghis Khan: they don’t make stars like they used to razibkhan.com/p/genghis-khan… In 2003, a bombshell paper reported that one in 200 men worldwide, and 10% of Central Asian males, were direct paternal descendants of a single man who lived about 1,000 years ago. Using the then cutting-edge methods of genotyping, the researchers found that one particular widely distributed Y-chromosomal haplogroup, a set of genetic markers passed down from father to son, coalesced back to a single male some 40 generations back. The resulting genetic tree, a visualization of the descendent haplotypes, each distinguished by randomly accumulating new diagnostic mutations in the Y chromosome, arrayed itself as a “star cluster.” Instead of gradual point-by-point accumulation of new variants, the scientists found numerous descendant haplotypes separated by only a single genetic difference across their 32 markers, which produces a radiating star-shaped cluster. Visually, you suddenly get an ultra-dense node in the midst of a loosely spaced network, like a metropolis raked with arterial roads plunked down amid sparsely populated farmland. These star cluster phylogenies emerge only when a lineage undergoes massive expansion so rapidly that the customary gradual, organically emerging topology of a gene tree is completely outrun by the lineage’s pace of sudden proliferation. A one-man baby boom.

Given the populations that carry this star cluster, it is no surprise that the paper was titled The Genetic Legacy of the Mongols. In the abstract, the authors are more precise: “The lineage is carried by likely male-line descendants of Genghis Khan, and we therefore propose that it has spread by a novel form of social selection resulting from their behavior.” I might quibble with the time honored drives for world conquest and to impregnate everyone in sight actually being “novel” pursuits and “social selection” might not be the term I would choose to describe their outcomes. But I think we can all agree some uniquely successful behaviors at scale explain both Khan’s enduring fame and his astonishingly common presence among our genes a millennium later.

Khan had four sons by his primary wife, Jochi, Chagatai, Ögedei and Tolui. By his secondary wives and concubines, he fathered countless more. Jochi, Chagatai, Ögedei and Tolui in their turn each spawned enormous lineages. Jochi was the ancestor of the Golden Horde that would loom large in Russian history and Tolui was the father of Kublai Khan, future Emperor of China, who in turn had his own vast harem. But the fecundity of this particular lineage was not restricted to the man born Temujin, who would become Genghis Khan and to his progeny. His brothers Khasar, Khajiun, Temüge and Belgutei all fathered large broods, and Khasar’s house would repeatedly intermarry with that of the Royal Manchus who went on to conquer China in the 17th century and found the Qing Dynasty. Even more importantly, Genghis Khan was not even the first prominent ruler of his Borgijin clan; his great-grandfather Khabul Khan had ruled much of Mongolia. The clan had been founded three centuries before the time of the Mongol Empire, around 900 AD by a highly successful warlord named Bodonchar Munkhag. The 14th-century conqueror Timurlane was not a paternal descendent of Genghis Khan, which would have lent him more prestige. But his Barlas clan actually also descended from Bodonchar Munkhag, meaning he would have carried the same Y chromosome and in his turn contributed to its enduring impact.

The 2003 discovery made headlines even beyond the confines of science media, with write-ups in The New York Times and National Geographic. Since then, other star clusters that point to the existence of “super-male lineages” have been detected. A branch of haplogroup R1b has been adduced to derive from the Ui Neill, descendants of the 4th-century Irish high king Niall of the Nine Hostages. East of Mongolia, and about four centuries after Genghis Khan, the Manchu people also underwent a massive expansion with their conquest of China in the 1600’s, and there scientists observe another associated Y-chromosomal star cluster.

These particular historical instances illustrate a broader phenomenon: the periodic exponential increase of a particular Y-chromosomal lineage and its sweep across a population. The most plausible explanation is what the 2003 paper's authors posit: social selection, which likely played out via conquest, the extermination of local male elites and the rape and amassing of women in harems. Their choice of term can sound bewilderingly bloodless, but that’s kind of the point; the authors were only interested in the patterns of inheritance and what drives them. So we can think of the misleadingly anodyne “social selection” as in contrast to “genetic selection.” Human behavior alone, not functional genetic fitness swept this lineage to overnight dominance. We can see this elsewhere historically in phenomena like the Iberian expansion into the New World. The frequencies of haplogroup Q crashed overnight, replaced by haplogroup R1b. This reflects the enslavement and extermination of indigenous men across much of Central and South America, and their replacement with lineages rooted in Europe. But star clusters are perhaps at their most intriguing before recorded history. A 2015 paper reported the emergence of several star clusters around 4,000 years ago, likely associated with polygynous social structures. We may never know who these people were because these expansions occurred beyond the purview of literate civilization, but it seems clear that Genghis Khan had many prehistoric forerunners. He may in fact have been among the last of his kind, not a singular exception.

Read 11 tweets

Razib Khan 🧬 ✍️

@razibkhan

May 31

more red = fewer cross-sex friendships
more blue = more cross-sex friendships

the pattern in india, like elsewhere, can be explained by islam, but not totally. islam exacerbates the NW pattern, but the area across the border in india has very few muslims, but similar patriarchal punjabi and rajasthani cultures

interesting than even gangetic e. india (greater bengal) has more cross-sex friendship than southern india, and especially the interior of maharashtra (maratha mindset?)

Read 4 tweets

Razib Khan 🧬 ✍️

@razibkhan

May 25

the nytimes piece by @sapinker brings up a lot of good points. most academics are harvard are not ideologues; they didn't get to harvard that way

BUT, ~2020 happened. there was a broad agreement among many that @HdxAcademy was a failure. persuasion didn't work...

existential threat that trump admin is throwing at the academy has clarified A LOT. ppl now are speaking up. they now know that the whole institution might go down with the ideologue ship.

reality is most academics need to feel skin in the game. they are now

i'm aware that the majority of academics are not woke scolds

but everyone well knows that the woke scolds, not ppl like @sapinker, were dictating terms until the strong arm of the feds came down on the institutions

academics should be allowed to fix their own house...but...

Read 5 tweets

Razib Khan 🧬 ✍️

@razibkhan

Jan 22

https://twitter.com/Tom_Rowsell/status/1881983326959157720

ppl keep asking me about this stuff. tbh on the scientific stuff there is not much daylight on the specific details btwn me and @Tom_Rowsell but let me elucidate my own 'stance' on some issues

the branch of R1a (z93 mutation) associated with indo-iranians emerged 3500 BC or so

https://twitter.com/Tom_Rowsell/status/1881983326959157720

non-z93 branch of corded ware went west into europe proper, the z-93 fatyanovo-balanovo ppl went east. the structure may date to the yamnaya period, or may come from EHG idk. but it's old

z93 started where? vistula? maybe a bit east? but it's in europe geographically. europeans

so the ultimate origin of indo-aryans to the indo-iranian branch of corded ware circa 2900 BC is european.

but were the indo-aryans of the vedas 'european'? my sense as a non-sanskrit speaker from what i have read is that they were substantially sycentrized

Read 10 tweets

Razib Khan 🧬 ✍️

@razibkhan

Oct 9, 2024

i should say something since 10/7, and the israel-palestine thing after TNC vs. cbs guy exploded

personally do lean to the israel side, but it is not a high intensity issue for me. but, it does 10/8 broke the woke cartel by peeling off a lot of lefty jews. this is good.

but...

there has been cancel culture directed at the pro-palestine side. some of this is OK in my opinion. if you are an adjunct professor who is praising the revolutionary acts of hamas on 10/7 with a lot of jewish students i don't know what i can do or say...

but the cancel weapon is overused, and honest and moderate measured discussion doesn't happen often. the only pro-palestine ppl i often see are bomb throwers, and i think it's because moderate ppl with a more 'balanced' take on the issue are scared of being called antisemite

Read 8 tweets

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